CALLS BURNS AT HOME TO TELL HIM HE’D booked a menacing pizza the night before. It was disturbing the peace in front of Carrie’s home.
“What the hell?” Burns says after he finishes the recap. “You think he sent it?”
“If I were a betting man?”
“Yeah.”
“Gotta say it doesn’t feel like his style. It’s a little too creative. But I got a partial off one of the pieces of glass and it’s a likely match.”
“So it’s him.”
“Maybe. The thing is, it’s the only print we found on any of the contents in the package. There’s nothing on the razors, the computer chips. I got a couple of nice thumb prints off the outside of the box, but I bet they’re from one of the guys at the pizza shop.”
“So you’re saying that whoever put the package together was being too careful to leave even a nice little partial.”
“Seems odd, doesn’t it?”
“The whole thing seems odd,” Burns says.
There are other facts to consider: In the last forty-eight hours none of them had logged Cogan in the vicinity of a Roundtable and he’d been at home yesterday at 8:30 p.m., the last time Billings checked up on him. But they didn’t have him nailed down at the delivery time, which was a problem.
Even so, Madden thinks it doesn’t make sense. What would Cogan hope to accomplish by sending a menacing pizza to the girl’s home? There were other, less obtuse ways to spook her. Like through the media. Two short articles had appeared in the local editions of the Mercury News and The Chronicle, but the case had yet to attract major publicity. Dupuy had told Crowley that her client preferred it that way—both for his sake and for the families involved. But at a certain point, they would have to resort to more hardball tactics, go to a scorched-earth approach. “I will sensationalize this thing if I have to, Dick,” she’d warned.
“Maybe Kroiter delivered it,” Burns suggests. “You think of that?”
He actually had. But the same question applied. What did it gain him? More heat on the doc perhaps. Yet, at the same time, if his ruse were uncovered, it would totally jeopardize the case. The guy would have to be nuts. That wasn’t totally out of the question, but still, it was a stretch.
“Where are you now?” Burns asks.
“I’m outside of a Starbucks. The Santa Cruz Ave. one in downtown Menlo. He’s inside with those kids.”
“The next-door neighbor?”
“Yeah, and his friend.”
“What are they doing?”
“I’m not sure. They’ve got a laptop. They’re hanging out. Maybe they’re playing a game. I can’t tell.”
“How long you going to keep this up, Hank?”
“It’s going to break, Burnsy. I got a feeling. It’s going to break soon.”
“How soon?”
He knows what Burns is really asking. He’s tired of the flying-under-the-radar act.
“We’ll talk to Pete and Crowley on Monday, OK? We’ll lay out what we’ve got and see how they want to proceed.”
“Hank?”
“What?”
“You think he purposely gave Billings the slip the other day? You get any indication he knows he’s being followed?”
“No. But that doesn’t mean anything.”
“Why?”
“Because for all we know, he wants us to follow him.”
May 12—1:40 p.m.
“OK, here’s the deal,” Josh says, placing the empty envelope next to Cogan’s laptop on the small, square café table. “She says she wants you to put the thousand bucks in the envelope, then I walk over to FedEx and send it to the address on the envelope. When she sees the receipt, she’ll hack in.”
Lifting an eyebrow, Cogan looks at the name. If it weren’t neatly typed, he would have thought it was misspelled. Diafongon Babdo is the name and he or she lived in Mali, Africa.
“You’re serious? I’m mailing a thousand bucks to someone in Mali?”
“She sponsors some kids over there,” Josh explains. “This is the teacher at the local school. She says over there a thousand dollars is the equivalent of twenty thousand here, maybe more. It’s really a lot of money. You’d really be doing someone a lot of good.”
“She doesn’t want anything?”
“She wants you to pay for her coffee.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“What is she, the Mother Teresa of hackers?”
“Something like that. Except she’s an atheist.”
“I’ll be damned,” he says, truly awed that such a person, especially one so young, exists. “And she thinks she can do it?”
“She knows she can get in. She’s done it before. She just doesn’t know whether she can find the info you’re looking for.”
He glances in her direction. The virtual teammate he only knows by the call handle Vas (short for Vaseline)