“Even with that, you can’t hide the computer’s MAC address. Every device has MAC address attached to network card. Is like fingerprint.”

  “But this one doesn’t?”

  “I think maybe they spoof address, make it invisible.”

  “I thought you said it wasn’t a spoofing email?”

  “Does not matter. We can break those systems, no matter which method used,” he said quite confidently. “No matter if MAC address spoofed. That is what we do! But this email was not sent on one of those platforms. It could not be. It has none of protocols required to send message over broadband, including an IP, or Internet Protocol, address.”

  “So I guess it has to have all that stuff?”

  “Of course, Travis, get with fuckin’ program.” Valentine sighed and sat back on the couch. “When you send email, sender and recipient IP addresses are in packet. Then it is directed to gateway or router. Then on to higher-level network. It does this over and over, until it gets to destination email address.”

  “So then how did the email manage to show up in my inbox?” asked Devine, before answering his own question: “Someone had to have my email address.”

  “Yes, this is true. But that is easy to get. The big thing, Travis, is we do not know who send it or how they manage to send it. I mean, we can’t even trace message to any portal on internet.”

  “This is getting a little beyond my depth,” conceded Devine.

  “There are basically five IP classes. Classes A, B, and C are used for public and private use. Class D for things like video streaming, TV networks, and such.”

  “That’s only four classes. What’s the fifth?” asked Devine.

  “Class E, not reserved for public. Mainly used for research. Is experimental IP class. If I had to guess, I say your email sent somehow using Class E, but I can’t figure out how.”

  “It came in at nine twenty-two a.m. It said that a custodian found Sara’s body at around eight thirty that morning and the police were called. So less than an hour later someone knew she was dead and had details about how she died and where the crime scene was and what she looked like hanging there. And then they sent out a message only to me, as far as I know, that you guys can’t trace. That’s pretty damn fast.”

  “You have to find out about this, dude. People I work for are freaking out over this. I mean seriously freaking out.”

  “How can I find out about it if you guys can’t? I’m not a world-class hacker.”

  “I mean talk to people. Talk to this dude that found body.”

  “Is not being able to trace an email really that catastrophic?”

  “For me, it is end of world. It means what I do . . . goes poof. And it means that bad people on internet, they get away with anything, because they are invisible. Get with program.”

  When he said it like that, Devine began to understand the importance of the situation.

  “And you knew this girl, Travis. You told me you dated her. Don’t you want to find who killed her?”

  “Of course I do. But if I’m going to be snooping around there, I need your help.” Devine was thinking about the security database at Cowl and Comely. He told Valentine what he wanted done.

  “Give me your log-in and password,” the Russian said.

  Devine hesitated. “I’m not sure I should do that, Will.”

  Valentine smiled. “I can find out in about one minute, dude. But if you don’t want my help?”

  “You screw me, I’ll kick your ass,” said Devine.

  “Dude,” Valentine said with a smile.

  Devine emailed it to him and the Russian’s fingers began flying over the keyboard.

  “How long do you think it will take?” asked Devine.

  “Is done.”

  “What!”

  “Your employer has bullshit encryption. I email you what you need to get into database.” Valentine did so and said, “And you Americans wonder why you get hacked all the time. Is bullshit.”

  As Devine walked off he knew one thing. There was really only one way the sender of the “invisible” email could have known those details at that point in time.

  I think whoever sent me the email also killed Sara.

  CHAPTER

  26

  6:20.

  The train slid free from the station and Devine dutifully looked out the window. Sunday had hardly been a day of rest. He felt like he’d already worked a full week at Cowl, not simply starting another one.

  The nosy journalist, Rachel Potter, Waiting for Godot, the meeting with Emerson Campbell, Ewes’s parents, particularly the suspicious mother, whatever the police had found there, the missing diary that might have him in it, and, finally, Valentine and the apparently earth-shattering invisible email revelation. It exhausted him just thinking about all of it.

  The train stopped and picked up passengers, then chugged up to the knoll and stopped. It was so regular it was almost funny. Almost.

  And there she was through the gap between the bottoms of the tree canopies and the top of the wall. She was already sitting by the pool. Her terry cloth robe was off, and her string bikini was once again shiny emerald. The color looked good on her.

  “She’s an exhibitionist, you know. Least that’s what I figure. Why else would she be out here this early in pretty much her birthday suit for all of us to see? She can’t miss spotting a stopped train, can she?”

  Devine turned to the man sitting next to him. He was around fifty and dressed in a stylishly cut dark blue suit, slim tie, and white shirt with matching pocket square. His hair was a wavy brown heavily laced with gray, his brow was lined, and saggy pouches undergirded his eyes. Devine thought he might be staring into a futuristic mirror and seeing himself in less than two decades. The man looked woeful and lustful in a hollowed-out, pathetic way, Devine thought. He eyed the man’s wedding band.

  “What do you know about her?” asked Devine.

  “Nothing other than she’s got one of the hottest bodies I’ve ever seen. And she’s probably a nymphomaniac. Women who are exhibitionists are usually nymphos, too.”

  “Is that so?” asked Devine.

  The man sniffed, eyed the woman, and in a wishful tone said, “Well, on the streaming shows they almost always are. And the woman before her was just as hot.”

  Devine started. “The woman before her?”

  “Yeah. I’ve been riding this train for a long time. I remember them building that house. That’s Brad Cowl’s place, in case you didn’t know. Anyway, that chick would come out in a bikini, too, from time to time. She was a stunner, just like that one. Cowl obviously likes them young, beautiful, and nearly naked.”

  “What happened to the other woman?”

  “I don’t know. One day she was just gone.”

  “When was this?”

  “Oh, a little over a year ago, I think. It was during the summer.”

  “What did she look like?”

  “Pretty much the same as this one, only brunette.”

  Devine turned to look back at the woman. She just sat there, her legs crossed one over the other. She didn’t appear to even realize a body of water was there. She lifted her gaze and it appeared for an unsettling moment that she was staring right at him. But that wasn’t possible. Not with the distance and the angle and the glass in between.

  Right?

  She rose, picked up her robe, and walked into the house. He and every guy on the starboard side, and probably a bunch on the port side, watched her every step of the way, their focus so intense it was like the last minute of their lives.

  Maybe she does get off on that stuff, thought Devine. She knew the train was there, with people on it, watching her. He wondered how Brad Cowl felt about it. But then again, he was having sex with his employees on desktops.

  The train picked up speed and headed on.

  Later, he walked out of the subway station in the Financial District and into the heat of the morning. It was early enough for the city to still be waking up. Delivery trucks were parked illegally, and cabs, cars, and Ubers were hammering their horns, besmirching the only quiet time of the day the city had. Birds pecked at pavement trash, street sweepers were sweeping, yawning suits and nonsuits were shuffling to their jobs looking like they were heading to their graves.

  Food carts serving breakfast items were opening for business. Later, for lunch, there would be offerings of grilled halal, cheong fun, rice noodles, and Indian king biryani, and traditional fare like pretzels, hot dogs, falafel, Tex-Mex, steak, BBQ, and sushi. If you couldn’t find a food here it was because it didn’t exist.

  Construction crews were muscling pipe and wheelbarrows and gripping shovels and lunch pails and smoking their Camels and drinking their non-Starbucks morning eye-openers.

  The sky was clear, the heat already percolating over the fingertips of the skyscrapers. At lunchtime the funneled warmth between buildings, coupled with billions of tons and thousands of acres of reflective concrete and glass, respectively, would spike the temperature on the ground to near volcanic proportions, or so it would seem to the clothed inhabitants just trying to earn a buck or enjoy their holiday.

  And while he thought about all of this, Devine also mulled over his very serious problems: He had paid a visit to, and raised the suspicions of, a grieving mother. He, and apparently only he, had received an untraceable email about a murder.

  And the email had not stated that Sara had died by suicide. Devine realized he had just assumed that was what the email had implied. Yet it had only said that she was dead. And then it had gone on to describe the hanging body. It was Wanda Simms who had mentioned suicide. She said she’d overheard the police. And Detective Hancock had confirmed that initial opinion during their first meeting.

  He had to talk to people to find the sender of the weird-ass email, because it apparently could not be done with computer keys and a server. For Devine, it was actually refreshing to see that not every single problem today was solvable by technology alone. Sometimes a little shoe leather and the semblance of a personality and a few well-formed questions might just do what artificially intelligent thinking and petabytes of data hovering in fake clouds couldn’t. But the email was tied to Ewes’s murder, which had to be tied to whatever nefarious things were going on at Cowl. And this was exactly what Emerson Campbell had told him to work on in order to stay out of a military prison. His marching orders couldn’t be clearer.

  He knew the guard currently on duty at Cowl. His name was Sam. He was around sixty, grizzled hair, pale skin, sloped shoulders, big gut that stretched his shirt’s fabric to near its breaking point, and a pleasing smile to top it all. He seemed like a favorite uncle or grandfather who would get down on the floor and play with the little ones, a beer in hand.

  Devine walked up to the granite-topped reception console and placed his leather briefcase on it, rubbing a few sweat bubbles off his forehead.

  “Hey, Sam.”

  “Hey right back, Devine.”

  “Pretty crazy shit happening around here.”

  “Got that right. Police have been in and out. New developments.”

  “Right, I heard. Murder instead of suicide. Pretty damn big difference.”

  “Hell yes it is. You knew the woman?” asked Sam.

  “A little. You ever see her?”

  “Oh yeah. Always a smile and a wave. Nice young lady, damn shame.”

  “Understand one of the custodial staff found her.”

  Sam shook his head and grimaced, as though something foul had entered his mouth. “Jerry Myers. Thought the poor guy was going to stroke out. He come running in here screaming about this gal hanging in the storage closet. I thought he’d lost his marbles. I mean, in this building, what the hell, right?”

  Devine stiffened. “Wait, he came all the way down here to tell you? He didn’t call you or the cops from up there?”

  “No, he didn’t, the knucklehead, but he was upset. Poor guy had never seen anything like that. He went into the storage room to get something and bam, there she is. Would’ve shocked anybody. So I cut him some slack on not phoning from up there. I called the cops and then me and Jerry both went up there. I was really hoping the guy was drunk or having hallucinations or something. But nope, there she was. Poor lady. I used to be with the Newark Police Department, but I have to tell you, I felt my breakfast coming back up on me, too.”

  “I bet. By that time of the morning there must have been a full house up on the fifty-second.”

  “That’s why I hustled up there as soon as I made the 911 call, and had another guy cover the front, to let the cops up when they arrived. I mean, it was a potential crime scene and there are protocols and all. See, at that point I didn’t know how she died, nobody did. But you got to preserve the evidence.”

  “Lucky you got up there so fast before anyone knew what had happened.”

  Sam eyed him closely. “Well, fact is, I can’t vouch for that.”

  “What?”

  “Jerry left the door partially open. Least that’s how we found it.”

  “Did he say that’s how he left it?” asked Devine.

  “Hell, he was so shaken up he could barely remember his own name. The cops got there about five minutes later. I didn’t want that responsibility any longer than I had to.”

  “And what’d you do after that?” asked Devine.

  “Hung around up there in case they needed anything.”

  “Talk to anybody?”

  “Just Jerry and one of the cops.”

  “None of the office staff or people like me?”

  “By the time the staff started trickling in, the cops wouldn’t let them get off the elevator. I didn’t see anybody else.”

  “Never mind the admin folks, there must have been the crew like me up there by then. It was going on nine.”

  “What can I tell you. I didn’t see any.”

  What the hell. He thought about Wanda Simms up there getting people out of their offices. That did not mesh with what he had just been told.

  “So I guess Jerry probably quit after finding the body? Or took some time off at least?”

  Sam waved this off and sipped on coffee in a mug emblazoned with the New York Giants football logo. “Nah. He’s a single guy with no kids whose job pays real good with benefits and all. You can’t just throw that away. He’s here now, in fact. Up on the thirty-fourth changing light bulbs. Least that’s what he told me a few minutes ago.”

  “Okay. Hey, hang in there.”

  Sam smiled. “I got it easy, Devine. You’re the one busting your hump. And for what, I ask you? All you need is some food, a roof over your head, a few brewskies a day, baseball in the summer and football in the fall, a missus to watch over you, and you can be a happy man.”

  Thinking that Sam was more right about that than wrong, Devine got on the elevator and headed to the thirty-fourth floor.

  CHAPTER

  27

  THE ADMIN CUBICLES UP HERE were not occupied. These folks simply earned a salary, no more and no less, regardless of how hard they worked. So unless there was some sort of apocalypse, they came in at nine and left at five or close to it.

  Jerry Myers was up a ladder down one of the halls. The suits hadn’t arrived en masse yet here either, Devine knew. He would have heard fingers clacking on computer keyboards behind the closed doors. Most of his kind got in around eight but didn’t leave until around nine at night. And there were no watercooler breaks at Cowl and Comely. It was pedal to the metal until lights out.

  “Mr. Myers?”

  The man turned on the ladder and looked down at him. He was about Devine’s height, barrel-chested and strongly built, around forty-five with a thick head of dark hair.

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m Travis Devine. I work here. I was a friend of Sara Ewes.”

  Myers finished with the lights, clipped the cover shut, and climbed down. “That was the worst damn day of my life,” he muttered.

  “I bet. It must have been traumatic as hell.”

  Myers folded up the ladder and picked up a box of light tubes. He looked at Devine and said, “You want something?”

  “Sam told me about you finding her and then mentioned you were up here replacing some lights.”

  “Okay, so?”

  Devine thought quickly, realizing he was close to blowing this whole thing. “Like I said, I was a friend of hers. I still can’t believe she’s dead. First they said suicide, and now it’s murder. I mean, what the hell, right?”

  Myers looked sympathetically at him now. “Yeah, it was a gut punch for everybody. It sure as hell looked like a suicide to me, but what do I know? I never found a dead body before.”

  Devine picked up on this. “You found her around eight thirty or so?”

  “Something like that, yeah. Told the cops that.”

  He started to walk down the hall and Devine kept pace with him as he thought of his next question.

  “Sam said you came to the lobby to tell him and that he called the police.”

  “That’s right. I was shaking like a baby. Could barely hit the elevator button or swipe my card through.”

  “What’d you go in the room for?” asked Devine.

  “Look, I already told the cops all this.”

  “I know,” said Devine quickly. “It’s . . . it’s just that we were friends and this has really shaken me to my core. I just want to know some of what you know. It might help me process all this.”

  Myers studied him curiously for a moment and then nodded. “Okay, I can understand that. The fact is, I went in there to get a damn printer cartridge, if you can believe that. Got a message that one of the big printers in the business center on that floor was low and needed to be replaced. Opened the door and there she was. My ticker must be strong, otherwise I’d be dead.”

  “I bet. So is that room normally kept locked?”

  “I don’t know about normally. I know I had to use my key to unlock it that morning.”

  The ladder banged against Myers’s leg.

  “Here, I’ll take that,” said Devine. He relieved the man of the piece of equipment.