Doctor Who_ Blue Box - Kate Orman [2]
Hurrying back through the corn, I got diagonal glimpses of the car through the rows. Soon I could see there were two cars: mine, and a black-and-white police cat
Shit burgers, I thought. I crouched down in the corn and whipped out the telephoto lens for a better look. Sally sat behind the wheel of my car, looking nervous as hell. There were two troopers, also sitting in their car, parked in front of mine.
I didn’t know which way to jump. The troopers had a clear view up and down the road; there was no way I could walk out of the field without being spotted.
I waited in that ditch for an hour. I was sure that eventually they’d get bored, get out of their car, and start searching the cornfield. I was damned if I could think up a good story to tell them. But there was no film in my camera. I kept telling myself that, over and over. I was only using the lens, like it was a telescope. There’s no film in the camera, so there’s no way they can claim you were spying. It was bullshit, I know, but when you’re stuck in a muddy ditch for an hour with your bladder bursting and your girlfriend looking pissed off enough to drive away and leave you there, you need to tell yourself something.
Finally, one of the policemen, a big guy with a big gut, got out and had a few words with Sally. I had no idea what he was saying or how she was reacting. But then Sally started up my car (after a couple of faked failed attempts, bless her) and pulled out onto the road. The cop car followed.
She came back again, alone, about half an hour later, just as I was deciding to get up and try and walk to the nearest town before it got dark. I threw my camera in the back and took over the steering wheel. ‘Lemme take you away from all this,’ I said, and we headed north, back to DC.
‘I did just what you said,’ Sally told me. ‘I told them my boyfriend had walked up the road to find a phone. They offered to make the call for me, and when I said that it would be OK, they didn’t have to, they offered to wait here with me.
What was I supposed to do, tell them to get lost?’
‘You did fine,’ I said. ‘You did the right thing.’
‘Did you find out what you wanted to?’ she said sullenly.
‘Oh yeah. Last piece of the puzzle.
‘Well, I just hope they don’t come after us. That fat cop was real polite, but his partner kept trying to look down my shirt.’
‘Relax,’ I told her. ‘You weren’t doing anything wrong.’
‘What about you?’
‘Trespassing, maybe. You know,’ I said suddenly, ‘I think I left a beer can out there in the field.’
Sally said, ‘You better hope they can’t get your fingerprints off it or something.’
The back of my neck tightened up like a twisted rubber band. She was joking, but actually my fingerprints have been on file since that little incident in Los Angeles in 1978, the reason I moved to the east coast.
We could turn around, try to find the spot where I pulled over try to find that empty can out at the end of the cornfield. I thought about it, but in the end I just kept driving back into Washington. ‘When the book comes out,’ I said, ‘they’ll know all about it anyway.’
Two
The sad story of Sarah Swan ends in a wheelchair somewhere in Virginia. I could start the story in any one of about a dozen places. But let’s begin in a kids’ theme restaurant on Rockville Pike, Maryland, two days before Christmas 1981. Let’s begin with a young lady we’ll call Peri Smith1.
The right word for Peri is ‘petite’. She’s short and slender, with dark hair cut in a bob, deep-brown eyes, and a full mouth that curves into an impish smile. That night she was wearing jeans and a burgundy sweater. It’s not the image that you get when you think of a computer criminal: the picture in your mind is some socially inept, grody teenage boy, either bloated on Doritos, or pale and skeletal like a forgotten potted