A band about eighteen inches high ran the width of the door; the gouges looked to be nearly a quarter of an inch deep, overlapping where the dogs had tried to claw their way through, and lighter than the surrounding wood because they had gotten beneath the stain.
I didn’t even have to point a finger at what I saw. McKenzie, I knew, was seeing the same thing.
“I think he wasn’t alone,” I said. “I think someone came over and the dogs were in the way. What I need to know is who let them out. Do you know someone I can hire to hack into an e-mail account?” And I told him my suspicions.
He wrote down an e-mail address, hackyou@gogo.jp.com, and slid it across the table. “I didn’t give this to you.”
“How much does he charge?”
“She. Less than three months of Internet.”
“That means everyone can afford to hack,” I said.
“Everyone does.”
Olive had settled on his lap. I remembered the cheese sticks and olives in the refrigerator. I asked if he had time for another beer. Without consulting his watch, he said that would be great.
I assembled a small plate of things from the cheese store and brought it out to the living room with another beer for him. I had a memory of having done exactly this with Bennett. It threw me so much that I did not get a second beer for myself.
McKenzie had moved from the couch to the bookcase. When he turned around, he was holding a piece of brain coral the size of a fist that I had found on a beach in St. Croix and used as a bookend.
“Have you ever been night diving?” he asked.
“The one time I went, the visibility was so poor, all I saw was my flashlight.”
“It’s spectacular. The hard corals bloom and the reef turns phosphorescent. A whole different set of fish come out, even more beautiful than the daytime crew. At night”—he held up the bleached coral—“this is the color of a sapphire.”
I couldn’t ask if he was planning to go diving with Billie anytime soon, so I said, “Are you planning to go diving anytime soon?” I hated how timid and suspicious I had become.
“The night I described was off Saint John. I’d like to go back there again.”
But everyone who flies into St. Thomas ferries over to St. John, and Billie had said she was going to St. Thomas. To pick up patty-cakes.
“The Stilton is really good,” McKenzie said, reaching for the knife and another cracker.
He was changing the subject, but I wouldn’t let go. “It must be hard for you to dive again.”
“I haven’t yet. But I’m ready, I think.”
Now I wanted to change the subject. Now I was afraid to learn that they were going on a diving trip together. I was sorry I had brought it up in the first place. So I forced McKenzie back into being my lawyer. “If it turns out that Cloud was locked in the bathroom, is there a chance she could come home?”
“We’re entitled to an appeal.” He looked at his watch.
I preempted his excuse to leave by thanking him for bringing over the photographs. I did not thank him for the hacker information, as he had not wanted acknowledgment. At the door, he told me to take care of myself.
• • •
I went down Grand Street toward the BQE. I noticed, as I often did, the number of pit bulls being walked by the younger residents of the neighborhood. Nowhere else had I seen so many of them as well-cared-for pets. I had my theories about why — that they were the most misunderstood and misjudged breed, that they were, in a sense, like tattoos, like instant gangsta cred (even though most of them were mushes), that young people wanted to adopt a rescue and the breed clogging all shelters was the pit bull. I’d several times seen a poster of a pit bull in shop windows: “Born to love, taught to hate.” And another one: “For every 1 pit bull that bites, there are over 10.5 million that don’t. Stop bullying my breed.”
Near yet another construction site, I found the address I had been given by hackyou. The storefront was filled with cheap religious figurines such as one sees in the bay windows of private homes or underfunded churches in the neighborhood. I double-checked the address, given what filled the display window, and saw that I had come to the right place. I walked in, a bell chimed, and a zaftig woman of around thirty, in a black dress that resembled a nun’s habit, came from the back and asked if she could help me.
“I was given this address but I think I might have written it down wrong. Do you fix computers here?”
“You’re McKenzie’s friend?”
“So I am in the right place. But what’s with the religious statues?”
“Have you heard the one about the mohel in the clock shop? So a guy’s looking for a place to find a mohel. He finds 273 Main Street, and the whole place is filled with clocks. He says to the guy at the counter, ‘I’m looking for a mohel.’ And the guy says, ‘That’s me.’ ‘But what are all these clocks doing in the window?’ And the guy says, ‘What do you want me to put in the window?’ ”
I followed her into the back room, which was as surprising in its own way as the front. There was a single laptop, not the gadgetry they always show in the movies. I said I was surprised that she could hack with one ordinary computer.
“Breaking into an e-mail account isn’t hacking. It’s cracking. Hacking is an art. It’s discovering and exploiting the weaknesses in technology. Without hackers, we wouldn’t have a hope of privacy.”
“That sounds like the opposite of privacy.”
“Hacking isn’t personal. It’s about decentralizing information and giving it away for free. I’m talking about government and corporate information, not catching some congressman looking at pornography in his home.
“So tell me what I can do for you.” The woman had not given me her name.
“I need to find out if someone sent e-mails to herself as though from another person, or if these e-mails were, in fact, sent to her by someone else.”
“I can tell if they’re sent from the same IP address. It’s possible to reroute a message so that it appears to originate from a different IP, but you’d have to be a pro. And I can tell if this was done.”
She asked me for the server and user ID, then started typing. She said that the most popular password is password. The second most common password is 123456. The third-ranking password is 12345678. And one in six people use the name of a pet.
“Does Samantha have a pet?”
I told her I didn’t know.
“Let’s see if she has pet insurance.” The woman ran Samantha’s name through some kind of database. The computer was facing her, so I could not see exactly what she was doing. I looked at the religious statues — a chipped Virgin Mary, a weathered apostle, an armless St. Christopher. Did anyone ever repair them?
“Samantha Couper has pet insurance with the ASPCA for a six-year-old shepherd mix named Pal, with Cushing’s disease.”
So we all had sick, injured, or rescued dogs. If coincidence, it was odd for a man who didn’t like dog hair on his clothes. If not, then Bennett was a predator drawn to the goodness he lacked. In that case, he was the man I could build my thesis on. My pulse picked up and, for once, not in fear.
The woman typed in something new. She typed in something else. And again. On only her sixth try, she smiled. “MyPal. What is the username you suspect she’s using to write herself?”
I gave her Bennett’s e-mail — themaineevent@gmail — the only e-mail address he had used with me. The woman typed it in and turned the computer so that I could see the screen. Hundreds of messages came up. About a quarter of them after his death. Again, I nearly swooned — that old-fashioned word — at the shock of seeing the username that I had once longed for.