Chapter 5: Two If By Phone (Part II)

“It is not a sex toy!” A reflexive retort—but it was hard not to snort a suppressed laugh. “The chassis is a body for Hadaly. You, being incarnate, wouldn’t fully understand how distressing a disability it is for a noncorporeal in this world of solid objects and tactile sensation.”

“Uh huh,” he replied as he juggled a second Coke from the fridge and passed its chilled caffeinated goodness to her. “Those Teflon coated bearings working out better than the milled steel? Those ones are rated at near a one-hundred thousand PSI.”

“They are working out fine. Thank you.”

“More touchy than usual today,” her brother said, stabbing the fridge closed with his foot. “Phone got you down?”

“It’s the case I’ve taken,” she said. Zane cocked his head to one side and spun in the chair. Elaine knew that he’d been waiting for her to get to this part, it was the point of all the meaningless banter. Although she understood he was concerned about her mental welfare that her lab had been taken from her, he brought it up as a segue to ask about the case. “Since I didn’t get an answer earlier tonight, mind if I ran a question by you? It’s related to the case—I’d rather a source yet untainted by the details.”

“Lay it on me.”

“Well, riddle me this,” she said. “What causes a girl from a fairly affluent family—so rich her bones jingle—to turn to a lowly, computer wizard gone psychic detective for the most important problem in her life? Wait, wait, it gets better. This rich girl, who probably has all of daddy’s money at her disposal, also prefers a visit in the open, goes on the advice of friends who are Wiccan, and not the law graduate sort, and in the face of a denial doubles her offer.”

Zane blinked. She could almost see the lights flickering behind his eyes as he thought it over—probably trying to determine who she was talking about, and what the case might possibly be. Knowing her brother he’d already settled on something fantastic involving gods and demons of impossible variety.

“Old money family?”

“New money, I think,” Elaine said. “Their daughter managed to go to ASU.”

“So, she’s probably not a werewolf or some other lineal disease. I am going to guess that one, she doesn’t want to appear to be a failure in front of her parents…and-or she feels that running to daddy shows that she can’t handle herself. As for the law grad verses Wicca thing, I’d say you wouldn’t have taken this case unless it had some arcane element, which means that your girl knows the hinky-jinky when she sees it and went to the first person she thought of that might have insight.” He paused a moment. “Where is she from?”

“Maine.”

“Stephen King territory. Maybe she’s read too many horror novels. Small town sensibilities growing up in the big city with daddy’s money. I’d say that you flustered her. You are a little bit strange, you know. Can I know who ‘she’ is now?”

Elaine nodded as she mulled over his observations. They weren’t too far off of her own.

“Emily Early,” she said. He was about to find out in a moment—the address book from her iPhone had completed uploading and now the images were transferring, there were over six-hundred of them. “I get the feeling that she’s being stalked. You’ll understand in a moment. But the stalker right now is simply fixing elections so that she wins.”

“Huh, yeah,” he said. “Early has been on the ASU political ticket since my freshman year. I think that she’s an officer in six different clubs and president of at least one. Big name… Whoa.” He leaned closer, lowering his voice. “How much did she offer you?”

A gloating expression crossed her lips. “Five grand,” she said, “three up front. I already have it in my bank account! Like that. Right from her iPhone. And, by telling you all of this, I’m officially bringing you into my circle of confidence. This is strictly hush-hush.”

It wasn’t that she really needed to say that; Zane probably assumed it the moment she mentioned that it was a case. She trusted him to be a confidant without asking. He had always been discreet in the past. It was protocol.

He whistled slow and low. “Understood.”

Protocol satisfied, Elaine went on, “I think she’s being stalked. We were in a public place, and she was almost PTSD. Even the crowd scared her. I wonder if my office hadn’t been raided if she would have agreed to meet there anyway. When her phone rang, she jumped. Now, the image she showed me was creepy, but I think she suspects more than she’s letting on.”

Zane glanced at the computer. Still chugging away, but on the home stretch.

“Don’t tell me… They were not naked pictures?”

“Erm. Nothing so reasonable for a stalker.”

Do-ba-dee! said the computer as it finished its deep copy of the iPhone’s internals. Looking at the spread of the chart on the screen, Zane had set it to grab everything it could from the flash memory on the phone, even the ROM and other hard coded programming that might exist in other subcomponents. The part she was most interested in, a large orange circle with folder icons radiating from it: the main memory with the images and e-mails.

“Bring up the last few picture mail message the phone has received,” Elaine said. “I disabled the radio right after I picked it up; it couldn’t have updated from the service yet. It might even be the very last one.”

“What am I looking for?”

It would be some days before Elaine forgot that image. “Imagine someone carved out your True Name on the side of a cliff with a bulldozer, and then photographed it from orbit. Except that the cliff is the size of the entire Universe and the orbit somewhere outside of everything.”

Images flickered past: girls, buildings, cars, rooms full of people in expensive clothing… Emily certainly had a life different from anyone else. As evidenced by the photos aside from being a stuck-up college student—she filled her nights with black tie meetings and wild parties held in extremely luxurious apartments. Elaine thought she’d recognized a bellhop from one of the crustiest of the uppercrust hotels in Phoenix Metro; and at least one image reminded her of a local resort, the Buttes.

“Sounds creepy,” Zane said. “There’s just one teeny problem.”

“What’s that?”

“Not one of these pictures matches the one that you just described.”