Facade

by Susan Cory

  “They have to come out this way after they arrest DeWitt and I need that money shot of him in cuffs for the front page.”

  “Unless I end up taking a shot of his plane taking off with him on it instead. I don't see any staties around,” Shane said.

  Iris heard footsteps running toward her. She turned and saw Russo and an overweight state trooper, red-faced and panting.

  Russo and the Statie flashed badges and Russo whispered something to the TSA agent. The security line was closed off and the line began to back up. Irritated passengers looked at their watches and phones.

  “My plane's taking off in ten minutes,” a man in a trench coat complained loudly.

  “What's going on? Is it a terrorist threat?” a worried-looking woman asked her husband.

  Iris stood on tiptoes, but the walkway split sideways after security so she couldn't see very far.

  What is Xander doing, Iris wondered. Why is he running away? I was going to give him an alibi. He must be guilty. Clearly he planned to fly off to someplace without extradition and escape punishment for what he'd done to poor Lara. They would never find out the truth behind what had happened and why.

  Then Iris saw Xander racing down the corridor in her direction, shouldering his way through milling passengers, heading for the escalator. She saw Russo weaving through the same obstacle course of suitcase-rolling passengers, but he was too far behind. Xander was going to get away!

  Shane lifted his camera onto his shoulder, all pretense of secrecy gone.

  That's when something in Iris snapped.

  She shoved over the roped stanchions and raced through the body scanner. She passed the rolling baggage belt, and the startled TSA agents. At a full run, Iris slid into a leg sweep, hooking Xander's ankle and bringing him down. He toppled in a heap on top of her, cursing loudly in, presumably, Dutch. As her arm bent at a distorted angle, Iris let out an agonized cry.

  Russo closed the gap between them, yanked Xander to his feet, grabbed his hands behind him, and slipped on cuffs. Close behind him, Malone rushed up and helped Iris to her feet by her uninjured arm.

  “Where did you come from? Malone asked her. “That was amazing.”

  CHAPTER 57

  Iris was strapped into the passenger seat of Sterling's Lexus, gingerly adjusting her new plaster cast above the seatbelt, tuning out Sterling's scolding. She still couldn't believe that she'd blocked Xander's escape using a karate takedown. She was probably in for another lecture from Sensei Ono about Uechiryu being a self-defense-oriented martial art, not to be used for aggressive purposes. She also knew she'd have to endure ridicule from her fellow karate students. At the speed she'd been moving, her leg sweep, caught no doubt by Shane's camera, would have looked like some macho Bruce Lee flying side-kick. This was the opposite of the type of subtle, close-in fighting her school of karate taught. The dramatic move had cost her a broken arm, but at least it was her left arm, not her drafting arm.

  Sterling had finished his lecture and was now concentrating on dodging cyclists as he drove through the back streets of Cambridge. The pain of the fractured radius bone in her arm had been dulled by the meds supplied by the doctor at Mass General's emergency room. Luckily, she hadn't needed surgery, only some realignment and a cast to hold her arm in place.

  While she was being tended to in the emergency room at Mass General, Sterling had placated the cranky people at TSA and the state police for her transgressions on their turf. Given the satisfactory outcome achieved at her own personal risk, they were willing to drop the charges for her breaking through their security line without a boarding pass.

  “You realize, of course, that this whole debacle will be on the six o'clock news, thanks to your buddy with the video camera,” Sterling said, pulling into her driveway.

  “Not my buddy,” Iris said. “Thanks for the rescue, Sterling.”

  Iris managed to unlock her front door with one hand, and to sort through the mess of mail in her entry hall. She sacrificed a junk mail envelope into Sheba's waiting mouth, to be dumped on the kitchen floor in exchange for a treat—one of the least useful tricks Iris had ever taught the dog.

  The clock on her microwave read four o'clock and she realized that she hadn't eaten since breakfast. She opened the refrigerator door, surveyed its contents, then closed it again. She wasn't hungry.

  She fished out Martin Taylor's business card and her phone from her purse. After composing an excuse for her change of heart into words that she hoped sounded convincing, she dialed the lawyer's office number. Of course he wasn't available, so she left her message on his voice mail.

  Iris was too restless to do any work in her office in the next room, and she'd already called Ellie from the hospital, so she headed instead to the basement. She needed to demolish something.

  Her ongoing plan to build a sculpture studio required her to reconfigure the existing two underground rooms. The utility and storage rooms would be made smaller, creating space for a third room large enough to fit a band saw, a planer and a joiner for assembling huge wood blocks. These she would carve into abstract, organic shapes. Having a self-contained studio would keep the wood shavings and mess generated from infiltrating the entire basement.

  She stuffed some rags into the crack under the door at the top of the stairs to keep plaster dust from filtering up into the house, then changed into a tee-shirt and ripped jeans. Only one of the three walls she needed to remove was structural. She would need help in erecting a beam to hold up the weight of the floor above it, but that left two walls that she could safely attack today. She lifted a crow bar down from its hook on the wall. There were no plumbing pipes in this first wall, but there were sure to be electric wires, so she'd have to proceed carefully. Once she'd chipped off the horsehair plaster and peeled back the lath, she could whale on the vertical studs with her crow bar to work herself into a satisfying state of exhaustion.

  By the time one wall was completely down, Iris was covered in a fine layer of gray dust. Her broken arm was sore and sweaty in its cast, but she didn't care. Waiting for the air to clear, she heard Sheba's long, drawn out baying overhead. As she mounted the stairs, she could hear the doorbell ringing.

  Iris slid the dust mask onto the top of her head. Her hair, already gray-tinged with plaster, now stuck out in tufts. She opened her front door to reveal Martin Taylor, immaculate in a navy pin-striped suit, on the front porch. He looked momentarily surprised.

  “I heard about your ordeal at the airport and thought maybe you could use this.” He held up a bottle of wine. “How's your arm?”

  “Not too bad, thanks, but I probably shouldn't be doing one-armed demolition in the basement.”

  Martin cocked an eyebrow. “You know, you can pay people to do that.”

  This remark irked Iris, but she stood aside to let him enter. Sheba growled quietly and stayed close to her mistress.

  “Sorry for dropping by unannounced but you're on my route home and I was hoping to discuss the message you left,” he said, taking in her large hallway and casting Sheba an appraising look.

  Iris led him to the living room. She glanced down at her dusty jeans, then decided to remain standing. Martin did the same.

  “Today's been discouraging for all of us with DeWitt trying to jump bail, but he probably just panicked after a night in jail.” Martin looked at her earnestly. “That doesn't change what you saw that night. It will be up to a jury to put the pieces together to figure out if he's guilty or not, but that requires giving them all the pieces. Otherwise the system doesn't work.”

  Iris leaned against the door frame. “I'm not comfortable anymore being part of his defense and, since I'm the one who stopped him from getting away today, I'm sure he doesn't want me on his team.”

  “I understand. DeWitt did a wrong thing today. He was scared and confused. If you'd feel more comfortable, we can call you as a hostile witness. Just tell the jury what you saw and when. I know you want to get to the truth like the rest of us.”

&nbs
p; Iris closed her eyes and sighed.

  “What do you say we have a glass of wine?” Martin said. “You've had a rough day,”

  “That's an excellent idea.” She led him to the kitchen and got out a corkscrew and two wine glasses, checking them first for water spots.

  The doorbell rang again and Sheba scurried toward it. Who else would be dropping by now?

  When she opened the door, Luc was standing there looking frazzled. He wore a black apron over his jeans and held a paper bag which gave off an amazing aroma. Iris felt like hugging him.

  “I saw the thing on TV. Are you alright?” He reached out and patted her cast, looked at her shyly, then crouched down to scratch Sheba behind the ears. The dog leaned against him.

  “Hell of a day.” Iris said. “How're you doing?”

  Luc rose to his feet, and began to say something. Then his eyes turned flat.

  Iris turned and saw Martin standing behind her in the doorway holding two glasses of wine.

  Luc handed her the bag. “I just wanted to drop this off. I left Eduardo in charge of the kitchen. I hope the arm's better soon.” Then he left.

  As Iris watched Luc's retreating form, Martin handed her a glass and said, “What's in the bag?”

  CHAPTER 58

  “Girl, you're turning schizo,” Ellie said on Monday morning as Iris walked into their shared office with her laptop propped under her cast.

  “First, you tackle an escaping suspect, now you're back on the team to exonerate him. Whose side are you on?”

  Iris shook her head. “I just need to find out the truth. I can't stop thinking about the girl. We'd never have learned what happened to her if Xander had run away. We still might not find out after a trial. But Martin pointed out— ”

  “Martin—that's the lawyer? You're on a first-name basis now? What's going on with Luc?”

  “Don't even ask,” Iris said as she rummaged in her desk drawer for a Kit-Kat bar, unwrapped it, and bit off a piece. “Did you arrange things with the computer wizard, Elvis?”

  “I did, and I'd better not get any blowback. I spent most of last semester trying to discourage his crush. I mention my dear husband and college-aged daughter every chance I can, but nothing seems to dampen his ardor. He said he'd meet you at the Starbucks by the Broadway Market at nine.”

  Iris consulted her watch as she shoved the rest of the candy bar into her mouth.

  “Elvis said he saw your takedown of Professor DeWitt on YouTube. He sounded impressed.”

  “It's on YouTube? Swell. I thought I was getting some weird looks as I passed through the studio just now,” Iris said. “Gilles is probably going to fire me.”

  “Your hero act has either canceled out his mistake in hiring a murderer or it's given GSD a reputation for having cuckoo professors.”

  “How did I ever get mixed up with Xander DeWitt?” Iris threw her purse over a shoulder. “Gotta go meet Elvis. I'll tell him you say hi.”

  Iris spent the four block walk to Starbucks reviewing what she wanted to learn from the computer wizard. As she awkwardly pushed through the front door with her cast arm, she spotted a young Asian man in shorts and flip-flops sitting at a table reading the Globe. When he saw her he held up the front page—Shane's shot of her midair body block of the oncoming Xander. She had to admit she looked pretty kick-ass.

  “Way to go, Professor Reid,” he shouted.

  She fluttered her good hand in a keep-it-down gesture and looked around self-consciously. No one in the shop paid her any attention. She slid into the seat across from him and shrugged out of her jacket. “Thanks for meeting with me, Elvis. I'm hoping you can help me with some computer questions.”

  “No problem. What do you want to know?”

  “First, I need you to keep what we discuss completely confidential. You can't talk about this with anyone. Are you comfortable with that?”

  “But Ellie, I mean Professor McKenzie, is in on this, isn't she?”

  “You can't even discuss this with Professor McKenzie, OK?” The last thing Ellie would want would be Elvis imagining some shared secret.

  Elvis slid his chair closer and lowered his voice to be just audible above the hissing and sputtering of the coffee machines. “My lips are sealed.”

  “I understand you helped Professor McKenzie retrieve some information on her computer last semester, files she thought she had erased accidently.”

  “Yeah, her computer crashed and, if you can believe it, she hadn't backed up some files, so I trawled through her hard drive and used some recovery software to pull out fragments and recreate the files. Basic stuff.”

  “And... if you wanted to put something incriminating on my computer without getting caught, how would you go about it ?”

  Elvis raised his eyes to the acoustical tile ceiling. “I would probably send you an e-mail from an internet café or a library using a free e-mail address. If I wanted to get fancy, I could use a web anonymizer or web onion to ping off satellites around the world to mask where I was sending it from. Then I'd include a logic bomb so it would self-destruct after you read it.” His eyes glistened. “I wouldn't want anything sent from my own computer because even if I cyber-scrubbed the hard drive, the forensic techs could still recover ghosts. Then again, you wouldn't be able to completely erase the stuff I sent either.”

  “How about if you had direct access to my computer? Let's say you broke into my house and knew my password.”

  “That's easy. I'd just download some evil stuff—like how to make a bomb or something. The FBI is often tracking who goes to those kinds of sites. If you noticed it later on your browsing history, you could try to erase it but, like I said, that stuff leaves ghosts that techies can dig out.”

  Iris chewed on this information. “That's just what I needed to know. Thanks.” She wanted to shift gears without having Elvis notice the transition. “I need a latte. Can I get you something?”

  After she returned with their drinks she started up again, “I know you're in Professor DeWitt's seminar this semester. Who's going to teach the class now that he's in jail?”

  “Gilles said that the professor's assistant Nils was going to take over until someone from their Amsterdam office could fly over.”

  “I don't really think of Nils as a teacher. I thought he was more of a tech guy.”

  “He's an all-purpose TA. I'm really bummed because I wanted to study with someone of Professor DeWitt's caliber.”

  “I'm sure Xander's firm will send someone high-powered.”

  “I guess.” Elvis finished off his coffee.

  “One more thing,” Iris said. “Earlier this semester I was having trouble getting onto my GSD network account. My password no longer worked. I eventually changed to a new password, but now I'm thinking that someone might have hacked into my account. Does that sound likely or am I just being paranoid?”

  “In this day and age, there's no such thing as paranoid. Your worst fears are reality. If you want to leave it with me now, I can run some software to detect if any spyware was planted on it. I can run the program while I'm in the studio, then drop off your laptop at your GSD office. It will take me about half an hour.”

  “Seriously? That would be great. I'd really appreciate it.”

  At that moment the reality of knowing whether someone had been reading her e-mails hit Iris, making her skin prickle. “If you find anything, you can take it off—right?”

  “Of course.” Elvis looked affronted. “You know, putting spyware on someone's computer is pretty heavy stuff—illegal even. It would take someone with pretty high-caliber computer chops to pull that off.”

  “Do you know of anyone at GSD with those kinds of skills?”

  He paused in thought. “I couldn't say for sure but rumor has it that there's someone in your studio who's quite the cyber-freak. They say she broke into the GSD main servers last year and the administration never even noticed. She's that good.”

  “Who are we talking about?”

  He star
ted shredding his wooden stir stick into little pieces. “I don't know if I should say. You're not going to get her in trouble, are you?”

  “No, not at all.”

  Elvis leaned over conspiratorially, “It's Jasna. Jasna Sidron.”

  CHAPTER 59

  Xander always expected to be famous, just not for this. Not for killing a young girl.

  The morning after his ignominious capture at Logan, he sat across from his two solicitors in a tiny airless interview room in the bowels of the Cambridge police station, staring at himself on the front page of the Globe.

  Farrington tapped the newspaper. “I'm not going to sugarcoat this, Xander. Your attempt to jump bail yesterday has given the D.A. the upper hand. You're being transferred later today to Walpole, a maximum security prison.”

  “How long will I have to be there?” Xander asked, his lips tightening.

  Farrington paged through some papers in front of him, found the one he was looking for, consulted it, then announced, “Your trial's been set for mid-March, six months from now. You'll be held at Walpole until then.”

  Xander felt nothing but shock.

  Farrington went on. “You need to understand: yesterday, we had a no body, no weapon, sketchy-motive case. The burden was on the state to string together enough circumstantial evidence to convince a jury beyond a reasonable doubt. But now, the pendulum has swung. The Cambridge police's Cyber Forensics lab has found child pornography on your computer. Someone attempted to erase the images, but they've reformatted your hard drive and found it. If you're a pedophile, you could have a motive for kidnapping and possibly murdering the girl. Furthermore, your attempt to flee yesterday makes you appear guilty.”

  Xander rubbed his temples and stared at the metal table between them.“Those images were planted when my house was broken into. I called my assistant, Nils, to make sure they were taken off my computer immediately. What was I supposed to do?”

  He could see Farrington and the well-dressed younger lawyer exchange quick looks. The younger man asked, “Did you think about reporting those pictures to the police?”