"That firearm safety convention in Trenton," Loren said. "What, six, seven years ago?"
"Something like that." He folded his arms, kept leaning against her hood. "You here on official business?"
"I am."
"It involve a former school chum of ours?"
"It might."
"Wanna tell me about it?"
"Wanna tell me why you're here?"
"I live near here."
"So?"
"So I spotted a county vehicle. Figured I might be able to be of some assistance."
"How's that?"
"Matt Hunter wants to move back to town," Lance said. "He's closing on a house not far from here."
Loren said nothing.
"Does that work into your case?"
"I don't see how."
Lance smiled and opened the car door. "Why don't you tell me what's going on? Maybe we can figure out how together."
Chapter 16
"HEY, GUESS WHAT I'm doing to your wife right now?"
Matt held the phone to his ear.
The man whispered, "Matt? You still there?"
Matt said nothing.
"Yo, Matt, did you tattle on me? I mean, did you tell the wife about me sending you those pictures?"
He couldn't move.
"Because Olivia is being much more protective with her phone. Oh, she won't stop doing me. That ain't gonna happen. She's addicted, you know what I'm saying?"
Matt's eyes closed.
"But all of a sudden she says she wants to be more careful. So I'm wondering, you know, guy to guy here, did you say something? Let her in on our little secret?"
Matt's hand clamped down so hard he thought the phone might crack in his hand. He tried to take in deep breaths, but his chest kept hitching up. He found his voice and said, "When I find you, Charles Talley, I'm going to rip off your head and crap down your neck."
Silence.
"You still there, Charles?"
The voice on the phone was a whisper. "Gotta run. She's coming back."
And then he was gone.
Matt told Rolanda to cancel his afternoon appointments.
"You don't have any appointments," she said.
"Don't be a wiseass."
"You want to tell me what's wrong?"
"Later."
He started home. The camera phone was still in his hand. He waited until he pulled up to their place off Main Street in Irvington. The already-sparse grass had pretty much died in the recent drought- there had been no rainfall on the East Coast for three weeks. In suburbs like Livingston, the lushness of one's lawn is taken seriously. Banning it, sitting by idly as one's green deadened to brown, was worthy of a good neighborly teeth-gnashing over the new Weber Genesis Gold B backyard grill. Here, in Irvington, nobody cared.
Lawns were a rich man's game.
Matt and Olivia lived in a declining two-family held together by aluminum siding. They had the right side of the dwelling; the Owens, an African-American family of five, had the left. Both sides had two bedrooms and one and a half baths.
He took the stoop two steps at a time. When he got inside he hit the speed-dial-one spot for Olivia. It went into her voice mail again. He wasn't surprised. He waited for the beep.
"I know you're not at the Ritz," Matt said. "I know it was you in the blonde wig. I know it wasn't a big joke. I even know about Charles Talley. So call me and explain."
He hung up and looked out the window. There was a Shell gas station on the corner. He watched it. His breaths were coming in shallow gulps. He tried to slow them down. He grabbed a suitcase from the closet, threw it on the bed, started stuffing his clothes into it.
He stopped. Packing a suitcase. A stupid and histrionic move. Cut it out.
Olivia would be home tomorrow.
And if she wasn't?
No use thinking about it. She would be home. It would all come together, one way or the other, in a few hours.
But he was no longer above snooping. He started in Olivia's drawers. He barely hated himself for doing it. That voice on the phone had set him off. Best-case scenario now: Olivia was hiding something from him. He might as well find out what.
But he found nothing.
Not in the drawers, not in the closets. He thought about other possible hiding spots when he remembered something.
The computer.
He headed upstairs and hit the power switch. The computer booted up, came to life. It seemed to take an inordinate amount of time. Matt's right leg started shaking up and down. He put his palm on the knee to slow it down.
They'd finally gotten a cable modem- dial-ups going the way of the Betamax- and he was on the Web in seconds. He knew Olivia's password, though he had never dreamed of using it like this. He logged onto her e-mail and scanned the messages. The new stuff held no surprises. He tried the old mail.
The directory was empty.
He tried looking under her "Sent Mail" folder. Same thing- everything had been deleted. He tried the section called "Deleted Mail." It too had been cleaned out. He checked through the browser's "History," hoping to see where Olivia had last surfed. That, too, had been erased.
Matt sat back and drew an obvious conclusion: Olivia had been covering her tracks. And the obvious follow-up question was: Why?
There was one more area to check: the cookies.
People often erased their surfing history or their mailbox, but the cookies were something different. If Olivia had wiped out the cookies, Matt would automatically know something had gone awry. His Yahoo! home page wouldn't automatically come up, for instance. Amazon wouldn't know who he was. A person trying to cover their tracks would not want that.
Clearing out the cookies would be too noticeable.
He went through Explorer and found the folder that held the Web's cookies. There were tons of them. He clicked the date button, thereby putting them in date order, the most recent at the top. His eyes ran down them. Most of them he recognized- Google, OfficeMax, Shutterfly- but there were two unfamiliar domains. He wrote them down, minimized the Explorer window, went back to the Web.
He typed in the first address and hit return. It was for the Nevada Sun News- a newspaper that required you to sign up in order to access the archives. The paper's home office was in Las Vegas. He checked the "personal profile." Olivia had signed up using a fake name and e-mail address. No surprise there. They both did that, to prevent spam and protect privacy.
But what had she been looking up?
There was no way to tell.
Strange, maybe, but the second Web address was far more so.
It took a while for the Web to recognize what he'd typed in. The address bounced from one spot to another before finally landing on something called:
Stripper-Fandom.com.
Matt frowned. There was a warning on the home page that nobody under the age of eighteen should continue. That didn't bode well. He clicked the enter icon. The pictures that appeared were, as one might expect, provocative. Stripper-Fandom was an "appreciation" site for…
… for female strippers?
Matt shook his head. There were countless thumbnails of topless women. He clicked one. There were biographies listed for each girclass="underline"
Bunny's career as an exotic dancer started in Atlantic City, but with her impressive dance moves and slinky costumes, she quickly rose to stardom and moved to Vegas. "I love it out here! And I love rich men!" Bunny's specialty is wearing bunny ears and doing a hop-dance using the pole…
Matt clicked the link. An e-mail address came up, in case you wanted to write Bunny and request rates for a "private audience." It actually said that- private audience. Like Bunny was the pope.
What the hell was going on here?
Matt searched through the stripper fan site until he could take no more. Nothing jumped out at him. Nothing fell into place. He just felt more confused. Maybe the site meant nothing at all. Most of the strippers were from the Vegas area. Maybe Olivia had gotten there by clicking an advertising link at that Nevada newspaper. Maybe the link wasn't even marked as a stripper site and just led there.
But why was she on a Nevada newspaper site in the first place? Why had she erased all her e-mails?