Lynne Heitman - First Class Killing

He offered one of his stingy smiles. “Why does that not surprise me?”

“The best part is, it works not only for Angel but for us, too.”

“How?”

“I’ll insist on meeting her Web master to develop the specs for the program. I think the Web master is the key to getting Angel.”

“Web master? She has one of those?”

“She has aWeb site. That means someone built it and maintains it. I suppose it’s possible she does it herself, but Irene and Tristan seem to think she’s borderline illiterate. My guess is she has someone who does it for her. If the scheduling is done through the Web site, then probably payments are as well, which is the jackpot for us. That’s how we prove that there is payment for sex. All that information would reside right there with the Web master.”

He shoved out his lower lip and tapped on the temple of his glasses. “Do you really think she will hire you?”

“We’ll see. I planted the seed with her last night. The fact that she was out there with her crew tells me she knows she has a problem.”

“I am hesitant to implement a change like this so close to the end of the case.”

“ Harvey, we are nowhere near the end of this case, and I have already wasted a lot of time trying to fit in with a group of women who will never accept me. I don’t have the goods to be a hooker. I don’t look like them, I don’t think like them, I don’t dress like them, and I’m too old. But this-” I reached over and drilled the stack of pages with my index finger. “This is the kind of stuff I’m good at. I have years of business experience, and so do you. This we can do on our terms.”

“Very well. If you think you can do it.”

“I know I can do it. I got some stuff at the party, new intelligence.” I pulled my backpack up off the floor, unzipped it, and started digging for my notes. “Have you been able to do the top swapper analysis?”

“I am still waiting for the schedules. Apparently, they are quite large.”

“What about the Robin Sevitch murder?”

“I have done a bit of research, which I can give you. Her death was quite violent. She was beaten to death by a homeless man. One of the detectives who worked on the case is supposed to call me.”

“Here they are.” I pulled out my notes-four pages from my small notebook and two cocktail napkins, all wrinkled and some stained. My notebook hadn’t fit into my little skirt, so I’d ripped out some pages and stuck them in my waistband. When I ran out, I had apparently switched to cocktail napkins. I spread everything across the desk and smoothed them flat. It was the first time I had looked at them since I’d written them, and it was deeply disconcerting to see words and phrases written in my hand to which I felt not even the barest cognitive connection.

“What are those?”

“I did an interview at the party.”

What was even more disturbing was to follow the change in my handwriting, the slow loss of function, the slowsurrendering of function from early to late in the evening. I stared at the completely illegible scratches on the last napkin. How had I become the person who had written that?

“Tony” was written on the first loose page. I saw his name, and I remembered his seedy smell. I shivered all over again at the feel of his cold, fumbling hands through the thin knit tank top. But I felt something else, too, as I looked over the notes-a stirring of anticipation, because Tony, a client of the ring, had given me the name of the Web site he accessed to schedule dates, along with his sign-in name.

“ Harvey, type this Web address into your computer.”

He swiveled around to face the typewriter stand on which he had replaced his IBM Selectric with an old and slow desktop PC. He used his index fingers to tap himself into his browser. I read the address, and he typed that in. I walked around to see just as the error message popped up on the screen.

“It does not work.”

“Try it with ‘dot org’ and ‘dot net.’ ”

He did. “Nothing.”

I went back to the source documents and studied them again. Tony the Actor’s information had come earlier in the evening, so it was perfectly legible. The Web address was there, but so was something else that caught my eye.

“He said something about pool girls.”

“Who?”

“This guy I was talking to. He thought I was a hooker. He mentioned pool girls.”

“Pool girls? Such as cabana girls?”

“I don’t know. I wonder if it was something about the pool at the party?” I tried to think back to my conversation with Tony. There was so much about it I didn’t want to remember; it was hard to pick out the wheat from the chaff.

“Do you have the Web site?”

I found the address and read it off again, this time assuming thei was anl.

“That one works,” he said, leaning in to study the results.

I went over and insinuated myself in front of his keyboard. “Scoot over.”

The two of us stared, Harvey sitting and me crouching next to him, at a screen that was blank except for a sign-in box and a password box, just as Dan’s contact had said it would be.

“I have the sign-in name.” I found it on one of my wrinkled pages. “It’s TonyThesp001. But that doesn’t help us much without the password, and this guy had no password. That’s why he was talking to me.”

We stared for a few more seconds. I knew very little when it came to what was behind the slick surface of the Internet. Harvey knew less. But I knew someone who could help.

“ Harvey, would you be averse to me bringing someone in who might be able to help us on this Web stuff?”

“Help how?”

“He’s a hacker. We worked on that case down in Miami earlier this year. He’s phenomenal. He helped me break it.”

“What can he do for us?”

“First of all, he can get us past this screen. That would be a snap. Maybe he can track it all back to the Web master. If he can, he might be able to suck everything we need right out of there without anyone ever knowing.”

“Can we afford him? Our margins at this point are razor-thin.”

“He worked for free last time. I don’t want to ask him to do that again. I’ll pay him out of my end.”

“If you think he can help, call him, by all means. You do not have to pay from your share, but keep in mind that we are time-constrained.”

“I know. That’s one reason we need him. He’s fast.” I checked my watch. It was after eleven, which must have been the reason Harvey was in a robe and slippers. My internal clock was wacky from traversing time zones. All I knew was this one day had already seemed two days long. I had to go home to bed. “I’ll call him tomorrow.”

FELIXMELENDEZ, JR., PICKED UP IN THE MIDDLE of the first ring.

“Majestic-Airlines-Passenger-Services-this-is-Felix-how-can-I-help-you?”

He sounded the same, his voice as bright and sparkling as the morning sun streaming through my window. I wondered if he looked the same, tall and lanky, all joints and hinges, like the kid he still was. I also wondered if Majestic had let him keep his spiky hair with the frosted tips.

“Hello, Felix.”

After the slightest pause, there came a gusher of excitement that flowed over the phone lines and practically lifted me off my stool, where I sat enjoying breakfast at home and not in some hotel coffee shop on the road.

“MissSha nahan? Is that you? Wow. This is so cool to hear from you. How did you find me…I mean…of course, you could find me. How are you? How have you been? I can’t believe it. Are you in Miami?”

“I’m in Boston. How is life at the airport? Do you love it?”

“Way cool, Miss S. Way,way cool. I love it so much here. The people are so nice to me. It’s exactly what I wanted.”