Mr. Mercedes (Bill Hodges Trilogy, #1)(102)

“Never seen that one before.”

“Me, either.” She still won’t look directly at his face, but her affect has changed remarkably otherwise. She pulls up a chair and sits beside him, tucking her lank hair behind her ears. “And I know Mac programs inside and out.”

“Go with your bad self,” Jerome says, and holds up a hand.

Still looking at the screen, Holly slaps him five. “Play it, Sam.”

He grins. “Casablanca.”

“Yes. I’ve seen that movie seventy-three times. I have a Movie Book. I write down everything I see. My mother says that’s OCD.”

“Life is OCD,” Jerome says.

Unsmiling, Holly replies, “Go with your bad self.”

Jerome highlights SPOOKS and bangs the return key. From the stereo sound sticks on either side of Olivia’s computer, a baby begins to wail. Holly is okay with that; she doesn’t clutch Jerome’s shoulder until the woman shrieks, “Why did you let him murder my baby?”

“Fuck!” Jerome cries, and grabs Holly’s hand. He doesn’t even think about it, and she doesn’t draw away. They stare at the computer as if it has grown teeth and bitten them.

There’s a moment of silence, then the baby starts crying again. The woman screams again. The program cycles a third time, then stops.

Holly finally looks directly at him, her eyes so wide they seem in danger of falling out of her head. “Did you know that was going to happen?”

“Jesus, no.” Maybe something, or Bill wouldn’t have sent him here, but that? “Can you find out anything about the program, Holly? Like when it was installed? If you can’t, that’s all ri—”

“Push over.”

Jerome is good with computers, but Holly plays the keyboard like a Steinway. After a few minutes of hunting around, she says, “Looks like it was installed on July first of last year. A whole bunch of stuff was installed that day.”

“It could have been programmed to play at certain times, right? Cycle three times and then quit?”

She gives him an impatient glance. “Of course.”

“Then how come it’s not still playing? I mean, you guys have been staying here. You would have heard it.”

She clicks the mouse like crazy and shows him something else. “I saw this already. It’s a slave program, hidden in her Mail Contacts. I bet Olivia didn’t know it was here. It’s called Looking Glass. You can’t use it to turn on a computer—at least I don’t think so—but if it is on, you can run everything from your own computer. Open files, read emails, look at search histories . . . or deactivate programs.”

“Like after she was dead,” Jerome says.

“Oough.” Holly grimaces.

“Why would the guy who installed this leave it? Why not erase it completely?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he just forgot. I forget stuff all the time. My mother says I’d forget my own head if it wasn’t attached to my neck.”

“Yeah, mine says that, too. But who’s he? Who are we talking about?”

She thinks it over. They both do. And after perhaps five seconds, they speak at the same time.

“Her I-T guy,” Jerome says, just as Holly says, “Her geek freak.”

Jerome starts going through the drawers of Olivia’s computer station, looking for a computer-service invoice, a bill stamped PAID, or a business card. There ought to be at least one of those, but there’s nothing. He gets on his knees and crawls into the kneehole under the desk. Nothing there, either.

“Look on the fridge,” he says. “Sometimes people put shit there, under little magnets.”

“There are plenty of magnets,” Holly says, “but nothing on the fridge except for a real estate agent’s card and one from the Vigilant security company. I think Janey must have taken down everything else. Probably threw it away.”

“Is there a safe?”

“Probably, but why would my cousin put her I-T guy’s business card in her safe? It’s not like it’s worth money, or anything.”

“True-dat,” Jerome says.

“If it was here, it would be by her computer. She wouldn’t hide it. I mean, she wrote her password right under her goshdarn keyboard.”

“Pretty dumb,” Jerome says.

“Totally.” Holly suddenly seems to realize how close they are. She gets up and goes back to the doorway. She starts flipping the collar of her housecoat again. “What are you going to do now?”

“I guess I better call Bill.”

He takes out his cell phone, but before he can make the call, she says his name. Jerome looks at her, standing there in the doorway, looking lost in her flappy comfort-clothes.

“There must be, like, a zillion I-T guys in this city,” she says.

Nowhere near that many, but a lot. He knows it and Hodges knows it, too, because it was Jerome who told him.





30


Hodges listens carefully to everything Jerome has to say. He’s pleased by Jerome’s praise of Holly (and hopes Holly will be pleased, too, if she’s listening), but bitterly disappointed that there’s no link to the Computer Jack who worked on Olivia’s machine. Jerome thinks it must be because Janey threw Computer Jack’s business card away. Hodges, who has a mind trained to be suspicious, thinks Mr. Mercedes might have made damned sure Olivia didn’t have a card. Only that doesn’t track. Wouldn’t you ask for one, if the guy did good work? And keep it handy? Unless, that is . . .