When Dooley went off shift, he took the backpack with him. His uncle called to him from the back of the house when he came through the front door. Dooley tossed the backpack into the hall closet. His uncle was sharp enough that he would notice it and, if Dooley lived up to his promise to be straight, probably tell him what an idiot he was for monkeying with it. He went through to the kitchen.
“I want you to come home right after school tomorrow,” his uncle said. “We have an appointment.”
“Appointment?”
“With a lawyer. Just in case this thing goes somewhere.”
What did that mean—goes somewhere?
His uncle looked at him for a few moments.
“You okay, Ryan?”
Other than needing a lawyer just in case the cops decided to charge him with a murder, never mind that smash-and-grab he couldn’t believe he had done, no matter how out of it he was, “Yeah, sure. I’m going upstairs, okay?”
He snagged the backpack from the hall closet on his way.
Twenty-One
Dooley dropped the backpack onto his bed. The smartest thing to do, he knew, would be to go right back downstairs, show his uncle the backpack, tell him exactly how it had come into his possession, and get his uncle to take it to the cops. Graff would probably be suspicious. He’d probably have his own ideas about how Dooley all of a sudden happened to have Mark Everley’s backpack and was surrendering it. But Dooley could describe the guy who’d given it to him and Kevin could back him up that the guy had showed up at the store. Yeah, let the cops handle it. That was the probably the smart thing to do.
But he didn’t do it. He couldn’t. Not with all the stuff that was swirling around in his head.
Gillette was dead.
Dooley had a past with Gillette.
People had seen Dooley and Gillette in some kind of fight together the night Gillette disappeared.
The cops wanted to know, Ryan, did you kill Edward Gillette? (What if Graff found out that Gillette had been with him that night in the house? Maybe it had been a mistake to tell his uncle. Jesus, what had he been thinking? His uncle used to be a cop. Once a cop, always a cop. What if his uncle had second thoughts? What if he felt obliged to tell Graff everything he knew? Or what if Graff decided to question his uncle formally? There was no way his uncle would sit there and lie to a fellow cop. For sure there was no way he’d lie in court, if it came to that.)
There was more.
Gillette had come up to him that time and asked him if he thought someone had pushed Everley off that bridge. Why would he ask that? Boy, there was a question Dooley wished he had asked, but it was too late now.
And now the cops were saying: Hey, Ryan, did you push Mark Everley?
That was something else. Everley was dead. Gillette was dead.
Everley and Gillette hung around together.
What were the chances that two guys who hung around together would die within a couple of weeks of each other, one maybe an accident, maybe not, the other definitely not?
What was going on?
Whatever it was, Dooley didn’t want to be involved in it. He didn’t want to go down for it, either. Which meant that he should at least take a look at Everley’s backpack, be on top of the situation for a change, be the one finding things out instead of the one the cops sprang stuff on. Besides, he’d been the one to find the backpack.
He sat down on his bed and opened the pack. Beth had said her brother always had it with him. He had his camera in it. He had notebooks that he wrote in. Who knew what else was in there?
Sure enough, there were four notebooks, the hard-covered kind, held together with a big rubber band. But there was no camera. He wondered if that was why the homeless guy had taken off without waiting for more money. Maybe he’d already taken the camera. Maybe he’d sold it.
Besides the notebook, Dooley found a lighter, half a pack of cigarettes, a couple of pens, a mechanical pencil, a strip of rubbers, a copy of Hamlet with a school stamp in it, and, in a small pocket, some loose change, and a key ring with three keys on it.
He pulled the rubber band off the notebooks and flipped through them one by one. They were filled with writing and sketches. Stories, Beth had said. She’d said some of them were good. Dooley scanned some pages and read others. He wondered if Beth had actually read any of her brother’s stories. If she had, he wondered what she liked about them. They were all about gangs and violence, guns and knives, grudges and revenge—and they all read like the storylines of direct-to-DVD movies, the kind that no-talent guys like Jean-Claude Van Damme made and that only left the Action/Adventure shelf to go to the sale bin, five-ninety-five, they were that bad.
Some stuff fell out of one of the notebooks—a business card and some scraps of paper. The card was for someone named Bryce Weathers. It had the name, address, and phone number of an immigrant and refugee organization on it and someone—Everley?—had scrawled another name on it: Sara. Dooley flipped it into his wastepaper basket. Ditto the scraps of paper—they looked like something Everley or someone else had photocopied from the newspaper and then ripped up.
He jammed the notebooks back into the backpack and started to re-zip all the zippered pockets s when he felt something else. Something small and hard. He looked into the pocket, but didn’t see anything. He saw then that there was a hole in one of the seams. He pushed his finger through it and poked around. There was something in there all right, something that had slipped into the lining. He pulled it out. It was a small rectangular object, maybe half an inch wide, three inches long, and a quarter of an inch thick. The lettering on it said USB Storage, 512 MB. A data storage device. Dooley wondered what was on it. A guy who wrote stories might write other stuff. It was possible.
He took the device into the middle bedroom, which his uncle had turned into an office and study. The place was lined with bookshelves. It also had a big oak desk and, beside that, a computer table with a gigantic, ancient desktop computer on it. Dooley checked it out, but there was no place to plug in the storage device. They probably hadn’t been invented when Dooley’s uncle had bought the computer, which was probably back when Dooley was in elementary school. Okay, so that wasn’t going to work. He needed a more up-to-date computer. And he knew just where to find a whole roomful of them.
He went back into his room, closed the door, tossed the USB data device onto his dresser, and dropped the backpack into his closet. He would take the device to school tomorrow and check it out. After that, he would do the smart thing. He would tell his uncle about the backpack after he’d checked out the device and let his uncle stickhandle its surrender to the cops. He wondered if the cops would return it to Beth right away or if they’d hang onto it for a while, and supposed that depended on how they were looking at Everley’s death, whether they really thought someone had pushed him or whether Graff had been trying to bluff him.
He got ready for bed and then lay there, thinking about Beth. She was why he’d gone looking for the backpack in the first place. He wanted to make her happy—well, less sad—by offering her something to make up for refusing to be hypnotized. The way it looked now, he’d have to get hit by a car or pushed over a cliff to accomplish that goal. She seemed to hate him as much as she’d loved her brother. And that was something, too, the fact that she was so fierce in her love for Everley. Either the guy must have had some good qualities or Beth was one hundred percent blind to his shortcomings. Dooley thought maybe it was a combination of both.
Dooley grabbed the USB device off his dresser the next morning and dropped it into the pocket of his jean jacket. During his spare, which was just before lunch, he went into the computer room. There was a teacher in there, watching over the equipment while she graded test papers. Her name, Dooley knew, was Ms Hurley, and she was new to teaching. The expression on her face when Dooley appeared and asked if he could use a computer was both startled and nervous. She started to say something—it seemed to Dooley that she was getting ready to say no, maybe to ma
ke up some lame excuse why he couldn’t—when two girls appeared with the same question. Ms Hurley assigned the girls a machine right up front, making them a buffer, Dooley realized, between herself and him. She waved Dooley to a machine at the back of the room, which was fine with him.
He had no trouble finding a place to plug in the device. He had no trouble looking at the directory—there were a lot of files on the device, and, from what he could see, most of them were big. Geeze, did Everley have entire novels on there or what? He clicked on a couple of the files names, but all that came up on the screen was page after page of gibberish. Some files he couldn’t open at all.
“Problem?” said a quiet voice beside him.
Dooley turned cautiously and saw Warren, two computer stations away—when had he come in?—craning his neck to look at the screen in front of Dooley.
“Looks like you’re using the wrong program,” he said. He didn’t come any closer, either respecting Dooley’s privacy or afraid to approach him.
“How do I know what’s the right program?” Dooley said. He’d never taken much interest in computers. He hadn’t had much access except at school and then there had always been so many restrictions on what you could and couldn’t do that what was the point?
“Well, what kind of files are they?” Warren said.
Dooley was lost and felt stupid because of it.
“You want me to take a look?” Warren said.
Dooley hesitated. Then, what the hell, he was getting nowhere on his own. “Yeah, okay,” he said.
Warren got up, came over to where Dooley was, hooking a chair on the way, and sat down next to Dooley. Dooley moved his own chair over so that Warren could get a good look at the screen. The chair legs scraped against the surface of the floor. Ms Hurley looked up from what she was doing. As soon as Dooley made eye contact with her, she looked down again, her cheeks pink. Warren glanced at her, then at Dooley. He kept his voice quiet when he said, “Well, there’s your problem right there.”
“What?” Dooley said.
“They’re not data files.”
Dooley looked blankly at him.
“They’re images, right?” Warren said.
“Images?”
“Photographs,” Warren said, sounding surprised to be telling Dooley what was on the device instead of the other way around. He clicked the mouse, pulling up one screen after another, clicking in and out of them so fast that Dooley didn’t have a chance to even understand what he was looking at. “I didn’t think so,” Warren said at last.
“Didn’t think what?” Dooley said.
“They don’t have the right program here. You can’t access these files.”
“Oh.” Dooley looked at the computer screen. “What kind of program do I need?”
When Warren told him, Dooley didn’t know what to do with the information.
“If you want me to,” Warren said, “you could come over to my place after school. You can take a look at them there.”
“I can’t,” Dooley said.
Warren’s face changed. “Okay, well, whatever,” he said.
“I don’t mean I don’t want to,” Dooley said, because he knew that’s what Warren was thinking. “I mean I can’t. I have an appointment.”
“Okay, so what about now?” Warren said. “I live about a block from here.”
“Okay,” Dooley said.
“Yeah?” Warren said, his mood buoyed.
“Sure,” Dooley said. He reached to pull the USB out of the port at the back of the computer. “Whoa!” Warren said. “You have to eject that first.” He showed Dooley how.
They went out the back way—Warren’s idea, not Dooley’s—and at first Dooley was glad. After all, who wanted to be seen with a geek like Warren? He looked at Warren as they walked quickly across the school yard and saw that Warren was scanning the area, checking, Dooley realized, to see if anyone noticed that he was with Dooley and pleased (it seemed to Dooley) that a few of the people who were outside glanced in their direction. Dooley thought then that maybe Beth was right. Maybe, despite everything that he had done and all the regrets he had, some people did think he was kind of cool. Warren was sure acting as if he did.
It turned out that Warren lived on the next street over from the school. You could see the football field from his bedroom window. The house was small, but neat, and it smelled like a bakery.
“My mom makes extra money baking and decorating cakes,” Warren said when Dooley sniffed the air appreciatively. He didn’t say why she needed the extra money, and Dooley didn’t ask.
Warren’s room was smaller than some bathrooms that Dooley had been in. It contained one single bed; one desk, the kind with the writing surface that you folded down when you needed to work and folded back up again out of the way when you were done; one triangle-shaped computer table that was wedged into a corner, and a set of bookshelves that ran all the way up to the ceiling and that was jammed with books and stacks of computer magazines. Dooley figured he had come to the right place.
Warren sat down at the triangle-shaped computer table and within minutes started displaying photographs on his computer screen. There were dozens of them—landscapes and portraits, shots of people Dooley had seen around school and shots of complete strangers. Shots of Rhodes and Bracey and Landers and of their girlfriends. Shots of Beth that took Dooley’s breath away.
“These are pretty good,” Warren said.
Dooley looked at him. “Why do you say that?”
“The composition is interesting,” Warren said. “And the framing. There are no lampshades growing out of people’s heads, you know, stuff like that that amateurs do. They look into the camera and they just snap away. They don’t think about what’s really there. Plus, the portraits are nice. Tight, you know. Focused right in there on the subject. They give you a sense of what the person is like, you know.” He showed Dooley four different pictures—one of Rhodes, one of Landers and Bracey together, one of a Rhodes and Bracey, and one of Beth. Dooley stared at the one of Beth—she looked like an angel, sweet and kind and soft, which, in a way, she was. But that wasn’t all she was.
“How can you know from a picture what someone is really like?” Dooley said, because he’d seen a different side of Beth, one that was angry and stubborn.
“Well, the ones I know, these pictures pretty much confirm how I feel about them,” Warren said. He clicked the mouse, his finger twitching so fast that the screen went from pictures to disk indexes and folders, to more pictures. Then he said, “Stalled” and looked expectantly at Dooley.
“What?” Dooley said.
Warren nodded at the screen. A little box had popped up, asking for a password. Dooley shook his head.
“These aren’t yours, are they?” Warren said, his tone telling Dooley that he had probably known it right from the start.
“No,” Dooley said. There didn’t seem to be any point in lying. He waited to see what Warren would say next.
Warren looked at Dooley and shook his head. Then he turned back to the screen. “Some of these files are password protected,” he said. “I can’t get into them unless you give me the password.”
“I don’t have it,” Dooley said.
Warren leaned back in his chair.
Dooley looked at the stacks of computer magazines on Warren’s shelves. Warren must know a lot about computers if he had all those magazines.
“There must be some way to see what’s in them,” Dooley said.
Warren shook his head. “You put a password on these files and it’s like locking them up in a safe. If these were my files and I put a password on them and then I forgot the password, it would be like I forgot the combination to the safe. There’d be no way I could get into them.”
Dooley wondered why Everley had files that were as good as in a safe. He said, “There’s always someone who can get into a safe.”
Warren sat quietly for a few moments, staring at the computer screen.
“Whose flash drive is t
his?” he said finally.
“What difference does it make?”
“Most people, when they make up a password, they either make up something complicated that they have to write down or they use something that they know they’re going to remember. If you know the person, you can at least come up with some possibilities—that is, if the password is something that means something to them. If it’s something complicated that they wrote down and hid somewhere, that’s another story.”
“So either the password is written down somewhere,” Dooley said. He thought about all that scribbling in all those hard-covered notebooks in Everley’s backpack, which right now was in Dooley’s closet. “Or it’s something that someone might be able to figure out.”
“Well,” Warren said, “you’ve got the flash drive, so you know who it belongs to, right?”
Dooley didn’t say anything.
Warren stared at the computer screen for a few moments. Then, without looking at Dooley, he said, “It belongs to Mark Everley, doesn’t it? The people pictures—they’re all people he hung around with. And that’s his sister.”
Dooley reached for the flash drive. Warren put out a hand to stop him.
“I have to eject it first,” he reminded Dooley. Then he said, “I’ll take a shot at it if you want me to.”
“You mean, you can figure out how to open those files?”
“I can’t guarantee anything,” Warren said. “But I can try.”
Dooley looked into Warren’s small gray eyes, set in his too-round face with its not-too-great complexion, surrounded by his wispy blond hair.
“Leave it with me overnight,” Warren said. “If I can’t crack it, I’ll give it back to you, no harm done.” When Dooley still hesitated, he said, “Let me try, you know, for my sister. Okay?”
Dooley Takes the Fall Page 16
