The next morning, Saturday, just before sunrise, I heard my father pull his suitcase from his closet. He was headed to Philadelphia for a fine arts conference. I had the place to myself for the weekend, right through to the next. I waited until he was gone before I got out of bed. I burned myself some toast and scanned the so-called news sites for bits about Nicole. The “New Beau” garbage was still out there, but it had fallen lower in the most-read story rankings. Why weren’t the detectives all over this thing? A girl gets burned, and they’re not worried the perp is going to attack again?
Before I left the apartment to log a double shift at BJ’s I tapped out an email to Nicole: Sorry I was an idiot. Hopefully I’ll see you at Schmidt’s.
Perfect: non-stalkerish, leaves the door open for her to reply.
Work was busy with people lining up to save money on Halloween crap, five-pounder sacks of Three Musketeers, pumpkin lanterns big enough to pass for parade floats. I was too beat to skateboard home and grabbed the Access-A-Ride bus. Another rider gave me a dirty look. Nobody suspects you for an epileptic until you seize. I wondered if Nicole had been issued a bus pass.
When I got into the apartment, I took a few seconds to relish the fact that I wouldn’t have to deal with my father for a whole week. I cranked up a playlist of alternative rock that was heavy on Pearl Jam. Nicole’s suggestion of The Smiths had me digging through my father’s CDs. His collection was vast: classical, jazz, a ton of rock, five albums that featured Tuvinian throat singers. I found a Smiths compilation disc and added it to my mix. They were good. “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want” ended too abruptly, though, or maybe that was the point. I cracked a Red Bull and then my backup laptop, which wasn’t really a backup. From the outside it seemed to be an antiquated Dell, the same open-box special with the scratched screen my mother got for me when I was in fourth grade. But I had modified it. Actually, I’d gutted it. The transplants were Mac turbo. I built my computers piecemeal from parts picked up at swap meets and shady discount stores in the city. I always paid in cash, so my machine ID was as untraceable as my IP address, which was changing all the time. I never used Ethernet or any other type of cable-based communication, sponging off my neighbors’ wireless instead. I had snaked fencing wire up and down the underside of the fire escape outside my window, hiding it in the wild ivy that covered the side of the building. This six-story antenna grabbed signals from three miles away. My computer had thousands of wireless networks to choose from. I’d programmed it to switch accounts every ninety seconds. Whether or not those networks were locked didn’t matter. Cracking a laptop firewall is ridiculously easy, pure script kiddie stuff. I’d tell you how to do it to save you the trouble of downloading what you need from The Pirate Bay, but then you’d do it, and you shouldn’t unless you have a good reason, and you don’t. I did.
My main thing back then was outing the bullies at my school. Once in a while I’d leak stuff about phishing scams. Presently my focus was tracking down Arachnomorph before he struck again. I admit it: I was crushing on Nicole. Not that I expected she would like me back, not romantically anyway, but that was fine. Sometimes a crush is better when it’s a one-way, as long as you keep quiet about it and don’t freak the girl out with creepy leering or unsolicited corny texts or whatever.
I typed “www.njclarion.com.” They were running what I had been leaking since the night before, the two emails Arachnomorph sent to Marks, the ones I had scooped from that poorly guarded brandywine_hollows_hs.nj.edu server. The link was near the bottom of the Local News section, the eighth click down, but I was on the boards.
The Clarion reported that the police were angry the emails had gotten out to the public, as this was an ongoing investigation. Whatever. Anybody who has seen two episodes of The Shield knows that if a perp isn’t identified in the first forty-eight hours, the likelihood of nailing him is cut in half. After ninety-six hours, your chances drop to twenty-five percent, and so on. Six and a half weeks since Nicole was burned, and the police hadn’t made a single arrest? That’s not an ongoing investigation. The detective running this thing was a joke, whoever he was. They were holding that information back, for some reason. I’d invested most of the previous night’s hours into hacking for a name, but I couldn’t find anything. The police were working undercover.
I got a little more play with some of the other news sites, smaller local outfits. They were calling the attacker the Recluse, a spider that wasn’t much in the size department, but it packed a sick bite. The fanging itself was so light as to be unnoticeable, but the venom was devastating. The necrosis was comparable to a third-degree burn in some cases. The recluse spider only attacked when provoked. Maybe Schmidt was right. Maybe the Recluse was a woman, jealous of Nicole, her perfection. How many women would be capable of that kind of envy? The answer to that was a question: How many women had seen Nicole’s face?
The Recluse had to be keeping tabs on the press’s coverage of the investigation. I scrolled through the readers’ comments, mostly sympathy for Nicole, anger that the cops weren’t doing enough. I searched for “bitch deserved it” and the like and of course came up empty.
I checked my suspect list: “jealous classmates” was too unfocused a target to dig into without a lot more information. I’d added Rick Kerns after he’d gone all Mr. Volta-Shock with the lightning bolt Mohawk, but I’d knocked him off the list almost immediately. The lightning bolt was too obvious if you really were the acid thrower, and I didn’t see anything on Facebook that led me to believe he had a beef with Nicole. That left me with Schmidt, Mr. Sabbatini, Dave Bendix, and Mr. Sager.
Sager did have a military record, honorable discharge, literally a Boy Scout as a kid and now a troop leader. He had two kids he doted on, never missed his child support payments, worked a second job as night security to pay for his daughter’s violin lessons. He met the woman he was seeing, Isabella1801, through a dating site for the divorced. She was a nurse, spotless record. Their credit card statements showed nothing suspicious. A night at a Catskills motel that billed itself as Lovers’ Lane was as crazy as they got. I still couldn’t imagine why he needed all that muriatic acid, but would he keep that much around if he really was the acid thrower? I kept him on the list as a weak maybe.
My eyes ticked to Dave Bendix’s name. If I was going to invest precious hours into turning him inside out I would have to overcome the fact that I was-again-light on motive, seriously so. Dave was headed for big things. He was a great athlete, had perfect grades, came from money. Why would he risk all that to burn his girlfriend? On the other hand, even if he didn’t throw the acid, he knew not to touch her. Biggest of all was the tiff in Schmidt’s office. What did Dave Bendix ask Nicole Castro to lie about?
My phone vibrated with a text. It was in my backpack. I ripped the zipper so fast I broke it. Starbucks Cherry: Heya, rave lame. Still wishing you were here though.
My mind flickered to Nicole, drenched with rain, the bandage tape beginning to peel away from her cheekbone. Then back to Cherry. Raves we don’t want to go to, movies we don’t want to see, pushing her castaway car through the mall parking lot after we can’t get it started, up to the gas station, begging the mechanic to give us a battery jump. Bowling. Those fungus-ridden rental shoes. Back to Nicole, the left side of her face. What was under the bandage? Or what wasn’t? How much had she lost? How much was she still losing? Bursting into tears like that, on the side of the road? Where does that kind of fear drive you? She had made herself get out to the stables, to socialize, but she was constantly looking around, waiting for the next media hit, maybe even the next acid attack. How long can you keep living in fear of turning every corner, before you give up and hide out in your house for good? Back when I was doing home school, I had to force myself out of the apartment, food shopping, the Laundromat. Falling into that pit of self-imposed isolation didn’t take long. I wasn’t exactly out of it yet, either. Sometimes I went the whole day without speaking to anybody.
My cell vibrated again. I let it. Two calls from Starbucks Cherry two minutes apart? Now I knew how Nicole felt Thursday afternoon in CVS: like I was being stalked.