The Hunt (8 page)

“This is a useless drink,” I said, jabbing at the ice in my plastic cup with a straw.

“Only forty-one hours left,” said Peter, his tone encouraging.

“You forfeited your right to comment when you let your mother trick me out like a prom queen,” I said to him.

“I thought it was Bridesmaid Barbie,” he said.

“The two are hardly mutually exclusive,” I said.

Luisa giggled.

I looked up, startled. Giggling was as unprecedented as blushing. “Did you just giggle?” I asked her.

“What can I say? It’s funny.” She pulled her cigarette case and lighter out of her handbag.

“I’m glad you’re taking such pleasure in my suffering,” I said.

“Who wants to debrief first?” asked Peter, wisely steering the conversation onto a more productive path. “Luisa, how about you? Did you find a way to reach Iggie?”

She shook her head. “I had no idea he was such a man of mystery. First I left messages at Igobe, and I even tried to send a couple of e-mails to obvious addresses like [email protected] and [email protected], but they bounced right back. Then I must have made calls to two dozen of our classmates, including everyone who lived on our hallway sophomore year, but even his old roommates didn’t know how to find him. They haven’t heard from him since college, and one of them is still harboring quite the grudge—I got an earful about how Iggie borrowed his autographed picture of Bill Gates and never returned it.”

“Bill Gates? As in the guy who founded Microsoft? That Bill Gates?” asked Ben, who had been silently sipping his latte up until now.

I nodded. “Iggie always used to wonder if he should bother sticking around until graduation. He said he already knew more than most of the professors and Bill Gates dropped out of college and did just fine without a degree. If you haven’t gathered as much by now, Iggie was never the sort to be paralyzed by self-doubt.”

“He was absolutely confident that he would eventually be as successful—if not more so—as Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or any of the other technology moguls,” added Luisa. “And this was even before the Google guys or any of the other more recent Internet billionaires.”

“So was that it?” Peter asked her. “Nobody knows where he is or how to reach him, but his old roommate wants his Bill Gates picture back?”

“I do have one potential lead,” Luisa said, taking a cigarette out of her engraved case and tapping its end on the table. “Somebody mentioned she may know a way to get in touch with him. I’m going to follow up with her later.”

“Who’s that?” I asked. “Someone from college?”

“No, just a friend.” She busied herself with her silver lighter.

“Which friend?” I asked. I’d seen Luisa light cigarettes on countless occasions, and it had never required such concentration.

“Just a friend,” she repeated, finally releasing a lick of flame from the lighter and touching it to the tip of the cigarette.

It was unlike her to be evasive, but perhaps being evasive went with the blushing and giggling.

And my withdrawal hadn’t completely compromised my powers of deductive reasoning. Putting
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together the blushing and giggling with the phone call Peter had fielded that morning indicated with abundant clarity that the “friend” in question was almost certainly Abigail—not that I had any idea as to why Abigail thought she could locate Iggie when nobody else could. It was also abundantly clear that Luisa hadn’t “overslept” on her own.

I was about to ask her who she thought she was fooling with her coy references when her phone rang. She dug hastily into her bag to retrieve it and checked the caller ID. “I’ll just be a minute,”

she said, jumping up. “Hi,” she said into the phone, her voice practically giddy. She walked toward the far side of the statue, but even at a distance I could see her cheeks redden.

I didn’t know what to think of anybody anymore. Fearsome, fearless Hilary was sending out distress signals and cynical, self-contained Luisa was behaving like a love-struck teenager. And I was supposed to make sense of it all without caffeine. It didn’t seem fair, but it did prove to me how far I’d come. I was definitely normal compared to the two of them.

I turned to Ben. “What about you, Ben? Did you get a chance to check out the security tapes?”

He nodded. “I spent the last couple of hours reviewing the footage from the different cameras.”

“How did you convince hotel security to give you access?” asked Peter. “Did you show them your FBI identification?”

Ben took another sip of his latte. “Uh, well, yeah. But I guess they took pity on me, too.”

“Why’s that?” I asked.

“I told them my girlfriend was cheating on me and I needed to prove it.”

That excuse must have been close enough to the truth to be embarrassing. Ben might be a bit slow sometimes, but he was really taking one for the team, I thought with growing respect. It was too bad Hilary couldn’t see how he was coming through for her. Maybe she’d rethink the potential for their relationship.

Luisa rejoined us, lowering herself into her seat and stowing her phone in her purse. Her cheeks were still flushed. “Where were we?” she asked with a bright smile.

“Ben was telling us about the security tape,” Peter told her.

“How’s your friend?” I asked.

“Did you see Hilary with Iggie?” Luisa asked Ben, ignoring my question and busying herself with lighting another cigarette.

“No, just Hilary,” Ben said. “She came in on her own a little before midnight. One of the cameras caught her at the lower lobby entrance. Another caught her going up in the elevator from the main lobby and getting off on our floor, and then another caught her getting into a different elevator a minute or two later with her laptop and notebook. And then the camera for the lower lobby showed her leaving. But I didn’t see Iggie in any of the footage.”

“Well, she definitely left the party with him,” said Peter. “One of the kids who works for the valet service remembered them leaving, and not just because of Hilary’s dress. Iggie’s driving a Lamborghini these days.”

Luisa whistled, which I assumed meant a Lamborghini was impressive. She felt about cars the way Hilary felt about Luke Perry.

“The crazy thing is, Iggie wasn’t the only one—somebody else at the party was driving the exact same make and model,” said Peter. “The kid couldn’t remember who. He only remembered Iggie because he was with Hilary, and he couldn’t understand what someone like her would be doing with a guy like him. He also said Iggie tipped him with a hundred-dollar bill and told him to buy Igobe stock when it goes public.”

“So we’ve confirmed that Hilary left with Iggie and then went to the hotel to get her laptop and notebook, just like we thought. Did you see anything else of interest on the security tape?” I asked Ben.

“A couple of things, but I don’t know if they’re relevant. Somebody else from the party came and went about fifteen minutes after Hilary—going up to the same floor and then leaving a few minutes after that. I didn’t actually meet him at the party, but I have a good memory for faces, and I’m pretty sure it was the same guy.”

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“What did he look like?” I asked.

“About our age. Medium height, brown hair, wire-rimmed glasses. Sort of an average-looking preppie in a blazer and khakis.”

Ben’s words were almost exactly the same as those I’d used to describe Alex Cutler to myself.

“That sounds like your friend Alex,” I said to Peter.

“True,” he said. “But it also sounds like half the guys in the Bay area. And what would Alex be doing going in and out of the Four Seasons at midnight?”

“What else did you see?” Luisa asked Ben. “You said there were a couple of interesting things.”

Ben grinned, the first full-on smile I’d seen from him this weekend. “I’m not sure you want me to say.”

“What do you mean?” asked Luisa.

“Well, I saw you.”

“Oh,” she said, with dawning realization. Her blush had begun to subside, but Ben’s words seemed to reignite it.

“The security guards were pretty psyched,” said Ben. “They wanted to rewind the tape and watch it again.”

“Oh,” repeated Luisa, her cheeks reddening even more.

“Oh?” I asked.

“Who wants to know what was on the memory stick?” she said.

“Who wants to change the subject?” I asked.

“What was on the memory stick?” asked Peter, coming to Luisa’s rescue.

Luisa flashed him a grateful look. “Two files,” she said. “I think the first is encrypted somehow—no matter which program I used to open it, all I ended up with was a bunch of ones and zeros.”

“I can check that out later,” said Peter. “I might be able to figure out how to decrypt it. What was the other file?”

“That one’s text—a beginning draft of Hilary’s article,” she said. “And it looks as if she definitely intended to focus on Iggie’s company. There was only the title and an opening paragraph, but what little she’d written is all about him and Igobe, and it’s quite provocative.”

“Provocative?” asked Peter. “How?”

“Does she say anything about Iggie’s wardrobe? Or about how he calls himself the Igster?” I asked.

“I think the working title says it all. Ready for this?” We waited expectantly as she exhaled a stream of smoke. “‘Igobe: Naked Emperor 2.0?’”

“Question mark included?” I asked. She nodded.

“‘Naked Emperor 2.0?’ What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Ben.

“I would guess it’s a reference to ‘the emperor has no clothes,’” said Luisa, omitting the

“obviously” with which I would have started my own response to that question.

“And it’s a play on Web 2.0, which is how people are referring to the most recent wave of Internet companies,” I added. “What does the rest of it say?”

“As I said, it’s only the first paragraph, but it makes clear from the outset that she thinks there’s more spin than substance where Iggie and Igobe are concerned,” said Luisa.

“He won’t like that,” I said.

“No, he won’t like that at all,” she said.

“If his ego is everything you two have said,” added Peter, “he especially won’t like that being printed in a national magazine.”

“It’s not just his ego,” I pointed out. “Negative press could make it difficult for Igobe to sell shares to the public at the high prices people are talking about. Which means Iggie won’t be a billionaire, and his investors won’t be able to recoup their investments with astronomical profits.

The markets are still skittish about Internet companies after the dot-com bust—investors tend to flee from anything even the slightest bit questionable.” And getting Winslow, Brown involved in
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an unsuccessful IPO could be a career-limiting move, but I kept that thought to myself.

Ben started to say something then, but his words were drowned out by an exhilarated whoop from behind us.

We all turned to look as a girl on a skateboard launched herself off the top of the granite steps on the north side of the plaza. Her feet separated from the board as she soared into space, tucking her body into a ball and somersaulting in midair. I watched with a mixture of wonder and horror, certain we were a split second away from seeing her smash headfirst onto the pavement.

But the board landed with a clatter at the bottom of the steps, and she landed lightly on top of it, and together they hurtled our way at maximum velocity. Just when I thought she would collide with our table, she flipped the skateboard out from under her feet and caught it neatly with one hand, alighting right next to my chair.

“Are you Rachel Benjamin?” she asked me, not the least bit winded.

I nodded, too stunned to speak.

“Some old dude gave me twenty bucks to give you this.” She tossed a small package onto the table.

And then she sped off, across the square and out of sight.

9

W hile the rest of us were still gawking after Skater Girl, Peter sprang to his feet and sprinted in the direction from which she’d come, bounding up the stone steps as if he hadn’t already done more of a workout today than most people did over the course of any given month. He paused at the top, scanning first one side of the square and then the other, but after a minute he shrugged and rejoined us at the table.

“I thought the guy who paid her might have been watching to make sure she gave it to the right person,” he explained. “But I didn’t see anyone. At least, not anyone familiar or anyone who seemed to be taking any notice of us.” It was a good thought, and I appreciated how quickly he’d both had it and acted on it even if it hadn’t yielded any insight.

There would be plenty of time later to comment on the death wish a person must have to make a habit out of skate-boarding in a city like San Francisco, with its steep downhills, impossible uphills and pedestrian and vehicular traffic, much less debate whether or not skateboarding was hopelessly passé. Instead, we turned our attention to the package Skater Girl had left behind. It was the sort of generic, padded brown-paper envelope that could be found in any drugstore, about the same size as a paperback book. My name was printed on the front in black felt-tip pen—large block letters in a hand none of us recognized.

“Open it,” urged Luisa.

“What if it’s a bomb?” I said

“Don’t be absurd. Why would it be a bomb?” she asked.

“Why would somebody drop a padded envelope in my lap in the middle of Union Square?” I countered.

“I don’t think it’s a bomb,” said Ben.

“Me, neither,” Peter agreed. “Especially not given the way she chucked it onto the table.”

I gingerly held the package up to one ear. It wasn’t very heavy, and I couldn’t hear anything ticking, but I was fairly certain bomb science had advanced beyond the point where an alarm clock was required to detonate an explosive. I’d learned the hard way that airport security believed a simple lip gloss could take down a plane.

Luisa heaved a sigh of impatience, grabbed the envelope from my hand, ripped it open, and dumped the contents on the table. “See,” she said, when we weren’t all blown to bits. “It’s not a bomb. Although,” she said, checking inside the envelope to make sure she hadn’t missed anything, “a bomb might have made more sense.”