A Perfect Life

by Mike Stewart

  Almost.

  There was one person. Natalie Friedman had been fresh out of Boston College and chained to the PC help desk when Scott first arrived at the hospital. Natalie had set up Scott's access to the hospital's IT system, and she'd solved a printer spooling problem for him a month later. She'd even had dinner with him in the hospital cafeteria on two or three occasions. The two young professionals had connected. Scott now hoped that would be enough.

  A face approached in the hallway without triggering any sense of familiarity. Scott waited for the stranger to get inside the limited range of his vision and glanced at the security name tag dangling from his belt. CLEMENT PEOPLES. The man's name was no more familiar than his face. This was as good as it was going to get.

  “Excuse me.”

  Clement Peoples turned to meet Scott's eyes. “Yes.”

  “I'm looking for the help desk. Natalie Friedman.”

  Peoples pointed past Scott's shoulder. “Go to the end of the hall and hang a left. You'll go down a short set of steps and dead end at some double doors. Turn right, and you'll run into the help desk offices. Natalie's stuck at one of the cubes in there.” He snorted out a little chuckle. “Unless she's out showing some dork where the delete key is on his computer.”

  Scott said, “Thanks,” and turned away.

  The time was creeping toward five now, and Scott hurried. If she had gone home, he'd have to take the same chances all over again the next day.

  When he turned at the double doors, Scott came face to face with four young men. They were leaving the help desk office, carrying coats and briefcases. Scott lowered his head and brushed past. Through a tiny window in the office door, he saw three women preparing to leave for the day. One of them was Natalie Friedman.

  The women pushed through the door and brushed past. No one asked why he was there. No one offered to help. It was quitting time. If he wasn't going to speak up, they weren't going to volunteer.

  Scott turned to see his hope leaving in the person of Natalie Friedman.

  Shit. “Natalie!”

  One of her friends giggled. “You got caught. See you tomorrow.”

  Natalie sighed and turned. As she did, Scott was already stepping through the door to her office.

  The young programmer wrinkled her brow, then marched down the hallway and pushed open the door. “You really shouldn't be in here. If you need help, the second shift will be on at eight.”

  Scott turned to face her. “I need your help, Natalie.” For a moment, he thought she might scream. White showed around her dark irises. “Someone's trying to frame me for murder. A man named Darryl Simmons. His hacker name is Click.”

  Her expression changed, and Scott could tell that Natalie had heard Click's name before.

  “I have Click's IP address. He was working with someone here at the hospital.” His eyes dropped. “At least, I think he was. It's the only thing that makes sense.” Scott looked back up into her eyes. “I need your help, Natalie. I don't know where else to turn.”

  Natalie stepped backward and put her hand on the door. She pointed to a plastic chair ten feet distant. “Sit there.”

  “What?”

  “Sit down or I'm leaving right now. Sit!”

  Scott obeyed. “Okay, what now?”

  “Tell me about this alleged frame. Tell me about Click and how you got the IP address of one of the most notorious hackers in New England. Explain it. I'll listen as long as it makes sense. But”—she pointed at Scott like a teacher warning an unruly student—“move an inch, try to stand up, even raise your voice, and I'll scream bloody murder. You got that?”

  “I've got it. Is it okay if I put my glasses on?”

  “You can put your glasses on.” Her voice turned softer. “Now start talking.”

  CHAPTER 29

  Dusk had settled outside the windowless basement offices. The streets were a different place now from when Scott stepped through the hospital's glass doors only minutes before. People hurried more and spoke less. Drivers swerved, slammed brakes, and blared horns, trying too hard to maintain a reputation as the most aggressive commuters in the world.

  Inside the IT dungeon, fluorescent light was constant. Day and night, winter, spring, summer, and fall, computer jockeys moved through halls and offices as unchanging as a photograph.

  “Can we go somewhere else to talk?”

  Natalie Friedman shook her head. “No. We can't.”

  “Somebody could come in—”

  “So I'm supposed to go off with an accused murderer to God knows where? I don't think so.” Natalie pressed her bottom against the door to make sure it was ajar. “Talk now, talk here, and talk fast, or I'm gone.”

  Scott looped his glasses over his ears and tried to slow his breathing. He studied Natalie's face. She was definitely nice to look at, but not magazine-cover beautiful. Not really. But she had something more than that. Intelligence and empathy combined with . . . something. She was just astoundingly attractive. That was the word.

  He decided to dive in. “Patricia Hunter was murdered while I was at home, asleep in bed. Somebody—I don't know who—called me at three A.M. and told me about it. I came down to the hospital, and the cops started treating me like a suspect.” Scott examined Natalie's face. Her eyes watched his. She knew something. The biggest mistake he could make would be to tell her a lie or to gloss over incriminating facts she already knew. He decided to tell her everything. Almost everything. “My apartment was burglarized the day before this happened. At the time, I thought nothing was taken. Later I found out that the two burglars brought an empty Palm Pilot. They beamed everything in my Palm into the one they had, put mine back in the charger, and left without taking anything. Without taking anything I'd notice missing.”

  Natalie nodded. This was something she knew about.

  Scott needed to keep her nodding. “My Palm had everything in it. They got my online banking passwords and used it to steal thirty thousand dollars from my trust account in Birmingham.”

  “Was that all the money in the account?”

  “No. The account had everything left from my father's estate. Just enough to finish my doctorate. They took about half of what was there.”

  “Why would they only take half if . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  “I don't know. Maybe taking everything would have triggered too much interest at the bank. Maybe . . . I don't know. I do know they used the funds to try to frame me for Patricia Hunter's murder.”

  Natalie's eyes darted around the help desk room. “Who are ‘they'?”

  “Darryl Simmons. Click. I know that for sure. I found a Palm with my data in it on a desk in his office.”

  “How'd you . . . ?”

  “I broke in. The man's a criminal. He invaded my life. And I broke in to what I thought was his apartment to find out why. He has a kind of office—with four computers and boxes of stolen cell phones and PDAs—set up in an old tenement apartment.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “And I guess you've got a good excuse for torching your house.”

  She must have seen the web site. Scott objected. “I didn't torch anything. I was ten years old.”

  “No, Scott. The house out in the country south of here. It was in the papers. The police arrived to serve a warrant, and the place burst into flames with two or maybe three officers inside.”

  Scott shook his head. His eyes dropped and moved over the floor. “I know the place.” He stopped talking as a horrible thought worked through. “Are the cops . . . did they get caught in the fire?”

  “They're fine.”

  “Good.” Scott shook off the image of burned bodies. “Someone rented the house in my name and put a computer and a bunch of porno in there.”

  “On your computer here at the hospital, too.”

  He looked up. “Huh?”

  “Porno. We found some nasty stuff on your hard drive.”

  “I didn't have a computer. I was a part-time student analyst. I was lucky they gave me a cub
icle and a phone.”

  “Oh. Well, it was one of the psych ward computers. There were all these S and M pictures—dirty, nasty, black-and-white photos of . . .”

  Scott could tell he was losing her. He looped back to something she could understand. “It had to be Click. Somebody hired him. He told me. Somebody hired him to ruin my life. To frame me for Patricia Hunter's murder.”

  Natalie began to edge backward. The door pushed open another inch.

  Now or never. “He was working with someone here at the hospital. I paid a computer hacker to help me work through this. He said the hospital's system administrator could pull up a list of all the e-mails that have come through here. I've got Click's IP address. All I need is to check it against—”

  “No way.” Natalie's voice was harsh. But she was no longer inching backward.

  “You know you can do it.”

  “I can do a lot of things. I'm not even supposed to know how to do what you're asking.”

  Scott tried a smile. “But you do know how, don't you?”

  “I know how to do a lot of things that could get me fired.”

  Scott started to stand. She tensed, and he eased back into the formed plastic seat. Seconds passed. Both of them were thinking. Finally, he said, “This is the only thing I could come up with. I don't know what else to do.”

  More time passed. Natalie exhaled as if she'd been holding her breath. “You've exhausted everything else? Every other way to check into this?”

  He almost admitted that there were other loose ends out there, but thought better of it. He needed to know who Click was working with at the hospital. So, in the end, he lied. “Yes. I don't know what else I could do.”

  Lines formed between her eyebrows. “If you find something—if you find someone here at the hospital who was communicating with this Click person—will you turn yourself in and give that information to the police?”

  “They won't listen.”

  She was shaking her head before he got out the third word. “It's the only way I'm going to help you.”

  Scott tried to read her face. All he said was “Okay.”

  Natalie glanced at her watch. “The next shift comes in at eight. That means you've got about two and half hours to find what you need and get out of here.” She swept her hand around the room. “Pick a computer. I'll walk you through the logon and password procedures.”

  Scott smiled. “Are you going to stay there in the doorway, like you've got a wild animal in the room?”

  “Yes.” She didn't smile. “That's exactly what I'm going to do. I'll get you into the system. Then I'm out of here. You can sit here and scroll through the e-mails by yourself. Now”—she made an impatient gesture with her hand—“pick a computer. You've got a few thousand e-mails to scroll through, and not much time to do it.”

  Two uniformed cops loitered at the first-floor information desk. One—a skinny kid with acne scars—stood with his back to the receptionist. His arms were folded. He rocked on his feet from heel to toe. The second cop was all beef and attitude. He leaned forward, ropy forearms resting on the tall Formica counter, his mouth working overtime. “We need to see this Clement Peoples, uh, in your IT department. He called in a—” The receptionist's phone rang. She reached for the receiver, and the cop barked, “Stop!”

  The woman jumped in her seat. “There's no need . . .”

  The beefy cop took a deep breath. “I been standin' here for five minutes not able to get a sentence out 'cause you been pickin' up that phone every time I get started.” She tried to speak, but he kept talking. “I know it's your job to answer that thing, but it's my job to find a murderer.” Now he had her attention. “We got a 911 call about an hour ago from some guy named Clement Peoples. Said he'd wait here for us. Said he spotted a fugitive here at the hospital.”

  The receptionist nodded. “I'll ring his extension.” Seconds passed. “I'm sorry, he's not in. Maybe he got tired of waiting . . .”

  “You got an emergency contact number for him?”

  “No. I don't, but they'll have one in IT.”

  “Call 'em.”

  The woman's fingers shook as she punched in the number.

  Leaving Scott alone in the help desk room, Natalie had walked immediately down the hallway to the night manager's cubicle. Like Scott, she had a little over two hours before the night shift came on at eight. She would be fired, or worse, if anyone caught her. But she needed the monitoring software on the manager's hard drive.

  Natalie began to review every keystroke Scott had made since he logged in to the system. She wanted to help. But she wasn't crazy. One wrong move by Scott, one improper inquiry, one attempt to sabotage anything, and she would call security.

  For almost an hour, she watched the young shrink stumble through thousands of e-mails—finding reams of nothing—until she had begun to simultaneously feel both deep sympathy and growing distrust for him. She'd been almost ready to give up on him when he got his first hit.

  Click—if that was really who belonged to the IP address—had sent an e-mail to someone at the hospital with the in-house address bill13k@boshosp.com. Natalie halved the size of her monitoring window and opened the manager's e-mail program. Three or four seconds, and the program popped on screen. She clicked address book and scrolled through for bill13k. There was no such address.

  She glanced over. Scott had two more hits. Now he was opening the e-mails, printing each in turn. Natalie couldn't see the texts, and she couldn't open the notes on the manager's computer while Scott had them open at the help desk. She waited, her fingers poised over the keys, her breathing slow and shallow.

  The phone rang, and Natalie jumped inside her skin. She glanced around. She was where she was. No pretending otherwise. If someone knew she was in the manager's cubicle and she didn't answer the phone, well, how bad would that look?

  Natalie grabbed the receiver. “Manager's desk.”

  “Yes. Is this Susan?”

  “No. This is Natalie.” No need for last names. “I was working in this area and heard the phone ring.”

  “Oh. Uh, this is Ms. Selma at the information desk on one. I've got two police officers here who need an emergency contact number for Clement Peoples. Do you have access to that information?”

  “Is something wrong?”

  “I think it's about that woman getting murdered here in the hospital.” A grumbling male voice sounded in the background, and the receptionist said “Sorry” with her mouth away from the receiver, as if speaking to someone else. “Look, hon.” She was back. “They don't want me talking about it. Just give me that number, okay?”

  Thought scattered and then seemed to coalese in Natalie's mind. “Sure. I can get that for you. Just give me about five minutes to pull it up, and I'll ring you right back.”

  “Okay, hon. Thanks a lot. I'm at extension ten-eleven. Talk to you in a few minutes.”

  After hanging up, Natalie glanced at the program monitoring Scott's keystrokes. An involuntary shudder ran up her spine. She closed all programs, logged off the computer, and turned off the power. She was outside the cubicle and walking too fast when she spun and went back.

  Natalie fished a packet of Handi-wipes from her purse, pulled out a white sheet, and went to work. She wiped down the keyboard and mouse, the desk and chair. A separate wipe took care of the telephone.

  She stepped back to inspect the area. The chair was right, the desk neat. Everything was exactly as she'd found it, except . . . Natalie bent down to wipe the power button on the minitower, then dropped both towelettes into her purse. She was moving fast as she left the room of cubicles and turned down a fluorescent-lighted hallway.

  The receptionist would expect Natalie to call back in two minutes. A minute after that, the receptionist would try to call her. Then it would be a matter of seconds before the police decided to check out just what the hell was going on in the IT department. All in all, she figured Scott had about four minutes before the cops started looking for someone, an
yone, working in the department.

  Unfortunately, at 7:08 P.M.—fifty-two minutes before the start of the night shift—Scott would be the only one there.

  CHAPTER 30

  She almost left him there. For all Natalie knew, she'd provided hospital-wide system access to a murderer. But Click's alleged IP address had turned up a number of hits, all to the same e-mail address inside the hospital. That's what stopped her.

  Natalie glanced at her watch and broke into a run. As she rounded the corner outside the help desk office and burst through double doors, she called his name. “Scott!”

  He swiveled in the task chair and shot to his feet. When his eyes met hers, he said, “Don't do that. You scared me to death.”

  “Log off the computer.”

  “Why? I'm finding—” Her panic broke through his, and he began to think. “Who's coming?”

  “The police are at the information desk out front. The receptionist called back. Someone spotted you coming in.”

  Scott turned and started punching keys. Natalie pushed him aside. “Move.” As her fingers began to fly over the keyboard, she called back, “Check the door.”

  Before she finished her sentence he was through the door, glancing down the long hallway outside. He leaned back into the room. “Nothing.” Then he seemed to freeze. “Wait.”

  He stepped back into the hallway. Seconds passed. Natalie felt the tingle of adrenaline flowing into her blood. “What?” Her voice was sharp. “Wait on what?” She logged off the computer.

  Scott stepped back into the room. “The cops—two in uniforms—they've got a woman with them. They're checking the offices.” He stopped to examine the horrified face of the woman who'd let him sneak into the hospital's brain. He felt sick. “I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, Natalie.” His eyes bounced around the room, looking for a way out that wasn't there. He walked toward her. “Start screaming.”