The Straw Men

by Marshall, Michael

  'In other words, dummy guys in illegalities,' I said. 'As discussed. So what?'

  'Then I looked right through the disk,' he said, ignoring me. 'Ran a low-level media scan, checked for hidden files, partitions, the works. Nothing. Then I looked through the software, of which there ain't much.'

  'Dad wasn't a nerd,' I said. 'That's why I didn't bother to look through the computer in the house.'

  'Right. But he did use the Net.'

  I shrugged. 'Email, occasionally. Plus he had a site for his business, though someone else maintained it. I used to go look at it once in a while.' It had seemed easier, somehow, than calling them on the phone. Since I'd dropped out of college, they'd never really known what I was doing. They certainly didn't know the reason I hadn't finished the course, or who I'd gone on to work for. My parents never gave the impression of being political people, but they'd been there in the 1960s, as the video I'd found made more than clear. You were there in the Summer of Stupid Pants, then you took certain attitudes on board. Finding their son was working for the CIA would not have gone down big. I'd hidden this from them, not realizing this meant I was hiding everything else. Of course that now seemed a little bizarre, given what they'd been withholding from me.

  Bobby shook his head. 'He had Explorer and Navigator on his disk, and he obviously used both a great deal. Huge cache, and about a zillion bookmarks in each.'

  'For what kind of thing?'

  'You name it. Reference. Online stores. Sports.'

  'No porn?'

  He smiled. 'No.'

  'Thank God for that.'

  'I went through every single one. Even the ones that seemed like nothing, just in case he'd covered up by re-naming the bookmark to cover what the link actually led to.'

  'You're sneaky,' I said. 'I always said so.'

  'So was your father. He had renamed one, in fact, hidden in a folder of a hundred and sixty bookmarks for what I can only regard as the dullest facets of the realty business. It was called 'Recently sold Mizner/Intercoastal lots'. Mean anything to you?'

  'Addison Mizner was an estate architect in the 1920s and '30s. Built a bunch of prestige property in Miami, Palm Beach. Italian villa-style. Very sought-after and outlandishly expensive.'

  'You know some wacky stuff. Okay. But the link didn't lead to a site to do with land or houses. It led to a blank page. So I thought shit, dead end. Took me a few minutes to realize that actually the page was covered with a transparent graphic that had a hidden image map. When I worked that out I got through to another set of pages, with some pretty odd links.'

  'Odd how?'

  He shook his head. 'Just odd. Looked like the usual home pages, complete with excessive detail, bad punctuation and rancid colour use, but all the material seemed very anodyne. There was just something hinky about them, almost as if they were fakes.'

  'Why would someone put up fake home pages?'

  'Well,' he said, 'that's what I wondered. I followed most of the links down into dead ends and 404s. But the line kept on going, through pages of links—and on each page only one of the links seemed to lead more than a couple of pages away. Then I started hitting passwords. At first, easy Java stuff that I could hack myself, using a few goodies I found stashed on your disk. Incidentally, you need more RAM. Fucker crashed on me about five times. Then—hope you don't mind, there's a few long-distance calls on your room—I got some help from specialist friends. I had to get down to wedge tracing and UNIX backdoors and shit. Someone who really knew what they were doing had set up a lot of obfuscation.'

  'But what's the point?' I said. 'Surely anyone could just bookmark the end site, whatever it is, and go straight there the next time. Why screw around setting up a paper trail when the whole point of the Web is nonlinear access?'

  'My guess is that the destination address changes regularly,' Bobby said. 'Anyway, finally I got through to the end.'

  'And what was there?'

  'Nothing.'

  I stared at him. 'Say again?'

  'Nothing. There was nothing there.'

  'Bobby,' I said, 'that's a shit story. It sucks. What do you mean, 'nothing'?'

  He shoved the sheaf of papers toward me. The top sheet was blank apart from a short sentence centred in the middle of the page. It said: WE RISE.

  'That's all there was,' he said. 'A couple of hours' worth of subterfuge to hide a page with no links and just two words. The other sheets are just printouts of the route I took to get there, along with some of the hacks required. Plus I got the IP address of the final page and did a trace on it.'

  Most Web addresses are known by a format that, while often not exactly something that trips off the tongue, can at least be understood as words. In fact, the Internet's computers regard them as purely numerical addresses—118.152.1.54, for example. By using this more basic form of address you can track the page down to a rough geographical location. 'So where was it?'

  'Alaska,' he said.

  'Whereabouts? Anchorage?'

  He shook his head. 'That's it. Just Alaska. Then Paris. Then Germany. Then California.'

  'What are you talking about?'

  'It moved. Kept blipping all over the place, and I don't think it was ever really in any of those places at all. It was ghosted. I'm not King Nerd, but I know what I'm doing and I've never seen anything quite like it. I've got a couple of friends looking into it, but either way, something weird is going down.'

  'No shit.'

  'Not just what's happening to you. This kind of thing is my job. I need to know how they're doing it. And who they are.' He took a long pull on his drink, and looked at me seriously. 'What about you? What are you going to do now? Aside from more drinking.'

  'There's three sections on the tape. I can't do anything about the last one, about finding … the other child.' I'd been intending to say 'my twin,' but shied away at the last moment. 'I don't know what city it was, and it's over thirty years ago anyhow. He or she could be anywhere in the world. Or dead. The second section doesn't seem to lead anywhere. So I'm going to go looking for the place in the mountains.'

  'Sound thinking,' he said. 'And I'm going to help you.'

  'Bobby…'

  He shook his head. 'Don't be an asshole, Ward. Your parents didn't die in any accident. You know that.'

  I guess I did, and had done for a little while, though I hadn't really allowed the thought to settle, to say it to myself in words.

  Bobby did it for me. 'They were murdered,' he said.

  Chapter 12

  Nina sat in the yard with Zo Becker. The night was cool and she wished she'd accepted the tea she had been absently offered. Zandt had already spoken with the woman, and stood in her daughter's room, and was now inside with her husband. Neither Becker had seemed surprised to find two investigators on their doorstep, even this late in the evening. Their lives were already too far divorced from what they were prepared to accept as reality. The two women talked fitfully for a while, but soon lapsed into silence. Zo was watching her foot as it jogged up and down at the end of her crossed leg. That at least was the direction in which her eyes were directed. Nina doubted she was seeing anything at all, but rather floating in a void in which the movement of her foot was as meaningful an event as any other. She was glad of the silence, because she knew the only thing the woman would want to talk about. Was her daughter still alive? Did Nina think they would ever get her back? Or would there, in this house that Zoë had spent so much time getting just so, now always be a room whose emptiness and silence would darken until it was a black crystal at the centre of their lives? On the wall of this room was a poster for a band that none of the rest of them had ever heard except by accident. So what was the point of it now? Nina had no answer to this question or others like it, and when the woman appeared about to speak she looked up with dread. Instead she found that Zoë had started to cry, exhausted tears that seemed neither the beginning of anything nor its end. Nina didn't reach out for her. Some people would accept comfort from strangers, and s
ome would not. Mrs Becker was one of the latter.

  Instead she leaned back in her chair, and looked across through the French doors to the sitting room. Michael Becker was perched on the edge of an armchair. Zandt was standing behind the couch. Nina had spent the entire day with Zandt without hearing more than five sentences that did not relate to the case. They had walked the ground of the disappearance early in the day, before the shopping crowds gathered. They had visited Sarah Becker's school, so that Zandt could see how it fit into its environment. He had observed the sight lines and access points, the places where someone might wait, looking for someone to love. He spent a long while over it, as if believing there was some new view he might chance upon that would enable him to glimpse a man's shadow in the daylight. He had been irritable when they left.

  They had not visited any of the families from The Upright Man's previous murders. They had the files of the original interviews, and it was very unlikely there would be anything new to be learned. Nina knew he held their interviews in his head, and could have told the families things they had themselves forgotten. Talking to them could only confuse matters. She also privately believed that if Zandt was able to lead them closer to the killer, it would be little to do with something he had learned, and much more to do with something he felt.

  Nina had another reason for keeping Zandt away from the families. She did not want any of the relatives stirred up enough that they might call the police or the Bureau to check how the investigation was going. No one knew she had reinvolved John Zandt in the case again. If anyone found out, all hell would break loose. This time it wouldn't just be disciplinary: it would be the end of her career. Allowing him to talk to the Beckers was a risk she had to take. The parents had seen so many police and Bureau men since the disappearance that it was unlikely they would remember one in particular, or mention him to someone else. Or so she hoped. She also hoped that whatever the men were talking about, it might spark something in Zandt's mind.

  And that he would tell her about it if it did.

  •••

  'I'll go through it again if you want.'

  Michael Becker had already recounted his movements twice, responding quickly and concisely to questions. Zandt knew that the man had nothing helpful to tell him. He had also gathered that, in the weeks leading up to the disappearance, Becker had been so involved in his work that he would have noticed very little about the outside world. He shook his head.

  Becker abruptly looked down at the floor and put his head in his hands. 'Don't you have anything else to ask? There must be something else. There has to be something.'

  'There's no magic question. Or if there is, I don't know what it might be.'

  Becker looked up. This was not the kind of thing the other policemen had said to him. 'Do you think she's still alive?'

  'Yes,' Zandt said.

  Becker was surprised by the confidence he saw in the policemen's face. 'Everyone else is acting as if she's dead,' he said. 'They don't say it. But they think it.'

  'They're wrong. For the time being.'

  'Why?' The man's voice was dry, the breathing wrong, the sound of a man caught wanting to believe.

  'When a killer of this type disposes of a victim, he usually hides the body and does what he can to obfuscate its identity. Partly just to make it harder for the police. But also because many of these people are seeking to hide their activities from themselves. The three previous victims were found in open ground, wearing the remains of their own clothes and still with their personal effects. This man isn't hiding from anybody. He wanted us to know who they were, and that he had finished with them. Finishing implies a period in which he requires them to be alive.'

  'Requires them…'

  'Only one of the previous victims was sexually abused. Apart from minor head injuries, the others showed no abuse apart from the shaving of their heads.'

  'And their murder, of course.'

  Zandt shook his head. 'Murder is not abuse in this kind of situation. Murder is what ends the abuse. Forensics can only show so much, but it suggests that all of the girls were alive for over a week after their abductions.'

  'A week,' the man said, bleakly. 'It's been five days already.'

  There was a pause before Zandt answered. During the interview, his eyes had covered most corners of the room, but now he saw something he hadn't noticed before. A small pile of schoolbooks, on a side table. They were too advanced to belong to the younger daughter. He became conscious that the other man was looking at him. 'I'm aware of that.'

  'You sounded like you had another reason.'

  'I just don't believe he will have killed her yet.'

  Becker laughed harshly. 'Don't 'believe'? That's it? Oh right. That's very reassuring.'

  'It's not my job to reassure you.'

  'No,' Becker said, face blank. 'I suppose not.' There was silence for a few moments. And then he added: 'These things really happen, don't they?'

  Zandt knew what he meant. That certain events, of a kind that most people just watch or read about, can actually happen. Things like sudden death, and divorce, and spinal injuries; like suicide, and drug addiction, and fading grey people standing in a circle looking down at you muttering 'The driver never stopped'. They happen. They're as real as happiness, marriage and the feel of the sun on your back, and they fade far more slowly. You may not get back the life you had before. You may not be one of the lucky ones. It may just go on and on and on.

  'Yes they do,' he said. Unseen by the other man, he touched the cover of one of the schoolbooks. Ran his finger over its rough surface.

  'What chance do you think we have of getting her back?'

  The question was asked simply, with a steady voice, and Zandt admired him for it. He turned away from the table.

  'You should assume that you have none at all.'

  Becker looked shocked, and tried to say something. Nothing came out.

  'A hundred people are killed by men like this every year,' Zandt said. 'Probably more. In this country alone. Almost none of the killers are ever caught. We make a big fuss when we do, as if we've put the tiger back in his cage. But we haven't. A new one is born every month. The few we catch are unlucky, or stupid, or have been driven to the point where they start making mistakes. The majority are never caught. These men are not aberrations. They are part of who we are. It's like anything else. Survival of the most fit. The cleverest.'

  'Is The Delivery Boy clever?'

  'That's not his name.'

  'That's what the papers called him before. And the cops.'

  'He's called The Upright Man. By himself. Yes, he's clever. That may be what causes him to fall. He's very keen for us to admire him. On the other hand…'

  'He may just not get caught, and unless you find him we're never going to see Sarah again.'

  'If you see her again,' Zandt said, replacing his pad and pen in an inside pocket, 'it will be a gift from the gods, and you should see it as such. None of you will ever be the same. That need not be a bad thing. But it's true.'

  Becker stood. Zandt didn't think he'd ever seen a man who looked both so tired and incapable of sleep. Unknown to him, Michael Becker was thinking the same thing of him.

  'But you'll keep trying?'

  'I'll do everything I can,' he said. 'If I can find him, then I will.'

  'Then why tell me to assume the worst?'

  But his wife came in through the French doors, with the FBI agent just behind, and the policeman did not say anything more.

  Nina thanked the Beckers for their time, and promised to keep them up to date. She also managed to imply that their visit had been a formality, without direct relevance to the course of the investigation.

  Michael Becker watched as they walked away down the path. He did not shut the door when they were out of sight, but stood a moment looking out at the night. Behind him he heard the sound of Zoë going upstairs to check on Melanie. He doubted his second daughter would be asleep. The nightmares of a year ago were
returning, and he could not blame her. What little sleep he managed was an enemy to him, too. He knew she still used the spell he had written, and the knowledge filled him with horror. Irony was no protection, whatever he and Sarah and the directors of modern horror films might think. In a land of blood and bones, irony doesn't cut it. He remembered discussing night fears with Sarah, several years before. She had always been a questioning child, and asked why people were afraid of the dark. He told her it was a leftover from when we were more primitive, and slept out in the open or in caves, and wild animals might come and kill us in the night.

  Sarah had looked dubious. 'But that's an awfully long time ago,' she'd said. She'd thought for a little while, before adding, with a ten-year-old's perfect certainty: 'No. We must be frightened of something else.'

  Michael believed now she was right. It's not monsters we're afraid of. Monsters were only a comforting fantasy. We know what our own kind is capable of. What we're frightened of is ourselves.

  He closed the door eventually and walked into the kitchen. Here he made a pot of coffee, something that had become a ritual for this part of the evening. He would carry it into the sitting room on a tray, along with two cups and a jug of warm milk. Perhaps a cookie or two, which was all Zoë seemed willing to eat. They would sit in front of whatever the television had to offer, waiting for time to pass. Old films were best. Something from another time from before Sarah had been born and any of this could be true. Sometimes they would talk a little. Usually not. Zoë would have the phone close by.

  As he took two cups from the new dresser—old pine, imported from England after their recent trip—Michael thought back on the things the policeman had said, holding each sentence up for consideration. He realized that, for the first time since the disappearance, he felt a small thread of something that must be hope. It would be gone by the morning, but he welcomed its temporary respite. He felt it because he believed he knew what had been said between the lines, that what the policeman had said was less important than what he had not.