by Shane Lusher
I shrugged it off and went inside, draping my suit coat over a chair at the kitchen table and laying the files down on the counter top. Smelling smoke when it wasn’t there was something I discovered happened to me at odd times after I’d stopped my nicotine habit.
Since I’d moved in with Erin, I’d made it a rule not to bring beer to Tad’s house, but there was a bottle of good bourbon in the cabinet above the sink. I got that down, along with a tumbler glass, and poured myself a healthy three fingers before walking down the hallway to Tad’s office.
When I switched on the light, I realized something was wrong. Someone had been in the room, but I couldn’t quite decide why it felt that way.
Tad’s file cabinets were there, and the gun safe on the wall was still locked. Other than these things, the only furnishings in the small room were a desk and a tiny couch along one wall. The carpet on the floor looked untouched, which wasn’t saying much. Since I rarely vacuumed and the cleaning lady only came once every two weeks, untouched meant that it was so worn with traffic anybody could have been in here. I wouldn’t have been able to tell by looking for tracks.
The monitor on the desk was still in place, and an empty bottle of Diet Coke I couldn’t remember drinking stood next to it.
Then I looked down, and immediately I knew what it was. Ted’s computer was missing. There was a rectangular imprint in the carpeting where it had stood, beneath the desk and next to the wall.
I set the glass of whiskey down and listened, trying to sort out the noises I knew should be there from anything else that shouldn’t.
A car went by on the street outside and continued on, and I strained in that moment, in case someone was in the house and decided just then to make their move.
The air conditioner, which had been running, kicked off. I listed for floorboards creaking, for breathing, but came up with nothing.
I must have stood there for a full minute before my phone rang. I listened to the ring tone go off five times before it stopped. The ringing in my ears went away after a second or two, and I listened again to the silence.
Time to get that gun.
Tad’s gun safe had been a gift from the Illinois Sheriff’s Association when he’d been elected, a sleek cabinet that could hold just about anything he would ever need to keep in his home. It filled up half of one wall in his tiny office.
The safe was locked via combination, and it opened using a massive, jutting bar that reminded you of the kind you used to see in banks in old black and white westerns.
I also knew the combination. People are creatures of habit, and though I’d never had the inclination toward becoming a hacker, I had worked in IT help desk in previous lifetimes long enough to be able to guess most people’s passwords, at least back before companies had grown more savvy and started requiring something other than back-to-back husband’s and kid’s names.
Tad’s combination was Erin’s birthday.
I’d cracked it one bored, drunken evening after Erin had gone to bed and I’d sworn off my bachelor lifestyle in favor of her well-being. The good thing about a manual combination is that you can try it as many times as you want, without a system locking you out when you mistype the password more than three times.
Hunched sideways to the door, trying to focus my eyes in two directions at once, I started sweating as I turned to the first number, then back around to the second, then double around in the other direction to the third. I pulled on the bar, which, in spite of its newness, squeaked, and then the safe was open.
I listened again for a moment, the sound of the clicking water heater in the basement the only thing disturbing the stillness in the house.
Then I considered the contents of the safe. I knew just about every weapon contained within because they had all belonged to our father.
There were two double-barreled shotguns and another shotgun fitted with a slug barrel. There was a .50 caliber black powder long rifle, a twenty-two rifle, and a .30-.30. On the bottom shelf were a 9 millimeter Austrian Glock, a 9 millimeter Ruger, a revolver whose caliber I didn’t know, and a .357 Magnum. Leaning in the corner, there was also an old WW I-era Russian rifle that looked more like a carved up four-by-four with a metal tube sticking out of it than a gun, and I wondered where the hell Tad had gotten that.
All part of your standard Midwestern gun-owner’s arsenal. It occurred to me then that my possession of the weapons was illegal, since I’d let my Illinois Firearm Owner’s Identification card lapse.
That was the least of my worries.
I debated taking one of the shotguns, but decided against it, figuring that a shotgun, while you didn’t really need to aim carefully in order for it to be effective, wasn’t suited well in close quarters.
So, I chose the Ruger, and set out in search of ammunition.
Ever the stickler for the rules, Tad not only kept his guns unloaded inside the safe, he also didn’t store any rounds there. They would be somewhere else in the house, and I would have to find them. I couldn’t very well head out to Scotty Mart and buy bullets, not without an FOID.
Just then my phone began ringing again.
Cursing, I shoved the Ruger into the pocket of my shorts, grabbed the Russian four-by-four, and pushed the door to the safe closed.
Before it hit the fifth ring, I pulled out my phone and answered it.
“Dana!” It was Rassi. “You will not believe-”
“Where are you?”
Realizing I’d just shouted, I held the phone down and listened to the house again before putting it back up to my ear.
“—so the limo driver, he says—”
“Where are you?” I asked again.
“I just told you,” Rassi said. He was slurring, and the connection was bad. There was the sound of a television in the background. “The limo just dropped me off.”
“What limo?” I asked. “What are you talking about?”
“The limo? Angeline’s? You ever ride around in that thing?”
I remembered, though I’d never actually partaken in that particular kind of erotic transaction.
Angeline’s offered a special service that was kind of an extended table dance option. Patrons could, for a hefty charge, enter the back of a limousine with one of the dancers and a bottle of champagne, at which point the car would drive around downtown Peoria for a half hour while the stripper did her thing.
There was no intercourse involved, and, as at Angeline’s proper, no touching. I had no idea what such a thing cost, nor did I understand why anyone would be interested in it.
“Where are you now?” I asked.
“The hotel,” he said. “Hey, you know they say those strippers are untouchable? Well, I got her number.”
Bravo, Dave. No doubt that number would prove to be a fake, when and if he chose to actually try it.
“I had to tip her an extra fifty, but-”
“What are you doing tomorrow?” I asked. I didn’t feel like driving all the way back over to Peoria to speak to a drunk guy, and I sure as hell didn’t want to rouse him into coming back here given the state he was in.
“I don't know,” Rassi said. “I can really only afford the one night.”
“We need to talk,” I said.
He went quiet on the other end, the television blaring in the background. The silence went on a long time, and for a moment I thought maybe he’d gone to sleep.
“About what?” he asked finally.
“I need to go over a few things about what we talked about,” I said, not wanting to arouse his suspicions. “You know, about Tad. About you talking to him. When he was shot.”
“Oh, sure,” Rassi said, and yawned loudly. “That.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That. Anyway, when are you coming back here?”
“Well, I was going to try to hook up with Danny,” he said.
“Who’s Danny?” I asked.
“The stripper,” Rassi said. “She’s got a guy’s name.”
“Okay,” I said. “Wel
l, before you hook up with Danny, give me a call. I need to talk to you.”
“You got it, Ace.”
I hung up and stood there for a moment and listened again. Then I walked out into the hallway and into the kitchen, making sure the back door was locked.
After that I went into every room in the house, clutching the Russian rifle by the barrel like a baseball bat, turning on lights and pausing to listen.
As I went along I checked for places Tad might have chosen to hide his ammunition, and in the upstairs hallway I found it. It was all lined up in two shoeboxes at the back of a shelf in the closet.
Luckily, there were already two clips filled with shells for the Ruger. I jammed one in, checked to see where the safety was, and shucked a round into the chamber. Then I pocketed the other clip, as well as another box of shells, and went back downstairs to the office, picking up my laptop bag from the couch in the living room on the way by.
I’d just drunk half the glass of bourbon and booted up my laptop when I realized I’d forgotten to check the basement.
The genius who had designed Tad’s house had somehow forgotten to plan for a light switch at the top of the stairs. Instead, the light was turned on by a chain that hung from the bare light bulb in the ceiling downstairs.
I rummaged around in the kitchen drawers for a flashlight, but couldn’t find one, and then just went over and opened the door that led to the basement. The only sound coming up from below was the click and hiss of the sump pump. I took a deep breath and plunged down into the darkness.
I had the light on within three seconds of clearing the top landing, and when I looked around, there was nothing. Tad had never been one to save things he didn’t need, and except for two sawhorses and a workbench with tools all in their place lining the wall, the cellar was empty. No bogeyman, and no one hunched beneath the stairs waiting to kill me.
I shook my head, gripped the gun, and went back upstairs. I left the light on.
When I returned to the office with the bottle of bourbon, I poured another inch, drank half, and logged in to my laptop. Eyeing the rectangular patch that had once held the missing computer, I went into the bedroom and searched through the closet until I found the baby phone.
I hadn’t thrown out anything of Jake’s, and the only device I could come up with that might function as an alarm would be his baby phone. It was a top-of-the-line gadget, and there was a setting that made it shriek holy hell if it was unplugged.
I got a bit of wire from the basement and jury-rigged the baby phone to a hinge of the door in Tad’s office, pulled the wire tight across, and plugged the phone in. The idea was that, should I pass out on the couch, anyone coming through the door would trip that wire and set off the alarm.
I did wonder how much good it would do. Groggy from sleep and booze, would I have enough time to raise the gun and defend myself? Most likely, and only if I were lucky, the sound of the alarm would scare off the intruder.
I didn’t want to think about what would happen if it didn’t. The most probable outcome was that I would only catch a glimpse of the person coming through the door before they did me in.
Everything arranged, the gun lying next to the keyboard on the desk, the whiskey not far beyond, I made myself comfortable in the office chair.
I popped open an application I had built at the same time I was working for Chicago PD. This was a program using Google searches, but which filtered out irrelevant information according to certain parameters. I got busy typing names into the database.
I started with Randall Dubois, Wayne Trueblood, and Ulrich Anderson. Then I added Victor Daniels, David Rassi, and Tad Ely.
I would get to the others; Sweeney and Roe and Colby and the kids who’d last seen her alive, in a later search. I hit “Go” on the app and then let the laptop work.
I took a seat on the couch and sipped my drink greedily. I was feeling the alcohol, but I was still counting the drinks, which meant that if I did okay, I wouldn’t get horribly trashed that evening. It was the times when you sat down at the bar and just downed one after the other without thinking of the quantity that you got so trashed you couldn’t get up in the morning.
Or so I told myself.
I watched the app as it opened and closed my internet browser, a special box along the left-hand side tossing out green-on-black strings of meaningless numbers and characters.
The screen was my tip of the hat to Hollywood. It’s only in the movies that computers look like computers. Everybody knows that in real life, all you get is an hourglass when software is taking its time doing what it’s doing.
The gist of the application I’d built was this: Google ranks everything on the internet according to keyword relevance. That keyword relevance, in turn, is parsed not only by occurrence of those keywords, which was standard fare for all search engines back in the 90s, but also by various other factors, such as keyword placement within a text, whether the keyword appears in a header or in a paragraph, what ratio the keyword contains to the full body of the text, and how often a website is visited according to successful searches.
There are numerous other factors, but most of them are just sheer speculation. In spite of the behemoth that Google has become, the secrets of its search engine algorithm have never been fully disclosed.
My application was built on top of that. It opened a Google search, retrieved results, and then used its own built-in filters, such as a setting that limited the search results to forensics analysis.
This meant that it wouldn’t come up with someone’s yard sale or the fact that Wayne Trueblood enjoyed horse breeding, unless horse breeding cross-referenced with a psychological makeup that indicated horse breeders liked to blow up meth makers.
There are a few other things the software did, but that wasn’t the point. It had taken down the Chicago Shopper, and that was why I was using it.
Maybe I’m a product of the times, but I know that if I just went looking for all these people separately I’d get sidetracked, stuck reading up on the Mongols’ use of catapulting corpses to spread the black plague in the Siege of Kiev in 1240, and fall asleep before getting anything done.
I’m not suggesting that an amateur such as myself could improve on Google. But what good did it do to anyone to come up with 18 million web page hits when most people never got beyond the third page?
At this point, I usually lost people in the explanation.
I could mention that the app did a bit of facial recognition, if you’ve got a photo to match up against, but that kind of technology, though promising, was years away from actually being usable for people without government clearance.
It was also slow, slow enough to give me some time to sit and stare at the screen and think about nothing for a while.
Friday
Twenty-Six
Since returning to Tazewell County, and more so since Tad had been murdered, I’d been plagued by nightmares.
One of them occurred regularly, though I believe I’d begun having it back in college, when I’d shed my healthy-eating, athletic cocoon for the oiled skin of a barfly, sinking slowly toward the abyss of mind-numbing hours and the withering intrigue of office politics.
In the dream, I’m in a crowded café, being seated by a faceless waiter. The only free spot is in a corner taken up by an upholstered bench that runs around the entire perimeter of the establishment.
I’m wearing a bandage on one eye.
In order to get to the free spot, I have to climb on top of the vinyl upholstery, step over a man and a woman sitting in front of a table, and wedge myself down between them.
Immediately after I sit, the man reaches up and grabs at the bandage.
“What’s wrong with your eye?” he asks.
“Nothing,” I say, but his hand keeps flitting up toward the bandage every few moments, and when I try to get back up, both the man and the woman jump on top of me.
We grapple to the floor, locked in a strange kind of death embrace; they, zomb
ie-like, trying to rip my eyes from their sockets, me trying to get away from them.
Or kill them.
I woke up and looked at the monitor, my eyes bleary and my mouth feeling like I’d been sucking on an old leather shoe.
The screen was filled with a yellow smiley face and the word “Done!” in size fifty-five font.
When I scrambled off the couch, the nine millimeter fell to the carpeting with a dull thud. Checking that the wire I’d strung across the door was still in place, I picked up the gun, set it down on the desk, and seated myself in front of the computer.
The laptop clock read 4:52. I’d been asleep for nearly five hours. I needed more sleep, but I unlocked the application with my password and checked through the information I’d gotten.
An added bonus, and the real value, of the software was that when it sorted information, it tried to do so by cross-referencing and prioritizing material.
If any keywords should be determined as over-prevalent based on an editable variable, those articles containing the entered, prioritized keywords would appear along with the newly-found word.
In this case there were three: The Quiverfull, which I already knew about, Tuan Nguyen, whose name I’d forgotten to enter but whom I knew about as well, and Ullie Anderson.
I clicked immediately on Anderson’s name and the app pulled up all articles having to do with the old German lawyer.
Lists of adoption records attached to his name came up, and although I couldn’t actually see the records themselves, I could see that the processing attorney had been Ullie Anderson.
I settled on one hit specifically marked as having high relevance to Anderson and Dubois.
The article was a newspaper clipping from the Pekin Observer, from 1982.
I wondered who had gone to the trouble to scan in something that far in the past, but if Nguyen had had enough interns over the years, who knew how much he’d been able to accomplish? He seemed a strange character, but he also knew his way around electronic media.
