(for its peaceful existence). I checked the video and groaned. Forty thousand more views. Damn, this thing was going to make the national news.
Clegg came back on the line. “Well, I got something,” he said.
My pulse jumped, and my leg involuntarily kicked out and sent Ginger scampering away.
“Tell me.”
Clegg said, “Nothing about his hacking chops, but if your game buddy is plotting an attack, then he’s going to do it from the shadows. It looks like the report was filed a couple months ago by a neighbor.”
“What report?” I asked.
I felt a sick drop in my stomach. That was around the same time I’d become Elliot Uretsky.
“You’ll be surprised,” Uretsky had said to me.
You’ll be surprised.
Clegg said, “A neighbor of his filed a ‘be on the lookout’ message about three months ago with the Medford police.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“It means somebody wants to know where the Uretskys are, and nobody has seen them.”
CHAPTER 26
The next day Ruby and I drove to Medford to scope out the house where Elliot and Tanya Uretsky resided. I keyed the address taken from Uretsky’s game account—38 Skyview Lane—into my phone’s GPS. Twenty minutes later we were parked on a wide, pleasant street across from a single-story, vinyl-sided ranch home with a detached single-car garage. Thick beige curtains blocked out every window.
My thumb is brown when it comes to gardening, but even I could have spruced up this place. The trees in front of the house were sparse and scraggly. There were bushes all around, but those looked as shaggy and unkempt as the front lawn that begged for a trim. The home itself appeared dark and uninviting. I surveyed the landscape, looking for lawn furniture or toys or any sign of habitation, but saw nothing of the sort. The garden, brown and untended, seemed especially out of place in a neighborhood full of neatly landscaped properties with colorful flower beds.
Ruby and I climbed out of the car. She was wearing a wide-brimmed sun hat and smelled of SPF 50 sunblock. Her jeans and long-sleeved shirt were for added protection. She seemed shaky on her feet, so I wrapped an arm around her waist to give her some added support. We had grown to hate the drugs keeping her alive almost as much as we hated the cancer that was killing her.
“Are you feeling up to this?” I asked.
Ruby nodded, though I could see she felt about as healthy and ready as Uretsky’s lawn.
I checked the mailbox, a big black metal oval mounted on a faded wooden post. It was full, but not overly so. There were bills (nothing from UniSol Health), along with the current issues of O Magazine (addressed to Tanya Uretsky) and The New Yorker (also addressed to Tanya Uretsky). I put the mail back in the box, ignoring the temptation to check out this week’s cartoon contest.
“Where is the rest of their mail?” I said to Ruby. “If we’re to believe Clegg, these people haven’t been seen in months. Shouldn’t there be a mountain of it?”
“That’s still a big if in my mind,” Ruby said, meaning whether to believe Clegg. My look conveyed my disagreement. “Anyway,” Ruby continued, “maybe the post office is keeping it.”
“Then why is today’s mail here and nothing else?”
“I dunno,” Ruby said. “Uretsky is probably hiding out. He doesn’t want his neighbors to see him.”
“Hiding out with his wife?”
Ruby shrugged.
“Something is wrong,” I said. “Something is very, very wrong with all this.”
“What?” Ruby asked.
“I just don’t get the feeling that a psychopath lives here.”
“Why? Because it’s not all spooky?”
I shrugged. Ruby was right—the place didn’t feel scary as much as lonely.
“Can we ever really know what our friends and neighbors are up to?” Ruby said.
“Follow me,” I said.
There weren’t any lights on inside the home, but I tried to get a peek through some of the windows. Unfortunately, the closed curtains made it impossible to see, and it was too dark inside the house to get a good look through the front door sidelight windows. I couldn’t see into the garage—no windows there—so Ruby and I worked our way around back.
The backyard was a small, unfenced square of land, not more than a quarter of an acre, but as poorly maintained as the front. I saw a grill and some all-season furniture on the stone patio, but those were dusty from disuse. A dark shadow seemed to have been cast over this place, impervious to the sweet scent of spring air and an afternoon sky