Cuts Through Bone (20 page)

“You heard it,” he said.

“Seriously?”

“You mean
before
?”

“Yeah,” she said.

“He almost got me. You didn't hear that? The old bastard tried to splatter my brains with a pipe.”

“I heard a clang,” she said. “Lucky he missed. I don't think you can spare your head.” She smiled. “You wouldn't make four feet without it, you know?”

The little detective shook his head. “Wasn't luck—I was listening. All of a sudden, I couldn't hear him, so I knew he'd stopped. I had just poked my head out the feed end of the chute, and I didn't hear him, so I drew back. He had that set up, running there with a pipe waiting. I drew back just as he swung.”

“You
heard
he
wasn't
making noise? That don't sound right.”

“Ain't it?” Guthrie grinned. “I used to chase things when I was little—don't say it—and rabbits got this sudden stop trick. When you're barreling along behind them in a rough patch, they'll stop. They cut the other way once you shoot past. You have to listen for them.”

“Did the rabbits do something to you?”

He laughed. “I just wanted to see if I could catch them. That came along after seeing if I could
find
them.”

The Garment District was in the early stages of waking up when Guthrie and Vasquez parked on Thirty-fourth street. A roll-up door slithered in its track like a rack runner call to arms, but the street was quiet when they went inside. While they finished coffee, they raided photos from Web sites, the DMV, and the video clip Guthrie had shot in the Columbia University food court. They mixed in extra faces, looked for candids to match the style of the video clip, and found driver's-license photos for some of the college students to make a credible lineup.

Guthrie and Vasquez drove down to the Village to see the Overtons. The front of their narrow town house on Grove Street was still wet from the hose. One of the steps was coated with a slick, shallow puddle. Phil Overton answered the door as soon as they knocked. Jeannette had seen them through the window. Phil brought lemonade and cookies while they sat in the front room with Jeannette.

The old couple continued playing gin while Jeannette looked at the pictures. She studied them slowly, and Phil took advantage of the distraction to score some victories. Two piles of pictures grew on the edge of the card table. One was much larger than the other, but even the smaller pile had several prints. Afterward, she led them through the pictures she had chosen; all were of Greeks from Columbia University. “A few times,” or “Often,” or “I recall seeing him once,” or “He reminded me of my cousin Bert,” she said before she ended with a single picture in her hand: one of Justin Peiper.

“This one was very determined,” she said. “He courted continually, until the good boy came along. Almost every day, this young man came to visit, even if it was only briefly. For a long time, I thought he had won her. Months.”

Outside in the midmorning, the sky shone like polished silver, with the hot sun invisible but powerful overhead. The smoothly running engines of the city's cars purred in the distance, away from the quiet nieghborhood. Guthrie paused on the sidewalk in a puddle of shade to consider. The little detective was upset; Jeannette Overton had eliminated Peiper for the murder. After explaining to Vasquez that the old lady knew Peiper well enough that he couldn't be the deliveryman, he said, “He's dirty for something, and I'll find it out. That leaves me wondering about the computer. That's next.”

Guthrie used a computer geek who worked in Brooklyn to do his programming and setups, like the kill switches in the palmtops and office computers. They made two stops on the way to Brooklyn. At the office, they took Bowman's hard drive from the strongbox, and then Guthrie stopped to buy two liters of Norwegian vodka at a package store. They crossed the Manhattan Bridge on the top deck, mixed into a motorcade of drivers packed up for Long Island, with their cars full of anxious kids. The dog days were melting the city, and people were heading to the beach.

Barney Miller's, the electronics store, was as dark as a cave. Out front, a faded, barely legible sign showed a blond boy in red coveralls offering an ancient radio. The boy had tiny projecting antennae on his head, like a 1930s pulp-book Martian. The interior of the store was divided into two bays. On the right, a roll-up door in the back admitted a corona of light, and a handful of men in dark coveralls crawled in, on, and under a chromed lowrider. The lowrider's system blared intermittently as the techs tested the installation, harried by shouts from a skinny black man with a long goatee and a row of shining silver stripes on the sleeves of his dark coveralls. Shelves crammed the remainder of that side, loaded with a junker's selection of system components, wire, fittings, conduits, and rows of dusty, archaic junk—analog televisions, cartridges for obsolete video games, refurbished toasters, and old record albums.

On the left, a second bay looked like an old pharmacy. The shelves held fire alarms, lightbulbs, remote controls, game controllers, headphones, and patent medicines in a mix of dusty packaging with ancient stickers and neatly printed handmade tags. A tattooed Latino kid wearing a brown skullcap and a ragged T-shirt was browsing the shelves and laughing to himself. In the back, a wire cage surrounded some hanging droplights that floated in a cloud of haze. The wire walls were blockaded by more shelves inside, all loaded with electronic components, with attached and detached cables bundled like sluggish snakes. A tan baseball cap with an upturned bill floated in the smoke like a sentry peering above the shelves.

Guthrie led Vasquez around the corner of the cage, where an opening served as a door. A gigantic Korean sat perched on a high stool at a worktable littered with components and supplies. Fat-Fat's arms were the size of an ordinary man's leg, and he had heavy shoulders to hold up a head like a small laundry basket. The ball cap sat high on his forehead like a joke. He glanced up when the detectives rounded the corner.

“Yo, Guth, what's up?” he said as his gaze dropped back to his work.

“Brought you something I need looked at,” the little detective replied. He found an open spot on the table to lay the hard drive and vodka.

“Gotta finish this mission,” Fat-Fat said. A circuit board rested on the palm of his wide hand, held beneath a circular magnifier clamped to the worktable. A hot iron smoked faintly in his other hand, held between his fingers like a cigarette as he rotated a chip under the magnifier to align it. A bank of flickering oscilloscopes on his left made his outline wink like a hologram, and his eyes were red slits against the haze of flux smoke, but his hands were deft. His iron tapped like a woodpecker, shifting and settling, rotating down his fingers like a Vegas shuffle each time he reached for test probes or a brush. After a short quarter hour he holstered his tools with a sigh.

“I gotta get out of here, Guth,” Fat-Fat said.

“Now?” Guthrie asked suspiciously.

“No, man,” the big Korean said, and grinned. “Just the usual. I keep dreaming about jumping off New York Life, and that's just crazy. Too short, and I don't figure I bounce back from that splat.”

“So where you going?”

“I ain't done Angel Falls yet,” Fat-Fat said. “I'm gonna base Angel Falls, just as soon as I get airfare.”

“Then I got some help for you. If you get locked up in South America, though—”

“Don't call you? Come on, man. My dad keeps saying that, too. You old guys are all alike.” He tugged open the brown paper bag from the liquor store and saw the glowing white necks of the vodka bottles. He rubbed his belly and grinned. “Must be something special, huh?”

“I ain't sure,” the little detective said. “I want to know if somebody went into it and cut any files out.”

The Korean's eyebrows shot up. “No idea what's on it?”

“Or what it is, beyond somebody told me the owner was careful.”

“
Mystery,
” Fat-Fat said softly. He picked up the hard drive. “Okay, this's a high-end case, about the biggest you can get on a desk.” He undressed the machinery and looked it over with his magnifier. “Looks factory, but these pricey ones can come out clocked and all that now.” He screwed the case back together carefully, wiping as he went, and winked at the little detective. “Speaking of going to jail, right?”

“I should've thought about that, Fat,” Guthrie said. “Now I wish I'd asked you to put on gloves.”

“Shit! Seriously?”

“That thing might end up being evidence, depending.”

The big Korean frowned and wired the drive into his system. He had a bundle of cables for power and busing attached at the worktable, and a keyboard to prop in a space he swept clean with one huge hand. A monitor winked on when he flipped a switch. He scrolled through the directory, pronouced it normal, and then opened his toolbox to begin an examination. After a few moments of operations, Fat-Fat's monitor colored, and he whistled.

“This's something,” he said. “Can't go in the ordinary way.”

Fat-Fat's system emitted a low beep and then began repeating every few seconds. The monitor cycled color again. Fat-Fat killed the power to Bowman's hard drive, then began typing furiously on his keyboard.

“That thing's got teeth, Guth,” he said when he stopped.

Guthrie grunted.

Fat-Fat typed some more, until his system stopped signaling. “That thing's lethal,” he said. “I could try opening it from a couple of different software platforms to see if it has keys to attack them, but it's real slick. Somebody good put that together.”

“So what won't it do?”

The big Korean shrugged. He repowered and gave the drive a string of commands from within the system. The files wouldn't open or delete. He tried a lock pick inside the system, and the pick ran without triggering a counterattack. “The hardware's been tinkered with,” he said. “I could maybe bypass by switching chips, but I knew a guy one time built a drive that made files only it could open, even after they were transferred. Like it has a special tool to signal the file—take out the chip, and the file wouldn't open because it doesn't hear the signal.”

“That might be the case here?”

“It's something in the hardware,” Fat-Fat replied. “Some of the hard-cores picked up on it a long time ago, like Jobs. You keep things proprietary by making sure the query and the mailbox are a hard fit, and that don't need much tinkering in the ROM. Wait, got something.”

One of the alphabet-soup files ballooned open on the monitor, disgorging a multitude of tiny pictures, each wrapped in a line of text and numerals arrayed like a date, time, and names. Fat-Fat's cursor skittered on the screen, guided by his fingertip on the touch pad. “Some of these are small—here's a big one,” he mumbled a moment before his selected image amplified.

“Ooh, party pictures!” He tapped some more at random, showing tables circled by drunken young people, dancers, and people clowning. “Looks like rave shit…” He hit one that expanded into an explicit shot of a young couple in suspended motion. A curvy young woman with short chocolate hair stood gripping the posts of a bed, with her near foot braced on the mattress, while a tall young man lined up with her from behind.

“Ooh, action!” Fat-Fat tapped again, and the photo smoothly became video, with accompanying moans and gasps. “Whoa, Guth!
She
knows the camera is rolling, but I don't think
he
does. I need a copy of that one—”

“Not a good idea,” the little detective said. “You don't want your fingers pinched in that trap.”

“For real?” The big Korean shrugged. “There's a lot there—maybe something different?”

“It ain't worth it. You can get better than that anyway.”

“You're kidding, Guth. She's on fire.”

Vasquez peered over Fat-Fat's other shoulder. “She looks to be enjoying it, true enough.”

“Shit!” The big Korean killed the screen, then looked sheepishly at her. “Sorry.”

“She ain't as mean as Wietz,” Guthrie said.

“Not yet? You haven't pissed her off yet.” He gave Vasquez a wary look. “Yeah, the vodka's good.” He unplugged the drive from his system and cleaned his cache. “That good?”

“That's something you don't want coming back up from the sewer.”

The big Korean raised an eyebrow. He kept erasing, and invited Guthrie to take turns. Rap music blared occasionally when the techs on the other side tested the system in the lowrider. The little detective gave him a handful of fifties and wished him good luck in Venezuela.

Guthrie and Vasquez drove back to the office on Thirty-fourth Street, and he locked Bowman's hard drive back in the strongbox. The day passed without any more success than that, despite some efforts in other directions. They were tired. Eventually they were both watching the clock, staying only to avoid sleeping too early.

Late in the evening, Guthrie checked his watch and pronounced it time. Vasquez pulled her windbreaker from the back of her chair, but he pointed at the phone. “Try Sand Whitten one last time,” he said, “and then call LMA.”

Vasquez sighed. Whitten's phone took messages; she'd left a half dozen already that day. Guthrie wanted to show her the pictures Jeannette Overton had studied. The unidentified Grove Street deliveryman had dark hair, and so did Whitten's persistent admirer from LMA, but the little detective hoped Whitten might pick a face from their stack of pictures. Vasquez delivered another annoyed message to the bartender's voice mail. Then she called the Long Morning After, and received an angry snarl from the man who answered when she asked for Whitten.

“I take it she's not there,” Vasquez retorted.

“That's right. I'm filling in again. If she lays out tonight, too, she's fired. Tell her if you find her—who are you?”