Hooked

by Matt Richtel

  “Was the woman in the picture the driver of the red Saab?” I said.

  “You remember any details?” The lieutenant dismissed my question. “The interior. Was it leather? What about the license plate? What about the frame around the license plate?”

  Wouldn’t they have known all this already? Maybe they wanted to verify they had the right car.

  What was the harm in answering about the Saab? I mostly already had—the day the café exploded. I did it again. I told him what I’d told him before.

  “I wasn’t focused on the car,” I said.

  He seemed to consider this, and accept it.

  “Why are you asking about the Saab?” I said.

  No answer. I upped the ante. “Did you find it?”

  Lieutenant Aravelo turned his lips upward into a tight, controlled grin. It could have meant anything. I interpreted it as: You’re a better tactician than I thought.

  “How did you know that?” he asked.

  It was a fair inquiry. One I was totally unprepared to answer. It would have meant jeopardizing Sergeant Weller and my relationship with him. Maybe Weller and Aravelo were on the same team, maybe not.

  Before I’d left Erin, she’d told me I would know what to say when I got into the interrogation room. The realization came upon me slowly, like a wave of nausea.

  “The explosion is just the tip of this thing,” I said. “Something went wrong at that café long before it turned into a fireball. You know it. I know it. Please stop treating me like a chump.”

  I steadied myself for whatever was coming and was still unprepared.

  “From now on, I’m calling you Sleeve. Not Steve, Sleeve.”

  I squinted.

  “Do you know why a woman hates when her man goes to a strip club?” He continued to not make sense. “It’s not about the tits and ass and the lap dances that make weaker men cream their pants. It’s because the men fall in love. For a few minutes, we soak in the belief that we are connecting. We are connecting. The best strippers are opening themselves up to us, and we, knowing it’s a finite experience, open up right back. When it works, it’s not about sex. It’s about love.”

  He opened the top of a clear plastic container and took a swig of a thick, strawberry-colored juice drink.

  “Being a great cop involves reading emotions and being honest about what motivates me and other people. I can see what’s happening inside you right now; you wear your emotions on your sleeve. Your anxiety has a smell, and it’s not just the kind that comes from sitting in the hot room. I can see where the edge is and I can see how close you are to it.”

  He clasped his hands.

  “What did you have to do with the explosion?” he said.

  “Give me a break.”

  Aravelo pulled a notebook from his back pocket and flipped it open. He glanced at it while he talked.

  “You left the café just before it exploded,” he said.

  Then he listed the rest of the circumstantial evidence. I’d known about the red Saab. I knew it had been found, something that hadn’t yet been made public. “Now you’re telling me that there was a previous problem at the café. Would you care to elaborate?”

  The way he asked it, I wasn’t sure whether he knew about Andy or Simon Anderson.

  “I want to talk to my lawyer.”

  When I said it, I was struck by a single thought: Why the hell didn’t I insist on talking to my lawyer earlier? I guess it was because I never thought I was considered a suspect.

  “You’re not the only one trying to figure out what is going on here,” I said, standing. “The difference is, maybe I’m doing a hell of a lot better job.”

  My frustration, confusion, adrenaline, and yearning boiled over. Aravelo slammed his fist into the table.

  “You. Will. Stay. The. Fuck. Out. Of. My. Investigation!”

  I walked out of the building in a rage. I pictured myself slamming a two-by-four into Aravelo, succumbing to a reckless adolescent fantasy.

  I hadn’t slept well in two days. My neck balled with tension—a clear demand of the brain by the muscles: Slow down or we will seize up or tear and enforce bed rest. I tapped my head against the side of the building and tried to calm myself by remembering the likely medical causes of my compounding stress. This was all just biochemical. I was experiencing acute stress disorder, the result of a highly traumatic event like confronting death or its prospect. The symptoms were potentially serious—anxiety, detachment, and even dissociative amnesia. Was I even accurately remembering what happened at the café?

  I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply, just as the phone rang.

  “We need to get out of here,” Erin said.

  21

  Erin picked me up two blocks away. I noticed the smell. Groceries. The back was packed up with Safeway bags.

  “Lieutenant Aravelo is a very dangerous man,” I said.

  “I got that feeling.”

  “He uses his brain the way his brother uses a flashlight.”

  “Which means?”

  “As a blunt object.”

  “Elaborate, please.” Erin was losing patience. “What did you learn?”

  My head pulsed. I rubbed my temples.

  “He asked me about you.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked. Alarm.

  “He showed me your picture. He asked if I’d seen you at the café.”

  Erin took her hand off the wheel and put it to her mouth. She bit the tip of her thumb.

  “Why would he do that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did he tell you why he wanted to know?”

  “I don’t think it’s anything to worry about,” I responded. “He said he was interested in anyone who survived the explosion.”

  Even as I said it, I realized the comment would not mollify Erin, and it wasn’t mollifying me. There were a handful of survivors. Why would the cops ask me about one of them?

  I learned in medical school that when you perform surgery, you separate the patient’s head from the body with a curtain. In theory, this is supposed to create privacy and protect the patient from seeing anything uncomfortable. The reality is that it protects a surgeon—from whatever case of the nerves might come from realizing that the meat puppet he or she is carving up is attached to a real human being. It lets the doctor be clinical. I felt a momentary urge to be able to look at Erin more clinically, protected by a curtain, and to make a cold assessment. Of her, Aravelo, Danny, the whole ensemble cast.

  “I told them everything I knew,” Erin said. “I didn’t see anything.”

  “You went to the bathroom.”

  “I hate cops,” she said.

  The words hung in the air.

  “What picture did they have of me?” she asked, sounding calmer.

  “A head shot. You looked . . . well, a little younger. Maybe ten years. I think you wore a sweater.”

  Erin had a destination in mind. She asked me if I wanted to join her for a night in Santa Rosa. A friend of hers had a secluded house there and she said she needed to get away. She promised she would cook and that I could sleep. It was what the doctor ordered. En route, we stopped by my place so I could feed the cat, pick up a change of clothes, my laptop, and my work papers. I had what I knew would be a vain hope I’d get some work done on my soon-to-be-overdue article.

  Erin told me how she’d spent the previous hours. She said she had checked out Andy’s apartment and it was still intact, then called his landlord, who told her he hadn’t ordered any electrical work. But he said the cable company had been doing some work in the building in recent weeks.

  As we were crossing the Golden Gate Bridge, I realized I was supposed to meet Sergeant Weller in a few hours. More than that, I needed to meet him. He was a back channel for information and I was ready to demand answers. I started dialing.

  “I have an idea,” Erin said. “Why not turn that thing off for an hour.”

  I didn’t precisely sleep, but I managed stupor. I tried
a relaxation trick Samantha taught me that entailed slacking the jaw, softening the eyes, and focusing entirely on the image in front of you. Hocus-pocus, maybe, but it was the best I could do without Jose Cuervo and lime. I looked at the license plates of cars in front of me. I recited the digits, letting my jaw go slack. Still, I felt my eyelid twitch involuntarily, blepharospasm. My brain channeling its electrical activity. I blinked hard, but I couldn’t zero out, couldn’t rid it of Annie.

  In the previous twenty-four hours, I’d learned about Andy and the Andersons, and some blonde in a yellow blouse in a grainy photo, and had been grilled at police headquarters. Underneath them all, there was Annie, her memory blurring with the scenery. Townships passed in a flash, then the hillsides farther north. Green bled into green.

  You can have your Swiss Alps, your Italian coast, Aspen. Then bow to Northern California. Go a hundred miles any direction from San Francisco and you’re in bliss. Santa Cruz. Lake Tahoe. Napa Valley. Mountains touching sky. Cliffs overlooking divinely created shores.

  “Sarah.”

  I yanked out of my stupor.

  We had pulled into the right lane. Preparing to exit the highway.

  “Explain what that means,” Erin said, “after you hand me a map.”

  I rummaged in the glove compartment for a Thomas Guide. Then I skipped ahead—in the story.

  “Lieutenant Aravelo showed me a picture of a woman.”

  “Another picture?” Erin sounded surprised.

  I hadn’t recognized the woman, but I thought of someone who might—an old friend of Annie’s. Her best friend—maybe Sarah could shed some light onto why I had been handed a note in Annie’s script.

  As uncomfortable as Sarah made me, I had a soft spot for her, particularly the eulogy she gave at Annie’s funeral. Her opening anecdote revolved around a sizzling August day when Annie was eleven years old. There was a 10K run around the lake. Her father had set Annie up with a tub of strawberry ice cream in a cooler packed with ice, and a sign: “Ice cream scoops $1.”

  Annie didn’t want to do it, but her dad insisted it would be a good learning experience. When he returned at midafternoon, the ice cream was all gone, but Annie only had one dollar in sales. He asked what happened. Annie said, “I started a foundation.”

  The church crowd had let go of their sadness with a huge laugh. But there was another punch line. Partway through the day, a benevolent passerby had seen her giving away strawberry scoops. He responded in kind. He had come to sell his blond Labrador puppies from a large wicker basket. He gave one of them to Annie.

  “Permission to use my mobile phone again,” I said to Erin.

  She smiled and shook her head. It struck me as knowing, in a maternal way. “You’ve got a problem with that thing.”

  I dialed the number I had for Sarah and left a rambling message, concluding awkwardly that I had a question about our long-gone mutual friend.

  Erin put her hand on my knee and smiled. “Put the phone down again—before you hurt someone.”

  “Shoes off,” Erin said.

  She was carrying a bag of groceries into the kitchen. The gentleman in me should have offered to help. But he was looking at the couch the way my cat, Hippocrates, looks at, well, the couch.

  I plopped down. One last thing to do. I’d noticed when I called Sarah that I had two voice-mail messages on my mobile phone. One was from my attorney, Eric Rugger. Good man, smart as hell, huge fan of Bloody Marys. But, as far as I could tell, never during trial. Besides, he was what I could afford.

  “Got your e-mail and your phone messages,” he said. “I hadn’t heard about the Aravelo case being reopened. I’ll look into it. But, importantly: Don’t panic. These things are not uncommon. Call me if you have questions, or I’ll get back to you with details.”

  The second message was from Mike Thompson. It was classic geek brief. “It’s Mike. Checked out your laptop. Give a call.” Click.

  I did, and when I got him on the line he made a techie joke I didn’t understand, prompting him with silence to get to the point.

  “I opened the diary, like you asked. Piece of cake. I wasn’t sure what else you wanted me to do. I gave the computer a cursory look. I checked out the operating system and the applications. It seems to be in good working order.”

  I put my feet on the wood table.

  “Thanks, Mike.”

  “I didn’t mean to suggest there wasn’t something unusual.”

  I sat up. “Can you say that part again—without the double negatives?”

  His response came quickly.

  “It’s an encryption scheme.”

  “I thought you were able to get into the diary.”

  “Not that. Do you know what GNet is?”

  I said no.

  “It’s an application I’ve never seen before. I found it attached to the operating system.”

  “What’s it do?”

  “Dunno,” Mike said. “It’s inactive.”

  “But it caught your attention.”

  “Not really.”

  “But you just said that—”

  Mike cut me off. “It wasn’t the program that interested me. It’s the fact it’s being guarded by the most sophisticated encryption scheme I’ve ever seen.”

  22

  In English,” I said.

  “How’s that?” said Mike.

  “Explain in English what happened to the computer. Slowly. Like I’m the village idiot.”

  I was sitting straight up on the couch now, my posture mimicking my curiosity. Erin picked up the change in my mood and sat down next to me.

  “There’s a piece of software on your computer . . . ”

  “Actually, it’s not my computer.”

  “Whoever’s computer this is has a piece of software I haven’t seen before,” Mike ran over my interruption. “In the operating system, it has the name GNet.”

  “Like the letter ‘G’ then the word ‘Net’?”

  “Yep,” he said. “It may not be a big deal. Can’t really tell.”

  Erin put her ear next to mine. It wasn’t speakerphone, but it would have to do.

  I said, “If it’s not a big deal, then how come you bothered to mention—”

  He cut me off again. No one is more assertive than a geek who is in control of a technical situation.

  “The program didn’t catch my attention. It’s the encryption scheme. That’s what caught my eye. It’s pretty sophisticated. Multiple layers and encryption keys. Seemingly unnecessary. Like locking your diary behind a vaulted door protected by armed guards.”

  I listened, tried to digest, then fell back on a classic journalism technique. I repeated what he said back to me—in my words. This accomplished two goals: It helped me understand, and it slowed him down.

  “What you’re saying is that there is some possibly unusual program on the computer.”

  “Affirmative.”

  “And it is being protected by a definitely unusual, and very impressive, different program that we’d need a supercomputer to crack.”

  “You got it, dude,” Mike said.

  “What else can you tell me?”

  Mike said he had a better idea.

  “Why don’t I show you?” he said.

  I told Mike I’d come down to Palo Alto the next morning for coffee.

  He seemed mildly energized by the prospect of looking into the matter further, but he didn’t ask why I was inquiring, or about anything else related to the computer. It surprised me a little. Mike was different from a lot of geeks. He did care about context, and he wasn’t consumed exclusively with bits and bytes. He wasn’t at all a bad communicator. But he also had no inkling about the potential significance of this computer. Potential significance. Maybe there wasn’t any at all.

  “So Andy’s computer has an unusual program on it?” Erin said.

  “That’s the way it sounds.”

  “So what does that mean?”

  Maybe the program was innocuous. Maybe it was
a video game—that Andy had protected with a password. Who knew? I gave the look that would embody such a response. Namely: a blank stare. This had become utterly overwhelming, a buffet of uncertainties. Erin laughed.

  When she walked away, I gave a surreptitious look in her direction. She wore jeans with a red flower embroidered on the right back pocket. I wanted to trust her. I felt like I was starting to, but I knew almost nothing about Erin Coultran. Nothing biographical, or geographical, or educational. We’d spent a day together in the foxhole. But, outside of knowing she was composed when it mattered most, I didn’t have a clue.

  I added it to the list. Of things I didn’t know, but wanted to find out about.

  I twirled my torso around to put up my feet. I then took the ultimate prerequisite step toward falling asleep in the modern age, and turned off my mobile phone. It didn’t take; I turned the gadget back on again. Unfinished business tugged.

  When I dialed, I tried to orient myself. Was Sergeant Weller one of the good guys? As he had done in the past, he put me immediately at ease.

  “I need an eleven-letter word. The clue is ‘lactose and wimpy.’?”

  “Aren’t you on the taxpayer’s dime?”

  “That’s why it’s urgent I get the answer immediately. So I can get back to eating doughnuts. Hang on a sec,” he continued. “Lemme get somewhere a little less within earshot of the chain of command.”

  It was more than a sec.

  “Milquetoast,” I said. I’d counted it on my fingers. Eleven letters.

  “We are going to become good friends.”

  Danny asked me if we were going to get together at six, as planned, and I told him I needed to take a rain check. We agreed to meet in the morning. I told him where I was and with whom.

  “The waitress?” he asked, sounding surprised.

  I told him we needed to get somewhere quiet. He didn’t say anything. It struck me that, looking at it from his perspective, the idea of me and Erin hanging out might not just be confusing, it might be suspicious. After all, we were two survivors of the explosion, who had discovered each other, and were holed up in a remote location. To try to mollify Danny’s concerns, I told him that I had a lot to fill him in about, starting with my dressing-down by Aravelo. Again, he seemed genuinely surprised. I was less surprised by what he said.