American PI

by Jude Hardin

  “I’m going to do something crazy tonight,” I said. “Probably the craziest thing I’ve ever done. I don’t want to do it, but I don’t see any other way.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about breaking into Klein Fertility and searching their records for donor number one-seven-three. The information on him has to be there somewhere, right?”

  “I don’t know. But breaking into their office seems a little extreme. You could go to jail for doing that.”

  “I really don’t know what else to do,” I said. “I can’t just sit around and wait for Everett to show up dead somewhere.”

  Laurie leaned over and kissed me.

  “I have to get ready for work,” she said. “I hope you’re here when I get home tonight.”

  “I hope so too.”

  She reached into her purse and grabbed her keys. She slid one off the ring and handed it to me.

  “That’s my door key,” she said. “I have another one in my car.”

  “Thanks. Maybe you’re right. Maybe I should research the other siblings before I do anything else.”

  “I think it would be wise. Anyway, I better jump in the shower now.”

  While Laurie got ready for work, I started going through the list of Everett’s brothers and sisters from the Sibling Boards website. I was still at it when she left the apartment. It took me over two hours to do the research on all of them.

  As far as I could tell, the rest of them were still alive. But that didn’t ease my mind much, because none of the remaining twenty-eight had turned twenty years old yet. Tyler Chadwell was the closest, and his birthday was still over six months away.

  Maybe it was a coincidence that Stephanie Vowels and Philip Davenport had both been murdered the day they turned twenty, but I didn’t believe it. I was convinced that their sperm donor father had killed them, and that he was going to kill Everett Harbaugh on Saturday.

  I took a shower and changed into the clothes I’d brought from my camper. I was checking my phone for messages when I realized I’d been running around the past couple of days without my revolver. It was still stuffed behind one of Laurie’s couch cushions. I’d forgotten about it. I grabbed it and slid it onto my belt.

  There was one message on my phone. It was from the cleaning service. They said it was going to cost three hundred and fifty dollars to put my Airstream back in order. I called, but they were gone for the day. I left a voicemail for them to go ahead with the job.

  It was eight o’clock by the time I left Laurie’s apartment. It had been dark for a couple of hours. Klein Fertility had closed for business at five, and it was a safe bet that everyone was out of the office by now.

  I walked out to my Jimmy and saw right away that both of my back tires were flat. Not just one of them, but both of them, which meant the spare wasn’t going to do me any good. At that moment, I decided that I really was going to kill Shelby Spelling. She’d gotten me back, all right. Three-fifty for the camper, and now a pair of truck tires that I knew were going to run at least a hundred apiece. All because I’d smeared a little ketchup and Big Woofa sauce on her windshield. Unbelievable.

  It was too late to buy tires tonight. Everything was closed. I walked back into the apartment and called a cab. While I was waiting for it to get there, I searched the computer for the nearest rental car place.

  It was 8:56 when I got there. I paid the taxi driver and walked inside with my wallet open.

  The clerk standing at the counter wore a dark blue business suit and a white shirt and a striped tie. Incongruous with the professional attire, his hair had been dyed bright orange and his ears had been stabbed with multiple silver studs. I guessed he was in his early twenties and hadn’t been out in the sun any of that time. You could see the veins in his cheeks. He was running the tape on his computerized cash register.

  He looked up at me when I walked through the door.

  “I’m sorry sir, but we’re closed.”

  “The sign says nine o’clock.”

  “And it’s nine now.”

  “No it’s not,” I said. “It’s two minutes till. I need a car.”

  “I’m afraid that’s going to be impossible tonight. We open at seven in the morning, if you’d like to come back.”

  I shook my head. “I can’t wait until seven in the morning. I need a car tonight.”

  “There’s a place called Rent-A-Gem over in Mandarin,” he said. “They rent used cars. They’re open until ten, I think, if you want to give them a try.”

  I slapped my debit card on the counter. “I need a car tonight. It’s an emergency. I don’t have time to play around.”

  “I’ve already closed out my—”

  “I don’t care. I’m not leaving here until you rent me a car.”

  He reached for the phone, but I grabbed his wrist before he had a chance to pick it up.

  “I’m going to have you arrested,” he said.

  “No you’re not. You’re going to open that register back up, and you’re going to rent me a car. You want to know why? Ever hear of a motorcycle club called the Five Points Posse? Their leader, a sociopath known as Fatso, happens to be a good friend of mine. Fatso weighs over three hundred pounds. That’s why they call him Fatso. For some reason, he hates pale, wormy little retail clerks who pierce their ears and color their hair. He hates them so much, he could probably be persuaded to have a few of his chain-toting psycho thugs follow one of them home sometime. Maybe even tonight. It’s still early for guys like me and Fatso.”

  “All right,” he said. “Let go of me. It’ll take about fifteen minutes to reboot the system.”

  I let go of his wrist.

  “Great,” I said. “I’ll just sit over here and have a cup of coffee while I wait.”

  “That coffee’s been there since this afternoon.”

  “Then I’ll make a fresh pot. Don’t worry, I can manage. You just tend to your business there.”

  He tended to his business, and I stepped over to the waiting room and built a pot of coffee. While it brewed, I thumbed through a copy of Sports Illustrated, and it reminded me that the New York Yankees and the Florida Marlins were supposed to have played game five of the World Series this afternoon. I supposed they had, barring a rainout. I turned on the little television set in the corner, switched it to one of the sports channels, and waited for the rolling text at the bottom of the screen to show the score.

  Florida won. Now they were up three games to two. One more win and they would be the world champions of baseball. Friday was a travel day, and game six would be played Saturday afternoon at three o’clock in New York. If all went well, I would invite Everett Harbaugh and his parents out to watch the game with me. If all didn’t go well, Everett would be dead and I would be in jail.

  I switched off the television and poured myself a cup of coffee. I kept pacing and looking at my watch until the clerk finally called me back over to the counter. It was almost ten o’clock by the time I got out of there. I left the parking lot with a brand new Chevrolet Caprice, and the clerk left the parking lot with a bruised wrist and a bruised ego.

  I was just happy that he didn’t call my bluff. If there was anyone in the world who wasn’t going to do me a favor, it was Fatso from the Five Points Posse. I’d made sure of that the other night at Arenque’s when I pointed a gun at his crotch.

  I stopped at a pharmacy and bought a box of examination gloves. The kind doctors and nurses use. The only color they had was an embarrassing shade of purple, but I was hoping that nobody would see me wearing them anyway. I was counting on it.

  I drove south for a couple of miles, and then took a left. My destination was on the right, a few blocks past the hospital. I steered into the driveway two buildings beyond Klein Fertility and pulled around to the back, out of sight from the road. I turned the headlights off and killed the engine. It was dark back there, and quiet except for the traffic passing by.

  I opened the trunk and found the tire
tool. I figured I would break into the sperm bank the same way Shelby Spelling had broken into my camper. I didn’t think there would be a burglar alarm. After all, who’s going to steal sperm? There’s always plenty to go around for free.

  I donned a pair of the sexy purple gloves, slinked across the shadowy parking lots and made my way over to the Klein building. I stepped up to the back door, the employees’ entrance. It said AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. I jammed the tire tool into the space between the door and the jamb and gave it a quick jerk. The wood splintered with a loud crack and the door swung inward and some lock parts jangled to the floor. I quickly stepped inside and switched on the miniature flashlight I keep on my keychain, found a chair and shoved it against the door to keep it closed.

  To the left there was a small desk and some cardboard boxes stacked against the wall and a portable partition with a bunch of lab jackets hanging on hooks. The partition ended a few feet from the wall on the right side, creating a doorway that led to the laboratory. There were sinks and cabinets and machines and microscopes. Everything looked very clean and state-of-the-art.

  Against one wall, there were a series of stainless steel chests. Their shiny round lids had little steering wheels on top of them, like the watertight hatches you see on ships, and signs behind them warned that liquid nitrogen was in use. On the front of each chest there was a toll-free number to call in case of emergency.

  I figured those were the freezers where they kept the specimens. I wondered how many gallons they kept in those things, and I wondered what would happen if I opened them and allowed the cold air to escape. My fourteen-year-old brain considered all that for a few seconds, and then I moved on.

  There was a metal door with a lever-type knob at the far left side of the lab. I walked over there and opened it and stepped through and let it close behind me. The numbered doors lining the corridor on the other side reminded me of the examination rooms at a doctor’s office. Same kind of setup. I opened door number three and scanned the room with my flashlight. There was a couch against the wall and a coffee table with a bunch of magazines spread on top of it. Obviously, these were the rooms where they sent the donors to “produce a specimen.” I wondered if the nurse ever came in and gave them a helping hand. My fourteen-year-old brain again. I couldn’t help myself.

  The corridor ended in a T, with perpendicular hallways leading left and right. I chose a direction, navigating as quickly as I could. To the left there was a waiting room and a reception window, and to the right there was what I’d come for: the front office.

  Behind the computer monitors and phones and desks and chairs and file cabinets, hundreds of clients’ charts lined shelves that ran from the floor to the ceiling. Now all I had to do was find the chart for donor number 173. Piece of cake, I thought. I figured I would be out of there in ten minutes, maybe less.

  I grabbed a stepstool and started with the folders on the top shelf, working left to right, pulling them out and looking at the numbers stenciled on the covers. Unfortunately, the charts weren’t arranged the way I thought they would be. They weren’t categorized sequentially, by number. I guess that would have made too much sense. Instead, they were in alphabetical order.

  And of course I had no clue what 173’s name was. If I’d known his name, I wouldn’t have had to break into the sperm bank in the first place. Now I faced thousands of patient records that, for me, were in random order.

  I stepped off the stool, stood back and looked at the shelves, thinking it would probably take all night to go through the charts one-by-one. A daunting task, to say the least, and one I didn’t have time for. I needed to find another way.

  I figured there was a cross reference somewhere that matched the numbers with the names. I opened desk drawers and file cabinets, searching for a volume the size of a phonebook, but I never found anything like that. What I did find was a list of user names and passwords that someone named Bobbi had scribbled on a sheet of copy paper. It was in the back of a drawer, in a file marked LIQUID NITROGEN MATERIAL SAFETY DATA SHEET.

  Bobbi must have considered the file a relatively safe place to stash her secret paper. When I thought about it, I supposed it was. OSHA required the Material Safety Data Sheet to be on site, but the employees there at Klein Fertility probably never had any use for it. If a problem ever came up, a leak or a spill, they were probably trained to call the emergency number on the front of the freezers and let the experts take care of it. So it was a fairly safe bet that nobody ever looked at the file, and anyone who did would already have access to the company’s computer programs anyway. Anyone except me, of course.

  I sat at one of the desks and turned on one of the computers. The monitor blinked on. I sat there and stared at it, hoping it wouldn’t illuminate the front window enough to be seen from outside.

  A screensaver with the Klein Fertility logo and a dozen or so icons finally stabilized in front of me. I clicked on the icon that said RECORDS and got a screen that required a user name and password. There were five sets on the cheat sheet I’d found in the file cabinet. None of them was labeled, and I knew from experience in similar settings that a program as exclusive as this one would probably only give me three chances to log on. After that, I would be locked out and referred to administration.

  If that happened, I was doomed. Or, rather, Everett Harbaugh was doomed. If I couldn’t log onto the database, there was no other way for me to find the donor’s name in time to save him.

  I started at the top of the list. I typed in Bobbi72 GTR969902, and got some red text over the log-in box that said USER NAME AND PASSWORD INCORRECT!

  Of course it was incorrect. For all I knew, Bobbi72 GTR969902 was Bobbi’s log-in information for her personal email.

  I tried the second user name and password on the list, got the same result. Now I had three more to choose from, and only one more chance to log on successfully. It felt like a game of Russian roulette, only it wasn’t my life that was on the line. It was Everett Harbaugh’s.

  I stared at the piece of copy paper Bobbi had written her information on, trying to find some sort of insight into her thought process, essentially trying to see something that wasn’t there.

  I told myself to just do it. Just pick one and go with it.

  And then I did.

  Of the three remaining lines of text, I selected the one in the middle. There was no rhyme or reason to my choice. It was totally random.

  I typed Bobbi7290 into the user box, and G96T99R02 into the password box, and then I waited.

  And waited.

  Then, slowly, against the odds, the home screen for the Klein Fertility Client Record Database faded in. Success! Finally, I was where I needed to be.

  Unfortunately, a few seconds later, while I was still celebrating my little victory, I noticed the blue lights flashing outside the window.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  I got up, darted over to the window, and peeked through the blinds. A police cruiser had pulled into the bicycle lane in front of Klein Fertility and was creeping by at about five miles per hour. One car, one officer. I could see him staring toward the window and talking into the microphone of his two-way radio. I thought he was going to drive away, but then he took a right into Klein’s parking lot and gunned it toward the back of the building.

  I bolted back to the computer desk, sat down and stared at the monitor with my fingers over the keyboard, knowing I needed to hurry. Knowing it was a matter of life and death. If that cop walked in and caught me doing what I was doing, it was game over. I would go to jail, and Everett would die.

  There was a search box in the top right corner of the screen. I typed in 173 and hit Enter. And there it was. Three pages of information on a man named Trent Appleton.

  I heard a car door slam. I figured the police officer had gotten out of his cruiser and was walking toward the building now. As soon as he took one look at the back door, he would know there had been a break-in. My only hope was that he wouldn’t charge in by himself, that
he would call for backup and wait outside until another officer or two arrived. It would be the smart thing to do, and I imagined it was department protocol. At any rate, I knew I didn’t have much time. Not enough to figure out how to route Trent Appleton’s information to one of the printers in the office. I needed to get what I could, and then get out of there. Pronto.

  I pulled a drawer open and found a pencil and wrote down Appleton’s address and phone number on the sheet of copy paper Bobbi had used for her crib notes. I folded the paper and stuffed it into my back pocket and killed the power on the computer. I didn’t want anyone to know that the database had been compromised. If anyone found out, Klein Fertility might alert all of their clients to the fact, and then Appleton would know that someone was on to him. I didn’t want him to know anything. I wanted it to be a surprise.

  The wooden legs on the chair I’d jammed against the back door screeched against the rubber floor tiles as the officer entered the building. He hadn’t waited for backup after all. Or maybe another cruiser had pulled in without me noticing. If that was the case, I was toast. One officer would cover the front of the building while the other entered through the rear. No way to escape.

  I peeked through the blinds again. I couldn’t see anything, but it was dark and my field of vision was limited. An officer could have been standing far enough to either side of the building to be completely out of sight from the window.

  I decided to exit through the front door. I really didn’t have much of a choice. I cupped my hand over my flashlight and switched it on and headed back to the hallway. I could see well enough to avoid bumping into the furniture, but that was about it. I walked past the reception window and the waiting area, found the door and clicked open the deadbolt. I turned the flashlight off and put my keys in my pocket.

  “Police,” the officer behind me shouted. “We know you’re in there. Exit through the rear of the facility with your hands laced behind your head. Do it now, and nobody gets hurt.”

  His voice was distant and muffled. I figured he was still back in the lab. I eased through the front door, looked left and right, and took off running across the driveway. I jumped over a stand of shrubs that separated Klein Fertility from the imaging center next door, hurried into the shadows and duck-walked to the back of the building and across the parking lot to the address where I’d started. The Chevy Caprice was there waiting for me. Nobody else was around. I climbed in and started the car, steered it out of the driveway and eased into the flow of traffic. No sirens, no flashing blue lights in my rearview mirror. I’d made it.