Soon, though, they did agree that neither Deb Stewart nor Tony were there.
They both looked around the place, and Cindy couldn’t help wondering what kind of a girl Deb was. Was she a horrible creature like Tony himself, maybe part of his plan all along? Or was she an innocent, caught up somehow with things beyond her ability to see?
Tony could be happy with either, Cindy knew. She herself was the second flavor, but he’d probably had other affairs that she was unaware of, and who knew what kind of woman really turned his crank?
“Hey, look here,” said Maria.
Cindy turned and looked at her. She was holding a book called Living with Selective Mutism written by Janice Malloy.
“What’s that?”
“I had a cousin who had this. If she has it, it means she might be terrified of new people and situations. Makes me wonder even more how she met him.”
Cindy shrugged.
There was a framed photograph sitting on the counter in the kitchen. It was Deb with a man and woman. Cindy picked it up and figured it was her parents. All three were smiling, and she realized Deb could be very pretty when she smiled. She quickly put the photo back, not wanting to get to know the girl any more than she already did.
“Let’s go. Something feels wrong. I don’t think we’ll find anything here that will help us.”
“Okay.”
As they were about to leave, Cindy noticed a glass of milk on the table. It stank. She picked it up and found that the milk had soured. It was a gooey mess.
“Oh, no,” she said.
Maria looked at the glass. “She wouldn’t have left that. Everything else here is neat as a pin.”
“He took her.”
They looked at each other, and Cindy couldn’t help feeling sorry for Deb. She wondered if she was still alive or if she was being held captive somewhere like Avril had been.
She put the milk glass back, wondering if it would matter that she’d left her fingerprints there.
* * *
The two friends spent a couple of more hours trying to find Tony. They drove by Seattle’s First Music, but the store was closed and there were no lights on.
“Be just like him to just abandon his job,” said Cindy.
“Any other ideas?”
Cindy tried to think but nothing formed. She knew that there was a bar somewhere that Tony frequented, but he’d never told her which one. Anytime she’d tried to ask where he’d been, an angry look would cross his face. It hadn’t taken her long to realize that questioning him only led to bruises, so she stopped asking.
She wondered if Deb and Tony had decided to lay low in a hotel somewhere. Deb had a million dollars, so money wasn’t an issue.
“For all we know, they’re off in Europe somewhere.”
A rush of frustration caused her to reach out and hit the steering wheel hard with her hand. She didn’t care about the pain. Pain was an old friend.
They drove the rest of the way in silence. Cindy just wanted to go to bed, but Maria wasn’t having any of that.
“There’s got to be a way to find him,” she said.
Cindy just shrugged and then said, “I just don’t know any place to look.”
When they entered the house, Cindy checked that the alarm was still set and hadn’t been tripped, so she knew there was no way Tony could have broken into the house. That didn’t completely satisfy her, so she walked from room to room, not seeing anything out of place.
By the time she found herself back in the kitchen, Maria had found a bottle of Pinot Blanc and poured two glasses.
“Here,” she said. “White wine always fixes things.”
Cindy took her glass and had a small sip, then followed Maria to sit in the living room.
“Are you okay?”
Cindy tried to smile but knew it probably looked forced.
“I’m trying.”
“It must be hard staying in this house, with all her memories.”
“Sometimes. But then I can’t imagine moving somewhere else and leaving so much of my life behind.”
She knew she was editing her thoughts as she spoke. It wasn’t just the memories. It was Avril’s scent, which she could still smell in her room. It was her stuffed rabbit, Juicy. It was the single-serving boxes of Fruit Punch in the refrigerator and the jar of peanut butter waiting to be called for a sandwich.
It was Avril’s favorite television station, Disney Junior, which was the channel that would play if the TV in the living room was turned on. It was just . . . this was Avril’s home, and she didn’t know how to explain that to Maria. She couldn’t leave her baby’s ghost.
Suddenly, Maria put her glass of wine on the little oak table beside her.
“Oh, my God.”
Cindy broke from her reverie to look up.
“What is it?”
“Remember when you first told me about DarkNet, and how you were exploring and found all these places that would do anything for a price? All the stuff about organs for transplants, stolen credit card numbers, all that?”
“How could I ever forget it? I wish I’d never heard of DarkNet.”
“One of the things you told me was that they could trace a cell phone if you lost it.”
Cindy squinted, trying to remember that.
“Oh, right. Yes, that was there. One of a thousand things . . .”
“Tony always carries his phone with him. Why not use DarkNet to track his phone? Then you’d know where he is.”
Cindy stared at her friend, as if trying to believe it was possible. Then she put her wine down, spilling it, and rushed to her study.
She clicked on the Tor software (an action she’d swore she’d never do again).
“How do you find stuff? You can’t use Google, right?”
“There’s lot of search engines for the dark side of the Internet. TOR Search, Torch, Evil Wiki . . . there’s no problem finding things.”
She launched one of the Google-like programs and typed in “Track Cell Phone.”
The first hit back was exactly what she wanted. She checked out the website and nodded.
* * *
We will track almost any cell phone in the United States. How? All cell phones constantly communicate with the closest cell phone towers, even when they’re not in use. They need to do that in order to receive calls. The various carriers have the easy ability to use that as well as the phone’s built-in GPS to pinpoint its location very precisely.
They can only legally do this for law enforcement reasons. For a price, we’ll do the same thing.
* * *
Cindy clicked to continue. The next screen asked for the state, carrier, and phone number. She entered the information for Tony’s phone and immediately got a message, This will cost you ten bitcoins. Continue?
“How much is that?” asked Maria.
“Almost two thousand dollars.”
Maria whistled but Cindy didn’t hesitate, completing the transaction.
We will have your result in less than an hour. Please do not shut this window.
They both stared at the message. Cindy felt like she was being duped, that this was just another DarkNet scam, but she had no other option. This had to work.
Maria went to get their glasses of wine and they sat in silence, just waiting for whatever was going to happen.
Then, after only fifteen minutes, the window blinked and a map started to fade in. Cindy recognized that it was the outskirts of the city, old farmland. She zoomed in and the exact address showed.
An option flipped to a satellite view and she could see an old farmhouse. There was a barn behind it.
A translucent red letter X showed on top of the barn.
Bingo, thought Cindy. We got you.
Chapter 27
September 5
When Tony’s whereabouts displayed on Cindy’s computer monitor, the translucent letter X blinked slowly, fading from a bright crimson and then reappearing over the course of a few seconds. She could use
the scroll buttons to zoom in and the satellite was good enough that she could see the area was a farm. There was a barn in the rear and she could see (or thought she could, at least) fields of hay.
They had stared at the monitor for twenty minutes when the X migrated from the barn to the road and then back to the barn. Cindy couldn’t help wondering why. Was he going to his car? She shrugged.
The screen showed the address: 3000 Rockway Court. That address would be imprinted on her mind for the rest of her life. She realized there was a very good chance that was where he had kept Avril.
“My little girl died there . . .”
Maria was sitting beside her. She turned and gave Cindy a hug.
“I need to go.”
At first Maria didn’t seem to hear and Cindy wondered if she’d only imagined saying it. Then, she heard, “I know. But not tonight. It’s late and you need to have your energy up if you’re going to confront him.”
“If I wait, he might go somewhere else.”
“It looks like this thing will keep working as long as you keep the window open. And what if it doesn’t? Just do the same thing and track him in the morning. It’s dark, you’re tired, and . . .”
“And what?”
“You really should call the police. Let them deal with this.”
“No! He tortured my little girl!”
“They’ll bring him to justice.”
“Like hell.”
“At least think about it. Don’t do anything until the morning.”
“I need your help, Maria.”
Cindy stared at her friend, feeling the emotion pierce the air between them.
Maria’s eyes were wide, sad and suddenly very old. “I can’t help you kill him. I just can’t.”
Cindy stared a moment longer and then dropped her gaze, nodding.
“It’s best I do this myself anyway.”
“Please wait until the morning. Nothing will change.”
Cindy glanced at the twilight through the office window and nodded. She felt the weight of months of stress ripping through her body and knew Maria was right about one thing: she’d have more strength in the morning, and maybe daytime would make it easier for her.
She soon said good-night to Maria and then slept fitfully, and her eyes shot open when the alarm clock ticked six o’clock.
I’m coming for you, Tony.
She tried to follow something vaguely resembling a morning routine, showering, eating a bagel with cream cheese and slurping back half a cup of coffee. All the time, though, she wasn’t really paying attention to what her body was doing. All she thought about was killing Tony. For Avril.
Even after all this thought, though, she didn’t really have much of a plan besides going to the deserted farmhouse and finding some way to get revenge.
There were no guns in the house, but she had a nice set of steak knives, so she took one of them and put it in her purse. It wasn’t as fancy as a butcher knife but it was lightweight and one stab to the heart would take care of everything.
She checked her computer and the shining red X was still hovering over the barn. He’d been there all night?
Her car was almost out of gas, so she took the time to stop and fill it up. She couldn’t think of anything else she needed to do, so she headed off to hunt down her murderous husband.
* * *
When Cindy got in her Mazda, she clicked the bottom button on her phone to launch Siri and said, “Take me to 3000 Rockway Court.”
Her iPhone immediately started directing her, and she drove away, almost robotically, not paying attention as she went. At one point she realized she wasn’t fully aware of where she was going, noticing she was driving down dirt roads that were totally unfamiliar.
None of that mattered, of course. All that mattered was getting revenge for what was done to Avril.
The landscape was foreign, as if she were driving in the middle of Tibet. The trees didn’t seem to match anything in her memory, and the curves in the road made her feel like she was going in circles.
Within minutes, though, all that faded into the dark recesses of her mind, and she flipped back to driving automatically, just following the mechanical directions from the small speaker on her phone.
Instead, her mind went back to the canvass of images that was being painted out while she drove: the life of her daughter as it should have been.
She saw Avril grow into a beautiful teenager, popular but shy at school, still working on improving her chess game. She would have gained her grand master status one day, of that Cindy had no doubt, and she would have had a special boy in her life to celebrate with her.
The wedding would be small, but all of her friends would be there, and Cindy would be sobbing with happiness at the front of the church. She would have given them a honeymoon trip to Europe as her wedding gift and watched Facebook as they posted photos of their trip. Cindy would never lose her daughter, but she would have gained a new family member, her son-in-law. He would only enhance the wonderful relationship the two women had.
They’d live close but not too close, and they’d see each other often, laughing and sharing stories of their lives, never forgetting the importance each had for the other.
Cindy could see herself aging, and one day, she’d need Avril to help care for her. And, of course, she would.
The life ahead of them was full of promise and love, and every last bit of it was stolen by a monster that she’d married.
As she neared her destination, it occurred to her that today was her and Tony’s thirteenth wedding anniversary. Lucky thirteen. No matter what happened, she expected it to be a day to remember.
It took almost an hour to get to the abandoned farm. She parked about a quarter mile away and sat in the car, staring at it. From there, she could see the farmhouse was ancient, wooden siding falling off, the roof sagging, and most of the fence posts out at the front of the property knocked down. Part of it had collapsed and looked burned out. There was no chance anybody lived there.
So why was Tony there?
The engine of her car ticked but she ignored it. She didn’t notice the sound of birds in the nearby trees or the banging of an empty tin can as the wind blew it across the road in front of her.
Visions of Avril had vanished as she parked the car. Now, she was focused solely on Tony and had one goal: to kill him.
She stepped out of her car and gently pushed the door shut, trying not to make any noise. She thought she was too far away for him to hear anything, but it wasn’t worth taking any chances.
Cindy walked off the road to the dense underbrush at the side and worked her way toward the farmhouse. There were patches of mud beneath her that sucked at her shoes but she just ignored that, walking without hesitation.
She still had no weapon other than the steak knife, but somehow she didn’t care. God would either provide her with one . . . or He wouldn’t. Maybe the knife would be enough. Either way, the summer-long ordeal was almost over.
The sun was hot today, and sweat started to fall from her brow. She licked her upper lip and felt the heat on her bare arms. The cool temperatures of the previous few days was gone, as the dog days of summer came back to roar one last time.
There was a window that looked in on the burnt-out living room. She actually didn’t plan on spending much time with the main house, because the computer tracking had shown that Tony had spent almost the whole past day in the barn. She no longer had access to the e-tracking, though, so she didn’t know for sure that he was still there.
Of course you are, you bastard.
She didn’t know why she felt so strongly that he was in the barn, but she just knew it.
The living area of the farmhouse was a mess. There was an orange couch that had big rips in the seats. Pillows were scattered on the floor. Broken glass covered several other areas, and burn stains covered all the other areas she could see. Even through the closed window, she could smell something rotting. Like flesh.
Av
ril?
But, no, she knew it wasn’t her daughter’s body. That was buried in a civilized cemetery.
Deb Stewart?
She moved away from the window, trying not to care if Tony’s lover was dead or alive. That no longer mattered worth a damn.
The barn was about two hundred feet behind the house but there was no surface shrubbery to hide her approach. She looked around and saw only an old metal cask, about halfway to the barn. She had no clue whether it had once been used for storage grain, making wine, skinning animals, or just a place to hide tools.
She moved so as to place the cask between her and the barn and hunched down as she hurried in that direction. When she got there, she peeked around. There weren’t any windows directly facing her, but there were a couple at the side where Tony could be looking out and might see her.
Fuck it.
She ran, hunched over again, to the section of the barn that was closest and flattened herself against the wall.
She blinked sweat from her eyes and tried to catch her breath. A rush of adrenaline made her body shake with energy. She resisted the temptation to just grab the barn door and run inside, screaming at the top of her lungs. She wanted to do that, her body craved that, but she took deep breaths to calm herself down.
There were a few garden tools lying on the ground not far away. A rake, a broken hoe, and a spade. She grabbed the spade. It was almost orange because of the rust accumulated over the years, but the point was sharp. It weighed more than she expected but if it came down to it, she knew she could easily take it and slice it right through the monster’s neck.
She kept herself pressed to the side of the barn as she sidled toward the nearest window. When she got there, she hesitated, knowing this was the point he was most likely to see her.
After a couple of minutes, she convinced herself she really had no choice and she turned to look inside.
Darknet Page 18
