Abandoned: A Thriller

by Cody McFadyen

  He tries on a sympathetic face. It doesn’t sit well on him; that’s not how this man is built.

  “I understand, Smoky. I really do. But I’m sorry. You’re on paid mandatory leave until you get clearance from a shrink to return to work.”

  Rage sweeps over me, leaving me a little bit dazed by both its suddenness and its fury. I do my best to bite it back, but some of its fire and bile leaks into my voice.

  “Can’t follow that order, sir.” The words sound like rock grinding against rock.

  He points a finger at me and shouts, “You’ll fucking follow orders or I’ll have you escorted off the premises!” So much for sympathy.

  “Go fuck yourself,” I shout back, jumping up.

  I hear myself speaking from a distance. It’s me, yet it’s not.

  Rein this in now, or something’s going to happen here that you can’t take back.

  AD Jones hits his feet as well. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him this angry. It strikes me that this reaction is probably based as much on fear for me as anger at my defiance.

  “Give me one good reason to keep you on the job!”

  I explode inside. It’s all internal. It’s as though I’m in the meadow again, but this time the light is atomic. A mushroom cloud rises, and the winds erase the living.

  This rage, I realize, is for Dali, not the man in front of me.

  “Because, sir.” My voice shakes. I grip the desk and look into his eyes. “Because he came into our world and he took two of us away and one of us is never coming back. He has to answer for that. Nothing is going to stop me from going after him.”

  I watch him struggle. He wants to destroy something right now, but it’s not me. He slumps back down in his chair. “Fuck it and fuck you. Get out and catch him, then.” He doesn’t look at me. “If you screw up, you’re fired.”

  My mouth opens in surprise. I’m angry again, rage thrums. “Fine.”

  He doesn’t seem to care.

  No other response is forthcoming, so I turn and leave the office. A final glance back catches him looking after me. I’m shocked at the sadness I see in his eyes. It’s as if he’s already mourning my loss.

  Why? Does he know something I don’t?

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  “Rough one?” Alan asks me as I drive. He’d offered to take the wheel, but I need the control and the speed.

  “He wanted me to stay at home. Ordered it, actually.”

  “And?”

  “I refused. He gave in.”

  He looks doubtful. “Just like that?”

  I grip the steering wheel with my nine good fingers. The injured one throbs. “No. He said if I screw it up, I’m fired. Can you get a couple of Advil from my purse?”

  He hands me two pills after a little bit of searching. He offers no wisdom but silence. We watch together as the road disappears beneath us. The sky is what California is always so ready to offer up: hopeful, blue forever, blessed by the sun.

  We pull into the prison parking lot. It’s about half full. A handful of people, mostly women, some pulling children along, head either to or from their cars. No one looks very happy.

  “Up place,” Alan observes. “Gotta love a prison.”

  It’s true. The sky here somehow seems less blue. The sun frowns, shining not quite as bright. “Good place for him.”

  “True,” he agrees. “And others like him. Look, when we’re done with this case, I’m out. I’m retiring.”

  I swivel my head in shock. “Retiring? Why?”

  Alan peers at me with a mix of pity and … what? Disbelief? Yes. “Why? Are you serious?” He indicates his arm in the sling. “It’s happened again, Smoky. I got shot. Leo got part of his brain carved away. You lost half a finger and spent time getting tortured while you’re pregnant, for Christ’s sake!” He shakes his head once, vigorously. “No more. Price is too high. You should think about the same.”

  “Quitting? No. Never.”

  “Why? What’s so important about this job that you can’t just walk away? You’ve done your part, sure as shit.”

  I twist my hands on the wheel and think about my answer. “It used to be because I know that evil exists. You understand? I’m not talking about morality or religion. I’m talking about an understanding. A certainty. There are people out there who exist—who exist—to hurt others. I know that. Can’t unknow it. Have to do something about it.”

  “I follow that.”

  My finger is really starting to throb. I hope the ibuprofen kicks in soon. “Now? Truth? It’s all I know. I’m afraid of being left alone with myself. If I don’t have the job, I’ll have to spend too much time with me. What’ll happen then?”

  “You’ll heal, love your husband, love your daughter, raise your baby. Not a bad deal if you ask me.”

  If anyone else had been asking me these questions, probing me in this way, I’d be on the attack. Alan is different. He has seen the whole of me and remained my true friend.

  “I’m hanging on by a thread here, Alan. I appreciate what you’re saying, and I promise I’ll give it all some thought, but right now it’s going to take everything I have to finish this. Can you back me up?”

  “’Til the cows come home. Let’s go fuck this fucker up.”

  Hollister is a changed man, and not for the better. If his unraveling began during the interrogation at his home, it’s been completed here.

  Bruises decorate the right side of his face. He’s missing four of his upper front teeth and four of the lower. His skin is gray and his eyes are filled with wildness and despair.

  “Looking good, Hollister,” I tell him. It is cruel. I can’t help myself. I point at the bruises. “Gifts from a friend?”

  Hate replaces the despair. “Fuck you, cow.”

  “Got a lover?” I press. “Let me guess, he got rid of those teeth so his cock could slide in easier, right?” Alan’s hand against my arm, warning me.

  I wanted to hurt Hollister, and his expression tells me I’ve hit home. “Fuck you!” he screams. Tears roll down his cheeks.

  I grin. The cruelty is like a living thing inside me, something demonic and real. “So it’s true! You’re someone’s property.” My grin grows wider. “How’s your asshole, Douglas? Got AIDS yet?”

  He launches himself at me, tries to jump across the table. The restraints yank him short, like a dog on a leash. I laugh at him as Alan watches, aghast. Douglas collapses into himself, the rage burning away as fast as it had arrived. It’s replaced by despair.

  “Fucker won’t leave me alone,” he mutters, more to himself than to us. “He’s too big, a monster. If I fight him off, he makes it worse.”

  My hatred evaporates, as his rage had. I feel tired, drained. “This is you paying for your sins, Douglas,” I tell him. “You killed your own son.”

  To my surprise, he nods in agreement. “Yes. You’re right, I think. Heather got what was coming. But Dana? And my boy? No, no, that’s all on me. I got greedy.”

  Alan steps into the breach between us, taking advantage of the cessation of hostilities. “Douglas. I want to ask you something. If you answer honestly, it won’t add anything to your sentence, but it might help make up for some of the things you’ve done.”

  He takes Hollister’s silence as assent.

  “Approximately five weeks ago, the man you call Dali shot me and took Agent Barrett and another agent hostage. The other agent was a computer expert, and he told Agent Barrett that he was convinced Dali had been tipped off by you.”

  He tries to hide it even now, but I see the truth in his eyes. It’s a cunning light, a flash of self-satisfaction.

  “Piece of shit,” I whisper. I struggle to breathe, and I understand, at this moment, here and now, why they make you surrender your weapons before entering an interrogation room. I have no doubt that, if I had my gun, Douglas would have been dead a millisecond after I saw that light in his eyes.

  He grins now. The missing teeth make it hideous. I can see his tongue.


  “Did he do that to you? Cut off your hair? What else did he do?”

  I recognize his cruelty. Warning bells clang in my head; the similarities between us need to end. But I’m helpless. All I can see is Leo and the choice that I made.

  I lean forward, keep my voice calm, and put as much promise in my eyes as I can muster.

  “You’re going to die in here, Hollister. Fucked to death or shanked in the shower. You’re going to die. That’s a promise.”

  The grin fades slowly. I see uncertainty, followed by fear. I nod.

  “That’s right.”

  He rips his eyes away from mine with effort. Focuses his gaze on Alan. “All I did was send him an email. I told him that I was pretty sure you were trying to set him up.” He glances at me. “I told him about her.”

  “How’d you send the email?”

  “Prison library. Not supposed to have access, but there are some smart people in here. They have ways.”

  Alan digests this. I manage to hold my tongue. “That’s good, Douglas,” he says. “But the thing is, you told us you didn’t have a way to contact Dali, remember?”

  Douglas remains silent.

  “Is there something on the servers you worked on that we need to know about?”

  There it is again. The cunning light. Alan sees it too. “Douglas?”

  “I need protection. I’ll trade segregation for information.” He fumbles with his hands. He looks humble and frightened. “Please. I’ll tell you what you want. Just get me away from him.”

  I want to jump up, tell him to fuck off. I want to laugh in his face and slap him. I hold myself back, waiting for Alan.

  “Tell you what, Douglas,” Alan says, his voice mild. “I’m going to let my experts comb those servers first. If they don’t find anything, if I need your info, then I’ll be back and we’ll talk deals. If it turns out I don’t need you”—he shrugs—“then have fun getting passed around.” He leans forward. “Leo Carnes is a vegetable now because of you. Fuck off and die.”

  He stands up and heads toward the door. I follow, dumb.

  I stop before leaving, turn.

  “Why?” I ask Hollister.

  He glares at me, his eyes full of tears and hate.

  “Because,” he says. “You ruined everything.” He stands, strains against his chains, and shouts at the ceiling. The cords on his neck stand out; veins throb at his temples. “You ruined everything!” he screams.

  Guards rush in as we leave.

  Back to hell. I shudder a little at my own satisfaction. But only a little.

  Alan sits as we drive, silent, brooding.

  “Sorry about that, back there,” I offer. “I’m still …” I sigh. “Maybe AD Jones is right and I’m not ready to come back. Anyway, I’m sorry.”

  He waves me off. “I understand—and that’s the problem. Five years ago I might have reported you. Today? I was just as bad, and I still don’t care.” He sighs and falls silent.

  The sky is blue again as we leave the prison behind, but invisible rain falls, trapping us, and only us, in a prison world of gray.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  “We found it,” James tells me.

  It’s mid-afternoon. Alan and I barely spoke on the hour-plus drive back to the office. What was there to say? We’d condoned the rape of a man because of our rage. We felt vindicated and soiled, all at the same time.

  “That was fast,” I say.

  “It didn’t take long. It wasn’t that it was well hidden. It’s that no one would have found it unless they were looking for it. It seems innocuous enough, and under most circumstances, it would be, but it did the job it was meant to do.”

  “Which was?”

  “There were two programs. Both were installed with root access on the key servers at the ISP where Hollister worked. One was a search program. It would search email, chat rooms, instant-message logs when kept, and various other things, looking for combinations of keywords. Kill my wife, divorce, and hate, stuff like that. It was pretty sophisticated.”

  “Sounds cumbersome,” I say. “Wouldn’t you come back with thousands of results?”

  “Yes, but the sophistication of the program was that it grabbed a one-line snippet of each ‘conversation.’ It’s pretty easy to scan through and to then know what to discard and what to follow up on. Take a look.”

  He hands me a printed page. Each line is preceded by a date, a time stamp, a number, and, at times, an email address. “What’s the number? An IP address?”

  “That’s right.”

  I read over the page and see that James is right. It’s simple to separate the wheat from the chaff. The keywords are highlighted in bold type.

  One excerpt from an email sent by bob4121 says: That diamond ring as a gift, just killed my wife!

  “Good job, Bob,” I murmur.

  Another begins: I hate my wife. We are getting divorced and I wish she was dead.

  I hand the page back to him. “I get the idea. What was the other program for?”

  “It was a kind of digital drop. Like a mass mailer. Send a message to it, and it forwards that message to two or three hundred different free email addresses.”

  “Free makes it virtually impossible to trace,” Alan points out.

  “The first program interacts with the second. It puts together a summary and then passes it over to the digital drop. The drop program sends the summary to every email address on its list.”

  “What were the benefits to him of doing this?”

  “Numerous. Since the programs are given root access, they have permission to access anything on any server they’re placed on. This lets them perform without raising any red flags. They can get into email, server logs—anything they have the password for.”

  “Let me guess: Hollister provided the programs with the passwords they’d need.”

  “Unconfirmed, but it’s the best guess. Initial installation of a program like that would have had to be done by an administrator or someone with the admin passwords to the server.”

  “Dali probably offered him a discount,” Alan says. “When he found out that Hollister worked for an ISP, he probably said, Put these programs on your servers and I’ll cut fifty thousand off what you’re supposed to pay me.”

  “Sounds risky,” I say. “Wasn’t he taking a chance by leaving a trail?”

  “Yes and no,” James explains. “They were very well written. They execute in the background and put no strain on the servers at all. They keep no logs themselves, and Hollister would do regular purges of references to the programs from the server logs. That’s actually how we found them. Hollister hasn’t been around to delete from the logs. Even if they were discovered—if Hollister had been hit by a car or had a heart attack—so what? They’d be dismissed as an interesting but generally unimportant exploit from a hacker. Even if they were followed up on, good luck tracing him via those hundreds of email addresses. Most of them are probably dormant, and even the ones that aren’t could be set to forward to another address, which could then forward to another, ad infinitum.” He shakes his head in reluctant admiration. “It’s his brilliance. Keeping it simple. He had you for four weeks, for example. Can you tell us where the building was or what he looked like?”

  “No.”

  “Same principle here. The difference is, Douglas Hollister took out some life insurance.”

  Excitement surges inside me. “What?”

  “He modified the program, or got someone to modify it for him. It had a built-in IP logger. Here’s how it worked: Dali would occasionally access the server directly so that he could modify variables that the programs used, such as adding or deleting keyword combinations or email addresses. Hollister had the program log every access to it.”

  “Why not just look at the server logs?” I ask. “Isn’t every incoming access logged?”

  “Sure. Millions of them.”

  “Ah.”

  “This was easier. It was isolated to the programs themselves, which m
eant the IPs logged would belong to Dali.” My eyes widen. “That’s good.”

  “There’s more. Douglas compiled a list of all the email addresses Dali was using and plugged them into a custom email program, which he then made Web-accessible. He could access the program in any Web browser and do two things with it: send an email out to those addresses, or email a list of them to himself. It’s obviously how he sent the warning email to Dali from prison.”

  “More insurance,” Alan says. “Maybe that’s why Douglas got overconfident about not paying Dali off. Thought he could blackmail him.”

  “A miscalculation,” James observes.

  I frown. “Seems strange Dali wouldn’t consider the possibility of something like this happening.”

  Callie speaks up for the first time. She’s stayed quiet, though I’ve felt the weight of her gaze on me. “I think it goes back to what I talked about before: risk assessment. He could have weighed the possibility against the necessity and decided the risk was justified.”

  “He did take precautions,” James continues. “We’ve tracked the IPs used to a series of Internet cafés, a library—he used public systems, probably paid in cash.”

  “Shit,” Alan says.

  Something stirs inside my head. A glimmering. I frown. James looks at me closely. “What is it?”

  “I don’t know. I feel like what you just told me is trying to meet up with some other information about the case. I can’t grasp it yet. Tell me again where he accessed the Web?”

  He checks a paper. “Internet café. Internet café. Internet café. Library—”

  “Stop.” I feel it now, swimming toward me, growing in size and clarity. “Library. That’s it.”

  “What’s it?” Alan asks. “I’m confused.”

  “Earl Cooper,” I say. I smile at James. “Which of these things is not like the other?”

  “Library,” he answers, nodding. “I get it.”

  “Explain it to the lesser minds, honey-love.”

  “Cooper talked about mental maps. We find places of comfort and security both consciously and unconsciously.”