Silence. Tyler figured Bill was on his office line. He cast a casual glance across the newsroom, seeing who was on the phone, trying to guess which of his coworkers was getting the assignment no one wanted. Then Bill’s voice dropped to a venomous whisper.
“Don’t be so goddamn stupid. You know why I can’t give this to Tyler.” More silence, while Tyler’s stomach coiled into serpentine knots. “Yeah. Well, maybe next time you should think before you talk. Get it done by Thursday morning.”
The receiver clattered into its cradle. Now Tyler just wanted to slip out of the bullpen, to reach the downstairs door and the freedom of the street without anyone cornering him. He held his breath, crossed the crack in the doorway, and—
“Hey. Tyler. Got a sec?”
So much for a quick escape. He poked his head into the office. The back wall of Bill’s cluttered den wore a mosaic of award certificates and framed clippings, a legacy of the paper’s victories. More than a few of Tyler’s and Nell’s pieces were on that wall.
“How ya doin’?” Bill asked, bifocals riding low on the bulb of his nose.
“Heading out,” Tyler said. “Following up a lead on the Weaver Group story.”
“Good, good.” Bill eyed him like a doctor with a bad prognosis to deliver. “You, ah…need to take a couple vacation days soon?”
Tyler had been thinking about that. More like he put a lot of effort and energy into not thinking about it and failed.
“Maybe Friday,” he conceded.
“Why don’t you take Friday and Monday off,” Bill said.
“Really, Friday is fine—”
Bill fluttered his tobacco-stained fingers, waving Tyler’s words away.
“Take Friday and Monday,” he said. “Make it a long weekend.”
* * *
“Welcome to the dark side, mon ami.”
Duke made his office in the back corner of PC Connect, where they rented computers by the hour and sold movie-theater snacks at prices that would make a loan shark blush. He didn’t sit on his chair as much as he was poured into it, a slug with three days of stubble on his waxy cheeks. He popped the tab on a can of Cherry Coke, setting it next to three empties, and gave Tyler a know-it-all leer before turning back to his screen.
“It’s not for me,” Tyler said. “My partner’s chasing down a lead and needs a little help.”
“Nell Bluth? I read her piece on DefCon last year. She’s hot, for a librarian type. You tap that?”
Tyler put his hands on his hips. “Come on, dude. She’s like my sister. She was the best man at my wedding.”
“Didn’t know you were married.”
Tyler’s gaze drifted to the computer screen. He’d expected to see an illegal hacking operation in progress, some shady dark web business or the digital trail of a cracked bank account. Instead, Duke was idly guiding a wide-eyed and scantily clad anime girl across a digital landscape, bopping goblins with a magic wand.
“Was,” Tyler said. “Can we get on with it?”
“Touchy, jeez. Okay, here’s how this works. You give me the number of the phone you want tracked and let me know when you want a log trace.”
“A log trace being…” Tyler said.
“The Microbilt system takes a snapshot of the last ten cell towers your target phone has been in range of. If you’re lucky—and if they stay in one place long enough—you can use it to triangulate their location down to a quarter of a city block. Give or take. I can grab as many logs as you want, but I’ve got to charge you two hundred a pop.”
“Two hundred. American dollars.” Tyler stared at him. “That’s highway robbery.”
A horde of leering goblins mobbed the anime girl. She died in a melodramatic swoon as streaks of red painted the screen. Duke cursed under his breath and finally tore himself away from his game, swiveling in his chair.
“That’s economics, my good fellow. Microbilt is only available to a small number of people with a proven need for access, which is why it’s legal. Barely. This guy who will remain nameless has a valid account. He farms his access out, under the table, to a few bounty hunters who use it for skip-tracing. One of those bounty hunters farms his access out to me. This is a big, healthy, black-market food chain, and everybody’s got their hand out, every step of the way. When all is said and done, my cut’s something like forty bucks. These are friend prices.”
“What a pal,” Tyler said. “Doesn’t Microbilt notice all these weird inquiries coming in from all over the place on this one guy’s account? Doesn’t he have to justify why he’s asking?”
“Microbilt gets paid too.”
8.
Nell was working through lunch. Her usual routine was to find the closest fast-food place—Mexican, today, a corner joint off Clarendon Road where the dirty windows caught the steam from a street grate and fogged up solid, turning the world outside into a ghostly silhouette. She grabbed a table and spread out her file folders. Lunch was a time for review, revisiting all the notes and scraps she had gathered on her latest obsession, treating them like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
She had a carnitas and rice bowl with salsa hot enough to scorch her tongue. The stout and gray grandmother behind the counter knew how Nell liked it. She savored the burn and slipped into a meditative haze, walking backward through the case. Sometimes she found new leads this way, spotting an off-the-record comment or a casual observation that didn’t take on real meaning until months later.
A newspaper clipping felt coarse against her fingertip. She remembered adding it to the file on their first day of background research when Bill gave her and Tyler the thumbs-up to make the Loom, and the Weaver Group, their top priority. A detail shuffled to one side until now, and in light of the morning’s events, it took on a new tone.
City Councilman Cerezo Killed in Mugging Incident.
In Amarillo, three people on the city council had held their ground against giving the Weaver Group control of the city’s data. Cerezo was the loudest, urging the other two to hold strong. The article recounted how he and his wife were walking along a normally safe stretch of town, coming back from a fundraiser, when a man in a hoodie confronted them at gunpoint. Cerezo decided to fight instead of handing over his wallet; the gun went off and the mugger ran, leaving his widow to tell the story.
One week later, the two other holdouts flipped their votes. The Loom was unanimously approved. When asked about the change of heart, they refused to comment.
Tyler, being Tyler, pointed out how convenient it all was. Nell saved the clipping but shrugged it off. Wealthy corporations didn’t stage murders to eliminate the opposition. Bribery was safer and smarter than a bullet.
“What if they tried that first, and he said no?” Tyler asked.
Now Arthur Wendt was dead, without even the pretext of a mugging; someone had come to his door in the middle of the night on a mission of murder, and she could only see one motive. She opened her spiral pad, screwed off the hot pink cap of her tactical pen, and made a note.
Fiber-optic upgrade a prerequisite to sealing the deal with New York. Weaver can’t afford that, they need the liquid capital from Barron Equity to make it happen. Wendt could have tanked the entire project if they figured out he was turning whistleblower.