The Scarecrow

FOURTEEN: One False Move

On Monday morning I went on eastern daylight time. I wanted to be ready to react when Rachel called from Washington, so I got up early and cruised into the newsroom at six A.M. to continue my work with the files.

The place was completely dead, not a reporter or editor in sight, and I got a stark feeling for what the future held. At one time the newsroom was the best place in the world to work. A bustling place of camaraderie, competition, gossip, cynical wit and humor, it was at the crossroads of ideas and debate. It produced stories and pages that were vibrant and intelligent, that set the agenda for what was discussed and considered important in a city as diverse and exciting as Los Angeles. Now thousands of pages of editorial content were being cut each year and soon the paper would be like the newsroom, an intellectual ghost town. In many ways I was relieved that I would not be around to see it.

I sat down in my cubicle and checked e-mail first. My account had been reopened by the newsroom techs with a new password the Friday before. Over the weekend I had accumulated almost forty e-mails, most from strangers in reaction to the stories about the trunk murders. I read and deleted each, not willing to take the time to respond. Two were from people who said they were serial killers themselves and had put me on their list of targets. These I kept to show Rachel but I wasn’t too worried about them. One of the writers had spelled it cereal and I took this as a hint that I was dealing with either a prankster or someone of deficient intelligence.

I also got an angry e-mail from the photographer Sonny Lester, who said I had double-crossed him by not putting him on the story as I had agreed. I fired back an equally angry e-mail asking him which story he was talking about, since none of the stories on the case carried my byline. I said I had been left out to a greater extent than him and invited him to take all complaints to Dorothy Fowler, the city editor.

After that I unpacked the files and my laptop from my backpack and got down to work. The night before, I had made a lot of headway. I had completed my study of the records relating to the murder of Denise Babbit and had composed a profile of the murder along with a comprehensive list of the things about the victim that the killer would have had to know in order to commit the crime in the manner in which it was carried out. I was halfway through my study of Sharon Oglevy’s murder and was still compiling the same sort of information.

I set to work and was undisturbed as the newsroom slowly came to life, editors and reporters trudging in, coffee cups in hand, to start another week of work. At eight o’clock I broke for coffee and a doughnut and then made a round of calls at the cop shop, seeing if there was anything interesting on the overnight sheets, anything that might take me away from the task at hand.

Satisfied that all was quiet for the time being, I went back to the murder files and was just completing my profile of the Oglevy case when my first e-mail of the day chimed on my computer. I looked up. The e-mail was from the axman, Richard Kramer. The missive was short on content but long on intrigue.

From: Richard Kramer ‹ RichardKramer@LATimes.com›

Subject: Re: today

Date: May 18, 2009 9:11 AM PDT

To: JackMcEvoy@LATimes.com

Jack, swing on by when you get a chance.

RK

I looked over the edge of my cubicle wall and at the line of glass offices. I didn’t see Kramer in his but from my angle I couldn’t see his desk. He was probably in there, waiting to give me the word on who would be taking Angela Cook’s place on the cop beat. Once more I would be squiring a young replacement around Parker Center, introducing this new reporter to the same people I had introduced Angela to just a week before.

I decided to get it over with. I stood up and made my way to the glass wall. Kramer was in there, typing out an e-mail to another hapless recipient. The door was open but I knocked on it before entering. Kramer turned from his screen and beckoned me in.

“Jack, have a seat. How are we doing this morning?”

I took one of the two chairs in front of his desk and sat down.

“I don’t know about you but I’m doing okay, I guess. Considering.”

Kramer nodded thoughtfully.

“Yes, it’s been an amazing ten days since you last sat in that chair.”

I had actually been sitting in the other chair when he had told me I was downsized but it wasn’t worth the correction. I remained silent, waiting for whatever it was he was going to say to me-or to us, if he was going to continue to refer to both of us.

“I’ve got some good news for you here,” he said.

He smiled and moved a thick document from the side of his desk to front and center. He looked down at it as he spoke.

“You see, Jack, we think this trunk murder case is going to have legs. Whether they catch this guy soon or not, it’s a story we’re going to ride with for a while. And so, we’re thinking we’re going to need you, Jack. Plain and simple, we want you to stick around.”

I looked at him blankly.

“You mean I’m not being laid off?”

Kramer continued as if I had not asked a question, as if he had not heard me make a sound at all.

“What we’re offering here is a six-month contract extension that would commence upon signing,” he said.

“You mean, then, I’m still laid off, but not for six months.”

Kramer turned the document around and slid it across the desk to me so I could read it.

“It’s a standard extension we will be using a lot around here, Jack.”

“I don’t have a contract. How can it be extended when I don’t have a contract in the first place?”

“They call it that because you are currently an employee and there is an implied contract. So any change in status that is contracturally agreed to is called an extension. It’s just legal mumbo-jumbo, Jack.”

I didn’t tell him that contracturally was not a word. I was speed-reading the front page of the document until I bottomed out on a big fat speed bump.

“This pays me thirty thousand dollars for six months,” I said.

“Yes, that is the standard extension rate.”

I did the quick, rough math.

“Let’s see, that would be about eighteen thousand less than I make for six months now. So you want me to take less to help you stay out front with this story. And let me guess…”

I picked up the document and started flipping through it.

“… I’m betting I no longer get any medical, dental or pension benefits under this contract. Is that right?”

I couldn’t find it and I guessed that there wasn’t a clause on benefits because they simply did not exist.

“Jack,” Kramer said in a calming tone. “There is some negotiation I can do financially, but you would have to pick up the benefits yourself. It’s the way we’re going with this now. It’s simply the wave of the future.”

I dropped the contract back on his desk and looked up at him.

“Wait till it’s your turn,” I said.

“Excuse me?”

“You think it ends with us? The reporters and the copy editors? You think if you’re a good soldier and do their bidding that you’ll be safe in the end?”

“Jack, I don’t think my situation is what we’re discuss-”

“I don’t care if it is or it isn’t. I’m not signing this. I’d rather take my chances on unemployment. And I will. But someday they’re going to come for you and ask you to sign one of these things and then you’ll have to wonder how you’ll pay for your kids’ teeth and their doctors and their school and everything else. And I hope it’s okay with you because it’s simply the wave of the future.”

“Jack, you don’t even have kids. And threatening me because I do is-”

“I’m not threatening you and that’s not the point, Crammer. The point I’m trying to make is…”

I stared at him for a long moment.

“Never mind.”

I got up and walked out of the office and straight back to my pod. Along the way I looked at my watch and then pulled out my cell phone to see whether I had somehow missed a call. I hadn’t. It was nearing one P.M. in Washington, D.C., and I had heard nothing yet from Rachel.

Back at the cubicle I checked the phone and the e-mail and I had no messages there either.

I had been silent and had avoided intruding on her till now. But I needed to know what was happening. I called her cell and it went right to voice mail without a ring. I told her to call me as soon as she could and clicked off. On the slim chance her phone was dead or she had forgotten to turn it back on after the hearing, I called the Hotel Monaco and asked for her room. But I was told she had checked out that morning.

My desk phone buzzed as soon as I hung up. It was Larry Bernard from two pods away.

“What did Kramer want, to hire your sorry ass back?”

“Yeah.”

“What? Really?”

“At a reduced rate, of course. I told him to cram it.”

“Are you kidding, man? They’ve got you by the balls. Where else are you going to go?”

“Well, for one thing I’m not going to work here on a contract that pays me way less and takes away all my benefits. And that’s what I told him. Anyway, I’ve got to go. Are you making the checks on the story today?”

“Yeah, I’m on it.”

“Anything new?”

“Not that they’re telling me. It’s too early, anyway. Hey, I Tivoed you on CNN yesterday. You were good. But I thought they were supposed to have Winslow on. That’s why I put it on. They were promoting it at first and then he wasn’t on.”

“He showed but then they decided they couldn’t put him on the air.”

“How come?”

“His penchant for using the word motherfucker in every sentence he speaks.”

“Oh, yeah. When we talked to him Friday I picked up on that.”

“Hard not to. I’ll talk to you later.”

“Wait, where are you going?”

“Hunting.”

“What?”

I put the phone down on his question, shoved my laptop and files into my backpack and headed out of the newsroom to the stairwell. The newsroom might have at one time been the best place in the world to work. But it wasn’t now. People like the axman and the unseen forces behind him had made it forbidding and claustrophobic. I had to get away. I felt like I was a man without home or office to go to. But I still had a car, and in L.A. the car was king.

I headed west, jumping onto the 10 Freeway and taking it toward the beach. I was going against the grain of traffic and moved smoothly toward the clean ocean air. I didn’t know exactly where I was going but I drove with subconscious purpose, as though the hands on the wheel and the foot on the pedal knew what my brain didn’t.

In Santa Monica I exited on Fourth Street and then took Pico down to the beach. I pulled into the parking lot where Denise Babbit’s car had been abandoned by Alonzo Winslow. The lot was almost empty and I parked in the same row and maybe even the same space where she had been left.

The sun had not burned off the marine layer yet and the sky was overcast. The Ferris wheel on the pier was shrouded in the mist.

Now what? I thought to myself. I checked my phone again. No messages. I watched a group of surfers coming in from their morning sets. They went to their cars and trucks, stripped off their wet suits and showered with gallon jugs of water, then wrapped towels around their bodies, pulled off their board shorts and changed into dry clothes underneath. It was the time-honored way of the pre-work surfer. One of them had a bumper sticker on his Subaru that made me smile.

CAN’T WE ALL GET A LONGBOARD?

I opened my backpack and pulled out Rachel’s legal pad. I had filled in several pages with my own notes from the survey of the files. I flipped to the last page and studied what I had put down.

WHAT HE NEEDED TO KNOW

Denise Babbit

1. Details of prior arrest

2. Car-trunk space

3. Work location

4. Work schedule-abducted after work

5. Visual-body type-giraffe, legs

Sharon Oglevy

1. Husband’s threat

2. Hiscar-trunkspace

3. Work location

4. Work schedule-abducted after work

5. Visual-body type-giraffe, legs

6. Husband’s home location

The two lists were short and almost identical and I felt sure that they held the connection between the two women and their killer. From the killer’s angle, these were all things that he would seemingly need to know before he made his move.

I lowered the car’s windows to let the damp sea air in. I thought about the Unsub and how he had come to choose these two women from these two different places.

The simple answer was that he had seen them. They both displayed their bodies publicly. If he was looking for a specific set of physical attributes, he could have seen both Denise Babbit and Sharon Oglevy onstage.

Or on computer. The night before, while composing the lists, I had checked and found that both the Femmes Fatales exotic revue and Club Snake Pit had websites that featured photographs of their dancers. There were numerous photos of each dancer, including full-length shots that showed their legs and feet. On www.femmesfatalesatthecleo.com, there were chorus-line shots that showed the dancers high-kicking at the camera. If the Unsub’s paraphilia included leg braces and the need for a giraffe body type, as Rachel had suggested, then the website would have allowed him to research his prey.

Once a victim was chosen, the killer would need to go to work identifying the woman and filling in the other details on the lists. It could be done that way but I had a hunch that it wasn’t. I felt sure that there was something else in play here, that the victims were connected in some other way.

I zeroed in on the first item on both lists. It seemed clear to me that at some point the killer had acquainted himself with the details of each of his victims’ legal affairs.

With Denise Babbit, he had to have known of her arrest last year for buying drugs and that the arrest took place outside the Rodia Gardens housing project. This information inspired the idea of leaving her body in the trunk of her car nearby, knowing that the car might be stolen and moved but ultimately traced back to that location. The obvious explanation would be that she had gone there again to buy drugs. A smooth deflection away from the true facts.

With Sharon Oglevy, the killer had to have known the details of her divorce. In particular, he had to have known of her husband’s alleged threat to kill her and bury her out in the desert. From that knowledge would spring the idea of putting her body in the trunk of his car.

In both cases the legal details could have been obtained by the killer because they were contained in court documents that were open to the public. There was nothing in any of the records I had that indicated that the Oglevy divorce records had been sealed. And as far as Denise Babbit went, criminal prosecutions were part of the public record.

Then it hit me. The thing I had missed. Denise Babbit had been arrested a year before her death but at the time of her murder the prosecution was ongoing. She was on what defense lawyers called “pee and see” status. Her attorney had gotten her into a pretrial intervention program. As part of her outpatient drug-abuse treatment, her urine was tested once a month for indications of drug use and the courts were ostensibly waiting to see if she straightened out her life. If she did, the charges against her would go away. If her attorney was good, he’d even get the arrest expunged from her record.

All of that was just legal detail but now I saw something in it I had overlooked before. If her case was still active, it would not yet have been entered into the public record. And if it was not part of the public record, available to any citizen by computer or visit to the courthouse, then how did the Unsub get the details he needed to set up her murder?

I thought for a few moments about how I could answer that question and decided that the only way would be to get the information from Denise Babbit herself, or from someone else directly associated with her case-the prosecutor or the defense attorney. I leafed through the documents in the Babbit file until I found the name of her attorney and then I made the call.

“Daly and Mills, this is Newanna speaking. How can I help you?”

“May I speak to Tom Fox?”

“Mr. Fox is in court this morning. Can I take a message?”

“Will he be back at lunchtime?”

I checked my watch. It was almost eleven. Noting the time gave me another stab of anxiety over still not hearing anything from Rachel.

“He usually comes back at lunch but there is no guarantee of that.”

I gave her my name and number and told her I was a reporter with the Times and to tell Fox that the call was important.

After closing the phone I booted up my laptop and put the Internet slot card in place. I decided I would test my theory and see if I could access Denise Babbit’s court records online.

I spent twenty minutes on the project but could glean very little information about Babbit’s arrest and prosecution from the state’s publicly accessed legal data services or the private legal search engine the Times subscribed to. I did, however, pick up a reference to her attorney’s e-mail address and composed a quick message in hopes that he received e-mail on his cell phone and would return my request for a phone call sooner rather than later.

From: Jack McEvoy ‹ JackMcEvoy@LATimes.com›

Subject: Denise Babbit

Date: May 18, 2009 10:57 AM PDT

To: TFox@dalyandmills.com

Mr. Fox, I am a reporter with the Los Angeles Times working on the ongoing story about Denise Babbit’s murder. You may have already spoken to one of my colleagues about your representation of Denise, but I need to speak with you as soon as possible about a new angle of investigation I am following. Please call or e-mail as soon as possible. Thank you.

Jack McEvoy

I sent the message and knew that all I could do was wait. I checked the time on the corner of the computer screen and realized it was now after two P.M. in Washington, D.C. There seemed no way that Rachel’s hearing could have lasted this long.

My computer dinged and I looked down and saw I had already gotten a return e-mail from Fox.

From: Tom Fox ‹ TFox@dalyandmills.com›

Subject: RE: Denise Babbit

Date: May 18, 2009 11:01 AM PDT

To: JackMcEvoy@LATimes.com

Hi, I cannot respond to your e-mail in a timely manner because I am in trial this week. You will hear from me or my assistant, Madison, as soon as possible. Thank you.

Tom Fox

Senior Partner, Daly & Mills, Counselors at Law

www.dalyandmills.com

It was an automatically generated response, which meant Fox had not yet seen my message. I got the feeling I would not be hearing from him until lunchtime-if I was lucky.

I noticed the law firm’s website listed at the bottom of the message and clicked on the link. It brought me to a site that boldly trumpeted the services the firm provided its prospective clients. The firm’s attorneys specialized in both criminal and civil law and there was a window marked Do You Have a Case? in which the site visitor could submit the particulars of their situation for a free review and opinion from one of the firm’s legal experts.

At the bottom of the page was a listing of the firm’s partners by name. I was about to click on Tom Fox’s name to see if I could pull up a bio when I saw the line and link that ran along the very bottom of the page.

Site Design and Optimization by Western Data Consultants

It felt to me like atoms crashing together and creating a new and priceless substance. All in a moment I knew I had the connection. The law firm’s website was hosted in the same location as the Unsub’s trip-wire sites. That was too coincidental to be coincidence. The internal portals opened up wide, and adrenaline dumped into my bloodstream. I quickly clicked on the link and I was taken to the homepage of Western Data Consultants.

The website offered a guided tour of the facility in Mesa, Arizona, which provided state-of-the-art security and service in the areas of data storage, managed hosting and web-based grid solutions-whatever that meant.

I clicked on an icon that said SEE THE BUNKER and was taken to a page with photos and descriptions of an underground server farm. It was a colocation center where data from client corporations and businesses was stored and accessible to those clients twenty-four hours a day through high-speed fiber-optic connections and backbone Internet providers. Forty server towers stood in perfect rows. The room was concrete lined, infrared monitored and hermetically sealed. It was twenty feet belowground.

The website heavily sold the security of Western Data. What comes in doesn’t go out unless you ask for it. The company offered businesses big and small an economical means of storing and securing data through instant or interval backup. Every keystroke made on a computer at a law firm in Los Angeles could be instantly recorded and stored in Mesa.

I went back to my files and pulled out the documents William Schifino had given me in Las Vegas. Included in these was the Oglevy divorce file. I put the name of Brian Oglevy’s divorce lawyer into my search engine and got an address and contact number but no website. I put the name of Sharon Oglevy’s attorney into the search window next and this time got an address, phone number and website.

I went to the website for Allmand, Bradshaw and Ward and scrolled to the bottom of the homepage. There it was.

Site Design and Optimization by Western Data Consultants

I had confirmed the connection but not the specifics. The two law firms used Western Data to design and host their websites. I needed to know if the firms were also storing their case files on Western Data servers. I thought about a plan for a few moments and then opened my phone to call the firm.

“Allmand, Bradshaw and Ward, can I help you?”

“Yes, can I speak to the managing partner?”

“I will put you through to his office.”

I waited, rehearsing my lines, hoping this would work.

“Mr. Kenney’s office, can I help you?”

“Yes, my name is Jack McEvoy. I’m working with William Schifino and Associates and I’m in the process of setting up a website and data storage system for the firm. I’ve been talking to Western Data down in Arizona about their services and they mentioned Allmand, Bradshaw and Ward as one of their clients here in Vegas. I was wondering if I could talk to Mr. Kenney about how it has been working with Western Data.”

“Mr. Kenney is not in today.”

“Hmmm. Do you know if there’s anybody else I could talk to there? We were thinking about pulling the trigger on this today.”

“Mr. Kenney is in charge of our firm’s web presence and data colocation. You would need to speak to him.”

“Then you do use Western Data for colocation? I wasn’t sure if it was just for the website or not.”

“Yes, we do, but you will have to speak to Mr. Kenney about it.”

“Thank you. I will call back in the morning.”

I closed the phone. I had what I needed from Allmand, Bradshaw and Ward. I next called Daly ?amp; Mills back and went through the same ruse, getting the same backhand confirmation from an assistant to the managing partner.

I felt that I had nailed the connection. Both of the law firms that had represented the Unsub’s two victims stored their case files at Western Data Consultants in Mesa. That had to be the place where Denise Babbit and Sharon Oglevy crossed paths. That was where the Unsub had found and chosen them.

I shoved all the files back into my backpack and started the car.

On the way to the airport I called Southwest Airlines and bought a round-trip ticket that left LAX at one o’clock and would get me into Phoenix an hour later. I next booked a rental car and was contemplating the call I would need to make to my ace, when my phone started buzzing.

The screen said private caller and I knew it was Rachel finally calling me back.

“Hello?”

“Jack, it’s me.”

“Rachel, it’s about time. Where are you?”

“At the airport. I’m coming back.”

“Switch your flight. Meet me in Phoenix.”

“What?”

“I found the connection. It’s Western Data. I’m going there now.”

“Jack, what are you talking about?”

“I’ll tell you when I see you. Will you come?”

There was a long delay.

“Rachel, will you come?”

“Yes, Jack, I’ll come.”

“Good. I have a car booked. Make the switch and then call me back with your arrival time. I’ll pick you up at Sky Harbor.”

“Okay.”

“How did the OPR hearing go? It seemed like it went really long.”

Again, a hesitation. I heard an airport announcement in the background.

“Rachel?”

“I quit, Jack. I’m not an agent anymore.”

When Rachel came through the terminal exit at Sky Harbor International, she was pulling a roller bag with one hand and carrying a laptop briefcase with the other. I was standing with all the limo drivers holding signs with their arriving passengers’ names on them and I saw Rachel before she saw me. She was looking back and forth for me but not paying attention to what or who was directly in front of her.

I stepped into her path and she almost walked into me. Then she stopped and relaxed her arms a little bit without letting go of her bags. It was an obvious invitation. I stepped up and pulled her into a tight hug. I didn’t kiss her, I just held her. She bowed her head into the crook of my neck and we said nothing for possibly as long as a minute.

“Hi,” I finally said.

“Hi,” she said back.

“Long day, huh?”

“The longest.”

“You okay?”

“I will be.”

I reached down and took the handle of the roller bag out of her grasp. Then I turned her toward the exit to the parking garage.

“This way. I already got the car and the hotel.”

“Great.”

We walked silently and I kept my arm around her. Rachel had not told me a lot on the phone, only that she had been forced to quit to avoid prosecution for misuse of government funds-the FBI jet she had taken to Nellis in order to save me. I wasn’t going to push her for more information but eventually I wanted to know the details. And the names. The bottom line was that she had lost her job coming to save me. The only way I was going to be able to live with that was if I somehow tried to set it straight. The only way I knew how to do that was to write about it.

“The hotel’s pretty nice,” I said. “But I only got one room. I didn’t know if you wanted-”

“One room is perfect. I don’t have to worry about things like that anymore.”

I nodded and assumed she meant that she no longer had to worry about sleeping with someone who was part of an investigation. It seemed that no matter what I said or asked, I was going to trigger thoughts about the job and career she had just lost. I tried a new direction.

“So are you hungry? Do you want to get something to eat or go right to the hotel or what?”

“What about Western Data?”

“I called and set up an appointment. They said it had to be tomorrow because the CEO is out today.”

I checked my watch and it was almost six.

“They’re probably closed now, anyway. So tomorrow at ten we go in. We ask for a guy named McGinnis. He apparently runs the place.”

“And they fell for the charade you told me you were going to pull?”

“It’s not a charade. I have the letter from Schifino and that makes me legit.”

“You can convince yourself of anything, can’t you? Doesn’t your paper have some kind of code of ethics that prevents you from misrepresenting yourself?”

“Yeah, we’ve got a code but there are always gray areas. I’m going undercover to get information that cannot be gathered any other way.”

I shrugged as if to say, no big deal. We got to my rental car and I loaded her bag in the trunk.

“Jack, I want to go there now,” Rachel said as we got in the car.

“Where?”

“Western Data.”

“You can’t get in without an appointment and our appointment’s tomorrow.”

“Fine, we don’t go in. But we can still case the joint. I just want to see it.”

“Why?”

“Because I need something to take my mind off what happened today in Washington. Okay?”

“Got it. We’re going.”

I looked up Western Data’s address in my notebook and plugged it into the car’s GPS. Soon we were on a freeway heading east from the airport. Traffic moved smoothly and we were to Mesa after two freeway changes and twenty minutes of driving.

Western Data Consultants loomed small on the horizon on McKellips Road on the east side of Mesa. It was in a sparsely developed area of warehouses and small businesses surrounded by scrub brush and Sonora cacti. It was a one-story, sand-colored building of block construction with only two windows located on either side of the front door. The address number was painted on the top right corner of the building but there was no other sign on the facade or anywhere else on the fenced property.

“Are you sure that’s it?” Rachel asked as I drove by the first time.

“Yeah, the woman I made the appointment with said they had no signs on the property. It’s part of the security-not advertising exactly what they do here.”

“It’s smaller than I thought it would be.”

“You have to remember, most of it is underground.”

“Right, right.”

A few blocks past the target, there was a coffee shop called Hightower Grounds. I pulled in to turn around and then we took another pass at Western Data. This time the property was on Rachel’s side and she turned all the way in her seat to view it.

“They’ve got cameras all over the place,” she said. “I count one, two, three… six cameras on the outside.”

“Cameras inside and out, according to the website,” I responded. “That’s what they sell. Security.”

“Either the real thing or the appearance of it.”

I looked over at her.

“What do you mean by that?”

She shrugged.

“Nothing, really. It’s just that all those cameras look impressive. But if nobody is on the other end looking through them, then what do you have?”

I nodded.

“Do you want me to turn around and go by again?”

“No, I’ve seen enough. I’m hungry now, Jack.”

“Okay. Where do you want to go? We passed a barbecue place when we got off the freeway. Otherwise, that coffee shop back there is the only-”

“I want to go to the hotel. Let’s get room service and raid the minibar.”

I looked over at her and thought I detected a smile on her face.

“That sounds like a plan to me.”

I had already set the address for the Mesa Verde Inn into the car’s GPS device and it took us only ten minutes to get there. I parked in the garage behind the hotel and we went in.

Once we got to the room, we both kicked off our shoes and drank Pyrat rum out of water glasses while sitting side by side and propped against the bed’s multiple pillows.

Finally, Rachel let out a long, loud sigh, which seemed to expel many of the frustrations of the day. She held her almost empty glass up.

“This stuff is good,” she said.

I nodded in agreement.

“I’ve had it before. It comes from the island of Anguilla in the British West Indies. I went there on my honeymoon-a place called Cap Juluca. They had a bottle of this stuff in the room. A whole bottle, not these little minibar servings. We motored through that whole thing in one night. Drinking it straight, just like this.”

“I don’t want to hear about your honeymoon, you know?”

“Sorry. It was more like a vacation, anyway. It was more than a year after we actually got married.”

That killed the conversation for a while and I watched Rachel in the mirror on the wall across from the bed. After a few minutes she shook her head as a bad thought crept in.

“You know what, Rachel? Fuck ’em. It’s the nature of any bureaucracy to eliminate the freethinkers and doers, the people they actually need the most.”

“I don’t really care about the nature of any bureaucracy. I was a god-damn FBI agent! What am I going to do now? What are we going to do now?”

I liked that she had thrown the we in there at the end.

“We’ll think of something. Who knows, maybe we pool our skills and become private eyes. I can see it now. Walling and McEvoy, Discreet Investigations.”

She shook her head again but this time she finally smiled.

“Well, thanks for putting my name first on the door.”

“Oh, don’t worry, you’re the CEO. We’ll use your picture on the billboards, too. That’ll really bring in the business.”

Now she actually laughed. I didn’t know if it was the rum or my words but something was cheering her. I put my glass down on the bed table and turned to her. Our eyes were only inches apart.

“I’ll always put you first, Rachel. Always.”

This time she placed her hand on the back of my neck and pulled me into the kiss.

After we made love, Rachel seemed invigorated while I felt completely spent. She jumped up from the bed naked and went to her roller bag. She opened it up and started looking through her belongings.

“Don’t get dressed,” I said. “Can’t we just stay in bed for a little while?”

“No, I’m not getting dressed. I got you a present and I know it’s in here some-Here it is.”

She came back to the bed and handed me a little black felt pouch I knew came from a jewelry store. I opened it up and out came a silver neck chain with a pendant. The pendant was a silver-plated bullet.

“A silver bullet? What, are we going after a werewolf or something?”

“No, a single bullet. Remember what I told you about the single-bullet theory?”

“Oh… yeah.”

I felt embarrassed by my inappropriate attempt at humor. This was something important to her and I had trampled on the moment with the stupid werewolf line.

“Where’d you get this?”

“I had a lot of time to kill yesterday, so I was walking around the District and went into this jewelry store near FBI headquarters. I guess they know their neighborhood clientele because they were selling bullets as jewelry.”

I nodded as I turned the bullet in my fingers.

“There’s no name on it. You said the theory was that everybody’s got a bullet out there with someone’s name on it.”

Rachel shrugged.

“It was a Sunday and I guess the engraver was off. They said I’d have to come back today if I wanted to put anything on it. I obviously didn’t get the chance.”

I opened the clasp and reached up to put it around her neck. She lifted a hand to stop me.

“No, it’s yours. I got it for you.”

“I know. But why don’t you give it to me when it’s got your name on it?”

She thought about that for a moment and then dropped her hand away. I put the chain around her neck and clasped it. She looked at me with a smile.

“You know what?” she asked.

“What?”

“I’m really starving now.”

I almost laughed at the abrupt change in direction.

“Okay, then let’s order room service.”

“I want a steak. And more rum.”

We ordered and both of us were able to get showers in before the food arrived. We ate in our hotel bathrobes while sitting across from each other at the table the room service waiter had rolled into the room. I could see the silver chain on Rachel’s neck but the bullet had been tucked inside her thick, white robe. Her hair was wet and completely uncombed and she looked good enough to eat for dessert.

“This guy who told you about the single-bullet theory, he was a cop or an agent, right?”

“A cop.”

“Do I know him?”

“Know him? I’m not sure anybody really knows him, including me. But I’ve seen his name in a few of your stories in the last couple years. Why do you care?”

I ignored her question and asked my own.

“So did you show him the door or was it the other way around?”

“I think it was me. I knew it wasn’t right.”

“Great, so this guy you dumped is out there and he carries a gun and now you’re with me.”

She smiled and shook her head.

“This is so not an issue. Can we just change the subject?”

“Fine. What do you want to talk about, then? You want to finally tell me about what happened in D.C. today?”

She finished a bite of steak before answering.

“There is nothing really to talk about,” she said. “They had me. I had misled my supervisor about the interview at Ely, and he authorized the flight. They did their little investigation and did the math and said I used about fourteen thousand dollars’ worth of Jet A fuel and that constitutes misuse of government funds on a felony level. They had a prosecutor out in the hallway and ready to go with it if I wanted to push it. I would’ve been booked right there and then.”

“That’s incredible.”

“The thing is, I was planning to do the interview at Ely and that would have made everything fine. But things changed when you told me about Angela being missing. I never got to Ely.”

“This is bureaucracy at its worst. I have to write about this.”

“You can’t, Jack. That was part of the deal. I signed a confidentiality agreement, which I’ve already violated by telling you what I just told you. But if it makes its way into print, they will probably end up charging me after all.”

“Not if the story is so embarrassing to them that the only out is to drop the whole thing and restore your status as an agent.”

She poured another round of rum into one of the snifters that had been delivered with the bottle. With her fingers she transferred a single cube of ice from her water glass to the snifter, then rolled the glass in her hand a few times before drinking from it.

“That’s easy for you to say. You’re not the one betting that they will see the light instead of seeing a way to put you in jail.”

I shook my head.

“Rachel, your actions, no matter how ill-advised or even illegal, saved my life for sure and probably a bunch of others’. You’ve got William Schifino and all the victims this Unsub will never get to now that he is known to authorities. Doesn’t that count for anything?”

“Jack, don’t you understand? They didn’t like me at the bureau. Not for a long time. They thought they had me out of sight and out of mind but then I forced them to move me out of South Dakota. I got a piece of leverage and I used it, but they didn’t like that and they didn’t forget it. It’s just like anything else in life. One false move and you are vulnerable. They waited until I made the mistake that made me vulnerable, and they moved in. It doesn’t matter how many people I may have saved. There’s no hard evidence of anything. But the fuel bill on that jet? That’s evidence.”

I gave up. She couldn’t be consoled. I watched her take down her whole snifter of rum and then spit the ice cube back into the bottom of the glass. She then poured herself another shot.

“You better have some of this before I drink it all,” she said.

I held my snifter across the table and she poured in a sizable shot. I clicked my glass off hers and took a long pull. It went down smooth as honey.

“Better be careful,” I said. “This stuff is easy to get blasted on.”

“I want to get blasted.”

“Yeah, well, we’ll have to leave here by about nine-thirty tomorrow morning if you want to make our appointment on time.”

She put her glass down heavily and drunkenly on the table.

“Yeah, what about that? What exactly are we doing tomorrow, Jack? You know I have no badge anymore. I don’t even have a gun and you want to just waltz into this place?”

“I want to see it. I want to figure out if he’s in there. After that, we can call in the bureau or the police or whoever you want. But it’s my lead and I want to get in there first.”

“And then write about it in the paper.”

“Maybe, if they let me. But one way or another I’m going to write about this whole thing. So I want to be there first.”

“Just make sure you change my name in your book, to protect the guilty.”

“Sure. What do you want to be called?”

She tilted her head and tightened her lips as she thought about it. She raised her glass again and took a small sip, then answered.

“How about Agent Misty Monroe?”

“Sounds like a porn star.”

“Good.”

She put her glass down again and her face turned serious.

“So… enough fun and games. We go in there and we what, just ask which one of them is the serial killer?”

“No, we go in there and act like prospective clients. We take a tour of the place and meet as many people as we can. We ask questions about security and who has access to the sensitive legal files our firm will be backing up in storage. Things like that.”

“And?”

“And we hope that somebody gives themselves away or maybe I see the guy from Ely with the sideburns.”

“Would you even recognize him without his disguise?”

“Probably not, but he doesn’t know that. He might see me and make a run for it and then-ta da!-we have our guy.”

I raised my hands palms-out like a magician who has completed a difficult trick.

“This doesn’t sound like a plan, Jack. It sounds like you’re making it up as you go along.”

“Maybe I am and maybe that’s why I need you to be there.”

“I have no idea what you mean by that.”

I got up and came around to her side and got down on one knee. She was about to raise her glass for another drink when I put my hand on her forearm.

“Look, I don’t need your gun or your badge, Rachel. I want you there because if somebody in that place makes a false move, even a small one, you’re going to read it and then we’ve got him.”

She pushed my hand off her arm.

“Look, you’re exaggerating. If you think I’m some sort of mind reader who can-”

“Not a mind reader, Rachel, but you’ve got instincts. You do this work the way Magic Johnson used to play basketball. With a knowledge and sense of the full court. After just a five-minute phone conversation with me you stole an FBI plane and flew to Nevada because you knew. You knew, Rachel. And it saved my life. That’s instinct, and that’s why I want you there tomorrow.”

She looked at me for a long moment and then nodded so slightly I almost didn’t see it.

“Okay, Jack,” she said. “Then I’ll be there.”

The rich rum didn’t do us any favors in the morning. Rachel and I were both moving pretty slowly but still managed to get out of the hotel with more than enough time to make our appointment. We stopped at Hightower Grounds first to get some caffeine moving in our veins, then doubled back to Western Data.

The front gate of the complex was open and I pulled into the parking space closest to the front door. Before turning the car off, I took a final drag on my coffee and then asked Rachel a question.

“When the agents from the Phoenix office went in here last week, did they tell them what it was about?”

“No, they said as little about the investigation as possible.”

“Standard procedure. What about the search warrant? Didn’t it lay it all out?”

She shook her head.

“The warrant was issued by a grand jury that has a blanket mandate to investigate Internet fraud. The use of the trunk murder site fits under that. It gave us camouflage.”

“Good.”

“We did our part, Jack. You guys didn’t do yours.”

“What are you talking about?”

I noted her use of the word we.

“You’re asking if the Unsub, who may or may not be in this place, is aware that Western Data might fall into a greater focus. The answer is yes, but not because of anything the bureau did. Your newspaper, Jack, in its account of Angela Cook’s death, mentioned that investigators were checking the possible connection to a website she had visited. You didn’t name the site but that only leaves your competitors and readers out of the loop. The Unsub certainly knows the site and knows that if we are onto it, then it may only be a matter of time until we put it together and show up here again.”

“We?”

“Them. The bureau.”

I nodded. She was right. The story in the Times had blown it.

“Then, I guess we better go in before them shows up.”

We got out and I grabbed my sport coat out of the backseat and put it on while on my way to the door. I was wearing the new shirt I had bought the day before at an airport shop while waiting for Rachel to land. I wore the same tie for a second day. Rachel was wearing her usual agent outfit-a navy suit with a dark blouse-and she looked impressive, even if she wasn’t an agent anymore.

We had to push a button at the door and identify ourselves through a speaker before being buzzed in. There was a small entrance area and a woman sitting behind a reception counter. I assumed she was the person who had just talked to us through the speaker.

“We’re a little early,” I said. “We have a ten o’clock appointment with Mr. McGinnis.”

“Yes, Ms. Chavez will be showing you the plant,” the receptionist said cheerfully. “Let’s see if she’s ready to go a few minutes early.”

I shook my head.

“No, our appointment was with Mr. McGinnis, the company CEO. We came down from Las Vegas to see him.”

“I’m sorry, but that’s not going to be possible. Mr. McGinnis has unexpectedly been detained. He is not on the premises at the moment.”

“Well, where is he? I thought your company wanted our business, and we wanted to talk with him about our particular needs.”

“Let me see if I can get Ms. Chavez. I’m sure she will be able to speak to your needs.”

The receptionist picked up the phone and punched in three digits. I looked at Rachel, who raised an eyebrow. She was getting the same vibe I was getting. Something was off about this.

The receptionist spoke quietly and quickly into the phone and then hung up. She looked up and smiled at us.

“Ms. Chavez will be right out.”

“Right out” took ten minutes. A door finally opened behind the reception counter and a young woman with dark hair and dark features stepped out. She came around the counter and held her hand out to me.

“Mr. McEvoy, I’m Yolanda Chavez, Mr. McGinnis’s executive assistant. I hope you don’t mind my taking you around today.”

I shook her hand and introduced Rachel.

“Our appointment was with Declan McGinnis,” Rachel said. “We were led to believe that a firm of our size and business would merit the attention of the CEO.”

“Yes, I assure you that we are very interested in your business. But Mr. McGinnis is home ill today. I hope you understand.”

I looked at Rachel and shrugged.

“Well,” I said. “If we could still get the tour, we could then talk to Mr. McGinnis when he’s feeling better.”

“Of course,” Chavez said. “And I can assure you that I’ve conducted the plant tour several times. If you can give me about ten minutes, I will show you around.”

“Perfect.”

Chavez nodded, then leaned over the reception counter and reached down for two clipboards. She handed them to us.

“We first have to get a security clearance,” she said. “If each of you could sign this waiver, I will go make copies of your driver’s licenses. And the letter of introduction you said you had.”

“You really need our licenses?” I asked in mild protest.

My concern was that our California licenses might raise a security flag since we had said we were from Las Vegas.

“I’m afraid that is our security protocol. It’s required of anyone taking the facility tour. There are no exceptions.”

“Good to hear. I was just making sure.”

I smiled. She didn’t. Rachel and I handed over our licenses and Chavez studied them for indications they were counterfeit.

“You’re both from California? I thought you-”

“We’re both new hires. I’m doing mostly investigative work and Rachel will be the firm’s IT person-once we reconfigure our IT.”

I smiled again. Chavez looked at me, adjusted her horn-rimmed glasses and asked for the letter from my new employer. I pulled it out of the inside pocket of my jacket and handed it over. Chavez said she would be back to collect us for the tour in ten minutes.

Rachel and I sat down on the couch beneath one of the windows and read the waiver form attached to the clipboards. It was a fairly straightforward waiver with check boxes stating that the signer was not an employee of a competitor, would take no photographs during the tour of the facility and would not reveal or copy any of the trade practices, procedures or secrets revealed during the tour.

“They’re pretty serious,” I said.

“It’s a competitive business,” Rachel said.

I scribbled my signature on the line and dated it. Rachel did the same.

“What do you think?” I whispered, my eyes on the receptionist.

“About what?” Rachel asked.

“About McGinnis not being here and the lack of a solid explanation why. First he’s ‘unexpectedly detained,’ next he’s ‘home sick.’ I mean, which is it?”

The receptionist looked up from her computer screen and right at me. I didn’t know if she had heard me. I smiled at her and she quickly looked down at her screen again.

“I think we should talk about it after,” Rachel whispered.

“Roger that,” I whispered back.

We sat silently until Chavez returned to the reception area. She handed us our driver’s licenses and we gave her the clipboards. She studied the signatures on each.

“I spoke to Mr. Schifino,” she said matter-of-factly.

“You did?” I said a little too un-matter-of-factly.

“Yes, to verify everything. He wants you to call him as soon as possible.”

I nodded vigorously. Schifino had been blindsided by the call but must have come through.

“We will as soon as we finish the tour,” I said.

“He’s just anxious to make a decision and to get things going,” Rachel added.

“Well, if you follow me, we’ll get the show on the road and I’m sure you will make the right decision,” Chavez said.

Chavez used a key card to open the door between the reception area and the rest of the facility. I noticed that it had her photo on it. We stepped into a hallway and she turned to face us.

“Before we go into the graphic design and web hosting labs, let me tell you a little bit about our history and what we do here,” she said.

I pulled a reporter’s notebook out of my back pocket and prepared to take notes. It was the wrong move. Chavez immediately pointed to the notebook.

“Mr. McEvoy, remember the document you just signed,” she said. “General notes are fine but no specifics or proprietary details of our facility should be recorded in any manner, including written notes.”

“Sorry. Forgot.”

I put the notebook away and signaled our host to continue the presentation.

“We opened for operation just four years ago. Keying on the growing demand for high-volume, secure data management and storage, Declan McGinnis, our CEO and founding partner, created Western Data. He brought together some of the best and brightest in the industry to design this state-of-the-art facility. We have almost one thousand clients, ranging from small law firms to major corporations. Our facility can service the needs of any size company located anywhere in the world.

“You may find it interesting that the American law firm has become our most common client. We are strategically designed to provide a full raft of services specifically aimed at satisfying the needs of the law firm of any size in any location. From web hosting to colocation, we are the one-stop shop for your firm.”

She made a full turn with her arms outstretched, as if to take in the whole building, although we were still standing in a hallway.

“After receiving funding from various investment blocs, Mr. McGinnis zeroed in on Mesa as the place to build Western Data after a yearlong search determined that the area best met the critical location criteria. He was looking for a place where there were low risks of natural disaster and terrorist attack as well as a ready supply of power that would allow the company to guarantee twenty-four/seven uptime. In addition and just as important, he was looking for a location with direct-access bridges to major networks with massive volumes of reliable bandwidth and dark fiber.”

“Dark fiber?” I asked and then immediately regretted having revealed that I did not know something I possibly should have known in the position I was supposed to be in. But Rachel stepped in and saved me.

“Unused fiber optics,” she said. “In place in existing networks but untapped and available.”

“Exactly,” Chavez said.

She pushed through the double doors.

“Added to these site-specific demands, Mr. McGinnis would design and build a facility with the highest level of security in order to meet compliance demands for hosting HIPPA, SOCKS and S-A-S seventy.”

I’d learned my lesson. This time I just nodded as if I knew exactly what she was talking about.

“Just a few details about plant security and integrity,” Chavez said. “We operate in a hardened structure able to withstand a seven-point-oh earthquake. There are no distinguishing exterior features connecting it to data storage. All visitors are subject to security clearance and recorded while on site twenty-four/seven with the camera recordings archived for forty-five days.”

She pointed to the casino-style camera ball located on the ceiling above. I looked up, smiled and waved. Rachel threw me a look that told me to stop behaving like a child. Chavez never noticed. She was too busy continuing the rundown.

“All secure areas of the facility are protected by key cards and biometric hand scanners. Security and monitoring is done from the network operations center, which is located in the underground bunker adjacent to the colocation center, or ‘farm,’ as we like to call it.”

She went on to describe the plant’s cooling, power and network systems and their backup and redundant subsystems, but I was losing interest. We had moved into a vast lab where more than a dozen techs were building and operating websites for Western Data’s massive client base. As we walked through, I saw screens on the various desks and noted the repeated legal motifs-the scales of justice, the judge’s gavel-that indicated they were law firm clients.

Chavez introduced us to a graphic designer named Danny O’Connor, who was a supervisor in the lab, and he gave us a five-minute rap about the personalized, 24/7 service we would receive if our firm signed up with Western Data. He was quick to mention that recent surveys had shown that increasingly consumers were turning to the Internet for all their needs, including identifying and contacting law firms for legal representation of any kind. I studied him as he spoke, looking for any sign that he was stressed or maybe preoccupied by something other than the potential clients in front of him. But he seemed normal and fully plugged into the sales pitch. I also decided he was too chunky to have been Sideburns. That’s one thing you can’t do when you are wearing a disguise: decrease your body mass.

I looked past him at the many techs working in cubicles, hoping to see somebody giving us the suspicious eye or maybe ducking behind their screen. Half of them were women and easy to dismiss. With the men, I saw nobody I thought might have been the man who had gone to Ely to kill me.

“It used to be you wanted the ad on the back of the Yellow Pages,” Danny told us. “Nowadays you’ll get more business with a bang-up website through which the potential client can make immediate connection and contact.”

I nodded and wished I could tell Danny that I was well versed in how the Internet had changed the world. I was one of the people it had run over.

“That’s why we’re here,” I said instead.

While Chavez made a call on her cell, we spent another ten minutes with O’Connor and looked at a variety of websites for law firms that the facility designed and hosted. They ranged from the basic homepage model containing all contact information to multilevel sites with photos and bios of every attorney in the firm, histories and press releases on high-profile cases, and interactive media and video graphics of lawyers telling viewers they were the best.

After we were finished in the design lab, Chavez took us through a door with her key card and into another hallway, which led to an elevator alcove. She needed her key card again to summon the elevator.

“I am going to take you down now to what we call the ‘bunker,’ ” she said. “Our knock room is there, along with the main plant facilities and the server farm dedicated to colocation services.”

Once again I couldn’t help myself.

“Knock room?” I asked.

“ Network Operations Center,” Chavez said. “It’s the heart of our enterprise, really.”

As we entered the elevator, Chavez explained that we were going down only one level structurally but that it totaled a twenty-foot descent beneath the surface. The desert had been deeply excavated in order to help make the bunker impenetrable by both man and nature. The elevator took nearly thirty seconds to make the drop and I wondered if it moved so slowly in order to make prospective clients think they were journeying to the center of the earth.

“Are there stairs?” I asked.

“Yes, there are stairs,” Chavez said.

Once we reached the bottom, the elevator opened on a space Chavez called the octagon. It was an eight-walled waiting room with four doors in addition to the elevator. Chavez pointed to each one.

“Our knock room, our core network equipment room, plant facilities and our colocation control room, which leads to the server farm. We’ll take a peek in the network operations center and the colocation center, but only employees with full-access clearance can enter the ‘core,’ as they call it.”

“Why is that?”

“The equipment is too vital and much of it is of proprietary design. We don’t show it to anyone, not even our oldest clients.”

Chavez slid her key card through the locking device of the NOC door and we entered a narrow room just barely big enough for the three of us.

“Each of the locations in the bunker is entered through a mantrap. When I carded the outside door I set off a tone inside. The techs in there now have the opportunity to view us and hit an emergency stop if we are determined to be intruders.”

She waved to an overhead camera and then slid her card through the lock on the next door. We entered the network operations center, which was slightly underwhelming. I was expecting a NASA launch center but we got two rows of computer stations with three technicians monitoring multiple computer screens showing both digital and video feeds. Chavez explained that the techs were monitoring power, temperature, bandwidth and every other measurable aspect of Western Data’s operations, as well as the two hundred cameras located throughout the facility.

Nothing struck me as sinister or relating to the Unsub. I saw no one here that I thought could be Sideburns. No one did a double take when they looked up and saw me. They all looked rather bored with the routine of potential clients coming through on tour.

I asked no questions and waited impatiently while Chavez continued her sales pitch, primarily making eye contact with Rachel, the law firm’s IT chief. Looking at the techs studiously avoiding acknowledgment of our presence, I got the feeling that it was so routine that it was almost an act, that when Chavez’s card set off the intruder alert, the techs wiped the solitaire off their screens, closed the comic books and snapped to attention before we came through the second door. Maybe when there were no visitors in the building, the mantrap doors were simply propped open.

“Should we head over to the farm now?” Chavez finally asked.

“Sure,” I said.

“I’m going to turn you over to our CTO, who runs the data center. I need to step out and make another quick phone call, but then I will be back to collect you. You’ll be in good hands with Mr. Carver. He’s also our CTE.”

My face must have shown I was confused and about to ask the question.

“Chief threat engineer,” Rachel answered before I could ask it.

“Yes,” Chavez said. “He’s our scarecrow.”

We went through another mantrap and then entered the data center. We stepped into a dimly lit room set up similarly to the NOC room with three workstations and multiple computer screens at each. Two young men sat at side-by-side stations, while the other was empty. To the left of this line of stations was an open door revealing a small private office that appeared empty. The workstations faced two large windows and a glass door that looked out on a large space where there were several rows of server towers under bright overhead lighting. I had seen this room on the website. The farm.

The two men swiveled in their chairs to look up at us when we came through the door but then almost immediately turned back to their work. It was just another dog and pony show to them. They wore shirts and ties but with their scruffy hair and cheeks they looked like they should be in T-shirts and blue jeans.

“Kurt, I thought Mr. Carver was in the center,” Chavez said.

One of the men turned back to us. He was a pimply-faced kid of no more than twenty-five. There was a pathetic attempt at a beard on his chin. He was about as suspicious as flowers at a wedding.

“He went into the farm to check server seventy-seven. We got a capacity light on it that doesn’t make sense.”

Chavez stepped up to the unused workstation and raised a microphone that was built into the desk. She clicked a button on the stem and spoke.

“Mr. Carver, can you break away for a few minutes to tell our guests about the data center?”

There was no reply for several seconds and then she tried again.

“Mr. Carver, are you out there?”

More time went by and then a scratchy voice finally came through an overhead speaker.

“Yes, on my way.”

Chavez turned to Rachel and me and then looked at her watch.

“Okay, then. He will handle this part of your journey and I will collect you in about twenty minutes. After that, the tour will be completed unless you have specific questions about the facility or operation.”

She turned to leave and I saw her eyes hold for a moment on a cardboard box sitting on the chair in front of the empty desk.

“Are these Fred’s things?” she asked without looking at the two techs.

“Yup,” Kurt said. “He didn’t get a chance to get it all. We boxed it up and were thinking about taking it to him. We forgot yesterday.”

Chavez frowned for only a moment, then turned toward the door without responding. Rachel and I were left standing and waiting. Eventually through the glass I saw a man in a white lab coat walking down one of the aisles created by the rows of server towers. He was tall and thin and at least fifteen years older than Sideburns. I knew you could make yourself older with a disguise. But making yourself shorter was tough. Rachel turned and subtly gave me a questioning look anyway. I surreptitiously shook my head. Not him.

“Here comes our scarecrow,” Kurt said.

I looked at the kid.

“Why do you call him that? Because he’s skinny?”

“ ’Cause he’s in charge of keepin’ all the dirty, nasty birds off the crops.”

I was about to ask what he meant by that, when Rachel once again filled in the blanks.

“Hackers, trolls, virus carriers,” she said. “He’s in charge of security on the data farm.”

I nodded. The man in the lab coat made his way to the glass door and reached for an unseen locking mechanism to his right. I heard a metallic click and then he slid the door open. He entered and pulled the door closed behind him, testing to make sure it had properly locked. I felt cool air from the server room wash over me. I noticed that right next to the door was an electronic hand reader-it took more than a simple key card to access the actual farm. Mounted above the reader was a case with a glass door that contained what looked like a pair of gas masks.

“Hello, I’m Wesley Carver, chief technology officer here at Western Data. How do you do?”

He extended his hand first to Rachel, who shook it and told him her name. He then turned to me and I did the same.

“Yolanda left you with me, then?” he asked.

“She said she’d come back for us in twenty minutes,” I said.

“Well, I’ll do my best to keep you entertained. Have you met the crew? This is Kurt and Mizzou, our server support engineers on shift today. They keep things running while I get to putter around on the farm and chase down the people who think they can have a go at the palace walls.”

“The hackers?” Rachel asked.

“Yes, well, you see, places like this are a bit of a challenge to the people out there with nothing better to do. We have to constantly be aware and alert. So far, so good, you know? As long as we’re better than they are we’ll do fine.”

“That’s good to hear,” I said.

“But not really what you came to hear. Since Yolanda handed the baton to me, let me tell you a little bit about what we’ve got in here, yeah?”

Rachel nodded and signaled with her hand for him to proceed.

“Please.”

Carver turned so he was facing the windows and looking into the server room.

“Well, this is really the heart and brains of the beast down here,” he said. “As I’m sure Yolanda has told you, data storage, colocation, drydocking, whatever you want to call it, is the main service we provide here at Western Data. O’Connor and his boys up on the design and hosting floor might talk a good game, but this down here is what we have that nobody else has.”

I noticed Kurt and Mizzou nod to each other and give each other a fist bump.

“No other aspect of the digital business world has grown so exponentially fast as this segment,” Carver said. “Safe, clean storage and access to vital company records and archives. Advanced and dependable connectivity. This is what we offer. We eliminate the need to build this network infrastructure privately. We offer the advantage of our own direct, high-speed, redundant Internet backbone. Why build it in the back room of your law firm when you can have it here and have the same sort of access without the overhead costs or the stress of managing and maintaining it?”

“We’re already sold on that, Mr. Carver,” Rachel said. “That’s why we’re here and why we’ve been looking at other facilities as well. So can you tell us a little bit about your plant and your personnel? Because this is where we’ll make our choice. We don’t need to be convinced of the product. We need to be convinced of the people we are entrusting our data to.”

I liked how she was moving it away from technology and in the direction of people. Carver held up a finger as if to make a point.

“Exactly,” he said. “It always comes down to people, doesn’t it?”

“Usually,” Rachel said.

“Then let me give you a quick overview of what we have here and then perhaps we could retire to my office and discuss personnel issues.”

He walked around the line of workstations so that he was standing directly in front of the big windows that looked into the server room. We followed him around and he continued the tour.

“Okay, then. I designed the data center to be state of the art in terms of technology and security. What you see before you here is our server room. The farm. These big, long towers hold approximately one thousand managed, dedicated servers on direct line with our clients. What that means is that if you sign on with Western Data, your firm will have its own server or servers in this room. Your data is not commingled on a server with any other firm’s data. You get your own managed server with one-hundred-megabit service. That gives you instant access from wherever you are located to the information you store here. It allows you interval backup or immediate backup. If needed, every keystroke made on your computers in-Where are you located?”

“ Las Vegas,” I said.

“ Las Vegas, then. And what is the business?”

“A law firm.”

“Ah, another law firm. So then, if needed, every keystroke made on a computer in your law firm could be instantaneously backed up and stored here. In other words, you would never lose anything. Not a digit. That computer in Las Vegas could be struck by lightning and the last word typed on it would be safe and sound right here.”

“Well, let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” Rachel said, smiling.

“Of course not,” Carver said quickly and humorlessly. “But I am just telling you the parameters of the service we provide here. Now, security. What good is it to back everything up here if it is not safe?”

“Exactly,” Rachel said.

She took a step closer to the window and in doing so moved in front of me. I could clearly see that she wanted to make the lead connection to Carver, and that was fine with me. I stepped back and left them standing side by side at the window.

“Well, we’re talking about two different things here,” Carver said. “Plant security and data security. Let’s talk about the facility first.”

Carver covered a lot of the ground Chavez had already covered but Rachel didn’t interrupt him. Eventually, he homed in on the data center and offered some new information.

“This room is completely impregnable. First off, all the walls, floor and ceiling are two-foot-thick cast concrete with double rebar and rubber membrane to protect it from water sources. These windows are level-eight glass laminates that are impact resistant and ballistic proof. You could hit it with both barrels of a shotgun and you’d probably only hurt yourself with the ricochet. And this door is the only means of entry and exit and is controlled by biometric hand scan.”

He pointed to the device next to the glass door.

“Access to the server room is limited to server engineers and key personnel only. The biometric scanner unlocks the door after reading and confirming three distinct hand groups: palm print, vein pattern and hand geometry. It also checks for a pulse. So nobody can get away with chopping my hand off and using it to get into the server farm.”

Carver smiled but Rachel and I didn’t join in.

“What about if there’s an emergency?” I asked. “Could people be stuck in there?”

“No, of course not. From the inside you simply push a release button that opens the lock and then slide open the door. The system is designed to keep intruders out, not keep people in.”

He looked at me to see if I understood. I nodded.

Carver leaned back and pointed to the three digital temperature gauges located above the main window on the server room.

“We keep the farm cooled to sixty-two degrees and have plenty of redundant power as well as a backup cooling system. As far as fire protection goes, we employ a three-stage protection scheme. We have a standard VESDA system with a-”

“Vesda?” I asked.

“Very Early Smoke Detection Alarm, which relies on laser-based smoke detectors. In the event of a fire the VESDA will activate a series of alarms followed by the waterless fire-suppression system.”

Carver pointed to a row of red pressure tanks lined on the back wall.

“There you see our CO₂ tanks, which are part of this system. If there is a fire, carbon dioxide floods the room, extinguishing fire without harming any of the electronics or the client data.”

“What about people?” I asked.

Carver leaned back again so he could see around Rachel to look at me.

“Very good question, Mr. McEvoy. The three-stage alarm allows sixty seconds for any personnel in the server room to escape. Additionally, our server room protocol requires anyone entering the server room to carry a respirator on their person as a WCS redundancy.”

From the pocket of his lab coat he withdrew a breathing mask similar to the two hanging in the case by the door.

“WCS?” I asked.

“Worst-Case Scenario,” Rachel said.

Carver put the mask back in his pocket.

“Let’s see, what else can I tell you? We custom-build our own server racks in a shop attached to the equipment room down here in the bunker. We have multiple servers and attendant electronics in stock and we can hit the ground running to provide for all our clients’ needs. We can replace any piece of equipment on the farm within an hour of malfunction. What you are looking at here is a reliable and secure national network infrastructure. Does either of you have any questions about this aspect of our facility?”

I had nothing because I was pretty much at sea on the technology. But Rachel nodded like she understood everything that had been said.

“So again, it’s about people,” she said. “No matter how well you build the mousetrap, it always comes down to the people who operate it.”

Carver brought his hand to his chin and nodded. He was looking out into the server room but I could see his face reflected in the thick glass.

“Why don’t we step into my office so we can discuss that aspect of our operation.”

We followed him around the workstations to his office. Along the way I looked down into the cardboard box that was on the chair of the empty station. It looked like it was mostly full of personal belongings. Magazines, a William Gibson novel, a box of American Spirit cigarettes, a Star Trek coffee mug full of pens, pencils and disposable lighters. I also saw a variety of flash drives, a set of keys and an iPod.

Carver held the door to his office and then closed it after we entered. We took the two seats in front of the glass table he used as a desk. He had a twenty-inch computer screen on a pivoting arm, which he pushed out of the way so he could see us. There was a second, smaller screen beneath the glass of his desk. On it was a video image of the server room. I noticed that Mizzou had just entered the farm and was walking down one of the aisles created by the rows of server towers.

“Where are you staying?” Carver asked as he moved behind his worktable.

“The Mesa Verde,” I said.

“Nice place. They have a great brunch on Sundays.”

Carver sat down.

“Now, then, you want to talk about people,” he said, looking directly at Rachel.

“Yes, we do. We appreciate the tour of the facility but, frankly, that’s not why we are here. Everything that you and Ms. Chavez have shown us is on your website. We really came to get a feel for the people we would work with and entrust our data to. We’re disappointed we were unable to meet Declan McGinnis and, frankly, a little put off by it. We haven’t received a credible explanation for why he stood us up.”

Carver raised his hands in a gesture of surrender.

“Yolanda is not at liberty to discuss personnel matters.”

“Well, I hope you can understand our position,” Rachel said. “We came to establish a relationship and the man who was supposed to be here is not here.”

“Completely understandable,” Carver said. “But as a director of the company I can assure you that Declan’s situation in no way affects our operation here. He simply took a few days off.”

“Well, that is troubling, because that’s the third different explanation we’ve gotten. It doesn’t leave us with a good impression.”

Carver nodded and exhaled heavily.

“If I could tell you more I would,” he said. “But you have to realize that what we sell here is confidentiality and security. And that starts with our own personnel. If that explanation is not acceptable, then we might not be the firm you are looking for.”

He had drawn a line. Rachel capitulated.

“Very well, Mr. Carver. Then tell us about the people who work for you. The information we would store in this facility is of a highly sensitive nature. How do you ensure the integrity of the facility? I look at your two-what are they called, server engineers? I look at them and I have to say they look to me like the type of people you are protecting this facility from.”

Carver smiled broadly and nodded.

“To be honest, Rachel-can I call you Rachel?”

“That’s my name.”

“To be honest, when Declan is here and I know a prospective client is coming in on tour, I usually send those two out back for a smoke break. But the reality of this facility and the reality of the world is that those young men are the best and the brightest when it comes to this work. I’m being straight with you. Yes, there is no doubt that some of our employees have done their share of hacking and mischief before coming to work here. And that’s because sometimes it takes a sly fox to catch a sly fox or at least to know how he thinks. But every employee here is thoroughly vetted for criminal records and tendencies, as well as the content of their character and psychological makeup.

“We have never had an employee break company protocols or make an unauthorized intrusion into client data, if that’s what your concern is. Not only do we qualify each individual for employment, but we closely watch them after. You could say that we are our own best clients. Every keystroke made on a keyboard in this building is backed up. We can look at what an employee is doing in real time or has done at any time prior. We randomly exercise both of those options routinely.”

Rachel and I nodded in unison. But we knew something Carver either didn’t know or was expertly covering up. Someone here had dipped into client data. A killer had stalked his prey in the digital fields of the farm.

“What happened to the guy who worked out there?” I asked, jerking a thumb in the direction of the outer room. “I think they said his name was Fred. It looks like he’s gone and his stuff is in a box. Why did he leave without taking his personal things?”

Carver hesitated before answering. I could tell he was being cautious.

“Yes, Mr. McEvoy. He has not picked up his belongings yet. But he will and that is why we placed them in a box for him.”

I noticed that I was still Mr. McEvoy with him, while Rachel had moved on to being on a first-name basis.

“Well, was he fired? What did he do?”

“No, he was not fired. He quit for unknown reasons. He failed to show up for his shift Friday night and instead sent me an e-mail saying he resigned to pursue other things. That is all there is to it. These young kids, they are in high demand. I’m assuming Freddy was lured away by a competitor. We pay well here but somebody else can always pay better.”

I nodded as if I agreed completely but I was thinking about the contents of the box out there and putting other things with it. The FBI visits and asks questions about the trunk murder website on Friday and Freddy splits without so much as coming back in for his iPod.

And what about McGinnis? I was about to ask if his disappearance could be related to Freddy’s abrupt departure but was interrupted by the mantrap buzzer. The screen beneath Carver’s glass desk automatically switched to the camera in the mantrap and I saw Yolanda Chavez coming back in to collect us. Rachel leaned forward, inadvertently putting an urgent spin on her question.

“What is Freddy’s last name?”

As if they had a prescribed length of buffer space between them, Carver leaned back a distance equal to Rachel’s forward movement. She was still acting like an agent, asking direct questions and expecting answers because of the juice the bureau carried.

“Why would you want his name? He no longer works here.”

“I don’t know. I just…”

Rachel was cornered. There was no good answer to the question, at least from Carver’s point of view. The question alone threw suspicion on our motives. But we got lucky when Chavez poked her head in through the door.

“So how are we doing in here?” she asked.

Carver kept his eyes on Rachel.

“We’re doing fine,” he said. “Are there any other questions I can answer?”

Still backpedaling, Rachel looked at me and I shook my head.

“I think I’ve seen all I need to see,” I said. “I appreciate the information and the tour.”

“Yes, thank you,” Rachel said. “Your facility is very impressive.”

“Then I’ll take you back up to the surface now and let you sit down with an account representative if you wish.”

Rachel got up and turned toward the door. I pushed back my chair and stood up. I thanked Carver again and reached across the table to shake his hand.

“Nice to meet you, Jack,” he said. “I hope to see you again.”

I nodded. I had made it to the first-name list.

“Me, too.”

The car was as hot as an oven when we got back into it. I quickly turned the key, cranked the air conditioning to high and lowered my window until the car started to cool.

“What do you think?” I asked Rachel.

“Let’s get out of here first,” she replied.

“Okay.”

The steering wheel burned my hands. Using just the heel of my left palm I backed out of the space. But I didn’t drive immediately to the exit. Instead I drove to the far corner of the lot and made a U-turn at the back of the Western Data building.

“What are you doing?” Rachel asked.

“I just wanted to see what was back here. We’re allowed. We’re prospective clients, remember?”

As we made the turn and headed toward the exit, I caught a passing glimpse of the rear of the building. More cameras. And there was an exit door and a bench beneath a small awning. On either side was a sand jar ashtray, and there, sitting on a bench, was the server engineer named Mizzou. He was smoking a cigarette.

“The smokers’ porch,” Rachel asked. “Satisfied?”

I waved to Mizzou through the open window and he nodded back. We headed toward the gate.

“I thought he was working in the server room. I saw him on Carver’s screen.”

“Well, when addiction calls…”

“But can you imagine having to come out here in the thick of the summer just to smoke? You’d get fried, even with that awning.”

“I guess that’s what they make SPF ninety for.”

I closed my window after I turned back out onto the main road. When we were no longer in view of Western Data I thought it was finally safe to ask my question again.

“So what do you think?”

“I think I almost blew it. Maybe I did.”

“You mean at the end? I think we’re fine. We were saved by Chavez. You just have to remember you no longer carry that badge that opens all doors and makes people quiver and answer your questions.”

“Thanks, Jack. I’ll remember that.”

I realized how callous I must have sounded.

“Sorry, Rachel. I didn’t mean-”

“It’s okay. I know what you meant. I’m just touchy because you’re right and I know it. I’m not what I was twenty-four hours ago. I guess I have to relearn my finesse. My days of bowling people over with the power and the might are gone.”

She looked out her window, so I couldn’t see her face.

“Look, right now, I don’t care about your finesse. What about your vibe back there? What do you think of Carver and everybody else? What do we do now?”

She turned back to me.

“I’m more interested in who I didn’t see than who I did see.”

“You mean Freddy?”

“And McGinnis. I think we have to find out who this Freddy who quit is and what the deal is with McGinnis.”

I nodded. We were on the same page.

“You think they’re connected, Freddy quitting and McGinnis not showing up?”

“We won’t know until we talk to them both.”

“Yeah, how do we find them? We don’t even know Freddy’s last name.”

She hesitated before answering.

“I could try to make some calls, see if anybody is still talking to me. I am sure that when they went in there last week with a warrant, they got a list of names of all employees. That would have been standard procedure.”

I thought that was wishful thinking on her part. In law enforcement bureaucracies, once you were out, you were out. And that was probably more so with the FBI than anywhere else. The ranks in the bureau were so tight, even legitimate, badge-carrying cops couldn’t get through. I thought Rachel was in for a rude awakening if she thought her old comrades were going to take her calls, run down names and share information. She was going to quickly find out that she was on the outside looking in-through six-inch glass.

“What if that doesn’t work?”

“Then I don’t know,” she said curtly. “I guess we do it the old-fashioned way. We go back and sit on that place and wait for Freddy’s slacker buddies to punch out and go home. They’ll either lead us right to him or we can finesse it out of them.”

She said it with full sarcasm but I liked the plan and thought it could work to find out who Freddy was and where he lived. I just wasn’t sure we were going to find Freddy himself. I had a feeling Freddy was in the wind.

“I think it’s a good plan, but my vibe is that Freddy’s long gone. He didn’t just quit. He split town.”

“Why?”

“Did you look in that box?”

“No, I was too busy keeping Carver busy. You were supposed to look in the box.”

That was news to me but I smiled. It was the first sign I registered that she viewed us as partners on this case.

“Really? That’s what you were doing?”

“Absolutely. What was in the box?”

“Stuff you wouldn’t leave behind if you’re just quitting your job. Cigarettes, flash drives and an iPod. Kids that age, their iPod is indispensable. Plus, the timing of it. The FBI shows up one day and he’s gone the same night. I don’t think we’re going to find him here in Mesa, Arizona.”

Rachel didn’t respond. I glanced over and saw her furrowed brow.

“What are you thinking?”

“That you’re probably right. And it makes me think we have to call in the pros. Like I said, they probably already have his name and they can run him down quickly. We’re just spinning our wheels out here and kicking sand in the air.”

“Not yet, Rachel. Let’s at least see what we can find out today.”

“I don’t like it. We should call them.”

“Not yet.”

“Look, you made the connection. No matter what happens it will be because you made the break. You’ll get the credit.”

“I’m not worried about the credit.”

“Then, why are you doing this? Don’t tell me it’s still about the story. Aren’t you over that yet?”

“Are you over being an agent yet?”

She didn’t answer and looked out the window again.

“Same as me,” I said. “This is my last story and it’s important. Besides, this could be your ticket back inside. You identify the Unsub and they’re going to give you back your badge.”

She shook her head.

“Jack, you don’t know anything about the bureau. There are no second acts. I resigned under threat of prosecution. Don’t you get it? I could find Osama bin Laden hiding in a cave in Griffith Park and they wouldn’t take me back.”

“Okay, okay. Sorry.”

We drove in silence after that and soon I saw a barbecue restaurant called Rosie’s come up on the right. It was early for lunch but the intensity of posing as someone I was not for the past hour had left me famished. I pulled in.

“Let’s get something to eat, make some calls and then go back and wait for Kurt and Mizzou to punch out,” I said.

“You got it, partner,” Rachel said.