Here She Lies (23 page)

This the computer?”

“That’s it,” Lazare answered, coming up behind Smith. Then, to me: “Warrant’s been approved. Agent Smith’s going to take a look in Julie’s computer before deciding whether he needs to take it.”

“She have a laptop, too?” Smith asked.

“Yes,” I answered, “but I don’t see it. She must have taken it.”

Smith sat down, positioned himself in front of the screen and cupped his hand over Julie’s mouse. “Well, let’s see what she’s got here,” he said in the easy, professional tone of a doctor saying
open wide
and searching for infection in places you yourself cannot see.

We stood behind him for a while, watching, but there was little that made any sense to me. He navi-gated the system deftly, discarding most of what he came upon. Finally he launched a search and sat back, arms folded, to wait while the screen filled with unrecognizable (to me) data. It appeared to be some kind of code. Smith reached into his back pocket and withdrew a small pad, then turned around to ask any one of us,

“Is there a pen I could borrow? Forgot mine.” Bobby leaned forward and nudged a blue ballpoint so it rolled in Smith’s direction. His freckled fingers caught it before it rolled off the desk. He made a few notes, then shut down the computer.

“So what do you think?” Lazare asked Smith.

“Looks like it’s loaded,” Smith said in a tone that was matter-of-fact, even unconcerned. Like Lazare, he was at work, doing his job and probably (hopefully) doing it well. Julie’s computer being “loaded” was just another development in just another case, nothing like the life-changing shift it was to me. Bobby took my hand and squeezed it as we stood there, listening to the cops chart their plans.

“I’ll bring it with me to Boston,” Smith said. “It’ll take some time, but I can e-mail you a preliminary report tonight.”

As soon as the screen blanked, Agent Smith began to pull out plugs and loop cords up and down from his elbow to the crook of his thumb, creating a stack of neat bundles, which he left on the desk. In fifteen minutes, he had Julie’s hard drive and keyboard packed into the trunk of his car. Bobby and I watched from the window while Lazare shook Smith’s hand and waited as he drove away.

In the light from the window, the skin beneath Bobby’s eyes was a translucent blue-green mottle. Exhaustion,
collapse
, had appeared in his face when I wasn’t looking. I took his hand and he smiled at me.

“I don’t think Julie would put Lexy in any danger,” he said.

“Of course not,” I said. “She loves Lexy.” I put my arms around him and for a minute or two we just held on, trying to keep at bay our worst fear: that our baby could be lost to us. I knew Julie would care for her lovingly, but we wanted more than that.

We wanted Lexy back.

Downstairs, six officers from the Great Barrington Police Department were searching the house. Julie’s catalog rooms with their pretty surfaces were now overturned and upended. Bobby and I didn’t know what to do with ourselves. Everywhere we went we seemed to be in the way, so we just floated from kitchen to dining room to living room until we heard Detective Lazare’s voice in the backyard. I opened the French doors in the living room and we went outside, where the early afternoon sun made mirrors of rain puddles on the slate patio.

When Lazare finished speaking with one of the officers, he turned his attention to us. Smiling a little, he said, “These waits are hard, I know.”

“What about the Amber Alert?” I asked him. “How long do they usually take?”

“No good answer there,” he said. “They take as long as they take. We’ve thrown a wide net—we’ll find them.”

But how could he be sure?

He pinched the bridge of his nose between forefin-ger and thumb, briefly closing his eyes. “This Thomas Soiffer thing has thrown me a little, I admit,” he said.

“I made a call and found out that your Clark Hazmat was right about Soiffer getting his identity stolen, too.

But without the murder weapon, we’ve got nothing to check against Soiffer’s prints on file, so we’ve just got to go with what we’ve got. Here’s what I’m thinking: Soiffer, he was mad as hell”—Lazare paced back and forth, tracking wet footprints from the damp grass to the slate—“and he came here, right here, to Julie’s house. He stalked her, waiting for the right moment.

And Zara Moklas, poor kid, who happened to resemble you two in the dark, walks by and she gets it for all the damage your sister did to the wrong guy.” He stopped pacing and looked at me. “How does that sound to you?”

“About right,” I said quietly, despising the presump-tion that any of that could actually be true. Despite what Julie may have done to me, the possibility that Thomas Soiffer had really wanted to kill her was deeply painful.

“But what I can’t get”—Lazare talked and paced—

“is how your daughter factors into this.”

“You’re married, Detective,” I said, “and so I assume you’ve been in love.”

He stopped and looked at me. “Still am, actually.”

“So you know how deeply love can move a person,” I said.

He nodded. “Go on.”

“Julie loves Lexy in a really special way, particularly since she’s my daughter.” I wiped nascent tears away with my fingertips. It was awful thinking this way, but too late to pull the thoughts back in. “Julie can’t have children of her own.”

“So she’s jealous?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Essentially. Lexy’s like the baby she can’t have herself, but it’s more than that. Lexy is
my
baby, and Julie wants what
I
have. When our parents died we were left very much alone together, and when I had my own family, I stepped out of our bubble. She wants Lexy, so she took her.”

“And the rest of it?” Lazare stepped forward, his eyes pinned on me now. “Stealing your identity.

Why?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “Maybe hurting me first would make it hurt less for her when she stole my baby. I really don’t know.”

“Or maybe it’s just what she does,” Bobby said. “If she did it to Thomas Soiffer, and she did it to Annie, then she probably did it to other people, too.” It was hard not reacting to that. Julie was still my twin and loving her, defending her, was sewn into my being. At this point I would have been willing to take Lexy back and walk away from the rest of it—but would I ever have that option?

“It’s a wait-and-see game now.” Lazare opened his cell phone and dialed a number from memory, saying,

“Let’s see what gives.”

But nothing gave. The Amber Alert had netted no information and, more significantly, no Lexy. Once the police finished searching the downstairs, they worked their way through the bedrooms and finally went upstairs to Julie’s suite. Lazare worked his phone. Bobby and I retreated into the living room and sat together on the couch.

“Now what?” I asked.

“We wait, I guess.”

“For how long? It’s torture just sitting here in this house, Bobby.”

“Do you want to take a drive?”

“I do and I don’t. If we leave, I’m afraid we’ll miss something. And if we stay, I’m afraid we’ll miss something. Every place I am right now feels like the wrong place.”

He took my hand and squeezed it so hard it hurt. His eyes were full of turmoil when he looked at me and started to say, “Listen, Annie, I—” But he stopped when Detective Lazare walked through the French doors to announce that he was returning to the station but would be back soon. When we were alone again, Bobby did not finish his broken sentence. What had he been about to say?
I’m going crazy, too. I love you. I
will move with you to New York when this is over. I
want you to come home with me.
It could have been anything.

On the coffee table lay
Identity Theft in a New
World
, the book Bobby had bought at the airport. I reached for it, stretched out on the living room couch, plunked my feet in Bobby’s lap and opened to the first chapter. I was a fast reader and as the afternoon waned I was increasingly astounded by what I learned. It seemed that identity theft was more than just a new hazard to beware of. Its practitioners had, somewhat silently, multiplied into a small invisible army with potent, far-reaching tools that had already devastated a growing number of victims. Because most targets of identity theft never learned who had victimized them and because the thieves usually got away, the victims shared a sense of fragility, realizing that it could happen again at any time. You no longer knew who to trust. Identity theft had destroyed careers, broken up families, ruined lives. The book even went so far as to liken it to a tsunami, whose imminence might come in a warning but whose arrival could not be stopped once it was set in motion.

As I read, I saw myself in every word, except that in my case there was more at stake than financial losses.

There was Lexy.
At every thought of her, panic blossomed in my chest. And so I read and read and read to pass the time and fill my brain with something other than raw worry. Up until now, I had shouldered every burden life had thrown me. I could even handle the theft of my identity—but not the theft of Lexy.

Bobby rubbed my feet as I read, disappearing occasionally and then returning, dozing at his end of the couch. As twilight swallowed the last of the afternoon, I fanned the book open on my chest and closed my eyes, too. It was Tuesday evening and we hadn’t slept more than a few hours since Sunday night. I thought about Lexy, recalled the bright lines of her face when she smiled, the incredible softness of her skin, the powdery smell of her neck, the salty taste of her tears when I kissed her cheeks as she cried. It was the smiling face I settled on as I drifted off to sleep. When I awoke, hours later, the night outside the windows was solidly black and Bobby was gone, no longer at my feet.

I got up and saw that the police were gone, too, and had left everything more or less in place. Then, nearing the kitchen, I heard voices.

Bobby and Gabe Lazare stood together in front of the microwave, which was elevated above the stovetop; something inside slowly rotated and the appliance’s feeble light cast them as Vermeer milkmaids at a window, somber faces aglow. Lazare was holding a piece of paper, with Bobby reading along.

Beside them, on the kitchen counter, lay Julie’s sleek pink cell phone. I felt a lump in my stomach when I saw it—this explained why she hadn’t answered any of our calls—and when I saw my wallet next to the phone the lump dissolved to bile. I swallowed it back. Why should it be any surprise that Julie had abandoned her phone or stolen my wallet? Why should I feel shocked by the sight of these two objects?

I flashed back to Gatsby’s, where I’d last seen my wallet on Thursday. When had she taken it from me?

Somehow I had missed the significant event of my sister stealing from me, over and over and over. Had getting my driver’s license and Social Security card been Julie’s final step in
becoming
me? Had leaving her phone behind been a step in
un
becoming herself?

I picked up the wallet—
mine
, but its discovery held no comfort for me. Opening it, I found exactly what I now expected: nothing. All my ID had been removed, even the little photo I carried of Bobby and Lexy.

“Where was it?” I asked.

In a strange, choreographed movement, they looked over at once. They seemed surprised to see me. I must have slept longer than I’d thought.

“Buried under one of the slabs of slate on the patio,” Bobby said. “The police tracked the cell phone’s satellite signal and found the wallet with it.”

“Heard from Agent Smith.” Lazare rustled the paper in his hand, which I now saw was a printed e-mail.

“He’s been busy. Seems it
was
Julie who wrote those love letters. And she was tracking the GPS in the Audi, so she knew you were on your way back. Wonder if taking off like that was a change of plans—maybe she couldn’t face you, knowing you had been arrested, that it went that far.”

I couldn’t know what Julie was thinking, not exactly, but his hypothesis felt right. “Or maybe,” I said,

“taking Lexy was never a plan at all. Maybe she just did it.”

“Maybe,” Lazare said.

I put the wallet down and joined them in front of the microwave so I could read the e-mail. It was littered with acronyms, words and phrases that would have seemed like another language if I hadn’t just read that book. She had amassed a collection of identities, not just mine or Thomas Soiffer’s, by way of parts and pieces of information. She phished for suckers, key-logged for PINs, sent Trojan horses into private king-doms. She had encrypted lists of MMNs (mother’s maiden name); cobs (changes of billing capability with a PIN included so you could get at someone’s bank account or credit card by using the PIN to change the mailing address); dumps (a credit card number); drops (a safe address, such as a post office box, to collect statements and deliveries); and algos (algorithms for encoding the magnetic strip on the back of a credit card). Smith’s sign-off suggested that Julie might have even been a rather large fish in a growing sea, saying that it looked like she might have “successfully hit an aggregator.”

“What does that mean?” I asked, touching my fingertip to that last line.

“Aggregators are companies that collect consumer data,” Lazare explained. “Cyber thieves love them because they don’t have to work so hard to gather all the information they need; it’s all in one place. Remember that scandal a couple of years ago? When that company, ChoicePoint, actually sold information to con artists posing as marketing executives?” I not only remembered—I had just read about it in the book. When ChoicePoint’s data bank had been compromised by the thieves, the sensitive information of hundreds of thousands of people, both credit and personal, was suddenly
out there
. Data-aggregation companies collected information on individuals, including birth certificates, DMV records, credit and medical histories, court records and consumer transac-tions to create database reports on billions of individuals. They made money by selling the data to direct marketers to help them target products to consumers—