Nick of Time

by John Gilstrap

  “A little skim milk,” Vinnie said. “And two Equals.” He had to smile at the ease with which the instructions came out.

  Three minutes later, the matter was settled. Vinnie gratefully accepted his new coffee—this one a venti size as a form of compensation—and three times told linebacker-boy that everything was truly all right. Finally, they went their different ways.

  As Vinnie headed toward his gate, it never occurred to him to wonder why the kid who was in such a hurry to catch his flight was now on his way back to the main terminal.

  * * *

  Rachel Raty hadn’t spoken to Nicki in over three months. In fact, according to her, no one in the old crowd had spoken to her. “I don’t mean to be mean or anything, but Nicki’s gotten kind of weird recently. I know she’s sick and all, but sometimes, when she walks into class, she like just doesn’t talk to anybody. Try to talk to her and she bites your head off. I don’t think she hangs around with anyone anymore . . .”

  Carter made an excuse and hung up. The clock was ticking too fast to waste time listening to some bitch dis his daughter. A second call, this one to Leslie Johnson, another name he pulled out of memory, brought essentially the same result. He stared at the phone after he hung up with her. Maybe Nicki really didn’t have any friends anymore. Given the way she’d been behaving recently—the huge mood swings and the general nastiness—how difficult was that to imagine?

  Okay, so if the “we” of her note wasn’t someone from school, then who might it be?

  Carter’s eyes scanned the room and fell on her computer. Good God, that was it. The Internet.

  Nicki’s computer was an old IBM workhorse with few bells and no whistles, but it had nonetheless claimed that part of her existence once owned by the television. He couldn’t count the number of nights he’d been on his way to bed at some ungodly hour and heard Nicki tapping away at her keyboard. Sometimes, he’d hear her laughing as somebody typed something back at her. Once or twice, he’d mentioned to her that it was getting late and that she should get to bed, but she’d responded with one of the withering glares that always seemed to be in special reserve just for him.

  Jenny used to lecture Carter on the importance of choosing your battles when raising a teenager, and all things considered, he’d decided to let the computer fixation go. Score another home run for dear old dad. His stomach knotted even tighter. The thought of running away with someone was horrifying in its own right; that it would be with some predator she’d met online was unthinkable.

  Two years ago, Carter had worked a computer-stalker case in which a teenage girl was lured out of her house by some psycho posing as a sympathetic ear. She’d been tortured and raped and ultimately left to die, but turned out to be stronger than her attacker had thought. She’d lived, only to wish every day that she hadn’t. Mercifully, the latticework of facial scars were invisible to her slashed eyeballs. The police had done a terrific job identifying a guy named Dickie Menefee as the would-be murderer—a big-necked, washed-out old gym teacher with the IQ of a seat cushion—but the girl, Deni James, either couldn’t or wouldn’t make a positive identification. Carter had never seen such terror on a witness. As a result, Little Dick, as Carter had come to call him, got to walk. Last time he saw the son of a bitch, Little Dick was holding court with others of his breed in a little greasy spoon called the Pitcairn Inn, stuffing his face with pancakes and beer, reveling in the fact that the regulars still called him “Coach.”

  Carter made sure that Nicki heard the details of the Deni James case, if only to drive home the point that the Internet was a vast, unexplored frontier for psychopaths. The anonymity of cyberspace made it potentially more dangerous than the worst neighborhood in the toughest city on earth. In the bricks-and-mortar world, you at least had a chance to get a good read on people, to look them in the eye. In cyberspace, men could be women, friends could be predators. As her interest in computers grew, Nicki needed to understand that. He even showed her a few of the pictures of Deni’s gruesome wounds.

  After all of that, how could Nicki possibly run off with some guy from cyberspace? And he was certain it was a guy. Internet sickos were almost always guys.

  Carter moved from the bed to her desk chair, where he pressed the button and waited for the machine to grind through its booting protocol. The monitor popped and crackled, and then he faced the computer wallpaper: yet another pop star, this one shirtless, with his pants unfastened to his pubic hair.

  Carter guided the cursor to the swirly triangular logo for their Internet provider and clicked it. Since he didn’t know her password, he didn’t bother trying to sign on. It wasn’t necessary, anyway; not for what he was looking for.

  He clicked on her cyber file cabinet and searched his way through several menus until he found the one he wanted. Nicki changed her log-on password every other day, it seemed, but it never occurred to her to protect access to her files. Such a simple precaution wouldn’t have prevented Carter from finding what he wanted, but it would certainly have slowed him down.

  When he found the file marked Chat Logs, he clicked that, and there they were: a complete record of every chat his daughter had had since God knew when. After the Deni James case, one of the detectives he worked with had told him how to rig Nicki’s computer software so that every website she visited and every chat and instant message she shared became a part of a permanent digital record, still around even after the user thought that the files had been erased. If the James family had had such a bug in their daughter’s computer, they might have been able to get help before the permanent damage was done. Certainly, it would have left a trail that would have negated Deni’s refusal to testify.

  Carter gaped at the endless list of chats. He knew that she spent a lot of time online, but he had no idea that it was this much time! More surprising, he saw that the vast majority were time-stamped between midnight and three in the morning. No wonder she was always so tired.

  Could it be that he was so hopelessly naïve, that Nicki was living a life he knew nothing about, hiding even more details from him than he’d thought?

  Fifteen minutes later, he had his answer.

  Chapter Four

  Vinnie Campanella glanced nervously at the digital clock over the ticket taker’s station. If everything were truly running on schedule, he had only fifteen minutes left before boarding, with thirty pages left to go in the novel he was reading. In it, a quadriplegic New York City detective was in grave danger, and Vinnie hated like hell to break up the action to board the airplane.

  So engaged was he in the novel that he was surprised he even heard the page over the public address system: “Vincent Campanella, please go to the nearest white courtesy phone for a message.”

  The announcement caused his insides to tighten. He couldn’t imagine that white courtesy phones carried much good news.

  The nearest phone was mounted on a pillar two gates away. The other side was already ringing as he brought the receiver to his ear. “Customer service,” said a pleasant voice on the other side.

  “Um, hello, my name is Vincent Campanella. Did you just page me?”

  He heard papers shuffling in the background. “Oh, yes, Mr. Campanella. Someone turned in a wallet here with your identification in it. Did you lose a wallet?”

  Vinnie’s right hand slapped his left hand suit coat pocket—a move fast enough to make passersby wonder if he might be in pain. Sure enough, his billfold was missing. How could that be?

  “Someone found it on the floor near the coffee shop in Concourse C,” she explained.

  Of course, he thought. The collision in the hallway.

  “I hope you didn’t have any cash,” she said, “because it was turned in empty.”

  “Yes, I had cash!” Vinnie boomed, drawing stares. “I had eleven hundred dollars!”

  Ms. Customer Service made a clicking sound with her tongue. “Well, it’s all gone now. In the future, you might want to consider traveler’s checks.”

  Oh, how v
ery helpful. It’s always nice to know what you should have done after you’ve been caught not doing it. “What about my credit cards? There should be one Visa and one MasterCard in there.”

  The customer service lady hummed a little as she stalled for time. “Oh, okay, there they are. Yep, I see a Visa and a Master, plus a Costco card, and—”

  “I don’t care about the others,” Vinnie said, cutting her off. “And I presume that you have my driver’s license, or else you wouldn’t have known to page me.”

  “Yes, sir, that’s exactly right. We have a set of keys, as well.”

  Vinnie couldn’t believe it; but sure enough, when he patted his pants pocket, they were gone, too. “Oh, my God,” he said.

  “I have one key that looks like it’s a house key, and another that has the word Ford printed on it.”

  “My house and my car,” Vinnie said. “Jesus, my pocket’s been picked.”

  “Do you know when it happened?”

  “Yes. A guy ran into me in the hallway here. It was a big collision, and in all the confusion, he must have lifted my stuff. He was good.”

  “You should file a police report,” said Ms. Service. “I can page them, too, if you’d like.”

  Vinnie shook his head. What would be the point? With terrorism alerts and God only knew what other kinds of distractions, his pickpocketing incident wouldn’t go to the top of anyone’s priority list. Besides, he had a flight to catch. “No, the guy took the money, and that’s my fault. The important stuff is still there.”

  “But sir, if he’s still here at the airport, don’t you want—”

  “What I want is to catch my flight. In eight hours, I intend to be sitting in Paris, meeting with clients, and enjoying the sights. There’s plenty of time for me to expense the cash I lost. Now, if you could just tell me where to go to get my property back . . .”

  * * *

  It felt great to be free again. For Brad Ward, it was the greatest feeling in the world. The fact that it was over a hundred degrees there in the long-term parking lot didn’t bother him a bit, any more than it would have bothered him if it were thirty below zero or blowing like a hurricane. He didn’t think it was possible for people who’d never been in prison to understand just how precious—how priceless—fresh air could be. Even if it was only as fresh as an airport on the outskirts of Washington, DC.

  Simply seeing the sun without craning your neck was life-affirming—or inhaling the aroma of freshly cut grass. Hell, even the smell of dog shit beat the stink of inmate shit.

  He walked calmly down the wide aisles between cars, the slap of his flip-flops keeping time with a song that only he could hear. At the little bus stop where the shuttles took you to and from the terminal building, he stooped and reached under the trash can to recover the Leatherman tool he’d stashed there. Security in the airport might not be all that the government wanted you to believe, but there wasn’t a chance in hell that he could have gotten the Leatherman through the checkpoint. Think Swiss Army knife on steroids. While he walked on, he slid the tool’s leather pouch onto his belt.

  In a perfect world, he’d have been in shorts instead of chinos, but he feared that the glaring whiteness of his flesh might cause people to ask questions. Institutional pallor was the tattoo of everyone who’d lived as Brad had lived these past two and a half years.

  Soon, though, he’d be in Florida, and from there, if he could talk her into it, he and Nicki would be in the Caymans, out of the country and out of reach. Then, the entire world would belong to them. Three thousand miles would yield light-years of separation from everything that was ugly.

  This was a big step, though, fraught with big risk. For the past six months, he’d lived by the baby step, moving no more than fifty or sixty miles in a day, laying low in campgrounds and flophouses and keeping in touch with the world via the Internet.

  But now, the only part of the world he really cared about was coming to join him. Who would have believed the luck in that? Maybe the time really had come for life to settle out for him. It wouldn’t be easy, of course—for him, nothing was ever easy—but if things could settle down just a little, he’d be better than fine with that.

  So far, it was going even better than he’d hoped. The big guy in the airport was totally clueless about what happened, and Brad was particularly proud of the last-minute gambit to buy the second cup of coffee. It was the only way he could think of to keep the guy from reaching for his wallet.

  What Vincent Anthony Campanella didn’t realize was that he’d been Brad’s sole target from the moment he’d driven into the parking lot. He met all of Brad’s criteria: First of all, the car had to be a Ford, because that was the only key that Brad had with him. The model didn’t matter all that much because all the Ford keys looked alike, and Fatso wasn’t ever going to be driving his vehicle again. All that mattered was for the keys on the ring to look right if and when airport security returned them to him.

  The second criterion Campanella met was his arrival in the long-term parking lot. That, combined with criterion number three—lots of luggage—made it a done deal. From there, it was just a matter of timing. Brad had followed him all the way to Concourse C, getting past the security station merely by showing the security guy a copy of an e-mail he’d sent himself this morning with an itinerary for some flights he had no intention of taking.

  Once at the concourse, Brad had to wait for the mark to distract himself, and then it was time to move in. The wallet, of course, had been easy, but the keys were a work of art, if he did say so himself. It had been years since he’d pulled that particular gag.

  The bright red Mustang lay dead ahead, nosed into the curb right where Campanella had left it. Brad paid cash to get out of the parking lot, then meandered his way to the eastbound lanes of the access road, which in turn led to the Braddock County Parkway. He figured it would take the better part of an hour to get to the Brookfield bus station, thanks to the 3.4 million traffic lights.

  Before settling in for that commute, however, Brad had a couple of phone calls to make. As he was lifting the wallet from Vincent Campanella’s pocket, his fingers had brushed the man’s cell phone, but he’d decided to leave it there, lest the guy got the urge to make a call.

  Brad pulled into the parking lot of the Giant Food store in Jefferson Farms, and went inside to the customer service desk to find the number he needed in the phone book. The manager was nice enough to offer the house phone to make a local call, but Brad declined, preferring instead to use the pay phone on the wall outside.

  “Ritz-Carlton, Mason’s Corner,” said the accented voice on the other end of the line.

  “Reservations, please,” Brad said. As he waited for the call to be connected, he pulled from the pocket of his jeans the slip of paper he’d used to jot down Vincent Campanella’s credit card numbers.

  * * *

  Detective Christopher Tu arrived within minutes of Carter’s plea for assistance. He’d been the chief investigator on the Deni James case, and Carter knew him to be an unparalleled whiz at all things computerized. Thanks in large measure to a glowing letter that Carter had written for the younger man’s file, Chris had only recently been bumped up to detective first class, and he was clearly anxious to give his friend a hand.

  Carter met the detective at the door and ushered him into the foyer.

  “Have you learned anything since we talked?” Chris asked. His body language showed that he fully appreciated the urgency. Born and raised in America as the only son of Chinese immigrants, Chris nonetheless spoke with a distinct accent.

  “I haven’t touched a thing,” Carter said, leading the way upstairs. “I didn’t want to screw anything up.”

  “What exactly are we looking for?” Carter had told him the essentials over the phone, but had not gotten into the details. Chris recoiled from the blast of pink as he entered Nicki’s room.

  “I loaded that security software you told me about, and I was able to find the chat logs where she tal
ked about running off, but I don’t know how to figure out the identity of the other party.”

  Chris helped himself to Nicki’s desk chair. “Piece of cake,” he said. He took a few seconds to review what was already on the screen. “So this is the guy you’re worried about? This BW477?”

  “That’s him. I figure if I can find out where he lives, I’ll know where Nicki went.”

  Chris went to work, his fingers flying on the keyboard. As the detective leaned forward for a closer look at the screen, Carter found himself leaning in right with him. When Chris leaned back again, they bumped heads.

  Carter apologized.

  “Why don’t you go get me a soda or something?” Chris suggested.

  Carter hesitated, then nodded. He’d seen Chris pull the “I’m thirsty” trick before, and recognized it as the detective’s polite version of “Get lost.” He took his time getting a Coke from the refrigerator and pouring it over a glass of ice, stalling to give the detective as much time alone as he could.

  Seven minutes was the limit of Carter’s endurance. He carried the drinks back upstairs. Chris didn’t even turn around as he said, “She’s on her way to someplace in Virginia called Brookfield.”

  Carter stopped, dumfounded. “You know that already?”

  “Yep. She’s going by bus to meet a guy named Brad. Give me a couple more minutes and I can get you a last name, too.”

  Carter froze. He felt the blood draining from his head and helped himself to the edge of Nicki’s bed. “Ward,” he said.

  “Excuse me?” Chris took the soda from his host.

  “His last name is Ward. Brad Ward.”

  Chris stopped typing and pivoted in his chair. “You know him?”

  Carter closed his eyes against the realization. This was a terrible turn. “Keep looking, please, and pray that I’m wrong. The Brad Ward I used to know was bad news through and through.”

  The detective’s eyebrows fused as he swung himself back to the keyboard.

  Carter owed him an explanation. “Years ago, when Nicki was just a little girl, our neighbors next door were professional foster parents. Never really got to know them. My guess is, they knew what I did for a living and kept as low a profile as possible. They’d sometimes have four or five foster kids staying with them at a time. Brad Ward was one of them. He lived there for a couple of years, in fact, starting when Nicki was in fourth or fifth grade. He was a good-looking kid, athletic with a quick smile, but he was much older. In high school. And Nicki had an enormous crush on him.”