At four that afternoon, Cherry called with a promise of hot news. “Tell me in person,” I said. I had re-upped my anonymity settings, but I couldn’t be absolutely certain the Recluse wasn’t watching me. Cherry showed up at my apartment with Starbucks scones. “So my father’s cop friend didn’t get an ID on the woman.”
“And this is hot information because?”
“He got a lead on the car owner.” She clicked a picture onto her Droid screen: a shot of the Civic’s rear bumper. “A traffic camera picked up the car.”
“Okay?” I said. “We already had the plate number.”
“Right,” she said, “but we didn’t have this.” She zoomed in on the plate. “The plate itself is bad, yes, but not the plate rack, the kind the dealer gives you to advertise the dealership.” Cherry tweaked the picture, magnifying the plate rack: Vardy Dealership.
I nodded. She left the scones on the counter and hurried for the door.
“What’s the rush?” I said.
“Work.” Cherry DiBenneditto was a very cool girl.
A little after 4:00 Tuesday morning, I cracked the Vardy database. The company had resold four hundred and sixteen 1990s model Civics in the last fifteen years, and none of those went to anybody named Vratos or Wood. By now I’d hacked the class list for Sabbatini’s chem lab. None of the last names matched.
I created a map that covered Brandywine and the Hollows outskirts, and I checked the addresses of the Civic owners with Google Earth Street View, one by one. It took hours. Around 11:45 Tuesday night, about three-quarters of the way down the Vardy list, I found what I was looking for, a dumpy little house not far from my apartment building, in lower Valedale, still in the Brandywine school district but definitely low rent. The black Civic was in the driveway. The stolen plates had been swapped out for the ones registered to the address, but I recognized the car by the gash that ran across the driver’s-side doors. The Civic owner’s name was Roberta Lyles. I tapped up her Facebook page.
Bobbie Lyles listed herself as divorced. She was probably in her early thirties but the lines around her eyes made her look a lot older. She had long blond hair, but she couldn’t have been the woman I saw in the Civic hauling out of my parking lot. That woman was thin, and Bobbie was not. Still, she looked familiar. Those eyes. . I tapped up Chrissie Vratos’s page. At a stretch, she and Bobbie could have been distant cousins. Maybe they were friends, and Chrissie had simply borrowed the car? Took me about half an hour to go through Chrissie’s posts and albums, and I didn’t find anything that connected her to Lyles. Bobbie’s page took half a minute to scan. She had nothing up there except a handful of pictures, all of crocheted objects. She was using Facebook primarily to promote her home business, handcrafted scarves, sweaters, blankets made to order. She had six friends, and none of them linked her to Chrissie. I tried to connect Bobbie and Marisol Wood and came up empty there too. I tried to link her to the suspects I had already eliminated from my list, Mr. Sager, Kerns, Dave, Schmidt, Sabbatini. I crossed my fingers when I tried to link her to my father and sighed relief when I couldn’t. I couldn’t link her to Marathon, New Jersey, either. I had to dig deeper into that and find out what my father was hiding down there, but not yet. I had one more name I needed to cross-reference with Bobbie Lyles. I hesitated. I forced myself to do it.
She didn’t connect to Nicole either.
I checked to see if the black Civic had been stolen recently. It hadn’t, or Bobbie Lyles hadn’t reported it as such. I ran her address into the cable service provider database. The house was wired for basic television, Vonage, and Internet service. The only machine IDs that came up were for a fax machine, an older model TV and a very old desktop PC, the kind Bobbie Lyles might use for her little startup business, to post her wares on eBay. She listed her employer as Dunkin’ Donuts.
The low-tech computer, low-rent cable, low-wage job: perfect cover-too perfect. That black Civic was in her driveway. She was involved in this thing somehow.
I pulled a long-standing string I had into BinarTREE, one of the major manufacturers of cell phone towers. They owned the northeast with nine of every ten towers flaunting their brand. The towers were equipped with sensors that pinpointed wireless data flow. Obviously media companies would pay dearly to know which homes were gobbling up lots of gigabytes, and then push their products there.
Why was Bobbie Lyles importing ridiculous amounts of data into her home, into her back bedroom, specifically; way more data than that crappy desktop dinosaur PC with its half a gigabyte of RAM could handle? I’d found her. I’d found the Recluse. She had a very powerful computer in that back room, the kind I had, homemade, no machine ID, untraceable, the kind you never dock to an Ethernet cable, to keep yourself invisible. The only way I was going to be able to suck the information from Bobbie Lyles’s hard drive was to dock to it with an external drive. My phone beeped midnight. Knock on my door.
“Yup?”
My father leaned in, yawning. His gut hung over the waistband of his pajamas. “Saw your light on under the door.”
“And?”
“Did you vote today?”
“Dad? I’m sixteen.”
He eyed the laptops. “What the hell are you working on that you need two computers going?”
“Project.”
“Fascinating description.” He rubbed his eyes. “This is what you do all the time. Bird with the broken wing syndrome. Of all the girls out there, you have to fall in love with this one?”
“I’m not in love-”
“Look, I’m traveling a lot the next couple of weeks. It can’t be helped. It’s the heart of the fall season, you know? I’m thinking I want to take you with me.”
“Yeah, thanks, no.”
“Jay, if you keep messing around with Barrone’s case and you get pinched, I can’t help you. After Pete, I have no connections to PD. You screw up, you’re on your own.”
I was thinking the same about him. Traveling a lot? Would he be making any stops in Marathon?
I called Angela to tell her where I was in the hunt, but she was out at a club and in no mood to talk. “Call me tomorrow and we’ll divvy up assignments,” she said. But by tomorrow it would all be over, one way or another.