19

She gave Melanie a couple of tasks. The first was to connect her with the Westmuir Record. A panicked Rebecca Portman came on the line. “Mr. Sunderland is on the warpath,” she said. “He just called from Atlanta and I had to tell him about our Thursday edition. I, um, have a message he made me write down. He told me to read it to you.”

“I didn’t call you, Miss Portman, to pick up messages from your boss.”

“I’m sorry, but, just the way he sounded…”

“I have a couple of needs you can take care of for me. Do I still have your attention?” Portman murmured that she did. “The first thing is, I’ve decided you can run Colin Eldwin’s story again. In fact, I want you to run both chapters four and five in Monday’s edition.”

“Both?”

“Yes. Is that going to get you in trouble again?”

“I’m afraid it will. Maybe I should read you Mr. Sunderland’s message, Ma’am? He asked me to read it to you.”

“Does it have the word feckless in it?”

“Um…” She was scanning the note. “Not exactly.”

“Is your boyfriend in today?”

“Who?”

“Beaker, Miss Portman, your nervous little friend in IT. I want him in my station house in fifteen minutes. Tell him to put all the emails Colin Eldwin has sent you – all of them – on a CD and have them bring it over to me. I have some questions for him.”

She thought she could hear Portman’s heart pounding over the phone. “He’s uh, not in today, Detective. Friday is usually pretty quiet.”

Hazel wanted to reach through the phone and wring the little dope’s neck. “Do you know where he lives?”

“Um -”

“Tell him I won’t keep him long. And I’m ‘Detective Inspector’ to you.”

“Sorry, Ma’am.” Hazel closed her eyes and held her tongue. “He really wants me to read this note to you.”

Cartwright appeared in the doorway. Hazel covered the mouthpiece. “What?”

“Mr. Pedersen says he’s having brunch with his wife. Is it urgent?”

“Tell him to come in when he’s done. And if he’s at Ladyman’s have him bring me a peameal bacon sandwich.”

She put the phone back to her ear. Portman was evidently reciting Sunderland ’s message. “‘… and don’t think I won’t.’ I’m sorry for the strong language, Ma’am. But he insisted.”

“My ears are burning. Tell him you could hear me swallowing nervously. Hey, do you want to know what we called your boss in high school?”

“No.”

“We called him ‘Pokey’ because he was always in other people’s business. Probably the boys called him that too because he had a small penis. He might still answer to it.” There was silence on the other end. “Send me your little friend, Miss Portman. Burn him his CD if you know how, and get him over here. He has thirteen minutes now.”

Hubert Mackie – that was the kid’s name – showed up fourteen minutes later, out of breath and looking panicked. Cartwright offered him a cup of coffee, but he told her coffee made him sweat and she gave him a glass of water instead. He was wearing a black cloth jacket with a broken zipper and his wispy hair kept falling over his forehead. “I guess we’re going to need a computer,” he said, and Hazel led him out to Wingate’s work station. The kid walked through the pen with his head down, muttering “hello” left and right and pushing his hair away from his eyes.

Hazel pulled the chair out for him, and Mackie sat, apologizing as he did, and Hazel asked him if he wanted a sedative.

“Oh no, Ma’am, that’d just make me sleepy.”

“Then let’s get to work.”

“What is it you were wanting to know, Ma’am?”

“That story the paper is running – did the chapters all come from the same email address?”

He’d popped the CD into Wingate’s drive and was waiting for it to show up on his desktop. “I had Rebecca turn the emails you wanted to see into rtfs to make things easier.”

“Meaning?”

“Just text files, Ma’am. They’ll open in any word processor.”

His fingers flew over the keyboard. He used the first two fingers of each hand to type and he seemed to be faster than Cartwright with all ten. The windows started opening on the screen, blooming and expanding until there were more than a dozen. “Thirteen in total, Ma’am.”

“Where are they coming from?”

“There’s his email address right there,” the kid said, putting his finger against the screen. The address read [email protected].

“Is it always the same? Like, is it coming from the same email address every time?”

“Yeah,” said Mackie.

“So that means it’s him writing to you guys.”

“Well, it’s his email address.”

“Is that a ‘yes’?” she said, getting impatient.

“It’s just that, you know, when you write an email, there’s an IP address attached to the ISP both sending and receiving the email -”

“English, Beaker!”

“I’m trying!” He hunched over the keyboard for a second, making an effort to become invisible. He spoke faster now. “IP: Internet Protocol. Every machine, you know, a computer or a device of any kind, that’s connected to a network – like the internet – has an IP address. It’s a unique identifier, it tells you where the device is located. Most of the time. ISP: Internet Service Provider. Simply said, your email originates at one IP address, that of your ISP, and arrives at another, the IP of your recipient’s ISP.”

“Fine. Where were these emails sent from?”

The kid started cycling through the text files. He ran his finger down a long string of gobbledegook that preceded the first bunch of the email messages. “Well, these all both originate and terminate at a Mayfair hub.” He quickly put his hands in the air to keep Hazel from yelling at him again. “A hub is the physical location where the ISP has its computers, and where all information is received, processed, and/or sent along. Eldwin’s provider is Ontcom, which has a hub in Mayfair, and ours is Caneast, which does too. So he sent these from his computer to the Ontcom servers, they sent them along to the Caneast servers, and we uploaded them to our hard drives from the Caneast servers.”

“So, broken telephone.”

“Sort of,” he said. “Except in the internet version, you can trace every step of the journey.”

“What about the rest of the emails? I want to know where chapters three, four, and five came from.”

He brought those up. She could see for herself that they still came from [email protected]. “These were sent from the internet, but still from his account.”

“Meaning.”

His shoulders slumped a little. “How come you don’t know this stuff? Ma’am.”

“You want me to slap your cranium?”

“You can send email from your desktop, you know, at home, off a program, or you can send it from the internet itself, from your ISP’s webmail program – it’s called a ‘shell’ and they all have one – which means you’re logging on to your account from some homepage – and this could be anywhere in the world – and you can send and receive mail from there.”

“Does the IP address change?”

“Yes,” he said. “Different servers.” He quickly added: “Servers are machines connected to the internet.”

“Can you find the location of these servers?”

“Yes,” he said, and he opened the browser on Wingate’s computer. He was copying and pasting strings of numbers onto a webpage. He clicked something and waited. Then he said, “Or no.”

“What do you mean no?”

“I mean these later chapters were sent from Colin Eldwin’s email address through the shell, but he was anonymized.”

“For Christ’s sake!”

Mackie turned in the chair, panicked anew. “Please, Ma’am, don’t slap my cranium. There’s all kinds of ways to be anonymous on the internet these days. You can send email, surf, chat, all anonymously. You can be untraceable. Anyone can do it.”

“So we can’t know it’s Eldwin physically sending the emails?”