I asked her to open the first one dated after his death. I began reading: Sam, did you get to the bank? Did you find your passport? I trust you. I love you. We’re almost there.
“Can you tell if she sent this to herself?”
“If she sent it to herself, she didn’t use the same computer.” The woman clicked on an icon I’d never before seen. “You ping an address, and this sends a signal to a URL — like sonar — and it bounces back and you can determine how long the round-trip took. You press return and the IP address appears, followed by how many seconds or milliseconds the ping took. I know this was sent from around here.”
Either she was sending them to herself from my neighborhood and following me around, or someone I didn’t know was sending them from my neighborhood. Both scenarios scared me; I could think of no reasonable way to protect myself.
“Can you do one more thing for me? Can you find me the password for themaineevent?”
The woman quickly eliminated the most popular passwords. “This guy, Jeremy Gofney, created a twenty-five-computer cluster that can make three-hundred-and-fifty-billion guesses a second. But it will take me between thirty minutes and six hours. Why don’t you head out, and I’ll text you when I get it.”
I got a coffee to go from Gimme! Coffee and went home to walk Olive. I decided to take her to Cooper Park for a change, not as big as McCarren Park, but, pleasingly, on Olive Street. And the chances of finding small dogs for Olive to play with were better there. But on this winter afternoon, even Olive’s cable-knit sweater didn’t keep her warm enough, so I put her inside my coat and we sat on a bench.
Where was Samantha planning to go that she needed a passport? Or where was she being urged to go? Would this be something she would write to herself? Only if she expected someone else to see it. And why would she stop writing to herself after this? Or why did the person who might have sent this message stop?
Olive squirmed inside my coat and brought me back to the here and now, the simple needs of a living creature. Thinking she had to pee, I put her down, but she refused to go. So I tucked her back inside my coat and walked quickly home. I mimicked the tired gestures of someone being pursued — looking first over one shoulder, then the other. I didn’t have it in me to fake the confident stride that would supposedly ward off an attacker.
The hacker was going to break into Bennett’s account. Maybe I was better off not knowing all that he had been capable of. It would surely be a trade-off: information versus further humiliation. Was one’s capacity for it endless? But the information — if I could shut down my personal response to it — would be valuable for my thesis. I would see firsthand the mind that conjures such behavior — I would see the predator as he moved in on his prey. The sociopath and his victim: me.
I probably still had a couple of hours until I could expect to hear back from the hacker. I needed to steel myself for whatever was coming. I had only four.25 mg Xanax left, but I had one more refill on the prescription Cilla had written for me. I left for Napolitano at the corner of Graham and Metropolitan. At this old-fashioned Italian pharmacy they knew you by name. The owner, with her red hair and perpetually white roots, greeted me warmly. Everyone in the neighborhood had heard what I’d been through. When I handed her the vial of remaining Xanax, she looked at the label and said, “You only have one more refill.” Apparently, I looked as though I needed more.
I checked my phone for texts, even though my phone hadn’t buzzed. I said I would wait for them to fill the scrip. I pictured someone with a mortar and pestle in the back. I handled the Italian soaps that you wouldn’t find at other pharmacies. I felt at peace, relatively, knowing that I was getting tranquilizers. What if I found out that Bennett had never loved me? That suggested, of course, that I still thought he had once loved me. But I had never driven past an accident on the road without looking at the injured.
I paid for the refill. Just before I got home, hackyou texted me: I’m in.
I could have taken one of the new pills, but decided instead to ride the excitement of the discovery, whatever it would bring. When I got back to the store, hackyou was with another customer, a nun. Whom was the nun hacking?
“With you in a minute,” the hacker called to me.
The nun was holding a small statue of the Virgin. The hacker told the nun to come back in a week, the repair would be completed by then. So the store wasn’t a front.
“Come around the counter,” the hacker said. “We can talk in the back.”
I followed her and sat in the folding chair she indicated.
“Unless Samantha is a pro, she didn’t send herself the e-mails.” The hacker handed me a yellow Post-it and a pen. She told me to write down the password that she dictated to me. Not wanting to leave evidence of her own hand, I guessed.
“How much do I owe you?” I had brought cash as instructed.
McKenzie was right: I paid more for three months of Internet.
26
The password was evenwhenusleep.
I thought of the wall. His making me sleep against the wall.
I felt as though I was about to be served a poisoned feast. I was starving, and I would be made to poison myself. Maybe if I ate something first — a piece of dry toast — it would line my stomach so that the poison would not kill me.
Nothing was remarkable about these e-mails other than that a dead man wrote them. Just the ordinary reassurances that Samantha was on his mind and he couldn’t wait to see her (though wait he would). I had expected to linger over every word and try to suss out not just the meaning but the nuance. Instead, the messages were so banal that I grew impatient. Same thing, seven times over. But in the next one, he tells Samantha that a crazy ex-girlfriend killed herself, and for some reason the police are looking at him for it. If he needed her for an alibi, he wrote, could he count on her?
Samantha would not have written to herself asking to be her own alibi.
I took off my pullover sweater. The apartment wasn’t warm, but I was sweating.
The next message from Bennett answered a panicked question from Samantha: I was home alone all day, but that won’t hold up as an alibi.
The day he claimed to be alone, he was driving to meet me in Maine.
I read a dozen more. Whoever was writing to Samantha claimed to be hiding in Canada, but I already knew that — Samantha had told me. I kept on, looking for something I did not already know. And there it was. “Bennett” had asked Samantha to meet him in Toronto, and they would go from there. And as I had just learned, she would be paying for this pleasure (Did you get to the bank?). The first e-mail mentioning the trip — or honeymoon? — appeared the day after Pat’s murder. My stomach plunged. Should I notify the police? Which police? I had illegally broken into the e-mail that contained the information. Would I tell them that a dead man was planning to meet his fiancée in Toronto after he, the dead man, killed an ex-lover?
My stomach growled, but I couldn’t eat anything. Instead, I poured a double shot of Stoli.
I typed in Susan Rorke, searching for the last e-mail Bennett had sent her, the day before her death. Now I was reading something he had actually written; I downed the rest of my drink.