L.A. Bytes (5 page)

“Hi, Des. It hasn’t been that long, has it?”

“You don’t even know, do you?”

Chris sniffed. Des was always such a drama queen. “I don’t L.A. BYTES
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keep a calendar.”

“You should. If you did, you’d know it’s been positively ages.

Two weeks at least, maybe even three.”

“I’ve just been a teensy bit busy.”

Des laughed. “Oh, and the rest of us aren’t?”

Chris popped the fridge door open and surveyed the interior.

What could he do for supper? Should he bother preparing anything—how likely was David to be home? He’d picked up a pork loin to stuff, but why make the effort just for himself?

“So aside from that, just how is everything?” Chris asked, eying a bowl of fettuccine and pesto and trying to remember when he had made it. As usual he had forgotten to label it.

“I’d like you and David to come for supper Wednesday night.

I’ve got a little party set up for my birthday. You did tell him, I hope.” Des’s voice rose a notch. “I’ve got a surprise for both of you. Ohhh, you’ll be so thrilled.”

“I’ll have to check with David,” Chris said warily. Des’s surprise could mean anything from fi nding a new designer to showcase in his upscale men’s boutique in Beverly Hills, to his latest tuck. “But yes, I told him about it being your birthday.”

“Tell him he absolutely must come. No squirming out of it for anything; not work, nothing. I’ve found the most fabulous sushi chef. He does amazing things with ahi and ono. You’ll just die.”

Chris perked up. He loved ahi. “I’ll let you know. Let me talk to David.” His second line beeped. “Gotta go. Talk later.”

Wandering into the living room he dropped onto the white leather sofa facing the bay window overlooking the reservoir at the bottom of the hill. A trace of mist clung to the hillside as it trailed down onto the glassy surface of the lake, giving the area its name. The lake looked like it was steaming.

“Christopher Bellamere? This is Troy Garcia of the
Los
Angeles Special
—”

Chris slammed the phone down with a strangled curse.

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Garcia was the kind of sleaze-ball journalist who made Roz look respectable. Neither Chris nor David had forgiven him for running the sleazy images of David’s former homicide partner, Jairo Hernandez, when Jairo, who had tried very hard to seduce David and take him away from Chris, had been shot and killed in a botched hostage taking crisis. That whole fi asco had nearly derailed their relationship, but ultimately led to David proposing to him and their subsequent marriage. When the phone started ringing again he let it go to voicemail. Climbing to his feet he entered his home offi ce tucked in the back of the house. There he turned off the phone and sat down in front of his workstation.

Logging in, he opened his email program and watched the usual fl urry of messages come in. He discarded the spam and moved several business-related emails into their respective folders, then skimmed the others. Just as he was about to close his mail program, a new email popped into his inbox. The subject line read “Warning for Chris” and the handle in the From column was Sandman422—no one he knew.

There were no potentially dangerous attachments. He opened it.

It contained one line.

MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS OR ELSE

A second look at the email handle showed it was a Freemail account. Sandman422. Anyone with access to the Internet and fi ve minutes could set up an anonymous account there and never worry about being traced. Okay, it was a joke. One of his online contacts playing a tasteless joke.

Then a little mail icon appeared in his system tray. New mail.

Escaping out of Sandman’s email, he found a second one from the same person.

He hesitated only briefl y before opening it.

IF YOU MESS WITH ME DAVID MIGHT NOT BE SO LUCKY NEXT TIME

Shards of ice raced through Chris’s gut. The skin of his face L.A. BYTES
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felt tight. “You bastard,” he whispered to the silent screen.

This time he opened the properties of the email and looked at the message source. It told him a whole lot of things that weren’t going to help him catch the prick. Sandman422 had sent his email from a Calnexxia server—Calnexxia was a local telecom company, spawned by the breakup of the telecommunications monopoly. The ISP that hosted Freemail used their servers and fi ber lines as conduits for their product.

Chris ran a host lookup utility and found no surprises. The ISP matched the Calnexxia domain. Then he ran an Arin WHOIS

search and got an organizational ID and a local Los Angeles address. Sandman422 had indeed used a free emailer to threaten David. He could have made the threat from anywhere. Not that Chris believed that. Sandman had to be local—how else would he know about David? He must have either been at the hospital, or—a horrible fear blossomed in his gut. Chris thought of the phone call from Troy Garcia. Had he received the same phone call Roz got? Was it Sandman who was spreading the story about his attack?

His phone rang. Chris answered, hoping it was David.

“Intelligent Security, Chris speaking—”

“Hey, Chris,” Terry sounded scared. “You need to get down here right now.”

“Something new happen?”

“There’s some serious shit going on. Denton pretty well tore me a new one,” Terry said. “But he’s given me support in tracking this asshole down. I’ve isolated that computer on the third fl oor.

Talked to a guy I know who’s done some work for the FBI and he told me how to secure it.”

“Good.” Chris cradled the phone between his shoulder and his chin while he sorted through some papers he had pulled together earlier for another client.

He was beginning to rethink his decision to work with Terry on this. It was promising to turn into another media circus—sure
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as shit this thing was going to become a public nightmare. But he’d already signed the contract, so his reluctance was moot.

“Can you come down now? Denton wants a proposal on how we’re going to tackle this. I told him I’d have something on his desk for Wednesday.”

Chris thought of David. No telling when he’d be home. He sure hadn’t gone out of his way to let Chris know his plans. He could be gone all night.

Chris tucked the papers into a fi le folder. He thought of his aborted search for something to eat. “You hungry?” he asked.

“Haven’t eaten yet, so I guess so,” Terry said.

“Cafeteria still suck?”

“What do you think?”

“Tell me what you want and I’ll be there in thirty.”

It ended up taking nearly fi fty minutes before Chris rolled into the hospital and had Terry paged. The system administrator loped off the elevator and grabbed Chris’s arm, nearly knocking the bags of takeout out of his hand and jostling the laptop case against his hip.

“Hope there’s coffee in there,” Terry said.

Chris handed him an extra large.

“Come on,” Terry said. “Let’s sit in the cafeteria, the dinner rush is over.”

Except for a pair of doctors in green scrubs and a woman nursing a bowl of soup, the small cafeteria was empty. Terry grabbed a table in the far corner.

Chris dug into his pastrami, savoring the sharp bite of stone ground mustard. He drew a yellow legal pad out of his laptop case and while he ate, made notes.

“Tell me where you are so far,” Chris said.

Terry ticked off on the fi ngers of one hand. “I’ve copied all the activity logs to my workstation and I made hard copies. We can go over them later. I checked for outside connections but L.A. BYTES
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couldn’t fi nd anything suspicious, so I think your call that it’s all coming from inside is right.” Terry guzzled coffee.

“Where is the workstation now?”

“In my offi ce.”

“Can you round up another computer similar to it that we can use for the next few days?”

Terry wiped his hands on a napkin, shredding it before he stuffed it into the take-out bag with the rest of the garbage. “It’s an older model, up for replacement this quarter. If memory serves me we’ve already replaced some on the other fl oors...”

Chris rounded up the rest of the leftovers and grabbed his laptop case. “Let’s go check it out.”

In Terry’s offi ce they found a technician hunched over a keyboard, tapping away with a classic hunt and peck method. He straightened when the door opened, his bearded face twisting into a scowl. Light from the monitor bounced off his hairless head.

“Yuri,” Terry said. “This is Chris, he’s helping us out for a bit, too.” He nodded at the ranks of glowing monitors. “Anything up?”

“Nada.”

Chris glanced at the monitor Yuri was scowling at. A helicopter zoomed into view and a rain of fi re traced its fl ight.

The helicopter vanished in a fi reball. Yuri cursed. So much for due diligence. Terry seemed too distracted to notice his assistant was gaming instead of working.

“Where are those PCs we swapped off the fi fth fl oor?”

“They’re in the work room. What do you want them for?”

Terry glanced at Chris. “What do you want it for?”

“We clone the workstation,” Chris said. “That way we don’t damage the original fi les. If we catch the guy you’ll need them intact to prosecute.” Being married to a cop had its advantages.

40 P.A. Brown

Yuri nodded absently. Fishing a red stick of licorice out of a package he chewed on it while he tried to move his online character to safe ground.

Chris and Terry left Yuri to his game. They grabbed a cart and loaded the third fl oor machine onto it.

“Where we going?” Chris asked.

“Second fl oor storage room just down the hall. We stage new equipment out of it, and decommission old stuff while we wait to ship it.”

They rolled the cart into the storage room, which Chris was happy to see had a properly set up staging area for several computers to sit side by side while techs worked on them. It took the two of them only a few minutes to wrestle the machine into place and fi nd a matching computer among several sitting on a skid in the far corner. Chris hooked monitors onto the two systems and cabled them together.

Chris opened his laptop and sorted through his software. He powered on both computers and slid the disc into the third fl oor machine. Within minutes he had the cloning process running.

“That’ll take about an hour,” Chris said. “You want to keep looking over those logs?”

Tuesday 6:25 pm, Cove Avenue, Silver Lake, Los Angeles
Martinez dropped David off at home. “I don’t want to see your face until Friday”

David didn’t argue. Exhaustion rode him like a too tight shirt; even breathing was an effort.

Chris’s car was gone. A single light burned over the small courtyard. The house was dark. The interior air cooled his heated face. Sergeant greeted him with glee, leaving David exhausted by his enthusiasm. He slipped his shoes off in the tile foyer and padded into the kitchen. The dog followed. He knew he needed to eat, but the thought of food roused only dull nausea.

A shower might help.

After taking the dog out for a ten-minute run, he crawled into the shower. A half hour later he managed to down a couple of pieces of toast and a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice.

The phone rang. Chris? He gingerly picked up, expecting a blasting.

It was Des.

“I invited you and Chris for dinner Wednesday,” Des said. “I don’t want him to welch out without telling you.”

David smiled. “Chris wouldn’t do anything like that.” They both knew he would, especially if he thought it was in David’s best interests. “I’ll let Chris know we’d be happy to come. Thanks, Des.”

After he got off the phone he headed for the media room.

Nothing on TV held his interest. Even a late season game between Boston and Atlanta left him yawning. His head buzzed with too many thoughts, none of which could focus. He thought of the interview tomorrow. Would the son have heard of his mother’s
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death? He knew the propensity for “if it bleeds, it leads” meant most of the media would ignore the apparent suicide of an old woman as non-news. So if he knew what did that say? Was he involved in her death? If David’s instincts were correct and it was homicide, then the son became their prime suspect. The interview was going to be a tricky one. David preferred to interview next-of-kin before releasing the bad news. He knew it often came across as harsh and unfeeling, but trying to catch a killer in a lie was more important than playing nice. Distraught families were rarely able to focus on the needs of the investigation. But the son would know something was wrong the minute he arrived at an empty apartment. What time had the nosy neighbor said the son usually arrived?

He checked his notes. She’d been fuzzy on the time and David hadn’t pushed her. He called her now, hoping there wasn’t a Tuesday night Mass too.

She answered on the fourth ring.

“Oh, Detective,” Alice said. “I was just thinking of you.

Imagine you called!”

“I just have one question, Mrs. Crandall. What time does Nancy’s son usually come to visit? Do you remember if there was any pattern?”

“He always showed up around ten-thirty or so. He knew his mother and I had tea every morning and she asked him not to come then. We had Bible study and she didn’t want him interrupting us.”

A thought occurred to David. “Did he resent his mother’s new interest in religion?” Maybe he felt she’d betrayed her old faith. It was a stretch as a motive, but he’d seen worse done for less.

“He never said anything to me and Nancy never spoke of it. He always seemed like an attentive boy. Always there for her.

Always had a smile for me or anyone else he met, except...”

“Except what, Mrs. Crandall?”

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“That smile never went anywhere. His eyes always looked like they was laughing at you, even when he was playing nice. I never told Nancy, it being her only blood, but I never liked that boy much.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Crandall. I appreciate your time. I’ll let you get back to your evening.”