The Devil Went Down to Austin (29 page)

inside and found empty clothes hangers, missing toiletries, everything else clean and tidy, nothing perishable in the refrigerator.

"She left under her own steam," I said.

"Or it's been made to look that way."

I ran down the mental list—Jimmy, Jimmy's exwife, Jimmy's aunt. Five years ago, Jimmy's mother. Except for my good friend W.B., every Doebler I knew had been taken out of service. And even W.B. had hired a bodyguard.

"Jimmy's family history," I said. "That tip he got about a lost sibling. What are the odds, Maia?"

Maia was quiet so long I thought I'd lost her.

"I know what you're thinking," she said at last. "There was one case like that in North Carolina. A woman went to court to open her adoption files. Gave medical reasons, but really, she'd harboured years of resentment, felt she'd been abandoned to abusive foster care. When she found her birth family, she tracked them down—murdered her mother and two sisters. But she was caught immediately, Tres. The paper trail was clear. The consent of the birth family had to be given for her to track them."

"That assumes the paper trail is legitimate," I argued. "We're talking about South Texas in the 1960s. An unmarried society woman getting in trouble with the wrong man, going off to a 'resort,' paying a little money for the baby to vanish. Better on the family's conscience than abortion. That was anything but rare, Maia."

The rain was letting up outside, coming down in random cupfuls on the sidewalk. A street person shuffled by in a green parka made of Hefty bags.

I took Maia's silence for disapproval.

"All right," I relented. "So it was a long shot. What made you want to check back with Faye?"

"Listen, Tres. I've had a lead for a couple of days now, but I wasn't sure what to do with it. I was afraid you'd say I was crazy, grasping at anything. I know Lopez would accuse me of that. After going to Faye's, I decided to do a little paperdigging. I spent the last hour at the Travis County Courthouse."

"Jimmy's search," I said. "The birth certificates."

"As near as I can tell, that's a big blank. No birth certificates with Clara Doebler as the mother for the years in question. At least, nothing on file. Nothing legal."

"But?"

"Dwight's story," she said. "About Pena's parents."

"The car accident."

"I made some calls. It wasn't easy, but I found out the parents lived in Burnet County. I talked to a deputy out there who knew them, remembered the accident. According to this guy, there was nothing suspicious. The parents were coming back from a Christmas party late at night. The road was icy. They'd been drinking. They swerved off a sharp turn in a hill. End of story. The police did a thorough check on the car, and no tampering was found. The deputy said the Heismans were good people, said he never thought much of the son, but Matthew had been away at college at the time.

Nobody seriously suspected him of any complicity."

"The Heismans?"

"That was their name. The search I did a couple of days ago, Tres, when I was trying to dig up dirt on Pena's past... I hit a brick wall—no records at all before he was eighteen.

My deputy friend says Matthew took back his birth name, even changed his Social Security number the day he turned eighteen—a kind of 'screw you' present to the Heismans. It'll be a hard job to confirm that his birth name really was Pena."

I stared at the lines of Middle English in my book. "Pena is about as old as me."

"It may mean nothing," Maia cautioned.

"Sure."

"Might be worth talking to Dwight Hayes, see if he knows any more."

"Sure."

"But given Matthew Pena's age, we know one thing."

"Sometime after 1967," I supplied, "Matthew Pena was adopted."

Mrs. Hayes was exactly where I'd left her, on her couch under the portrait of Jesus.

Her dress was pistachio green today, and she had no child to fan her. Otherwise she looked no different than she had Sunday night.

"Dwight went out for a moment, Mr. Navarre," she said. "But please sit down."

Grimy sunlight streaked through the windows. Jesus gazed toward the dead moths in the light cover on the ceiling. I could hear the two older kids, Chris and Amanda, playing fulltackle freezetag in the front yard.

"Only two little lambs today?" I asked.

Mrs. Hayes' makeup suggested a scowl, but there was no life to it—just paint.

"Matthew called me yesterday," she said. "He told me Dwight lost his job because of you."

I tried to remind myself she was just a frustrated mother looking out for her son. She didn't know all the things I had to deal with. And Jesus was looking at me, too. Despite that, I had the overwhelming urge to crack her rosy image of Matthew Pena over her head like a cascaron.

"Don't worry," I told her. "Losing that job might be the best thing for Dwight. Cutting the apron strings."

It took her a moment, but the metaphor sunk in. She didn't seem to like it. "I don't appreciate your tone, young man. If you were one of my children ..."

She looked out the window at a flash of metal. A gray Honda was turning into the driveway.

"But never mind," she said. "Matthew Pena was good to my boy."

"You ever deal with foster children, Mrs. Hayes?"

Her eyes traced an imaginary box around me. "Occasionally I help a child from GardenerBettes."

"GardenerBettes, the juvenile home."

"Yes. Why do you ask?"

"Just a case I was working on. A child I think was adopted. I think it might have been locally."

"How long ago?"

"Oh, years. Thirtyplus years."

There was an archipelago of tiny brown moles on her rounded shoulders. I imagined a laser burning them off, one by one, as I waited for her reply.

"I couldn't help you," she told me. "The life expectancy for adoption agencies is not good. The one you're looking for probably would not be around anymore."

"Probably not," I agreed. "A shame. This particular placement didn't work out too well.

The adoptee in question turned into quite the little coldblooded killer, Mrs. Hayes.

Someone I'm sure you wouldn't admire. No one you'd want your son to work with."

Her eyes became small, amber points.

Dwight came up the sidewalk, his backpack on his shoulder. He stopped to chew out Chris and Amanda, who were throwing rocks at each other, then came inside.

He looked from me to his mother, read the tension immediately. "Goddamnit, Mother.

Leave him alone."

He tossed a plastic drugstore bag onto the table.

Mrs. Hayes raised her eyebrows. "You will not speak in that way, Dwight. Not while you're in this house."

"I'll arrange for a hotel tonight, then. I'll give you a check for the month's utilities." He glared at me. "Come on, Tres. Don't sit with her. You'll never get up again."

He wheeled around and headed for the stairs.

I smiled apologetically at Mrs. Hayes. "Nice seeing you again, ma'am."

I could feel her eyes on my back as I left, like ice cubes pressing into my shirt.

Halfway up the stairs, one of the smaller children was blocking my path. It was Clem, Mrs. Hayes' fanwielder, watching me with feral brown eyes under a mess of brown hair. He had a shoebox pinched between his knees.

"She doesn't like you," he confided.

I looked in his box. Brown and green things moved, glistening in the bottom—things about the size of almonds. My skin crawled.

Not that I hadn't seen cicadas before, but Clem had tried a new experiment. He'd put them back into their former skins—liberally Scotchtaping their desiccated shells to their bodies. He'd left some of the legs free, so the suffocating cicadas could crawl in helpless paths, going nowhere, waiting to die.

"It's a race," he confided.

I hugged the wall as I stepped around him.

Dwight's bedroom was on the left. He sat in the dark on a trundle bed, his backpack between his knees, staring dejectedly at a dumpedover bucket of toy cars on the carpet.

A bookshelf dominated the south wall—comic books in protective plastic sleeves, science fiction paperbacks, hot rod magazines, computer programming manuals, Clive Cussler novels. There was a window on the right, light filtering through the upper branches of a redbud in the backyard. Posters were thumb tacked to the wall: Nolan Ryan, Stevie Ray Vaughan, the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. If the room had been any more Average Texan Boyhood it would've cracked the meter.

I started to reach for the light switch.

"Don't," Dwight said. "She doesn't like the lights on. Wastes energy."

I wondered how Dwight had gotten so tan growing up in a dark house. The answer immediately presented itself: Dwight would've left as soon and as often as possible.

"You okay?" I asked.

"The kids. It's like having a Little League team invited to trample over your childhood."

I went to the window, looked out at the yard. "At least they limit a Little League team to nine."

Dwight nodded sourly. He fished something out of his pack, threw it to me. "Good news. What I did this morning."

A handwritten label on the tape said TECHSAN. It looked no different from the eighttracks Garrett used to keep in his car when I was a kid—certainly nothing worth dying for.

"What did you find?"

Dwight zipped his bag. "What Pena will announce today. There's a sequence in the code that shouldn't be there. He'll blame it on the original programmers."

"The back door."

Dwight lay back on his bed, stared at the ceiling. "It's a beautiful subroutine. Elegant, really. And until it's closed, nothing is safe— not a single file on a client's server, as long as they're running Techsan's product."

I looked out the window. The yard below was balding crabgrass, lined by a wooden fence with missing planks. A barbecue pit squatted between a tool shed and scraggly hibiscus bushes.

"You said you had good news."

"It depends on whether you find Garrett," Dwight replied. "Whether he'll help. I heard—I heard about Ms. McBride. I'm sorry."

"How can Garrett help?"

"I think it would be possible to track where the stolen files were diverted to. I'm not sure. This isn't my area of expertise. But if Garrett got into the source code, if he retraced the steps of the original sender, identified the packet sniffer and the PGP key involved—he might be able to triangulate an IP address."

"In English?"

"Find the saboteur."

"Before, Garrett couldn't even find the problem in his own code."

Dwight's ears turned red. Apparently, the idea that he'd found something Garrett had missed embarrassed him.

In the backyard, one of the smaller boys—John, maybe—ducked under a loose board in the fence. He was carrying a VCR that was much too big for him. It was partially wrapped in a blue towel. He saw me watching from the window and froze. He slid the VCR behind the nearest hibiscus bush and walked toward the house, trying not to run.

The scene made me feel sad down to my bones. I'd seen my share of disturbed children in eight years of PI work, but never so many in one place.

The hell of it was, I wasn't going to talk to the kid about it. I wasn't even going to turn him in. I wondered how many days fanning the Leviathan you'd get for stealing a VCR.

"I talked to Maia this morning," I told Dwight. "She had some information about Pena."

I told him about Maia's conversation with her new pal, the deputy in Burnet County.

Dwight stared at his comic book collection, shook his head. "That doesn't mean anything."

"You knew he was adopted?"

"Of course I knew. What difference does it make?"

"The harassment of the software developers, the disappearance of Adrienne Selak—I think that's just a small sample of what Matthew's capable of. His main agenda with Techsan isn't about money. It's personal—retribution."

Dwight opened the trundle bed cabinet at his feet, yanked out an empty duffel bag. "I told you—there's no reason the deal would be personal. He never met the Techsan principals before."

"Matthew's age," I said. "Born around '67. Clara Doebler, Jimmy's mother—she supposedly had an abortion around then, but just before Jimmy died he was searching birth certificates, asking questions— looking for that lost child. He was told that the child had been born— and I think Pena was the one who told him."

"And you think . . ." Dwight's throat seemed to be closing up. He shoved underwear into his bag. "That's nuts."

"Clara had already lost custody of one child," I said. "She couldn't bear to lose another one—not completely. She never had the abortion. She gave the child up instead. You said it yourself: Pena is treating this takeover differently. He's making it the centrepiece of his career. What better way to get revenge on your birth family than building on their ashes?"

"I've known Matthew almost fifteen years. He's never given any indication. He would never—"

His voice faltered.

"The night Adrienne drowned," I said. "You weren't with Pena, were you?"

Dwight yanked a Hawaiian shirt from the drawer—the blue one with the yellow lotus designs.

"All right," he admitted. "I lied. I lied to protect a guy who's helped me ever since college. When I walked aft that night, I ran into Matthew. I didn't see Adrienne go over.

I just saw Matthew, frantic—coming my way, looking for help. We roused the whole damn ship together, didn't have time to talk about exactly what had happened. Later, when people started questioning us, I saw a kind of fear sink into Matthew's eyes, like he was suddenly realizing what they'd accuse him of. He said that I'd been with him when Adrienne fell. He told what had happened, only as if I'd arrived a few moments earlier. I had to make a splitsecond decision. I went along with it. I didn't know what else to do. But he didn't kill her, Tres."

I'd spent years listening to people's stories, learning to separate out the lies. There wasn't anything suspicious in Dwight's voice. The night of Adrienne's drowning, some cop had merely committed the cardinal sin of interrogation—not isolating the witnesses prior to questioning. Somebody had done that, given Pena the chance to shape Dwight's testimony before he made it.