Lee Vance - The Garden of Betrayal

“Ganesa’s a two-person outfit, as far as we know,” I mumbled, feeling a little flushed myself. I’d seen porn before but never in the company of my daughter. “I doubt Ellen Cho’s the one looking at this stuff. So, in addition to being a stock-market manipulator and an accomplice to murder, I’m guessing this makes Mohler a pervert.”

Claire joined us, carrying coffee.

“Can he be arrested for looking at stuff like that?” she asked disgustedly, tipping her head toward the screen as she handed cups to me and Reggie.

“No,” Reggie answered. “Not unless there are minors involved. And I don’t want to shock anyone, but taken by itself, this sort of thing doesn’t make Mohler that strange a dude. One of the things you learn in my line is that lots of otherwise mild-mannered people are into all kinds of freaky stuff. Patrol cops see it all the time, because they get called out when people forget to close the drapes or when sex games go wrong. The homicide guys are the ones with the really weird stories, though. They dig deep on people who didn’t know they were about to check out, and who didn’t have time to tidy up beforehand. Spanking porn is on the mild end of the fetish scale.”

“Which is one of the things that made you wonder if Alex committed suicide,” I said uncomfortably, remembering our conversation on the park bench. “Because you figured he might have been into something strange and dumped his hard drive to tidy up.”

“Possible.”

“I’m kind of offended to hear you call this stuff mild,” Kate burst out angrily. “I don’t see how porn promoting violence against women is any less bad than porn involving children.”

Reggie glanced upward, looking as if he wished he was somewhere else.

“World’s a complicated place,” he said. “When it comes to sex, the only bright line I know to separate right from wrong is consent. Children can’t consent.”

“And women who are abused or dependent can?”

“Enough,” Claire interrupted. “We can have this debate another time. The only question that interests me right now is whether this tells us anything useful about Mohler.”

“Maybe,” Reggie replied, looking relieved to be let off the hook. “Porn addiction generally suggests a loner and a guy who feels bad about himself for some reason. Mohler could be the life of every party and never miss a night’s sleep, but it’s a better bet that he has something gnawing at him. It’s also likely that he has other addictions. Guy strike you as a boozer, Mark?”

“Possible,” I said, still half thinking about Alex. Reggie’s description fit Alex to a T. Maybe Reggie was right to suspect that he’d ditched his own hard drive. “He didn’t look like the healthy type.”

Reggie’s phone rang before he could follow up.

“Sorry,” he said, checking the display. “I got to take this.” He put the phone to his ear and stepped away.

“We’d know more if we could see Mohler’s e-mail,” I said, glancing back to Kate. “Any possibility of that?”

“Not yet,” she answered, shaking her head. “Connecting to the router is like connecting to a switchboard. I can eavesdrop on the conversations that Ganesa’s computers are having with each other and with outside computers, but persuading them to talk to me is a whole different level of complexity. It might be easy, or it might be really hard, I can’t tell yet. Gabor sent me a step-by-step procedure to try.”

“You’re back in his good books?”

“Totally. The T-shirt was exactly the right thing to send him. He e-mailed me a picture of himself wearing it.”

I was glad to hear it. At Kate’s request, I’d laid out a hundred and fifty bucks for a vintage Pretenders concert T-shirt that she’d found online at a shop in London. The seller had drop-shipped it to Budapest, along with a faxed note from Kate that apologized for missing lunch with Gabor’s mother. Another miracle of the digital age.

“Let me guess. Gabor’s my age, pudgy, balding, and looks like he could use a bath.”

“Not quite. Twenty-five, skinny, and dreadlocks. But yes to the bath. Kind of a grubby rock-star nerd look. I showed the picture to Phil and he got all jealous.”

She didn’t sound particularly unhappy to have upset him. Claire headed back toward the pantry. I turned to follow and my eye stopped on the clock mounted over the door. A half-formed thought caught me up short.

“How long has Mohler been browsing on these porn sites?”

She pressed a few keys on her computer.

“Pretty much nonstop for the last hour. He’s on something called Hot Crossed Buns right now.”

The time was a few minutes past four. The stock market closed at four. Not many money managers I knew ignored the close if they were near a screen, regardless of how kinky they were.

“He have any other pages open? Maybe something financial?”

She dragged a couple of fingers across her trackpad as I hunched over to watch. She was scrolling through the log file too fast for me to pick much out, but I managed to spot a couple of the Web addresses she’d mentioned and a couple she hadn’t. LeatheredMaidens. com and BirchHollow. com were two she’d omitted.

“Porn and more porn, as far as I can tell. Nothing that looks financial. Why?”

“Just another thing that seems odd,” I said, wondering exactly what kind of business Mohler ran. “Let me know if you make any more progress.”

“Will do.”

Reggie was still on the phone, so I joined Claire in the pantry.

“More coffee?” she asked.

“Not yet, thanks. Kate’s incredible, isn’t she?”

Claire smiled.

“I remember when she was ten and we got the new VCR…” Claire trailed off uncomfortably.

“And Kate was the only one who could figure out how to program it, and Kyle got furious. I remember, too. It’s okay to remember.”

“I know.” She crossed her arms and leaned against the counter behind her. “I’m worried.”

“About what?”

“About what’s going to happen if we get this whole thing figured out but we can’t prove it, because we took too many shortcuts.”

It was the same question I’d asked Reggie in the car by the river, after our trip to Staten Island.

“I’ll take care of it. I promise.”

“By beating someone with a bat?”

I winced. It wasn’t something I’d wanted her to know about.

“Reggie told you?”

“He’s worried also. We’re all worried. For the same reasons, and for different reasons. Whatever happens, I want you to remember that Kate needs you.”

“Kate?” I asked, my heart aching.

“And me,” she said, biting her lip. “We’re a family.”

I leaned forward to give her a kiss, and she put her arms around me. I suddenly felt better than I had in days.

“Who was on the phone?” Claire asked, looking over my shoulder.

“Friend on the job with a couple of updates,” Reggie replied, walking toward us. “The tech who matched the partial on Carlos’s belt buckle to Theresa gave the news to the homicide boys. Homicide put out an APB and sent her photo and prints to Immigration and Interpol. If we’re lucky, they’ll get some kind of hit.”

“But they only know her as Carlos’s girlfriend, right?” I said. “Not as Theresa Roxas?”

“Right. But that’s fine for now. She’s likely moving around under some other name anyway. The department makes Theresa as a connection between Carlos Munoz and Alex Coleman, and two things are going to happen. First, our degrees of freedom will go way down, because Chief Ellison will consolidate everything under someone more politically reliable than me, and we’ll be left out in the cold. Second, he’ll shine a big bright light up my backside, and your backside, and do everything he can to make our lives miserable.” He tipped his head toward Claire. “Pardon my language. But unless we’re willing to toss the whole thing to Ellison, and to give up on the kind of stuff we pulled today, I think we should continue to keep our mouths shut.”