David Kessler - Mercy

“Will you quit with your literary comparisons?”

Nat, she recalled, had a bachelor’s degree in English Literature.

“What I mean is, everyone misunderstands Frankenstein. He wanted to create life, but he created something that he couldn’t love. The monster didn’t start out a monster. It started out as a creature with feelings that his creator couldn’t bring himself to love. And love was all the creature wanted. So the creature became a monster because he was starved of the love that he craved. I think it was the same with Burrow. It’s like that saying that Alex misquoted over the phone to you.”

Juanita raised her eyebrows, quizzically.

“Hell hath no fury,” Nat explained.

“Oh, yeah. Everyone misquotes Shakespeare.”

“Congreve actually. William Congreve. The full saying is ‘Heaven hath no rage like love to hatred turned. Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.’ But it isn’t just a woman. A man needs love too. And sometimes it’s harder for a man because he’s culturally indoctrinated not to show it.”

“Are we still in English Lit class? Or have we moved on to Sociology 101?”

“I’m just saying that monsters are created, not born. And it was Sally Burrow who created Clayton, both the boy and the monster. And all because she couldn’t love him.”

Juanita had picked up on something in Nat’s words.

“You feel sorry for him, don’t you?”

“I don’t really know. It’s the old free will debate. At what point do we stop feeling sorry for the wrongdoer and start blaming him?”

“And when do we?” asked Juanita as Nat brought in the coffee.

Nat opened his mouth, but nothing came out. The issue wasn’t quite as straightforward as it sounded. After a second or two, he found his voice.

“In the immortal words of that guy from Kung Fu : ‘I seek not to know all the answers…’”

Juanita held up her right hand and put on a mock Chinese accent.

“‘… but rather to understand the questions.’”

They burst into childish laughter.

“You may know your books,” said Juanita. “But I know my TV.”

“In that case, you should remember that Kwai Chang Caine didn’t have a Chinese accent!”

And with that, Nat scooped up his coffee and went to his small office. Juanita took a sip of her coffee and then put in a call to Esther Olsen. She introduced herself and quickly came to the point.

“Look, one of the things we’ve found on the hard disk of Dorothy’s computer is a booking with an online travel agent. But some of the data is missing and we don’t know where it was to. I was wondering if you could help us out.”

There was silence on the other end of the phone.

“Mrs. Olsen?”

“I’m sorry. I don’t know.”

Juanita thought quickly. There had to be a way to get some more information.

“In order to make an online booking one normally needs a credit or debit card. Do you know if your daughter had one?”

“She had a debit card. She got it with her new bank account when she gained control of her trust fund from her grandfather. Jonathan did too.”

“Do you, by any chance, have any of her old bank statements?”

Again there was hesitation.

“Er, no … she used to shred everything.”

“You’re sure she didn’t leave anything or maybe forget to shred something?”

“Positive.”

“Okay, thank you.”

Juanita put the handset down with the uneasy feeling that Esther Olsen was holding something back.

David opened the second button of his short-sleeved shirt against the sweltering heat. The air conditioning had broken down again and the early afternoon sun was getting to him. He wished he had worn a loose-fitting T-shirt. Hot weather didn’t agree with him — something Debbie used to tease him about when they were children. But right now he needed his concentration more than ever.

He had already established that Dorothy had bought a ticket from a now defunct Mexican airline company, Quetzalcoatl Airlines. The receipt was from the EasySabre electronic booking system. And as he had told Juanita, the first company to offer self-service online booking through EasySabre was Compuserve Information Services.

If Dorothy had a Compuserve account, then it might still have a record of the booking or a copy of the receipt. He also knew that CIS had been taken over by AOL in February, 1998, in a complex three-way deal. Because the Compuserve brand was still popular in its own right, it continued to function under AOL and so David knew that there was a chance that Dorothy’s account might still exist in some passive form even now.

So after telling Juanita what he had discovered, he logged on to the Compuserve website and spent the better part of the next hour trying to track down and get into her account.

The difficulty was how to find it. When Compuserve started out, they used ten digit numbers: six digits, then a comma, then four more digits. But then they had changed and allowed their customers to use a name followed by “@compuserve.com.” The trouble was that many customers had the same name, so they had to resort to letters and numbers. Thus one John Smith might become johnsmith@compuserve.com, but another might have to become johnsmith275@compuserve.com.

He tried “dorothyolsen” as the user ID, reasoning that she’d be more likely to use her full name. But it didn’t offer him a password reminder. It simply flashed up a message that said “Invalid User ID.” He followed up with “dolsen,” but again drew a blank. Various others along those same lines followed, including both names backward and various name and number combinations like “dolsen1,” “dolsen01,” “DOlsen,” etc. But every time he was greeted by the same message: “Invalid User ID.”

After a while he was cut off because of “too many attempts” and he had to log on from another computer. But the screen reply remained stubbornly the same.

He took the opportunity to go out and get some sandwiches. But when he came back, all he could do was try more permutations of her name and random numbers, constantly having to break off when he found himself greeted by the “too many attempts” message.

He knew that this was no way to go about it. His approach was about as unscientific as it could be. The trouble was, there was no mathematical solution. But there might just be a psychological one. He knew that if he was to make any progress, he was going to have to get inside Dorothy’s mind.

Juanita took a deep breath of fresh air as she left the building. She felt a bit guilty taking an outside lunch. There was still so much work to be done. But there was someone else covering the office, and they had reached an impasse. There was no point sitting round waiting for the phone to ring. Plus she was going stir-crazy. She needed a break from the confinement.

So she made her way to the deli, grabbed a tray and stood in line. She looked round, wondering what she was even doing there. It wasn’t hunger that had drawn her out of the office; it wasn’t even boredom. It was tension. But even tension wasn’t the right word. It was frustration — the frustration of trying to do a job and knowing that it was an uphill struggle. Fighting the good fight was all very well. But some battles are over before they’ve even begun.

She took a Caesar salad and mineral water from the refrigerated unit and moved along the line to pay.

As she carried her tray to her favorite table in the corner, she told herself that she wouldn’t be long.

Favorite , she thought wryly. Normally she wouldn’t be eating here at all. She’d buy a take-out and eat it at her desk. But on this occasion the strain was too much and she’d needed a break.