J. Daniel Sawyer - Clarke Lantham 01 by And Then She Was Gone Read Free Book Online Page A

the idea, a computer followed with instructions in a voice as graceful as a fart in a rose garden. “Please leave your message after the beep. When you have finished recording, you may hang up, or press 1 for more options,” the computer unhelpfully informed me.
    I hung up.
    So he was on AT&T—I’d heard their computer’s trademark line more often than my own name. I have it on good authority that it’s one of the greatest hits Satan uses for elevator music in hell .
    Gravity would have a credit history with Ma Bell, and they reported to TRW, so it shouldn’t be too hard to find out a bit about him —starting with his real name. That kind of data dig should take me the rest of the evening.
    The office was half an hour away, whichever way I drove. Sunset was maybe twenty minutes off, which gave me just enough time to hit the top of 24 west of the hills. There’s this stretch of road, maybe a half-mile long, with the best view in the Bay Area. During midsummer, the sun sets over Mount Tam in the northwest, so when you come out of the Caldecott Tunnel you see Oakland, the Bay Bridge, and the City laid out in front of you like signs on the road, all bathed red and purple in gorgeous sidelight.
    I hit the timing just perfect—one small triumph at the end of a day’s worth of frustrations. The sky was clear, and the City looked close enough to tap on the nose. The Golden Gate bridge glowed like it had decided, just for a few minutes, to catch on fire and guide the evening ships into port.
    The forty seconds at the top of the grade on 24 was worth all the mindless driving and running around the day had put me through.
    I pulled into the parking lot of the Italianate Victorian where I kept my office. The front door was still open—Angie, my downstairs neighbor, was working late, judging by the light under her door.
    Slipping up the stairs without her hearing me was its own artform—if she hijacked me I’d get a detailed report of everyone’s comings and goings for the last three days.
    A pretty good graphic designer, she fancied herself a budding Holmes, and thought my work must be unbearably sexy. Not me, mind you—just the work. She couldn’t understand why I wasn’t perpetually decked out like James Bond and seducing all my clients.
    Makes me wish I was still a cop. Nobody thought police work was sexy. In some ways it’s easier to get spit on by protesters than it is to have the same people sucking up to you because they just know you’ve got the inside dope on every local secret and scandal.
    Once safely on the second floor I snuck my keys out with barely a tinkle, unlatched the door to my three-and-a-half room suite, and tiptoed inside.
    In the main office, the bit of a bay view out the window behind my desk glowed with the last of the orange fading to deep violet. I tossed my jacket onto the couch, made myself some coffee in the kitchenette, and sat down in my rickety leather office chair.
    Gravity’s website wasn’t helpful. A big splashy page, some shots of the guy spinning records at local clubs, a gallery of him at protests and rallies—establishing his street cred for his intended audience, maybe—accompanied by a few surprisingly articulate political screeds on subjects I had very little interest in.
    Not to come off as anti-intellectual or misanthropic, but you do what I do and you don’t have a lot of time for larger issues. They’re not important to the job, and the things that are take a hell of a lot of work to keep current on.
    Credit and phone records, for example. Every year the regulations change, and we’ve gotta hop from one foot to another to keep track. My subscriber database access costs me more money than I care to count—I don’t just keep my accounting sheets encrypted to protect myself against other snoops, I do it as a mental health measure. Depression is a killer.
    In this case, it didn’t do me a damn bit of good. The cell phone account was registered to Kinksters Inc., a