don’t know, might take some time. She’s not ready yet. How about your girl?”
“She’s not ready either. I think Brittany is our best bet.”
“I’ll get it done. I may have to sleep with her, but I’ll get it done.”
“Attaboy.”
Jumper’s phone rattled and he yanked it out of his pocket. Lindsey picked up hers, and for ten minutes they returned texts and emails. The food arrived and they finally put down their phones. Jumper said, “Got a question.”
“All right.”
“Why not just hack into the nursing home’s records and get all the information you want? Its security is lousy. Any decent hacker could do the job overnight. I got some friends.”
“It’s against the law, plain and simple.” Lindsey realized she sounded a bit too pious. The truth was that they had hacked before and would do so again. Their hackers were far better than anything they faced. But the real truth was that the mysterious drug they were looking for would not be in any patient’s records.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE INFORMANT
1.
On a warm breezy day in early March, Bruce was sitting at his desk and enjoying his coffee as he opened the daily mail for the store, something he still insisted on doing after almost twenty-four years. He also insisted on opening each of the countless boxes of new books that arrived three times a week. He loved the smell and feel of each new book, and he especially enjoyed finding the perfect place on the shelves for each one. And he habitually boxed up all the unsold books and sent them back to the publishers as returns, acts of defeat that still depressed him.
A plain envelope, light lemon yellow in color, was addressed to him at Bay Books on Main Street in Santa Rosa. The address was typed in all-caps on a label, and there was nothing for the return. It was postmarked in Amarillo, and at first glance it looked like nothing but junk mail, and he almost tossed it in the wastebasket. Then he opened it. On a plain yellow sheet of paper the sender had typed:
THE LAST PERSON I TALKED TO ABOUT THIS WAS NELSON AND WE KNOW WHAT HAPPENED TO HIM. DO YOU THINK WE SHOULD HAVE A CONVERSATION?
Attached to it was a yellow index card with the message: Crazy Ghost is a chat room for anonymous mail. Costs $20 for a month, credit card. The address there is: 3838Bevel.
Bruce placed the letter and the card on his desk, took his coffee cup and went upstairs to the café and rinsed it out. He dried it, poured another cup, stared out the window, spoke to no one because the place was deserted, and went back to his office. He went online, couldn’t find anything, and walked to the front cashier and asked a twenty-year-old tattooed part-timer about the site. In less than three minutes the kid, without looking up from his screen, said, “It looks legit. One of the private chat rooms from overseas, either Singapore or the Ukraine, there are a bunch of them, and they burn the messages five to fifteen minutes or so after they’re put up. Twenty bucks a month.”
“Would you use it?” Bruce asked.
“You don’t pay me enough.”
“Ha ha. In other words, what do you do when you want complete privacy?”
“I use sign language. Seriously, I assume nothing is private on the Internet so I post only what I don’t care about. Texting is a bit more private.”
“But you wouldn’t be afraid of this?”
“Probably not. You laundering money again?”
“Ha ha.” This, from a twenty-year-old kid. No respect.
Bruce went to the site, paid with a credit card, and said hello to 3838Bevel.
Bay Books here. Anybody home? Got the message. 050BartStarr.
Fifteen minutes passed, there was no answer, and his message vanished. He waited half an hour and tried again with the same result. With meaningful work now impossible, he puttered around his First Editions Room and tried to appear busy. He got a response on