Come and Find Me

by Hallie Ephron

  “And you don’t think your sister came home at all,” Pam said. “Someone else left the clothes and picked up the mail to make it look as if she did.”

  It sounded preposterous. “I’ve left her a gazillion messages. On her home phone. On her cell. At work. She’s got the number of the cell phone I’ve got with me.” Diana slipped it from her pocket to make sure she hadn’t missed a call. “If she’s back, why hasn’t she called me?”

  “And you think someone tampered with your security systems?” Pam paused to consider this, as if it were a completely rational possibility. Diana felt herself relax another notch. “Seems like there ought to be a connection. Think back. Did anything unusual happen before your sister disappeared?”

  “Ashley broke up with the guy she was seeing. That’s pretty unusual. For Ashley. And he wasn’t too thrilled.” Diana told Pam about the scene Aaron had made in the bar. How he’d followed her to Copley Square to apologize, then backed off.

  “You think he might be the person your sister’s neighbor saw in the hall?”

  “He could be.”

  “And you know for sure that your sister was at Copley Square three days ago?”

  “She called me from there. And there’s video footage, posted online, that shows her at the improv event.”

  Diana went over to Pam’s computer. The forum in the amphitheater on OtherWorld was still going on. Pam had left PWNED sitting on the stage, watching the speakers.

  “May I?” Diana asked, her hand poised over the mouse.

  Pam nodded.

  Diana opened a new browser window and typed in the Spontaneous Combustion address. She clicked the “Up in the Sky” video they’d posted. As the opening music played, Pam rolled her wheelchair over.

  “This was Friday,” Diana said. She fast-forwarded to the clear shot of Ashley. “And that’s my sister, Ashley. There are just a couple more glimpses of her.” She fast-forwarded to the next one, and then to the next.

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s all I could find in the montage they posted. But of course there’s got to be more footage. Lots more.” She told Pam about the different video cameras that had filmed the event. “I called, and they offered to let me examine the rest of the footage. But I’ve got to get over there to do it.”

  “So what are we waiting for?” Pam said. “We can go right now.”

  “They’re closed,” Diana said. It was nearly seven o’clock already. But Pam called anyway, hitting the speakerphone button so Diana could hear.

  The phone rang three times. Then: “We’re here from 10 A.M. until 6 P.M.,” a recorded voice informed them.

  Pam stabbed at the phone and disconnected the call. “First thing tomorrow we head over there.”

  Over dinner—a meze platter and kabobs that Pam brought back to the apartment from a Middle Eastern restaurant around the corner—Diana reconsidered Pam’s question: Had anything unusual happened before Ashley disappeared?

  She explained to Pam the kind of work she and Jake did, resolving security issues for clients in health care. “The same day Ashley disappeared, another client blew up in our faces. As soon as we’d found the breach, before we could track down the hackers, they called us off. It’s the third time that’s happened. I was furious.”

  “Can you tell what these hackers were after?”

  “I can show you one of the files they took. It didn’t mean a thing to me.”

  Diana connected her laptop to Pam’s wireless network and got into her e-mail account. She opened the data file she’d left in the drafts folder and turned her laptop so Pam could see.

  All it took was a glance. “That’s a DNA profile,” Pam said. She scrolled through it. “A unique individual, somebody somewhere. If we knew what we were looking at, we could find out all sorts of things about him.”

  “Him?”

  “Him.” Pam pointed to a line of data. “But that’s just the beginning. An expert could analyze the genetic code and tell us something about this man’s ethnic background. Certain genes make a person susceptible to specific viruses and immune to others. Or deadly allergic. Or—”

  “But what good is it? I mean, why would someone want to steal this stuff?”

  Pam propped herself up, straightening her spine and shifting in the chair. It occurred to Diana how uncomfortable it could get, sitting in the same chair all day long.

  “Assuming they could link the profile to a person, like through a Social Security number, I can think of lots of information in a DNA profile that someone wouldn’t want others to know—and that you certainly wouldn’t want your insurance company or your employer to get wind of. Just suppose, for example, that you have the gene for ALS. Or you’ve got a chromosomal abnormality that’s been linked to violent behavior? Or sexual perversion? I can easily imagine—”

  Pam was interrupted by what sounded like a dog barking. It was coming from her computer. “My network watchdog,” she said.

  She rolled over to her computer, clicked the mouse, and the sound stopped. “It just stopped a message from going out.” Frown lines deepened on her forehead as she stared at new information that had popped up. She turned to Diana. “Looks like it blocked an outgoing message that originated on your computer.”

  “But I didn’t send anything.”

  “Well, your computer sure as hell did. Or at least it tried to. Must have been when you connected to the Internet.” She swiveled the screen so Diana could see.

  OUTBOUND LEVEL 1 BREACH INTERCEPTED.

  Below that was a message addressed to USER003 on Volganet. All it contained was:

  42.33765016859684–71.07173681259155

  “I have no idea what those numbers mean,” Pam said. “Do you?”

  “They’re geocodes,” Diana said. She pulled up the Web site WhereUAre.com and pasted the numbers into a search box. “Shit,” she said, the back of her neck prickling as a map of the South End came up with a virtual pushpin on Harrison Avenue in the precise location of Pam’s apartment building.

  Chapter Nineteen

  “The good news is . . . that message never made it out,” Pam said. Diana found that only marginally reassuring.

  It didn’t take long for Pam to find the program that had launched it. She examined the code. “This is awfully clever. Simple but effective.” She looked over at Diana. “But how’d it get here?”

  “When did it get here?”

  “I can tell you that. Hold on,” Pam said. A few clicks later, Pam pointed to the screen. “Just under a year ago.”

  “No way.” Diana had owned the laptop for about that long—since Gamelan started. For that entire time it had been broadcasting her whereabouts to Volganet? She dropped into a chair. With all the fancy security systems that Jake had set up for her, how was that possible?

  Diana watched as Pam deleted the program. We have no privacy. She remembered Daniel’s rant about how the Internet, which had started out as a haven for freedom, had been co-opted, transformed into a playpen for Big Brother. Every time you’re on the Internet somebody knows where you are.

  Pam handed the laptop back to her. The tiny circle over the top of the screen, a built-in video camera that she’d never bothered about, seemed to blink at her.

  “You got any masking tape?” she asked Pam.

  When Pam brought her a roll, she tore off a tiny scrap and stuck it over the camera lens.

  If her laptop had been sending out information about its whereabouts, maybe there was a GPS chip transmitting from the car too. For that matter, a tracking device could have been sewn into clothing—like the brand-new clothes she’d purchased online and that Ashley had been wearing when she disappeared.

  Diana picked the leather jacket off Pam’s coatrack where she’d hung it and turned it over in her hands. She wondered how small and well camouflaged a GPS emitter could be. She examined
the metal fittings on the jacket. Could it resemble a snap or be embedded in a buckle?

  She ran her fingers up inside the lining and rolled the collar and cuffs between her fingers, feeling for any kind of anomaly. Then she examined the jeans and T-shirt that she still had on. Then the red boots that she’d shucked when she came into the apartment.

  She pulled out her cell phone. Didn’t they come with embedded GPS locators? She’d have to take that risk. It was the only way that Ashley could reach her, and she couldn’t turn it off—not until she was sure Ashley was safe.

  That night, Diana tried to fall asleep on a blowup mattress on Pam’s floor. It was comfortable enough and she was warm under a down comforter, but her insides were tied up in knots. She timed her morning tranquillity pill so it would be at full strength for the trip to Copley Square. It was only ten blocks away, but just looking out the window to the street below gave Diana the jitters. Even with Daniel’s walking stick, she’d never make it on foot. Driving the Hummer into the congested downtown and finding a parking spot near Spontaneous Combustion’s office—how likely was that?

  She needn’t have worried. Pam offered to drive.

  They rode down in the elevator together. Pam went outside, her wheelchair easily navigating the steps down to the sidewalk and off the curb. Pam’s silver van was parked in a handicapped spot in front of the building. She used a remote to open the van’s door. A platform slid out and Pam rolled onto it and waited for it to rise. When it was level with the van, she rolled inside and positioned her chair where the driver’s seat had been removed.

  The passenger door slid open and Diana got in, holding Daniel’s walking stick. She sat back, barely aware of the door sliding shut, of Pam whirring up and back, positioning the wheelchair and locking it in behind the steering wheel. The van was so much like the one Diana had been driving home from college when she had her first full-blown panic attack. So high off the ground, the windshield so close to the car in front of them. That first time, she’d been ambushed. This time she saw it coming.

  Pam started the van and, using one of the hand controls attached to the steering wheel to accelerate, pulled out into traffic. Diana grasped the door. Her heart sped and the walls of the van threatened to fold in on her, but a part of her seemed to remain on the outside, watching and monitoring her response, observing pedestrians darting across the streets or making their way up and down the sidewalks. That detachment—it was her pill doing its work.

  “Take your time. Control it,” Pam said as she crossed over the highway and into downtown Boston.

  Diana looked over at her, startled. She understood.

  Pam rolled down the windows on both sides of the van and cold air filled the interior. “Just breathe.”

  Diana sat back. The vise that gripped her slowly loosened.

  Minutes later, Pam parked the van in a handicapped spot alongside Trinity Church, its steps and arched front now in deep morning shadow, its central tower and two side towers looming overhead.

  Only about a dozen pedestrians were in Copley Square. Like a holographic image, Diana envisioned Ashley standing there in the middle of the plaza, barely fifty feet from where they’d parked, wearing the same clothes Diana had on now and offering a cell-phone salute to the Fairmont Copley.

  Across the street was the pillared front of the library where the improv participants had assembled. Behind her was the Copley Plaza Hotel, where Superman had been launched from a top-floor window.

  “Spontaneous Combustion is in that building over there,” Pam said, pointing past the plaza, across Boylston. Diana recognized the building with the decorative ironwork at the roofline. “You ready?”

  Pam waited until Diana nodded before rolling up the windows and opening the van doors. Holding Daniel’s walking stick, Diana got out. She raised her jacket collar and folded her arms. With Pam rolling along beside her, Diana walked to the spot in the center of the plaza where Ashley had stood. She was right here. Diana looked around, envisioning what it had been like with the plaza crowded with pedestrians. She looked across the street and imagined a glowering Aaron Pritchard, standing at the light watching her. But then what happened?

  The offices of Spontaneous Combustion were across the street, on the top floor of a building tucked between a CVS and a Starbucks. Eddie, who’d talked to her on the phone, set up Diana and Pam in a small, windowless video editing room. The walls were painted black, and three computer monitors were set on a shelf over a worktable with a single keyboard and mouse and banks of control panels. Eddie showed them the basics of how to work the system and left them to it.

  There were six video files. The first one started with Eddie, standing on the library steps, wearing a director’s cap and addressing the crowd through a bullhorn. The camera stayed with him. Diana slowed to half speed whenever the camera zoomed out to take in any of the crowd.

  A few minutes in, Diana thought she spotted Ashley. She paused the video and backed up. Sure enough, there she was, standing at the back of the crowd listening to the director’s instructions.

  Diana replayed the video, more slowly. The camera caught Ashley throwing a look behind her, then stepping into the crowd and getting swallowed up. Diana backed up again and froze the screen on Ashley’s face as she looked over her shoulder and in the direction of the camera. She zoomed in.

  “A little blurry, but what do you make of that expression?” Pam asked.

  “She looks—” Diana searched for the right word.

  “Pissed off?”

  “Exactly right. And I’m guessing she sees Aaron, the guy she’d just dumped.” So where was the other man Aaron had claimed he’d seen Ashley talking to?

  Diana grabbed a pencil from the table and a piece of paper from the trash. On the blank back, she drew a crude map of Copley Square and the surrounding area. She jotted an A at the approximate spot on the plaza where Ashley stood, and the 6:03:25 time stamp from the video.

  Diana pushed play and the view shifted back to the director, and stayed with him except for cutting away once to capture the brief drama of Superman getting snagged on the spire, and once again lingering on the unfurling banner at the end.

  The first camera’s video contained only one Ashley sighting. Diana prayed the others would yield better results.

  The video from the second camera had been taken from the roof of the building they were now in. The angles were all long shots across Copley. Individual people looked small and insignificant. It was slow going, backing up and inching ahead, zooming in to examine the crowd. There might have been another Ashley sighting. And another. Both were near where she’d been spotted earlier. Diana penciled in more As and time stamps on her map.

  Footage from the third camera yielded nothing new. The fourth camera focused on bystander reactions. Diana spotted the red hat again. Ashley had her back to the camera, her arm raised. Diana jotted an additional A on her map with a new time. As the camera meandered through the crowd, its operator seemed particularly enamored of a young woman whose abundant cleavage overflowed her low-cut top as she raised her arm in a cell-phone salute to the hotel.

  A fifth camera also caught the proceedings from sidewalk level. This one had caught Ashley crossing the street, from the library to Copley, and later in mid-pivot as Superman crossed overhead.

  The sixth video file was much smaller than the others. It had in it only five minutes of footage, shot from Spontaneous Combustion’s office window. It began at 6:53 A.M. the next morning and showed a gray, deserted Copley Square with a single pedestrian moving slowly across it. Traffic was sparse, and the headlights of about half of the cars were turned on.

  Diana sat back. By then Ashley had vanished, gone off the grid as Jake would have put it.

  “Hey!” Pam said. She was pointing to a figure sitting at the edge of the fountain.

  Diana blinked, unsure of what she was seeing. She froze the vi
deo and zoomed in. Wrapped in a blanket beside the fountain alongside Copley Church sat what looked like a homeless woman with a wheeled cart stuffed with clothing. On her head, she wore a newsboy-style cap.

  Chapter Twenty

  “Sure looks like the hat your sister had on,” Pam said when Diana had enlarged the frame even more.

  Diana stared closely at the image. The hat seemed to be the right shape, and it might have been red, but really it was just a blur. The woman wearing it was definitely not Ashley.

  “Even if it is, it doesn’t get us anywhere,” Diana said. “Better to focus on what we know.”

  She flattened the hand-drawn map on which she’d noted the times and places they’d spotted Ashley. “She starts out here.” She poked the map at the first A at 6:03:25 on the library’s front steps. “Then she’s here and here.” She moved her finger to the A still on the steps at 6:11:02 and on to the one in the middle of Dartmouth Street at 6:16:23.

  Diana went on, tracing all eleven points in time and space. “So, the last time we see her for sure is at 6:23:05,” she said. “Three minutes later, poof.”

  “People don’t just disappear.”

  “Right. So, what happened between 6:23 and 6:26? With six video cams going, one of them must have picked up something.” As she said that, Diana felt the prickle of excitement. There had to be clues buried somewhere in all that footage. There just had to be.

  Diana used all of the monitors to bring up videos from all six cams. She froze each at 6:23:05, the time of the last Ashley sighting. Each of the cameras had a different view, and in one of them, Ashley was standing in the square, facing away from the camera, her cell phone raised.

  Diana started the videos, synchronized to the same time and all running at the same slow speed. Ashley stood in a frozen salute. The camera cut away from her to show a woman pushing a double stroller, stopping to look. Simultaneously, another camera was capturing a cop looking baffled. Another focused on Super Dummy appearing in the hotel window. It started its descent. In the panoramic video shot from the office window, almost every pedestrian in Copley Square was frozen, attentions riveted as Super Dummy flew overhead.