Chapter Twelve

MICHELLE STROM lived in an Arlington apartment, like half of the other DDC employees. The apartment was in a complex fifteen minutes from our hotel. From the street, it was a tidy, well-kept collection of six-story yellow-brick buildings, with a swimming pool deck and parking garage. There were a bunch of trendy chain stores-Crate & Barrel, Pottery Barn, Williams-Sonoma, Barnes & Noble-as part of the same complex of buildings, and a lot of pedestrian traffic around it all.

“Well-off singles, mostly,” LuEllen said. “Won’t be any trouble getting in the door. Hope the corridor outside Strom’s place isn’t too busy.”

We began by figuring out which part of the building she was in, and then calling her. No answer.

Then I sat in the car, on the street, where I could see one of the entry doors. LuEllen, carrying a cloth tote with the laptop and probe inside, sat on a retaining wall a few yards down from the entrance, as though waiting for a car to pick her up. When I saw a man inside, walking toward the door, I gave her a beep with the car horn. She bounced to her feet, hurried up the steps with her key ring in her hand. By that time, the guy was coming through the door, and she caught it, smiled at him, and went through.

I sat in the car, not a care in the world, for five minutes. Then she reappeared, looking positively perky-she loved doing this. I don’t know how in the hell she thought she’d be able to quit. She walked to the car, hopped in, said, “Routine Schlage,” and we were out of there.

The software gave us the blank number and we stole three blanks from a suburban Home Depot. We also got a tiny triangular file, which we paid for. LuEllen took three hours to make three keys, looking at the software designs and working very carefully. When she was done, we drove back to the apartment and tried them on the outer door. All three worked, but outside locks are notoriously loose. We probably wouldn’t have that kind of luck with Strom’s lock.

“Single, early thirties, Saturday night. What are the chances?” LuEllen asked.

“I don’t know. We can call.”

“Better off if we could watch her, isolate her, then you go in while I make sure she’s out of the way.”

“In a perfect world,” I said. “But we’re short on time.”

She thought about it for a minute. “We call her, and if she’s in, we go away. Maybe until Monday. If there’s no answer, you go in. I do my waiting-impatiently act in the downstairs hallway, and if she comes in, I call you on your cell, and you get out.”

“If she still looks like her ID photos. And that assumes she’s not somewhere else in the building, and that she won’t come in the end doors instead of the main door.”

“It assumes she’ll take an elevator instead of walking up the steps,” LuEllen said. “Nothing we can do about it if she’s at the next-door neighbor’s. She’ll walk in on your ass and you’ll have to chop her head off and make it look like Carp did it.”

“Got it. I’ll draw the sign of the Carp on the walls.”

“In her blood.”

“Naturally.”

We tended toward heartiness when we suspected we were about to do something stupid, of which there had been a couple of instances in the past.

We went back to the apartment complex, walked arm in arm past all the commercial stuff, window-shopping, looking up at where LuEllen thought Strom’s apartment was. The window was dark. We called from the Barnes & Noble. No answer. Called her cell phone, and she picked it up on the third ring. “ Sharon?” I asked.

“I’m afraid you’ve got the wrong number,” she said. Strom was a natural soprano, and sounded like a nice woman-a polite one, anyway. I could hear other voices in the background, and said, “I’m sorry, is this…?” I gave a number close to hers.

“No, you’re very close, but you’ve got two of the numbers turned around. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said. “I hope I didn’t disturb you.” Another voice, and a clank-dishes-and we both hung up.

I looked at LuEllen. “She’s in a restaurant.”

“Could be five minutes from here,” LuEllen said. “Probably is.”

“No better time,” I said. “Let’s go.”

I HAD the keys in my pocket, my laptop under my arm. We went through the front door, and up. LuEllen pointed me at Strom’s and I tried the first key. The door popped open. “I’m a genius,” LuEllen said. “I’ll be downstairs.”

I stepped inside the apartment and called, “Hello?”

No response. I pushed the door shut with my foot, tripped a light switch, and called, a bit louder, “Hello? Anybody home?”

No answer. I moved quickly, one fast lap of what turned out to be a two-bedroom apartment, looking for the lights on a burglar alarm key pad. No pad. The place smelled of plants and the acrid odor of plant food. I found, in the kitchen, six African violets, all freshly watered, sitting on a draining board across the sink.

Then I headed into the second bedroom, which had a cozy office setup, including a desktop Dell and a good office chair. A black-leather satchel, the kind prosperous women executives use as briefcases, sat next to the chair. I brought the machine up, then checked the satchel. Inside was the usual collection of office junk-pens, pencils, Kleenex, an airlines sleep mask, a telephone connection cord for a laptop but no laptop, a spare pair of regular glasses and a pair of prescription sunglasses, a hundred or so business cards, and, tucked away in a pen slot, a gray USB memory key. Terrific.

I stuck the key into my laptop’s USB slot, dumped a half megabyte of something into my hard drive, and put the key back into the satchel. No time to see what it was. I’d been inside the apartment for three or four minutes and was already feeling the pressure.

I sat at her machine, hooked it into my laptop, and started dumping her document files to the laptop’s hard drive. Most of the files had unpromising names like Budget and Letters, and I didn’t have a lot of confidence that I was breaking out her computer passwords. While I waited for the files to clear, I checked her desk drawers, the bottom of the keyboard, the underside of the desk, and minutely examined the satchel for any anomalous number-letter combinations that might be passwords. I found nothing.

Probably was around somewhere, I thought. High-security places tell their employees to come up with passwords of random numbers, letters, and symbols, so that they can’t be cracked by hackers doing research. The problem is, nobody can remember the high-security numbers, so they get written down.

A better policy would be to tell the password holder to think of a person or place that’s significant to him, subtract a letter or two, and add a significant number or two. Say, your father’s middle name backwards, with your mother’s birthday attached. That way, you’d have a password that you could work out, would never come up in a hacker’s dictionary, and wouldn’t be written down so it couldn’t be stolen. As it is, most high-security passwords look like the registration code on the back of a Windows software box.

And I couldn’t find one. I found an address book, flipped through it, looked in a checkbook, scanned a small Rolodex, flipped through the pages of a wall calendar featuring English kitchen gardens. Still nothing. The document files cleared, and I went into her computer, looking for other files, finding not much.

The cell phone rang. A single ring-LuEllen’s signal that I’d been inside for ten minutes. Now we were pushing it. Too many things happen when you stay inside too long. People notice lights, decide to stop by for a visit. People come home.

Getting nowhere. Shut down the computer. Gave up.

I CALLED LuEllen on the way out, and when I got downstairs, she was already walking across the parking lot to the car. I got in, and she said, “What?”