by Mark Gessner
DATE PLACE URINE DOG BODY
12-15 MT TAMALPAIS Y Y ?
12-26 HARRISON VALLEY N Y Y
01-15 SCHAUMBRG Y Y Y
02-27 AUSTIN/ST.EDS PARK N Y N
02-17 AUSTIN/CITY PARK N Y N
"That look about right?" asked Jason.
"Yeah, that's good. I like the chart. Lets you see what's missing." said Kurt.
"So it looks like we have two confirmed dead bodies, possibly a third. I haven't heard of any murders in Austin recently, have you?" said Jason.
"No," said Kurt.
"--and the Kragers said that the dog was just buried by its owners, so no foul play there. So then we also have four dead dogs and two bottles of urine. Let's see if we can find any bodies with that Mt. Tam cache," said Jason. He keyed in a new search, looking for any news reports concerning a murder at Mt. Tam. Nothing. It could have been too long, or maybe it hadn't been newsworthy, or maybe the local paper in the area wasn't publishing its stories online. Or maybe there was no murder. "How 'bout we call Martello," Jason said.
"You got his number?" asked Kurt.
"I'll check his profile on the caching website," said Jason, opening a new window and tapping some more. "There's his cell number, grab my desk phone there and punch it up."
Kurt punched up the number. He heard three shrill ascending tones and a female voice saying, We're sorry, you must first dial a one, then the area code and number. Please check the number and try your call again. Kurt sighed, punched the switchhook, and then redialed the number, prefacing it with a one this time.
Holding a hand over the mouthpiece while the call clicked through, he said, "How long have phone networks been digital? You'd think if they had enough intelligence in their system to bring up a recording to tell me I need to dial a one first, that they'd have the capability to just insert a one in front of what I dialed, then patch it through without pissing me off by making me dial the whole freakin number aga--."
"Yo," interrupted the voice on the phone.
"Hello, Martello?" said Kurt.
"Yeah. Who's this?" asked Martello.
"It's Kurt Denzer and I've uh, got Jason Heckmann here too, a couple cachers you met in Austin last month," said Kurt.
"Sure, what can I do for you two?" said Martello.
"We're calling about that dog you found up on Mt. Tam last winter," said Kurt.
"Well, it's still winter here, but what about it?" laughed Martello.
"Sorry about that, it's spring here already," said Kurt, "We're curious about the police tape around the ranger station. Did you ever hear anything more about what was up with that?"
"No, I haven't, but I can call the folks I was staying with, they go up there all the time, maybe they know something more. Why?" said Martello.
"Just curious, we found some strange goings on with some caches, and we're just gathering data, looking for a pattern" said Kurt.
"Tell him we're looking for a body," whispered Jason.
"Jason says to tell you we're looking for a body," said Kurt.
"No shit? Okay, let me see what I can find out. I'll call you when I hear anything," said Martello.
"Thanks man," said Kurt. He put the receiver back on its cradle and pushed the phone back into the corner of the desk. Jason kept his desk neater than most engineers. You could actually see most of the surface.
"Okay, so there's no bottle of urine in the Pennsylvania murder, but we have a dead dog. Looks like the dog may be an accident though," said Jason.
"Seems kind of fishy, like too coincidental, you think?" said Kurt.
"Maybe. We can do a search on that and see what we find," Jason said, opening up a new search page. After paring it down a bit more, the search returned no hits. Dead end. Still the lure of the seventy-five thousand dollar reward kept that murder on the top of Kurt's list.
"Hey Jason, get in here, the Swedes just came online and we're getting our asses kicked," said one of the slackers, popping his head up over the cube wall.
"Duty calls," said Jason, shrugging.
"Catch you later," said Kurt, "Have fun." What a bunch of slackers, he thought.
Chapter 24
Alamogordo, New Mexico
February 10
THE KILLER CROSSED THREE NAMES off his list, Ricky Nelson, Jimbo McChasney, and that polock Zinny Chorzempa. There were more names, but he'd needed a break, needed to get some clean clothes, take a real bath. He'd also needed to do more research on a few of the other names on his list. With the break, his anxiety, his panic attacks had subsided.
The freight out from Chicago had brought him straight to Alamogordo without incident, and in record time. The trains out west were more organized and easier to follow than that fucked up rat's nest they had back east.
Breaking with his previous pattern, he rented a hotel room out on the edge of town. He spent most of his time at the library. He knew all internet access was traceable. He'd been doing some very detailed research on his next victims, and public internet was critical to avoid a trace. He would only research one victim at any given internet access point. He could get free anonymous access at the library.
New Mexico. Snow capped mountains. Great gypsum deserts. Beautiful scenery, nice friendly people, and they even had their own special brand of Mexican food, except who the hell wanted a fried egg on top of their enchiladas?
It was a great place to add to your list.
Chapter 25
National Solar Observatory - Sunspot, New Mexico
February 14
RAMONA HAD SPENT THE evening in her quarters in the cramped Quonset hut down the hill from the Vacuum Tower Telescope. She'd been examining the images from the day's viewing and the atmospheric distortion was still as strong as ever, perhaps even more so than before she'd applied her newest algorithm. She'd gone over and over her code, checked each line against the design, and then checked the equations against her derivations. Second order partial differential equations, vector calculus, and lots of plain ordinary high school algebra. Ramona loved math. Math was her life. The computer stuff was unavoidable if you wanted to actually do anything useful with the math. She wasn't a computer geek, hated computer geeks in fact, but that was how she had to make her living.
Her quarters were spartan. A single bed, a single bulb in the ceiling fixture, cold yellowed linoleum floor, a small upholstered chair in the corner on which she had piled her parka and leggings, and a dorm-sized refrigerator filled with a variety of organic vegetable drinks in single-serve plastic bottles. Next to the doorway to the left, a small desk and chair. Through the doorway, a cramped bathroom and shower. No tub. She'd dispensed with the luxury of hot baths for a shot at developing some breakthrough mathematics that would leave her mark on the world of space science.
The work she did for Locklin was so secret, buried under the cloak of the black project, that she'd never gain any fame from it. Still, she had the satisfaction of knowing that any time there was a war, which was pretty much all the time, her work in computer adaptive optics was used daily to help missiles and other projectile weapons identify, track and destroy enemy combatants. And the bastards deserved it, if the images she saw on the TV were true. Dirty foreigners, yellow or brown skinned bastards, groveling in jungles or hiding between sand dunes, never bathing, never knowing personal hygiene, shitting and rutting outdoors like animals, not even having the decency to speak English. Unable to organize themselves into stable Christian democratic societies, they deserved their fate; they deserved to die. She was glad she could help the U.S. Government eradicate every goddamn last one of them.
Defense was her career, but Astronomy had always been her passion. It's what had led her to mathematics and finally to adaptive optics. The same technology that helped missiles and shells find their targets in Iraq, Syria, Korea, and a half-dozen other declared and undeclared wars, helped clean up the atmospheric distortion in telescope images. The atmosphere was the enemy of good astronomy. No matter how great a telescope you bui
lt, if you operated it from the surface of the earth, you had to look through sixty-odd miles of atmosphere, which was constantly in a state of flux, wrinkling and distorting your image. It's why stars twinkled, and why NASA had spent billions developing and servicing the Hubble Space Telescope, to get it out beyond our atmosphere so it could see clearly.
Now her algorithms would allow earth based telescopes to achieve more clarity than Hubble, by sensing and then filtering out the atmospheric distortion mathematically. This was her chance to shine. She'd be published. She'd be famous in the world of astronomy. Maybe they'd name a crater or an alien mountain range after her someday.
She'd taken the sabbatical after working at Locklin for fifteen years. Her supervisor was glad to give her the year off just to keep her from leaving for good. It was hard to find good optics experts in the defense industry lately. The pay wasn't so good as the commercial world, and many employees these days had moral issues around developing tools that would be used to kill lots of people, some of them innocent. Not Ramona.
The code checked out line for line against the design. Shit. She was hoping for a simple coding error. It was easy enough to do in that goddamned C language. Stupid language was designed by Unix geeks back in the sixties, designed to be so arcane and twisted that only Unix geeks could figure it out. Job security. Even after fifteen years, she wasn't a C expert. She kept a well-worn pocket sized C language reference book handy at all times. By two A.M. she had checked the design line-for-line against the base algorithms. That too checked out. Still, those distorted images stared at her up from her laptop screen, mocking her. It had to be something wrong with the laser sensor board she'd installed in the telescope. She was too tired to continue debugging the problem tonight, and besides, she'd need to view the sensor in the daytime to debug it.
The killer hid in the line of trees across the service road from Ramona's Quonset hut. She had her curtains pulled, but there was a crack. It was late. Most of the scientists here were asleep. Not Ramona. The killer crept up to the street, and carefully snuck across the powdery snow to the window. He put an eyeball up to the glass and peered in through the crack. Her lights were on. He could see her working at the computer. Her back was turned to him, and it was dark outside. She couldn't see him. He thought about busting in through the door and taking her now, but it would be too messy. There were a line of Quonset huts, and someone next door would hear the noise. No way to guarantee that she wouldn't scream.
She was the homeliest bitch he'd ever had the misfortune of working for. Face wrinkled from decades of cigarette smoking, long hooked nose, flyaway dishwater blonde hair that looked like it rarely met with comb or brush. A hairstyle unknown to fashion. Seeing her from behind, so vulnerable in her t-shirt and panties barely covering her wide ass, he couldn't wait.
She scooted back her chair and folded the lid of her computer shut. She was getting up from the desk. He twisted and scuttled back into the forest. He watched her silhouette move back and forth through her quarters, then switch off the light. He'd have to wait until tomorrow.
Chapter 26
THE DUNN SOLAR VACUUM Tower Telescope stood over a hundred thirty feet high. Its concrete cone stabbed straight up into space from the summit of Sacramento Peak like the nose cone of a mammoth nuclear missile. At the tip of the brilliant white cone, a narrow service walkway surrounded the central protrusion of the scope's bulbous window turret. The entrance window, a thirty-inch diameter quartz glass, covered two mirrors that could be swiveled remotely to track the sun as it moved across the sky. The huge cone itself didn't move; it was fixed to the ground, and indeed extended a couple hundred feet more underground. Light from the sun passed through a long vacuum chamber, further limiting the ability of the air to distort the image. At ground level inside the concrete structure lay a forty-foot circular control room packed with instruments, spectrographs, sensors, optical benches, observing tables, and enough networked computer firepower to keep an army of computer geeks safely out of the gene pool for years.
But this morning, there was no one in the control room. It was too early. Most of the scientists were still either finishing up with brunch in the mess hall, or attending an all-day seminar down at the nearby Apache observatory on the other side of the mountain. Not Ramona.
Ramona's laser sensor array was installed in the instrumentation chamber, in the dead center of the control room. The instrumentation chamber was about the size of a hotel elevator, but cylindrical and only half as tall. Its inner walls were mirrored with pure silver. It had a rack fitted near the top for placing sensors and filters directly into the path of the sunlight before the light continued on its way through the vacuum chamber two hundred twenty-one feet to the primary mirror below. The sunlight in the instrumentation chamber was the most intense of anywhere in the entire light path. The chamber had three separate latches on its heavy metal door, which was also silvered inside.
The entire vacuum chamber, all three hundred plus vertical feet of it, floated suspended in a pool containing ten tons of mercury. A technician could rotate the two hundred ton chamber with ease by hand if necessary.
She was the first one here, so she'd have to go through the whole telescope power-up procedure by herself. She pressed the main power button, and then listened for the filter wheels to stop grating as they rotated into position. The main telescope computers started their boot-up procedure. She could see across the room as the Unix terminals stepped through their startup scripts, dumping the results to their consoles in shades of amber and green on black. She opened the turret using the handbox controller, then patched in the correct azimuth and elevation coordinates for the sun. The sun wasn't up yet so the sun tracker pointed at the horizon, patiently waiting for the sun to rise. When the sun rose, the tracker would automatically lock onto the sun's image and center it. She re-checked the calibration, and then checked the level indicator to make sure there was enough coolant.
The coolant checked out okay, so she pulled a fresh mag tape out of the box next to the main processor, threaded it into the drive, pressed LOAD, and closed the drive cover as the tape reels spun out and back automatically to feed a few feet onto the take-up reel.
The power-on sequence completed, Ramona could now concentrate on her own work. She boarded the tiny elevator platform, and punched the UP switch. The elevator hoist gave a growl of protest, then pulled the platform upward toward the top of the cone. The rickety metal platform was open to the air, with only a waist-high metal railing between the passenger (only one person could ride the elevator at a time) and a spectacular fall to the control room floor below. The elevator was fixed to a track on the inside of the cone, and so as she rose, Ramona inched both upward and diagonally toward the top center of the cone.
She opened the hatch to the outside platform, stepped off the elevator, and carefully fixed a tiny reflective laser target to the center of the quartz window. She'd need this to calibrate the sensor below. The sun still hadn't risen but outside the sky was turning from dark blue to light blue. The weather had been mild the last few days, and they'd even watched much of the snow melt, but the pre-dawn air was still cold. There was no wind, which was fortunate since she hadn't expected to be up here long and she wasn't wearing a coat. She had to be careful not to frost the glass with her breath.
After she had fixed the target, she leaned out over the railing and watched the sky to the east. The dawn of her day. It was beautiful. She'd debug this little sensor glitch, then the world would know her name. Well, at least the world of astronomy.
Chapter 27
THE KILLER WOKE TO the beeping of his watch alarm. He'd been spending nights in the restroom at the observatory visitor center. It was actually heated at night, though he was prepared to bundle up in his parka if needed. That was a nice break. Getting access to the visitor center after hours had not been easy. He'd been prepared to break in, but he really wanted to avoid attracting attention. So he signed up for a tour on his first day on the mountain,
cased the place without being obvious. He'd toured the compound, visited all the telescope and lab buildings, and watched all the geeks in their lab coats and parkas running around taking pictures of the sun. He couldn't imagine a more boring job. How many pictures of the sun did they need? The place was so remote that they just left everything unlocked most of the time. Except for the visitor center. There wasn't much to steal in the compound anyway, just a bunch of test equipment and lab stuff. Not much market for that. There were laptop computers everywhere, but a thief would have an easier time down in Alamogordo ripping off a liquor store or something. Sunspot was just too remote to bother with.
