Lost & Found

First 2 3/4 chapters of a thriller novel. The first draft is complete and I'm entering rewrite/polish mode.

Have had some preliminary interest from an agent acquaintance. Interested in feedback on the prose and pacing, and whether it makes you want to read more.

Thanks...







One


Tonight his name is SpiritGurl1167.

Tonight he is a brunette, slightly overweight college coed with a penchant for stuffed teddybears, rock climbing, and a band called Coldplay. He is active in a neighborhood theater group, having recently starred as Juliet in a local production of Shakespeare’s classic. Rave reviews. He loves to shop at Hollisters, has been known to purchase undergarments at Victoria’s Secret, and used to have a boyfriend, but is now “on a break”. SpiritGurl1167 is bored, home alone on a Friday night with a bowl of popcorn, and just looking to make new friends.

He tapped on the keyboard, surfing through various chat rooms looking for interesting conversation; browsing Internet meeting areas dedicated to every imaginable addiction, interest, and fling. Internet Relay Chat (IRC) rooms where thousands from around the world were online in dedicated areas discussing subjects ranging from the latest movie releases to the pleasures of intercourse with little people. AOL discussion areas that, while more censored than the wild west mentality of IRC, still attracted hundreds of people in the various chat groups. He recognized many of the names he saw in these rooms, but they didn’t know SpiritGurl1167. They were friends of BeachBabe911, PinkJammies33, and others. He’d forgotten most of the names, but he had reached out and become them all. The glow of the monitor sparked in his eyes as he watched the conversations flash past. He jumped in on a few of the chats, tossing some bait into the waters, and discovered an AOL chat room dedicated to gothic fashion where someone with the screen name Damsel4536 was leading a discussion on women’s piercings. Reaching up to touch the screen, he felt the words scrolling past pulse like heartbeats beneath his fingertips. A bead of sweat rolled down the hollow of his cheek and fell in an oily splatter on the computer mouse sitting next to the keyboard. It shimmered in the jagged light thrown off by the bare bulb hanging above his head. Pop music streamed quietly from speakers set in front of the monitor. A selection of Black Eye Peas songs he had programmed into his online MP3 player.

He heard a moan and his hands dropped from the keyboard. SpiritGurl1167 was waking up.

Behind him the screaming began. Small, sharp whimpers that grew into a hoarse scream that bounced around in the maze of pipes that criss-crossed the unfinished ceiling. He could feel them vibrate.

Punching a key, he closed the chat windows on the screen in front of him. One by one the boxes of scrolling multicolored text vanished. Punching another key, the streaming music changed from bouncy pop to the solid steel of heavy metal. A Megadeath and friends playlist. He turned up the volume until the driving guitars clashed with the scream behind him. His favorite mix. He reached up and jerked the tiny chain connected to the swaying bulb above him, leaving the room in shadows broken only by the hazy glow of the computer screen.

He sat in the darkened room and stared at the monitor. Rhythmic beats of light burst across the plasma face in time with the music. Callouses on his hands, grown from hours of pushups against cinderblock and gravel, twisted as his fingers dug into the arms of the chair. They pushed against the hard plastic padding, trying to claw into the metal frame beneath. The music played, the simple melodies of black skies and crashing lightning, and he felt the heat, like a match on damp straw, building inside him. He let it grow, enjoying the agitation, his body tightening into a coiled spring. This was the peak. The chase. The capture. It all led up the moments of utter terror when they wake up, bound and blindfolded, and know that God lied to them, and that maybe good girls do get punished.

The screams behind him finally began to fade into rhythmic, whimpering grunts until they were lost beneath the waves of music. Glancing down, he noticed that the pulsating images on the computer monitor reflected like a burning house on the muscular, slippery skin of his chest. The skin, not pale, but virgin white, was like an empty canvas waiting for a stroke of color. Sinewy lines of muscle in his arms moved like snakes as he dug at the chair. SpiritGurl1167 moaned again, louder. He breathed deeply and allowed the musty air to smother the fire raging inside him. She yelled. SpiritGurl1167 wanted to know where she was, why she was tied up, and who the hell he was. All the usual questions he had heard time and time again. He sighed.

He turned off the music blaring from the computer speakers. The sudden silence seemed to paralyze her and the only sound was a whispered gasp that bounced around the room.

He closed his eyes and begun to sing quietly to himself.

“Come out Virginia..Don’t make me wait..You Catholic girls start much too late...”

He turned and smiled, though, being blindfolded, she couldn’t see him. SpiritGurl1167 huddled in darkness across the room. He stood and walked over to where she sat, pinned in a metal chair, squirming in the shadows. The sharp coolness of the smooth cement floor crawled across the soles of his feet and climbed, wrapping around his naked body like a wet sheet. He pulled a chain dangling above her, and light from another bulb, hanging from a frayed, swinging cord, lit her in a pale yellow gloom. He inspected the ropes that had her tightly bound to the chair, and the chair to the stained wooden beam stretching from the floor into the maze of pipes and wires of the unfinished ceiling above. She was wearing jeans, streaked with grease,dirt, and motor oil like she’d been dragged across a parking lot. He smiled at the memory. Her Florida State t-shirt, torn and stretched, had a tomahawk emblazoned across her chest. Chop chop. He reached out and gently touched her hand.

“Hope the noise didn’t wake you,” he said, his high-pitched voice strained, like steam escaping from a cracked boiler.

She jerked away and screamed. The ropes around her neck tightened and the scream choked off to violent gagging. With a sigh he grabbed her shoulders and placed her back upright in the chair. He squatted down and leaned in toward her. His nose brushed against the scratchy wool of the scarf that had been tied around head and kept her blind. He sniffed and could smell the heat, like ozone, coming from her ragged breath. A mixture of fear, tart and tangy, and the remnants of the chloroform that had kept her sedated during the ride out of town.

He touched her hair. Long and brown it curled softly around and through his fingers. Like warm cotton and smelling of fruit. Her t-shirt, stretched and twisted, did little to hide the ample softness of her chest. He felt the fire begin to build again and took a deep breath. Her breath coming in chunks, she swallowed in an effort to find words. She tried to speak, her words thick and slurred.

“Who are you? Why are you doing this to me? Look, my parents have money. They’ll pay you...”

“Pay me to do what?” he responded, staring at her. His voice was almost friendly. She heard the words, but couldn’t see his face. He knew that if she could, she’d still be screaming. A face like his, thin, pockmarked, and uneven, didn’t fit into her little world of trendy clubs, Spring breaks, and sorority pledge nights. He could never have a piece of that world, but he could certainly give her a piece of his.

“You know, to let me go. They’d pay you a lot of money.” He could see the ropes stretching around her with each heaving breath.

He stood and walked over to a table that sat in the middle of the room.

On the table was another computer. Attached to the computer was a video camera. Other cables extended from the back of the computer, including one that snaked up through the beams in the ceiling, through the floor above, and connected, like his other toys, to a very secluded on-ramp to the information highway. In his world of loneliness and desire, technology was the great equalizer and the Internet was his playground.

“Did you hear me? I can get you money..” The child’s voice was gone. She screamed in a clashing mixture of fear, frustration, and anger. The sound echoed off the floor and cinderblock walls of the room and buzzed around him like an annoying gnat.

He looked at the monitor that was attached to the computer. The video of the girl was still running. SpiritGurl1167 sitting at a desk, computer keyboard on her lap, smiling and talking to the camera.. It was exceptional quality for an Internet web camera. All the pretty people had web cameras these days. He noticed she often reached up to brush the long brown hair from her eyes. It was cute. Recorded over a period of weeks from various I-C-U group web chats, the looped video had been teasing his electronic audience for hours now.

He tapped a couple of keys. The video stopped and was replaced with a live view from the camera that sat on the table. He positioned the camera so it pointed at the chair and checked the computer’s monitor. The picture was somewhat grainy, but the girl was clearly visible and in focus. He adjusted the camera’s angle to ensure that, even squirming and jerking against the restraints, her every movement was captured on the monitor. Tapping on the computer’s keyboard, he set the camera to record. He crossed the room to a closet hidden in shadow. His bare feet made no noise as he walked.

He turned toward the girl. She was twisting around in the chair. He saw the waves of desperation, like a beating heart, racing around as her head flung, back and forth, listening for some sound to indicate his position.

He opened the closet and pulled down a green surgical gown. He slid the garment over and down his naked body. The starched fabric was like electric sandpaper as it rubbed against his skin. Also hanging in the open closet was a brown stocking, stretched, torn in spots, and scabbed with coppery stains. He lifted it gently and sniffed. The faintly metallic scent brought back a rush of memories.

“Where are you? What are you doing? Say something..please?” She was still struggling against the ropes, her every movement reflected on the screen.

He slipped the stocking down over his head. The room was in blurry shadow. He moved across the floor and flicked a switch. Powerful spotlights mounted on the cement blocks of the surrounding walls flooded the room in a sterile glow.

He walked over to a cart that sat up against one of the walls and rolled it over next to the chair. The sound of the wheels squeaking across the concrete floor echoed. She whimpered

“What’s going on? Who are you, you sonofabitch? LET ME GO!” .

He turned, looked at the camera, and nodded. He wondered how many were watching. Looking at the cart, he made his choice, and picked up a soldering iron. He plugged it into an electrical socket that hung from the ceiling and the tart smell of heated metal slowly filled the room. SpiritGurl1197 sniffed, like a deer picking up on an approaching forest fire. But she couldn’t run, so she thrashed against the ropes.

Squatting down, he tried to hear the words that were spilling out of her in a garbled whisper. Barely audible, she was reciting the Lord’s Prayer. Beneath the stocking he smiled. He reached around and pulled off her blindfold. She blinked rapidly and shook her head trying to come to terms with the brightness. Before she could adjust, he leaned in, brushed her ear with his stocking covered lips, and whispered.

“Don’t you hate final exams?”

Her skin burned.


Two


Brian Deavers glanced away from the laptop screen and tried to focus on the red digits of the digital clock sitting next to him. He blinked a few times and was finally able to bring the numbers into focus. Two a.m. He’d been at it for over eight hours and barely had anything. He stood and stretched, the joints and bones throughout his six foot frame cracking sharply, like knots on a burning log.

There’s something I’m missing, he thought. He walked across the floor of his apartment, dodging the empty soda cans and candy bar wrappers that had been carelessly tossed around his feet, and turned down the volume on the CD player that had been blasting his collection of Nine Inch Nails disks. He preferred the music loud when he was exploring. Fortunately, his neighbors, all twenty-somethings too, also kept late hours. Of course, they spent their nights partying at the clubs instead of wearing out computer keyboards. Brian walked over to a desktop computer sitting on a card table in the corner of his den slash bedroom slash office Next to it, he could see the green glow of the online indicator on the DSL modem that fed Internet access to the network of computers he maintained in the apartment. The monitor connected to the computer flashed as the system continued to cycle through Internet Protocol (IP) addresses looking for targets of opportunity. Each address represented another computer or network device connected to the Internet. An IP address could be associated with a computer physcially located anywhere in the world, but, if he was able to get in, it might as well been sitting right next to him.

Brian returned to the laptop. It was a Sony model running the Linux operating system and had a wireless networking card inserted. Attached to the card was a thin cable that led to a 16 inch antenna perched on the window sill. The laptop was also connected to the Internet, but not through Brian’s home network. It was, via the long range antenna, borrowing a wireless connection from an electronics store located down the block. Brian had long ago cracked the security key of the in-store network and often borrowed their bandwidth for some of his more, uh, sensitive activities. Better safe than sorry.

Brian tapped on the laptop’s keyboard and brought up a command prompt window. With a few more keystrokes he again connected to the IP address he had discovered the night before. He launched some of his custom code against it and quickly was able to gain access to what appeared to be a high level directory listing that displayed the titles of the various buckets of information on that computer. It was the names of these buckets that had intrigued him when he had hacked his way in earlier that day. It was clear to Brian that he had stumbled into some sort of web server that was focused on storing and delivering multimedia through the Internet. The most interesting part was that it appeared to be a private server. There were millions of web servers available on the world wide web. Internet browsers could point to www.cnn.com to catch the latest breaking news, www.google.com to search for information, or any of the other various corporate or hobbyist sites. Most were publicized and easily found via search engines or just by guessing a name and putting www dot in front and dot com or net behind it. Some were not so publicized. Many had no names associated with them and could only be reached by knowing the IP address associated with the computer that it was running on. IP addresses were commonly represented as dotted notation strings such as 122.34.23.56. Each of the four numbers in an IP address was called an octet and could range from 1 to 255. Simple math extrapolated that there were roughly 4,228,250,625 possible IP addresses. It was easy to hide in a neighborhood that big. That’s why Brian, and others like him, spent their time trying to find the hidden gold nuggets that were scattered across the Internet. The web server he had come across appeared to be well hidden and well protected. A definite nugget.

Brian had spent hours carefully picking his way through multiple layers of security just to get to the level where he was able to view the core directories of the system. He’d had to create custom code as the system seemed impervious to all the known exploits that he kept in his digital toolbox. Exploits were pieces of computer code designed to break specific security layers, such as firewalls, allowing access to the data behind it. Many firewalls and operating suystems such as Windows and Unix had holes in the software that could be taken advantage of by using the right exploit. As holes were discovered, hackers, good and bad, would develop and distribute code to take advantage of the flaw in the software. Most did it as an learning exercise and to alert the software makers of their faulty products. These were the white-hats, or the good hackers. Others developed exploit code primarily to exploit the flaw and take over the systems the software was running on. These were the black hats, or the bad hackers. Simple classifications and titles served up by the media. But Brian knew that, as in the rest of life, nothing was ever black or white. People like him ran in technological grey areas as they skated across the information highway.

After multiple rounds of build the code, try the code, Brian had reached the point where he could access the system to a level where he could see the directory structure of the web server. There was no welcome page to the web site. Whenever he would input the IP address of the site into his Internet browser, a solid black page would appear. No welcome message, no menus, no graphics, no anything. There was nothing thee. This led Brian to believe that there had to be another way into the site - some hidden page or script that would allow entry. Chances are that hidden page or script was stashed in one of he directories he was seeing. He just couldn’t get to it - yet.

He could also tell, based on the Internet traffic originating from the system that the web server was sending out a steady multimedia stream. It could be music, video, or some combination of both. But it was encrypted and Brian could not decipher the content. Progress. But curiosity demanded that he dig further.

Brian turned off the CD player and sat in the silence. He could faintly hear a dog barking through the wall he shared with the apartment next door. Paging through the notes he had accumulated in his attempts to access the mysterious web server, he made a mental note to package up the exploit code he had developed and forward it on to a few friends that he worked with in the Treehouse. Brian was a big believer in sharing the wealth, and good exploit code was worth more than gold to his fellow cyberspace cowboys. He thought about going for a run to clear his head, but remembered that there had been a late night mugging several weeks ago in his Toco Hills neighborhood. The Northeast Atlanta suburb had seen rapid growth over the last several years as home and apartment prices in the tony Druid Hills area just south of Toco Hills had taken off. Suburban sprawl. It was beginning to become difficult to tell where metro Atlanta ended and the rest of the state began. Brian had lived in Atlanta all his life. His parents still had the house he grew up in over in Buckhead. It was worth a fortune now, well the land it was on was anyway, and they were thinking of selling and moving to Arizona to be closer to his sister and her children.

The phone rang. Brian smiled. Jennifer must be home, or better yet, on her way over to see him. He pushed aside the notes that were covering the handset and picked up the phone.

“Hey, tell me you’re on your way over” , he said.
“Nope, sorry, you were in major geek mode when I left earlier, so I figured you and your computer wanted to be alone tonight.”
Brian laughed. “Sorry, been working on a real ball buster. How was work?” Jennifer was a bartender at Thunder Island, one of the new trendy bars on Pharr Road in Buckhead. The Buckhead in-crowd was changing and Peachtree Street was littered with empty buildings with faded signs reading World Bar, Lulu’s Bait Shack, Mako’s Cantina, and others attesting to the shift.
“Fine. Some techie convention in town over around Lenox so we were packed. Tips were okay. Scott asked if you could stop by in the next couple of days. The server is acting up again. Or as he put it, ‘the monkey in the box is fucked’.” Brian smiled. Scott Tyson, the manager of Thunder Island, had heard Jennifer talk about Brian’s skills with computers and had hired him to do sporadic maintenance and trouble shooting on the network used to manage the nightclub. Much needed cash under the table for a few hours work here and there.

After saying good bye to both Jennifer and all chances of getting laid that night, Brian grabbed a piece of stale pizza and stared at the screen in front of him. The web server was still sending the media stream, represented by a rapidly scrolling display of numbers, letters, and symbols across his screen. The only people who would be able to see and or hear what the server was sending would be those who had entered a specific password or key. To anyone else, the transmitted stream would appear to be garbage characters, as it did to him now. He needed that key to be able to decipher the encrypted data and turn those scrolling characters into whatever the server meant for its trusted users to experience.

Or did he?

If he couldn’t obtain a legitimate key to decipher the encrypted media stream, maybe he could develop some illegitimate code that would break the encryption. Two hours later he had his first round of test code ready. It was based on the source code developed several years prior, by a hacker out of Germany, to defeat the then current version of Microsoft’s Digital Rights Management (DRM) software. Microsoft introduced DRM and its associated encryption scheme to allow the online media distribution of protected or copyrighted content. The theory behind DRM was that web sites could securely sell and deliver, via live streaming or stored files, licensed content such as CD’s and Hollywood movies across the web because the DRM system ensured that only legitimate purchasers of the content would be able to access it. Joe consumer could log onto a web site, pay a fee, and download or listen to the latest Kilers CD or watch the outtakes from Napoleon Dynamite. However, like any supposedly secure system, someone eventually found a way to crack the DRM encryption scheme. Microsoft had had to make changes in future versions of the DRM software to plug the hole.

These days everyone was getting into the idea of online TV. The Internet was full of multimedia broadcasts ranging from streamed sporting events to kids with portable web cameras broadcasting from their bedrooms. Brian was curious to see what this hidden web site he had discovered was sending out.

His fingers flying across the keyboard, Brian went through several cycles of running his code against the stream and making changes based on the results. He smiled as he worked. This is what it was all about. Me against the machine, he thought. With a little patience, all walls eventually come down. An hour later he hit the right combination of code and timing, and this wall fell as well. The stream encryption broken, he punched a key on the computer to bring up a media player. The software would be able to interpret and display the stream as it was meant to be played, be it video, audio, or both.

As the media player appeared on screen and began loading the incoming stream, Brian stood, stretched and retrieved a beer from a six pack he had bought the day before. Celebration time, he thought. He noticed one of the plastic tupperware bowls in the fridge appeared to have sprouted a greenish-white fuzz across the top. He resisted the urge to play “guess what’s beneath the mold” and went back to the computer. He saw that a video was now playing in the main screen of the media player. He heard sounds coming from the speakers and turned them up. Let’s see what these guys are serving up, he thought.

The video was bright, and while he could see movement, the size of the picture was too small to make out any real detail. He enlarged the picture so that it filled the screen of the monitor. Much better. The screen showed a bunch of bouncing, blurry green shapes. Bushes, or trees. Out of focus. Someone was carrying a camera and walking through some sort of greenery. Through the speakers he could hear the rustling of branches as the camera brushed by. He could also hear sharp, raspy breaths as if the someone was breathing right next to the microphone of the camera. Whoever was holding the camera appeared to be slowly moving through the blurry green foliage. The camera was bouncing and occasionally Brian could see a flash of blue as it pointed skyward. Suddenly, the view jostled, as if the holder had tripped, and glare from the sun flashed across the monitor and briefly washed out the picture on the screen into a dazzling white image. Sloppy film making, Brian thought. He was beginning to think he was watching a home movie of some kind.

The camera paused and he saw the greenery come into focus. Definitely bushes. Through the speakers he heard a faint car horn and what sounded like a door being slammed. After a few moments the camera began moving again, but the bushes seemed to be getting thinner and he could make out other shapes ahead. He leaned in closer to the screen. He could see a little house in a patch of grass. The camera zoomed in and he could see it was a small wooden playhouse with a swing set attached. The camera shifted. Now he could see a bigger house. Brick with white shutters. Whoever was holding the camera was obviously in the back yard of this house. The camera zoomed in and panned around the back yard. The only sound was the raspy breathing. He could see the playhouse, a fence surrounding a pool, and a massive barbeque grill next to the fenced in pool as the camera panned across the yard. Brian reached over and took a swallow of his beer, not moving his eyes from the screen. He was starting to get a creepy feeling.

The camera then zoomed in and focused in on a door that led from the backyard into the house. Brian could see the red frame surrounding the white paneled wood of the door, the slightly curled paint shavings where the sun had begun to crack the surface. He could see the sun’s glare bouncing off the glass that ran across the top half. Suddenly the view started bouncing again and the house loomed ahead as the camera approached. “He’s running to the door,” said Brian to himself, at the same time wondering why he called this person “he”. Maybe this is just some footage from Cops or one of those reality shows, he thought. But there was no music. No narration. No sound at all except the raspy breathing. It reminded him of that movie The Blair Witch Project, where student film makers had wandered around the Maryland countryside in search of a legend. He chugged the rest of his beer and reached for another slice of pizza.

The camera approached the door to the house. The view stayed below the level of the window in the door and when it finally stopped moving, all Brian could see on the screen was the blurry white wood of the door. Either the guy was really short, maybe a child, or he was crouching, Brian mused. He saw a hand reach out and turn the knob on the door. It was obviously locked and the hand retreated. After a moment, the hand reached out into the view of the camera again and Brian was able to see that, even out of focus, it was definitely a man’s hand, large, knotty,and with brown tufts of hair on the knuckles. He also noticed that the fingernails appeared to be blurred, almost as if they had been chewed down. The hand reached up and pressed, in several places, palm first, into the wood of the door.

Suddenly the camera view rose and Brian was staring at the glare of the sun off the glass of the door. He briefly saw a face in the glass. A reflection of a face partially obscured by a camera. The face of the film maker. Before he had a chance to register any details of the face, the camera view on screen seemed to sway and he heard a sharp intake of breath. The picture jerked and he heard a crash. There was no more door. He could see right into a hallway in the house. Brian briefly saw a tricycle against a wall before the camera holder, he, rushed into the house. In a flurry of movement that, at the same time, seemed like slow motion, Brian saw stairs come in and out of focus. The camera bouncing. Raspy breathing that almost drowned out the sound of footsteps running up the wooden stairs. Running, turning corners. A dresser, a bed, some kind of big screen television - they all rushed by, one second in focus, the next out. Opening doors. Slamming doors. Brian pinched his nose, his stomach tight, but his eyes glued to the screen. He felt dizzy. It was like a video game on crack, the motion was nauseating.

Then he saw the man. In a corner of some room staring at the camera. The camera quickly panned around the room, but then everything slowed to a crawl. Brian could see curtains from an open window flapping around the man. Blowing around the still figure with his fists clinched and a look of determination on his bearded face. Wood plank floors. Support beams all around. It looked like an attic. The camera stayed fixed on the bearded man. Brian could hear him speak. His voice seemed to echo through the speakers. “What do you want? Get the fuck out of my house!”

Bearded man stood frozen, as if standing on the edge of a creek. Ready to jump over, but afraid he might miss the other side.

The camera stayed focused. Brian could see the struggle in bearded man’s eyes. “Jump the bastard,” Brian yelled. “It’s just a stupid camera!”

Brian heard a faint voice through the speakers. “Honey? What’s all the banging around?” The camera swung and centered on a closed door. Then it swung back. Bearded man’s eyes were dancing around and he yelled. “Susan! Run, get out of the house!”

Brian heard a crack, like two pieces of wood slapped together. A dark smear appeared on bearded man’s face and a piece of his head seemed to fall away. Then he fell. The camera focused briefly on bearded man convulsing on the floor, a liquid pool flowing from his head onto the wood. Brian stared at the screen, his mouth open, and he could feel his heart thrashing. He lifted the bottle of beer to his mouth and didn’t even notice it was empty.

The screen went dark. Movie over, except there were no credits, and Brian was pretty sure that was no movie.

He sat staring at the darkened screen, the sound of muted static coming from the speakers. A door closed next door and he jumped. “Neighbors coming home, chill out”, he whispered. I need another beer, he thought.

He heard a clicking sound from the computer speakers. The picture went from black to a blurry green. It was the same footage started over. That explained the constant media feed from the site. It was looping the same video over and over again. He watched for a few moments as the camera’s trek through the foliage repeated itself.

Suddenly a loud beep came from the speakers and Brian flinched. He had been trying to pick up additional sounds from the video and had turned the volume of the speakers to their maximum. A message box appeared on his computer screen, blocking a portion of the playing video. Brian noticed immediately that it was network message box, the type used by members of the same network to send quick text messages to one another. But no one else was on Brian’s network.

Uh oh, he thought. Busted. Maybe by someone from the electronics store. They probably wouldn’t be real happy that he’d been using their bandwidth for the laptop’s Internet access.

He reached up to shut down the wireless network interface when text appeared in the message box. His fingers froze over the keyboard.

....YOU’VE SEEN US....AND NOW I SEE YOU.....

Brian stared at the blinking cursor. Somehow he knew it wasn’t from anyone at the electronics store.




Three


I glanced out the filmy window that separated me from the heat of a late Georgia Summer. The afternoon sun was beating down on the flowers that the building’s landscaping crew had recently planted outside. And from the way they were already wilting in the heat, I was pretty sure they’d be putting in a new batch within a month.

“Mr. Truman, I’m sorry, but as I told your secretary outside, I just don’t understand why you don’t have more...”

I turned to face the woman sitting across my desk. She was blonde, maybe mid-40’s; the classic prom queen grown into country club diva. She still had the body to put all the right curves into the sun dress she was wearing, but it was an easy bet that most of them were under surgical warranty. I leaned back in my chair and sighed. “She’s not my secretary.”

“Excuse me?” She looked confused.

I really hated these jobs. The money was good, but the happy endings were few and far between. Come to think of it, the beginnings and the middles pretty much sucked too.

“Ms. Oliver is not my secretary.”

She waved her fingers dismissively in the air and her eyes squinted like she’d bitten on a lime. “What-”

I raised my hand. “-ever. Yes, I know. But it’s important to me. Look, Mrs. Carson, we located your husband. You have the address of the hotel where he is, or least was, as of yesterday. We even met with him to let him know that you had hired us to find him.”

She was nervously tapping her fingers on the desk. Her nails, long and red, flashed when the light pouring through the window hit them just right. She stared at me, then stared at the window, then back at me.

“And he was there with a woman?” Her voice seemed to rise and slightly crack on the last word.

“There was a woman in the room with him. Yes.” I really hoped she would stop there. The pieces of the puzzle pretty much spelled things out:: husband, woman-not-wife, hotel room. What was left to ask? But they always asked. She leaned in and whispered.

“Did you catch them, you know, doing it? Having sex or something?”

Or something?

“Mrs. Carson, everything is in the report that we gave you..”

Her voice rose. “I know what’s in the goddamn report! I hired you to find my husband. I think that gives me the right to know what he was doing when you did!”

I shrugged. “As I said, he was in a hotel with -”

“Did you at least get her name?”

I slowly turned my chair to face the window. Through the sparse patch of trees outside I could see the line of cars, bumper to bumper, crawling up Piedmont Road. “No, I didn’t get her name.”

“Uhhh, and why not?” She asked the question as if she couldn’t believe she would have to.

“Because you hired us to find your husband. You didn’t hire us to find her.”

She stood up and walked over to the window. I wondered if she noticed the wilting flowers outside or was just staring out at the traffic inching past. She quietly asked, “What did he say?”

I squirmed in my chair. Just a little. “Mrs. Carson, it’s all there in the-”

She abruptly turned from the window, walked to the desk, and grabbed the bound folder. Her face contorted in anger as she ripped through the pages. She was shouting now and shaking the folder by the throat. “The report? This is what’s in the damn report!”

I leaned back and stared at the tiles of the ceiling.

“ ‘Tell the bitch that I’m on vacation!’ That’s what’s in the report! You’re telling me that’s what he said?!”

She stood rock solid still, the only movement a twitch that made her eye look like a faulty light bulb. I shrugged and nodded. “I’m sorry.”

She dropped into the chair. Life seemed to slide off her like a sheet. She stared at it as it all fell to the floor and pooled around her.

She looked up and seemed to focus somewhere over my shoulder. “What do I do now?”

“You might want to think about a vacation yourself”, I replied.

Several hours later, I was packing up to head home. Nina Simone’s Gin House Blues was playing softly on the CD player. I reached down to grab the duffel bag lying beneath my desk, winced at a familiar pain in my shoulder, and instead had to step out of the chair and squat down to retrieve the bag. Predictably, Kendra chose that exact moment to walk into my office. She made a point of looking but not looking and tossed the day’s actvity log onto my desk. I noticed that she had changed into a slinky black skirt and top. I noticed again. She wore the outfit well. No surgical warranties required there.

I stood up and sat back in my chair, eyebrows raised. “Latest in office attire?”

She leaned up against the doorframe of the office and brushed something off her skirt. “Have a date later. What do you think of the wrapping paper? Too much?”

I took a moment to look her up and down. “Too little.” I saw she was barefoot. “I’m picturing 6 inch stiletto heels with that outfit, but hey, the wiggly toes thing works too.”

“I’m not putting those damn heels on til I absolutely have to. Besides, I’m not sure of the value of clothing advice from a man who’s idea of going formal is wearing a belt.” Kendra Oliver, holding up well at age 35, legs up to there, and a face, while not beautiful, was irresistibly cute, had worked for Lost & Found ever since I had met her in the course of a missing child case several years before. During that time she had had little success in her efforts to dress up my sense of fashion or recent taste in women. She squinted as she leaned in towards the speakers that sat beneath my desk. “And what are you listening to? One day it’s Van Halen, the next this old jazz stuff.”

“I have my moods.” Unlocking the bottom desk drawer, I grabbed my pistol, a 9mm, checked the safety, and placed it in the duffel bag, careful to wrap it in a towel I kept just for that purpose. “We close out the Carson case?”

Kendra stepped over and sat down in the chair opposite me. She glanced around the room and rolled her eyes, obviously taking in the scattered stacks of papers strewn about the office.

“Yeah. She settled up and rushed out of here. Think she was late for an appointment with either her botox counselor or a divorce attorney.”

I stared up a the ceiling tiles, counted ten dots, and let out a breath full of frustration. “New rule Kendra. Missing husband. Missing wife. Any variation of the above where a hotel room is likely to be involved. Give it to the puppy.”

Kendra smiled and cocked her head. “Sorry boss, the Dogs were out picking up Hebron, that bail jumper out of Knoxville. They took Junior with them to give him some real experience. Or how did Tommy put it? ‘Time to see what the little pecker is made of..’ ” She didn’t break the look. “How’s the shoulder?”

“Shoulder is fine. Knee is fine. ” I paused and looked out the window. Traffic on Piedmont was still bumper to bumper. In the fading evening light, headlights crawled by, and brake lights flashed like fireflies. I could no longer see the flowers that lined the landscaping outside, but I hoped they were relishing the respite from the sun and digging their roots a little deeper to prepare for tomorrow’s pounding. I met Kendra’s questioning eye. “I’m fine.”

I stood and stepped towards the door. “After I take a look at the log I’m out of here. Going for a workout then home. If any of the guys check in before you leave, tell them to call me on my cell. I especially want to hear how the puppy did on the bail recovery. And if you see Swain, tell him he better start filling out his own paperwork or I’m going to start taking a cut of his payouts.” I turned back. “Oh, and have fun on the date thing. Don’t hurt him.” I paused. “Well, don’t kill him anyway.”

Kendra smiled sweetly, stuck her tongue out, and brushed by me.

The Lost & Found holding offices are not spacious. They are not plush, and they are certainly not going to win any decorating awards. Kendra had done her best to try and give the place some color and comfort, but aside from the couches in the reception area, which primarily served as spare beds anyway, and the scattering of decorative plants, more dusty than green, the rooms are outfitted in basic wood and steel. Functional, durable, and able to hold up under the occasional pounding fist or spilling coffee. Needless to say, the occasional suspicious and secretive spouse aside, we didn’t entertain many clients here. So I was surprised a few minutes later when Kendra’s voice whispered across the intercom speaker on my phone. “Kirby, you have a visitor. New business I think.”

I’d forgotten we even had an intercom.

I walked out to find Kendra talking to a tall, middle-aged man wearing a charcoal colored sport coat. No tie. He held a steel briefcase by his side and was politely declining the cup of coffee Kendra was offering. He turned as I approached and He seemed to be studying me. You get used to it in this line of work.

According to the card he handed me, my visitor was one Randall Graham, CEO of Secure Point Technologies. I invited him back to my office.

“Mr. Truman, I appreciate you taking the time to meet with me. And I apologize for not calling ahead, but this is a rather delicate business matter that I want to get resolved as soon as possible. It seems we have a missing employee.”