Terminated Read online

  “I met her at the Thinking Cup. She was having trouble with her computer. And she doesn’t do water aerobics. She does yoga. She’s in fantastic shape.”

  “How did she wind up in your bed?”

  “Her computer was full of viruses. I offered to make her dinner and re-image her hard drive.”

  “Is that what they’re calling it now?”

  “Nice. She brought a bottle of Patrón, and one thing led to another.”

  “Like I said. Cougar bait.”

  I stood and started picking up Kevin’s wads of paper and putting them into the basket. My brain sloshed each time I grabbed one of Kevin’s missed shots. The hangover was winning. I dropped back into my chair and reached for the picture of Alice. She stared up at me from the crime photo. Her dead eyes were asymmetrical—one mostly closed, the other mostly open. Her lip was torn from the tape being pulled off. Or maybe she had torn it trying to breathe.

  I closed the folder.

  “Did your source say why I would kill Alice?”

  “Revenge.”

  “Why would I want revenge against Alice Barton? I didn’t know her.”

  Kevin picked up the folder. Fiddled with it in his hands. Opened it. Closed it. Looked at me. He said, “I’m just repeating what I heard.”

  “I understand that. What’s the problem?”

  “I don’t believe it myself,” said Kevin. His face flushed.

  My stomach was starting to twitch. I’d never seen Kevin like this. “Now you’re scaring me. What could be so terrible? Why would I kill Alice?”

  Kevin took a deep breath. “Because she stole Carol from you. The person told me that Alice and Carol were lovers.”

  That was the final drop of poison in my already roiling tequila stomach. I stood up, rushed to Kevin’s trashcan, and puked all over his Boston Celtics backboard.

  three

  I sat alone in Kevin’s office as he dealt with his despoiled wastepaper basket. My stomach felt better, but I couldn’t get my bearings. I was confused. Carol had been a lesbian?

  “You didn’t see that one coming, did you, baby?”

  I moaned. Carol was sitting at Kevin’s desk, wearing her funeral dress.

  “Jesus, Carol, not now.”

  “It seems like as good a time as any.”

  Carol’s legs slid beneath her dress as she crossed them. Whenever she did that, I thought about how those legs had felt under my hand, how my fingers had caressed the strong muscles. She looked as good as the day she died. Her black hair cascaded over her shoulders, and the plum dress draped across her breasts. They were part of a glorious body that I hadn’t touched in the last six months of our marriage.

  Carol had first appeared to me the week after her funeral. I had decided to sell the house and was looking at the place in the South End. I was checking out the bedroom when she arrived.

  “Hello, baby,” she said.

  I jumped across the empty room.

  “What the hell?” I stammered.

  “So you’re selling our place? How come?” Carol walked over to the window and looked out at the building next door. “This is awfully crowded. Don’t you like our house?”

  “You mean your house,” I said.

  “Oh, God, not this again.”

  “You wanted that house. I never liked it. There was too much grass and it was too big.”

  “It was big so we could have a family,” she said. “I didn’t want to raise kids in the city.”

  “Yeah, well, you weren’t going to get a family by not sleeping with me.”

  The Realtor had come back into the room, and Carol vanished. The Realtor asked, “So what do you think?”

  “I’ll take it.”

  So I moved to a new place, but Carol kept showing up.

  Part of me wanted her to leave me alone. Let me move on. But another part was happy to have her back. It was an uneasy relationship, just like when she had been alive. I didn’t know what would get her out of my life, but I knew it had to happen.

  “Is it true what Kevin said? Were you having sex with Alice?” I asked.

  Carol smiled. “What do you think?”

  “I think that if you were having sex with Alice, you could at least have offered me a three-way.”

  “Don’t be gross.”

  “I’m just saying it would have been a good way to break the news.”

  “If I were having sex with Alice, it would have been your fault. You were enough to put any woman off the whole idea of a penis.”

  “I don’t know about that. Maggie seemed satisfied.”

  “Don’t you trust that woman.”

  Kevin opened the office door. I glanced at him, and when I looked back at Carol, she was gone. I really do need to get to a shrink.

  Kevin said, “Were you talking to someone?”

  I said, “Do you see someone?”

  “No.”

  “Well, then, there you go. Where’s your wastepaper basket?”

  “I threw it away. You got orange juice pulp in the wire mesh.”

  “Sorry about that.”

  Another agent followed Kevin, filling the small office with his bulk.

  Kevin said, “Tucker, this is Agent Miller.”

  Agent Miller shook my hand and said, “Kevin’s told me a lot about you. Call me Bobby.”

  If you took a bowling ball, taught it to talk, and bought it a custom bowling-ball suit, you’d wind up with Agent Bobby Miller. His bald head reflected the buzzing overhead lights, and his massive chest filled my field of vision.

  Bobby said, “Kevin wants me to show you something.” He handed me a folder with his meaty hand. “Check these out.”

  Kevin said, “Unless you’re gonna puke again. I’m out of wastepaper baskets.”

  I ignored Kevin and spread the new folder out on his desk. The folder was full of pictures like the ones of Alice, but with different women. In the top picture, a small blonde with big breasts was on a hotel bed, tied with duct tape and suffocated.

  I said, “You’ve got more of these?”

  Bobby said, “Yup.”

  I pointed to the top picture. “I don’t know her.”

  “You wouldn’t. Her name was Courtney Acres. She was a prostitute in San Francisco.”

  Under Courtney was another picture. Another blonde, big boobs, duct tape.

  Bobby said, “Maria Scarborough. Prostitute in Orlando.”

  Next picture, a different blonde. Next one, another. Bobby had memorized the name and city for each one. I didn’t know the women, but I knew the cities: Dallas, San Antonio, Reno. I had been to all of them. They had all hosted the biggest software conference in the security industry: SecureCon.

  I asked, “Where is SecureCon this year?”

  Bobby turned to Kevin and said, “You were right. He is smart.”

  Kevin said, “Wicked smaht.”

  Bobby said, “It’s in Boston. All these women were killed by the same guy. We call him the Duct Tape Killer. Good old DTK.”

  “And you figure that he killed Alice Barton?”

  “I’d bet you a dinner at Legal’s.”

  “What’s this got to do with me?”

  Bobby said, “Nothing. You see that, Kevin? Tucker agrees with me.”

  Kevin said, “He doesn’t agree with you. He doesn’t have all the facts yet.”

  “What facts?” I asked.

  Kevin ticked numbers off his fingers. He liked to do that, talk in outline form.

  “Fact 1. DTK kills blond prostitutes on Thursday afternoons. This time he killed a brunette engineer on a Saturday night. It breaks the pattern.”

  Bobby said, “Maybe he just got bored.”

  “Fact 2. Someone told us that Tucker had killed Alice.”

  Bobby said, “But
you said that was bullshit. You said that guy hated Tucker.”

  I said, “What guy?”

  Bobby and Kevin said together, “Can’t tell you.”

  “This is bullshit.”

  Bobby said, “Exactly.”

  “Fact 3,” continued Kevin, “The brunette engineer who DTK killed on a Saturday worked with Tucker’s wife, Carol.”

  Bobby said, “That doesn’t count. There was no duct tape with his wife, her throat was fucking cut from ear to—”

  Kevin and Bobby disappeared, telescoping away into background noise. I was standing in my kitchen again. Carol’s corpse lay in the center of a giant bloody graph, the blood having run down the grooves of the kitchen tiles. I couldn’t reach her without stepping …

  A strong hand gripped my shoulder.

  “Tucker, come on back, buddy.” It was Kevin.

  I said, “I’m OK.” But my breath was still coming in shallow gasps.

  Bobby picked up the folder and said, “Now you got me saying insensitive shit in front of your friend. I’m done with this. Listen, Mr. Cybercrime, stick to spam and porn, OK? This isn’t your strong suit.” Bobby shook my hand, “Good to meet you, Tucker.” Then he left, slamming the door behind him.

  I was still shaky. I stood. “I gotta go, Kevin. I need to get out of here.”

  Kevin said, “Just stick with me. Just a little longer. You need to know one more thing.”

  I remained standing. My breath had returned to normal, but the adrenaline in my system had turned to bile. “What could I possibly need to know?”

  “Someone’s going to sell Rosetta.”

  “Shit yeah, Kevin. MantaSoft is going to sell it. That’s why they paid me to write it.”

  “I’m talking about the source code. Somebody is going to sell your source code.”

  Source code is the equivalent of a software manuscript. Once you have the source code, you can create your own versions of the product. You can pirate it, modify it, or hide viruses in it. You have complete control.

  I said, “That sucks, Kevin, it really does. But MantaSoft is a security company. They won’t lose the source code. On top of it, they fired me. Fuck ’em.”

  “I’m telling you it’s all related. Carol, Alice, you getting fired. It’s all related.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know.”

  And then it struck me.

  I said, “You want me to do your job.”

  Kevin was silent.

  I continued, “This is just like in school. You still can’t debug.”

  The world of top software engineers is broken into two camps: designers and debuggers. Designers, like Kevin, are organized architects who can build cathedrals out of information. You ask them for a program that can do email, and they’ll give you one that can do email, but that can easily be expanded to do text messaging, Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. They have ordered, logical minds that resonate when they see an elegant solution. But those ordered, logical minds have a weakness: debugging.

  Designers, like Kevin, make poor debuggers. They’re like Han Solo in The Empire Strikes Back, futilely punching the disabled hyperdrive and shouting, “It isn’t my fault!” They’ll look at a bug a hundred times and tell themselves, “It shouldn’t be doing that.” On the other hand, I’ll look at the same bug once and say, “You subtracted when you should have added.” My mind branches into all the alternate realities of the code and jumps to the thing that breaks the software. I’d saved Kevin’s ass before when his works of art just didn’t work.

  Now Kevin was trying to get me to do that for him with Alice’s murder. He couldn’t put the pieces together, and he wanted me to help.

  I said, “This has nothing to do with Carol, does it?”

  Kevin said, “Of course it does.”

  “You just wanted me to get all worked up so I could figure it out for you.”

  Kevin studied his shoes. “I need your help.”

  He looked pathetic. I wasn’t happy to hear myself say, “What can I do?”

  “So you’ll help?”

  “It depends,” I said. “What do you need?”

  “Like I said, it’s damn strange that you were fired the same day that Carol was killed. And it’s damn strange that the DTK killed someone on your project on a Saturday night. I think that you getting fired is a key here. I want you to find out why you were fired.”

  “And how do I do that?”

  “You ask Nate Russo. He still works at MantaSoft.”

  That wasn’t going to happen.

  “I’m sorry, dude, but I’m done here. I’m not talking to Nate. I hate Nate. I’m going home.” I headed for the door. At the door I stopped and said, “The guy was like a—forget it.”

  Kevin called after me, as I strode down the hall and out of his office, but I ignored him. I wasn’t going to talk to that backstabbing son of a bitch Nate Russo.

  four

  I stormed up Tremont Street with Government Center on my left and Kevin’s office building on my right. My cell phone rang. I looked at the caller ID: Kevin. I sent the call to voicemail. I was going home to enjoy my life as a bachelor.

  First, I was going to get food. Later, I would go for a run. I liked to run a few miles along the Charles. It would serve the double duty of keeping me in shape and venting my spleen. That night, I would watch the Red Sox on my HDTV, with a beer in one hand and a slice of pizza in the other.

  At Park Street Station, I considered how to get home. I could go underground and take the T, or walk through the Boston Common and Public Garden. But there was no good food on the T, while I could grab a snack if I stayed above ground. I decided to walk home.

  The Common was full of people. I strolled through the park and circled the Frog Pond, a big, manmade puddle that cools the city kids in the summer and gives them a place to ice skate in the winter. Since it was a hot summer day, the pond acted as an oasis for young mothers who watched their charges run into the pond and waddle out with expanded diapers.

  I walked past the pond and saw a trim redhead crouched in the path, hand-feeding a squirrel. I noted the redhead’s legs as they stretched the material of her shorts. I hadn’t noticed a woman in months, but my night with Maggie seemed to have changed that. I wondered if this was what healing felt like.

  My BlackBerry chirped and I looked at the message. Speak of the Devil. Kevin’s text message said, “Call me!” He would have to wait.

  The redhead was having trouble getting the squirrel to eat. The animal kept approaching her and veering away, only to come back to look longingly at the peanut in the redhead’s hand. She was holding the peanut between thumb and index finger and saying, “Here you go …”

  I put words into the squirrel’s mouth in a falsetto voice, “Oh God, I want that peanut so bad. But she’s big and scary!”

  The girl turned and said, “Tell me about it. He’s a skittish little thing.”

  I said, “I think he’s worried about the way you’re holding the nut. Try resting it in your palm.”

  She turned her hand palm up and rested the peanut in the center of it. The squirrel approached her, stood on its hind legs, and reached over her fingers to take the morsel. Then it retreated a few feet, sat on its haunches, and ate.

  The redhead stood up. She was tall and fit, with small breasts and green eyes that complemented her green sports bra. She said, “You know a lot about squirrels.”

  “I watch a ton of Animal Planet, but I learned about squirrels while growing up on the streets.”

  “The streets?”

  “Back in the ’hood: Wellesley.”

  “I see.” She smiled and put out her hand. “I’m Jeanette.”

  I reached out to shake, but was distracted by Carol. She had appeared behind Jeanette. Carol said, “Baby, you have the attention span of a pigeon.”


  I followed through with the handshake. “Hi, Jeanette. I’m Tucker.”

  Jeanette pushed a strand of red hair behind her ear and smiled.

  At this point, I imagined myself asking Jeanette if she’d like to get coffee over at the Thinking Cup. But Carol wouldn’t go away, and I felt inhibited.

  The squirrel was bounding back toward us like he was collecting rent. I said, “It looks like your buddy wants another peanut.”

  Jeanette fished out a peanut as I turned and walked away. Carol fell into stride next to me. I pulled my Bluetooth headset out and snaked it into my ear. If you walk down the street talking to your invisible dead wife, people think you’re crazy. However, if you put a Bluetooth headset in your ear, people think you’re industrious, even if you are crazy.

  I said, “You know, most widowers are allowed to move on with their lives.”

  Carol said, “You call this moving on?”

  “It’s a start.”

  “Don’t you even care who killed me?”

  “Of course I care. Why don’t you tell me?”

  “Because it doesn’t work that way.”

  I didn’t respond, and we walked together toward the Public Garden. We’d had this conversation before, and it didn’t get any better with time.

  Carol broke the silence. “Why were you wasting time with Red back there?”

  “I wasn’t wasting time.”

  “Oh please.”

  “What?”

  “Kevin gave you a simple task. You should be calling Nate to find out why he fired you.”

  “I don’t want to talk to Nate,” I said. Then, “Why do you suppose he fired me?”

  Carol’s voice took on an edge. “I’m sure I don’t know. I was being murdered. Do you ever think of anyone but yourself ?”

  “Oh for God’s sake, not this again.”

  Carol raised her hands. “Look, I don’t want to fight. What did Nate say when he let you go?”

  “He said the company was making a change.”

  “So why didn’t you ask him for more specifics?”

  “What’s the point? He was just going to lapse into that legal bullshit they use to keep you from suing them.”