The Stranger(70)

“Been a long time,” she said.

Sally still hadn’t looked up from the paper.

“It has,” he said. “How’s work?”

“Busy, lot of clients.” She finally met his eye. He felt a gentle pow and held on. “But you didn’t call for that.”

“No.”

It was one of those moments when the noise fades away and the rest of the world becomes background and it’s him and her and nothing else.

“Adam?”

“What?”

“I can’t handle a big thing here. Just tell me what you want.”

“Did my wife ever call you?”

Sally blinked as if the question, too, had been a bit of a pow. “When?”

“Ever.”

She turned toward her beer. “Yeah,” she said. “Once.”

They were in one of those noisy chain-restaurant bars, the kind that majors in deep-fried appetizers and has a million TV screens playing maybe two sporting events. The bartender came over and made a big production of introducing himself. Adam quickly ordered a beer to get him to leave.

“When?” he asked.

“Two years ago, I guess. During the case.”

“You never told me.”

“It was just once.”

“Still.”

“What difference does it make now, Adam?”

“What did she say?”

“She knew you’d been to my house.”

Adam almost asked how, but of course, he knew the answer, didn’t he? She’d put a tracking app on all the phones. She could check at any time to see the boys’ location.

Or his.

“What else?”

“She wanted to know why you were there.”

“What did you tell her?”

“That it was work,” Sally Perryman said.

“You told her it was nothing, right?”

“It was nothing, Adam. We were obsessed with that case.” Then: “But it was almost something.”

“Almost doesn’t count.”

A sad smile came to Sally’s lips. “I think to your wife it probably does.”

“Did she believe you?”

Sally shrugged. “I never heard from her again.”

He sat there and looked at her. He opened his mouth, not sure what he would say, but she stopped him with her open palm. “Don’t.”

She was right. He slid away from the counter and headed outside.





Chapter 36



As the stranger entered the garage, he thought, as he did nearly every time he came here, about all the famous companies that purportedly started in just this way. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak started Apple (why not call the company the Steves?) by selling fifty units of Wozniak’s new Apple I computer out of a garage in Cupertino, California. Jeff Bezos began Amazon as an online bookseller out of his garage in Bellevue, Washington. Google, Disney, Mattel, Hewlett-Packard, Harley-Davidson, all began life, if legend is to be believed, out of tiny, indistinct garages.

“Any word on Dan Molino?” the stranger asked.

There were three of them in the garage, all sitting in front of powerful computers with large monitors. Four Wi-Fi routers sat on the shelf next to paint cans Eduardo’s dad had put out here more than a decade ago. Eduardo, who was easily the best of them when it came to the technological aspects of what they did, had set up a system whereby the Wi-Fi not only went out and bounced all over the world, making them as anonymous as the Internet gets, but even if someone somehow tracked it back to them, the routers would automatically trip into action and move them to another host. In truth, the stranger didn’t get it all. But he didn’t have to.

“He paid,” Eduardo said.

Eduardo sported stringy hair that always needed a cut and the kind of unshaven look that made him look more greasy than hip. He was an old-school hacker who enjoyed the chase as much as the moral indignation or cash.

Next to him was Gabrielle, a single mother of two and the oldest of them by far at forty-four. Two decades ago, she’d started out as a phone-sex operator. The idea was to keep the guy on the line for as long as possible, charging his phone $3.99 per minute. More recently, in a similar vein, Gabrielle had posed as various hot housewives on a “no strings attached” hookup site. Her job was to coax a new client (read: dupe) into thinking sex was imminent until his free trial was over and he committed to a full-year subscription on his credit card.

Merton, their most recent colleague, was nineteen, thin, heavily tattooed, with a shaved head and bright blue eyes just south of sane. He wore baggy jeans with chains coming out of the pocket that hinted at either biking or bondage, it was hard to tell which. He cleaned his fingernails with a switchblade and spent his free time volunteering for a televangelist who did his services out of a twelve-thousand-seat arena. Ingrid had brought Merton in from her job at a website for a company called the Five.