“Why should I do this?” he asked.
“Because I need your help,” I said. “And you might need my help some day.”
He made a noncommittal sound.
“Please,” I said. “She’s five-foot-one, she weighs maybe a hundred pounds, and the guy who put her in the hospital’s your size.” I thought back to the first piece he’d turned in, a vignette called “All In The Family,” about a ten-year-old girl and her older brother and the father that beat them both. It wasn’t the last we’d heard from him on the subject. “Every bone in her hand is broken. Every bone, Kurland. He took her hand and slammed it in a door. Three times.”
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. Enough.” I could hear him breathing heavily, thinking it over. “You just need me to sit there?”
“Hopefully,” I said.
He didn’t sound happy, but then I don’t think I’d ever heard him sound happy. “You’ll pay me back.”
It wasn’t a question. “I will,” I said. “Somehow.” I gave him the address and room number, told him to call me if anything happened.
“Thank you,” I said, but he’d hung up.
“Real smooth,” Michael said as I holstered my phone, “making it sound like she was beat up by her boyfriend or something.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You know what else you didn’t say? One word. It’s spelled A-R-D-O.”
“Kurland did three years at Rikers for assault and armed robbery. He can handle himself.”
“You’d better hope so,” Michael said. “And then you’d better hope he’s not too pissed off at you when he finds out just what it is you neglected to tell him.”
“That’s true,” I said. “But in the meantime, at least I don’t have to worry about Julie making it through the night.”
He put his hands up in a don’t-blame-me gesture. “Your call.” Then he pointed at the screen. “So, hey, what’s the story with that e-mail you were so excited about? There’s nothing there.”
He was right. Dorrie’s e-mail account was open before me. The Inbox was empty. Zero new messages, zero old ones. I quickly clicked through the other folders. They were all empty too. Like someone had gotten there before me and wiped the place clean.
Chapter 10
It was the only possible explanation.
Even if you assumed that Dorrie had been in the habit of deleting all her mail as soon as she read it and hadn’t kept copies of any of the messages she sent, even if Dorrie’s last Craigslist ad was old enough by now that responses were no longer coming in, even if none of her existing clients who knew to contact her at this address had written to her since the last time she’d checked her mail—even if you assumed all that, and it was a hell of a lot to assume—it was still impossible for her mailbox to be empty. Because I knew one person who had definitely sent a message to this e-mail address since Dorrie had died. Me. Less than an hour ago.
And that meant someone had gone into her account in the past hour and erased everything in it. A lot, a little—I’d never know how much. But whatever it had contained was gone.
Minutes. I’d missed it by minutes. If I’d been able to guess her password when I tried, or if I’d thought of coming down here sooner, or if I’d spent less time talking to Michael or hadn’t called Kurland...maybe I’d have beaten my invisible opponent to the punch. Or maybe not. Maybe he had some high-tech way to snoop on the e-mail account and had gotten an alert as soon as my message showed up, had raced in and erased everything within seconds. All that mattered was what I saw: the box was empty. I’d gotten in too late.
Michael was still watching me. I told him it was nothing, that I’d been expecting a message that hadn’t come. It probably sounded like a lie, but what the hell, he was used to being lied to in his line of work. I was getting into something over my head, I could tell that’s what he was thinking; but it was, in the end, my problem, not his. He’d given me all the warnings he could. Now it was up to me to listen or not. He rose from his crouch and headed for the kitchen, cursing and limping because his leg had fallen asleep. I started to swing the laptop closed.
But a sad temptation stopped me. Dorrie had had another e-mail address, her real address, the one she’d used when she was being Dorrie rather than Cassandra. And it occurred to me that if she’d set her computer up to automatically enter the password for one address, she’d probably have done it for the other as well.
I told myself I needed to check it to be thorough, to find out if maybe there were some useful leads there. That’s what I told myself, and there was even some truth to it—but it wasn’t the reason I wanted to do it. Not really.
I went back to the main Yahoo Mail page and entered “dorrie_burke” into the ID box. Sure enough, a line of asterisks appeared in the password box below. I clicked “Sign In.”
This Inbox was as full as the other had been empty, the messages dating back more than a year in some cases. There were messages from her mother, from Lane, from students whose names I recognized. There were automated reminders from Columbia’s bursar about tuition payments coming due and there was junk mail touting penny stocks and Cialis. I saw my own e-mail address crop up here and there, messages I’d sent Dorrie over the months; things about school and short personal notes, answers to questions she’d asked me and random links I’d forwarded her when I thought she might be interested. I’d sent one of the earliest messages in the folder (Subject: Restaurant Dan?) and one of the last—just a couple of days back I’d finally dumped on her all the materials I’d dug up for her writing project, the miscellaneous notes and photos and Google hits I’d managed to amass about her parents and sister. I clicked through all these messages one by one and it felt as if I was walking through her apartment again, looking at all her personal things. The difference being that there was no equivalent here to the drawer full of lingerie and massage oil. Online, she’d kept her lives nicely separate—Dorrie on one side of the wall, Cassie on the other.
But if I found nothing here that pointed to Cassie or her killer, to Ardo or Miklos or the massage clients she’d taken with her when she left Sunset, there was plenty that pointed to Dorrie. It was more personal than her apartment in some ways, seeing her through the messages she’d written and received, the ones we’d sent each other; she was present in a way she hadn’t been even when lying dead in the next room.
It was strange, the way the Internet and computers had transformed not just our lives but our deaths. Once, the effects the dead left behind were tangible objects, the things they’d touched and held and made. Today what you left behind was as likely as not to be bits of light on a computer screen: digital snapshots, electronic mail. I couldn’t help wondering how many of Yahoo’s millions of e-mail accounts at any given point were like this one, an unintended shrine to the recent dead, how many grieving loved ones found themselves sorting through the cooling traces of e-mail like archaeologists sifting for precious artifacts in the ashes of Pompeii. Or how many e-mail addresses ended up used not as tools for communication but as repositories for remembrances, people sending final farewells knowing there was no possibility of reply.
The last message in the Inbox was from Stu Kennedy. He’d sent it this afternoon from his home address, and it bore the stamp of his unsteady, one-fingered typing. “dear ggirl,” he wrote, “your turbulnt soul is now at rst, whre none csn do you harm.” I wondered whether he’d gotten an early start on his drinking today; under the circumstances, it wouldn’t have shocked me if he had.