The Warning Sign

by Mia Marlowe

  “I’m sorry to be burden.”

  “I didn’t mean it like that,” he said quickly. “I understand the need to do something, but your safety is more important.”

  “Not if my life is totally disrupted.” Sara chopped up the rest of her omelet and put it in Lulu’s bowl. The little dog’s appetite wasn’t the least affected by the change in her surroundings. She scarfed down the treat, then parked her bottom on the floor and looked hopefully up at Sara for more.

  “This doesn’t feel like a disruption to me. I kind of like having you around,” Ryan said. He put his arms around her and held her close, his forehead touching hers. “A guy could get used to this.”

  “Me, too.” She tipped her chin and he covered her lips with his in a soft kiss. “But this weekend has been like a summer fling. It’s like a dream. Like Shakespeare said, ‘too flattering sweet to be substantial.’ It doesn’t feel real.”

  “Maybe that’s because you’re not letting yourself feel,” he accused, giving her a slight squeeze.

  She nodded. “You may be right.”

  Ryan released her. “Still Matthew?”

  “I don’t know.” She shoved her bangs back so they wouldn’t hang down on her face as she rinsed her plate and loaded it into the dishwasher. “He’s always been a part of my life. I dated a few guys before Matthew, but he was my first serious relationship. My only. Loving him came as naturally as breathing.” She sighed. “But I’ve been holding my breath for a while now.”

  “Do you still love him?” Ryan asked so softly, she had to speechread to understand him.

  “I don’t know.” Her feelings for Matthew were a jumbled mess, a blur of pain and longing for the lost innocence of their first love. She hated him. She cared for him. She wanted to hurt him as much as he hurt her. She wanted to comfort him over the pain of his guilt. She missed him. She couldn’t stand the sight of him. Would it ever stop?

  Sara shook her head. So many firsts. So many memories. So much of who she was was tied up with Matt Kelley. Perhaps it was time to untie that knot and find out who she was without him.

  “Maybe Matthew’s just a habit with me.”

  “If he is, he’s a bad one. I’d like to help you break it. He makes you sad, Sara. I hate what he’s done to you.” Ryan cupped her cheek for a moment and then turned away and started signing. Sara suspected it was so he wouldn’t have to meet her gaze. ‘I’m a guy who likes to fix things, but I don’t know how to make this better.’

  Sara reached up and turned his face back toward her. She stood on tiptoe and kissed him. “You’ve already made it better.”

  He took her in his arms again and kissed her back.

  For a long while, the fact that there had ever even been a guy named Matt Kelley, retreated to a very small, dark corner of Sara’s heart.

  ~

  “Next stop Kendall/MIT,” the T engineer announced in an electronically altered voice.

  Sara was queasy over getting on the subway again, but having Ryan beside her made it feel safer. They hopped off the train and rode the escalator up to the street level in Cambridge.

  It was a short few blocks along Main and Vassar to the Ray and Maria Stata Center, an oddly twisted building with small wings jutting out at all angles. The structure looked as if it had suffered through a major earthquake, but the asymmetry was part of its avant-garde design. Inside, Ryan assured her they’d find the bristling nerve center of MIT’s rarified computer researchers.

  And hopefully, someone who knew Anthony Valenti.

  In the lobby, Sara scanned the directory. There were so many departments.

  “Where do we start?” she asked in a hushed whisper. Associate professors didn’t exactly merit a name on the wall.

  “He was working on a project for a private company, you said.” Ryan ran his finger down the long list. “Programming Methodology Group. If he wasn’t there, maybe someone from that group will know where he was working.”

  They took the elevator and then wandered the corridors looking for the right suite. Programming Methodology was housed in a large space sectioned off into small cubicles, jammed together like cells in a honey comb. The place hummed with cyber-activity. A girl in ragged jeans and a greasy ponytail was noodling on a laptop in the first cubicle they passed. She looked up at them through Coke-bottle thick glasses that distorted the size of her eyes. Her nameplate said ‘Cerise Keep’—an odd mix of Woodstock wings and Puritan roots.

  “We’re looking for someone who can help us,” Ryan said. “Did Anthony Valenti work here?”

  “You want Dr. Chakra.” Cerise hunched further over her laptop. “Third cube on the right.”

  They found the professor and Ryan launched into the tale they’d agreed upon. Sara was supposedly Anthony Valenti’s cousin and she’d loaned him a laptop. When the police said they didn’t have it, she wondered if perhaps it was still here at MIT. Sara hated to play the sympathy card, but if she was willing to tell a fib, she was willing to make it convincing. She’d agreed to let Ryan tell Dr. Chakra she was hearing-impaired and needed the laptop back badly in order to find work.

  “I’m wishing very much to be helping you, but we are having nothing left here of Mr. Valenti’s,” Dr. Chakra said in his pleasant accent. “Please accept my sympathy. Your cousin was a brilliant young man. He is missed.”

  Feeling tawdry over their lie and even more deflated over not realizing any benefit from it, Sara trudged back to the elevator with Ryan. At the last moment before the doors closed, the girl from the first cubical hopped up and joined them.

  As soon as the doors whirred closed, she turned to Sara. “I heard what you said. There are no secrets in a room with cubes, you know.”

  “Did you know…my cousin?” Sara asked.

  “Yeah, I knew him and well, there’s no good way to say this,” Cerise Keep said, popping her knuckles in nervousness. “I’ve got Tony’s extra laptop. I’ve been wondering what to do with it.”

  “Why didn’t you give it to the police?” Ryan asked.

  “Because…well, I sort of borrowed it without permission,” she admitted.

  The girl mumbled too much for Sara to follow her, so Ryan signed her response. He did it so naturally, Sara didn’t feel the least bit strange and she blessed him for his thoughtfulness.

  “I was in this Mental Blocks Online video game tournament and my personal laptop shot craps. We’re not supposed to use the university computers for anything but our work here. I mean, I can’t even check my email,” Cerise said. “Tony left his spare—your spare, I guess—in his cube and I thought, what the hell, I’ll take it and win the tournament and bring it back the next day and he’ll never know the difference. Only the next day, the police were here cleaning out Tony’s cube.”

  “And you didn’t want to admit you’d taken it,” Sara finished for her.

  “Would you?” The girl rolled her eyes. “I wasn’t able to use it anyway. I hate to say this, but the thing is so full of downloaded porn there wasn’t enough available memory for me to play on it. Lousy with viruses. That stuff is loaded with them. And it had this weird little pop up that wouldn’t go away. Sure you still want it?”

  “I should be able to clean it out,” Ryan said. “We’ll take it off your hands.”

  Cerise sighed. “Good. It’s been bugging me. I know he was your cousin and all, and maybe you don’t want to hear this, but Tony just never seemed the type, you know. All buttoned down and intense. Whatever. The porn just surprised me, is all. This is really kinky stuff we’re talking. BDSM, ménage, really hard-core. Everything except kiddie porn.”

  Evidently Ms. Keep had spent plenty of time investigating the contents of Valenti’s computer even though she claimed the images revolted her.

  “My place is just around the corner if you want to come get it now,” Cerise said. “Tony and I have had cubes right across from each other all year. Guess you never really know anybody.”

  Sara pressed her lips together to keep from sp
eaking but she was thinking so hard it seemed impossible Cerise wouldn’t hear her.

  ‘She didn’t know he was into porn. I’ll bet he didn’t know she was a thief either,’ Sara signed to Ryan.

  “What did she say?” Cerise wanted to know.

  “Thank you,” Ryan said smoothly. “She said thank you for taking such good care of her computer.”

  Chapter 22

  Once Sara and Ryan were back in his condo, they fired up Anthony Valenti’s laptop and settled in to search out the dead man’s secrets. Fortunately, Sara had thought to ask Cerise if she knew if Tony had changed the password on the computer.

  “Well, we’re not supposed to share that with anyone,” Cerise Keep had said. “But I just happened to see him type his in one day.”

  Purely by chance, I’m sure, Sara thought sarcastically. “Do you remember what it is?”

  “Yeah, it’s ‘wonderland,’ all lower case,” Cerise said, popping her knuckles again. “I thought that was kind of weird at the time, you know, because it’s not a very strong password. We’re supposed to use alpha and numeric values and mix up the cases. We work on some pretty sensitive stuff around here, but I guess Tony didn’t think his porn needed all that much protection.”

  Sara had thanked her and asked for a business card in case she had any more questions. Cerise didn’t have a card, but she gave Sara her cell number.

  “In spite of everything, your cousin Tony really was a nice guy,” Cerise said as they parted company. “I’m sorry about how messed up your computer is…oh! and about Tony, too.”

  Sara decided Cerise had chosen her field well. She’d never make it if she had to deal with people instead of ones and zeroes all day. But fortunately, there were some techie-types with people skills as well and Sara was lucky enough to have one with her now.

  Ryan disabled the laptop from connecting into his wifi. If there was something important on this computer, Valenti wouldn’t have trusted it to the Cloud anyway.

  Sara felt a twinge of guilt over not texting Matthew about their find and turning the laptop over to the police. But the authorities wouldn’t do anything other than what she and Ryan were doing. She doubted the department boasted anyone who knew more about computers than Ryan.

  Besides, she was finally doing something to try to take back her life and it felt really good.

  Sara leaned over Ryan’s shoulder, inhaling his fresh masculine scent, as he typed in the password. “Wonderland. Do you think it’s a reference to the Wonderland Racetrack? Do you suppose that means Anthony Valenti was into gambling, too?”

  “That occurred to me,” Ryan agreed while the screensaver flickered to life. It was a photograph of a nude man and woman doing something Sara would have thought anatomically impossible if she hadn’t seen it with her own eyes.

  Ryan turned to her and shrugged. “Sorry.”

  “We were warned,” Sara said as the picture dissolved into yet another tortured pose of passion. The couple must have been double jointed all over. “Let’s just get into his files and see if there are any clues about why he was killed.”

  Ryan’s long, capable fingers flew over the keyboard.

  “If he had gambling debts he couldn’t pay, that might explain why someone wanted him dead—kind of as a warning to others who might not pay up.” Sara tried not to blush as another lewd picture flashed across the screen.

  And here all this time, she’d thought leashes were just for dogs.

  “I thought Matthew said Valenti’s finances were in order.” Ryan hesitated only slightly when he mentioned her ex.

  “The accounts the police know about were solvent anyway. Maybe he had some they haven’t found yet. Aren’t there usually organized crime elements involved with betting?” she asked with increasingly heated cheeks.

  The man in the next picture was heating the woman’s nether ‘cheeks’ with a wicked looking paddle, leaving angry marks on her bare behind. But the woman peered over her shoulder at her partner with a blissful smile on her very red lips.

  Pleasure from pain. Sara never understood how people confused the two.

  Sara forced her concentration back on the murder victim. Evidently the lurid pictures affected Ryan as well, for he seemed not to have heard her.

  “Even though Wonderland’s been closed down for a while, if Valenti frequented the dog track,” she said with more force, “he might have run afoul of some organized crime types.”

  “You might think so, but that’s not always the case,” Ryan said. “Wonderland was pretty clean in that respect.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just know.” Ryan clicked to check on Valenti’s emails.

  Sara drew a deep breath. The porn was gone. Words looked safe enough and she pulled up a chair to settle next to Ryan as he skimmed the subjects on Valenti’s incoming messages.

  There was lots of spam about how Anthony Valenti could enlarge his penis—as if the pictures on the lap top wouldn’t do the trick!—how to re-grow hair on his head and gadgets to remove hair from places where he didn’t want it growing.

  “Evidently, ‘cousin Tony’ didn’t believe in spam filters,” Ryan said as he closed down the tenth advertisement for Viagra.

  “Let’s check his sent mail,” Sara suggested. “Just the most recent ones.”

  For the last week of Anthony Valenti’s life, he was obviously preoccupied with a girl. Every sent message was tagged ALICE in the subject line. Some subroutine effectively obscured the addressee. Ryan clicked to open the last message, but a pop-up filled the screen instead.

  “Cerise said something about an irritating pop-up,” Sara reminded him.

  This one certainly qualified. It was a pulsing cartoon of a white rabbit, complete with a little red waistcoat and buttons that glittered. Every time Ryan tried to X the rabbit out, it divided into two. Soon the entire screen was filled with white rabbits grinning and glittering at them.

  Ryan sighed and signed to Sara since she was behind him. ‘Wonderland. Alice. And a white rabbit. There’s no telling how deep this rabbit hole goes. This is going to take a while.’

  Sara massaged his shoulders. “You can crack it. I know you can.”

  “I’ll do my best,” Ryan said, turning to face her. “Valenti was working on a project for a company outside the university. DES, you said? It might help if we knew what sort of project it was. Why don’t you use my computer and see what you can find out about them?”

  Sara settled herself at Ryan’s glass and chrome desk and signed on. She googled DES and pulled up multiple pages with every imaginable use of the letters from a suspect Wikipedia entry about Data Encryption Source to the Des Moines Register. At first she thought the Data Encryption might bear fruit but it turned out to reference a defunct company in the UK. The pages of possibilities stretched into cyber-space without end.

  She pointed and clicked for the next half hour without any success.

  “There are so many entries, I’ll never find the right one,” Sara muttered. She tried another tack, typing in both DES and MIT. Several hundred potentials popped up, but she scanned page after page, looking for her cyber-needle in a virtual haystack.

  Finally, she hit something promising. It was a cached article from the Boston Globe about the co-operative venture between MIT and a corporation called Dyson Electronic Systems. The university brain trust was teaming up with DES, the Globe said, to create a foolproof, unhackable electronic voting machine. MIT would provide the encryption and tabulation software and DES would manufacture the hardware.

  Once the initial phase was completed and in widespread use, the joint venture would explore ways of validating voter registrations using thumbprints and retinal scans. The resulting creation would increase reliability, decrease voter fraud, and revolutionize the way America cast its ballots.

  Sara thought the ACLU might have something to say about subjecting voters to fingerprinting and retinal scans. The procedures required just to build the data base smacked of inva
sion of privacy.

  The article went on to say the first use of the system in an actual election was slated for the coming mid-term Massachusetts senatorial contests. Already election officials were organizing sessions to train precinct volunteers how to operate the prototype.

  Concerns over lack of a paper trail were dismissed as groundless. After all, if we can bank and buy and board an airplane without paper, why shouldn’t we cast a ballot without killing trees as well?

  “I think I found it. Listen to this, Ryan. ‘A.L.I.C.E. is better than paper,’” Sara read aloud. “‘Alpha Level Interface Computer Encryption will send hanging chads the way of the horse and buggy.’”

  Ryan left his computer and hovered over her shoulder to skim the article.

  “This is Valenti’s ALICE, all right. It has to be,” he said. “But if they’re using DES machines in the coming election, he couldn’t have been designing the software at this late date.”

  “Maybe he was testing for bugs?”

  “Maybe,” Ryan allowed. “But if they’re already training people on the machines, quality control protocols should have been finished on the system months ago.”

  “Then what was he doing with it?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Ryan said. “But I think our friend the White Rabbit knows all of ALICE’s secrets. Now, I just need to get him to lead us through the looking glass.”

  ~

  Ryan spent the rest of the day, trying to bypass the rabbit pop-up. He powered down and rebooted. He wrote a quick subroutine trying to slip around it to no effect. Sara fixed ham and cheese sandwiches for lunch, which he ate in front of the flickering screen. When suppertime came with no further discernible progress, Sara insisted he leave it for a bit to eat the lasagna she’d whipped up.

  “Wow! You made this from stuff in my pantry?” he asked before shoveling in another delicious mouthful.

  “I’m glad you like it. I had to improvise a little,” she admitted. “Your pantry is fairly well-stocked, but your spice rack is pretty thin.”