Killer Move

“Whoa,” she said. “Just a pro forma dig, okay? The ‘How do you sleep at night, dude?’ routine. Not that I’m implying you have anything to . . . Look, whatever, you know? Call off the dogs. Relax.”

“Sure,” I said, forcing a smile. “Sorry.”

I was finding it hard to look away from her. Once you’ve seen a picture, you can’t forget it, and I had seen pictures I should not have seen. Being in her presence wasn’t turning me on, however. I felt . . . protective, perhaps, which was not something I’d ever have expected to feel about Karren White, a woman I believed had chosen to spell her Christian name in a nonstandard fashion purely to give her an excuse to spell it out to clients, the better to lodge it in their minds.

I felt that I should warn her about the photographs. But you can’t just pipe up with “Hey! I’ve got a dozen seminude pictures of you on a USB drive in my pocket . . .” unless you have a very innocent and convincing second half to the sentence, ready and waiting. I did not. Maybe I could do it when I had an explanation for how the pictures had ended up on my machine, but not yet.

“When you met with this David Warner guy on Tuesday,” I said instead, making it sound casual. “Anything strike you?”

“Apart from him being a sexist asshole? Not really. Why?”

“I didn’t tell you. He arranged to meet me that evening, to see the house.”

“Good for you.”

“Uh, not so much. He blew me off. Twice.”

“Huh,” she said, a little less tart. “Seems like he’s prepared to piss off Realtors regardless of their race, creed, or gender.”

“An equal opportunity asshole, for sure. You get a number for him?”

“No,” she said, looking sheepish. It was appealing because of its rarity value. Karren did not make unforced errors. “Forgot to take a note of it off the log. Duh.”

Indeed. One of the first rules of the job is to get a potential client’s phone number. I smiled and said something about it being no great loss.

As she settled down to bash out e-mails, I picked up one of the office handsets and scrolled laboriously back through the log of incoming calls. I went more slowly once I got back to Tuesday morning, knowing that what I was attempting would likely be hard—as we get a lot of calls, almost all with local codes.

I was about to give up when I saw a number I thought I recognized, however. I cross-checked with my phone and confirmed it. When I’d been sitting with Hazel outside Jonny Bo’s, a call had come into the office from the number I had stored for Melania’s cell phone.

“Karren—he called the office himself, right? Warner? Not his assistant.”

“It was him.”

“And not a pass-through? A ‘Got my asshole boss on the line, will you take a call from Planet 1970s’?”

Karren actually laughed, unaffectedly, a sound I hadn’t heard before. “Nope.”

I didn’t know what to make of that.

Kevin the Geek was a cheap lunch date, professing himself a big fan of some grilled sandwich on offer at Starbucks. I met him at the one on St. Armands Circle and left him at a table with my laptop while I ran a few errands. I performed these with about a third of my mind. The bulk was taken up with trying to work out whether to try calling Steph, and with wanting a cigarette, pretty badly. I didn’t call her, though I sent another SMS. I didn’t buy any Marlboro Lights, either.

“What’s the deal with the word ‘Modified’?” Kevin asked, when I returned.

I stiffened as I sat down, horrified that I’d somehow screwed up throwing away the pictures, and the folder was still there on my desktop. “Why do you ask?”

“You got about ten, twenty folders called that. Plus, it’s what you named your hard drive, right?”

“No,” I said, concerned that I hadn’t even noticed this the night before. “It was called, well, whatever the default is. Hard Drive, HD . . . I can’t remember.”

“Well, I’ll add that to the Pile of Strangeness, but I’ll warn you it’s a very small pile. You got nothing on here that raises a red flag. No keystroke recorders. Nothing unusual when it comes to wifi. Built-in firewall operating as it should, no suspicious ports open. Your machine is clean, basically, and your desktop as tidy as any I’ve ever seen. I have given it a gold star.”

“So what does that imply?”

“One of two things,” he said, looking a little uncomfortable. “Either someone is cruising your gated ’hood—a person who can grab passwords and whatnot out of the air and also tunnel back through a firewall to change folder and drive assignations.”

“How hard would that be?”

“Reasonably hard.”

“So what’s the or?”

“Physical access to your laptop. It’s by far the simplest explanation. Sending e-mail is a formality. Your browser will have saved a cookie, which means ordering off Amazon is easy, too, unless you log out every time, which no one does. And renaming folders and disks is far more explicable if someone’s just sitting at the machine.”

“There’s only one person who’d have access to my laptop,” I said. “My wife.”

Kevin didn’t say anything. He just looked a little more uncomfortable.