Authors: Matt Richtel
R
omp Studios.”
“This is a joke.”
“The offices of an adult film production company went to the ground. She beat the rap. But then she got sued.”
He handed me a printout from the East Lansing Superior Court. It had the name Erin Iris Coultran, a date six years earlier, and a long number that I guessed to be a docket number. I listened to Danny’s explanation in a daze. He said that, as near as he could piece it together, a pornography company had started shooting films in East Lansing, trying to recruit women from Michigan State University. Not long after a profile of the company appeared in the local weekly alternative newspaper, its offices were destroyed. Erin was part of a small group charged with what looked to be a political or religiously motivated attack. She was not convicted, Danny said, but she still faced a mountain of debt from the civil suit.
“So are you saying that Erin blew up the café?” I asked.
“I have no evidence that the waitress caused anything.”
He said he had a friend at the FBI run down the names of people at the café and Erin Coultran’s was in the database.
“I don’t know if the charges were dropped, or if she was acquitted—or precisely the dispensation.”
Erin. Blew. Up. The. Café. I let the words rain down. They didn’t go together. Did they? Something tugged at me—something unresolved about Erin. Too many coincidences. At the least, she had been way less than frank.
“Lieutenant Aravelo asked me about her.”
For a second, it looked like Danny’s eyes widened. “Anyway, I’m expecting details soon about the Michigan case. I will forward those that don’t violate her right to privacy.”
I looked at the paper and shook my head.
“I take it you don’t think Erin is capable of such an act of violence.” Sounding more like the sergeant with every passing moment.
“Nope. Can’t be.”
He pulled out a stick of gum. He offered the package to me.
“I do my puzzles with a pencil.”
I asked him why, what he meant.
“I put a lot of words in the crossword puzzle that ultimately don’t fit. But you can’t be afraid to put down some words that ultimately don’t work. Do the same with Erin. Take your time, see what fits.”
“Why not just ask her to fill in the blanks?”
“I’d advise against. You’ll scare her off. She won’t tell you anything and she might run.”
He suggested I continue spending time with Erin, if that’s what I chose to do. “Use your listening skills. Try on different ways of looking at her. See which one is the best fit. She’ll get clearer. They always do.”
After Danny drove off, I considered the essential question: Could Erin have blown up the café?
She’d given me no indication of violent tendencies, yet she’d been violent enough to attract the attention of the FBI. On its face, anything underhanded by Erin seemed implausible.
Unless.
There had been a fire at Simon Anderson’s house. Possibly started by a female electrician.
Arson. Explosion. Fire.
Then again, if she was as straight as my initial gut instincts told me, what did that say about Weller? Why would he impugn her?
Maybe there was a third possibility: Erin and Weller were on the up-and-up. Weller was exploring options and alerting me to pertinent evidence; Erin was on my side, but simply hadn’t told me something about her story. It could be a coincidence. That seemed plausible enough, given what I had learned so far about each person. Just then, Erin called. I sent it to voice mail.
I beelined to the nearest Internet café—the modern public library. I did a search on Erin Coultran, cross-referencing her with Michigan, East Lansing, Arson, Lawsuit. Each search turned up empty. Most newspapers don’t keep their archives online, and hadn’t even started building them until recently. I found a brief reference to the demise of Romp Studios. An item at the site of an adult film magazine mentioned a fire at the studio as one of the examples of backlash against pornographers in the late nineties.
Then I researched Danny Weller. There were a handful of stories about his crimefighting, including one about the Lingerie Larcenist. He was a bit player, and a stand-up guy. A brief mention in a column in the
Examiner
mentioned that Weller and his junior partner, Officer Velarde, were among those assigned to rotation on the homicide shadow investigative squad. He checked out.
I checked my e-mail. My editor, Kevin, had sent three messages. The last one was just a subject line: “What’s up?”
When I was a sophomore in high school, the dog ate my homework—a six-page paper on
The Red Badge of Courage
. I’d set the paper down under a well-lit window, and put my uneaten peanut butter and honey sandwich on top of it. The sun did its job of melting everything, and then the dog came in and cleaned up the mess. The teacher did not believe me. It should have taught me to come up with better excuses.
My phone brain story was due that afternoon. I needed something better than: The café explosion ate my homework. My subject line read: “I’m just polishing off the final draft.”
I was going to have to come up with something better soon, but I had bigger things to worry about. Like the intensifying pain shooting down my back, which felt like linebackers were performing
Swan Lake
on my spine. I looked at the clock on my phone and realized it had been an hour and a half since I got to the café. If I wanted to make it to Stanford Technology Research Center on time, I was going to have to speed again.
During the ride down to Palo Alto, Erin called twice, but I sent the calls to voice mail. I had a meeting with a geek about a laptop. What was hiding in that laptop that she wanted so desperately to see?
M
ike’s office was a study in obsessive-compulsive disorder. Everything was stacked, ordered, and dusted. Five pencils sat in a row on the desk, their tips of identical length. It seemed almost dainty compared to Mike, who had played linebacker at Stanford. He had a slight but chronic bend at his elbow from arthritis, caused by blows of helmet to joint, that was noticeable to anyone with anatomy training. When he typed on the computer keyboard, the pain in his left arm caused him to peck letters one at a time with his index finger.
On his wall were two posters. One was of Douglas Engelbart, the man credited with inventing the computer mouse, and, in turn, with making computers more user-friendly. Engelbart was an icon for people who wanted to make bits and bytes a little more human. The other was of Eldridge Cleaver, a man who wanted to make humans a little more human. Whether its presence had anything to do with Mike’s own heritage—African American—never seemed relevant to anything. One of Silicon Valley’s attributes was that it never seemed to give a damn about race. If you could make the green, you were on the team.
Mike’s only trouble was that he suffered the social condition of being overly friendly. He would try anything, go on any outing, hang out with any group, say yes to any invitation, and become ever present if you let him. He was reliable, smart, and nearly funny, but he was just slightly tone-deaf and so he couldn’t understand that not everyone was that happy all the time, eager to have fun, or altogether sincere in their social planning. He had to be kept at arm’s length or his friendship could be overwhelming.
“Dude, was your friend a hacker?” he said. He was fond of the title “dude.”
He was relatively social for an engineer, but he was still a geek. We weren’t going to distract ourselves with niceties. He didn’t ask why I was interested in the laptop. We went right for the technology.
“This encryption program is a doozy.”
Hackers get a bad name. The term can refer to the jerks who break into computers and destroy Web sites. But not all hackers are malicious. Some hackers take apart systems in order to improve them, work outside corporate channels, find new ways to attack problems. When the title is said in a certain tone, it is a tribute to someone who, tech-wise, has got it going on.
“I might have overlooked it. But the disk seemed way too full given the applications. There had to be something else on there.”
I mustered enough of the two required ingredients—concentration and patience—to follow his thinking. He was saying that when he first looked at the computer, he noticed its memory was very full. But on its face, there weren’t enough big programs to be taking up so much space.
“I did some digging,” he said. “And found this.”
He was in the computer’s directory—about fifteen submenus down from anywhere a person without a PhD would look. All that popped up was an icon for a computer application with the title “GNet.” Just like Mike had told me on the phone.
“The program is half a gigabyte. Huge—especially considering that it wasn’t showing up in any of the main directories.”
A big program. Possibly hidden.
“So what does it do?”
“Can’t tell you, dude.”
He had his index finger on the computer’s nipple, controlling the onscreen prompt. He put the prompt on the GNet icon. He clicked. Nothing happened.
“Cut to the chase,” I said.
It was uncharacteristic for me. Mike looked up at me dispassionately, like he was examining a computer with a virus, and jumped ahead. He said he thought, at first, that the program was corrupt, but it had been activated recently.
“Activated?”
“The logs show when a program is working. Just like you can tell in your word processing program when you most recently worked on a given document.”
He showed me the computer’s log. It had a date. Three weeks earlier.
“I tried about five hundred ways to open the app. I even loaded some all-purpose software I thought might pry it open enough for me to glimpse its raison d’être.”
He paused.
“It should have hit me a hell of a lot earlier. Most times when a program is encrypted, it asks for a password. Or it tells you that entrance is forbidden. That’s how you know it’s encrypted.”
“But you weren’t asked for a password?”
“Nope.”
He leaned back. He was in the Geek Teaching Zone. He explained that he was able to see in the computer logs that each time GNet was activated, so was a different program, AXcs*82.
“That’s the name of the encryption program,” I said.
“Yep. Very tidy. Very sophisticated. It is in stealth mode—blocking attempts to access GNet. But whenever the program is activated, the encryption is opened too—and therefore activated.”
I leaned forward.
“Meaning you didn’t get into the program either?”
“Dude, give an old dog a little credit.” Then he added, with a smile, “But just a
little
credit.”
I waited for the punch line.
“I didn’t break the encryption code. But I did manage to find the signature of its author.”
“The author’s identity?”
“Sort of a tagline you typically find associated with a program. It can tell you something about the author. Or the company.”
I nodded.
“I printed it out,” he said. “This stuff is typically jargon, or an oblique identifier, so it typically doesn’t tell you much. Seems to be the case here.”
He opened the piece of paper. I looked at it. I felt that little bit of me still tethered to reality had just become unglued.
F
orty-eight hours earlier, just before the world exploded, a woman handed me a note that saved my life. Written, seemingly, in the handwriting of my true love. There had been no way to make sense of it.
Maybe I’d imagined the whole thing, maybe it hadn’t been her handwriting at all. Or maybe it had been a ghost—a specter in a red Saab.
Until that moment, I didn’t have any reason to favor any of these explanations.
“I’ve been in the Valley a long time,” Mike said, stabbing his index finger at the words on the piece of paper. “I’ve never heard of this.”
But I had. I knew it well. I knew exactly what it meant. The name on the paper, the name of the company, or person, or memory that had written the encryption scheme on Andy’s computer.
Strawberry Labs.
Annie’s childhood dog. Strawberry. The Labrador retriever.
The past had returned.
A
fter Annie died, I took brief custody of Strawberry Too, the Lab Annie had named after her first dog. But my apartment was too small and the dog liked to throw up. I reluctantly put S2 up for adoption. I tried to make it symbolic of my getting over Annie’s death, but it wasn’t that neat.
One thing Annie’s death brought me was the idea for a magazine story that turned into my next foray into medical journalism. I wrote about the neurology of grief. Researchers had begun to use magnetic resonance imaging to identify the parts of the brain used when we experience all different sorts of emotions, including grief. They mapped reactions as people thought, felt, and remembered in real time. The research tried to hone in on to what extent grief emanates from the limbic cortex, where we think emotions originate, or the hippocampus, where we form memories. It was the nascent study of the neurobiology of attachment. If we identified its origin, could we mitigate the pain of loss?
The signs of Annie’s passing were everywhere, and not all of them I could have predicted. One day two men in suits knocked on my door. They introduced themselves as IRS investigators and said they’d come on a routine matter. They asked about my employment status. Specifically, if I’d ever worked for Kindle Investment Partners.
“No, I’m an ex.”
“Ex-employee?”
“Ex-boyfriend.”
I told them that I had dated Annie for just over a year. I was about to launch into the story of her death—the abridged version.
“We’re sorry for your loss,” the taller one said. “And you never worked for her—in a professional capacity?”
I explained to them that I’d graduated from medical school and was trying to make it as a freelance journalist. The tall one cut me off.
“Just one final question. Did you ever travel to New York with Ms. Kindle?”
A stab of pain. The Empire State Building. The Kiss. I nodded.
“And you weren’t working for Kindle, or Vestige. Did you deal with their accounting?”
Vestige
. That was the company we’d visited in New York. It had been one of the start-ups owned by Kindle Investment Partners. I assured them I never worked for either company.
“When you were in New York, did you attend a meeting regarding Vestige—pertaining to the company’s pending public offering?” the tall one asked.
I remembered the meeting. I’d attended long enough to give Annie some documents she’d left in the room. I told them I’d stopped in to the meeting for a few minutes to say hello. They seemed satisfied.
“Like I said,” the tall one said. “We’re sorry for your loss.”
“Can I ask . . . ”
“As you know, the Kindles have a substantial amount of wealth,” he explained. “The government just wants to make sure everything is in order.”
“It’s routine,” his partner added.
In the morning, I called Kindle Investment Partners. Glenn Kindle and I both loved his daughter. I didn’t like the man and he didn’t like me, but for the sake of her memory, I wanted to make things right between us, and find closure. It was the least I could do for my nearly future father-in-law.
That didn’t happen. I couldn’t even get him to come to the phone, not for at least six more weeks. That’s what the receptionist at Kindle Partners told me, in her usual hyperprofessional tone. When I told her who it was, she softened considerably.
“Oh, Nat. I’m so, so sorry. Annie was such an amazing person.”
Diane, Kindle’s receptionist, had been at the funeral, but we hadn’t had a chance to talk. She explained that Mr. Kindle was taking time off to grieve and had sequestered himself in Europe. I thanked her.
“Diane. One quick question. What if I have a question about Annie’s affairs? Could he be reached then?”
No, Diane said, not even then, but there was one option.
“You could try Dave Elliott.”
Dave’s office was in a high-rise building that looked out over the Bay Bridge. It separates San Francisco from Oakland, the “haves” from the “have to commutes.” The bookshelves behind Dave’s desk were sparsely appointed with a few law books with the spines intact, like they’d never been cracked open. A putter leaned against his desk.
“I’ve got a 2:15,” he said.
I looked at the clock to the right of his desk. It was two o’clock.
“I’ve got a 2:05.”
“What can I do you for?”
I told him about the IRS. He took it in.
“Thanks for the tip, buddy. I’ll check into it. Have Tim validate your parking at the desk.”
The words and tone were friendly enough, but I felt simmering anger. I asked him what the IRS wanted. Had something happened with Vestige? He told me it was almost certainly routine, but neither of us was fooled by my question. I was pissed about Annie’s death.
“I charge two hundred dollars an hour for law,” he said, smiling. “Twice that for psychotherapy.”
Dave looked as his clock. He launched into a fairly simplistic description of Kindle Investment Partners, the venture capital game, Annie. Her reputation as a rising star in the community caught me by surprise.
“In the venture circles, they said she’d bring glory to Kindle Investment Partners. Her technology instincts were amazing—marketing, engineering, everything. Start-up companies wanted to work with her. Competitors feared her.”
“Annie?”
“The Smiling Assassin.”
It rang false.
“People like that attract attention. Even after they’re gone.”
“Were you in love with her too?”
He chuckled.
“C’mon, buddy. This is the big leagues.”
“Meaning what?”
He let the bad taste swirl around in my mouth.
“You and Annie had a great thing. I’m not blind. You were something special to her. You provided her with a real texture, romance. I think it’s something you should be proud of.”
I considered shoving the putter two feet into his colon, but he kept pulling me back from the edge.
“Listen. You’re going to find something terrific again. It’s in your blood—finding real connections. If you want to chat more, don’t hesitate to call. In fact, why don’t you give me a call if you ever want to hit the Olympic Club for a round.”
It was a part of Annie’s world I’d just as soon have left behind, but when it haunted me again just a few weeks later, it was my own damn fault.