“I didn’t mean that. I mean about Dad.”
“I’m sad. I can’t talk about him or I’ll cry.”
“Me, too.”
“How’s Mom?”
“Mom’s mom. She’ll be fine.”
“She said you’re going to have to wear a dress at the service.”
“I know.”
“Are you?”
“Yes. For Dad.” Jessie glanced at the empty pet cage on Grace’s dresser. “Gonna get another hamster?”
“Maybe. I still miss Lucky.”
“Lucky didn’t do very much except eat and sleep. Whenever you held him he pooped in your hand. Is there something better you want? An iguana, maybe?”
“No!”
“How about a snake? A boa constrictor?”
Grace’s eyes widened in horror. Before she could answer, Jessie’s phone trembled. It was a text from Garrett. “Gotta go.”
“But-”
Jessie ran into her room and slammed the door behind her. The text read: “Wow. That’s some serious shit. Think it’s NITRON.”
“No way,” wrote Jessie. “NITRON’s for WCs.”
NITRON was a software language used exclusively by wireless carriers-WCs-namely phone companies like Sprint, AT &T, and ONE Mobile.
“You mess with the handset?” wrote Garrett. “Maybe you got ’em pissed.”
Jessie had never considered that it might have been something she’d done that had erased her father’s message. “Didn’t touch it. Swear.”
“No worries. We can ask Linus in class.”
Linus was Linus Jankowski, the TA who taught Jessie’s summer school computer class. The course was titled “Exercises in Extracurricular Programming,” but everyone in class called it the Hack Shack.
“For sure,” texted Jessie. “He’ll know.” The thought offered some relief. No one knew more about hacking than Linus. He’d almost won Capture the Flag at DEF CON last year.
“I’m really sorry about yr dad. That sux.”
“I’m ok.”
“No really. Feelin’ for you.”
“Tx.”
“TTYL.”
Jessie leaned against the door. She prayed that Garrett was wrong about the code being NITRON. She’d lied about not touching the handset. If the code had come from the mobile carrier, it meant they’d sent it because she’d unlocked the phone and that was against the rules. The code was probably an automated response she didn’t know about that did something crazy to the phone.
Jessie slid to the floor and covered her head with her arms.
Maybe it was her fault that her father’s last message had been erased.
21
Mary stood in the hall outside Joe’s office. It was four. The house was too quiet. Jessie should be rummaging through the refrigerator, complaining that there was nothing good to eat. Grace should be in the living room, watching an episode of Pretty Little Liars for the umpteenth time. Instead of melancholy and loss, she felt anger. A will to act. The silence acted as a call to arms, as stirring as a bugler’s tattoo. No one, she realized, was going to help her.
Mary flipped on the light. Joe’s office was a small, wood-paneled room with venetian blinds and a rattan ceiling fan. She took a look around before sitting at his desk. There were magazines and folders and a few paperback books, as well as the latest tomes from Home Depot on a dozen do-it-yourself projects. She saw nothing of interest that might be from his work. No court orders, no case files, no subpoenas, no warrant requests.
Somewhere there was a clue to what he had been doing. Jessie said that anything you did on a phone left a mark. People left marks, too.
Mary opened the drawer. It contained a riot of pens and pencils, erasers and rubber bands, unused DVDs still in their wrapping, and plastic packs of Zantac. There was a box of his business cards and another containing cards he’d collected, mostly from fellow agents and colleagues in the law enforcement community. She ran a hand to the back. Her fingers touched another box, this one containing a variety of flash drives. Several were standard stick drives, but the others were more imaginative, designed to conceal the aluminum dock. She found a silver pendant shaped like a heart, a big fat car key, a box of matches, and her instant favorite, a pack of bubble gum.
Mary carried the flash drives into the kitchen. One after another she plugged them into the desktop. All were unused. She found no stored information anywhere. Another dead end.
She returned to Joe’s office. A single personal decoration was on the desk: a small jolly brass Buddha, a souvenir of their time in Bangkok. They’d entertained Joe’s Thai colleagues often, hosting barbecues on the terrace of their apartment overlooking the Chao Phraya River. It was Joe’s practice to stage a charm offensive upon his arrival at a new posting. He’d invite the SAC, the agents he’d be working with, and any other noteworthy personalities. It was only now that Mary realized that Joe hadn’t brought home any of his new colleagues from the Austin residency.
There was something else. It came to her that Joe had given up speaking about his work to her. The FBI didn’t encourage its agents to divulge details of investigations to their spouses, but it wasn’t the CIA either. The Bureau maintained nothing close to a code of absolute silence. There was no “bromerta” among agents. And yet she couldn’t recall the last time he’d spoken to her about anything specific he was working on, other than the occasional trip to San Antonio for bureaucratic necessities.
She put down the Buddha and stood to leave. She paused at the entry and looked back. It took her a moment to spot what bothered her. The answer was nothing. The problem, she realized, was that the room was too clean.
Joe had the neatness habits of an eight-year-old. She’d spend an hour straightening up his office only for him to have it looking as if a hurricane had moved through ten minutes later. Her last effort to bring order from chaos had been five days ago. Since then, she knew, Joe had spent several late nights here, but there were no papers littering the floor, no empty cans of Red Bull in the trash.
And so? she asked herself. What am I driving at?
She didn’t know. Something was just…wrong.
Everything…and everyone…left a trail.
Mary started at the door and walked the room’s perimeter, tilting the bookcase, peering behind the easy chair, getting on her knees and looking under the desk. She found it lodged between the wall and the shredder. One crumpled-up ball of paper. She freed it gingerly and unfolded it on the desk, smoothing it with her palm.
Joe’s nearly illegible scrawl covered the page. There were mostly numbers, an address, some names, and a whole lot of doodles. Hardly the treasure trove she’d hoped for.
A phone number was printed at the top of the page with the name Caruso below it, and then “Exp. Confirmed 7/25.”
“Exp.” meant what? Expired? July 25 was only a few days ago.
A few inches lower, printed diagonally across the page, was an address: “17990 Highway 290 East. 3PM.” And then, a few inches further down: “FK. Nutty Brown Cafe. 1PM.”
Mary shook her head. Only in Texas could there be a Nutty Brown Cafe.
Below this were doodles of sticks and triangles, a dozen of them at least.
Mary hurried to the bedroom for her iPad and returned. First she typed the address into the query window. A satellite photo of burned central Texas landscape appeared, with a white line denoting Highway 290 running through it. The X showing the location of the address appeared in the middle of a tract of scrub. She zoomed in and dotted property lines appeared. Closer still, and a name. “Flying V Ranch.”