L.A. Bytes (26 page)

They’d fund him—it would explain the money for the bike and
226 P.A. Brown

the shelter. Maybe it made his mother suspicious and she got wind of what he was doing. That’s why he killed her.”

“If he did poison her. Maybe one of his ‘partners’ decided to take care of her?”

“I might be able to buy that,” Martinez said. “I still got problems with their target. That hospital hardly seems like a likely goal for terrorists like Madrassa or Al-Qaeda.”

David shook his head. The Madrassa had grown out of the ashes of the old terrorist groups following 9/11. At fi rst they had been religious schools but their evolution as training facilities for hatred had produced a whole new slate of unrepentant terrorists.

“I think the choice was Adnan’s. I’ll bet you his father died there, right on the same fl oor I was on. I also think he’s only warming up.”

“To what?”

“Something a lot more spectacular than blowing the front doors off a hospital.” David went around to his desk and sat down. He opened his report. “I think it’s time we brought Bentzen in. Our investigation seems to be overlapping his. Maybe he’s got something we can use.”

Bentzen had left for the day. David left him a voicemail. He wrapped up his report with his visit to the mission and his talk with Julian.

“Unless you got something else I’m calling it a day.”

Martinez didn’t. David grabbed his jacket and headed for the parking lot.

Traffi c on San Fernando Road was heavy. The I5 was at a crawl. It took him over an hour to reach the hospital and another fi fteen minutes to fi nd parking. It was just after eight when he reached Chris’s room.

The bed was empty. So was the tiny bathroom. Puzzled, David was about to head down to the nurse’s station when Dr. Finder entered the room.

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“David,” she said. “I take it your being here means you haven’t heard from Chris.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Chris walked out of here earlier today. Sometime before the dinner cart came around.”

What was Chris thinking? “What condition is he in, Doctor?”

“He shouldn’t be out there, I can tell you that. He’s physically weak. His body needs more time to recover from the surgery and from the trauma he suffered in the bomb attack.”

“Any idea why he left?”

“Your guess is as good as mine. Chris wasn’t exactly one to share.” Finder pulled out the Gap bag David used to bring Chris’s toiletries. She withdrew his red silks. “He had these on earlier.”

David took the bag and fi shed through it. All it contained was the silks. “His street clothes are gone.”

“Well I guess we know what he was wearing. Would he have gone home?”

David dialed; there was no answer. Chris wouldn’t go to all the trouble of getting out of here just to go home. So where was he? He pulled the bedside drawer open. Empty.

David slipped out of the room. The nearest exit was on his left. Ironically, toward the nurse’s station. He pulled the door open and peered down the stairs.

Finder followed him. He glanced back at her. “Where does this go?”

“Main fl oor. There’s a side exit that would take him out on the east side of the building.”

“He’d have to grab a cab or a bus,” David said. Knowing Chris, he’d take a cab.

He barely said goodbye before he hurried back to his own car.

It took over an hour to reach Silver Lake and Ste. Anne’s.

228 P.A. Brown

The front doors of the hospital were draped with a heavy blue tarp, which hung limply in the motionless air. The remnants of crime scene tape were still attached to the metal handrails above the cracked cement steps. He swung around to the parking lot.

Chris’s car was gone.

§ § § §

David let himself into the house, knowing before he got past the front door that it was empty. Chris might have been here earlier, but he wasn’t in the house now.

The kitchen smelled of coffee. David found a wet fi lter in the garbage under the sink. Sergeant was agitated and wouldn’t leave his side, ignoring him when he told him to go lie down.

But what did Chris do while he was here besides drink coffee?

He walked into Chris’s offi ce and knew that Chris had been in the room recently. The laptop was missing. He stared down at the desktop computer. Had he come back to get the laptop? What was he doing? Going after the Sandman himself?

He thought of Brad. It took a couple of phone calls but he got the technician’s phone number. He answered on the third ring.

“Brad, it’s Detective Laine. We spoke yesterday.”

“Yeah, I remember. Something wrong?”

“I’d rather you answer that.”

There was a telling silence on the other end of the phone.

“Uh, I’m not sure—”

“I’ve got a real puzzle here,” David said, knowing he had to hook Brad fast. “I’ve got a missing man and the computer he used just before he went missing.”

“Who?”

“He owns Intelligent Security, does a lot of high-tech work.”

“This is his system?”

“Yes.”

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“What do you want me to do?”

“Find out what he was working on.”

David could almost hear Brad shrug. “Bring it in tomorrow,”

Brad said.

“Not soon enough.” David’s palms were sweating. “He may be in danger.”

“Is this offi cial, sir?”

David stared hard at the blank monitor. He was skirting a gray area now. Chris wasn’t his case. He should be turning this over to Bentzen.

Except he wasn’t putting Chris’s safety in any one else’s hands.

“It’s offi cial. Will you look at it?”

“You’ll bring it here?”

“Sure.” David rubbed his damp hand against his pant leg and grabbed a pen from Chris’s pen caddy. “Where?”

§ § § §

Brad lived with his parents in Old Pasadena. David drove the Chevy onto the grounds of the gated estate, past a line of torches that led down to the shimmering blue of a classic kidney shaped pool.

The circular drive curved around the front of a white stucco house with an arched doorway opening into a garden courtyard.

Low-pitched gable roofs were covered with tiles that looked like dried blood.

David pulled the Chevy up behind a cherry 1954 Jaguar XK120. He came around to the passenger’s side and lifted Chris’s computer off the seat.

Shoes crunched on the decorative stone walk.

“Bring it around the side,” Brad said. “I got my own apartment—I’ve set up a lab down there.”

230 P.A. Brown

David followed Brad around the side of the house, through a living willow arch into the house. Brad waved at him to set the computer down on a cluttered workbench.

“Want a beer?”

When David shook his head, Brad got himself a Corona.

“So who is this guy anyway?” Brad swallowed half the beer and wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his T-shirt. “Why’s he so important?”

“He’s my husband and I think someone’s trying to kill him.”

David gestured at the computer. “How long will this take?”

“Depends what’s on it.”

“No booby-traps, I guarantee that.”

Brad bent over the computer and began hooking up various accessories. Then he powered it on. Eventually it came up to a login screen.

Brad cocked his head at David. “You know the password?”

Fortunately Chris had insisted he learn it. Leaning over Brad’s shoulder, David fi lled in the password fi eld.

Once Brad was in, he started poking around, at random as far as David could tell. But there must have been some rhyme to his meanderings because within minutes he was chuckling.

“This guy’s bad.”

“What? What do you mean?” David glared at the screen, which was fi lled with strings of gibberish. “What is it?”

“It’s the code behind a web bug. It’s a type of spyware, set up to be run on someone else’s machine and send back all kinds of information.”

“That’s illegal, isn’t it?”

“Oh, terribly,” Brad said gleefully. “Probably breaks a dozen state laws. A few federal ones too.”

David was horrifi ed. “What exactly does it do?”

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“It collects everything it can from the receiving machine.

Names, cookies, email addies, hell, if he’d added a keystroke logger, he’d have an all around data miner.”

“Any idea who he sent it to?” Though David already had his suspicions.

Brad confi rmed them. “[email protected] is the last address sent to...” He opened the sent mail and verifi ed it.

“Yep, that’s where he sent the bug. Who’s that?”

David’s cell rang. He answered it gruffl y. It was Martinez.

“They came back with an initial report on the cat hair,”

Martinez said. “It matches Adnan’s cat. If we want an exact DNA match we have to send the samples off to someplace in Texas, I think. I’ve got an arrest warrant in the works.”

“Good,” David said. “Let me know when you got it.”

He broke the connection and turned back to Brad. “Any way to tell if this web bug was opened at the other end?”

“It’s set to email the captured data back to this guy.” Brad patted Chris’s computer.

“He knew he couldn’t stay at home to collect it. What other options does he have?”

“Most accounts now are web enabled. Any Internet café will let you download your messages. A lot of cell phones have the capability, too—”

“Cell phone.” But Chris had lost his Blackberry. Except David knew better than to underestimate Chris’s resourcefulness.

Tuesday 8:10 pm, The Nosh Pit, Hyperion Avenue, Silver Lake, Los
Angeles

Chris found a spot just off Hyperion to park. He moved stiffl y, the damp chill in the air playing havoc with his strained joints and muscles. He hobbled down a street bustling with the usual weeknight dinner crowd.

232 P.A. Brown

It was too early for the late night drinkers to be out so he wasn’t surprised to fi nd The Nosh Pit still quiet, with only a scattering of tables taken and the bar itself half-fi lled.

Ramsey, the ex-marine owner-bartender, spotted him and grabbed Chris’s usual Cîroc off the top shelf. Chris shook his head; a wave of nausea rolled through him.

He eschewed the bar, fearing Ramsey would see too much from there. Instead he picked the table furthest from the light and gingerly eased down into a chair facing away from the bar.

He took the Blackberry out and turned it on, waiting for it to fi nd a signal.

Ramsey sent over Chris’s favorite server, a sexy little twenty-something Tongan who had blown into town four years before.

The slender caramel cutie had proved to be one of Ramsey’s more popular servers and recently they had become partners and lovers.

“Drink?”

“Seven-Up.” Chris didn’t feel up to handling alcohol. God knew what it would do to his poor, drug-riddled body.

The Tongan raised one carefully shaped eyebrow. His botoxed lips twisted into a pout. “No drink?”

“Seven-Up is a drink. Oh, what the hell, I’m feeling brave—

toss a lemon slice in there, too.”

The Tongan sashayed away. Chris couldn’t help it; he watched the gentle swing of the slender hips encased in skintight black pants. He knew his body really was broken up when he didn’t feel a thing looking at that tight round butt.

“Since when do you fl y solo?”

Chris swung around to fi nd Ramsey standing over him, his thick tattooed arms folded over his chest.

“What the fuck happened to you?” Ramsey asked. “You walk into someone’s fi st?”

“Nothing like that.”

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The Tongan came back with his drink. This time it was Ramsey’s eyebrows that shot up.

“Solo and dry?”

Chris fi shed the lemon out and squeezed it into the drink.

“David’s at work.”

“He know you’re here?”

Chris threw him a sour grin.

“Really man, what happened to you?” Ramsey looked genuinely concerned. “You sure you should be out here?”

“I’m fi ne.”

“You lie like a rug.”

“Don’t you have other customers to harass? Cute little wait-boys to take into the back room for a blow job?”

“Stop trying to change the subject. Seriously Chris, what are you doing here? Go home, go to bed.”

But Chris wasn’t listening. He was watching the tiny screen where a fl ow of incoming data was beginning to populate his Blackberry. Sandman had taken the bait.

He stored the cookies that were sent. He’d check them out later; see if he could determine where Sandman had been visiting when he’d downloaded them. Right now he was more interested in the guy’s browsing history and the stuff stored in his cache.

Chris pulled out his laptop and dug around until he came up with the syncing device. He hooked it up under Ramsey’s curious gaze and transferred all the data he’d gathered to the laptop where he could look it over more easily.

He’d already spotted a couple of cracker sites on Sandman’s list. That was probably where he had gone to get the code he’d used to hack the hospital the fi rst time. Very few crackers, even the best, wrote all their code from scratch. Why reinvent the wheel?

His BlackBerry beeped, signaling new email. It was from Terry. What could he want?

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The message sounded frantic.
I’ve been trying to reach you. It’s urgent.

Please call.
He included a cell number Chris didn’t recognize.

Chris dialed it. Terry snatched it up on the second ring.

“Yes?”

“Hey, Terry. It’s Chris—”

“Christ, man, I’ve been trying to reach you for hours. You gotta come out here.”

Chris was confused. “To the hospital?” That didn’t make any sense. The hospital was closed—

“No,” Terry whispered. “My place.”

Terry lived in Santa Clarita. Chris had been there once for a New Year’s party, before he’d ever met David. “Santa Clarita?

You gotta be joking.”

“It’s about David,” Terry’s voice dropped even lower. Chris strained to hear. “He’s in trouble. The kiddie porn was only part of it.”

“What do you mean?” How the hell did Terry know about the porn? “Forget it, you’re just pulling my chain. Why should I drive out to Santa Clarita?”