“So, broken telephone.”
“Sort of,” he said. “Except in the internet version, you can trace every step of the journey.”
“What about the rest of the emails? I want to know where chapters three, four, and five came from.”
He brought those up. She could see for herself that they still came from eldwincolin@ontcom.ca. “These were sent from the internet, but still from his account.”
“Meaning.”
His shoulders slumped a little. “How come you don’t know this stuff? Ma’am.”
“You want me to slap your cranium?”
“You can send email from your desktop, you know, at home, off a program, or you can send it from the internet itself, from your ISP’s webmail program – it’s called a ‘shell’ and they all have one – which means you’re logging on to your account from some homepage – and this could be anywhere in the world – and you can send and receive mail from there.”
“Does the IP address change?”
“Yes,” he said. “Different servers.” He quickly added: “Servers are machines connected to the internet.”
“Can you find the location of these servers?”
“Yes,” he said, and he opened the browser on Wingate’s computer. He was copying and pasting strings of numbers onto a webpage. He clicked something and waited. Then he said, “Or no.”
“What do you mean no?”
“I mean these later chapters were sent from Colin Eldwin’s email address through the shell, but he was anonymized.”
“For Christ’s sake!”
Mackie turned in the chair, panicked anew. “Please, Ma’am, don’t slap my cranium. There’s all kinds of ways to be anonymous on the internet these days. You can send email, surf, chat, all anonymously. You can be untraceable. Anyone can do it.”
“So we can’t know it’s Eldwin physically sending the emails?”
“That’s right,” he said, and he sounded proud of her. “Someone could have his password and is using his account. That’s all they’d need. Then they could cloak, log on, and send email and no one would be the wiser unless they ran the IPs, like we just did.”
Hazel stared at the screen. The string of numbers Mackie had input was now superimposed over an image of planet Earth with a big yellow question mark beside them. “So what you’re saying is these last three chapters could have come from anywhere.”
“Well, they came from Ontcom’s shell, but the person who logged on to the shell could have been in Mozambique for all we know. This person used a site called Anonymice to cloak themselves. It says it here in the expanded headers.”
“What if we serve Anonymice with a warrant?”
“Good luck,” said Mackie. “These sites don’t keep any records at all. They don’t know who’s accessing their service. Theoretically, you could identify a user if you somehow got legal control of the site and you found him while he was online, because the Anonymice servers know, at some level, who’s logging on and generally where they are before they cloak them and send them forward into the internet. But once your guy’s logged out of the site, he’s a ghost.” She leaned over him and brought up the window with the video in it. She let him watch it. “Omigod. Is that blood, Ma’am?”
“What can you tell me about that url?”
He copied it from the address window and pasted it into trace search. “It’s the same thing. The path begins and ends on the internet.”
“Is there any way to link the url with the company that anonymized the emails? Is it the same company?”
He did some typing. “Yes. This is being processed through Anonymice as well.” He pointed to a string of numbers. “That’s their IP address.”
“Right now?” she asked. “The connection is live right now?”
“Yes.”
She patted him on the head, and he shrunk a little under her touch. “You can go.”
She went out the back of the pen toward her office. “Cartwright?” Melanie Cartwright appeared in the hallway. “Where’s my bacon sandwich?”
“Do you mean Mr. Pedersen?”
“Him, too.”
“I’m expecting him any minute,” she said.
Hazel went into her office. The missing link to Eldwin was some internet service that existed solely to allow people to work untraceably on the internet. But she knew what the average person didn’t: even a buried footprint still exists.
Something landed on her desk. The homey scent of peameal bacon wafted up from it. “I serve two masters,” said Andrew Pedersen.
“Thanks for coming in,” she said. “Have a seat. There’s something I want to show you.”
He sat in the chair opposite her, looking around the office. Another phantasm of the past settled on them both, him in that chair, having brought her lunch. The comfortable silence of ritual. Would there come a time when she wouldn’t be stumbling into these hollows, shaped like her, that belonged to another time?
She opened the wax paper that wrapped the sandwich and passed him a small sheaf of papers. “I’m wondering if you can look at this for me. We think it’s written in a kind of code you might be familiar with.”
“Really.”
“It’s the fourth and fifth chapters of the short story in the Record. We’re not sure it’s still the same writer, and we think he might be leading us to something. Only we’re not sure what and we’re not sure where he’s telling us to look.”
His eyebrows went up. “Interesting.” He accepted the papers as she took her first bite of the thick, fatty sandwich. It was gorgeous. She let him read the papers in silence. When he’d finished them, he went back to the first page and read them through again. By the time she was done her sandwich, he’d finished as well. “Pretty sick stuff.”
“It’s not the plot that’s got us confused. It’s the sense that there’s something buried in it. Did you notice how many times he used the word damage?”
“I did.”
“So?”
“Well, he is better than the first writer -”
“So you agree it’s not the same person.”
“Absolutely.”
For some reason, his confirmation of what they believed weighed on her. “That’s what we thought, too.”
“The guy who wrote the first two chapters is incapable of something like…” He shuffled the pages. “‘Her bright, brown eyes came through the dark of her sockets like headlights coming out of a tunnel.’ That’s almost good.”
“Fine. So someone’s taken over the story.”
“That doesn’t bode too well for the first writer.”
“No. It doesn’t,” she said, and she decided not to say anything else. “Go back to ‘damage.’ Does it point to anything for you?”
Andrew looked down at the pages in his lap. “Well, there’s some pretty graphic ‘damage’ in the story, don’t you think? Maybe the writer’s just pointing you to its importance. Telling you it’s meaningful.”
“And nothing else? I’m of the mind that these two chapters are telling us what to do. The Wise character talks to this dead woman. Tries to destroy her again by burning something he’s written. This story. Then he finds himself trapped. I shouldn’t tell you this, but the man who wrote the first two chapters of this story seems to be missing. This isn’t a yarn anymore.”
He flipped through the story again. On the last page, he began to nod.