Ridley Pearson - Cut and Run

Skip Grossman was a rowing buddy of Larson’s from Creve Coeur Lake. Mike, who worked the graveyard shift and sat guard on the yard’s gate, knew Larson well enough to admit him. It wasn’t the first time Larson had stashed a witness for a few hours in this brickyard neighborhood that had risen from the Mississippi ’s banks at the birth of the Industrial Revolution.

The two ate their bagels in silence, both lost. It was a matter of waiting now, until Washington University ’s Earth and Planetary Sciences department opened. Their hunt for Markowitz was about to begin in earnest.

In its heyday, in 1904, St. Louis hosted a World’s Fair, the Olympics, and the Democratic National Convention all in the same year. Hundreds of stone mansions that had been erected during this golden era still stood in the area, including a long line of such homes along Lindell Avenue on the northern boundary of Forest Park. Immaculately kept lawns spilled down to what had once been a busy cobblestone thoroughfare.

“You can almost picture the carriages, the gentlemen in top hats, and the Victorian women with their parasols,” she said.

“Gateway to the West,” Larson said from behind the wheel of the Explorer as they made their way toward Washington University. “Anyone heading west resupplied here. It made it a very rich city.”

At the far western edge of the park, just across Skinker Boulevard, the pale stone buildings of Washington University rose in dramatic fashion, showing off a neo-Gothic architecture that rivaled the Ivy League colleges. The buildings stood amid towering oaks, maples, and a few elms that had survived Dutch elm disease. Larson had attended its night-school MBA program, though he had dropped out in the middle of a difficult protection six years earlier-a protection he couldn’t help but be reminded of, given the woman next to him.

“Where are you?” she asked.

“I was thinking back six years ago. And then I was thinking that Penny’s five years old.”

She applied makeup to her face using the small mirror in the back of the sun visor. She slowly created the look of a hollow-eyed woman ten to fifteen years older.

“Do you want to know?” she asked.

“Of course I do.”

“Then find her. Take a good long look at her. You’ll know.”

His chest tightened as his heart ran away from him at a full gallop. “I’ve known all along,” he said softly. He wasn’t sure she’d heard him.

“And I’ve waited for you to ask.”

“And I’ve waited for you to tell me.”

“I thought it would be cheap of me. Manipulative. Unfair. ‘It’s your daughter, so do something.’ How could I say that?” She didn’t take her eyes off him. “Are you okay with this?”

His throat caught. He found himself overwhelmed with wonder. Curiosity. Anticipation. “I’m great,” he managed to whisper.

“Light’s green,” she said.

He took an enormous risk by bringing her along. But it seemed a bigger risk to leave her behind and without protection. He could easily justify her being here because of her computer expertise, but what good would justification be if something went wrong?

He drove.

“Why haven’t they called?” she asked yet again.

“What’s she like?” he asked.

She pursed her lips, looked away from him, and attempted to conceal her eyes, now glassy with tears. “Not now. You wanted to know. That’s as far as I can go right now. Please don’t push me on this. The more I think about her…”

He said, “Look… they probably don’t know what to do next. They never meant to have Penny instead of you. They tried to trace your phone and we cut that off, and now all that’s left is to hunt you down while we hunt them. They’re not going to try to negotiate Penny’s release until they’ve figured a way to beat us, and there is no way to beat us. They know that. We know that.”

He pulled to a stop at the next light, the university now directly in front of them.

She fidgeted in her seat. Larson pulled through the intersection and found a place to park. He shut off the motor, and she popped open her door.

“Which one is Earth and Planetary Sciences?”

“Macelwane Hall.”

“Which one?”

“We’ll find it.”

She was out of the car. Larson climbed out, locked up, and caught up to her on the sidewalk. The neo-Gothic architecture towered over them.

Her shoulders slumped, she trudged, head bent, up the incline.

He caught up to her for the second time. “You came to St. Louis because of you and me. For Penny.” He waited. “Tell me why you came to St. Louis, Hope,” he persisted. “Did you want me in Penny’s life, or both of your lives?”

“I didn’t choose it for the weather,” she said. “But do me a favor and don’t go all warm and fuzzy on me because I don’t think I can handle that right now. Okay?”

He moved closer to her as they walked. He held his hand out to her.

And she took it, their fingers interlaced. Entwined.

Larson squeezed, and she squeezed back. Just for a moment it felt as if he were floating.

“We can’t do this,” she said. “We can’t get everything all confused.”

“Sure we can,” he said. “It can’t get any more confused than it already is; it can only get better.”

“Later,” she said, increasing her pace to keep up with him.

The Earth and Planetary Sciences office was staffed with a combination of salaried assistants and graduate students. The walls were lined with photographs of tornados and satellite images of hurricanes. Dr. Herman Miller, a man in his late sixties, had sad brown eyes, wet lips, and a runny nose he tended to with a white handkerchief. He wore a navy blue cardigan sweater populated with pills of yarn, some the size of bunny tails.

“Why more questions about Leo?” he asked. “I spoke to someone just yesterday.”

Larson introduced Hope as Alice. “She’s our contract I.T. specialist.”

“We’re interested in reviewing your mainframe’s access logs,” Hope said. “Specifically, the past six weeks.”

“And we’ve been looking them over, just as your guy asked. ‘No stone unturned,’ ” Miller said to Larson. “That’s how your other guy wanted it.”

That was Stubby by the sound of it. Trill Hampton was too street-cool to bog down in clichés.

Nonetheless, Hope and Miller got started, talking their own language. ID log-ons, pattern recognition software, spyware, key-trackers. Hope pushed for specifics each time Miller fired off too quick an answer.

Miller asked rhetorically, “Could Leo Markowitz get in and out of the Cray and the Silicon Graphics without our knowing it? Of course he could.”

“But if Markowitz is on the system, decrypting these records one by one, which we know for a fact he has to do because that’s the way he set it up in the first place-and there are thousands of records, don’t forget-then your processor logs are going to reflect that, even if they don’t tell you exactly who’s doing it.”

Larson asked for a definition of a processor log, and at the same time both Hope and Miller met him squarely with expressions of exasperation. He took a step back and let them go at it.

A few heated exchanges later, Miller said something like: “If you want an exercise in futility, be my guest.”

“Thank you,” she said. “Lead on.”

Miller, annoyed with her, walked down a hall covered with weather-radar printouts and time-lapse photographs of lightning. They passed through a steel door and down two flights of stairs that took them into a subterranean lab. They arrived at a door where Miller used his ID card to gain access.

The expansive room was chilly and the equipment it contained-mostly rack-mounted black and blue and yellow boxes with thousands of multicolored wires-hummed loudly. Row after row of them. Wires and lights, routers and hubs, all interconnected.