Darker Than Night

by John Lutz

  “Just like your old one only bigger and faster, ma’am. Sort of like a second marriage to a younger man.”

  Pearl looked at the pimply punk, wondering if he might be coming on to her. But he seemed oblivious as he did something to the back of one of the tower units with a screwdriver. He removed the cream-colored metal shell case which was apparently attached only by a few small screws, then began tinkering with the computer’s electronic guts.

  Pearl leaned to the side so she could see. “That the hard drive?”

  “Hard as you like it, ma’am.”

  Pearl stared at the kid. He smiled and went back to his work.

  What’s with me this morning? Does the male sex somehow smell recent activity?

  Pearl keyed in her PIN and went to the software program that matched items in the evidence room with dates and case numbers. As soon as she typed in Quinn’s name, a reference number came up that would act as a guide, much as the Dewey decimal system helped to locate library books.

  She copied the number on a Post-it, then shut down the computer and walked back to the evidence room.

  A sleepy-eyed sergeant was on duty behind a counter, sitting down and engrossed in a New York Post. Pearl flashed her shield and logged in, and the sergeant went back to reading what looked like yet another piece on Anna Caruso.

  Pearl pushed through a wooden swing gate and entered a caged-in area in a windowless room built onto the back of the precinct house over twenty years ago.

  It wasn’t hard to find the computer, wrapped in plastic on the second shelf of a tier of metal shelves. Pearl glanced around. At this hour she was alone. She had privacy.

  She made sure the tag on the computer matched the reference number, then dragged it over to the edge of the shelf and turned it around. After peeling back about a yard of masking tape, she slipped the plastic wrapping from the computer.

  Pearl had been afraid to borrow a screwdriver from one of the techies, but she’d brought the Swiss Army knife she carried in her purse.

  Its screwdriver worked just fine. It took her less than ten minutes by her watch to detach and lift off the computer’s rectangular metal case, remove the hard drive, then replace the case. Within another few minutes she had the computer rewrapped and taped, and back in its original spot on the steel shelf.

  The hard drive was shiny steel and about the size and shape of a paperback book. She tucked it into her waistband beneath her blouse, then returned to the squad room.

  “Going out,” she said to Sergeant Rudd, who was still busy with his paperwork.

  “Why? Those kids making you feel dumb?”

  “’Fraid so.” She grinned.

  “Used to be,” Rudd said, “people got smarter as they got older.”

  “That was always just a rumor,” Pearl told him as she pushed open the heavy door and went out into the morning heat.

  As she walked toward her unmarked, she glanced at her watch. Not yet eight o’clock. If she remembered correctly, the stock market didn’t open till nine-thirty. If she drove fast and didn’t get bogged down in traffic, she should have time.

  Of course she could make her destination in plenty of time if she used the light and siren. Trouble was, she wasn’t on a call, and it wasn’t an emergency, so strictly speaking, it was against regulations.

  Pearl decided to use the light and siren.

  When she turned the car onto Michelle Quinn’s block, the dashboard clock said it was eight-fifty. The stock market wouldn’t open for another forty minutes, so it was possible that Michelle was still in her apartment.

  Pearl left the unmarked in a no-parking zone and jogged across the street toward Michelle’s building. It was the first time she’d seen it. Her other meetings with Michelle had been at a coffee shop near her office in the financial district. It was an obviously expensive building, with a uniformed doorman who looked like the dictator of a small country. Michelle must know her stuff as a stock analyst. In fact, from what Pearl had heard, any analyst out of prison and still employed after the recent bear market must know his or her stuff.

  She gave the doorman her name and told him who she was here to see. He studied the tiny screen of a personal digital assistant he produced from a secret pocket in his tunic. One of his eyebrows arched.

  “She isn’t expecting me,” Pearl said.

  She stood back and admired his epaulets as he phoned upstairs to see if Michelle Quinn was home and receiving visitors dressed like Pearl.

  She was, and she was.

  Quinn’s sister was standing with her door open so Pearl would locate the apartment easier. Michelle was dressed for work in a pinstripe gray skirt and blazer, a lighter gray blouse, with a red-and-gray tie—or rather dressed for going to work, with her white sneakers sharply contrasting with the somber outfit. Pearl knew that like many New York career women, Michelle would carry her conservative, uncomfortable shoes in her purse until she reached her office.

  When Pearl approached, Michelle smiled and extended her hand. “Something important?”

  “Maybe. I don’t want to take up a lot of your time,” Pearl said as they shared a handshake.

  “If it’s about Frank, go ahead and take it up.” Michelle ushered her into a spacious and tastefully furnished apartment with a magnificent sun-touched vista of the city and the Hudson River beyond. The air, which seemed fractured by the crystalline light made somehow more intense by passing through the slanted panes, carried a faint, pleasant lilac scent.

  “Nice place,” Pearl said, wincing inwardly at her understatement. Most people in Manhattan would kill to live here. Pearl, maybe.

  Michelle offered her coffee, which Pearl declined; neither woman had time to waste.

  They went through the living room into a book-lined den furnished in rich wood and soft leather of the sort that looks worn-out the day it’s bought. On a wide walnut desk sat a blue-and-gray computer—it might have been lifted from the control panel of the starship Enterprise. Michelle motioned toward a chair, but Pearl declined again and reached into her purse. She drew out the hard-disk drive she’d removed from Quinn’s old computer. “This is—”

  “I know what it is,” Michelle interrupted. Caution had crept into her voice. She gave Pearl a look, something like the one Quinn sometimes gave her.

  “I won’t tell you how it came into my hands,” Pearl said, seeing Michelle’s problem, “but I will tell you where it’s from. It was part of the computer that was on your brother’s desk in the squad room when he had his problem.”

  Michelle stared at the tiny steel rectangular box and frowned. Pearl wasn’t sure what she was thinking, but she felt like telling Michelle not to fret so much. This was something she was getting from a cop; it wasn’t Enron all over again.

  Of course, on a personal level, it might be worse.

  Michelle moved closer and reached out and accepted the hard drive, gripping it firmly, obviously keenly aware that her fingerprints were now on it. This was a woman who sized up the game and didn’t make a move lightly.

  “I’m sure a lot’s been deleted,” Pearl said, feeling better about Michelle now. Quinn said she could be trusted all the way, his good true friend as well as his sister.

  “Not much actually gets deleted,” Michelle said, “unless whoever’s doing it really knows how. Or whoever’s trying to recover it doesn’t know. Prisons are full of people who mistakenly thought they deleted incriminating evidence on computers.”

  “I remember from seeing on my own computer how it keeps a kind of log—times and sites visited on the Internet. A chronological record of where I’ve been. If you were to arrange them chronologically…” Pearl was increasingly aware that she didn’t know what she was talking about. Not enough, anyway. But then, wasn’t that why she was here?

  Michelle was staring at her, waiting.

  Pearl pressed on. “If you could somehow recover those times, dates, and places on the Internet, the child porn sites, and compare them with when your brother was on duty,
we might be able to prove he was somewhere else when at least some of those sites were visited.” Pearl gave her a level look, trying to appear intelligent. This Michelle was intimidating. “Is any of this even remotely possible? Might that information still be accessible?”

  “It probably is.”

  The woman’s face didn’t give away much, Pearl thought. Mount Rushmore with makeup. “So what would you have to do to get to it?”

  “Risk my career.”

  “Like I’m risking mine,” Pearl said. “And Quinn’s not even my brother.”

  Michelle smiled. And in that instant Pearl knew her romantic relationship with Quinn was no secret. Maybe Michelle had talked to Quinn. Or Sergeant Rudd. Or maybe Michelle somehow had read her, simply figured it out. Maybe it had been on the damned radio.

  “Good point,” Michelle said. She examined the disk drive more closely. “It’s an internal drive, so it doesn’t simply slide in a computer bay ready to go. Somebody must have used a screwdriver to remove it.”

  “You’re the expert,” Pearl said.

  “I can reinstall it in another computer and examine it. There are ways, software programs, that can retrieve almost anything supposedly deleted. And most people—probably the ones we’re dealing with—think once they’ve pressed the delete key, they’ve actually irretrievably deleted whatever it is they want to get rid of.”

  “You have this software?”

  “If I need it, I can obtain it. But I might be able to get to what we need using another computer’s system programs. It might take some time.”

  “When can you start?”

  Michelle removed her blazer and carefully folded it inside out and draped it over the back of a chair. “Now. This morning. It promises to be a quiet day in the markets. Money’s on the sidelines waiting to see what the Fed’s going to do.”

  “Yeah,” Pearl said, “the feds.”

  Michelle grinned. “I’ll make a few phone calls, then set to work on this. Don’t expect anything right away—like today. Where can I get in touch with you?”

  Pearl leaned over the wide, polished desk and wrote her name and cell phone number on a tablet. “Here, or you can try Quinn’s number.”

  “Uh-huh.” But while her tone was dubious, Michelle appeared secretly pleased. Pearl thought it was nice to be approved of.

  “You have my word the source of any information you come up with will remain confidential if at all possible. But the truth is, that’s all I can promise.”

  “I understand. Your word’s good enough.”

  “Thanks,” Pearl said. “I mean, really thanks.”

  She thought Michelle was going to say she was welcome, but instead she said simply, “He’s my brother.”

  “One other thing,” Pearl said. “Unless you come up with something we can use, there’s no need to tell Quinn about any of this.”

  “Unless for some reason he asks. I’m not going to lie to him. He’s had enough of that.”

  “So he has,” Pearl said. “I’ll quit using up your morning and find my own way out.”

  Michelle didn’t waste time on amenities. She was already sitting down at her desk as Pearl was leaving.

  Back down on the sun-warmed sidewalk, Pearl thought about what she’d done: stolen police property from the evidence room and involved Quinn’s sister. And undoubtedly Quinn himself, if the theft came to light and there was nothing exculpatory on the hard drive.

  Everyone involved might take a big hit, even Fedderman. None of them would be trusted again. The law had been broken. Loss of careers would be the least of their problems.

  Computers, Pearl decided, were dangerous instruments.

  Lars Svenson writhed around in his bed for several hours, but sleep never came. He considered using more of the stash he’d stolen from his latest conquest, but that was what had probably put him on edge in the first place.

  He sat straight up in bed, sweating and trembling. This was pure shit. It felt like there were bugs crawling around just beneath his skin.

  He was never going to get to sleep, and he’d be like he was dead when he started work this afternoon.

  If he was going into work. The way the day was shaping up, he might call in sick. Or take a vacation day.

  Right now he was going to climb out of bed and get dressed. Get out of the apartment and take a walk. Maybe have a drink or two somewhere and try to numb himself, relieve the pressure that was building and building in him.

  Walk some more. Maybe for hours.

  Sometimes, if he walked far enough, walking helped.

  Sometimes it didn’t.

  38

  Lisa Ide realized she’d forgotten her glasses. She’d need them to read the tiny ornate print of the menu at Petit Poisson, where she was due in half an hour to meet two old friends from college. Over lunch and pastries they would have a grand time talking about long-ago allies and enemies. Maybe there’d be photographs to examine, old and recent. Lisa was looking forward to this lunch; it held the promise of being a real bitchfest.

  She stopped walking and moved back against a building to avoid the flow of pedestrians. She was less than halfway to her subway stop. There was still time for her to return to the apartment, get her glasses, then take a cab to the restaurant.

  Her mind made up, she began striding hurriedly back the way she’d come, breaking into a graceful half walk and half run to make the blinking walk signal at the intersection.

  In the hall outside her apartment door, she fumbled with her keys and dropped them. Reminding herself she had plenty of time, she bent over and picked them up, then keyed the lock and opened the door. Within seconds she should be leaving with glasses in hand.

  Where are they?

  She’d read herself to sleep last night, a Michael Connelly thriller, and probably placed the glasses on top of the book on the nightstand before switching off the light on her side of the bed and dozing off.

  But she’d taken only a few steps toward the bedroom when she recalled wearing the glasses in the kitchen this morning to read the calorie count on the cereal box. And later when she’d looked up a phone number in her address book.

  She went to the phone on its table near the door.

  No glasses.

  The kitchen, then. I probably carried them back into the kitchen an hour ago when I got bottled water from the refrigerator. Of course! I must have set the glasses down when I used both hands to loosen the cap on the plastic bottle.

  As she was moving toward the kitchen, she heard a slight sound from the bedroom, perhaps something falling.

  She stopped. Leon must have taken ill and come home.

  No, that wasn’t like Leon.

  But if it’s anyone, it must be Leon.

  Maybe he’d returned from the shop for something he forgot. She was here because she was absentminded, so why not Leon?

  “Leon?”

  She waited for an answer in the heavy silence of the still apartment. There was none. She called louder: “Leon!”

  Okay, he must not be home. The sound from the bedroom had simply been something falling over—a picture frame, maybe—or had been from the apartment upstairs. Or perhaps the faint noise had been only in her imagination. Lots of possibilities. She didn’t have time to worry about them now.

  Lisa continued on her way to the kitchen. As she walked through the door, she immediately saw her glasses lying next to a folded dish towel on the sink counter.

  Great! Nothing to do now but snatch up the glasses and be on my way again.

  As her fingers closed on the thin steel frames, she glanced at the digital clock on the stove. Still plenty of time.

  She was leaving the kitchen when she noticed the bouquet of yellow roses in the center of the table.

  She stopped cold, then went over to look at them. There were half a dozen of the freshly bloomed, cut yellow roses in a plain glass vase with water in it, no card. Quite beautiful. She couldn’t resist leaning over the table and sniffing the nearest blosso
m, enjoying its fragrance.

  Leon again? Another of his mystery gifts? Like the strange earrings I discovered in my jewelry box, the ones he’s pretending I had for years and forgot about?

  If so, she wasn’t supposed to find the roses yet; they were a surprise for this evening. Did he think it was their anniversary or her birthday? Either was possible. He’d gotten the dates of important occasions wrong before. Lisa remembered when the shop had been forty-eight hours early for Valentine’s Day, which the sale sign Leon had placed in the window proclaimed as TOMORROW. Lisa had to smile.

  She thought about calling her husband’s name again, or double-checking to make sure he wasn’t in the bedroom.

  But if he was in the bedroom, it was because she’d surprised him by coming back to the apartment unexpectedly, and he didn’t want her to know he was home. He was hiding, hoping she wouldn’t discover him or the roses.

  Lisa stood wondering what to do, then decided she should do nothing.

  Let Leon have his fun. Maybe he knows what he’s doing. He might be leading up to something. Like a European vacation or a Caribbean cruise.

  Lisa left the apartment, making sure the door was dead-bolted behind her. This evening she’d pretend the roses were a big surprise. Whatever was going on was weird, but there was nothing to do but roll with it.

  Only when she was back on the crowded sidewalk, waiting for the traffic signal to change so she could cross a busy intersection, did she let the thought occur to her fully: What if somebody else put the roses in the kitchen and went into the bedroom when I returned home unexpectedly?

  Somebody not Leon!

  “Move it or lose it, lady!”

  The light had changed to a walk signal. A florid-faced little man was trying to get around her, bumping her hip with his attaché case. Threads of sparse black hair were plastered across his otherwise bald scalp, and he was wearing a natty gray suit and what looked like a blue ascot.

  “Move it or—”