The Monitor

by Janice Macdonald

  “Randy, thank goodness. We really do have to get you a cell phone. I have been calling you since nine in the morning, and what if something were to happen to you? Who would know where you were heading?”

  I nodded. That was the joy and problem of the single life, no one to watch your back. Maybe I should start making a note of where I was heading to leave on my kitchen table whenever I went anywhere.

  I handed Steve a mug of coffee and sat on the edge of my old chesterfield, motioning for him to sit beside me. Instead he sat across from me in my sturdy bent-willow chair. This wasn’t a good sign. Whatever it was, it was going to be serious.

  “There’s a visiting specialist in town, a computer-crimes specialist. He’s been here since yesterday and spoke at a station assembly. He’s here tracking an on-line killer.”

  Steve was watching me very carefully. “His name is Ray Lopez and he’s from Austin, Texas.”

  “And he’s tracking Theresa Banyon’s husband’s killer,” I said.

  “Shit.” Steve’s shoulders sagged. “I was hoping against hope that you had no idea what any of this was about, but the more he talked about chat rooms and the international scope of his investigation, the more my gut began to twist. Randy, I think you have to talk to this guy.”

  “I agree. In fact, I was hoping that the owner of Babel would have got in touch with the police a lot sooner, but he was hoping that it could be cleared up without involving our chat community. And, you know, he’s right in a way. I don’t think it has anything to do with the underpinnings of Babel. It’s just a coincidence, like the murder happening in a certain apartment building or nightclub. It’s not the location that’s to blame.”

  “Any time you have some knowledge of a crime and neglect to report it, you are in contravention of the law. Now, we have a bit of slack for you because you are a Canadian citizen potentially unaware of an American crime having been committed. They just determined a couple of days ago that this guy’s computer was tampered with to create a circuit when he touched a certain key and moved the mouse at the same time. So, like I said, it ­wasn’t a crime officially till yesterday or so, but there is only so much I can do to protect you. I think you should speak to this Ray Lopez. He seems like a pretty good guy.”

  Ray Lopez indeed was a pretty good guy. Steve called him up, and we met for an early supper at the restaurant in his Holiday Inn. It seemed as if this was my day to eat out. He was a trim fellow but looked imposing because of his very broad shoulders. His face, too, was broad, but so was his smile, and his eyes were twinkling as he spoke. I had a feeling a laugh wasn’t far away from anything he said. After our obligatory remarks about how damned cold it was here, and how did we stand it, he and Steve got into a detailed discussion about grain-fed beef over corn-fed beef. The upshot was that Ray was obliged to order a steak, and Steve looked jubilant when Ray announced after the first couple of bites that, yes, he could taste the difference and that, yes, it was delicious.

  Steak sticks in my teeth, so I was working through a chicken Caesar salad as we began the serious part of our discussion. I told Ray about Babel and my duties there. Steve looked a bit shocked at my matter-of-fact discussion about cyber-sex and porn, but Ray nodded with an understanding of the ways of chat rooms. I described the relationship between Thea and Milan, Thea’s disappearance, and Milan’s distraction. I also tried to paint a description of how Tremor behaved in relation to the rest of the chat, to let Ray know that he wasn’t the norm, and he certainly wasn’t a regular, but he seemed to be able to appear and disappear at will. Ray, like Alchemist, was pretty sure that Tremor had to be a hacker with the ability to find a back door into the program.

  “It was just by chance that I happened to be reading an Austin paper and read about the electrocution of the fellow there, and that his wife was Theresa Banyon. Otherwise, there would be nothing from Babel to have alerted me to that crime connection.”

  “Truth to tell, we still don’t know if there is a connection. We’re following up on the files we managed to save from Theresa Banyon’s computer, one of which is her on-line bookmarks. There is a strong Canadian presence in Babel, so my supervisor sent me up here to suss out the activity.”

  “A strong Canadian connection? As far as I know, aside from a woman in Halifax and a few teenagers in Winnipeg and Brandon, and me and another fellow here, I am not aware of any Canadians.”

  “Who is the other fellow here? Have you two met?”

  I could feel Steve’s curiosity as well.

  “Well, no, he doesn’t know I am from here. I didn’t think it was a good idea, given my role as a monitor, to let out too much personal information. The thing is, I think I might have figured out who he is, well, within a circle of three, but I’m a bit leery of him, too, because his registration information seems to be fudged.”

  Ray laughed. “You would be astonished at how many registrations get judiciously altered, and not for nefarious reasons, either. Mostly, it’s to guard against spam, since so many spammers use webcrawlers to harvest addresses for e-mail sales lists. It’s like knowing it’s a telephone solicitor if he asks to speak to the ‘man of the house’ when you answer the phone. If you get e-mail for Harvey Foomph, then you know you can delete it immediately. Some e-mail programs even allow you to list the only names allowed through, and block the rest.”

  “Harvey Foomph?” Steve laughed.

  Ray laughed, too. “You’d prefer Tungsten Phoobie?”

  I was impressed by Ray’s easy knowledge of on-line activities. It turned out that he was subcontracted by the Austin police to deal with computer issues but that his main job was as a troubleshooter for major computer companies integrating systems and upgrading around the world. He had been one of the front-line community builders and counted people like Howard Rheingold among his good friends. If this weren’t such a serious situation, I would love to have discussed on-line ­community concepts with him all night.

  “So, not using your proper name isn’t a sure sign of subterfuge. I can see that. It just gives me a bit of a jolt in a place like Babel where it is requested only as a safeguard to ensure that people respect the place. Most of the people there have given correct information. In fact, that’s how we found Thea. You’d think if she had been planning to have her husband killed, she wouldn’t have given out her name and address quite so easily, right?”

  “Well, maybe when she signed up, she had no idea she’d be plotting to remove him from her life,” mused Ray.

  Steve nodded, too. That’s what I loved about Steve, his amazing ability to get up to speed on practically any topic. Until this evening, his grasp of computers was ­really utilitarian, with a dose of general cyber-porn regulations. Still, he was already understanding the scope of Ray’s investigation and starting to see the parameters of my job.

  Being cops, they had to check out the dessert cart. Since this was my fourth meal of the day, I couldn’t even finish all the romaine in my bowl. Steve regretfully declined a decadent-looking piece of cheesecake, and Ray looked longingly at a chocolate éclair but refused it. It turned out that his wife was a Weight Watchers leader back at home, and he didn’t dare go over his points too badly on road trips, or there would be no sympathy on that front.

  We shook hands in the lobby, and I promised to meet up with Ray the next day to show him around the university. Steve dropped me off at home after a nice long goodbye in the car. There is nothing like kissing in a car to make a person feel youthful. I walked down the hallway to my apartment door with a spring in my step. I’d have even more spring if I hadn’t eaten out so many times that day. I made a silent vow to go for a power walk the next morning before anything else. For good measure, I laid out my sweats at the end of the bed before making the coffee and logging into Babel for my shift. The Internet could put ten pounds on your rear end, and I didn’t need to go helping it along.

  34

  I’d set my alarm for the first time in ages, since I wanted to get an early start to the
day. There was no way I could get up before noon without external aid when I was routinely heading to bed at three in the morning. Today, though, I planned to power walk around the entire campus, get home to shower, and then be ready to meet up with Ray Lopez at the front of HUB Mall at noon.

  I braided my hair and put on a polar fleece headband that covered my ears. I put on my gray hoodie and sweatpants, but all I had underneath were panties and a sports bra, and there was no way that would be enough insulation at this time of year. I added a fleece vest, mittens, and knee-high sports socks, then laced up my runners and tucked my apartment key into the little zipper pocket on my vest. I checked the time as I pulled the door closed behind me. Nine-fifteen. I should be home by 10:00.

  I headed down 87th Avenue toward the campus. By the time I was passing the Education Building, I had got into my groove. I had a rocking gait that was not quite race walking but easier on my knees than a flat-out slow jog. Some folks used earphones and music to speed them along, but instead, I sang. Under my breath, though, so that no one could hear and report me to the looney-bin catchers. Show tunes, old Neil Diamond songs, bizarre novelty songs from the 1970s, as long as it had a snappy beat to it, it was fair game. It was also my fail-safe for monitoring my heart rate. As long as I could puff out a song, I was still within an aerobic workout.

  I was halfway through “Longfellow Serenade” as I passed the Faculty Club, on Saskatchewan Drive. I could feel a steady stream of sweat running down between my shoulder blades. This was where I tried to put on a bit of a burn. If I could get to The House, the building where part-time English lecturers had offices, before I had finished “The Wreck of the Mary Ellen Carter,” I knew I had worked off at least 150 calories, which was just about one quarter of any one of yesterday’s meals. I tried not to think that way. Checks and balances tended to make me despair of ever coming out ahead, whether it was my budget or my waistline. Instead I tried to focus on how healthy I was feeling, burning high-octane fuel instead of sludge, moving like a well-oiled machine.

  I was puffing by the time I reached the Human Ecology Ecohouse, but it was too cold to stop for a rest. Any piece of grass I trod on was crunchy underfoot. If I didn’t keep moving, the sweat on my forehead and down my back would become icicles. It took two extra ­choruses of “I Enjoy Being a Girl” to get me down the alley to the back door of my apartment building. My face felt windburned, and I could hardly bend over to unlace my runners. I really had to make a concerted effort to get out and moving more often.

  After a ten-minute shower and kiwi-flavored gel scenting the air, I felt better. I squinted toward the alarm clock by my bed as I was toweling off. Ten-twenty. Hah! There was no excuse for not scheduling some workout time into my day.

  Dressed in black cords and a deep green turtleneck, I wandered into my office area while braiding back my hair. I still had an hour and a half before I had to meet up with Ray Lopez. I had left a message for Chatgod and Alchemist about the meeting, mainly because I didn’t want to be acting behind anyone’s back. There was an e-mail message from Chatgod. Thank goodness it wasn’t requesting a discussion. He seemed resigned to the police connecting Thea’s problems with us and asked that I keep him up to date with anything I discussed with Detective Lopez.

  I was planning on letting Ray Lopez know about Sanders today, too. At least he was going to get my theories about Sanders. I had heard back from Denise by e-mail the night before. She claimed that Chick barely knew his way around e-mail, let alone Internet chat rooms, and that he seemed completely bemused when she made some allusions to Chatterton, asking whether that wasn’t the name of a geology prof he had had classes from in the late 1970s. So, on that basis, I was letting Chick off the hook. Sanders, for my money, had to be Winston Graham. The profile fit. He knew about computers, he was a loner, and he had a wide range of knowledge from all the various courses he had been taking over the last twelve to fifteen years.

  I wasn’t totally sure where we might find Winston Graham, or even if we could find him. There were ­several listings for W. Graham in the phone directory. Steve could certainly access any unlisted numbers in the ex-directory file, but I wasn’t sure whether he should even bother looking. It cost a lot to get an unlisted number, and why would Winston hide his phone number if he was so willing to let people on-line know what city he lived in?

  Of course, what did I really know about him? Aside from the fact that he was literate, well-read, and had been at the gala, nothing. Still, while I was worried about revealing too much to him and I wasn’t too sure about his cryptic commentary, I didn’t really have a sense of his being a bad guy. I popped some sugar-free gum into my mouth as I left my apartment, once more heading to the university. Of course, I wasn’t so sure I really knew what a bad guy seemed like. I had had some pretty close shaves in the past and hadn’t seen them coming. Maybe I was naïve and gullible when it came to the secret workings of the human heart. On the other hand, maybe I had a strong belief in finding the good side of people. I needed to hang on to that attitude, in order to keep teaching freshmen who didn’t want to be taking my classes in the first place.

  I made it to HUB Mall about ten minutes before noon. I wanted to be visible for Ray, since he had said he’d be coming from downtown by the light rail transit subway. I had told him to come out on the ground level, so he should be popping out either here at the HUB entry or perhaps down the road, if he’d exited at the wrong end of the platform. Whatever the case, it wouldn’t be too hard for him to spot me.

  Right at noon, he stepped out of the LRT entrance. I waved and walked toward him.

  “I thought I’d take you on a brief tour, because everyone will be racing to the lunch spots right now. This is an on-the-hour day for class schedules. By 1:15 we can take our pick of where to eat.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Ray said, and we fell into a companionable walking speed. I noticed that he had on a good thick melton jacket and gloves, along with high-tech around-the-back-of-the-head earmuffs. I commented on his preparedness.

  He laughed. “For a Texan? I did a degree at MIT, and whenever I think winter, I think Boston winters. This really isn’t bad at all.”

  “No, I agree. If you can block out the wind and stay layered, you can keep ahead of the cold. That’s the advantage to the ‘dry cold’ concept.”

  We talked about various places we had studied and how we’d been drawn to computers. Ray had gone the engineering route, while I’d been attracted to the ease of word processing and to the early bulletin boards and Usenet as an exploration in communication. Both of us were fascinated with the changing concepts of ­community, and he told me some great stories about Howard Rheingold’s shoe-painting parties.

  I gave him a brief rundown on Babel. He told me that it sounded a lot classier than most AOL or Yahoo Chats and less distinguished than much of the Well or Brainstorms. Of course, of those latter two, one was a paid subscription site and the other was by invitation only. I told him that, while we might not have an international brain trust in Babel, we did have a fairly interesting composite and variety of life skills and ­temperaments.

  “It makes discussion worthwhile, because no groove ever seems to wear into a rut, if you know what I mean.”

  “Do I ever,” he laughed. “With some of the older communities, you can already sense what the response of twelve or twenty regulars will be to any topic, and so sometimes you don’t even bother. On the other hand, that’s really closer to true community, isn’t it? The really close-knit kind, like the old church social group, or lunchroom crowd, or small-town service organization. The sort of place where everyone knows everyone.”

  “The Cheers mentality?” I suggested.

  “Exactly! Norm!” Ray laughed, and then commented on the sculpture on the side of the Student Union Building. He was a good tourist. He made appreciative comments about the older buildings and the newer features, and seemed impressed with the layout of the campus. I told him he and Stella should consider vacationing u
p here in the summer when all the festivals were on.

  “You’d be surprised. It always seems as if they’ve ­planted two or three hundred new trees on campus, when the deciduous trees come into leaf.”

  “But you end up losing that great view of the river valley, I’m betting,” Ray said, pointing across the road from where we were standing. We were on Saskatchewan Drive, near the Tory Turtle, the lecture theatre that was linked to the Tory building by means of an underground walkway.

  I pointed across the drive to Rutherford House, the historical home of the founder of the university and former premier of the province. “I know you must have a lot of historic sites in Austin, too, but I’m wondering if you’d like to go there for lunch. They have fantastic soups and salads. The solarium has been made into a tearoom.”

  “Wow, beats the food courts all hollow. You bet.”

  We were seated pretty quickly, and soon we had ordered and been given our own personal teapots with cozies.

  “You know,” said Ray, “this sounds crazy, I suppose, but Edmonton feels an awful lot like Austin.”

  “Yeah, with that minus-fifteen-degrees wind blowing, I’ll bet it does.”

  “Well, if you don’t count the weather. But we can get our cold winters, too, you know. What I mean, though, is the feel of the cities themselves. Follow me on this one. They’re both the capitals of really rich states—excuse me, provinces—where the money comes from cattle and oil. They are the university towns, rather than the head-office towns, and there is also a strong blue-collar feel to both, which you don’t get from either Dallas or Calgary. There is a big arts scene in Austin, and the whole theater and festival thing in Edmonton is sort of the same. See what I mean?”

  “Sounds like the same sort of idea, all right. It sounds like I might be pretty comfy in Austin.”