Guilty Minds

9

I’d forgotten what life was like without a cell phone. I had phone calls to make but no way to make them. I had to walk two blocks to find a pay phone that worked. It was covered with an ad for Red Bull. The holes in the mouthpiece were clogged with some mysterious brown substance that probably wasn’t Red Bull. When I remembered I had no quarters, I got change at a deli on East Capitol Street. I returned to my Red Bull pay phone, fished out Gideon Parnell’s business card from the breast pocket of my suit jacket, and called his mobile number.

He answered right away. “This is Gideon Parnell,” he said in his basso profundo.

“It’s Nick Heller.”

“You’ve spoken to my friend.”

“I’ll take the case.”

“Excellent. You have everything you need?”

I told him I thought I did and that I’d call back immediately if I didn’t. I understood that we were on a tight deadline — we had barely twenty-six hours before Slander Sheet’s deadline.

Next I wanted to call Dorothy, but her cell number was programmed into my iPhone, and I couldn’t remember it. Not so long ago I took pride in my ability to memorize numbers, but that seemed to be decaying, an evolutionary casualty of technology. Instead, I called my office and asked to be transferred.

“I called you a couple of times,” Dorothy said when she answered. “You must have been in your meeting with the justice.”

“What’s up?”

“I had that brainstorm I was talking about. How to hack into Lily Schuyler.com.”

“Tell me.”

“I used an old tried-and-true hacker trick — SQL injection. I found the customer log-in area on the website and started running script against the username and password fields. Trying to cause a buffer overflow.”

“Right,” I said, though I had no idea what she was saying.

“So I created a query in code, thirty characters long, and put that query into the username field. It dumped me into the back end of the website — the index.”

“I thought you were uncomfortable doing hacker stuff like that.”

“I am. But time is really short, and I was desperate. Also, it’s Gideon Parnell. I’d do anything for that guy. You know he marched with Martin Luther King?”

“Yep. I appreciate it.”

“I’ll e-mail you when I have something useful.”

“Oh, that reminds me. I don’t have a phone or a laptop anymore.”

“Anymore?”

“I’m temporarily back in the Dark Ages, and I don’t like it as much as I thought I would.”

I explained.

“Well, they’re both password-protected, the phone and the MacBook Air,” she said, “so you’re not at risk of losing information. More interesting...” I heard her tapping away at her keyboard. She seemed to be talking to herself.

Dorothy had set up both my phone and my laptop and given them to me plug-and-play. I’m no computer savant, but in my business you can no longer be ignorant about technology, unfortunately. At the very least you need to hire people who are good at it and let them do their thing. She insisted that Macs are extremely secure devices, and that the iPhone is the most secure phone you can get. I do what she recommends.

“Hold on one second,” she said. There we are. You have Find My iPhone turned on, very nice, and... oh, crap.”

“Now what?”

“They just turned it off.”

“How do you know this?”

“I see you had it at the Supreme Court building, but then it goes dark. That tells me they turned the phone off as soon as they stole it, and probably the laptop, too, to defeat the tracker. Someone knows what they’re doing. That’s too bad.”

“I’m going to need my phone and computer replaced.”

“Stop in at an Apple Store. There’s a couple in the district. Or else I can bring them to you.”

“How’s that?”

“You’re going to be in DC for at least a couple of days. My brother’s in the hospital in Prince George’s and I want to pay him a visit.”

“I’m sorry to hear about your brother.” I wasn’t aware that she had a brother. She was extremely private when it came to her personal business. “Ask Jillian to book us a couple of hotel rooms in DC,” I said. “It’s being billed to Shays Abbott, so make it a high-end place, something nice. Would you mind taking a piece of luggage for me?”

“Your go-bag?”

“Right.” In my office I always keep a packed carry-on case with a few days’ clothing and a shaving kit and miscellaneous necessities. Just in case I have to go somewhere out of town at the last minute.

“Sure. Nick, how did they know it was you?”

“The guy who stole my laptop, you mean?”

“Right.”

“I haven’t figured that out yet, but I will.” I told her I’d check back in with the office a little later on, since I was no longer reachable anywhere, and I hung up.

I summoned a mental image of the fake cop who’d guided me to my locker at the Supreme Court. I concentrated, did a mental inventory and download. I remembered him being about my height but broader and heavier. He had a blond buzz cut and his face looked flushed. Eye color? Gray, maybe, or light blue, but light in any case. Age? Somewhere in his thirties. I was putting together what birdwatchers and military types call the GISS, which stands for “general impression of size and shape.” For birders, it’s a way to make a field identification when you don’t know a bird’s species.

I turned away just when the pay phone rang. I picked it up.

“Nick Heller’s line.”

“Nick?” It was Dorothy.

“Yup.”

“Oh, good. As long as you stay by that pay phone all day, we should be fine. I’ve found our girl.”