Blame

by Jeff Abbott

  “I have a reason. And when this is done, you and I can have a talk about…us.” There was no “us”; there never would be. But he didn’t know that. Her coldness amazed her. But this was what had to be done.

  He nodded.

  It took all her will to get into the trunk. He closed the lid. He could drive her straight to her mother. Either he regretted his actions or he didn’t. Why did a guy have to be this way?

  She lay in the stinking quiet, and when he opened the trunk again, she wondered if she was back at her house. She climbed out. She wasn’t. She was, as requested, at the Halls’ lake house.

  “What exactly are you going to do here, Jane?” Adam asked.

  “Wash off in the lake and then get inside the house. And that’s a crime, and you can’t be here. And you need to get amnesia for the last twenty minutes.”

  “Jane.” He took a step forward.

  And she put up her hands. “Thank you for bringing me here. But I am not having this long-overdue talk with you right now.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” Adam’s voice broke. “You have to understand. I’ve tried to make so many things up to you. I thought…I thought I had hurt your dad. Giving him that hacker drive. Maybe he found out something he wasn’t supposed to and he killed himself, or… I didn’t know. So I thought the only thing I could do was take care of you. I tried. It was hard, because we had been so close and you didn’t remember me at all. You knew Kamala and David and Trevor when you were little, but I was your most recent friend, and I was gone from your brain.” He steadied his breath. “I just care about you a lot, more than I ever did before, and I miss the Jane I knew. I see flashes of her now and then. Not all of her.”

  “No one has been better to me than you have. No one. That’s why what you’ve just done has hurt me so badly.” Those words were true and she felt a ragged edge in her voice.

  “You hurt me, too,” Adam said. “But I’m not going to stand here and cry. I just want a chance with you.”

  She said nothing.

  “I feel weird about leaving you here. Don’t do anything dumb, Jane.”

  “I won’t if you won’t,” she said. “But know this. If you tell my mom where I’m at, I’ll never speak to you again.” He nodded. She said, “Can I have that blanket you have in the trunk?”

  “Sure. I’ll find a way to help you. You don’t have to doubt me.” He gave it to her, seemed ready to say something else, but then got in the car and drove off. She shivered, watching him leave.

  Behind an oak, not far from the water of Lake Austin, she stripped down to bra and panties, jumped into the cold lake, and, shivering, scrubbed the scum and garbage from her skin. She wasn’t clean now exactly, but it helped. She used Adam’s blanket to dry off and she tried to rinse the worst from her clothes, careful not to damage the papers in her pockets. The clothes didn’t smell a whole lot better, but she still shrugged into them.

  She walked around the house. Hoping for another shard of memory to pierce her mind and tell her what had happened here.

  But nothing.

  53

  IT MADE SENSE now, even without what Trevor and Kamala had told her.

  They had bought a crowbar. Why did you need such a tool? To break into a locked or boarded-up place. The Halls’ lake house was isolated, empty, and no one would have immediately thought to look for them there.

  It sat a few hundred feet off Lake Austin, the lawn flat and green, sloping down to the water. Lake Austin always looked more like a river than a lake to her, winding through the beginning rises of the Texas Hill Country. She could see the houses on the opposite side. There was one that was a plain-looking ranch house that looked like it dated to the 1970s and hadn’t been updated. The one farther down the lakeside was a Tuscan giant, all new architecture, high-end and glamorous.

  She had come out here a couple of times, for birthday parties when they were little. David’s birthday was at the beginning of summer and he liked the lake. She remembered that he’d nearly drowned out here, and Perri hated the house after that, but Cal refused to sell. When they were in third grade: her, Kamala, Trevor, and David, and other kids. She remembered that: ice cream and cake, jumping off the pier, swimming, the parents all watching over their cocktails, nervous, the cool pleasure of the grass against her bare, wet feet as she ran. They’d played freeze tag, the dumbest game ever, but oh they’d had fun. She remembered being frozen by Trevor—despite his bulk, he was fast—and David tagged her again, saving her, but Trevor caught him and froze him before he could reach the tree that was the safe base. David had sacrificed himself in the game to save her.

  It should have been a sweet, funny memory, but it made the back of her throat hot with emotion. Her face, her head hurt. She walked around the house. The land, the house, had to be worth a fortune. But it was quiet and private; something could be hidden here.

  If only she knew what it might be. It was infuriating to think the information was a ghost in her brain, untouchable, unreachable.

  Then an offhand comment Amari had made rose in her mind: Cal Hall had come to Happy Taco. She hadn’t thought about it much, but he had been in touch with Kamala earlier in the evening; that was in the texting record; if she found David and Jane here, and she was incensed enough to text Trevor—and yes, Kamala had admitted, she had texted Cal as well. It was a possibility, done in anger. Look what your perfect son has done.

  She peered in through a window. Maybe this was the window where Kamala saw them kissing. Kamala had said, I watched you through the window. You were crying. He took you in his arms. He kissed you, but like he’d never kissed me. He picked you up in his arms. You kissed him back. You—you wrapped your legs around his waist…He leaned you back against the wall…kissing you like you were everything to him and I was nothing.

  She heard a car driving and stopping on the other side of the house. She peered around the corner.

  Perri Hall. She froze. She watched Perri park. Then she saw Perri open her trunk and pull out a crowbar. It was sleek and steel and had a deadly cleanness to it.

  Jane stepped out from the building. “Mrs. Hall?”

  Perri looked like she was ready to drop the crowbar in shock. “Jane. Why are you here?”

  “My mother attempted to have me committed to a mental home. She had hired goons to chase me and she got my best friend to betray me. They roughed up Trevor Blinn. I hid here.”

  For a moment Perri said nothing to this catalog of tragedy. “Um, you smell bad.” Like a crazy person, Jane thought she would say.

  “I hid from them in a Dumpster. My clothes don’t matter. My mother…my mother and your husband were having an affair before my dad died. I’m sorry.”

  Perri tapped the crowbar against her own leg, gently. “That is really not a shock to me. I just talked with Randy Franklin.” They shared their information. Jane felt sick at the revelations.

  “Why did you bring the crowbar?” Jane asked.

  “Because you all were here that night. With a crowbar. Let’s go inside. Maybe it will prompt your memories.”

  Perri unlocked the door.

  Jane followed Perri through the house. It was a second home, but the furniture was not hand-me-downs from the main house; it was nice, high-end, a beautiful home but sterile, as if it wanted for people. Jane walked through the rooms. No doors were locked, nothing padlocked where you might need a crowbar to gain entry. She found a room with a touch of David about it—photos, posters of Lakehaven football, a wooden Lakehaven Roadrunners baseball bat mounted above the bed. A large window faced the driveway.

  ”Anything?” Perri asked. And Jane shook her head.

  “I hate this house,” Perri said.

  “Because David nearly drowned here?”

  “Well, that, but Cal wouldn’t ever sell it. We bought it when we couldn’t afford it and he’d never sell it even when we needed the money. Our finances turned out OK, but I couldn’t figure out why he loved it so. Maybe he saw it as a place to get away
from me. Or just a place to be with David and shut me out.” That last part came out before she thought about it.

  Jane said nothing. There was no comfort to be given.

  They finished their downstairs search and went upstairs. More bedrooms, for when the Halls hosted large parties. Most looked untouched. There was a master bedroom, facing out onto the lake, with a spectacular view.

  “I haven’t slept here in years,” Perri said. “Do you think this is where…your mother and…Cal?”

  “Don’t think about it. You’re divorcing him.”

  “I still love him.” She said it like it was something she hadn’t known.

  Jane wanted to reach out and touch her, but she didn’t.

  Jane went back down the hall. There was a door near the far end of the hall. Jane could see faint marks of damage along the door frame and the wall—perhaps where a crowbar had once been forcefully applied. It was locked.

  Perri ran her fingers along the marks. “Painted over. You two came here and then this was painted over.” She said it like something inside her was breaking.

  Jane took the crowbar from her. Without asking permission, she started levering the lock off. It was hard work, and Perri grabbed the bar with her and together they pulled. The door’s lock splintered. Perri kept her grip on the crowbar; Jane let go and stepped into the room. It was a small room, of no real purpose except for a small chair, a TV, and a card table. And, she saw, looking up, an attic door.

  “Did you know this was here?” Jane asked. Perri shook her head.

  Jane pulled the attic door open. A small stepladder folded out. She crawled up into the attic; the AC unit was on her left. To her right, toward the front of the house, was a wall and a door, dividing this small room from the rest of the attic. Padlocked. And scarred again from an earlier crowbar, but not painted over. Because no one would ever see it.

  “Oh,” Jane said. She nearly dropped the crowbar.

  “Are you remembering?”

  Jane covered her face. “I don’t want to be here.” Fear, like a fire, had lit in her gut, her spine, her brain.

  Perri turned from her, taking the crowbar from her hands, and went at the second door, her breath coming sharp. This door was tougher and by the time she splintered the lock, Perri’s face was drenched in sweat.

  “I feel sick,” Jane said. It was a sudden punch to the gut; she went to one knee.

  “Do you remember this?” Perri asked, kneeling beside her.

  “I don’t…we have to get out of here.”

  “No, Jane, not yet. Maybe you should go outside and get some fresh air.”

  “No.” Jane pushed herself up. “No. I need to see.”

  Perri put a hand on her shoulder and helped her up.

  The two women looked at each other, and then Jane pushed open the door.

  The first surprise was that this part of the attic—a large one, which ran the entire length of the house—was air-conditioned. The room was cold. Inside was a desk, four computers, a server array. It looked like the network setup for a small business. Perri thought, How can this be awful?

  Jane went to the keyboard of one of the systems. She slid the hacker drive that Perri had found into the port.

  “It wants to know common elements you might use for your passwords,” Jane said. Perri leaned down and typed: her birthdate, Cal’s, their anniversary, the names of the pets they’d had.

  “Any other dates?” she read on the prompt.

  “The date of the accident,” Jane said suddenly. Thinking of the combination on her mother’s safe, where she’d found her gun, found her hidden medical files. “Try that.”

  She did. The computer password was cracked in less than three minutes. The screen opened. Perri sat down in front of the screen. The icons on the desktop appeared to be links to server management apps, and to a distant server elsewhere, marked as being in Iceland.

  A browser window opened by default. She pulled the paper with the coded letters and numbers from her pocket and spread it smooth so she could read it. In the space for the web address she started typing in R34D2FT97S: the long, nonsensical code she’d found in her father’s file, the odd web address she’d tried earlier on her mother’s computer. Then at the end she added the .com.

  She could see David’s fingers typing the same, like a flash. She closed her eyes and the image was gone.

  “Randy said he saw a paper with a long series of numbers and letters. That can’t be a website,” Perri said, watching her type. “No one would ever remember the address.”

  “No one would ever accidentally type it in as an address, that’s the point. It didn’t work from my mom’s computer. It must only accept visits from a list of preapproved computer IP addresses. Hers wasn’t, but this one…”

  Jane hit Enter. The screen opened to a banner that read, Welcome to Babylon. There was a prompt for username and password.

  The jumbled numbers and letters below the address on the piece of paper. One marked “U,” one marked “P.” She entered the “U” code from the paper into username, the “P” code into password.

  Jane hit Return.

  The site opened.

  “Oh, no. No,” Perri said. “This can’t be.”

  The front part of the site was old-looking, like a relic from the early days of the web. Only when one clicked through to the various categories did the design get more sophisticated.

  Because this was a marketplace.

  Sex slaves. Illegal drugs. Illicit weapons. Hacker services. On the first tab the current offer was a thirteen-year-old girl, kidnapped from Cambodia, available to buyers. Jane moused to another tab, and there was a long list of human beings, mostly women and children, available for bidding. Perri made a noise and couldn’t look at it anymore, while Jane started to cry and moved the mouse to the arrow for illicit drugs. Offers appeared on the page, organized by prescription or by illegal. Oxycontin to heroin, cocaine to painkillers.

  On another page, requests for hacker attacks against various organizations, individuals, and companies, from the United States to Europe to Africa to China, with payment in digital currencies. It got even worse. A forum of death, of hired killers offering their services. Jane read, numb, as some restricted their services, announcing they would not kill minors or political figures.

  “What is this?” Perri said. “This cannot be.”

  Jane minimized the browser. “Stop looking at it.” She found a spreadsheet app on the desktop, opened it. She pulled the spreadsheet printout from her pocket, smoothed it flat. She entered in the names and abbreviations from the spreadsheet against a catalog of files. HFK. Alpha. On the same dates as the entries she found listings. Payments funneled from…her mother’s charity. Helpful Hands Reaching Out was a front, one of many channels to clean the money sent to this online marketplace.

  Her mother was part of this.

  “My dad must have found this when he was looking for proof of their affair. Then we found it…” Jane’s voice cracked.

  “Are you saying Cal came here when Kamala told him you were here…and found that you two had discovered this?” Perri pressed her fist against her mouth.

  “No,” Cal Hall said, standing in the doorway. “That’s not quite what happened.”

  54

  STEP AWAY FROM the computer,” Cal said. There was a gun tucked in the front of his pants. He had a Taser in one hand; he gestured with it.

  “Don’t you point that at us,” Perri said. “Explain yourself.”

  Cal pulled a cheap, orange phone from his pocket. Orange. Like the one missing from the crash, the one Brenda had knelt on when she went to help David. Cal pressed a button, listened, said, “It’s OK. We have a situation, but it can be handled. But I need you to be ready.” Then he hung up and put the orange phone in his jacket.

  Jane stared at him, and it was as if shards and slices of memory cut into the here and now, pierced her brain. This room. This terrible room. David sliding the hacker drive into the computer,
finding a password, discovering the distant server, entering the username and the passcode. And then the terrible truth of the dark market.

  “David went through the logs, the data records on the little hacker flash drive. He found the traces that my dad found. My dad was just looking for proof of e-mails or texts or something on my mother’s computer to prove you two were having an affair. What he found was the spreadsheets with far more money than anyone would expect moving through my mother’s charity accounts. So, being an accountant, he went looking for the source…”

  “He found Babylon. I had no idea how he had done it…I thought the leak was Laurel. I didn’t realize he must have had a hacker drive until it was too late. She told me she’d tossed all his stuff. I didn’t know she’d given some of it to David. She didn’t realize the harm she’d done.”

  “Our son. You let our son see this? Why would you do this, Cal, why?” Perri demanded.

  “I don’t ‘do’ anything,” he said. “I help move money. That’s all. I don’t…I don’t touch anything illegal.”

  “No, you just make it possible…” Jane said. She staggered back from him and it was as if the walls holding the hell at bay fell in her mind. “You. Oh. You. It was a chain reaction. David found the hacker kit. Maybe there is something on there that points to your affair with my mom. Then he found the money trail on your computer, too? This is what had to do with my dad. Both our parents breaking the law. What do we do? Talk about running to Canada. So we wouldn’t have to face you all. Then we think, where would this be? We’ve found the locked doors in the lake house, maybe already when we’re there being together sometime before; maybe there’s proof behind them. Something we can use to protect us. Protect me, David, and Perri from you. We buy the crowbar. We break in. We find this. It’s so much worse than simple money laundering. Then…”

  “Then what, Jane?”

  Jane shook her head, staring at Cal. “You put us into my car. You made me drive. You had the gun on me. To my head. You…you were in the car with us. You were there.” Her voice rose into a shriek.