Snow Blind

27

The mansion was silent except for the regular clicking of Grace’s keyboard. Harley, Annie, and Roadrunner were grabbing catnaps after working most of the night. She was exhausted herself, and sometimes, while she waited for a new line of programming to run, she’d feel her eyes start to flutter closed. But then she’d remind herself of what Magozzi had said about a killer being at the end of that chat room thread, and that woke her right up. There were three dead men in snowmen already, but maybe they could make sure there wouldn’t be a fourth.

The firewalls were getting harder and harder to break through. They’d found a second, then a third, and now Grace was beginning to wonder how many more there were, and how much time they had.

She pushed herself away from the desk and glared at the monitor. ‘I can’t keep doing this,’ she said aloud, and then suddenly realized how true that was; that of course she couldn’t keep doing this – and she didn’t have to. It was like when she used to keep Charlie’s big bag of food underneath the overhanging shelf in the pantry, just because that’s where she’d always kept it. Every morning she’d bend to retrieve it, and a lot of mornings she’d stand too quickly, forgetting the overhanging shelf, and bang her head. How many times had she bumped her head before it occurred to her to move the dog food? It didn’t matter how intelligent you were; sometimes routine and procedure blinded you to the obvious solution.

She heard Harley’s footfalls coming up the stairs just when she was about to go down and wake him. An unappetizing, vegetal miasma preceded him into the room, and Grace recognized the odor of his latest obsession – some hideous herbal tea he brewed secretly every morning and tried to push on all of them. God knew what was in it, but Grace hoped it was legal.

‘I’m not drinking that tea, Harley,’ she said without turning around.

‘You need more green stuff in your diet.’

‘Not in liquid form, I don’t.’

Harley set a mug of the stuff on her desk anyway. ‘I had on the tube while I was brewing this. They’ve got another snowman.’

Grace closed her eyes. They were already too late.

‘Don’t look like that, Grace. It wasn’t here. It was in Pittsburgh. So maybe our killer isn’t even in the state anymore. Maybe he’s on the move. Or maybe it’s a copycat. They don’t know much yet. Either way, we’ve got to get into that chat room.’

‘I was just about to come downstairs. I have something new to try, but I need you and Roadrunner.’

‘And Annie.’

‘Actually, we can let her sleep. You and Roadrunner can handle it.’

‘Are you shitting me? If I don’t wake her up and we crack into this thing, she’ll have my balls on a skewer. Be right back.’

Five minutes later Roadrunner stumbled in behind Harley, screwing his fists into his eyes like a kid trying to wake up. He found his way to the coffee machines, pushed the button on the one that held his Jamaican Blue, then stood there, watching it drip. It didn’t pay to talk to Roadrunner until he was well into his first cup. He wouldn’t hear anyway.

He was wearing a new Lycra suit this morning – lilac in color – and once Grace looked at him, she had a hard time pulling her eyes away. She’d never seen him in pastels before. He looked like a long, tall Easter egg.

Annie hadn’t even bothered to get dressed – she was wearing her silk kimono robe and a pair of bedroom slippers with marabou puffs. ‘Thanks a lot, Grace,’ she grumbled as she shuffled over.

Grace smiled. ‘I take it Harley broke down your bedroom door.’

‘Oh, hell, that would have been a kindness. Damn bastard sneaked in. Guess what it’s like to wake up and see that big hulking brute standing over your bed, watching you sleep.’

Harley sighed. ‘It was a Sleeping Beauty moment. I think my heart stopped.’

‘Pig.’ Annie flounced down at her computer in a flutter of shedding marabou.

‘Hey, Gracie thinks we’re going to bust this thing wide open. She wanted to let you sleep, but I’d thought you’d want to be here.’

‘Thank you, Harley. That was very thoughtful. But you’re still a pig.’ She turned to Grace. ‘So there’s a new snowman in Pittsburgh. Something real bad is going on out there, Grace. What’s your new plan?’

‘We’ve been going at this thing all backward. I thought we’d stop trying to break down the steel door and go to an open window.’

‘Oh, honey, do not talk in metaphors. The sun isn’t up yet.’

Grace swiveled her chair to look at them. ‘We’ve been trying to crack into a chat room with the best security we’ve ever seen. We’ll get there eventually, but it’s taking too long. I thought we could try piggybacking Harley’s and Roadrunner’s virus on the specific chat threads that caught our attention in the first place, let the virus lead us into the thread, if not the site itself.’

‘Goddamn,’ Harley murmured, then there was the sound of his knuckles cracking as he flexed his fingers over the keyboard. ‘This is going to work.’

Annie said, ‘Then why didn’t you think of it, genius? It’s your stupid virus.’

‘Because, Sleeping Beauty, I am a bull of a man. Charging right in, breaking things down, that’s what I do. This subtle stuff is for girls.’

‘Smart girls.’

‘I’ll give you that.’ He shoved the disk containing the virus program into his drive.

‘Way to go, Grace,’ Roadrunner gave her a sleepy smile as he set an extra mug of his precious Jamaican Blue on her desk. ‘That’s pretty far outside the box for someone who said we weren’t allowed to use that virus for anything except shutting down kiddy porn sites.’

Grace nodded. ‘Viruses bad,’ she reiterated their mantra, then grinned at him. ‘Except when they do good.’

‘It’s pretty good at shutting down the porn sites.’

‘And it was pretty good saving a thousand lives back in Wisconsin last summer.’

Roadrunner’s smile broadened at the memory. ‘You like my new suit?’

‘I love your new suit.’

‘Roadrunner, get your skinny ass over here. I can’t get the damn thing to launch.’

It took exactly ten minutes for Roadrunner to pull up the entire chat thread on his monitor. ‘I think I’ve got it.’

The others were behind his chair in an instant, reading over his shoulder in absolute silence.

Harley finally straightened. ‘Oh, man. This is all bad.’

‘And sad,’ Annie added.

Grace’s eyes had been busy while the text had been scrolling by, but when it stopped, she glanced up at the top of the monitor and frowned. ‘Look at the subject line of this thread,’ she pointed.

Harley squinted at it. ‘Bitterroot. Wow, that’s the second time in two days that name’s come up. How weird is that, and what the hell does it mean?’