by Rick Riordan
"Sure."
"But given Matthew Pena's age, we know one thing."
"Sometime after 1967," I supplied, "Matthew Pena was adopted."
CHAPTER 32
Mrs. Hayes was exactly where I'd left her, on her couch under the portrait of Jesus.
Her dress was pistachio green today, and she had no child to fan her. Otherwise she looked no different than she had Sunday night.
"Dwight went out for a moment, Mr. Navarre," she said. "But please sit down."
Grimy sunlight streaked through the windows. Jesus gazed toward the dead moths in the light cover on the ceiling. I could hear the two older kids, Chris and Amanda, playing fulltackle freezetag in the front yard.
"Only two little lambs today?" I asked.
Mrs. Hayes' makeup suggested a scowl, but there was no life to it-just paint.
"Matthew called me yesterday," she said. "He told me Dwight lost his job because of you."
I tried to remind myself she was just a frustrated mother looking out for her son. She didn't know all the things I had to deal with. And Jesus was looking at me, too. Despite that, I had the overwhelming urge to crack her rosy image of Matthew Pena over her head like a cascaron.
"Don't worry," I told her. "Losing that job might be the best thing for Dwight. Cutting the apron strings."
It took her a moment, but the metaphor sunk in. She didn't seem to like it. "I don't appreciate your tone, young man. If you were one of my children…"
She looked out the window at a flash of metal. A gray Honda was turning into the driveway.
"But never mind," she said. "Matthew Pena was good to my boy."
"You ever deal with foster children, Mrs. Hayes?"
Her eyes traced an imaginary box around me. "Occasionally I help a child from GardenerBettes."
"GardenerBettes, the juvenile home."
"Yes. Why do you ask?"
"Just a case I was working on. A child I think was adopted. I think it might have been locally."
"How long ago?"
"Oh, years. Thirtyplus years."
There was an archipelago of tiny brown moles on her rounded shoulders. I imagined a laser burning them off, one by one, as I waited for her reply.
"I couldn't help you," she told me. "The life expectancy for adoption agencies is not good. The one you're looking for probably would not be around anymore."
"Probably not," I agreed. "A shame. This particular placement didn't work out too well.
The adoptee in question turned into quite the little coldblooded killer, Mrs. Hayes.
Someone I'm sure you wouldn't admire. No one you'd want your son to work with."
Her eyes became small, amber points.
Dwight came up the sidewalk, his backpack on his shoulder. He stopped to chew out Chris and Amanda, who were throwing rocks at each other, then came inside.
He looked from me to his mother, read the tension immediately. "Goddamnit, Mother.
Leave him alone."
He tossed a plastic drugstore bag onto the table.
Mrs. Hayes raised her eyebrows. "You will not speak in that way, Dwight. Not while you're in this house."
"I'll arrange for a hotel tonight, then. I'll give you a check for the month's utilities." He glared at me. "Come on, Tres. Don't sit with her. You'll never get up again."
He wheeled around and headed for the stairs.
I smiled apologetically at Mrs. Hayes. "Nice seeing you again, ma'am."
I could feel her eyes on my back as I left, like ice cubes pressing into my shirt.
Halfway up the stairs, one of the smaller children was blocking my path. It was Clem, Mrs. Hayes' fanwielder, watching me with feral brown eyes under a mess of brown hair. He had a shoebox pinched between his knees.
"She doesn't like you," he confided.
I looked in his box. Brown and green things moved, glistening in the bottom-things about the size of almonds. My skin crawled.
Not that I hadn't seen cicadas before, but Clem had tried a new experiment. He'd put them back into their former skins-liberally Scotchtaping their desiccated shells to their bodies. He'd left some of the legs free, so the suffocating cicadas could crawl in helpless paths, going nowhere, waiting to die.
"It's a race," he confided.
I hugged the wall as I stepped around him.
Dwight's bedroom was on the left. He sat in the dark on a trundle bed, his backpack between his knees, staring dejectedly at a dumpedover bucket of toy cars on the carpet.
A bookshelf dominated the south wall-comic books in protective plastic sleeves, science fiction paperbacks, hot rod magazines, computer programming manuals, Clive Cussler novels. There was a window on the right, light filtering through the upper branches of a redbud in the backyard. Posters were thumb tacked to the wall: Nolan Ryan, Stevie Ray Vaughan, the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. If the room had been any more Average Texan Boyhood it would've cracked the meter.
I started to reach for the light switch.
"Don't," Dwight said. "She doesn't like the lights on. Wastes energy."
I wondered how Dwight had gotten so tan growing up in a dark house. The answer immediately presented itself: Dwight would've left as soon and as often as possible.
"You okay?" I asked.
"The kids. It's like having a Little League team invited to trample over your childhood."
I went to the window, looked out at the yard. "At least they limit a Little League team to nine."
Dwight nodded sourly. He fished something out of his pack, threw it to me. "Good news. What I did this morning."
A handwritten label on the tape said TECHSAN. It looked no different from the eighttracks Garrett used to keep in his car when I was a kid-certainly nothing worth dying for.
"What did you find?"
Dwight zipped his bag. "What Pena will announce today. There's a sequence in the code that shouldn't be there. He'll blame it on the original programmers."
"The back door."
Dwight lay back on his bed, stared at the ceiling. "It's a beautiful subroutine. Elegant, really. And until it's closed, nothing is safe- not a single file on a client's server, as long as they're running Techsan's product."
I looked out the window. The yard below was balding crabgrass, lined by a wooden fence with missing planks. A barbecue pit squatted between a tool shed and scraggly hibiscus bushes.
"You said you had good news."
"It depends on whether you find Garrett," Dwight replied. "Whether he'll help. I heard-I heard about Ms. McBride. I'm sorry."
"How can Garrett help?"
"I think it would be possible to track where the stolen files were diverted to. I'm not sure. This isn't my area of expertise. But if Garrett got into the source code, if he retraced the steps of the original sender, identified the packet sniffer and the PGP key involved-he might be able to triangulate an IP address."
"In English?"
"Find the saboteur."
"Before, Garrett couldn't even find the problem in his own code."
Dwight's ears turned red. Apparently, the idea that he'd found something Garrett had missed embarrassed him.
In the backyard, one of the smaller boys-John, maybe-ducked under a loose board in the fence. He was carrying a VCR that was much too big for him. It was partially wrapped in a blue towel. He saw me watching from the window and froze. He slid the VCR behind the nearest hibiscus bush and walked toward the house, trying not to run.
The scene made me feel sad down to my bones. I'd seen my share of disturbed children in eight years of PI work, but never so many in one place.
The hell of it was, I wasn't going to talk to the kid about it. I wasn't even going to turn him in. I wondered how many days fanning the Leviathan you'd get for stealing a VCR.
"I talked to Maia this morning," I told Dwight. "She had some information about Pena."
I told him about Maia's conversation with her new pal, the deputy in Burnet County.
Dwight stared at his comic book c
ollection, shook his head. "That doesn't mean anything."
"You knew he was adopted?"
"Of course I knew. What difference does it make?"
"The harassment of the software developers, the disappearance of Adrienne Selak-I think that's just a small sample of what Matthew's capable of. His main agenda with Techsan isn't about money. It's personal-retribution."
Dwight opened the trundle bed cabinet at his feet, yanked out an empty duffel bag. "I told you-there's no reason the deal would be personal. He never met the Techsan principals before."
"Matthew's age," I said. "Born around '67. Clara Doebler, Jimmy's mother-she supposedly had an abortion around then, but just before Jimmy died he was searching birth certificates, asking questionslooking for that lost child. He was told that the child had been bornand I think Pena was the one who told him."
"And you think…" Dwight's throat seemed to be closing up. He shoved underwear into his bag. "That's nuts."
"Clara had already lost custody of one child," I said. "She couldn't bear to lose another one-not completely. She never had the abortion. She gave the child up instead. You said it yourself: Pena is treating this takeover differently. He's making it the centrepiece of his career. What better way to get revenge on your birth family than building on their ashes?"
"I've known Matthew almost fifteen years. He's never given any indication. He would never-"
His voice faltered.
"The night Adrienne drowned," I said. "You weren't with Pena, were you?"
Dwight yanked a Hawaiian shirt from the drawer-the blue one with the yellow lotus designs.
"All right," he admitted. "I lied. I lied to protect a guy who's helped me ever since college. When I walked aft that night, I ran into Matthew. I didn't see Adrienne go over.
I just saw Matthew, frantic-coming my way, looking for help. We roused the whole damn ship together, didn't have time to talk about exactly what had happened. Later, when people started questioning us, I saw a kind of fear sink into Matthew's eyes, like he was suddenly realizing what they'd accuse him of. He said that I'd been with him when Adrienne fell. He told what had happened, only as if I'd arrived a few moments earlier. I had to make a splitsecond decision. I went along with it. I didn't know what else to do. But he didn't kill her, Tres."
I'd spent years listening to people's stories, learning to separate out the lies. There wasn't anything suspicious in Dwight's voice. The night of Adrienne's drowning, some cop had merely committed the cardinal sin of interrogation-not isolating the witnesses prior to questioning. Somebody had done that, given Pena the chance to shape Dwight's testimony before he made it.
"You're chasing ghosts," he told me. "If you want me to, I'll go to the police, change what I said about that night on the boat. I'll help in any way I can. But if you go to them, say this is about some longlost child-"
"They'll think what the police have thought all along. That the obvious answer is the right answer. And all along, they've been wrong."
He threw his duffel bag on the bed. He went to the bookshelf, pulled out a drawer, and began tossing papers and pictures. There were photos from Dwight's childhood, report cards, Christmas cards, college transcripts.
"You want to save your brother," he said.
"Of course."
"But you don't want the truth."
My face turned hot. "What are you not telling me, Dwight? What's got you so upset?"
He shoved the drawer closed, stared at the documentation of his childhood on the shabby carpet. He kicked an old report card. "I was trying to get up the nerve, Tres.
Now, I'm not sure it's a good idea."
"What?"
"You said Garrett couldn't find the back door in the software. I don't think that was his problem at all. I'm wondering if you already knew that."
He stared at me, waiting for some kind of confession.
"I'm sorry, Dwight. I'm lost here."
He picked up a leather belt from the shelf. "The way the back door was written, the way it's embedded in the program. Not many people could do that, Tres. Not many programmers are that good, at Techsan or anywhere else."
Only then did I see where he was going.
The walls of the little dark bedroom seemed to be closing in. I wanted to open the window, turn on the lights.
Dwight curled his belt into a limp snake, shoved it into his bag. "Your brother wrote that damn back door, Tres. I'm positive."
CHAPTER 33
This time, I didn't fail to inform Maia.
On our way to the marina, I told her and Detective Lopez what Dwight had said about the back door in the software-how Garrett might've been responsible. My only consolation was that Maia and Lopez didn't know what to do with the information any more than I did. Lopez said he'd call the High Tech Unit, bat the problem over to them.
When we got to Point Lone Star, Clyde Simms was waiting at the gate, and he did not look delighted to see us.
He removed the giant chain with the CLOSED sign, then followed us down to the water on his motorcycle. He unlocked the security gate at the pier, walked us down to where the Ruby, Too was docked.
"What's the matter?" he growled at Lopez. "Six hours' questioning, and you didn't get enough out of me?"
"Thanks, Mr. Simms," Lopez said courteously. "You can wait here."
Clyde glared at me, like he wanted to have a very long conversation over beer and brass knuckles, but he said nothing.
On board Ruby's yacht, aluminium fingerprint powder covered the hatches and railings like pixie dust. Some evidence tech had left a surgical glove and a Ziploc bag on the pilot's deck. I could see Maia Lee taking mental notes, her defence lawyer's mind assessing the trial potential-sloppy handling of evidence, amateur crime scene processing.
We went below. The Dell workstations were gone. There was nothing but dustless squares on the tables.
"Machines were impounded by High Tech," Lopez told us. "Early reports-they'd been wiped clean. Nothing to trace without a deep recovery method-very expensive, very timeconsuming. Kind of like my machine."
Maia had been lifting pages on Ruby's wall calendar. She stopped on November, turned her attention to Lopez. "Your machine?"
"Yeah, counsellor." Lopez mimed a strike on a keyboard. "I got mail. Message came in when I got back to the office this morning. I read it, hit the print command, froze my system to hell. You should've seen the look on our tech guy's face when he rebooted and got a screenful of static."
"The killer," I said, understanding. "The killer emailed you."
Lopez looked like he was trying to swallow a foul taste out of his mouth. "Anything's possible, Navarre, once you get some local press. The Techsan buyout, Jimmy Doebler's murder-both have been in the news the last few days. We got our share of hackers in Austin. Could be some seventeenyearold looking for something to do on his summer vacation. But this emailer-he claimed he shot Jimmy Doebler. He knew the calibre of the weapon. He also said something interesting-said it was a hideandseek game now. He thanked me for closing my eyes and counting to ten while he slipped off."
The boat rose and fell gently under my feet.
"Someone's toying with you," I said. "It isn't Garrett."
"Of course not, Navarre. It's never Garrett. I got an APB out for the killer and that's the first line of the description-It's not Garrett. Now if you don't mind, maybe you could tell me what you expected to find here?"
Maia brushed past him, went into the sleeping cabin. We followed.
Nothing had changed in the bedroom as far as I could see. Maia studied the photos, the Lake Travis wall map with its green and red pushpins. The nightstand drawer was open. There was no gun inside.
"Scuba equipment?" Maia asked.
Lopez shook his head. "We don't know what was normally aboard, and Mr. Simms wasn't much help. He said Ruby often stored a dive tank or two on board. There weren't any when we got here. That doesn't necessarily mean anything."
Out the small porthole window, the lake was
hazy. A momentary slice of sun made its way through the rain clouds. Smoke rose from a barbecue at the public park. A hawk circled the woods.
Lopez's cell phone rang. He answered, listened for a long time.
Maia came over to me.
"The email," she said. "Pena."
"If it's wiped off the hard drive, there's no proof."
"In the spring, I got several messages like that, Tres. I'm sure."
Lopez was looking at the ceiling. He said into the phone, "Yeah. You're probably right about that."
More listening, then his face paled. He looked at me, offered me the cell phone. "For you. Just thought I'd screen it for you first."
I took the call.
"Navarre?" a man's voice said. "Ben Quarles. Firearms."
"Quarles." I forced myself to sound upbeat. "Miss me already?"
His next exhale was a strong wheeze, maybe what passed for riotous laughter down in the ballistics lab.
"I wanted to follow up," Quarles said. "I got the full picture after you left-well, shit.
Listen, that was a tough break about your brother."
"Not your fault."
"Yeah, well. I did a little digging-ran a Drugfire search on the casing. We keep a database of casing images from all over the state, goes back two, three years. It's hit or miss, depending on what individual departments choose to enter into the system, but I ran a check for similar firing pin impressions on spent brass, just to see if I got any hits." "And?"
"And I got one. Maybe. Scored a cold hit on a case from Waco, robberymurder back in 1987. It's an old damn case. Waco PD just put all their unsolved homicides on the network last month. Sheer luck-"
"The case," I interrupted.
"Robbery gone bad. Perp broke in the back door, surprised the occupant, shot this old guy four times. The victim's stuff was rifled through-boxes of papers, a file cabinet overturned, all his IDs and money taken. Perp wasn't too bright.
Dragged the body all the way into the bathroom, dumped it in the tub, ran water over it.
Who knows, maybe he was shaken up, got some stupid idea he could scrub the scene clean, then realized it was no good. Despite that, he got away-no leads, no prints.
