Killer Move - Michael Marshall [39]
Karren actually laughed, unaffectedly, a sound I hadn’t heard before. “Nope.”
I didn’t know what to make of that.
Kevin the Geek was a cheap lunch date, professing himself a big fan of some grilled sandwich on offer at Starbucks. I met him at the one on St. Armands Circle and left him at a table with my laptop while I ran a few errands. I performed these with about a third of my mind. The bulk was taken up with trying to work out whether to try calling Steph, and with wanting a cigarette, pretty badly. I didn’t call her, though I sent another SMS. I didn’t buy any Marlboro Lights, either.
“What’s the deal with the word ‘Modified’?” Kevin asked, when I returned.
I stiffened as I sat down, horrified that I’d somehow screwed up throwing away the pictures, and the folder was still there on my desktop. “Why do you ask?”
“You got about ten, twenty folders called that. Plus, it’s what you named your hard drive, right?”
“No,” I said, concerned that I hadn’t even noticed this the night before. “It was called, well, whatever the default is. Hard Drive, HD . . . I can’t remember.”
“Well, I’ll add that to the Pile of Strangeness, but I’ll warn you it’s a very small pile. You got nothing on here that raises a red flag. No keystroke recorders. Nothing unusual when it comes to wifi. Built-in firewall operating as it should, no suspicious ports open. Your machine is clean, basically, and your desktop as tidy as any I’ve ever seen. I have given it a gold star.”
“So what does that imply?”
“One of two things,” he said, looking a little uncomfortable. “Either someone is cruising your gated ’hood—a person who can grab passwords and whatnot out of the air and also tunnel back through a firewall to change folder and drive assignations.”
“How hard would that be?”
“Reasonably hard.”
“So what’s the or?”
“Physical access to your laptop. It’s by far the simplest explanation. Sending e-mail is a formality. Your browser will have saved a cookie, which means ordering off Amazon is easy, too, unless you log out every time, which no one does. And renaming folders and disks is far more explicable if someone’s just sitting at the machine.”
“There’s only one person who’d have access to my laptop,” I said. “My wife.”
Kevin didn’t say anything. He just looked a little more uncomfortable.
As we walked out of the coffeehouse, someone called out Kevin’s name. We turned together to see Cassandra the ice cream girl coming along the sidewalk.
“Oh my lord,” she said. “What cataclysmic online dating accident brought you two together?”
“Hey, Cass,” Kevin mumbled. In the presence of a Real Live Girl his geekiness trebled in intensity. “What’s up?”
“Well, you know, you know,” she said, pausing to light a cigarette, her hands cupping around it in the process, as if to protect against a strong wind. “Still bathing in the glory of having kicked your ass.”
I presumably had the air of a human question mark. The girl blew out a mouthful of smoke and smiled. I watched the smoke dissipate into the hot air.
“Me and Kevs—or Lord Kevinley of Benjamin’s Estate—lately hang in the same gaming crowd,” she explained. “We were both at a meatspace meet-up last night for some convivial Dark Ages fragging fun. Lady Cassandra of the Eternal Lurid Flame—that would be me—proved far too tight a strategist for this gentleman and his rat-punk accomplices.”
“ ‘Meatspace’?”
She held up her hands to indicate the universe in general. “This hot, smelly place that some do call ‘The Real World’ and in which we are constrained to hang out. At least some of the time.”
Kevin chuckled appreciatively, and I realized he didn’t mind losing at whatever this dumb game was, at least not to this girl—and that her presence in the much-maligned Real World probably had a lot to do with him playing the game in the first place.
“Gotta head,” Cassandra said. “Kevs, see you in the chatterverse, stat. Mr. Moore, I’ll be dishing the frozen cow squirt later, should you wish to drop by.”
Kevin and I watched her go, like a cool breeze departed, and then got into my baking car.
I dropped him back