And, turning to a second monitor, I was pretty sure I knew who that author was. The screen was covered with unintelligible code. But if I glanced back and forth between the two monitors, I could see some of the text from the porn site on the second screen, interspersed with lines and lines of unintelligible gibberish pocked with brackets.
Apparently I’d interrupted Roger in the middle of updating his site. The cursor blinked right after the phrase “completely nekkid and reelly…” - I restrained my impulse to correct his spelling, and I didn’t particularly want to know what adjective he’d been about to type.
Was this how he normally spent his evenings? I wondered. Or just the evenings when his inept attempts at connecting with real live women fizzled?
I turned back to the first monitor. Something about the site looked familiar. I grabbed the mouse and scrolled up to the top of the page. Red and yellow words flashed at me, just as they had done on the site I’d seen at home - the site whose address I’d found in Ted’s cache. Different words, but same style - which means, unless all porn sites had the same graphic look, it was probably the same site.
I glanced at a third monitor, which seemed to be tracking the progress of Roger’s CD creation. He was copying vast quantities of files onto the CD. File titles flashed briefly across the screen as they were copied, and from the titles, I deduced that he was copying porn files. Backing up his site, perhaps? Adding new material to it?
I didn’t know enough to tell, and didn’t really care. Whatever he was doing, it shouldn’t be happening on Mutant Wizards property, with Mutant Wizards hardware. Tomorrow, I’d look for someone who could figure out what was happening. I grabbed a slip of paper and wrote down the address of the porn site, in case whoever I enlisted needed that to track it down.
“Meg?”
I jumped, and then realized that Roger’s voice was coming from my cell phone.
“I’m in the lobby. The dog’s not here. Anything else?”
“No,” I said. “Thanks a million, Roger. Sorry to drag you over there at this time of night.”
If I were Roger, I’d at least have pretended to allow enough time to walk over to the office, I thought, with irritation. Was he too stupid to think of that, or did he think I was? Either way, I needed to leave, now. But I wanted some evidence. I slipped a CD from the middle of Roger’s completed stack. And then, in case he was keeping count, I tiptoed across the lab, grabbed a blank CD from the box where they were stored, and slipped it back at approximately the same place.
The lab itself seemed relatively soundproof - perhaps that explained why Roger had not emerged to check on any of the earlier events of the evening. But as I opened the door to the corridor, I heard the front door open and close. Clutching the contraband CD with my left fingertips, I eased the lab door slowly closed and slipped back down the hall and into a nearby cube.
Just in time. I saw Roger’s shadowy figure pass by, and then I heard the computer lab door open and close.
I peeked out and peeked through the glass walls again. Roger was settled back in his chair, hands clasped behind his head, staring impassively at his monitors.
Time for me to disappear.
I tucked the CD into my purse and sneaked the long way back to the reception area. Even though I didn’t think Roger could hear it, I made sure to open and close the office door as quietly as possible. And I knew better than to wait for the geriatric elevator; I tiptoed down the stairs and eased the door closed. And breathed a sigh of relief. Unless Roger left the windowless computer lab, I’d be undetected. I was safe.
Or maybe not, I realized as I turned and stepped out into the parking lot. Which was still almost empty. Aside from Frankie’s van, my blue Toyota was the only car in the parking lot. And apart from me, the only person in sight was the huge biker who’d been lurking in our parking lot. At the moment, he was lurking beside my Toyota.
As I watched, he leaned down and peered under the car.
His back was to me, so I decided to sneak a little closer to see what he was up to.
He was at least six feet six inches tall, and remarkably broad. Aside from a slight potbelly, he seemed mostly muscle. He wore enormous canvas boots, greasy jeans, a T-shirt with the sleeves ripped out, and a denim vest with a florid painting of a winged ferret on the back. Chains jingled merrily from various parts of his outfit, and his arms sported a remarkable collection of tattoos, though his thick body hair made it hard to appreciate any of their details. Except for one: on a thinly forested patch of bulging bicep, I could decipher the words BORN TO LOSE. The effect was somewhat spoiled by the skull inserted between the o and the s of “lose.” Although a miniature work of art in its own right - one eye-hole sported a rose, and the other a writhing worm - the skull was so nearly identical in size and shape to the o that it was clear that the tattoo artist hadn’t been the world’s best speller, and had originally inscribed “Born to Loose.” You had to give the arm’s owner points, I decided. He was at least literate enough to consider fixing the typo worth additional pain and possibly more money.