She had disposed of her laptop weeks earlier. These days, they served as locaters no less than did a vehicle’s GPS. Her preferred computer source was a public library, wherever she might be. Even then, depending on the information she sought and reviewed online, she didn’t linger long at any location.
She found a branch in the Spanish-mission style, derivative but honest architecture with a barrel-tile roof, palest-yellow stucco walls, windows with bronze frames and muntins. Thriving banana palms sculled the air with their large paddlelike fronds, as if to row the building backward in time to a more serene era.
The parking area serving the library also abutted a park with winding paths, a picnic area, and a playground. As had become her habit, Jane drove past her destination and curbed the car on a side street a block and a half away. After removing a small notebook, a pen, and a wallet, she tucked her purse under the seat before she got out and locked the doors.
Inside the branch library, there were many more aisles of books than there were of computers. She chose a workstation two removed from one occupied by a surly-looking street person whose presence assured that other patrons would avoid that entire quadrant of computers.
Wild witches’ broom of dark hair, street-corner-prophet beard bristling and woven through with a white streak as though stiffened and selectively bleached by a lightning bolt, wearing lace-up boots and camouflage pants and green flannel shirt and voluminous black quilted-nylon jacket, the hulking man had apparently defeated the library’s block on obscene websites and was watching pornography with the sound off.
He didn’t so much as glance at Jane, and he didn’t fondle himself. He sat with his hands on the tabletop, and he considered the action on the screen with something like boredom and with what seemed to be puzzlement. There were drugs, such as Ecstasy, that if taken in too great a quantity for too long caused the brain to stop producing natural endorphins, so that you could no longer experience rapture, joy, or a sense of well-being without chemical assistance. Perhaps that might be his condition, because his sun-seared and weathered face remained without expression as he stared with the stillness and apparent incomprehension of a sculpture of a man.
Online, Jane searched for and found the Gernsback Institute, which produced the annual What If Conference, among other events. Its stated purpose was to “inspire the imagination of leaders in business, science, government, and the arts for the purpose of encouraging informed speculation in search of outside-the-box solutions to significant problems facing humanity.”
Do-gooders. For people with malicious intentions, no better cover existed than a nonprofit organization dedicated to bettering the human condition. Most of the people at the institute might in fact mean well and be doing good, but that didn’t mean they grasped the hidden intentions of its founders or their core mission.
In the notebook, she recorded data that seemed most pertinent to her investigation. She used numerical and alphabetical codes of her own devising, so that this information was in a form that no one but she would be able to read. Now she entered the coded names of the officers and nine board members of the institute, only one of which—David James Michael—rang in her memory.
David James Michael. The man with three first names. He was somewhere else in this compilation of names, dates, and places. She would pore through it later to find him.
Having bumped out of the porn site, the homeless man now watched dog videos on YouTube, again with the speakers muted, his hands resting on each side of the keyboard, his time-beaten face as expressionless as a clock.
After she logged off and pocketed her notebook and pen, Jane got to her feet, moved nearer to the guy, and put a pair of twenty-dollar bills on the table beside his computer. “Thank you for your service to the country.”
He looked up at her as if she had spoken in a language unknown to him. His eyes were not bloodshot, neither were they bleary from booze, but gray and clear and keenly observant.
When he said nothing, she indicated the tattoo on the back of his right hand: a blue spearhead as background, within which was a complete raised sword in gold bisected by three golden lightning bolts, the insignia of Army Special Forces Airborne, and under that the letters DDT. “Can’t have been light duty.”
Nodding toward the forty dollars, he said, “There’s them who need it more than me.” He had the voice of a bear with strep throat.
“But I don’t know them,” she said. “I’d be grateful if you gave it to them for me.”
“I can do that.” He did not pick up the money, but turned his attention once more to the dog videos. “There’s a free kitchen near here that can always use donations.”
Jane didn’t know if she had done the right thing, but it was the only thing she could have done.
As she left the alcove where the computers were arrayed, she glanced back, but he was not looking at her.
15
* * *
STILL, THE STORM had not broken. The sky over San Diego loomed heavy with midday dark, as if all the water weight and potential thunder stored over distant Alpine had in the last few hours slid unspent toward the city, to add pressure to the coastal deluge that was coming. Sometimes both weather and history broke far too slowly for those who were impatient for what came next.
In the park adjacent to the library, following a winding path, she saw ahead a fountain surrounded by a reflecting pool, and she walked to it and sat on one of the benches facing the water that flowered up in numerous thin streams, petaling the air with silver droplets.
The park was sparsely populated for the hour, only half a dozen people in sight, two of them walking dogs less leisurely than they might have under a more benevolent sky.
Jane took her case notebook from an inner sport-coat pocket, paged to the growing list of names, and found a previous entry for David James Michael. He was the man who, as she’d discovered in her recent library session, sat on the board of the Gernsback Institute that organized the invitation-only What If Conference attended by Gordon and Gwyn Lambert, now both dead by their own hands.
The notation after the first listing for Michael referred her to the suicide of a T. Quinn Eubanks in Traverse City, Michigan. Eubanks, a man of inherited wealth and considerable personal achievement, had sat on the board of directors of three charitable foundations, including the Seedling Fund, where one of his fellow directors was David James Michael.
Her next line of inquiry was now clear, or as clear as anything got in this case.
First, however, she had to make a call to Chicago.
At all times she carried a disposable phone with prepaid minutes. As far as she knew, disposables had never been trackable. Even if such bargain models now emitted identifying signals, she always bought them with cash and needed no ID to activate service.
A bevy of uniformed schoolgirls hurried past in response to the mother-quail urgings of a nun in a contemporary habit, who seemed to think the storm would break at any moment.
The air was yet too still. Like tectonic plates, a mass of cool air and a warmer mass would strike-slip and throw down a sudden rush of wind, and the downpour would come a minute or two after that.
Confident of her atmospheric intuition—and not wanting to use the phone while in the car, where she could be trapped in the event that she was wrong about the security of a disposable cell—Jane extracted her current phone from an interior jacket pocket and entered the number for Sidney Root’s direct line.
Sidney’s wife, Eileen, had been the Chicago-based advocate for the rights of people with disabilities about whom Jane had told Gwyneth Lambert. Eileen Root suffered a first and last migraine headache while away from home at a seminar, and three weeks later hung herself in the garage of the family home.