I held out my Blackberry and asked her if it was safe.
“My God, that ought to be in a museum. It’s so not safe. If they can get past our firewalls, they can easily snoop wirelessly. They can also track it.” She bites her lower lip. “I can get you one of the new Blackjacks they have downstairs.”
“I thought those were just for the bigwigs.”
“They’ll never miss it. And I can put an encryption program into a Blackjack.”
The newspaper is failing and they don’t know how many expensive cellphones are sitting around.
“Want your old number?”
I think about this and tell her to keep my old number on the Blackberry and give me a new one on the encrypted cellphone.
I ask, “Can they crack that, as you put it?”
She gave that little half-of-the-mouth smile. “Not the way I do it.”
***
I sit on the bus, trying not to stare at the bearded lady. The driver announces Pike Place Market and the monorail and I think about the blonde. Suicide blonde—who sang that song? She ran into me as I walked toward the elevator that day in Troy’s office tower—that much I’m sure of. She is tall but willowy, hardly the type who could toss Troy the gym rat off
a balcony. Maybe she had help. Maybe he looked away at the wrong moment. Amber is checking the license tag on the blonde’s gray Ford. I still haven’t seen her face up close.
So far, I don’t know anything else except she was standing outside my building. Maybe I am the next to die—she bungled the assassination, so Stu and Bill were understandably upset last night out on Mercer Island. But I’m still alive—foolishly comforted by the bright lights inside the bus—and they were looking for something, going into Troy’s old house. They were looking for something in my notes. I can’t figure it out and I am running out of time. Two weeks to November 11th.
Chapter Twenty-four
The rain eases into a steady mist as I walk down the hill to First Avenue. It gives haloes to the street lamps. I stop in a little convenience store and buy a throwaway cell phone. I read somewhere the world has four billion cell phones; now I have one more. Out on the street, I find it actually works and I call Amber’s pager. Free Press police reporters still carry pagers, as well as cell phones, don’t ask me why. They are barely used now. Amber hasn’t returned her pager, even though she is off the cops beat. In five minutes she calls me back.
“What are you wearing?”
“A big smile for you,” I say. “Is the line safe?”
“I’m at a pay phone. What about you? Did you buy the drug-dealer cell like I suggested?”
I told her I had, and quickly brought her up to date on my day’s dead ends.
“I have good and bad news. If I sound distant, it’s because I don’t want to catch Ebola from this phone mouthpiece. The good news is, I snuck back to Seattle early and pulled a missing person’s report on one Heather Brady. She’s a runaway from Denison, Texas. Seventeen years old. Long story short, she was in Seattle for about a year, but got back in touch with her parents three months ago. She would call them twice a week. They’d send her money, hoping they could lure her back home. She said she had enrolled in community college and was finishing her GED. But a month ago, the calls stopped. Her dad flew up here and filed the report, which the cops promptly shelved. What’s another runaway in Seattle?”
“And this one’s named Heather Brady?”
“Heather Jo Brady, five-feet-five, one hundred pounds, brown hair, looks pretty from the photo on the report. Homecoming queen-type.”
“Any connection to Megan or Ryan?”
“Not in the report.”
“But it did have the parents’ phone number?”
“Got it. I’m on that.”
“So she disappeared about the same time as Megan Nyberg.”
“Exactly,” Amber says.
“So what’s the bad news?”
“The car tab from your blonde. Comes back registered to a used-car place out on Aurora. I drove by, and it’s a real business. So either you wrote it down wrong, or somebody’s going to a lot of trouble to conceal their identity.”