When the boy was safely out the door, Allen gathered his papers, rambling over to give the computer room a once-over, just happening to glance at the sign-in sheet. The signature began with the letter J, but after that, it could have been anything. Back at the main desk, he asked for a library card application and said to the gray-haired librarian he’d seen laying out scratch paper in the computer room, “Was that by any chance Mike Flannery’s son? That skinny kid who just left?”
The trusting woman followed the direction of his eyes toward the automatic doors, then smiled at him. “You mean James? No, his name isn’t Flannery, it’s O’Connor—no, O’Connell, that’s right.”
“That’s funny, the kid’s a spitting image of a guy I used to know when I worked for a software company, three, four years ago. After it went belly-up, we sort of lost touch. Maybe fate’s telling me it’s time to look Mike up again. You need a letter, as ID, you say?” he asked, diverting her attention back to library business.
“Anything that’s been delivered by the post office within the past thirty days, as proof of address,” she repeated patiently. He thanked her and went out, frowning over the application card as if it were his SAT exam.
To be granted not only a phone number but a name as well made for a jump start on the case, and when he’d found himself a place to stay, Allen logged on. In no time at all, he had the kid’s identity pinned down, found the address that was connected with the backpack’s phone number, and printed off a map of the neighborhood. That evening he did his preliminary reconnaissance, driving past the front wall of the gated community in which the address was located. O’Connell had money, that was for sure. And in Allen’s experience, people with money guarded their possessions closely—and people who abused their kids generally thought of them as possessions. Setting up a surveillance inside those gates was not going to be easy.
But with the thought of those dark, hooded eyes with the feminine lashes, he figured he’d manage somehow.
Chapter 19
Afterward, Jamie could see that it was the death of the computer that had done it. Before the computer’s murder (or, to give the fuller truth that his mind tended to shy away from, before his participation in that murder), he would never have dared to carry on such a conversation with the woman who called herself A. Before that ivory-and-brass poker nestled into his palm, he would never have considered open rebellion against the man who had placed it there. Only after the killing had anger been born, and he hugged the heat of it to his thin chest. Afterward, he found himself thinking more and more about the small white-and-brown dog he’d seen on the TV program, the terrier who Couldn’t be trusted not to snap at its unfaithful owners.
Everything I love dies, had been his last thought before sleep. Everything, except Father.
On February twenty-sixth, the morning after the computer’s violent dismemberment, Jamie had woken to a sore shoulder and the knowledge that something had changed. He sat up hastily in a confusion of nerves, thinking that Father must be standing at the foot of the bed, but the room was empty. More empty than it had ever been. Jamie blinked at the debris strewn from desk to blanket, and felt himself flush all over. Shame was a familiar companion of his childhood, but not like this. He’d have felt shame if he’d merely watched Father smash the computer and made no objection; this was something hotter than shame, this memory of Father’s manipulation. He’d continued raining down blows even after Father’s hand came off his own; he’d wanted to. Jamie wished he could vomit up the memory of last night, not only the strange, perverse satisfaction, almost pleasure (yes!) he had taken in crunching and smashing the computer as if he was smashing Father—not (his mind hastened to add) that he’d really want to do that. But the truly mortifying thing, the knowledge that was already eating at his guts like some sour parasite and making it hard to think about getting out of bed and facing the day, was the haunting humiliation of his collapse into Father’s arms.
He did get up, of course, when he heard Mrs. Mendez call up the stairs. He even remembered to fish his slippers out from under the bed before venturing across the carpet. However, there were so many tiny pieces strewn over the entire room that a sliver of glass had made it inside the slippers, and with his first step it jabbed deep into the bottom of his foot. He got it out, but its ache stayed with him throughout the day, reminding him with every step he took. As if he needed a reminder; he hadn’t felt so completely . . . empty since his mother had died. While he dressed, he avoided looking at the pieces of the clever mechanical brain with which he had spent so many hours. He’d killed it himself, that he knew; not only with the poker but by making the fatal slip that had triggered a phone call from the teacher. He played various scenarios of revenge through his mind, but after a while, he had to admit to himself that the stupid bitch (he thought the term in his father’s voice) was only trying to help. She didn’t understand. And since he’d known she wouldn’t understand, what had happened was entirely his own fault. Not hers, not even Father’s. He’d known the consequences; he’d slipped anyway.
But what was he going to do now? Not only was he now completely cut off from the chat rooms and the games communities, but from a purely practical point of view, how was he supposed to do his schoolwork? Handwritten papers were a joke—only losers handed those in—and without the computer’s spell check, he didn’t think he could avoid discovery for long. Of course, it was entirely possible that when he got home from school this afternoon, the bedroom table would be polished, and sitting on it would be a newer, faster model, after which nothing more would be said. But it was every bit as likely that he’d get home to find that his father had forbidden Mrs. Mendez to clean, that the glass would still be in the carpet, and even after he’d cleaned that up, Father would make him do without for weeks, until he was satisfied that Jamie had paid hard enough for every scrap of an inadequate replacement. Jamie never knew what Father would decide. Never.
But before he left for school, Jamie had stood for a minute in the door of his room, looking in, and it was somewhere during that time that he became aware of the tiny burn of rebellion, lit deep inside. It wasn’t right that a harmless, sweet-running computer that hurt no one should be made to pay with its existence. And it was even less right that Jamie himself had been forced to participate in its destruction. Since he’d gotten it the previous summer, the computer had become very nearly a living thing to him, the pet he could never have, the confidant he dared not take on, more a friend than any other person he knew. It had been a beautiful machine, and seeing its parts strewn around brought to mind a picture he’d seen somewhere, when the Nazis in Germany had assembled great piles of books in the streets and set them alight.
He bent down to retrieve a shard of the machine that had landed near the door. The “A” key, he saw it was. He slid it into his pocket and left for school.
When he came home, the room was spotless, but the desk was naked.
Had his father been around during the days that followed—and certainly if the man had chosen that time to take the boy camping or fishing, or even to a movie—Jamie’s tiny spark might have smothered under the weight of his father’s affection, and open rebellion never come about. But his father was off again, for a week this time, and because Jamie could convince the softhearted Mrs. Mendez that he absolutely had to spend time in the library after school, the spark was nurtured, and glowed stronger. Under the impetus of that rebellion, with the happy coincidence of his afternoons of freedom in the library, Jamie’s first inchoate plan settled and grew within his clever mind, and eventually culminated in the deadboy email that ended up in front of Allen Carmichael.
my mother’s dead. my father hurts me
soemtimes I want to die too
Jamie didn’t know why he wrote it that way. In truth, he had no intention of dying. Not if things worked out.
When Allen had seen the sort of neighborhood he was dealing with, he drove to a twenty-four-hour print shop, where he used their computer to design
flyers and business cards for a hastily invented gardening service that charged five dollars an hour less than any of the other services he’d found in the paper. The bright, professional-looking flyer he mailed out to all the households in the community explained that Victoria’s Garden was a husband-and-wife operation that could undercut the competition because it made use of each household’s own equipment. It had the added bonus (although this was nowhere directly stated) of being run by a man whose primary language was English. (Not that they were being racist or anything, the half-dozen callers from the gated community reassured themselves as they dialed the number on the flyer the following week; it was just more practical to be able to communicate clearly with the help.) He spent half the night addressing and stamping them to the residents of the community, caught a few hours’ sleep, and went out in the morning to mail the flyers and find the local electronics store for middle-class families paranoid about their nannies. There he bought an assortment of tiny cameras and microphones—paying cash, which surprised the shop owners not in the least.
On his way back to the motel, Allen took his rental car back to the airport and went shopping for a pickup truck. At the third lot he found a seven-year-old Ford with some dents but a clean history. He paid cash. At a huge hardware store he stocked up on the sorts of tan pants and cotton shirts a high-class gardener might wear, along with rubber boots, a hat with a brim, and an assortment of hand tools and gardener’s whatnot. Early Sunday morning, he drove to the woods and rubbed dirt into everything, using 120 grit sandpaper on the wooden handles and running over the work pants a couple of times with the truck. Then he went to a Laundromat and pounded everything to softness in the industrial machines.
Allen’s first client hired him on the Monday, just three days after he’d seen deadboy in the library. The woman was pleased when Allen told her there’d been a cancellation the following day, and he could come then if she liked. At nine o’clock Tuesday morning, he gave his name to the gate guard (along with a flyer and a twenty-dollar thanks) and was waved into the estate, where he spent the morning trimming hedges, weeding flower beds, and mowing the woman’s ankle-high lawn. After his sandwich lunch, taken with ibuprofen to alleviate the aches of unaccustomed muscles, he spent an hour walking up and down the manicured streets, delivering more of his distinctive flyers to the residents as a follow-up to his earlier mailing. Whenever he found someone at home, he made sure to tell them which of their neighbors he was already working for, thanked them politely (tipping his hat in mild flirtation to the women, which went down well), and left them his card as well. One time he spotted a team of real gardeners, and went down the next street instead.
The O’Connell address was in the literal and figurative upper end of the estate, where the lawns of the suburban houses lower down spread out to become meadows, and where the only way you could hear the neighbors was if they were standing at an open window shouting at the top of their voices. “Privacy,” Allen muttered to himself. There were no doubt a lot of perfectly innocent individuals in the world who valued privacy for itself, but they were not the people he met in the course of his job. His householders sought distance from other ears, not a sense of spaciousness.
The woman who answered the bell was clearly a housekeeper. He gave her his card, told her which houses he was already working at, tipped the baseball cap he was wearing that day, and left her before the kid could appear. He did not expect to receive a call from O’Connell, and indeed, he did not. But he did ascertain that there was no dog, and that the man of the house was away for the day. He also took careful note of the house layout, its relationship to the perimeter wall and neighboring houses, the trees behind the wall, the color of its dark shingle siding, and where the phone wires came into the building.
He spent the afternoon and evening building his devices and testing the transmitters and receivers. Late that night, wearing black clothing and smears of camouflage makeup, Allen hiked in from the back reaches of the estate and went over the perimeter wall behind the O’Connell house.
Most of the time, what he did required no special skills. Ninety-five percent of the hours spent on the job involved sitting in front of a screen or monitor. But for the five percent that required him to venture out to retrieve information or the person, Allen put in a lot of practice. Sometimes, deep in his lessons with Dave the burglar or Yoshi the black belt, he would be struck by how silly it was for a grown man to play secret agent; he’d have to bite back giggles. But he kept at it, refreshing his skills in jungles natural and man-made, keeping up with the technology, teaching himself to use, mount, and disassemble his spy equipment blindfolded. He had even built, or adapted, some of it for his own particular purposes. Most of what he did required nothing more cutting-edge than common sense and a screwdriver, but for those times when high tech was called for, he was prepared.
Tonight he was there to set some fairly sophisticated bugs onto the O’Connell home. He crouched at the foot of the wall, allowing the sixth sense of patrol to unfurl, waiting for the internal reassurance that he was alone. At three A.M. on a weeknight, the neighborhood seemed to be asleep. Lights shone here and there behind drawn curtains, but none that Allen could see had movement or sound to accompany them. Certainly not in the house ahead of him, where the only light burned in the kitchen, its gleaming surfaces visible from his position under some young native oaks. The air was fresh with odors of new-mown, well-watered lawns (thanks to the other gardening service), orange blossoms, and crushed wisteria from the neighboring arbor.
In twenty minutes, nothing moved but a silent-winged owl overhead.
Allen got to his feet and followed the meadowy lawn down to the freestanding three-car garage. A touch pad glowed next to the side door, armed against intruders, and a glance inside the garage (only two cars at the moment, a black Lexus and an SUV whose make Allen couldn’t tell) showed the master alarm control, its green eye glowing in baleful warning. He found another armed pad on the wall outside the kitchen door. So O’Connell was serious about his household security, but not paranoid, and the placement of the security lights told Allen that the man was less concerned with a secure perimeter than he was that the lights not shine into the eyes of people inside.
Allen wouldn’t attempt to overcome the alarm system, not tonight, particularly without knowing if the house was inhabited or not. Instead, he circled the house, studying what he could see from the outside, which wasn’t a great deal. Cameras might not be of much use here, just microphones.
He set his bugs on the phone box and on three likely ground-floor windows, one of which was some kind of den in which he could see a bar, black leather sofa, and gigantic sound system. The room’s single window was high and vegetation grew up around it, so he mounted a tiny camera there as well. He took care concealing the transmitters and the waterproof, long-life batteries he buried under the soil, along with the automatic half-hour cutoff devices he’d begun to build in after one of his paranoid fathers had tried out a new counterspy bug detector and nearly brought down the entire operation. Everything Allen mounted on the O’Connell house was the same dark brown as the shingles, and all of it was concealed either by the shingles themselves or by the shrubs that grew near the walls. It took him the better part of an hour, avoiding the two motion-sensitive spotlights at the back corner and making sure he touched nothing with his bare hands, before he was satisfied. If nothing came of these particular eyes and ears, he would have to figure a way to get inside the house, or at least gain access to the upper-floor windows.
For now, he would begin with these. He concealed the receiver and recorder with their big batteries in a tree well outside the wall, and was back in his apartment before dawn.
From that point, the case went much as usual. The audio bugs proved clear, and from time to time, the back curtain was left open when the room was occupied, so Allen had many hours of the housekeeper or the boy staring straight ahead at the television that was just under the lens, and occasional glimpses
of O’Connell or another man walking into the room, pouring a drink, or picking up the remote—usually on the way to shut the curtains. A variety of the household’s activities were captured for Allen’s records—and, if it worked out that way, for the police to receive anonymously.
He spent his days gardening, his nights retrieving and watching the surveillance recordings, and his spare hours compiling a dossier of information on father and son. The online records of newspapers and some amateurish hacking gave him O’Connell’s business history, while a couple of well-placed bribes got him some of Jamie’s school records. He napped when he could.
It didn’t take long to confirm that deadboy had not been making up his oppression. Some of Allen’s cases had dragged on through the surveillance stage for months until the evidence of abuse was sufficient to justify their intervention. The shortest surveillance he’d ever run was a case involving a bank president with a serious cocaine problem, when after a mere nine days it had become terrifyingly clear that holding off even another forty-eight hours might easily leave them with nothing but the videotape of a murder. The O’Connell bugs ran for twelve days; the phone tap gave him nothing whatsoever, two of the room bugs and the back-room camera were satisfactory, but the microphone he’d stuck near the dining room kept going dead. This could have been some fault in its transmitter, or could mean that O’Connell had a bug sensor in the upstairs room, which he turned on occasionally to sweep for illicit ears. It didn’t matter all that much; the camera alone gave Allen all he needed.
Seventeen days after he had been given the deadboy email, he sat down and watched the father’s appalling game with the shotgun. The boy’s expression, a twelve-year-old child ripped in two between his longing for his father and his terror of the man, hit Allen harder than some of the rapes he’d witnessed. In minutes, he was on the phone with Alice.