The Hunt

by Jennifer Sturman

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “The person I’m thinking of-well, he’s dead.”

  “Leo?” asked Luisa.

  Abigail looked at her in surprise. “Who told you about Leo?”

  “He was the other man in the picture Hilary stored in the safe. Peter’s mother identified him-she remembered him from when she used to teach at Berkeley. Then I called the university’s technical-support hotline, right before we met up for dinner, and I asked if a graduate student named Leo had ever worked there. The woman who answered had overlapped with him, and she told me about the fire. I was getting to that part of the story when Rachel called and we had to rush over here.” This last was delivered with yet another pointed look at me. If this kept up, I might have to release Luisa from the dare purely out of self-defense.

  “How did you know Leo?” Peter asked Abigail.

  “And you still haven’t explained why you think you can get in touch with Iggie,” said Luisa.

  I’d been watching Abigail’s face, and maybe it was a trick of the light, but she was starting to look familiar in a whole new way, a way that had nothing to do with her resemblance to Christie Turlington.

  “You’re Biggie, aren’t you?” I said.

  She turned to me, her brown eyes wide. “How did you know?”

  14

  I’d first met Abigail only six months earlier, just after she started working at Peter’s company. At the time, Peter couldn’t stop talking about how pleased he was with his new hire’s business acumen and technical savvy, and, unaware of her current sexual orientation, I’d been far more concerned about what she and Peter might be up to together in the present than what she might have been up to on her own in the past. Nor had it occurred to me then to worry about what Peter might have been up to in his past.

  She had changed dramatically from the woman in the picture with Iggie and Leo, and it was more than the differences in shape and hairstyle that made her so unrecognizable. There was a self-possessed confidence to her now, a confidence the woman in the picture, hiding behind her veil of hair, had lacked. I could only guess as to how much of the change had to do with the physical transformation and how much of it had to do with extricating herself from a bad marriage. Either way, her caution in entering new relationships suddenly made sense in a way it hadn’t before-who wouldn’t be cautious after having been married to Iggie?

  A security guard came by just then and informed us the park was closing, so we returned to the Four Seasons, settling around a table in the lounge off the lobby. I held my tongue when Luisa ordered a rum and Diet Coke, a drink I’d never seen her order before, her or anyone legally old enough to order drinks, but clearly she felt it necessary to torment me. I was feeling less than one-hundred percent myself-in fact, I was feeling about three percent-but judging from Luisa’s behavior, caffeine withdrawal was a mere drop in the withdrawal bucket compared to nicotine withdrawal, and she blamed me for everything she was feeling. I also didn’t give it much thought when Ben ordered a cheeseburger along with his beer. I’d assumed he’d had dinner with Luisa and Abigail, but apparently not. Still, I didn’t wonder what he’d been doing instead-I was too curious about what Abigail had to say.

  “We all met in graduate school at Berkeley,” Abigail told us. “That was about four years ago. I was earning my M.B.A., and Iggie and Leo were both finishing up their doctorates in computer science, but we ended up taking the same class on entrepreneurship and technology. It was a popular class for business students, because so many of us wanted to find jobs at tech start-ups after graduation, but it was also a sort of crash course in business for people in the sciences. Iggie and Leo had already been kicking around an idea for a software venture, and they wanted to learn how to finance and build a new company.”

  “Was that Iggie’s first business, the one that never got off the ground?” I asked, remembering Alex Cutler’s comment the previous evening. It was hard to believe that conversation had taken place barely twenty-four hours ago.

  “Who told you that?” she asked, shaking her head. “If anything, their original idea was exactly what Igobe’s become. They first called the company Igleo, a combination of both their names, but after Leo died Iggie stripped out his name. But the concept was always to create software to help people maintain their anonymity on the Internet. They hadn’t yet begun development when I first met them, but they knew what they wanted to do, and they’d mapped out how it would all work technically. What they hadn’t figured out was whether they’d make money off it.”

  “Why couldn’t they just sell or license the software to people?” asked Luisa. “That’s how Microsoft and other software companies do it, right? And isn’t that how Igobe’s doing it now?”

  “That’s how the software business has worked traditionally, but more and more Internet businesses are making their money from advertising instead. All of the major portals like AOL and Yahoo! are supported by ads, and so are the big search engines and social networks,” said Peter. His own company was working on ways to speed the flow of data across the Internet, but it didn’t deal with consumers directly. Instead, his customers were the cable and phone companies that provided consumers with Internet access.

  “So Iggie and Leo couldn’t decide whether to sell the software to people or to let advertisers support it-was that the crux of the matter?” asked Luisa.

  “No. It was a lot more basic than that,” said Abigail. “What they couldn’t agree on was whether to make any money from the software at all.”

  We all stared at her, collectively perplexed.

  “Not make money?” asked Ben.

  “What do you mean?” asked Peter.

  “Then why bother?” asked Luisa.

  I was relieved the concept was just as shocking to them as it was to me-I sometimes worried that working in finance had so steeped me in avarice I no longer had a firm grip on how regular people felt about these things. “How could Iggie not want to make money?” I asked. “Iggie’s been obsessed with making money for as long as we’ve all known him. The guy had an autographed picture of Bill Gates in his dorm room, and it wasn’t because Bill was such a babe.”

  Abigail smiled at our reaction. “I know it’s hard to process. But it wasn’t Iggie-he was all for making money, and for making as much of it as he possibly could. It was Leo. He was pretty left-wing to start with, even by Berkeley standards. And then his father died while we were in school, from cancer. I don’t remember what his father did-some sort of middle-management job at a big corporation, I think-but Leo was convinced if he hadn’t been working so hard his entire life he wouldn’t have gotten sick. The experience made him even more radical. I went to the memorial service, and Leo did a reading from Das Kapital and then went on a rant about how his father had been alienated from the fruits of his labor.”

  “And that’s why all of the leftist clues made you think of him?” Peter asked.

  “That’s part of it. But only a part-it was more than the politics that reminded me of Leo. I mentioned before that he loved puzzles, and not just solving them, creating them, too. I could practically picture how much fun he’d have coming up with the clues you’ve been getting. A lot of developers hide surprises in the computer code they create-they call them Easter eggs-but Leo took almost more pleasure from burying Easter eggs in his code than in writing the code itself. In fact, the only thing he liked better was hacking into other developers’ code and finding their Easter eggs.”

  I was already paying close attention, but this made me lean forward in my seat. “Leo was a hacker?”

  “A lot of software developers are. It’s like a game to them, and there’s a certain amount of ego involved, too. They’re all trying to one-up each other by showing they can hack each other’s code. Some companies even pay hackers to try to get into their systems, to help them identify weak spots by seeing if they can break through firewalls and find flaws in security protocols.”

  At this point, only Peter knew about my
conversation with Laura Taylor. He looked at me. “Sound familiar?”

  I nodded. “Abigail, have you ever heard of a hacker named Petite Fleur?” It was hard to ask this with a straight face, but somehow I pulled it off.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Petite Fleur is the online pseudonym-at least, I think it’s a pseudonym-of someone who says he can hack Igobe’s technology.” I filled them all in on what Laura had told me. “It sounds so much like everything you’ve told us about Leo. An old friend of Iggie’s who’s now an enemy but has the technical know-how to compromise Igobe’s security. Who better to do that than Iggie’s partner in developing the technology in the first place?”

  “Leo was more than a partner,” said Abigail. “Iggie’s talented and he has great commercial sense, but Leo was the true technical genius. Leo was responsible for the most sophisticated parts of the software’s design. But this hacker, and the person who’s been sending you these clues, can’t be Leo. Leo’s dead.”

  “Are you absolutely sure about that?” asked Peter, taking the words from my mouth.

  “He’s dead. I wish he weren’t, but there’s no way he could have survived the fire that killed him.”

  “What happened, exactly?” asked Luisa. “The woman at Berkeley mentioned a fire, but she didn’t give me any other details, and it didn’t seem appropriate to ask.”

  Abigail took a sip from the glass of red wine she’d been nursing. “Leo had a cabin in the hills above Silicon Valley, off Skyline Boulevard. It was just a small place compared to some of the mansions people have built in the area with Internet money, but it was in a beautiful spot. On a clear day you could see all the way to the Pacific from one side of the house and to San Francisco Bay from the other. Leo thought of the cabin as his private retreat. He’d usually go up there alone, shut himself in, light a fire in the fireplace, put on some music and lose himself in work for days at a time. The report was that he must have fallen asleep one night with a fire going. The fire got out of control, and the cabin burned down with him in it.”

  “Are you positive he was in it?” I asked. After all, Abigail had just described a classic way to fake one’s own death, not that I had any idea why Leo would want to do such a thing. All of the other signs pointed at Leo and in such a definitive way as to smooth over any disconnect between his picture and the delicate femininity of the hacker’s online alias. I was reluctant to let a small thing like people thinking he was dead get in the way.

  “The cabin was so isolated it took a while for the fire trucks to arrive, and by then there wasn’t much left but ashes. Nobody inside could have survived, and nobody did. Once the fire was out, all they recovered were some bone fragments and teeth.” Abigail gave a small shudder, remembering. “That’s how they ended up identifying both Leo and Scat.”

  “Scat?” asked Ben.

  “Leo’s dog,” she explained. Scat seemed like a strange thing to name a dog-it was more like the sort of thing you’d say to a cat-but not everyone came from the Forrest school of pet-naming. “He really loved that dog.”

  “When did all of this happen?” I asked, disappointed. It was hard to argue with bones and dental records.

  “About eighteen months ago. Leo and Iggie were fighting all the time by then, and things were getting really bitter between them. All of the initial development was done on the software, and the preliminary testing was complete. They were ready for a broad commercial launch, but they still hadn’t resolved their disagreement about money, and Leo would complain that he never had time to get any work done, because Iggie was constantly scheduling meetings with venture capitalists to talk about business plans and deal terms. Leo wanted to start small and make some of the software available for free, but Iggie thought from the beginning that the technology could be worth billions, and he wanted the venture-capital firms to invest in the company so they could finance a big splashy marketing campaign and grow the business quickly.”

  “I guess we know which path he took,” I said. Now you couldn’t browse the Web, turn on the TV or pick up a magazine without encountering an Igobe ad. They were even plastered on buses and taxis. It seemed wrong that a product whose key selling point was its ability to protect one’s privacy was advertised in such an invasive way.

  “Iggie did exactly what he wanted once Leo wasn’t around to argue with him.”

  “Then what happened? With you and Iggie?” Luisa asked, her tone gentle. She had plenty of gentleness to spare for people she didn’t hold responsible for her nicotine-deprived state, and she also had her own reasons to be interested in Abigail’s personal history.

  Abigail looked down at her glass of wine. “I didn’t have a lot of experience romantically, and Iggie really swept me off my feet when we were in school. It never felt right to me, but I didn’t know how it was supposed to feel. The marriage started going south pretty much right after the wedding, but Leo’s death was the catalyst. It sounds like a cliché, but it drove home that I only had one life to live. I left Iggie a few weeks after Leo died, and I made a lot of other changes.” She lifted her eyes to meet Luisa’s. “And here I am.”

  This was as good an opportunity for a tender moment as I’d ever seen, and if I’d been less impatient or if Luisa had been nicer to me that day I would have let it take its course. “And there’s Iggie, about to become a billionaire,” I said instead. “That’s awfully convenient.”

  Abigail managed to tear her gaze from Luisa, and I could tell I’d struck a chord. “It was convenient, wasn’t it? This is going to sound crazy, but part of me always wondered whether Iggie had anything to do with the fire. The timing of everything couldn’t have been better for him. Once Leo was dead, Iggie could take the business in the direction he wanted, without any obstacles. He’s already made a bundle since then, and once Igobe goes public, he’s going to be seriously rich.”

  “Was there any suspicion of arson?” asked Ben.

  “No. At least, not officially. The investigators said it looked as if a spark had landed on the rug in front of the hearth. The fire spread quickly from there, and Leo didn’t manage to get out. But they didn’t find any evidence of foul play. Iggie kept telling people he thought it was suicide, that Leo was still depressed about his father’s death and set the fire himself. He said Leo wanted to die in a fire because his father had been cremated. But Iggie saying all that just made me wonder if he was trying to deflect suspicion from himself.”

  “Did Leo have any other close friends or relatives?” I asked. Perhaps somebody else had suspected Iggie of foul play, too, somebody who knew enough about Igobe’s software to hack it and who cared enough about Leo to avenge his death. Maybe a commie computer-whiz girlfriend who called herself Petite Fleur?

  But Abigail shook her head. “Leo was a loner, especially after his father died. All he cared about was his work, and music and Scat. He was a big fan of the masses, but only from a distance.”

  “Did Iggie know you suspected him?” asked Peter.

  “Maybe. Probably. But it didn’t worry him. There wasn’t much I could do about it. It wasn’t like I had any proof. He was home the night of the fire, working in his home office, but he might have sneaked out for an hour or two without my noticing, especially since we were barely speaking at that point. He could have gone up to the cabin, incapacitated Leo in some way and then started the fire to cover his tracks. I never would have thought he had it in him, but he’s always been so ambitious, and everything fell into place for him once Leo was out of the way. He didn’t even pretend to be upset when Leo died. Two days later he’d renamed the company and cashed a big check from a venture-capital firm. Two weeks after that, ads for Igobe were everywhere. And now Igobe’s about to sell shares to the public for more money than I think even Iggie ever dreamed of.”

  A silence fell over the table; each of us was thinking through the implications of what Abigail had told us, and I don’t think I was the only one feeling a newly heightened sense of alarm, and it wasn’t just becaus
e my hopes for the career-redeeming prospects of the Igobe IPO were fading fast. While we’d been concerned that Iggie wouldn’t be pleased if Hilary wrote an article claiming Igobe’s technology could be hacked, we’d dismissed the idea that he presented a real threat.

  But that was before we knew what had happened to the last person to get in Iggie’s way. We had a lot more to be concerned about if Iggie was capable of murder.

  15

  Peter seemed as shocked as any of us about Abigail’s secret history, but I guessed she hadn’t included details about her personal life on her résumé. “Can you get in touch with Iggie?” He asked her now. “Or do you know where he lives?”

  “We used to rent a house in Los Altos, but he’s moved since then, and I don’t have the new address or even a phone number. He’s paranoid about people knowing his personal information. And we handled all of the correspondence for the divorce through our lawyers. Iggie wasn’t very happy about the split, to put it mildly, and it was easier not to deal with him directly.” She hesitated. “I’d mentioned to Luisa that there’s someone I can call who always knows how to reach him. It won’t be easy-it’s a last-resort type of option-but I can do it if you’re desperate.”

  “We’re pretty desperate,” I said.

  “We might even be very desperate,” said Luisa. “Given what you’ve told us about Iggie, it sounds as if Hilary could be in serious trouble.”

  Abigail seemed to be taking our measure, weighing just how desperate we really were against making a call she was reluctant to make. Apparently we came across as sufficiently pathetic, or maybe she was just trying to please Luisa or even Peter, who was not only her friend but her boss, as well, although this sort of thing certainly wasn’t covered in her job description. “Okay. If it’s that important to you, I’ll give it a shot.”