Neither Adrienne nor Duran said a word as the elevator took them to the sixth floor, shaking a little from side to side. Finally, it shuddered to a halt with a loud dinggg, and the doors rattled open on the hallway.
“‘Jack be nimble,’“ Adrienne whispered. Duran nodded his understanding.
Inserting the key, he turned the lock and pushed the door open, half expecting the Bear to fill the space with the fury of a sudden storm. But there was nothing—no movement, and no sound but the distant hum of a refrigerator. Stepping inside, Duran was surprised to feel the tension within him dissolve. He remembered thinking, when he’d arrived back after the polygraph, how anonymous and generic the place was. But now he felt different. There’s something about this place, he thought. I just like being here. “C’mon in,” he said, speaking almost boisterously.
Adrienne shushed him, seeing at a single glance that someone had gone to considerable lengths to hide the violence that had taken place the day before. No bodies, no blood. Just a whiff of pine scented cleanser. Moving slowly through the room, looking for any sign of a disturbance, she’d almost given up when she found it: an indentation in the wall out side Duran’s consultation room. And a gouge in the wooden baseboard. You had to know where to look, though. “You see?” she said. “Those are from bullets.”
Duran nodded. “I’m a believer,” he told her. “I was there.” He looked at the damage. “They took the slugs, of course.”
She sighed. “I can see why the police didn’t buy it,” she said. “I mean if someone tells you that there’s a murder, that there are bodies, blood—and when they go to take a look, they don’t find anything… “ Her voice trailed away. “I mean, who’s going to check for gouges in the woodwork. Who’s going to look any further? I wouldn’t.”
Going to the spot where Bonilla had fallen, Adrienne stared at the floor. Finally, she said, “I don’t get it.”
“What?” Duran asked.
“Any of it. I can see where they might have been able to clean things up in the time it took for the police to get here, but… what did they do with Eddie? And the other man? How did they get them out of the building?”
Duran shook his head, as baffled as she. “Through the garage?” Then he pointed to an end table next to the couch. “Look at that,” he said.
Adrienne frowned. “What?”
“The lamp,” Duran said. “It’s gone. I must have broken it when I hit the guy with it.”
Adrienne shivered. “Where’s your computer?”
“In here.” He led her into the consultation room.
“You drive,” Adrienne said, swiveling the desk chair in his direction.
“What are we looking for?” he asked, sitting down in front of the computer.
“Patient notes. Address books. Whatever we can find.”
He pushed the Power button on the CPU, and the computer began to whir and tick, going through its incomprehensible boot up routine. It took a minute for the wallpaper to shimmer into view, then the icons, and finally they heard a fanfare of trumpets. “So—where do you want to go today?” he asked, resting his fingertips on the keyboard.
“Patient notes. Do you have a folder for Nikki?”
Duran nodded. Typing rapidly, he clicked successively on Start, Find (files and folders), and instructed the computer to list everything in the Sullivan folder. A moment later, the names of fifty-six files appeared in a little window. Most of them were denominated Nico, with a number after her name. Adrienne watched over his shoulder.
“What are the numbers?” she asked.
“First session, second session, third—like that.”
“Go to Intake,” she suggested.
Duran double-clicked on the file, then opened it in Word. The Microsoft splash screen appeared on the monitor and, soon afterward, later, a page consisting entirely of row upon row of numeral ones. Thousands of them. Disbelieving, Duran scrolled down the first page to the second in the file, and then to the third. They were all the same. Finally, he turned to Adrienne. “I don’t understand,” he said.
“Let me take a look.”
“You sure?”
She nodded as she took his seat, and began typing. “When I was in school, I had a part-time job at Dial-a-Geek,” she told him, fingers flying over the keys. “My junior year. I only got Tier One questions, but… “ She stopped typing and looked up at him. “We’ve got a problem, Houston.”
“I can see that, but—what is it?”
She pointed at the screen in front of her. He saw that it was a list of the files in the Sullivan folder. Scrolling horizontally, she pointed to the last column on the right. It was headed with the word, Modified, and under it was a series of dates and times corresponding to each file. The dates were all the same, the times within a minute of one another. November 14, 3:02 AM.
“Son of a bitch,” Adrienne muttered.
“What?”
She shook him off. “What’s your other patient’s name?”
“De Groot.” He spelled it for her.
“Is there a de Groot folder?”
“Yeah.”
She typed for a moment, and then sat back as the monitor flickered, and Windows listed the files in the de Groot folder. At a glance, they could see that all of the files had been modified on November 14 at about three o’clock in the morning. Hoping against hope, Adrienne called up de Groot 13—only to see that, like the intake file in the Sullivan directory, consisted entirely of the numeral 1, repeated thousands of times.
She sighed. “Someone wiped your text files last night,” she explained. “And only your text files.”
Duran couldn’t believe it. “How?”
Adrienne shrugged. “It’s not complicated. I bet if you went into Programs, you’d see a little file with a cute name like… ‘Wipeout’ or ‘Textburn.’”
“You’re kidding.”
“I’m not.”
“Someone wrote a program—”
She shook her head. “You can download it from hackers dot com.” She pushed her chair back from the computer, as Duran swore under his breath.
“But the information’s still there,” he insisted. “It doesn’t actually go away.”
“No?” she asked, arching an eyebrow.
“No,” he told her. “It’s like real memory. Even with amnesia, it’s just a question of retrieval. The data’s on ‘the disk,’ somewhere. All that’s changed is that someone’s erased the addresses.”
Adrienne shook her head. “They didn’t erase the addresses. They changed the ‘data’ in them to a lot of ones. That’s their content. That’s what they say.” She glanced at the screen. “Unless you made backups?” She gave him a hopeful look.
“In here,” Duran told her, pulling open the drawer on the left side of his desk. Only to find pens, pencils, scissors, and highlighters. A staple remover and paperclips. “I mean, they were.”
Adrienne looked around, then reached into the wastepaper basket beside the desk. “Is this it?” she asked, showing him a zip disk that someone had crumpled like an empty beer can.
Duran looked at the label, and swore.
“You said you made tapes,” Adrienne reminded him.
Duran nodded.
“So where do you keep them?”
“I don’t,” he said. “I mail them to the—” Suddenly, he winced and groaned. “—ohhh, jeez…”
“What?” Adrienne asked.
Shaking his head, Duran reached into the pocket of his jacket, and produced a cassette tape labeled de Groot 34. “I was supposed to mail it, but… everything went haywire.”
“That’s the only one you have?”
Duran nodded.
“What about that?” Adrienne asked, with a glance at the answering machine.
He looked at it. “There’s only one message,” he said, tapping the Rewind button with his forefinger. Slowly, at first, and then faster, the tape began to rewind, emitting a high and empty whine that reminded Adrienne of Nikki’s robot impersonation: Rrr-rrr-rrr. Finally, it snapped to a stop with loud cli-ick.