It was exhilarating, knowing that little bit more than was being reported. It’s why I never trusted what I saw or read in the news. Not that what was reported was wrong, just nearly always only a sliver of the truth.
Now for part two of my little quest. I handed Tigger the iPod.
“Can you take a look?” I said. “Supposedly Owl used it as a portable hard drive, sucking down info off Sayre’s computer.”
“And you want to look at it,” Tigger said, “because nothing says love like spying on a lady’s files.”
“I want to look at it because what’s on it might help explain how Owl wound up dead.”
“Okay, then,” she said. “Let’s see what’s on it.” She plugged the iPod into a USB shell in front of the right-hand monitor and her computer began a virus check on the device.
Tigger flashed me a grin, her nose ring tinkling in contact with her two front teeth, giving off a silvery ping.
She said, “I feel like Nancy Drew.”
“The Clue in the Crumbling Cock,” I chimed in.
“Get out, that isn’t one.” She laughed. I was a bad person, but still my bad jokes tickled her. Hell, I’d miss her.
After a few more seconds of chugging away, her computer gave the device an all-clear. We leaned our heads together as the contents of the iPod opened up on her screen.
Stacks of files folders appeared, 183 in all.
Tigger blew a feathery lock of hair from her brow.
“So, you know what you’re looking for here?”
“Nope.” I looked and looked and kept looking, reading the names of the folders one by one. Many were just meaningless series of characters like L77JPLEQIN.
Tigger said, “Look, I’d like to help, but my peeps will be waking from their naps soon, and I know someone’s going to want her snack.”
“I hear you. Let’s take a shortcut,” I said. “Can you sort all the folders by date? Oldest first?”
It was done before I’d finished asking her for it. Tigger studied the screen and said, “Interesting. The two oldest are from 2001, but after that there are none that are older than last year.”
I had her open the first folder, the oldest one, dated 2 /4/2001. It contained one item, a single Excel file.
Tigger double-clicked on the icon and a spreadsheet opened up. The field headings were all in Cyrillic characters, except for a logo at the top: TWEENSLAND. The alphabetical entries in the columns below were written in English, though. Names, addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers, e-mail and IP addresses. The names all looked to be male; the addresses covered some two dozen states. There was a column of dates (1999 through 2001), another showing durations in minutes, and one containing what appeared to be usernames, aliases like yancy77 and popeyespappy. The final column was what looked like a comments field filled with tidbits like “school principal,” “deputy sheriff,” “doctor,” “seminarian,” and more, entries like “softball coach,” “scout master,” and “two boys, Mike & Joseph.”
It all looked so innocent, unless you knew what you were looking at. Which Tigger didn’t—I’d told her about seeing Elena, but not what Elena had told me about the childhood Owl had rescued her from. For all Tigger knew, Tweensland was second cousin to McDonaldland.
Tigger started printing up the spreadsheet for me.
“Shit, Payton, there’s ninety-two pages of this. You’re going to owe me a ream.”
I smiled at her. “Saucy wench, and you a mother now.”
She giggled through her nose, it came out a snort.
“Let’s see what’s in the other 2001 folder,” I told her.
She clicked to open it. Inside were over forty mpeg files. Video. Before I could say anything, Tigger double-clicked one at random. “Wait!” I yelped.
Had it been my computer, there would’ve been a time lapse of anywhere from five seconds to fifteen minutes during which I could’ve stopped it or at least given her a more coherent warning. But Tigger’s computer was a hundred times faster and more modern, and so with ruthless efficiency the video clip sprang to life on the screen.
In the upper-right corner of the picture appeared superimposed the same logo from the Excel file: TWEENSLAND. A line at the bottom said Copyright 1999. The time-counter on the computer’s media player showed that the clip ran just over nine minutes.
A rangy twelve-year-old girl with shoulder-length chestnut-colored hair entered the frame beside an afghan-covered couch. She mumbled something, but it wasn’t in English, nor was the reply she got from a coaxing female voice from behind the camera’s lens.
Sweeping her hair out of her face, the girl looked into the camera, then unbuttoned and stepped out of her loose-fitting blue jeans. They fell in a heap at her bare feet. She tugged her brown sweater up over her head in a single cross-armed motion, ruffling her hair and revealing early breasts, small and nubby. Her skin was pale and smooth and iridescent; the curving innerwall of a seashell. Behind her on a small table stood three narrow cylinders on end—one flesh-colored, one kitchen-utensil white, one silver-enamel like a child’s toy missile—and an uncapped bottle of baby oil. She lay down naked on the couch and reached for—
Tigger shut down the media player and the image instantly vanished—from the screen, at least. I had expected something like it but still been unprepared. I was frozen, transfixed—like a butterfly pinned to a collector’s board.
Only 20 seconds into the clip, longer if measured in heartbeats. I felt wrung out, twisted.
Tigger didn’t say anything. I didn’t dare say anything.
Her printer went on spitting out the 92-page document.
She pushed back her swivel chair, steadied it, and stood up. She walked into her kitchen, where I saw her bend to take something from under her sink. She came back carrying a claw-head hammer.
I was tempted to defend my head with my hands, but she walked right by me, plucked the iPod out of the docking cradle and dropped it on the floor. She squatted beside it and smashed it with the hammer. I didn’t stop her. After five direct hits, it was ground up pretty good.
I said, “I think you got it.”
She turned on me in a flash, such a look of black fury on her face, I did cover my head suddenly with my hands, afraid that she might lash out indiscriminately.
She shook the hammer like Thor.
“Payton, whatever you’re involved in, take it out of here!”
“Look, I had no idea—”
She raised the hammer and I shut up. I heard her baby-daddy groan in the bathroom, but if any of the others had woken up, they remained quiet.
Tigger said in a tense whisper, “People lose their kids for having shit like that on their computer, and you brought it in here—”
The last page sent to the printer stopped abruptly. The sheet of paper came out only three-quarters complete. The machine made a frustrated grinding sound, like a gnashing of teeth, before finally spitting out the interrupted page unfinished.
I took the pages from the tray, squared them on the desk like a deck of cards. Tigger put her hammer down on the nearest mousepad. We both just breathed in and out for a bit.
She said, “Sorry, Payton, but—”
“It’s okay,” I said. “Everyone has lines they don’t cross. Or they should.”
Tigger asked, “Was it important evidence?”
I shrugged. “I saw more than enough.”
The girl’s nakedness flashed in my mind again and I re-squared the printed pages.