Hooked

by Matt Richtel

  Meantime, his lobe had gotten infected, which should have killed him, but maggots got there first and began feasting off the bacteria. They kept it from spreading. It was a fascinating conundrum for the doctors of San Francisco General. They had to clean his wound, without allowing bacteria to take hold. They succeeded, and had a great cocktail party story.

  Until the doctor told me something else of interest: The man’s wife was in the early stages of dementia. After his car accident, she had called the insurance company, which was obligated to send a care worker out for an in-home visit. It failed to do so, even after she called several more times (then forgot about it, thanks to her own dementia).

  The couple was not alone in their experience. Thousands of elderly Californians were not getting the follow-up home care they were entitled to under their insurance policies. According to lawsuits, at least four people had died in the previous two years as a result.

  After two months of investigating, I wrote a story in the California Medical Journal. The story, I was told, prompted the state legislature to put the heat on insurers.

  My stories fed on one another. Work and life took on a rhythm, and an honesty. There were fewer downs and ups. There weren’t the great joys or pits I’d once known. Maybe I was growing up.

  Or, just maybe, I was being lulled to sleep.

  31

  Where is Strawberry Labs?”

  “Would you believe I might actually know that?” Mike said. “Nat, this isn’t for a story you’re working on, is it?”

  “I need to know where it is.”

  “I was curious myself. I couldn’t find any mention of it on the Net.” He typed a few sentences or commands into his keyboard. “But I did do some IP mapping.”

  Mike said that the author of the encryption software hadn’t left any further information in his signature. The signature didn’t say the who, what, or where of its author. But the encryption program did provide some indirect evidence of the author’s whereabouts.

  “Indirect evidence? C’mon, Mike.”

  “Whenever someone signed on to GNet, they had to get through the encryption program. To do so, they signed on through a remote server.”

  “A computer located at Strawberry Labs,” I said.

  “I can’t tell you the physical location of Strawberry Labs. But I can tell you the Internet address—I can tell you in rough terms the Internet protocol address used by the company.”

  He paused.

  “You want some ibuprofen?”

  I realized I was gripping my neck and rubbing.

  “I’m good,” I said.

  He shrugged.

  “When people sign on to the Internet, they do so from a location that has a unique set of numbers. That set of numbers corresponds typically to an Internet service provider.”

  “Like America Online.”

  “Like Felton Community Net.”

  “Felton,” I said. “South of San Jose.”

  He nodded.

  Felton.

  I wouldn’t even have to stop for another tank of gas.

  I asked Mike not to say anything about his findings, mumbling something about it being part of an investigative story. I grabbed the laptop and exited Stanford Technology Research Center. On the hood sat Erin. Before I was barely within earshot, she said, “I thought we were in this together.”

  I muttered, “I thought we were too.”

  What should I say? What could I say?

  At the least, she had neglected to tell me she was accused of felony arson. It didn’t seem like a small detail to leave out, given the prominent role fire suddenly was playing in our lives. At the most, Erin had actually committed felony arson, several times.

  “My phone went dead,” I said.

  I sent an e-mail and it bounced back; my phone battery went dead; I didn’t get your voice mail, how weird!

  If we owe nothing else to the great advances in telecommunications of the twenty-first century, we at least should give it credit for availing us of a myriad of new excuses.

  I might as well have told Erin the dog ate my peanut butter and honey homework.

  “It rang five or six times every time I called,” she said, paused, then added, “Spare me,” in a resilient tone I hadn’t heard from her before.

  “I didn’t want to miss the appointment with Mike.”

  “I was worried about you. Jesus.”

  I studied Erin’s face. Worry, fear. What else?

  “I figured you must have come down here,” she said. “I wasn’t sure where else to look.”

  “You just figured I’d come down here?”

  “What’s your problem?”

  “What’s my problem? My problem is I want to know what the hell is going on.”

  She balled her fists together. Her eyes flickered.

  “We’re on the same side here, right?”

  She looked at my arm, which I had folded over Andy’s laptop. “I want to know what’s on the computer too. Did he open the diary? Let me see it.”

  The diary. Of course. I should have looked in Mike’s office—so I might know if there was anything of interest before Erin made her appearance. I put the laptop in the trunk.

  “Let’s check it out when we get there.”

  There are silences and then there are silences. The forty- minute drive to Felton started innocently enough, then grew into a silence of the professional variety. Cold, seeping Arctic air. My side wasn’t born quite of animosity, but of safety and strategy. I was waiting for an opening to explore, to get a feel, without pressing. Per Danny’s admonition, I should have been aiming to keep my conversation with Erin relatively normal, but the best I could muster was a thinly veiled pout.

  “Tell me what’s wrong,” she finally said.

  “My head feels like a steel drum at a Bob Marley concert.”

  The phone rang/vibrated. Battat and Bard. The offices of Murray Bard. Neurologist. Andy’s doctor.

  “Hello, Dr. Bard.”

  Dr. Bard made a brief attempt at pleasantries, asking if I’d been a classmate of Dr. Fernandez and whether I was still located in the city. I answered in the affirmative to both questions, technically not a lie even though when Dr. Bard asked about my location he was almost certainly referring to where I practiced medicine.

  “I’m between consults,” Dr. Bard said. “What can I do for you?”

  “I’m calling about Andy . . . ”

  I looked at Erin. She mouthed, “Goldstein.”

  “. . . Andy Goldstein.” Then I switched languages—into doctor.

  “Headaches. Insomnia. Rapid cycling of moods. Came in for an EEG.”

  Dr. Bard took a memory break. He saw hundreds of patients. Without a chart in front of him, they didn’t entirely exist.

  “He jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge about three weeks ago.”

  He responded after a pause. “I remember him now. Thin gentleman. Hyper. Not surprising for a meth addict.”

  Erin hadn’t told me anything about Andy using drugs.

  “He told you about that,” I said, with open-ended intonation.

  “Dr. Idle?” said Dr. Bard. “I can’t remember—what were you treating Mr. Goldstein for?”

  “I wasn’t his doctor. Just a friend.”

  “If you want to come by, I can pull his chart. Call my receptionist to set up a good time.”

  “Wait, Dr. Bard. I could really use your insights here.”

  “Please say hello to Dr. Fernandez for me.” He hung up.

  Erin had been watching me anxiously.

  “What was wrong with Andy? What did they do to him?”

  They.

  “You didn’t tell me Andy was taking drugs.”

  “What?”

  “Was Andy a drug addict, Erin? What aren’t you telling me?”

  “Andy? Drugs? No way. What kind of drugs?”

  “Meth. Uppers. The kind of thing that keeps you up all night and makes you walk off a bridge.”

  Silence
.

  “What’s going on, Erin?”

  “Nat, Andy was . . . my best friend. I knew everything about him. He was totally straitlaced,” she responded, her voice rising. “Drugs were not his . . . ”

  “His what?”

  “His vice. His vice. He didn’t have a single vice in the world, okay? Andy was a good, loving, kind, generous man.”

  She leaned back and turned her head toward the window.

  Half an hour of silence later, we arrived in Felton, which looked more like a movie than a town. I felt like I was on Lot B of Disney, where they shoot scenes of a quaint downtown, shopkeepers spending their coffee break raking leaves.

  I went to the one gas station and asked the one middle-aged full-service attendant for directions to the, hopefully, one Internet service provider. Felton Community Net. It was just a few blocks away, the portly man said.

  When I pulled up to it, I said to Erin, “I’m sorry in advance for what I’m about to ask.”

  32

  I told Erin that I wanted her to go into the Internet service provider and con them into giving her the address for Strawberry Labs.

  She put her hand on my knee and cooed, “I really want to look at Andy’s diary.”

  “We’re in a hurry. One thing at a time.”

  She grabbed a bottled water from the backseat and a manila envelope from my stack of papers. On the envelope, she wrote “Strawberry Labs.” She got out of the car and walked into the Internet service provider. There was a kid who looked to be about seventeen years old behind the counter. Just after she walked in the door, Erin tripped, spilling water from the bottle onto the front of her T-shirt. She was good.

  As I waited, I thought about Heather Asternak, whom I’d met six months earlier. I’d just wrapped up the story about Timothy Aravelo, and was looking to write about something that had zero chance of yielding a subpoena. Enter Heather, a dermatologist.

  I was writing a story about a trend among medical students: In growing numbers, they were abandoning bread-and-butter specialties, like family medicine, in favor of subspecialties like dermatology, where the hours were more manageable and the money much better.

  What struck me first about Heather was her heavy makeup—unnecessary given her youth and natural attractiveness. And when, over french fries and lemonade, she gave her reasons for choosing dermatology, she sounded like something she was reading out of a manual.

  I asked enough questions to keep the conversation going, then shut up and listened. She told me where she grew up, what drew her to medicine, when she fell into her first love—cooking. We ordered a second round of lemonades. She said how frustrating it was to have a soufflé fall. I nodded, as if to say: There is no perfection.

  “You love cooking, don’t you?” I said.

  She took a big gulp of lemonade. She looked toward the corner of the restaurant. More specifically, she looked away from my eyes.

  “I cheated on my boards,” she said.

  Just like that. I tried not to suck too hard on my straw.

  “I’ve never told a soul.”

  Heather was technically not a doctor at all, at least as far as the state licensing boards were concerned. She told me that she’d pursued dermatology because she didn’t trust her abilities. She thought she could do the least amount of damage.

  I never figured out what happened with her. I never told anyone about it. But I stored it away as a valuable insight—a lesson on how to wait out a revelation: (1) Care, and (2) let the source fill in the silences.

  That was my plan for Erin, who had performed masterfully with the seventeen-year-old. She told the young man she’d driven down from San Jose to courier some documents to Strawberry Labs, only to realize the office that sent her had left the stupid street address off the envelope. She couldn’t get anyone on the phone at the San Jose office, couldn’t find Strawberry Labs in the phone book, and wondered if he knew anything about the area. Nope, he couldn’t help her. She looked distraught. Anything he could do to help? she asked. She was having a really rough day. Wait, he said. What a coincidence, Strawberry Labs was a customer.

  “Three miles into the canyon,” Erin said to me coldly.

  I stopped at the one coffee shop in town and ordered the tallest, most powerful drink on the chalkboard. Then I asked the young lady behind the counter to add two shots of espresso. She was probably wondering: Where is the elephant he’s planning to revive?

  We wound up the canyon, through an increasingly dense green forest. Dirt side roads emerged, and our address came up on the right. We drove a quarter of a mile in through dense overhang and came to a gate. Behind it were three houses. The one in the middle was the most modern. It had the look of a log cabin, but a perfectly manicured one you’d find in the pages of Architectural Digest.

  The buildings to its left and right seemed similarly empty. Or, at least, there were no sounds or movement to indicate that we were sharing the wilderness. The building on the left was a rectangular pine shed that stretched fifty feet into the forest. Probably storage. The building on the right was a single-story residence, stained dark with red curtains drawn. It looked sterile. If this had been a campsite, it would have been the infirmary. Attached to it was a single-story garage.

  “The most sinister bed-and-breakfast I’ve ever seen,” I said.

  Said Erin, “We want the one in the middle.”

  As I approached the front door, I had a surge of reassurance and courage. Not from any sudden sense of perspective, or its loss, but from the sign.

  “Strawberry Labs,” it read. In small black handwritten letters on a piece of wood hanging by the door from a wire.

  It’s just a Silicon Valley software company, I thought. Perhaps the arm of something sinister, perhaps not. These were just engineers. Engineers didn’t merit this kind of suspicion. That’s what I told myself as I rapped my knuckles on the door of the business named after my dead girlfriend’s dead dog.

  No answer. I rapped again. No answer. Erin pushed open the door. We entered a messy room dominated by a round oak dining table covered with mountains of paper in total disarray, as if someone had come in, found an unkempt pile of papers, and then given it all a good going-over with a leaf blower.

  The openings in the middle belonged to two stairwells, just to the right of the front door, one set of stairs going up, one headed down—presumably to the garage.

  “Hello,” I yelled, then took a step toward the stairs leading upward. “Anyone home?”

  No answer. I looked back at Erin. She was looking down the other set of stairs. I turned back toward the stairs heading up, and climbed. At the top, I saw three doors. All closed. The door closest was the one to the left. Instinct drove me to it, or maybe it was the pungent smell.

  The door opened easily. My eyes flashed first on a bank of computers. The image gave way quickly. To Plexiglas cages, at least a dozen, more like twenty, stacked four on top of each other. Each with at least one rat, some with five or more.

  It took me a moment to realize they were dead. It looked like they were in suspended animation. Their lives had stopped mid-breath, as if the taxidermist had already visited, pulled their stuffing out, and sewed them up.

  Only one thing could do this: highly potent poison. A theory verified when I looked to a table to the right and saw a handful of small medicine-sized bottles of strychnine, opened, one tipped on its side. I crept closer to one cage. Near the bottom, in the middle of the stack, five gray rats inside. On the cage, there was a handwritten nameplate: “A6-A10.”

  I fought a wave of nausea. I pulled my shirt over my mouth—if there was disease here, I’d be well served not to inhale too deeply, though it was probably too late.

  Something else told me disease wasn’t at play—it was the two bald spots at the top of each rat’s head, toward the back of the skull. They’d been shaved, as had their erstwhile compatriots. Cage upon cage, each dead rodent shaved, each with two bald spots exposing rough skull. Except one. The gleam c
aught my eye. On the top right. B4. Black hair, in a cage by itself. The rat wore a thin metal band around its head, held tightly with screws. Two thin black electrical lines were attached to the back, leading out of the cage. Before I could discern where it led, I heard the scraping noise.

  I spun around. How had I not bothered to look in the corner of the room?

  One more cage, with one more rat. I moved toward its Plexiglas home. “A11” was still breathing.

  “You’re going to be okay, little fella,” I said.

  Had it been poisoned too, and survived, or merely overlooked by the assailant? My emergency training didn’t extend to rats. And saving A11 wasn’t really the point. What had happened here? Torture? An experiment? Both?

  I returned to B4, the black-furred critter with the metal headband.

  I’d seen testing labs in medical school. This looked consistent—lots of cages and rats, yielding lots of data. What kind of data? Why?

  “Oh God.”

  It was Erin. I turned around. She had her hands at her mouth. We locked eyes, hers registering terror, then a sudden resolution.

  “Nathaniel,” she said. “We have to get out of here!”

  I looked at her, not grasping her urgency. I turned back and pulled on the cage door.

  “Nat. Now,” she screamed. “The house is on fire!”

  33

  We’re going to die in here.”

  I didn’t see or smell anything burning, so I wasn’t sharing Erin’s urgency. That’s when I heard a throaty boom, followed by an aftershock. Something in the bowels of the log structure had exploded. The house turned momentarily into a waterbed. We swayed. I fell to my left, losing my grip on the cage, touching a knee to the floor.

  I was bathed in heat. A swirl of dangerous and cruel air surged up the stairwell.

  “The basement,” Erin said. “There was a pool of gasoline by the furnace.”