"He didn't say where he was?"
I shook my head. "No—but then I get this bright idea and forward it to this kid I know over at the university's tech support center. This kid locked himself out of the lab one night before he had a big paper due and I let him in. He said if I ever needed a favor from him, so…
"I go over there and tell him that I got an e-mail from my brother who's been missing for a couple of weeks, and I ask him if there's any way he could find out where it was sent from."
"He ran a traceroute on the computer the mail came from?"
"How did you know?"
"I went to college, remember. I read books. Me smart girl, know many things."
"So you keep telling me. The kid explained to me how a traceroute to an IP address will show the last few routers of the ISP through which they got the connection. Most ISPs name their routers to include the city they're in. Someone more security conscious will either name them differently so the city doesn't show up, or block traceroutes entirely, but that doesn't much matter because other routers in other networks which you use to reach them will be obviously named. Isn't that interesting?"
"Fascinating. Where is he?"
I took out my wallet and removed the slip of paper I'd been carrying around all day, looked at it—
16 pop1-col-P6-0.atdn.net (66.185.140.55) 101.196 ms 50.611 ms 50.027 ms
17 rr-atlanta.atdn.net (66.185.146.242) 62.850 ms 63.504 ms 105.878 ms
18 srp5-0.rdcoh-rtr2.atlanta.rr.com (65.25.129.102) 64.905 ms 103.651 ms110.467 ms
19 gig2-1.rdcoh-swt7.woodstock.rr.com (65.24.3.254) 62.967 ms 63.869 ms 65.189 ms
—then handed it to Tanya.
"He's in Atlanta?"
"Woodstock. It's a suburb. He was there at seven a.m. this morning. He could be anywhere now. And the only way to get any more specific than that is to have access to the city's phone company or cable records."
"Couldn't a really clever computer hacker get that information?"
"Yes." I looked at her. It took a moment for her to read my expression.
"The guy in tech support?"
"It took some really sterling acting on my part to convince him that this was a genuine family emergency, and it took him a couple of hours, but he got access to the cable company's records in Woodstock."
Tanya took hold of my arm. "Do you have an exact address?"
I nodded.
"Did he check for a phone number?"
"Yes. There isn't one. But guess who that cable account is registered to?"
"I have no—oh, shit, yes I do. Beowulf Antiques, Inc.?"
I nodded once again. "He went back to the only home he's got left."
Tanya stood up. "All right, here's the plan; your court appearance is Friday morning. It's now Wednesday morning—or really late Tuesday night, depending on how you want to look at it. We get a flight out to Atlanta as soon as possible, rent a car, drive to Woodstock, and bring him back here."
"Just like that?"
"Just like that. He's alone and probably sick with grief and sacred and… and I don't know what else. He's got no one else to turn to but us."
"Then why in the hell didn't he just tell me where he was?"
"He's testing you again. Maybe he wants to see how much you're willing to go through to find him."
"Sounds like something he'd do, all right."
"So?" Tanya stood there, arms crossed over her chest—a really great and sexy chest that I hadn't groped or ogled in over a week—drumming her fingers on her forearm.
I sighed. "Did I ever tell you how much I hate traveling? I mean really, truly, sincerely loathe it?"
"You might have mentioned it once or twice over the years, yes."
I stood. "Don't put us next to the wing, whatever you do. I'll keep flashing back to the Twilight Zone with William Shatner and the gremlin."
"I like sitting next to the wing."
"That's because you're an evil woman and know how much it freaks me out."
She took my hand, squeezed it. "I love you."
"You'd damn well better."
Fourteen-and-a-half hours later, a little before six p.m., just as the Georgia sun was casting a twilight clay over the red clay soil of that great and beautiful Southern state, Tanya and I were driving a rented car down the longest side road I'd ever encountered. Trees stood tall and thick-leaved on either side of the road, creating a canopy. Getting this far, we'd passed three fields overrun with kudzu, which I had never seen before. It looked like a massive, violent knot of human tendon to me. Which is to say I wasn't thrilled, where Tanya kept wishing aloud that we had a camera so she could take lots of pictures.
The road rose up, turning, and finally leveled out about twenty yards from a massive chain link fence with rolls of barbed wire running across its top. The gate entrance had been ripped from its hinges and the doors lay twisted and ruined on either side.
So they'd simply run through it with the bus. I could almost hear Arnold and Thomas and Rebecca and Denise encouraging Christopher to floor it and break it down. Christopher probably told them all to shut up, he'd do what he wanted, and then rammed through it anyway, much to their cheers.
It was almost enough to make me smile.
I killed the engine and sat there, staring at the house—a near-monstrous gabled number that looked like something out of a Daphne Du Maurier novel. I could almost see Mrs. Danvers snarling down from one of the windows as Maxim de Winter was arriving with his new wife, whom Danvers would forever refer to as "…the second Mrs. De Winter."
"Okay," said Tanya, "here's the big question: do you want me to come with you?"
"No. Absolutely not. The idea of you being even this close to that… place makes me sick."
"It's just a house, Mark."
"Right, and Auschwitz is just a bunch of old bunkhouses with a primitive form of central heating, got'cha." I leaned forward and peered out. "I don't see the motorcycle."
"He might have parked it in the back of the house. If he's hiding out here, that'd be the thing to do."
"Been on the run a lot, have you? Keeping one step ahead of The Man? You been hiding copies of Abby Hoffman's Steal This Book from me? Not good for The Movement, baby, not cool, un-groovy."
"Are you finished?"
"I'm scared to death, Tanya. I don't want to go in there, I don't want to see what it looks like. Every smell's gonna make me think I'm sniffing… leftovers." I swallowed. Once. Very hard. "And I know what he did to them in there."
"So do I."
I kissed her cheek. "I'm sorry, I'm stalling."
"Yes, you are. And if there's as much security in there and he said, then I'm guessing that Christopher already knows we're here." She pointed toward a security camera in one of the trees to our left. "Looks like the red light's on to me."
I looked up at the camera, mouthed "All in favor," then raised my hand.
"Go and get him, Mark."
"Here," I handed her the keys. "You might want to start it up and run the air conditioner if it gets too hot."
"If?" said Tanya, taking the keys. "The temperature's risen twenty degrees in the last five minutes just from all the hot air you've been blowing."
"You make me feel so manly."
"I will give you fifteen minutes, my love, to convince him to come out here and go home with us. If you're not out in fifteen minutes, tell him that I will be coming in for the both of you, and that nobody wants that. Go. Shoo. Fetch."
"Woof, woof." I climbed from the car and began walking toward the front porch. As I neared the house, I could see a section of Grendel's massive garden off to the right; it covered about half the ground to the side of the house and extended all the way around to the back. I imagined the kids out here most of the day, tending to his tomatoes, his peas, his onions, all the while knowing what waited for them later that evening, any evening, every evening.