by Andrew Mayne
Nothing.
Next I try the first one by itself, and get somewhere. The top result is a card catalog designation from a library.
So is the second, and the third.
Library card catalog numbers . . .
793.809 = Magic.
291.216 = Religion.
282.451 = The Occult.
NOTHING ELSE. NO names. Just three Dewey decimal system categories that are already at the forefront of my mind. Damian’s clue seems pointless.
But seeing things from a lost boy’s point of view . . .
What are those numbers to a child? They identify book categories, just like they do for me, but they also represent something else . . .
The basement of our house held my grandfather’s huge library. It was poorly lit and home to too many spiders, and I was afraid of going down there. Unfortunately, my favorite books—the ones Grandfather and Dad had little use for—were shelved all the way at the back of the basement. When I wanted to read Grimm’s Fairy Tales or The Wizard of Oz, I had to venture to the library’s darkest recesses. There was only one lightbulb there, and it was always burning out.
A scary home for fairy tales.
These numbers are not just a system. To a child, they’re locations in a library.
This is the connection to the lost boy.
I barely bother drying off. I quickly put on a pair of jeans and a sweater as I call the local deputy still on duty and tell him to find someone with keys to the Hawkton Public Library right now.
FORTY MINUTES LATER, an older woman with her hair in a net and a bathrobe around her plump shoulders meets me at the door of the small building.
“I’m so sorry,” I tell her, showing my badge.
“No, no. Whatever I can do to help.” She understands that this must be important, and that it has something to do with the explosion.
The library is one of the older buildings in town. Made from red brick and concrete, its shelves and furniture resemble a set from a Frank Capra movie.
I hand her the numbers and she leads the way. We grab all the books from the relevant shelves and set them on a table in the center of the reading room. In total, there are thirty books, worn but clean. They don’t look like they’ve been opened in ages. I take the first one, Hoffman’s Book of Magic, and flip through the pages, hoping for some kind of clue.
“Anything I can do?” the librarian asks.
“Look for writing in the margins.” My previous search for the child came up in a dead end, but what if he had been actually hiding here the whole time? “Better yet, do you have records of who checked these books out?”
She shakes her head. “We never went to an electronic system. It’s been hard enough keeping the doors open.”
“Damn.” That would have made things so much easier.
She takes the second book off the stack and flips to the back. “All you need to do is look here.” She removes a card and hands it to me. “Each book has its own card. When you check it out, you sign your name and leave the card at the desk. The card goes back into the book when you return it.”
The card has a dozen names in handwriting styles of varying legibility. Next to each name is a date, some going back to the 1970s. Every person who ever checked the book out is listed here.
“Can I have copies of all these cards? Wait, I can just take photos with my phone.”
“If it will help you, take them.” She starts to pull cards from the books. “I’ll sort them all later.”
“Thank you. Do you have records of library-card holders? If I found a name, could I match it to someone?”
“They only go back twelve years. After that, all those records are gone.”
“Shoot. I’m sorry. Thank you.” I collect all the blue cards from her and lay them out on the table, quickly dividing them into three piles according to topic. There are hundreds of names. The one I’m looking for should be in all three stacks, next to a date of at least twenty years ago. It’s really a job for a computer.
In magic, there are formulas and techniques for sorting. We call it “culling.” None of them ever held my attention for very long. Uncle Darius, on the other hand, could strip out the aces and high-value cards as he shuffled a facedown deck. He had some time to practice in prison.
“Are you looking for someone in particular?” she asks after watching me try to sort them for several minutes.
“I’m trying to find a name in all three of these piles. Somewhere in the 1980s, I think.”
She picks up the first stack and runs through it, glancing at each card before setting it on the table. She picks up the second and flips through it the same way, selecting three cards. She returns to the first pile and culls four. Finally, she goes to the last stack and pulls two cards.
“Impressive,” I tell her. “My uncle has a photographic memory.” I don’t mention how he used it.
“Is he a librarian too?” she asks.
I shake my head. “Only when he’s in jail.”
“I see.” She leaves it at that and points to a name on a card. “M. Rodriguez. He’s in all of them.”
“Does he sound familiar?”
She taps her temple. “I’m not so good with faces. Numbers are my thing.”
That name never came up in any of my school-related interviews. “Would he have had to be a resident to have a library card here?”
“No. We’re quite liberal about that. All he would have needed was a resident relative who could sign for him. To accommodate children visiting over the summer and that type of thing.”
Of course. Nobody at the school knew him because he probably never went there. “Thank you. May I hold on to a few of these cards as samples of his handwriting?”
“Sure. Sure. I’ll hold the books for you too.”
She helps me search through all the school yearbooks, just to be certain. M. Rodriguez is nowhere to be found. All we have is his childish signature and a list of books he liked to read.
I email Ailes the name so he can put in a search request for state and county records. Unfortunately, for older records that could take weeks. We’ll be able to prioritize the search, but it’ll still have to be done by hand.
I’m at a dead end until they can run it.
Or am I?
I remember the name Damian gave me, of the collector of ones and zeros: Max Ripken.
A quick web search finds someone with his name identified as a curator of the “Archive.”
It’s late, so I send him a brief email.
After a couple of minutes, my phone rings.
“Hello?”
“Jessica? Freddy told me to expect your call. I’m at your disposal whenever you’re ready.” Freddy? Must be one of Damian’s weird jokes. His voice is friendly and youthful. He kind of reminds me of Gerald. “Can I give you a name over the phone?”
He hesitates. “I’d prefer we handle this in person . . . you’ll understand why when we meet. Freddy told me I could trust you.”
I look at the tables of books around me. I feel so close. To leave Hawkton now? “It’s a little inconvenient.”
“I know, but I’m just not sure about talking to someone from the FBI over the phone about what I do.”
“I see . . .” This raises all kinds of red flags.
“You’ll understand.”
I better.
29
“A LOT OF this is in a legal gray area,” Max says after I give him a reassuring smile at the door.
“Unless I find a meth lab, I think we’re fine.” I peer over his shoulder with some hesitation.
“Freddy said you’re okay. So I’m glad to help.” He has a pleasant smile and the round, boyish features I often notice on men who find themselves working with computers all day. His hair, the color of sand, is slightly receding, suggesting that he�
��s probably a little older than he looks. Between the ten-speed in the corner and the rock climber forearms, I can tell he manages to keep active.
He leads me inside and down a long row of metal shelves filled with electronic parts in plastic bags. Hard drives and floppy disks of all kinds are stacked everywhere. It’s a history exhibit of data storage evolution.
He lives in a recently built mansion in rural Virginia. The “Archive,” as he calls it, is his collection of disk drives, with which he’s filled the house and an add-on building.
From my brief Google search, I’d gathered he was some kind of software millionaire, but I wasn’t able to find out anything more specific, or anything about him personally.
We pass deeper into his home, past bookshelf after bookshelf of hard drives in static-resistant bags, as he explains how his current “occupation” came to be. “After we sold the company, I was looking for something to do. A friend of mine wanted me to invest in a company that bought old computers and broke them down for scrap. There’s gold, palladium and a lot of other reusable metals in there. That’s how I found out about the black market for old hard drives. Criminals buy them to steal banking information, which got me thinking: What else are we throwing away besides credit card numbers?”
He’s probably told this story a hundred times, but seems to enjoying retelling it to me. “We make a big deal about television shows and movies that are lost forever. But what about data?” He walks over to a hard disk the size of a large toaster. “This has hospital data from a Northern California payment processor in the early 1980s. One of the first to computerize. It doesn’t actually have patient charts, those weren’t digitized yet, but it holds billing information. This lists prescriptions, what tests were done. Everything you’d pay for. You know that you can make a vector of the spread of HIV from that information? Think about it. While we were trying to solve that mystery through other means, we could have discovered right here what was going on. There’s a pattern in the data.
“It would have been illegal to have done that in the early 1980s. So I guess it’s even sadder that the HIV epidemic exploded under our noses. We’ll pass secret laws if we think terrorists might be a threat to an infinitesimal percent of the population, but we can’t do anything remotely like that to stop something that harms far more people.”
We walk down another corridor and come to a room containing something the size of a large washing machine. A single track light illuminates it like it’s an art exhibit. Max’s face brightens. “I found this in Guam. It’s from a naval tracking station that monitored the moon landings—secretly. It’s also got all sorts of spy satellite intelligence in there too. Satellite orbits, images of Soviet bases.” He looks at me anxiously. “Don’t worry. I told the Department of the Navy about it.”
“What’d they say?”
“They still haven’t got back to me. That’s the thing with this information. We’d rather pretend it doesn’t exist. I’m afraid we’re going to lose it all before we know what we have. It’s disposable.”
I’m not too surprised. A colleague and I had recently found a crashed MiG jet in the Bayou that our military never bothered to track down.
“My biggest project now is buying up old phone books and digitizing them. For a hundred years we’ve been tracking the migration of people from rural areas to the city without even realizing it.”
I get the sense he could go on for hours. I find it, and his enthusiasm, fascinating, but I’m trying to track a killer. Mitchum could have me completely removed from this case at any moment. “I don’t think the person I’m looking for had a phone number,” I reply, steering him back on topic.
“We’ll see what we can find. I have all kinds of random records. Not a complete life record on any one person, but everybody and I mean everybody is in my system somewhere. Even you.” He gives me a half grin.
“I’m afraid to ask.” I feel self-conscious.
His expression changes and he flushes. “I didn’t look you up. That would have been rude. Some of this data is very personal. I’m just saying that we leave footprints everywhere.”
We step into an office that’s empty except for a computer sitting at a desk next to two padded chairs. “Where is all the data stored?” I ask.
Max suppresses a smile. “That’s a secret. Freddy said I could trust you, but I still would like to keep that to myself.”
“Of course.” He’s still cagy about the fact that I’m in the FBI. This data could be a legal minefield.
He points me to a chair and sits down at the desk. “What do we know?”
“A boy around 1985. His name is M. Rodriguez. He was in Hawkton, West Virginia, around that time. I’d guess an age between ten and thirteen.”
Max nods. “Okay, anything else? Any other people?”
“Yes.” I give him the names of the victims.
“Oh.” Mentioning Hawkton was all it took to link this to what’s all over the news. “This boy is connected?”
“I can’t say how.” It’s a polite way to ostensibly deny knowing anything while implicitly confirming to him that he’s correct.
“I understand.” Max types for a moment, then leans back.
“That’s it?”
“Basically. It’s not quite a search in the traditional sense. The Archive isn’t just a database. It’s a piece of artificial intelligence software. There’s way too much noise for the signal. It has to make educated guesses and then keep approaching the data in different ways.”
“I was expecting a printout or zip file or something.”
“Well, that’s the problem. Most people either rely too much on human intelligence or too much on big data. That’s the difference between the CIA and the NSA. The best answers come from somewhere in the middle. Ask smart questions, then use your smarts to examine the data.” Max looks at the screen. “I could give you a list of the seven thousand M. Rodriguezes near West Virginia around that time, but that won’t do much to help you find the one you’re looking for. Sometimes the information is in the gaps.
“Say, for example, I wanted to track you down from all the other Jessica Blackwoods using phone records. Maybe there are twenty? I’d find your latest address and note when you got that address. Next, I’d look for when a Jessica Blackwood disappeared from a phone directory in some other city. It’s highly unlikely that two people with your name moved at the same time. I can then go backwards all the way until I find your first phone number.”
“What if I have an unlisted number or no landline?”
“There are lots of other ways. Subscribe to a magazine? Ever ask yourself how junk mail finds its way to you? Same thing. They sell that information to advertisers. And that’s just the legit data. I’m more interested in the gray data. The things people don’t realize are important.” He glances at his computer. “Hold on . . . I think we have something. What do you know about the couple named Alsop?”
“A little. Why?”
Max studies his screen. “That’s your connection. M. Rodriguez shows up in a database of kids who were in the West Virginia free- and reduced-lunch program.”
“He never enrolled in the school at Hawkton.”
“No, because he lived there during the summer. But they start that paperwork early.”
“How do you connect him to the Alsops?”
“They have about a half-dozen free- and reduced-lunch students in the system.”
“But they never had children!”
“Not of their own. But from 1980 to 1985, it looks like they were foster parents.”
This was a new revelation. “Foster parents? You have those records?”
“No. Just the lunch records. But that’s the deduction the software makes. It’s making a guess.
“All those databases aren’t tied together. Especially ones from back then. A child-services database might wipe out all
the information after the kids reach a certain age and never get imported into a new one.”
“Yeah, it’s just that nobody mentioned this in the background check or the interviews.”
“1985 was a long time ago.”
“True. Before my time.”
He checks his screen. “Marty Rodriguez left Sparrow Oak Elementary in North Carolina at the end of the 1985 school year and then vanishes from the rolls altogether.”
“Wait, so how do you tie him to the Alsops?”
“ACME Fun Toys has a card with his name and their address. It was scanned and added to a database.”
“ACME Fun Toys?”
Max clicks through some information. “He responded to an ad in the back of a comic book, listing their home address.”
“Any idea what for?”
“Hold on. It’s an old database, but they might have kept it. Yep . . . it was for one of those books on how to throw your voice.”
“Ventriloquism?”
“Yeah.”
This is interesting. The allegedly possessed boy on the audiotape had been reading up on the occult, magic tricks, and also how to throw his voice.
A little faker, indeed.
But where is he now?
30
“I THINK WE may have our sixth man,” I explain to Ailes. I trust him enough to share the broad details on how Max helped me identify Marty Rodriguez. I can hear him type the name into his own database on the other end of the line.
It took an uncharacteristically long time for Ailes to get back to me after I called and left a message. I know something is up, but I don’t want to pry. It might be personal.
“Interesting . . .” he replies. “We’ve been working on the 3-D reconstruction of the audio environment. We’ve got all the main players in there, but there’s still another voice we’re trying to track down.”
“That could be crucial. If we don’t find Rodriguez before our missing man finds him, there’s no telling what’s going to happen.”
