The Breaker

by Nick Petrie

  She took the go-bag from his hand and flung it against the wall, where it slid down behind a big leafy plant. She was stronger than she looked.

  “We have a good thing here,” she said. “It works for both of us. Don’t you want to be happy? Fixing houses with Lewis seems to make you happy. At least I think it makes you happy.”

  “Living with you makes me happy,” he said quietly. “Unless you’re yelling at me.”

  “Then stay, goddamn it.” She took a bottle of wine out of her backpack and waved a hand at his dusty work clothes. “Get cleaned up and I’ll call Dinah and see if they want to come for dinner. We’ll order Thai food.” June didn’t cook, but she was an expert at takeout.

  He heard her on the phone as he stripped naked and climbed into the shower. Two minutes later, she pulled back the curtain with a rattle. Water streamed down his long, lean body and splashed onto the bathroom floor.

  She stared at him as she undressed. Her eyes shimmered with tears. She stepped over the rim of the tub and into his arms. He picked her up and she wrapped herself around him and they stayed that way, each holding the other in that most ancient sacrament, for a long, long time.

  * * *

  —

  As it turned out, Dinah and Lewis had parent–teacher conferences, so Peter built a scrap-lumber blaze in the fire pit and they sat together on the big deck that he’d cantilevered over the steep edge of the ravine. With the lights off in the house behind them and open space all around, they drank Lucky Buddha beer and handed the white takeout cartons back and forth like urban primitives, soaking up the last warmth of the day while the night grew dark around them.

  After the fingernail moon rose over the trees, the wind changed direction and they heard a dog’s deep bark. Riverwest was full of dogs, but the only big mutt on the block was Mingus, the huge high-energy stray that Dinah’s boys had adopted after he took up residence under the porch at their old house.

  Mingus was an escape artist and a rambler. Over the summer, he’d learned to tear the pickets off Dinah’s back fence, causing an arms race between Lewis’s growing carpentry skills and relentless canine ingenuity. Canine ingenuity usually won. As a result, Mingus pretty much kept his own schedule. But he was crazy about June, and often her calls were the only thing that brought him home. He never seemed to mind getting caught as long as June would rub his belly.

  She got up and walked into the side yard and toward the front with its enormous old elm. “Mingus, where are you?”

  A moment later she reappeared at the corner of the darkened house. “Peter,” she whispered. “Come here.”

  Before she finished talking, Peter was out of his chair and moving. Mingus barked again. Standing beside June, Peter could tell that the dog wasn’t on the loose, he was still inside his fence. Mingus couldn’t be bothered to bark at a passing stranger. He barked when someone came up the front walk of Dinah’s house. Or June’s.

  “It’s the side door,” June said quietly. “It’s standing open.”

  “Are you sure you locked it?”

  “I always lock it,” she said. “Always.”

  They never used the front door. The only time they used the side door was when June came home on her bike. Peter had installed a third door in the back wall, for direct access to the deck and the detached garage.

  The house was still dark inside. With the floor-to-ceiling windows, if someone had turned on even a single lamp, the yard would have lit up. They wouldn’t have missed it.

  He grabbed the pitchfork he used to turn the compost heap, then opened the back door, reached inside, and flipped the switch for the big kitchen’s overheads.

  Nobody there.

  He floated through the first floor, pitchfork at the ready, then slipped upstairs, turning on more lights as he went, until the house blazed bright as day. Not a soul. In the basement, he found only spiders.

  The side door still stood open six inches. He closed it and threw the deadbolt. “All clear,” he called.

  He found June in the kitchen with her softball bat and a grim face.

  “They took my goddamn bag,” she said. “It had my laptop in it, my wallet, my biking gloves, everything.” She gestured at the little white side table where she stacked her notebooks and charged her gear every night. It was empty. “Peter, they took all my shit.” She waved at his backpack, still behind the plant where she’d thrown it a few hours before. “Why didn’t they take your goddamn shit?”

  Peter pulled her into his arms. Her whole body vibrated with emotion. “It’s only stuff,” he said. “We’ll get you new stuff.”

  She beat on his chest with her fists, then buried her face in his shoulder. “And change all the locks,” she said with a muffled voice.

  “And change all the locks.” Peter rubbed her back as he scanned the room for what else might be missing. The jar of loose change still sat on the kitchen counter. But not the gunman’s sunglasses that had sat beside it. “First thing in the morning.”

  8

  JUNE

  While Peter poked around outside with a flashlight, trying to figure out how the thief had gotten in, June borrowed his phone and called her bank to freeze her accounts and order new cards. The service rep seemed surprised that there were no new charges. Apparently the first step for most credit card thieves was to fill their gas tank, then go buy a bunch of expensive stuff they could resell for cash.

  She didn’t bother calling the Milwaukee police. Peter’s legal status aside, the cops would probably take two days to show up for a simple B and E. They had enough on their plate. Besides, she wasn’t going to file a claim and they weren’t going to beat the bushes for her burglar, so why waste everyone’s time?

  But June was a reporter and plenty pissed, so she used her iPad, which she kept under her pillow, to log on to her account, hoping she could track down her stuff using the location app. But the system couldn’t find either the laptop or the phone.

  She wasn’t surprised about the laptop, because it needed Wi-Fi to get online, but her phone should have been visible anywhere it had a cell signal, even if it was asleep. Which meant either the thief had turned it off, or he was somewhere underground, probably relaxing on the dirty mattress behind the boiler in his mom’s basement while he pawed through her things. Grrrr.

  She really hated to lose the electronics. Her phone and her laptop were cutting-edge gear set up for security with a virtual private network and a wide array of specialized research software, along with a lifetime of professional contacts and every draft of every piece of writing she’d ever done. She’d spent countless hours tuning her equipment, and large chunks of each day working with them. She knew they were just tools, but they felt more like trusted friends.

  Yes, she had multiple backups in place, so all her information was intact in the cloud, but still. Ordering new gear would not heal the hole in her heart.

  Worse yet was losing her reporter’s notebook. Again, because she transcribed her messy shorthand into her laptop at every opportunity, she hadn’t lost any of the day’s field notes. She even took photos of each page, because seeing her actual notes sometimes knocked new ideas loose, and because redundant backups were not paranoia but good practice. So it wasn’t the notebook itself, but the leather cover, which was a gift from her first editor at the Chicago Tribune. It was warped and worn and had fit her hand perfectly.

  Too wired to sit down, let alone go to bed, she stayed up late cleaning, which really was not like her at all. When she ran out of things to tidy or sweep or mop or scrub, she sat awake with a biography of Marie Colvin, alert to every creak of the old house, while Peter prowled the yard as if the burglar was coming back for their mismatched thrift-store silverware.

  By two a.m., she’d had enough.

  She stepped out of the side door bare-ass naked with her hands on her hips. She felt the cool night air raising goose bumps
. “Hey, Marine,” she called quietly.

  Peter jogged around the corner of the house. His eyes got wide when he saw her, and his mouth curved into a wolfish grin, demonstrating once again why she was crazy about him. She’d tried to tone herself down for every other guy, but Peter liked her wild side, and he had the energy to keep up.

  “Again?” he asked.

  She gave him a catwalk strut, putting on a show, then turned on her heel. “Hey, if you’re not up for it . . .”

  He laughed and scooped her up, threw her over his shoulder, and carried her inside.

  Eventually, they got tired enough to sleep.

  * * *

  —

  On her bike in the rain the next morning, headed north with Peter’s emergency credit card to pick up her new laptop and phone, June thought about the Public Market shooting. She couldn’t help herself. It was automatic. She’d woken up with a list of questions fully formed in her reporter’s mind.

  For example: Who was the man with the assault rifle and the electric getaway bike? When she and Peter and Lewis had watched the gunman approach the market, they had all thought he was a mass shooter. But he’d walked through the whole place and bypassed many possible targets to go after one guy and his phone.

  Why?

  It wasn’t for the value of the phone. Even the latest and greatest model was only worth a few hundred bucks on the black market. The gun itself was worth much more than that, at least according to Lewis. Assuming the shooter was even semi-rational, the risk of armed robbery in a public place was too large to justify the profit. Which meant the shooter wanted something on that particular phone.

  Next, why use an actual assault rifle? Pistols were smaller, cheaper, and easier to get. Was it the thrill of the weapon? Was it personal? Was he making some kind of larger point?

  He’d shot up the market afterward, but hadn’t killed a single person. And unlike most mass shooters, who often made elaborate attack plans that ended with suicide or suicide by cop, this guy had an exit strategy, his electric bike.

  Still, Peter told her that the shooter had seemed ready to kill his victim. Which implied some personal connection between the shooter and the victim. Murder was almost always personal.

  When she thought about the victim, another thought arose. If someone held you up at gunpoint and appeared ready to kill you, someone you had a personal connection with, why on earth would you leave before the police arrived?

  The only reason she could imagine was that the victim had done something he wanted to keep secret. Something he thought was worse than the threat of murder.

  June had to admit this was all terribly interesting. But what really stuck in her head was something else. She kept thinking she’d seen the victim’s face before. Which was strange, because she’d spent most of her career covering tech in Silicon Valley, so her mental filing system was full of West Coast hotshots, not Milwaukee suits.

  Back on her bike with her new equipment protected from the drizzle by her stylish new commuter bag, she told herself that she wasn’t going to get answers to any of those questions. If she could ask Peter to stand down from the hunt for the guy with the video glasses and the electric bike, she’d better apply that same logic to herself. Let it go, chill out, relax already.

  Because if she dug deeper into this thing, if she turned over the wrong damn rock, she ran the risk of the police deciding to take another look at the security footage. She didn’t want them to run facial recognition on the good Samaritan in the cowboy hat, not when she and Peter were finally finding their groove.

  Besides, June had a book to write and a deadline to meet. Even if she’d already done the fun part, which was chasing down the original story. The job now was to put new meat on the bones with additional sources and experts to put the story into larger context. Painstaking work. It would be a good book, and her agent assured her it would sell like hotcakes. But right now, she was fucking bored to tears. It was so much more fun to be on the hunt for something new.

  Usually, she went to her borrowed desk at the paper to pound out some pages in the blissful noise of the newsroom. Today, though, she knew she’d get pulled into the market story follow-up, so she decided to stay home and finish her goddamn chapter.

  Just as soon as she figured out why the guy in the suit looked so familiar. She’d gotten a decent look. Bald, egg-shaped head, deep-set eyes over slab cheeks, with fleshy lips and prominent ears. Like a movie robot from the fifties, made of bent tin and molded rubber.

  She’d find him.

  June’s facial recognition was better than any goddamn computer.

  9

  June plugged in her new laptop and started downloading updates, then fired up the coffeemaker. She told herself that she’d only look at her iPad until the caffeine was ready.

  She thought that she might know his face if he’d been in the Journal Sentinel in the last few months, so she went to their site and clicked through past stories, looking at pictures. There was plenty on the county exec and the governor and various business and government debacles, but no sign of the man from the market. She did the same thing with the Milwaukee Business Journal and got the same result. Nothing.

  Maybe he wasn’t local. Maybe he was in her mental file because he actually was a tech hotshot from out West who’d come to Milwaukee for some conference. But she found no conferences this week in Milwaukee or Madison, which was a tech hub, or even in Chicago, which was ninety miles away. Crap.

  Was he with one of the Big Five? She knew their top people well enough, could pull up their faces in her mind, but they were called the Big Five for a reason—they were big, and had a lot of people. She went through their corporate sites and found head shots of executive teams and leaders of top departments. No luck. Industry sites like TechHub had the usual PR cheese, but those photos got her nowhere, either.

  Maybe if she could remember his place in tech, that would narrow the search.

  Was he an enterprise guy, with Oracle or Salesforce or Slack? An infrastructure guy, with Intel or Sysco? Social media? Venture cap? An academic hotshot? Nothing rang a bell. She sighed and poured herself a cup of coffee.

  With the first sip, she had a new thought. She put his age somewhere between fifty or sixty. What if he looked familiar because he’d been a big deal in the past? Time would have changed his face just enough to mess with her memory. If that was the case, and he was still on her radar, he’d have been a very big deal indeed.

  If he was sixty, she reasoned, he was old enough to go all the way back to the first Internet boom in the late nineties, Netscape and AOL and all those first-generation companies, most of them now gone or greatly diminished. It was before her time as a tech journalist, but she knew the history. Her laptop was still downloading and updating software, so she didn’t have access to her Public Investigations database subscriptions yet. But she had other resources. She went back to TechHub and ran a few searches and clicked through an endless photo feed.

  It was full of self-satisfied white guys in blue button-down shirts and power ties and pleated khakis. Very few women among them. Jesus, if she really drilled down, she could spend a week at this, or a month. She picked up her coffee but it had gone cold. The exciting life of an investigative reporter. And this wasn’t even her story; she was just curious. Although curiosity was a big part of what drove the work, maybe the most important part. Who knew what you might come up with?

  While the microwave warmed her mug, she thought about the business cycle. When the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, it weeded out companies with catchy domain names and slick websites but no real business plan or paying customers. By the end of the decade, innovative survivors like eBay and Amazon had roared back, along with the next generation of companies, fueled by the emerging mobile Internet, which was then followed by the social media boom, which led to the unfortunate rise of the tech bro and hoodie as fashion state
ment. If her guy was fifty, he might have been in one of those groups.

  Back to TechHub. Another search, another feed of photos. The enormity of the task was clear now, and she clicked faster. A few brown faces this time, a few more women, but still mostly white guys. Which didn’t matter, because that’s who she was looking for.

  She was a half-dozen clicks past the picture before it registered. She missed it again going the other way before she finally slowed down and found it. There. In a corporate photo taken more than a decade ago, five men posed on a winding glass staircase, wearing matching polo shirts and Ritalin smiles.

  According to the attached article, they were the top five people at Sense Logic, a privately held company that did innovative things with electronic hardware, including energy and power management modules, accelerometers, magnetometers, gyroscopes, and a suite of other real-world sensors. Important stuff, but not exactly sexy.

  Except for the fact that the photo was taken to commemorate the company’s sale to a multinational industrial behemoth for well north of two billion dollars, part of a pre-recession tech spending spree that would not end well for the multinational giant.

  No wonder everyone looked so cheerful.

  June’s guy was on the second step from the top. At least she thought it was him. In the picture, he had a dirty blond ponytail and an extra hundred pounds that was the opposite of muscle. A former Caltech professor and the cofounder of Sense Logic, his name was Vincent Holloway.

  Now she remembered him. Right after she’d left the Tribune, she’d written her first freelance piece for the Mercury News about why a sensor company was worth two billion dollars. And of the dozen or more people she talked with, Vincent Holloway was the best interview.