What Are Friends For?

by Patricia McLinn

  So she had a good idea who might be tempted by a trophy like Anton Zeekowsky’s laptop. Someone who knew when Zeke would be occupied. Someone too blinded by hormones to think straight. Someone with enough heft to bend the grass down as he ran, but young enough to jump that fence.

  But before you could act on what you thought you knew, you had to know what you thought—and that started with fingerprinting Zeke’s bedroom, and eliminating the prints she found.

  And give me a list of anyone whose fingerprints you would expect to find in your bedroom.

  She could explain that she needed to know who’d been in the room to eliminate their prints. Would that make her sound less like a jealous woman?

  One good thing from this break-in was it would override any awkwardness with Mrs. Z. That porch light hadn’t gone off by itself Monday night. Mrs. Z had ideas about her son and Darcie, and Darcie hadn’t been looking forward to confronting that. But now she could safely ignore it in light of more important issues.

  She couldn’t ignore the storm of rising voices now, it was coming her way.

  Benny had taken the duty of getting Mrs. Z’s and Zeke’s preliminary statements and having them check the rest of the house. She heard him telling someone you can’t go in there, and she heard Mrs. Z, fast and excited in her native language.

  “Darcie.”

  That was Zeke’s voice. Just outside his bedroom.

  “A minute,” she said without looking up. Last one… Had it.

  “That’s damned rudimentary, isn’t it?” Zeke asked. He was standing in the doorway, blocking most of it, though she caught glimpses of Mrs. Z beyond him, her gestures coming as fast as the words Darcie couldn’t understand. “I’d have thought you’d have more sophisticated equipment.”

  “This isn’t CSI: Drago. Cutting edge, we’re not. What’s the problem?”

  “There’s a lot of stuff missing. They made a haul.”

  Her eyebrows shot up, her mind shifting to adapt to this new information. “What’s missing?”

  “Anton, you leave Darcie alone. Don’t listen to him, Darcie. You work. We leave.” Mrs. Z tugged Zeke’s arm. He didn’t budge. “Anton—”

  “Mostly electronic gear. A plasma TV, DVD player, VCR, massage chair, digital camera, digital camcorder, PDA—I sent those things, and they’re gone from the basement. I’ll get my assistant to give you a complete inventory.”

  Mrs. Z, suddenly quiet, peered around Zeke’s arm and met Darcie’s eyes. The older woman’s gaze held fatalism and a faint hope. She saw no way out of this, but her look said, if Darcie did, she’d be ever so grateful.

  Darcie didn’t.

  “You never told him?” she asked, though the answer was obvious.

  “Told me what?” Zeke looked over his shoulder at his mother, then back at Darcie.

  Mrs. Z tipped her head, eloquently saying that she hadn’t been able to bring herself to tell him. The gesture also placed responsibility for informing Zeke in Darcie’s hands now.

  “Told me what?” Zeke repeated, looking only at Darcie.

  “Don’t bother your assistant. I can give you a complete list from our records. Your mother’s been donating to the police auction to raise money for kids’ sports leagues. She’s been our biggest donor. All those things you mentioned have been auctioned.”

  “That’s how you know my mother,” he said.

  It figured that solving a puzzle would be his first reaction.

  Before she could relax though, he added, his voice flat and tight, “Everything I sent.”

  Mrs. Z teared up. “Anton,” she whispered, adding something in her native language.

  He kept staring at Darcie, his eyes giving her nothing to read.

  “Your mother promised me that you were okay with this.” She said that she’d told Zeke. That’s what Darcie intended to say. Before the words came out, though, she realized what Mrs. Z had actually said every time was My Anton just wants his mother to be happy. Not the same thing. “She’d indicated you’d be okay with it. She believed you’d be generous enough to be okay with it.”

  He turned, sidestepped his mother and started down the hall, forcing Benny to flatten himself—to the best of his ability—against the wall.

  “Anton? Anton, where do you go?”

  Darcie thought he was going to ignore his mother, then he shot back one word before he stalked around the corner and out of sight. “Walk.”

  Oh, yeah, closed-off high school Zeke was back. Big time.

  “Darcie?” Mrs. Z’s tear-filled eyes begged her.

  “He doesn’t want company. Let him think it through.”

  “Please. I have so few days with him home. I do not want to waste even one with his thinking.”

  Darcie could have laughed at that, except the older woman was clearly heartbroken.

  She sighed, exchanged a look with Benny, who nodded and stepped back against the wall to let her pass, too.

  She went looking for Zeke.

  She’d had to run to catch up with him, so at first saying nothing was expedient. She needed her oxygen for breathing.

  Even once she was beside him, she was getting plenty of aerobic benefits. Matching Zeke’s long-legged stride was a push at the best of times, when he was walking at ticked-off speed, it qualified as a fitness test that would have knocked Sarge off the force.

  But there was one more reason for saying nothing.

  She could feel Zeke’s emotions simmering down, approaching the point where he would admit he had any emotions. Up to that point, it wouldn’t have done any good to talk to him.

  “I hope to hell you got a good price for those things,” he muttered eventually.

  “We did,” she said calmly. “As I said, Mrs. Z’s been our biggest donor.”

  “Every damn thing I sent.”

  “Without her, without your gifts, there wouldn’t have been athletic leagues for the kids the past few years. The economy’s been so bad, all the usual sponsors dried up.”

  He didn’t seem to hear the latter part of that.

  “Gifts.” He snorted. “What gifts? She won’t let me do anything for her. She won’t take anything from me.”

  Darcie wanted to punch him in the arm. Was he listening to himself? Of course, Mrs. Z wouldn’t take anything from him. His mother loved him, she wanted only to give to him, not to take.

  She kept her mouth shut, and her hands pumping.

  “All I’ve ever wanted to do was to give her a good life, to take her away from here to someplace nice.”

  Now she really wanted to punch him.

  “She has a good life, Zeke. And she doesn’t want to go away.”

  “You think I don’t know that? I’ve been trying for years to get her to Virginia. Or at least let me build her a decent house here. All I get is No, Anton. Drago is my home. No, Anton. This house is my home. It drives me nuts.”

  “It’s natural to want to show your mother that you’ve made it, Zeke—”

  He stopped, squared off to her and glowered. “Is that what you think it’s about? Me showing off?”

  Maybe at some level she had thought that. The presents he’d sent Mrs. Z had been so outrageously inappropriate for her lifestyle, that she’d wondered how he could be so obtuse. “I think more useful things would have had a better chance of being accepted.”

  “Useful? Like maybe a can opener? Oh, no, Anton. I don’t need a can opener that plugs in. Just because the one she has is so old and rusted that it’s like opening a can with a fingernail. She used it last night and I swear dogs from five states showed up. Or like a new washing machine because the old one has been fixed so many times and they don’t make parts for it anymore, so it’s practically held together with rubber bands. When I tried to bribe the repairman to give her low bills and let me pick up the difference, she figured it out and got the full bill. She won’t even take that from me.”

  He turned away and resumed his quick time march. She hurried to catch the wrap-up of his complaint. �
��She has got to be the most hard-headed human being on earth.”

  “And here I always thought you took after your father,” she murmured.

  He glared down at her, but didn’t respond directly.

  “Why the hell do you think I give her all that stuff?” She recognized that as rhetorical. “I keep hoping something—anything—will strike her fancy, and she’ll start using it and maybe then she’ll let me really make her life easier. Even if she does want to stay in this godforsaken town, I could make life easier if she’d let me.”

  That burst of words might have broken some dam, because when he looked at her this time, his expression had lightened, though his pace didn’t slow.

  “Sorry, about godforsaken, Darcie. We’ll have to agree to disagree about Drago.”

  She fluttered a hand, waving that off. Not because she had any intention of letting him continue to disagree with her about his hometown—Drago couldn’t afford that attitude from him. But because she had only so much breath, and first things first.

  “I’ve got to tell you, Zeke—you need to change your thinking about your mother. First, accept and respect her choice to stay in Drago because she loves it. No more wisecracks.”

  He grunted. That would do.

  “Second, and as much as I hate to lose the best items for our kids’ leagues auctions—this is vital—you need to stop giving her expensive gadgets.”

  “She—”

  “Nope. No negotiating on this one. Even after she started donating to the auction, she was uncomfortable about getting those things. She’s loved helping the kids, but getting those packages from you always makes her unsettled, uncomfortable.”

  “I—”

  “This isn’t about what you need to give. It’s what she needs to get.”

  “What she needs.” His lips barely moved repeating the words, stripping them of inflection. He drew in a breath through his nose, looked down at his hands then away.

  She knew that look. The mile long stare hardening his gray eyes, the shutting off from everything outside himself. Some people confused it for that other look Zeke got—the absorption in tackling a problem. To Darcie the expressions were the difference between pulling down the shades on your windows and closing them off with steel shutters.

  They walked in silence for two blocks. At least the pace had slowed and they were headed toward the house and her squad car.

  There wouldn’t be any more meaningful conversation, so she might as well get Zeke back to his mother while she tackled the paperwork on the intrusion and decided whether she could resolve this situation without putting through the lab work. If might work if she could bluff about finding certain fingerprints. She was a pretty good bluffer.

  “Did you know my father was a professor?”

  “What?” She was buying time to adjust to the shock of Zeke talking after he’d brought down the shutters. And something personal, no less. Shock might be too mild a word.

  “My father was a professor, before he came to the United States. A professor of engineering. He was respected. One of the top figures at his university. Had a good life. He gave that all up when they came here.”

  “But, then, why…?”

  “Why did he repair shoes? Because he couldn’t get a job teaching in this country. His English was never good enough. If he’d been working on cutting-edge technologies, it probably wouldn’t have mattered what his English was like, but he wasn’t.

  “And he knew how it would be before he came over. He knew what he was teaching and working on was behind the times in the West. He knew he had no gift for languages. He knew he was giving up the respect, the prestige, the privilege he’d had there. Knew it and came anyway.” He turned haunted eyes to her. “For me.”

  “He loved you a lot.”

  “Yeah. And what did I do with his love? His sacrifice?”

  “Uh, become a huge success? Become one of the new technology’s top minds? Create a company and give people jobs solely with the ideas you thought up?”

  “It’s not enough. Not to repay him, not to repay my mother. She didn’t have the position he did, but she’d been a promising graduate student. If she’d continued working in her own language—I had to achieve. I had to be a success. All they gave up for me…”

  She understood better the drive that had set him apart from his peers and the weight that it had placed on his shoulders.

  But he’d had something to help make that weight bearable, too.

  “Your parents believed in you, Zeke,” she said without thinking.

  “Always.”

  The solitary word struck through her like a cold knife. “You’re lucky. You have no idea how lucky.” She felt the intensity of his focus on her, and she tried to shift it away. “The important thing about this situation with your mother is to remember—”

  “What makes you think your parents didn’t believe in you, Darcie?” He wasn’t stupid. No, Zeke was definitely not stupid.

  “This isn’t about me. Your mother’s intentions—”

  “Were good. They always are.” He’d stopped, holding her arm so she had to stop, too. “You’ve never thought your parents believed in you. Why?”

  “I’m on duty, Zeke. This is not the time to dissect my family history.”

  “But it was the time to dissect my family history, Darcie?”

  He tried to take her by the shoulders, but she eluded the hold.

  “Consider it part of the investigation. I need you to look over your laptop, Zeke.”

  She didn’t wait for an answer, but went inside. Mrs. Z peeked anxiously from the kitchen. Darcie gave her a reassuring smile, but had no time to say anything. Zeke was on her heels, intent on continuing the fruitless discussion. She didn’t want him bringing that up in front of Mrs. Z and Benny, settled at the kitchen table with coffee and cake, and her best hope of avoiding that was to get Zeke into his bedroom.

  She reached the room ahead of him, went to the desk, pointed to the dusted laptop and before he could say anything, repeated, “I want you to look over your laptop. For signs someone fooled around with it.”

  That caught his interest.

  “Nobody but an expert could get through our security, and even an expert wouldn’t be able to do it in the time before the alarm went off.”

  She opened the lid, pulled out the chair and gestured him to sit. “Someone was on your laptop, unless you wiped it clean after the last time you used it, because there are no fingerprints. Besides, we don’t know that the person left when the alarm went off. All we know is the person was out of sight when your mom checked it.”

  “Oh, come on. Who would stick around after that thing started wailing?”

  “Zeke, check the computer.” She gave him the I-am-a-cop-and-you’re-not look. It worked again.

  “Okay, okay.” His fingers flew over the keyboard. “See I could tell right here if… Well, damn.”

  “What?”

  “Just…”

  Darcie sighed. She supposed she should be grateful for that just. Even the one word was considerably more than she used to get in high school, when he’d disappear into concentration, leaving her on the surface wondering when he might return and trying not to stare too intently at those fingers, long and strong with interesting boniness.

  “Huh!”

  Zeke’s expelled breath made her jump guiltily, but he still hadn’t looked up from the screen, and his fingers hadn’t stopped moving.

  “What?”

  “Someone did try…”

  Before he submerged again, she demanded, “Tried what?” followed by “Zeke!” and a cuff to his shoulder.

  “Oh. Tried to hack in. Actually, more like planting a kind of spyware.”

  “Spyware? That can track keystrokes remotely, right?”

  “That’s a basic explanation. It can be elaborate. They use particularly sophisticated kinds in commercial espionage.” He looked up for a second. “Noncommercial espionage, too, for that matter.”

 
; “So someone put sophisticated spyware on your computer?”

  “Tried. We stopped them.”

  In those simple words, Darcie heard the man Anton Zeekowsky had become. No trumpets blaring, no bragging, a simple statement of fact. Yet said with confidence, pride and zest at meeting this challenge.

  A pulse of heat infused Darcie’s chest, then shimmied through her.

  Oh, God, she remembered what had turned her on so much in the taciturn, skinny, hurting boy in high school. That absolute confidence in his abilities, and the resolve to stretch them ever further.

  God help her, it turned her on now, too.

  The fact that he was no longer a boy or skinny or quite so taciturn made it all the more powerful.

  But the hurt…that was still there. It made her want to wrap her arms around him and push his hair back from his forehead.

  Not a good combination with being turned on.

  She swallowed, moved to put the desk between them. “Okay, you stopped them, but the point is, if this was a sophisticated attack—”

  “Intelligent, but not that sophisticated.” His eyes scanned the screen. “It’s—oh, yeah, that’s good—clever,” he concluded. “Not polished.”

  Her thoughts reordered themselves. “A talented amateur could do it?”

  “An extremely talented amateur. Smart enough to use several layers, hoping that if the first or second was uncovered one of the remaining ones would get—”

  “Wait. Stop. Be quiet.”

  He stared, but he obeyed.

  Bits and pieces clicked together, forming a picture, a possibility.

  She picked up the phone from the desk, looked at the bottom, then followed the cord toward the jack in the wall. There, where the cord dipped out of sight behind the bottom of the window curtain, she found what she’d been looking for.

  “What?”

  She stopped Zeke with a look. She took the camera out of the kit still on Zeke’s bed, shot pictures of it in place, drew the telephone cord up, took more photos and, finally, unclipped the device from the cord.

  “Okay?” he asked. After her nod, he added, “A tap?”

  “I think it’s a more general bug, using the phone for power. What you said about backups made me wonder if our guy had yet another backup.”