Jericho Iteration (16 page)

“Hmm?” Farrentino barely glanced at the collection. “Uhh … naw, I don’t think we need to do that. The only prints we’d find are his own. Just leave ’em with me. I’ll give them to his wife when I see her.”

The cop nodded his head and carefully laid them on the table between us before walking away. It occurred to me that John might have entered a few notes into Dingbat during his meeting with Beryl Hinckley. If there were any important clues as to why he had been killed, perhaps they might be stored on the PT’s floptical diskette.

“Okay, Rosen,” Farrentino said, breaking my train of thought, “let’s level with each other.”

“Sure.” I shrugged, trying not to stare covetously at Dingbat; it was just within hand’s reach. “Anything you want to know, Officer.” As I spoke, I picked up the beer and started to raise it to my mouth …

And then, at the last moment, I let my fingers slip from around the bottle.

It fell out of my grasp, bounced off the table, and fell between my legs, splattering beer across everything before the bottle broke on the concrete under the table. “Aw, shit!” I yelled, jumping up from my seat, staring down at the wet splotch that had spread across the crotch of my jeans. “Goddamn fucking …!”

When I want to screw up a conversation, I can outdo myself. Beer spilled off the table and onto the broken glass scattered across the ground. Farrentino stood up from his chair, alarmed and irritated at the same time. “What a fucking mess!” I whined. “I can’t believe I just … look, lemme go back to my place and get some dry pants on. It’ll just take a—”

“No, no, don’t do that,” Farrentino said, already moving away from the table. “Just stay here, okay? I’ll go get someone to clean all this stuff up …”

Then he turned his back to me and headed for the barroom’s back door; the two barmaids had already gone inside, presumably to get some towels and a broom and dustpan.

For a few precious moments, I was alone in the beer garden. I snatched up the evidence bag containing Dingbat. There was a red adhesive seal across the plastic zipper, but there was no time to worry about that now. I hastily unzipped the bag, breaking the seal, and shook the palmtop out into my hand, all the while keeping one eye on the door.

It took me only a second to eject the mini-disk from Dingbat’s floptical drive and stash it in the pocket of my jacket before I returned the PT to the bag and zipped it shut again. I had barely placed the bag back on the picnic table when Farrentino and one of the barmaids came out the door again.

We spent the next few minutes wiping up the spilled beer with paper towels and letting the barmaid sweep up the broken glass. I made a big deal out of sponging beer from my pants, although I kept one eye on the evidence bag. If you looked closely, you could see the split in the tape seal; someone would notice eventually, but I hoped to be long gone by then.

“Okay,” Farrentino said at last, after the mess was cleaned away and the barmaid was gone. He sat down at the table, clasping his hands together as he stared at me. “Here’s what happened …”

“Go on,” I said, adjusting my posture so that he wouldn’t have to look at both the evidence bag and me at the same time.

“A lady arrived here at the bar shortly after Tiernan showed up,” he went on, his voice lowered. “Black lady, nervous looking. Witnesses say they went up to that balcony together and were up there for a long time, talking. Seems they wanted to be someplace where they couldn’t be overheard. He was getting up as if to leave when he was shot—”

“How was he killed?” I asked. Farrentino hesitated. “That wasn’t a normal gunshot either,” I went on as my memory put together a picture of what I had seen up there. “He should have had his brains splattered all over the place if it had been from a gun, but I didn’t see any blood …”

Farrentino reluctantly nodded his head. “No, there wasn’t any blood. No one heard a gunshot either. Witnesses say that they heard the woman scream, that’s all. A second after that, a van parked across the street took off, but no one got its make or license number. The woman ran off before anyone could stop her.”

“You didn’t answer the question,” I said. “How was John killed?”

“We have some ideas,” he said tersely. “We’re looking into it right now—”

“Wonderful. I’m overwhelmed.”

“Don’t be a smartass,” Farrentino said, giving me a sour look. “Off the record, though, we think that it might have been a laser weapon of some sort. Remember the ‘Dark Jedi’ slayings in Chicago a couple of years ago?”

A chill ran down my back as he said that. Of course I remembered; it had been national news for several months. A serial killer—who, in a letter sent to the
Chicago Tribune,
had called himself the “Dark Jedi”—had picked off seven people at random over the course of several weeks, using a high-energy laser rifle. When the FBI and Illinois State Police finally tracked him down, the Dark Jedi turned out to be a rather sociopathic high school student from an upscale Chicago suburb. The scariest part of the case, though, was the fact that he had devised his weapon from a science-hobby handbook available in most bookstores, using equipment purchased through mail-order catalogs. In fact, the feds had found him because he had previously showed off a prototype of his laser rifle at a science fair; his “light saber” had won a second-place ribbon.

“So you think it’s a copycat killer?” I asked.

Farrentino shrugged. “That’s a possibility, but we don’t know yet. That’s all I can tell you right now.” He then jabbed a finger at me. “You next. Shoot.”

“Okay.” I folded my arms across my chest. “He told me he was investigating a murder—”

“Whose murder?”

“I don’t know,” I said. Which was the truth.

“Who was the lady?”

“I don’t know that either,” I said. Which was a lie.

“C’mon, Rosen—”

“All I know was that he was supposed to meet someone here at eight o’clock, and it had to do with the story he was doing.” I shrugged, gazing back at him. “That’s all I know … but I’m telling you, whoever she was, it wasn’t a girlfriend. John didn’t cheat on his wife. That’s a fact.”

Farrentino’s dark eyes searched my face. He said nothing for a few moments. He knew that I hadn’t told him everything I knew about the circumstances leading up to John’s murder, and I knew that he wasn’t playing entirely fair with me either. In John’s memory, we were playing one final game of quid pro quo, and this round had just reached a stalemate.

I glanced toward the entrance to the beer garden. A couple of cops were holding open the gate; I could hear the ponderous clank of the stretcher’s wheels as the parameds carefully inched it down the stairs from the balcony. In a few moments there would be nothing left of my buddy except a yellow chalk mark on a wooden floor.

“Lemme tell you something,” Farrentino said at last. “You may think you know a lot about this, but I know more than you do. John was a friend of mine …”

“Yeah?” John had plenty of friends on the force. For all I knew, Farrentino could have been a deep-throat source, but I had no way of proving that. “I’m sure he would have been glad to see you down here for him.”

Farrentino ignored the dig. “And he would have wanted us to work together to nail the guy who killed him. So if you want to come clean and tell me everything you know …”

The noise from the stairs stopped. The stretcher was on the ground. “I’ll keep it in mind, Lieutenant,” I said as I stood up again. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I want to go see John off.”

He started to say something else, but before he could stop me, I edged my way around the table and headed for the other side of the beer garden.

I stood on the sidewalk for a couple of minutes, watching John’s body as it was wheeled away. A white sheet had been pulled over the corpse, with three straps holding it down on the stretcher, but for some damn reason I kept expecting him to sit up, reach into his pocket, and ask if I wanted some gum.

The paramedics stopped the stretcher behind the ambulance’s rear fender, folded the stretcher’s wheels, then picked it up. I remembered us getting drunk together at college parties and going out for double dates with Marianne and Sandy. Standing in line before the graduation platform, waiting to get our diplomas while making whispered jokes about the pontifical commencement speech Sam Donaldson had just delivered. The letters and postcards he had sent me while we were living on opposite sides of the country, the absurd wedding presents we had sent to each other when we had married our girlfriends, the long-distance phone calls when our kids had been born.

Now it all came down to this: one guy watching the other being loaded into the back of a meat wagon, down here in the scuzzy part of town. I had always thought he was going to outlive me …

“Helluva shame, isn’t it?” Mike Farrentino said from behind me.

I jerked involuntarily. I hadn’t realized that he had been at my back the entire time. “Yeah,” I mumbled, not looking around at him. “Helluva shame.”

As the stretcher was pushed into the back of the ambulance and its doors slammed closed, I eased my way out of the crowd and began to walk, not too quickly, up the street away from Clancy’s. With each step I took, I expected someone to yell “Hey you!” and then ten cops would be climbing all over me again.

That instant never came. I was a block away when I heard the ambulance drive away from the curb. By then I was in the darkened doorway of the
Big Muddy
offices, reaching into my pocket to make sure I still had the mini-disk I had stolen from Dingbat.

It was still there, a little silver disk about the size of an antique fifty-cent piece. I looked down the street, but the detective was nowhere in sight among the blue leather jackets still clustered around the front of Clancy’s. I shoved the disk back in my pocket and ducked around the corner of the building, heading for the fire escape ladder.

There would be plenty of time for mourning later. Right now, all I wanted to do was find a killer.

A
S SOON AS I
crawled through my apartment window, I switched on my computer and booted up the mini-disk I had taken from John’s PT, and the first thing I did was make a backup copy.

Call it paranoia, but I knew that it was only a matter of time before the cops discovered that the evidence bag had been unsealed; even though I had fooled Farrentino once, I wasn’t going to count on his remaining stupid. The police could be here by morning with a search warrant. When the copy was made, I slipped it into a plastic case and took it into the bathroom, where I hid it beneath the toilet tank with a strip of electrical tape.

Back at my desk again, I rebooted the original disk and copied it onto the hard drive; once it was loaded into my system, I tried to punch up the root directory, only to find that I needed a password to get in. No problem there; not long ago, shortly after I had gone to work at the
Big Muddy,
John and I had agreed to share our passwords with each other, in case I ever needed to hack into his PT or vice versa. Being a faithful University of Missouri alumnus, his password was “Mizzou”; mine was “chickenlegs,” for no other reason than I happened to be dining upon an Extra Crispy Recipe snack box from the Colonel at the time. I typed in “Mizzou,” the system cleared me through, and I got my first peek at whatever had been contained in Dingbat’s memory.

I let out a low whistle as the screen was immediately filled by a directory as long as a small-town phone book. A bar at the top of the screen told me that almost 100 megabytes of information had been copied into my system, leaving less than 50 kilobytes free on the disk. As I ran the cursor down the screen, a seemingly endless list of filenames scrolled upward, many of them suffixed as
BAT
or
EXEC
commands, none of them immediately recognizable.

An extremely complex program of some sort had been loaded into Dingbat’s floptical drive shortly before John’s death. Tiernan had no business carrying around something like this unless Beryl Hinckley had downloaded it into his PT during their encounter at the bar … but exactly what it was, I hadn’t the foggiest idea. Cyberpunk, I am not; my hacking skills were only those of the average computer-literate college grad, and I didn’t have the knowledge necessary to understand a program of this complexity.

One thing for damn sure: my best friend had been shot through the head with a laser beam shortly after receiving this program. And despite what Farrentino had said about his murder resembling the “Dark Jedi” killings, I had the gut feeling that John’s death had not been a random shooting.

What if John had been assassinated?

And, to take this supposition one step further: what if John had been assassinated because of the contents of this very disk?

I took a deep breath, forcing myself to calm down. Don’t get panicky. I leaned forward again and began to run further down the directory, trying to find something that looked like a main menu or even a
README
file. I was like a blind man thrown into a large and unfamiliar room, but if I could just get hold of something I could use as a white cane, I might be able to …

The phone buzzed.

The answering machine was switched on, but without thinking I snatched the receiver off the cradle and lifted it to my ear. “Hello?” I said.

No voice from the other end of the line; the phonescreen remained blank. Figuring it for a wrong-number call, I was about to hang up when I heard, as if in the background, a brief, swift sequence of electronic snaps, chirps, and beeps.

“Hello?” I repeated. “Who’s there?”

As soon as I spoke again, the electronic noise ceased. There was a moment of silence, and I had almost hung up when I suddenly heard a toneless voice speak from the other end:

“Hello … hello … who’s there … hello
…”

“Who is this?” I said, losing patience.

The screen flickered, then random fractals appeared, casting undulating images like electronic finger paintings. A couple more chirps and beeps, then there came a sound like an audiotape being replayed at high speed—high-pitched voices, as if Alvin and the Chipmunks were bleating nursery rhymes from an old NASA space probe lost out beyond Jupiter—as the fractals congealed and began to assume a vaguely human shape. Then: