Ridley Pearson - The Body of David Hayes

“I’ll find it.”

“Leave your phone on. And come alone.” The line died.

Boldt was still looking up into the wet night sky, eyes searching for a cell tower’s blinking red light when something winked at him through the rain. Binoculars ?

Boldt moved his head, trying to force that wink to appear a second time. And there it was! Another wink of light from a spot slightly above the overpass. Some spy looking down, perched in a tree beyond? he wondered. But then he saw it again. Not a person at all. A camera lens mounted high atop an aluminum light post. A traffic cam .

He was being watched, but from a distance. Cell phone in hand, he wanted badly to make a call but thought better of it, not knowing if in the rain and the dark that camera could see him or not, but not wanting to test it. He headed back to the car at a run, slipping once on the wet grass, smearing his knee down into the muddy incline, and jumping back up. He hurried toward the car realizing the traffic camera, if accessible from the Internet, which he was guessing would prove to be the case, allowed those running him to look for ground surveillance while at the same time confirming Boldt did exactly as he was told. Big Brother, and in the hands of the wrong people.

Back in the car, yanking the wheel to make the exit ramp so he could reverse directions and return to the very exit where he’d been parked only ten minutes earlier, Boldt pulled the phone to his ear to report his situation. But the idea that the person on the other end of these calls might not be Svengrad or Hayes stayed with him, and for a moment he resisted connecting with Riz. The idea of a third party, an unknown, instilled fear. On some level, Boldt believed he could fight the enemies he could see-but was he putting the kids or Liz even further at risk if this proved to be an unknown? He took a moment to think.

As he drove, he typed the bar’s name into the Mobile Data Terminal to confirm its existence. After a long hesitation the computer’s tiny screen returned:

DO YOU MEAN: “Web-Stirs, 1100 NE 45th Street”??? (Y)es (N)o?

Boldt pushed Y, and the terminal offered to compute the quickest course, but Boldt declined, well aware that I-5 was the fastest way there.

Web-Stirs , he realized, was an Internet bar, and now he raced to conclusions. Weighing risks, he nonetheless called Pahwan Riz and caught him up to date on the traffic camera and his next destination being an Internet café. Before Boldt was off the phone Riz had confirmed that the traffic camera he’d seen was one of about fifty viewable live on the state’s highway website. Whoever had arranged this was able to watch Boldt move place to place in the comfort of his living room. It made him feel all the more like a pawn and brought his blood pressure considerably higher.

“I’m not liking this,” Riz said. “An Internet café. Get it?”

Boldt was no techno-wizard unless it related to the crime lab, an area where few could outdo him. “No.”

“Ingenious.”

“How so?”

“David Hayes? Web-Stirs an Internet café? That means a small office network hub, a router. Simple stuff. For a guy who could probably hack the Pentagon, kid’s stuff.”

“He’ll hack the computer network at the bar,” Boldt said, feeling his way through this.

“He has long since hacked the network. He’s established drive sharing on one or more of the machines. This guy is good ,” Riz said with a distant respect. “What he’s going to do is direct you to a particular machine. You’ll insert the disk, and the rest will be history, he’ll take it from there. He’ll enter the correct password that we could never determine, copy the disk, reformat it, destroying all its contents. Brilliant.”

“Can we stop praising him and start figuring out some way to prevent this?”

“No,” Riz answered. “Not unless you simply refuse to show up.”

“That’s not an option.”

“I’m aware of that.”

“He’s got us?” Boldt asked.

“He’s got us,” Riz confirmed. “You’re about to turn over the software to him.”

The Crown Vic screamed over the bridge through the pouring rain, Boldt bothered not only by what he heard, but by something else, something intangible, indefinable, like a moving shadow. Highways ? he wondered. Cars? Websites ? Something in the back of his mind that he couldn’t quite pull forward.

Riz, on the other hand, proved prescient, and for the first time a tingle of suspicion entered Boldt’s thought that a police insider like Riz could mastermind all of this from behind the scenes, no one ever the wiser. Make it all seem like the work of someone else while this person manipulated events for his own personal wealth.

This thought churning inside him, Boldt parked and walked a wet block to Web-Stirs, a glass and tile, ultra hip, ultra modern interior with colorful graphics and odd shapes hanging from the ceiling that Boldt assumed were meant to be art. A twenty-something bartender with slicked-back hair and black-framed nerd eyeglasses served food-coloring-hued mixed drinks in exotic plastic stemware. James Bond on a budget. The beer looked like a dark amber. The crowd was a surprising mix of women and men-Boldt had expected all men for no reason other than his own prejudices. The women showed their navels above their pants’ waists, as provocative as the waitresses, one of whose buttocks cleavage showed when she bent to retrieve a fallen napkin.

His phone rang again and, for a second or two, Boldt debated what Riz had said, debated not answering it, or walking out of the bar altogether. But it was not to be. He answered the call, stuck the phone to his ear, and was dictated a simple instruction. “Machine in the corner, when it comes open. Insert the disk into the drive bay and walk away.”

An Asian girl occupied the machine at the moment. Boldt wondered if the caller knew that, and what it meant if he did. Boldt scanned the room’s ceiling for security cameras and spotted two in opposite corners, wondering if a hacker could gain access to these as well. His world felt smaller and more claustrophobic everywhere he went, people watching. The girl looked over her shoulder at him and smiled, and he wondered if she were a plant or an innocent. Then he wondered if there were any innocents anywhere, taken in again by the sexual, casual dress of these kids-from his angle it was nearly impossible not to look directly down the shirt of this Asian girl. He turned and walked toward the bar, keeping a fuzzy eye on her in the smoked-glass mirror behind the bar.

“Get you something?” the bartender asked.

“Hot tea to go?”

“Two doors down.” The owner was not stupid enough to go up against the coffeehouses.

“Something soft,” Boldt said.

The guy ran off a list of pop drinks and bubbling waters. Boldt requested a ginger ale. The Asian girl spun out of the chair. Impossibly tight pants wrapped around a firm body. She headed in Boldt’s direction. He felt ancient in this company. He wondered if she were a messenger, a spy, a twenty-something prostitute. She walked right at him, her young nipples showing darkly through the T-shirt, the not-so-gentle sway of her hips emphasized by the low cut of the corduroy pants, the straight-cut black bangs so classic and timeless.

“Lieutenant Boldt?” she asked.

He felt a spike of heat, deciding someone had sent her, perhaps believing Boldt in need of a computer coach. He doubted immediately they’d ever trace the twenty or fifty he believed he’d find in her pocket to a suspect. At every turn the person behind this proved himself clever, and that pointed increasingly away from Svengrad and toward Hayes in Boldt’s mind. No way he had died in that cabin horror.