Then-almost as rapidly as they’d flooded her-she dismissed every sensation, reenergized her focus, and, staying low, crept through the area toward her office. Carpet muffled any sound her running shoes might have made. She listened to her breathing, hoping it was even, although it seemed labored.
She was stealing something this night.
Her name was still on the door. This reassured her. She prayed that none of the locks had been changed. They would be after she was fired, she knew. But when her key opened the room, she breathed a sigh of relief.
She thought she was not exactly a break-in artist or a midnight robber. But what she was doing was certainly a violation of her agreement with her boss, and bordered on the criminal.
She wondered if some clear-eyed prosecutor would look at what she had done and see felonies. Probably. Maybe. Possibly. She did not know. She asked herself: Would I? She knew the answer to that was yes. But fear mixed with determination to create an odd concoction that could be summed up with an obscenity: Fuck it. All she knew was that she was swept up in something and that right at that hour in the middle of the night it was up to her to discover an answer.
Finding a killer-that might just possibly keep her job safe.
Everything she had done and was about to do would seem like a small price-if she was successful. She didn’t want to imagine the alternative. Disbarred. Arrested. Prosecuted.
And worse: humiliated, knowing that she had been powerless to prevent a killer from walking away scot-free.
Susan closed the door to her office quietly behind her. She didn’t turn on the overhead light, but in the small glow from the city that crept through her window, she could see around the barren space. Everything is empty, she thought. The only way to fill it back up was to do what she was doing. She moved behind her desk and booted up her computer. Law enforcement access. She said another small prayer that her log-on and password hadn’t been compromised by her suspension. When the computer screen came to life, she was relieved-although a part of her was dismayed by what she considered genuinely sloppy security.
She hit a few keys. Each click! sound on the keyboard made her shift about nervously, hoping she wasn’t heard.
A Transportation Security Administration site came up.
She knew there would be no hiding that it was Susan Terry seeking information. Each keystroke and password was uniquely hers, as solid a bit of evidence as a signature on a page, and eventually it would be traced to her. Any competent investigator would find out what and where and when she was looking for this information. She could run any “erase disk” program she liked and she knew it would be fruitless. When it came to computer technology, investigators were way ahead of any capability she possessed.
She didn’t really care, but she knew this put a clock on everything she was doing. She could feel it ticking inexorably. One second. Two seconds. Three seconds. A minute. An hour. A day. How much time did she have to find a killer?
Susan bent toward the computer screen and whispered, “God damn it, Timothy Warner, I sure as hell hope you’re right. It would be nice to lose my entire career doing the right thing for a change, even if it is totally illegal.”
This was funny, she thought. Gingerly she removed her right arm from the sling.
For an instant she imagined herself to be a criminal seeking another criminal.
She typed rapidly, one-handed sometimes, sometimes overcoming the pain of forcing her right arm forward so she could move more quickly through the electronic police worlds.
Moth watched Andy Candy sleep.
He was slumped into his desk chair. His computer was open in front of him. Andy’s bag was nearby, and he knew the.357 Magnum was inside, but for the time being he left it alone.
He knew she was exhausted. Once, years earlier, after some truly sweaty teenage coupling, she had abruptly fallen asleep beside him. They had been in the backseat of a car-a cliché, he knew, but it was where they’d found privacy that night. She was naked and he’d spent the minutes she dozed trying to memorize every curve and fold of her body. He’d watched her then just as he did now. He thought they had no chance to continue together, that the only thing linking them now was something dark and murderous, and that eventually there would be light shining on the two of them and they would split apart again. It made him sad, and anxious. He didn’t know if he could bear losing her again-which didn’t seem a very mature way to feel. But he felt crippled by all that being adult had brought into his life. Drink. Hopelessness. Near death. Salvation through his uncle. He wondered if avenging his uncle’s murder-it seemed an almost Napoleonic notion-would cost him Andy’s presence.
He guessed it would. This caused him to shift in his seat. He wished he could join her in the narrow bed, but he was waiting.
The email counter on the computer made its electronic sound.
That will be her, he thought. He wondered if he should awaken Andy. He knew he could use her way of seeing things. But he let her sleep. Just a little longer. He opened up the first emaiclass="underline"
No Blair Munroe.
20 possible flights. Some connecting.
Sending all lists.
Meet you at 7 your place.
He hesitated, then started to open all the attachments and move them to his desktop.
Another email beeped.
He opened it immediately.
It read:
Dead?
I don’t think so.
It was a Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles driver’s license picture of Blair Munroe, blown up to fill the page.
He printed the photo out and held it in his hands.
Moth stared, hoping he could see killer in the eyes, the shape of the jaw, perhaps the cut of the hair or the turn of the lips. But there was nothing that obvious or helpful. He shuddered, thought he should awaken Andy to show her, but then realized it could wait. If this was the man he had to kill, there was no sense in rushing her into the crime. She could have a few more minutes of innocent sleep, he thought.
43
Moth fell asleep a couple of hours before dawn. He lifted a pillow from his bed and lay down on the carpet beside Andy Candy. He had some odd thought about modesty and not disturbing her before stripping down to his underwear and shutting his eyes.
Andy, on the other hand, awakened just as the first rays of morning light crept into the apartment. She saw Moth on the floor beside her, rose, and stepped over him gingerly. She made some coffee as quietly as she could and splashed some water on her face in the kitchen sink, then went to the computer and read everything that Moth had been working on. She saw the information sent by Susan that he had printed out and then picked up the driver’s license picture of Blair Munroe, going through many of the identical thoughts that Moth had processed just a few hours earlier. Then she took her coffee and sat down at the desk to examine flight passenger lists.
The first thing she did was rule out any women’s names.
Then she cleared any obvious couples. Goodbye Mister and Missus Last Names Alike.
“You don’t have a wife, do you?” she whispered to the photograph. “No common-law Bonnie and Clyde spouse cokiller at your side?” She paused, letting these questions hang in front of the computer screen, before mouthing her own answer: “No. I didn’t think so. You started out a loner and you’re going to end up one, too.” She understood that she was speculating, and that she didn’t really know much about murderers, although she no longer felt like a naïf in this particular school of understanding.