Tracker is expensive. At five hundred bucks for the first fifteen minutes and escalating from there, it’s not something you logon at whim. It’s difficult to access-the company that runs it likes to keep a low profile-but if you have its on-line number and a gold card, then you too can poke around in someone else’s private affairs. All you need is that person’s name, and you can find out virtually anything available on them through various private-sector databases.
Pearl seldom used Tracker. As a privacy-minded journalist-and, yes, there are still a few of us around-he was loath to invade the personal business of a nonpublic figure, and peeking into someone’s credit card accounts is the type of thing that has given reporters a bad name. Yet this was one time he was willing to play lowball.
“Here she is,” he said after he had entered Hinckley’s name, hometown, and place of work. I bent over his shoulder to look at his computer screen. Next to HINCKLEY, BERYL was a street address in St. Louis and a phone number. “Try that.”
I picked up his desk phone and dialed the number. “No answer,” I said after I let it ring a dozen times. “She didn’t turn on her answering machine.”
He nodded. “Okay. Now look the other way for a minute.” He shot a sharp glance over his shoulder at me. “I’m going to do something you shouldn’t know about,” he said. “Only a jerk like me would stoop to something like this.”
I turned away while Pearl keyed in a new command. Just outside the office door, I spotted Chevy Dick hanging out in the office corridor, jawing with one of the bohos from the production staff. He was probably dropping off this week’s “Kar Klub” column. If things weren’t so intense right now, I would have wandered over to join the bull session.
“Okay,” Bailey said, “you can look now.” I turned back around to see that a new window had opened at the bottom of the Tracker screen; it displayed the account numbers of three major credit cards-Visa, MC, and AmEx-along with their current balances and the dates of their most recent purchases.
“You’re right,” I said. “Only a jerk like you would do something like this.”
“Nothing TRW doesn’t do every day,” he replied. “Now looky here …”
He pointed at the line next to the Visa number. “Three hundred fifty-dollar ATM cash advance, taken out last night at nine forty-six. And see this?” He jabbed his finger at MC and AmEx numbers below it. “Another three-and-a-half c’s from the other cards, taken out just a few minutes later. Probably from the very same machine.”
“Twenty-one fifty-eight,” I murmured, noting the time entered during the AmEx transaction. “Almost ten o’clock. That’s not long after John was shot … probably right after she took off from Clancy’s.”
Pearl nodded his head. “Uh-huh. She headed straight to the nearest ATM and took out as much cash as she could-just over a grand altogether-and there hasn’t been another charge on any of her cards since.” He glanced up at me. “She didn’t want to leave any tracks behind her.”
“Credit card receipts?”
“You got it. Your girlfriend didn’t want to have to pay for anything with a card because that would allow someone to trace her, so she grabbed as much cash as her credit limit would allow. That’s a sign of someone who’s going underground.” He rubbed his jaw pensively as he stared at the screen. “Now I wonder if she …?”
He called up her driver’s license, then cross-referenced it with her credit cards. “She didn’t rent a car,” he said after a few moments. “Car rental agencies always ask for a license and enter it into their records, but this shows she hasn’t used her license for anything.”
“What about Morgan and Payson-Smith?”
Pearl shrugged. “I’ll check, but I bet we won’t find anything for them, either.” He bent over the keyboard again; this time he allowed me to watch over his shoulder as he began to repeat the same process for the other two Ruby Fulcrum scientists.
Modemed phone numbers, passwords, menu screens accessing the files of credit bureaus: Pearl was doing something almost akin to art, albeit strange and terrible to behold. Not to mention scary. If an amateur like Pearl could hack into credit files and use inductive reasoning to second-guess what a fugitive had been thinking the previous evening, what did this portend for the rest of us?
Bailey must have sensed my line of thought. “When I was a kid,” he said as his fingers wandered across the keys, “and my great-grandfather was still alive, he told me that his uncle Samuel had been an escaped slave from Tennessee, way back during the Civil War. He had taken the Underground Railroad up north to Chicago, and it was a hell of a ride. Hiding out in fruit cellars during the day, riding in the back of hay wagons at night, running from one abolitionist house to the next. Once he had to outrun some bloodhounds in some hick town in Kentucky and didn’t shake ’em until he lost the scent by wading several miles down a shallow creek.”
“But he got away, didn’t he?”
He nodded. “Yeah, he got away, but they only had bloodhounds back then. If great-uncle Sam had to do the same thing now, he probably would have stolen a car … and if he wasn’t paying cash all the way, then every time he stopped at a charge station, some database would have recorded a number with his name behind it. How long do you think he might have lasted? Probably not even to the Illinois state line.”
There was a sharp rap on the door; we looked around to see Jah standing in the corridor. He seemed nervous. “Gerry,” he said, “I’ve got something I think you ought to see.”
“Joker?”
He shook his head. “Joker’s clean,” he said, “except that everything you had stored on it has been dumped. It’s the backup disk you took from John’s PT. It …”
Jah took a deep breath, then crooked a finger at me. “Just c’mon down to the lab. You’re not going to believe this.”
Jah’s computer didn’t show anything unusual, at least at first glance; the screen displayed the same root directory I had seen the night before on my own ’puter, the cryptic acronyms for a couple hundred different files. He sat down at the computer and pushed a button on the CPU. The CD-OP bay slid open; the backup I had made from Dingbat’s original mini-disk was nestled in its drawer.
“When I got down here,” he began, “I booted it up like you see here and copied the files into the hard drive. When I was through doing that, I punched into the directory to see what I could find-”
“Sure,” I said, “that’s just what I did.”
“You did?” He glanced over his shoulder at me. “So what happened to you?”
I shrugged, not quite understanding what he was asking. “Well … nothing happened, really. I scrolled through the directory and tried to find something that looked like a front door, but I couldn’t.”
“Yeah?” He scratched at his head. “Then what happened? Did you try punching into a BAT file, or did you get out of the directory?”
I shook my head. “Naw, I didn’t get a chance to go that far. I got a phone call and … um, that’s about when the feds broke down the door. But I didn’t do anything before that.”
“Uh-huh. And they just unplugged everything and took it …”
“Yeah, right. What are you getting at?”
Jah pointed at his screen. “Well, I did the same thing you did, but when I tried the BATS and EXECS I couldn’t find a front door either. Everything came up BAD COM. So I decided to get out of the directory and log into a search-and-retrieve program I’ve got installed in this thing … a standard little number I put in here a few months ago to help me find lost files when I’ve been fucking around a little too much. This way I figured I might be able to unlock a back door or something. Anyway, I was entering the SAR program when-”
He snapped his fingers. “Boom boom, out go the lights. The whole screen went dead for a moment. It was like the computer had spontaneously decided to reboot itself, but I didn’t even get so much as a c-prompt. I was still looking under the table … y’know, like to see if I had managed to kick out the plug or something stupid like that … when the screen came back on again a moment later.”