I had no idea what Joe’s password would be. And then the image of a number jumped into my mind. It was the haziest kind of memory because I hadn’t thought about it when I saw it. Now I wasn’t sure if I’d seen it at all. I bolted to Joe’s office and opened the center drawer. I had put all of the contents back after I had tossed it, failing to find clues or evidence of Joe’s whereabouts.
Now I pulled the drawer all the way out. I dumped the take-out menus and pens and paper clips onto the rug, then took the drawer over to the desk lamp and looked at where the bottom met the sides of the drawer.
Something was written in pencil close to the seam, a long line of numbers and letters that added up to nothing.
Like the best kind of password.
I brought the empty drawer to the tablet on the floor of Julie’s room and typed the alphanumeric into the password box on Joe’s page. I got blocked several times. There were eighteen characters in this chain, and I blew it a few times.
The third time, I was slow and deliberate, and I was sure I’d typed in the eighteen characters perfectly.
And still the password was rejected.
I typed in a few obvious combinations of birthdays and names, but no luck. Joe was a spy. Triple threat. CIA, FBI, Homeland Security. He wasn’t using a password he’d written in his pencil drawer. He wasn’t going to use password1234, either. He wouldn’t use his daughter’s name to guard his secrets. Right?
Just for laughs, I typed in JulieAnne, and bam. I was in. Imagine that. Folders populated the little desktop.
It was immediately clear to me that this storage account was for Joe’s personal stuff. The Brooks Findlay file wasn’t there, for instance, nor any of Joe’s freelance clients. I found a file for football scores, and clips from blogs he followed. I found nothing marked top secret. And his contact list didn’t include Alison Muller’s info.
Before giving up, I clicked on the calendar icon, and when it opened, I flashed over the entries for the many empty days and months when Joe had worked from home.
The notes were brief and straightforward, but there were a couple of cryptic entries at the end of March. Joe had taken a trip back east to see his mother, who’d just had surgery to put in a pacemaker. He’d made notes of his flight reservations on this, his personal calendar.
But what I was reading showed me that Joe hadn’t made a round trip from SFO to New York’s JFK. He had booked connecting flights from SFO through JFK to Brandenburg, an airport in Berlin. And he’d noted the confirmation numbers for two seat assignments.
One for J. A. Molinari. And the second for a fellow traveler, Sonja Dietrich.
Joe had gone to Berlin with Alison Muller.
Who was he? I didn’t know my husband at all.
CHAPTER 62
JOAN RONAN MACLEAN was an attractive twenty-five-year-old bartender from Palo Alto who’d come to San Francisco on her own dime to see Conklin and me. She made himself comfortable in the visitor’s chair next to our desks, flipped her sandy-colored hair out of her eyes, and said Michael Chan frequented the Howling Wolf and had been at the bar a couple of nights before he was killed.
According to MacLean, “Chan was drinking alone, and he had more than his usual two beers.”
“How did he seem to you?” Conklin asked.
“Pensive. The bar was kinda empty and he wanted to talk. I speak a little Chinese because I had a Chinese nanny, so we’re kinda friends. But I was completely unprepared for this.”
“Please go on,” Conklin said.
“Yeah, yeah. He told me he was in love with a woman, not his wife, and that they were going to run away to Canada together.”
“Did he mention the woman’s name?”
“He called her Renata one time, and the other times he called her ‘my love.’ I asked him if he was serious about running away, because he has a wife and kids, you know? And he said she was married, too. And he said this lady carried a gun. So I said, ‘She’s a cop?’
“And he said, all dreamy-like, ‘I don’t really know.’”
I asked MacLean, “As you see it, does this affair have anything to do with Chan getting killed?”
“Well. It made me wonder if his wife killed him. Or if his girlfriend did.”
More questions in a case that was nothing but questions. I thanked MacLean for the tip and walked her out to the gate. When I got back to my desk, Conklin was hanging up the phone. He said, “Chi has a lead on the Chinese guys who’ve been dogging you.”
Chi was Sergeant Paul Chi of our homicide squad. He was born here but speaks some Chinese and has cultivated a stable of CIs in and around Chinatown.