Killer Move Read online

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  An hour later, to my surprise, I’d told her quite a lot. About the e-mail with the joke, about the book from Amazon, about the fact that the police were claiming David Warner was dead when I had the evidence of my own eyes to prove he was not. We were sitting on the floor by then, our backs against the kinda-sofa, and I had been informed that, should I wish, I could call her Cass. In my defense, I’d tried both the house phone and Steph’s cell again, twice. It was now well after eleven, and the world felt like it was teetering in the balance. Midnight is a feasible time to get back: I’d returned home around that time after the evening trying to meet Warner. Midnight can happen if the evening gets away from you just a little. Much later than that, however, and either you’re trying to make a big and serious point, or . . . I couldn’t complete the thought. That or led in directions that tangled and became poisonous.

  “Okay, well, that’s pretty strange,” Cassandra said, after thinking about what I’d told her. She poured us both another glass of wine. It was not the first refill. “Weirdness-wise, you can tick the box.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But what I don’t get is why your wife is so mad at you. I mean, a salacious photo book, even if you had ordered it . . . not such a big deal, right? I’m not getting the impression she’s notably uptight or a total vanilla wife, so why the spat?”

  Red wine on top of beer, I’m not sure what it was . . . but I reached in my pocket and pulled out the thumb drive. “Last night,” I said, “I got home, and she’d been on my laptop looking for pictures I took at a friend’s party. Instead, she found what’s on here.”

  I had been intending to describe the images, in very vague terms. Cass grabbed the stick from me, however, and was on her feet and up at the desk, slipping the drive into a port on her laptop, before I’d had time to react.

  “Hang on,” I said, struggling to my feet. By the time I got there, however, the first of the images was already on-screen.

  “A bad photo of a window, at night,” Cassandra said. “Yeah—I can understand why that would . . . Oooh, oh, I see. Gotcha. La-di-da.”

  By the time the fourth picture was up—the first showing Karren White with nothing above the waist—I was standing beside Cass. “I didn’t take these,” I said, about as embarrassed as I had ever been. “But they’re dated to a night when I was kept out all evening.”

  “Kept how?”

  “Chasing the meeting with Warner, which his assistant now disclaims all knowledge of.”

  The next picture came up. “Who’s the pretty lady?”

  “Her name’s Karren. She works in my office.”

  Then the next picture, frontal, in better focus. I was uncomfortably aware that I was standing close to a young woman while we looked at pictures of another woman, in a state of undress.

  “So how did these end up on your machine?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “And this is why you met up with Kevin?”

  “I didn’t tell him about the pictures, only that it seemed like someone had gotten remote access to my machine.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “That it was possible. Though he liked the idea of physical access better.”

  “Is the woman aware of her starring role?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t tell her?”

  “I thought I should wait until I had some clue about how to explain the pictures being on my laptop,” I said, aware of how lame an excuse this was.

  “Hmm,” she said, and then ducked her head closer to the screen. “This interests me.”

  “What?”

  Her hands flashed around the keyboard for a few seconds, causing small, semitranslucent windows to pop up and disappear almost too quickly to see. “You mind?”

  “Mind what?”

  Then the first picture was back up on-screen. A couple of finger taps, and it jumped in size—first to fill the entire screen, then twice as large again. Cass used a diagonal movement on the track pad to scroll to the bottom right-hand corner of the image, and leaned back, cocked her head, squinted.

  “Yep,” she said. “I am as cool as everyone says.”

  She closed the window and opened another from the folder, apparently at random. A three-quarter view of Karren was treated in the same way. “Again. See?”

  “See what?”

  She tapped a key combination and the image popped down a level in resolution. She caused the cursor to circle around the date and time stamp in the corner. “Examine the edges of those numbers.”

  I looked more closely. “I don’t get it.”

  “They’re not real.”

  “Not real?”

  “The way date- and time-stamped numbers appear on digital photos is pretty distinctive. These look off. The edges are too sharp, don’t have the halo. Could just be the camera in question, it does vary from brand to brand, but I don’t think so. Let’s check something else.”

  Another key combination, and a long thin window popped up next to the image, filled with orderly lines of text. She ran a finger down it, humming to herself.

  “Aha.”

  “What’s all that?”

  “The EXIF data for the image. Let me check another.” She reopened the first image, and the side window filled with similar data. “Bingo. My awesomeness abounds.”

  “I don’t understand what you’re showing me.”

  “E-X-I-F,” she said, spelling out the letters as if to an illiterate cat. “That’s Exchangeable Image File format to you. A way of storing metadata about a picture, in the file itself. When a digital camera takes an image, it injects pieces of information into the JPEG or TIFF, where it can be accessed by any viewer application. It will typically store the aperture, shutter speed, focal length, and ISO setting—and some will even log geolocation data in there, too.” She placed the slender tip of her finger near the top of the data window. “And of course, basic, it will log the time and date when the picture was taken.”

  I looked at the date next to her finger. Then at the numbers in the corner of the image itself.

  They were different.

  “Hang on,” I said. “The numbers on the picture say it was taken midevening on the twelfth, Tuesday. But the EXIF data says the eleventh. Which was Monday.”

  “That would be my point.”

  “But wait . . . wait a minute,” I said, as it dawned. “On Monday night I was out with Stephanie. All evening. From before dark. So if these were taken on Monday, then it couldn’t have been me, and she would know that.”

  Cassandra tipped her hand like a seesaw. “Don’t get too excited. The EXIF data relies on the camera’s settings as much as the old-school time/date stamp would. If someone set the camera to the wrong date or time, the EXIF stamp will be wrong, too.”

  “But I set the date and time correctly.”

  “I’ll bet. But you can’t prove it. You could have changed it to take the pictures, then changed it back, for some fell purpose of your own. You can’t use those numbers to actually prove when the picture was taken.”

  “But something’s hinky with them—because either way, the two dates should be the same. Right?”

  “Yes. Someone faked the date and time onto those images to pin it to a specific day and time. Which—”

  She stopped talking abruptly, mouth hanging open. Slapped herself upside the head. “Well, duh.”

  “What?”

  She appeared pained at her own stupidity. “What’s the word you keep seeing? Modified?”

  “They modified the dates, I can see that, but—”

  “No no no. Not only that, my friend. It’s not just one thing being modified, or even a bunch of little things. It’s an actual mod.”

  “What the fuck is a mod?”

  “Rewind. I play games, okay? Computer games, online. This has been established in prior conversation. Recall?”

  “Yes.”

  She looked perplexed. “You really don’t know wha
t a mod is?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. In gaming terms, a mod is what it sounds like—a modification—but actually it’s more than that. It’s ontological, world changing. It’s a file or patch you deploy in a computer game that alters a player’s circumstances—or the world—in fundamental ways. It’s an old-school idea—been around since people were playing Middle Earth text-based games back in the 1960s.”

  “Alters them . . . how?”

  “Depends. A weapons mod might mean that a character in a fantasy medieval universe suddenly has access to unlimited arrows, or even a gun. An environmental mod could mean anything from castle walls turning rainbow colored, to there being no trees or horses or gravity. You see?”

  “I still have gravity and I do not have a gun.”

  “But some things have changed, right? There’s people who feel differently about you because of a joke e-mail you never sent. Your wife thinks you ordered a book of arty porn—not just that, but lied about it—and not to mention thinks you might have gotten Peeping Tom around a coworker. People see you differently, behave differently toward you, and your world ends up different as a result, in a snowball effect, and you have to play catch-up.”

  I was getting there, albeit slowly. “But who the hell would be doing this?”

  “That’s the question. Old college buddy? Drinking pal? Some friend who’s close enough to know your life?”

  “I don’t really . . . have friends. Not like that.”

  “Really? You can’t think of anyone?”

  I could not. I had colleagues. I had contacts. I had blogs I followed. I came up short after that.

  “O-kay,” Cass said. “You might want to get onto that. Friends, well, I hear good things about the concept.”

  I was feeling tired, confused, and drunk. “I’ve got to get home. Right away. I’ve got to show this photo thing to Steph, tell her about all this.”

  “You do. Going to be a long walk, though.”

  “Only twenty minutes to get back to the car.”

  “Dude, driving-wise, you are in even worse shape than when you got here.”

  She was right, of course.

  “You got a number for a cab firm?”

  She grinned. “Let me ask my good friend Mr. Google.”

  And she did, and got a number, and I called it, and they said they’d send a car.

  In the meantime, we had another glass of wine. It was probably a kind of fuzzy jubilance that eventually had us sitting close together on the floor: mine at discovering actual evidence that I was innocent and that someone was absolutely, definitely, and for sure fucking with me; hers at having helped me get to this point.

  It gets foggy after that.

  I remember a call from the cab firm saying the driver had broken down or been abducted or something, and another would be sent at some point. I recall an additional bottle of cheap wine being opened. I remember trying all available phone numbers for Steph yet again. I remember—for god knows what reason—talking up my plans for clawing up the property ladder; perhaps because I thought Cass would disapprove, and I seemed to have started to care what she thought of me. She appeared to feel that my ambitions did not make me the devil incarnate.

  I remember her phone ringing, and her looking at the screen and not taking the call. I asked her if it was the cab firm, and she said no, it was Kevin.

  “He, uh, he likes you,” I said. I was drunk enough to think I was sounding avuncular and man-of-the-world. “I think he likes you a lot, in fact.”

  “I know. But it’s not going to happen.”

  “You don’t want to talk to him?”

  “Not right now,” she said, and settled back next to me, perhaps a little closer than before.

  I remember, but by then it’s getting patchy, flash images fading in and out as if illuminated by a failing strobe light of recall, getting to a point where she was leaning against me, my arm was around her shoulders. I remember her smoking, and I remember looking down as she took a drag on her cigarette, and looking not just at her hand, but at two small, pale shapes just beyond.

  “Mr. Moore—are you looking down my shirt?”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  She looked up at me, and smiled. “S’okay.”

  “It’s not, really.”

  “You see me moving away?”

  “I’m . . . married. And older.”

  “True, both. But I’m not, like, an actual infant. I can do up my own laces and everything.”

  “I know,” I said (though now I felt very ancient indeed), and tightened my arm around her shoulders, to show that I was taking her seriously.

  We didn’t say much more after that. I sat, content to be wreathed in her smoke, her body warm against my side as it got darker and darker in my head, and her breathing got shallower, and eventually she fell asleep.

  I sat there, supporting her meager weight, a still point at the center of the world.

  Some time later, having half woken, she smiled drowsily at me and hauled herself to her feet. She stumbled off in the direction of the bedroom, pausing just long enough to glance back at me from the door.

  I drifted back to sleep for a while, before waking again to find myself on the floor, her pack of cigarettes close to my face. Without giving the idea a second thought I took one, lit it, stuck it in my mouth, and dragged on it deep. I don’t remember whether it felt good or not, or whether I even finished it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  At two o’clock in the morning Hunter walks into the sleeping condominium complex and lets himself into the apartment on the second story. Everything is as he left it. He walks to the couch, lowers himself down, and sits in the darkness. It is very quiet. No one is awake at this hour. Through the sliding doors at the end of the living room he can see across the central area of tennis courts. There is a light in one of the condos opposite, but it is dim, most likely there to comfort and guide a child should he or she need the bathroom in the night. Hunter watches for ten minutes and sees no one. A child sleeps on, undreaming, unaware.

  He turns back to look across the room. On the wall is a canvas. Pieces of coral and seaweed have been stuck to it, along with some shells. In the darkness they look like blots of black ink against shadow. He wonders how long ago Hazel Wilkins undertook this project, a quiet and earnest celebration of where she lived, while a now-canceled TV show played in the background. These things of the ocean, once alive and in transit, are now so still they seem to deny the very idea of change, dismantling continuation and breaking the world into an infinite series of present moments.

  They’re there.

  They’re still there.

  They’re still there.

  And so is he. He closes his eyes, and there is a flash of noise and movement in his head. He lets his skull tip slowly forward, and holds it in his hands.

  He stands over the shape on the bedroom floor. This is where she ran. He is not yet sure what he’s going to do about the result. He steps over her and goes to the closet, pulls the doors open. From the interior comes the smell of perfume worn on other days. Dresses, blouses, jackets hang all in a row. There is a sufficient number that most touch the next in line, but it seems to him that if he were to take each item to a different town in the country, or even the world, they could not feel farther apart from each other than they do now.

  He has never been responsible for someone’s death—not so directly anyhow. If it hadn’t been for Hazel Wilkins, he could have told himself everything was going better than planned. He broke this woman’s neck with his own hands, however, and he feels bad about it.

  He turns from her closet and kicks her body, hard.

  He goes into the kitchenette and makes himself a cup of instant coffee. He drinks it standing at the doors out onto the balcony, far enough back that—should anyone look over—they will see nothing but shadow. It is cold in this apartment. The body in the bedroom would likely not announce its presence for a couple of days, by which time he hopes i
t will all be done. Hunter doesn’t know how often the maid service operates, however. It could be that at 8:00 A.M. sharp tomorrow some poorly paid Mexican woman will be opening the door to this apartment. Her response to a dead body is unlikely to be restrained.

  Hunter worked out pretty quickly why Warner had given him Phil Wilkins’s name. Partly as the real target was already beyond his reach, but also because Warner hoped a confrontation between Wilkins’s widow and Hunter would send a message to the real people Hunter is here to find. He was ready to sacrifice Hazel, in other words.

  Unfortunately, Warner was right—or he will be, if people find out what happened in this condo that afternoon. It doesn’t surprise Hunter that Warner would have been prepared to sacrifice someone, and he feels he owes it to Hazel Wilkins that her death not be a matter of fulfilling someone else’s plan. She cannot just be David Warner’s Post-it note or ploy, and so he needs to come up with some other way of letting this play out.

  Which means he needs to move her body.

  But first he needs to check if there is anything here in this apartment, anything from which he can learn.

  It soon becomes clear that, wherever the bulk of this woman’s stuff is, it isn’t here. Either she’s divested herself of a lot of the past, or it’s stored elsewhere.

  He checks the shelves, the drawers, the closets. There’s nothing except the big framed photograph of her and Phil, holding cocktails and grinning on the balcony of this very apartment on some long-ago sunny afternoon. He saw the picture on his previous visit. He recognized Phil Wilkins, recognized him as someone he’d thought of as, if not a friend, then a more than casual acquaintance. Realizing that this had been a lie, even so long after the fact, was part of what led to the unraveling of his discussion with the widow. Given how many lies we tell other people and ourselves, it’s funny how much those of others hurt.

  On the upper story of the duplex—a small adjunct up a narrow stairway, holding a second bedroom and bathroom—he finds a storage area. This is home to nothing but a couple of suitcases, both empty. It’s beginning to look as though all he’s going to come away with is the names she gave him that afternoon. She tried to give them early, too. It needn’t have gone the way it went, that was the worst of it.