Invasion of Privacy: A Novel Read online

  Jessie reviewed the lines of code that followed, noting that there were no further voice messages. It was 17:31 when her mom finally listened to her dad’s message. And 18:30 when she listened to it a second time. But nowhere in the lines of code did Jessie spot any instructions to delete a message. At least her mom wasn’t lying. With adults, you never knew.

  “It wasn’t my fault,” Jessie admonished her mother. “It’s yours for not listening to it earlier.”

  Jessie returned to a line of code that appeared different from the others. It was nothing but a jumble of letters and symbols. Meaningless. She was pretty sure she’d seen almost every kind of computer language, but she hadn’t seen this.

  She sent a text containing the mysterious code to Garrett, the only other high school student in her class at UT. He was no Rudeboy, but he was okay smart.

  “G. WTF is this? Found it on my mom’s phone. Help.”

  Jessie dropped the smartphone on the bed, then pulled off her headphones and stood up. She felt different, like herself again. She realized that she hadn’t thought about her dad the entire time she was looking at her phone. That was enough to trigger another wave of tears. She cried for a minute, but that was all. She was too tired to cry anymore.

  She got dressed. Jeans, Zeppelin concert T (the ’74 Stairway to Heaven tour). She brushed her hair and looked in the mirror long enough to make sure she didn’t have any zits and her face wasn’t puffy and blotchy. She pulled her shirt tight across her chest. She hated how big her boobs were getting.

  She left her room and crossed the hall. Grace’s door was open. She lay on the bed reading.

  “Hey,” said Jessie, poking her head inside.

  Grace looked up, then back at the book.

  Jessie saw the cover. Another mermaid. Ugh. She sat down on the edge of the bed. “Good book?” She had no idea where the question came from. She hated mermaids and Grace knew it, but she didn’t know what else to say. She was the big sister. She was supposed to console her little sister.

  Grace put the book down. “You want to read it after me?”

  “Not a chance,” said Jessie, then softened her tone. “I mean, no thanks.”

  “You don’t have to be nice to me.”

  “Yes, I do.” Jessie forced herself not to leave. “How are you doing, mouse? Feeling better?”

  “I’m okay, I guess.” Grace rolled on her side. “I think I was just carsick.”

  “I should have cleaned up the mess.”

  “It’s okay. Mom did it.”

  “I didn’t mean that. I mean about Dad.”

  “I’m sad. I can’t talk about him or I’ll cry.”

  “Me, too.”

  “How’s Mom?”

  “Mom’s mom. She’ll be fine.”

  “She said you’re going to have to wear a dress at the service.”

  “I know.”

  “Are you?”

  “Yes. For Dad.” Jessie glanced at the empty pet cage on Grace’s dresser. “Gonna get another hamster?”

  “Maybe. I still miss Lucky.”

  “Lucky didn’t do very much except eat and sleep. Whenever you held him he pooped in your hand. Is there something better you want? An iguana, maybe?”

  “No!”

  “How about a snake? A boa constrictor?”

  Grace’s eyes widened in horror. Before she could answer, Jessie’s phone trembled. It was a text from Garrett. “Gotta go.”

  “But—”

  Jessie ran into her room and slammed the door behind her. The text read: “Wow. That’s some serious shit. Think it’s NITRON.”

  “No way,” wrote Jessie. “NITRON’s for WCs.”

  NITRON was a software language used exclusively by wireless carriers—WCs—namely phone companies like Sprint, AT&T, and ONE Mobile.

  “You mess with the handset?” wrote Garrett. “Maybe you got ’em pissed.”

  Jessie had never considered that it might have been something she’d done that had erased her father’s message. “Didn’t touch it. Swear.”

  “No worries. We can ask Linus in class.”

  Linus was Linus Jankowski, the TA who taught Jessie’s summer school computer class. The course was titled “Exercises in Extracurricular Programming,” but everyone in class called it the Hack Shack.

  “For sure,” texted Jessie. “He’ll know.” The thought offered some relief. No one knew more about hacking than Linus. He’d almost won Capture the Flag at DEF CON last year.

  “I’m really sorry about yr dad. That sux.”

  “I’m ok.”

  “No really. Feelin’ for you.”

  “Tx.”

  “TTYL.”

  Jessie leaned against the door. She prayed that Garrett was wrong about the code being NITRON. She’d lied about not touching the handset. If the code had come from the mobile carrier, it meant they’d sent it because she’d unlocked the phone and that was against the rules. The code was probably an automated response she didn’t know about that did something crazy to the phone.

  Jessie slid to the floor and covered her head with her arms.

  Maybe it was her fault that her father’s last message had been erased.

  21

  Mary stood in the hall outside Joe’s office. It was four. The house was too quiet. Jessie should be rummaging through the refrigerator, complaining that there was nothing good to eat. Grace should be in the living room, watching an episode of Pretty Little Liars for the umpteenth time. Instead of melancholy and loss, she felt anger. A will to act. The silence acted as a call to arms, as stirring as a bugler’s tattoo. No one, she realized, was going to help her.

  Mary flipped on the light. Joe’s office was a small, wood-paneled room with venetian blinds and a rattan ceiling fan. She took a look around before sitting at his desk. There were magazines and folders and a few paperback books, as well as the latest tomes from Home Depot on a dozen do-it-yourself projects. She saw nothing of interest that might be from his work. No court orders, no case files, no subpoenas, no warrant requests.

  Somewhere there was a clue to what he had been doing. Jessie said that anything you did on a phone left a mark. People left marks, too.

  Mary opened the drawer. It contained a riot of pens and pencils, erasers and rubber bands, unused DVDs still in their wrapping, and plastic packs of Zantac. There was a box of his business cards and another containing cards he’d collected, mostly from fellow agents and colleagues in the law enforcement community. She ran a hand to the back. Her fingers touched another box, this one containing a variety of flash drives. Several were standard stick drives, but the others were more imaginative, designed to conceal the aluminum dock. She found a silver pendant shaped like a heart, a big fat car key, a box of matches, and her instant favorite, a pack of bubble gum.

  Mary carried the flash drives into the kitchen. One after another she plugged them into the desktop. All were unused. She found no stored information anywhere. Another dead end.

  She returned to Joe’s office. A single personal decoration was on the desk: a small jolly brass Buddha, a souvenir of their time in Bangkok. They’d entertained Joe’s Thai colleagues often, hosting barbecues on the terrace of their apartment overlooking the Chao Phraya River. It was Joe’s practice to stage a charm offensive upon his arrival at a new posting. He’d invite the SAC, the agents he’d be working with, and any other noteworthy personalities. It was only now that Mary realized that Joe hadn’t brought home any of his new colleagues from the Austin residency.

  There was something else. It came to her that Joe had given up speaking about his work to her. The FBI didn’t encourage its agents to divulge details of investigations to their spouses, but it wasn’t the CIA either. The Bureau maintained nothing close to a code of absolute silence. There was no “bromerta” among agents. And yet she couldn’t recall the last time he’d spoken to her about anything specific he was working on, other than the occasional trip to San Antonio for bureaucratic necessities.

  She
put down the Buddha and stood to leave. She paused at the entry and looked back. It took her a moment to spot what bothered her. The answer was nothing. The problem, she realized, was that the room was too clean.

  Joe had the neatness habits of an eight-year-old. She’d spend an hour straightening up his office only for him to have it looking as if a hurricane had moved through ten minutes later. Her last effort to bring order from chaos had been five days ago. Since then, she knew, Joe had spent several late nights here, but there were no papers littering the floor, no empty cans of Red Bull in the trash.

  And so? she asked herself. What am I driving at?

  She didn’t know. Something was just…wrong.

  Everything…and everyone…left a trail.

  Mary started at the door and walked the room’s perimeter, tilting the bookcase, peering behind the easy chair, getting on her knees and looking under the desk. She found it lodged between the wall and the shredder. One crumpled-up ball of paper. She freed it gingerly and unfolded it on the desk, smoothing it with her palm.

  Joe’s nearly illegible scrawl covered the page. There were mostly numbers, an address, some names, and a whole lot of doodles. Hardly the treasure trove she’d hoped for.

  A phone number was printed at the top of the page with the name Caruso below it, and then “Exp. Confirmed 7/25.”

  “Exp.” meant what? Expired? July 25 was only a few days ago.

  A few inches lower, printed diagonally across the page, was an address: “17990 Highway 290 East. 3PM.” And then, a few inches further down: “FK. Nutty Brown Cafe. 1PM.”

  Mary shook her head. Only in Texas could there be a Nutty Brown Cafe.

  Below this were doodles of sticks and triangles, a dozen of them at least.

  Mary hurried to the bedroom for her iPad and returned. First she typed the address into the query window. A satellite photo of burned central Texas landscape appeared, with a white line denoting Highway 290 running through it. The X showing the location of the address appeared in the middle of a tract of scrub. She zoomed in and dotted property lines appeared. Closer still, and a name. “Flying V Ranch.”

  She zoomed out until the town of Dripping Springs appeared to the west.

  The Flying V Ranch was where Joe had been killed.

  Next Mary typed “Nutty Brown Cafe” into the query window. The café had its own website and advertised itself as a restaurant and outdoor music venue. Pictures showed a long, low-slung building set back off the highway, a white awning running its length bearing the café’s name. A twenty-foot-tall neon cowboy slinging a lasso welcomed visitors. She plugged in the address and a map appeared showing the café to be located on Highway 290, fifteen miles east of Dripping Springs.

  “FK. Nutty Brown Cafe. 1PM.”

  She assumed that Joe had met someone at the café at one p.m. yesterday. Was that someone “FK”?

  She dredged through the names of Joe’s colleagues, looking for one that started with an F. She didn’t remember any, offhand. She asked ONELook to search “Boys’ names beginning with F.” A long list appeared, but she didn’t remember any Farleys, Franks, or Fredericks.

  Or was “FK” the informant’s initials? Mary didn’t think so. It didn’t make sense to meet an informant in a public place, then drive out to a secluded ranch to meet him again a few hours later.

  She returned to the phone number written at the top of the page. She picked up her phone and dialed. Four rings and then: “Angelo Caruso speaking.”

  “Hello, Mr. Caruso?”

  “State your business.” A crusty voice. Older. Tobacco-cured.

  “I’m Mary Grant.”

  “Do I know you?”

  “My husband was Joe Grant.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Special Agent Joseph Grant of the FBI. He was killed yesterday.”

  A pause as Caruso cleared his throat. “I’m sorry for your loss, ma’am. But I don’t think I can be of help.”

  “I saw your name and number on his pad and—”

  “Then you know that I am a superior court judge for the state of Texas, Travis County. Any business I had with your husband must and shall remain confidential. May I ask why you are calling?”

  “I had some questions about his work. I saw your name on his legal pad. I thought that maybe—”

  “Your husband was a federal agent, Mrs. Grant. As such, his business did not concern his family. I suggest you halt your inquiries. Good day. And again, I am sorry for your loss.”

  Caruso hung up.

  Mary lowered the phone, stunned by the man’s bluntness. He might as well have slapped her across the face. Who was he to say that Joe’s business did not concern her or that she should halt her inquiries? “And F you too, Judge Asshole,” she said aloud.

  It was at that moment that Mary Margaret Olmstead Grant formally assumed the role of her husband’s advocate, protector, and voice in this world.

  I will find out what happened to you, Joe, she promised his spirit, though she had no idea what in the world she might be getting herself into. At that moment she didn’t care. Something was being kept from her. She wanted to know what.

  Mary studied the wrinkled paper, her eyes fixing on the doodles scrawled across its lower half. They were pairings of triangles colored solid blue with little sticks extending from one side. No, not that. She had it wrong. Twin sticks connected at one end like the hands on a wristwatch, each leading to a blue triangle. The triangles were positioned differently. The first at twelve and three. The second at four and eleven. The rest at odd variations thereof. Phone doodles made while Joe carried on a conversation.

  Mary folded the paper in half and stood. The thought came to her that Don Bennett wasn’t the only one hiding something.

  And then she remembered that she still hadn’t examined one thing. Something that had come home from the hospital along with Joe’s shoes, belt, wristwatch, Marine Corps tie clasp, and the beloved Saint Christopher medal he’d worn around his neck since the age of thirteen.

  She ran upstairs.

  22

  Joe’s belongings sat on her dresser where she’d left them the night before. A drawstring bag held his shoes and belt. A smaller zip-lock bag held his wristwatch, tie clasp, and Saint Christopher medal. Mary selected the remaining zip-lock bag, which contained his wallet. It was a standard leather billfold, scuffed and worn. A Christmas present from the girls to their dad three years before, to replace the horrid Velcro one he’d used for years. She removed it and looked inside. As usual, she was amused at how few credit cards Joe carried. There was a government-issued Visa for his work expenses and an American Express card for personal use.

  Joe believed in paying off all his debts each month. It was a nice concept, but quaintly outdated in the era of a laptop for every student and prescription medications that cost $600 a month. Consequently Mary was in charge of family finances and merited an honorary degree in juggling balances between her four MasterCards and her bank custom credit line.

  She slipped her fingers into the pouches beneath the cardholders. One side yielded several school portraits of the girls, an organ donor’s card, and a business card for a roofer who’d visited the house a week ago to check on a leak Joe couldn’t patch. At the bottom of the stack was a small, folded piece of paper, gossamer soft, fraying with age. Once it had been sky blue, but now it was white. She unfolded it carefully, her chest tightening as she realized what she held in her hands.

  A younger woman’s flowery, hopeful script read: “You have made me the happiest woman in the world. I love you. M.”

  Mary looked away quickly. It was the note she’d given Joe on their wedding day, hours before the ceremony. She hadn’t thought about it since, yet here it was, soft and frayed, evidently unfolded and read hundreds of times over the years. The sky-blue paper, her youthful, innocent handwriting, the crazily optimistic words, were an indelible snapshot of one day in her life. It was something to cherish and to treasure. Something permanent. Sh
e looked at the words again, then folded the note and slipped it back into the wallet.

  That was that.

  Mary sighed. She was pleased to have discovered the wedding note but disappointed that Joe hadn’t left her another clue. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected to find…just something to add to the skein of information gleaned from the crumpled paper in Joe’s office.

  As an afterthought, she cracked open the wallet to count Joe’s money. She thumbed through a ten, a five, and four ones. There was a receipt, too. It was from the Nutty Brown Cafe and dated yesterday. She stepped out of the closet to read it in the daylight.

  The time listed was 2:05 p.m. Items included one cheeseburger, one French fries, one Coca-Cola, one egg-white omelet with green peppers. One coffee.

  On the flip side Joe had penned, “SSA FK 7/29.”

  Mary forgot her disappointment. There was FK once again. If she was no closer to guessing his name, at least she knew more about him. “SSA” stood for Supervisory Special Agent. FK, whoever he might be, was not the informant. He worked for the FBI.

  —

  The walk-in closet was as big as Mary’s childhood bedroom. Two cabinets hung from the ceiling, Mary’s to the left. Joe’s to the right. She opened her husband’s. The smell of him wafted over her. Sandalwood and citrus. The scents were sharp and nearly provoked an onslaught of tears. Mary steeled herself and concentrated on the job at hand. Some spare change and a few golf tees were scattered across the top shelf. A box of matches from Chuy’s, a fun Mexican place downtown.

  She started on Joe’s suits. He owned six or seven, usually buying two a year and retiring two. There weren’t too many casual Fridays with the Bureau. She found a napkin from Whataburger in one pocket, a few dimes, a handkerchief, and a bonus card from the local car wash. Her movements grew sloppier in lockstep with her frustration. She stopped returning his slacks to the rack, instead dropping them onto the carpet. The pockets were empty. All of them.