My broken heart

I knew. I missed my doctor’s appointment Monday. In fact, I missed two since yesterday was Monday.

I also knew Doc Roberts was not going to be happy about it, no matter what my excuse. The sniffling cold that I’d acquired after my dousing in the Chicago River was still hanging on and I had no doubts that it had to do with the immune suppressants I was taking.

I didn’t count on the vehemence of Doc’s reaction to me, though, or the other news he had.

“I told you to stay within half an hour of the hospital, Dag,” he said. “I’m pretty sure I explained the importance of keeping your scheduled appointments. You have to be serious about this if you want to actually be in line for a heart. I don’t have time or sympathy to waste on people who don’t want to get well.”

He wasn’t exactly yelling at me. I’m sure he meant it to be a severe warning. I couldn’t help but feel he was treating me like a disobedient child. Maybe I was, but I didn’t like being treated that way.

“I’m sorry. It seemed very important. A man’s life was at stake,” I said.

Not that anything I did seemed to have mattered. What did I really accomplish while I was gone? I moved some money to places where it might do some good. Got it out of the hands of bad guys. Got laid. Almost drowned. Almost died in a hotel room. And lost an old friend in an airplane accident that had “suspicious circumstances” written all over it. I couldn’t even explain why I did it. It just seemed like the right thing to do at the time.

“I’m finished,” I said. “No more running around. I’m on the program a hundred percent.”

“You don’t get it, Dag,” he practically yelled at me. “You missed a donor. After an hour of trying to reach you, we had to ship it to Phoenix where they planted in an eighty year old geezer who wants to live to a hundred. The difference between you and him is that he wanted it enough to do what he was told.”

I’d been punched recently—a couple of times. But neither of the thugs had hit me as hard as this news.

Damn.

“How could that happen?” I asked. “You said it could be weeks before I came to the top of the list and there was a heart available.”

“Could be,” he answered. “It was a fluke. You were third on the list locally. A thirty year old male died in a traffic accident on I-5 late last Monday night. The first guy on the list has pneumonia and I don’t dare cut him. The second passed on the night before. That brought me to you. It was a good match. It hurt to pack it in ice and send it to Arizona.”

“Do I stand a chance of coming to the top of the list again?” I asked.

“I never give up hope for my patients, Dag,” he responded. “Let’s get you healthy again so you can survive a transplant if we get one.” He paused and I had the feeling he wasn’t telling everything. Hell, he’d just given me a sucker-punch to the brain. What could be holding him back now?”

“But...?” I prompted.

“Dag,” he said quietly, “frankly, I don’t know what is keeping your heart beating now. Make sure you use what time you’ve got wisely. Put your house in order.”

I guess he could have been more blunt. I wasn’t sure how.

I walked out of his office under my own power and waved off a nurse’s offer of a wheel chair. As long as I could stand I wasn’t going to be pushed around like an invalid. I felt as though if I sat in it I would never get out again. I was at the door when it opened from the other side. There stood Billie the Kid and her mother, Wanda.

“Mr. Håmar!” the child exclaimed. “I was worried about you. Guess what!”

“Hello Billie,” I greeted her. “Hello Ms. Martin.” I nodded to Wanda who seemed to be positively beaming. “What’s up?”

“I’m coming to live at the hospital so I can be ready when my new heart comes,” the pint-sized patient exclaimed.

“That’s good news,” I said raising an eyebrow at her mother.

“It’s a miracle,” Wanda said. “I was meeting with a social worker to sign over custody and make Billie a ward of the State when a lawyer I’d never heard of called and said that an anonymous donor had set up a half-million dollar trust for Billie. He had to talk to the social worker and had her drive us to his office to verify the papers. Suddenly the State has become very helpful. Dr. Roberts said that the approach of the holiday season often results in an increase of donors and we should be here so there is no chance of her missing an opportunity.”

Even though she could not have known about my delinquency, I couldn’t help but hear a rebuke from Dr. Roberts over missing my opportunity.

“That’s truly wonderful news,” I said. I reached into my wallet for a business card and gave it to Wanda. “Please let me know when Billie gets her new heart,” I said. “I’d like to come and visit.”

“Can I have one, too?” Billie asked. I smiled and handed her a card over her mother’s shush. Billie looked at it carefully. “What’s a private investigator?” she asked.

“I solve mysteries,” I answered. “Usually I investigate what is on computer systems. If you ever need anything investigated, you just call on D. H. Investigations. We’ll get to the bottom of it.” We parted, and in spite of the shocking news I’d had this morning, I felt a little better.

Some things, however, I was taking very seriously. I had Riley take me by my attorney’s office and made some changes to my will. I would rest easier once that was signed. I thanked him for taking care of the business with Billie Martin and deflected his questions about where the money had come from.

After a very sensible, heart-healthy lunch, I convinced Riley to take me back to the office instead of straight home. I’d missed the one day during this month of record-breaking rainfall that I might have seen the mountain from my office window, but I once again wanted to stand there looking. There had been occasional sun breaks on this windy day and I didn’t want to miss a chance of seeing it again.

I do want to live. I’m not ready to give up and die. I’m fifty-seven years old, and I want to live forever. Or at least until Christmas. I’d like to live long enough to retire. I’d like to live long enough to see the next version of Windows for my computer. I’d like to see Riley get her degree, and a PhD if she wants one. I want to see Billie get her new heart, and see her go to school like a normal kid. I want to go for hikes in the mountains with Maizie running along by my side. Or at least be able to walk to the office again. I’d like to know if there is such a thing as true love and whether anyone was really right for me.

Damn it! Why me? Aren’t there enough criminals in the world that they could be the ones to have heart attacks?

Sure, I should talk. What I’d helped Simon do wasn’t exactly legal. We’d stolen from the criminals to give to the needy—like Billie. But even then, I hadn’t been able to get Simon to tell me what Bradley was doing. He’d just point to his chest where he wore his thumb drive and say it was all right here. The thumb drive he had worn on a chain around his neck until he gave it to Angel to wear and then flew off and got himself killed—the thumb drive that I now had around my neck.

I don’t know how long I’d been standing there. It got dark earlier and earlier now. I could see the lights from the ferries crisscrossing the sound. I returned to my desk and opened my computer. I inserted the drive and waited to see what would come up.

The dialog box was not what I expected at all. It asked for the encryption key. Encryption. The one place that Simon absolutely should not have used encryption. It required a key—an alphanumeric sequence that could be between eight and eighty characters. What was he thinking? Well, there was one chance, and that was that. Perhaps if I inserted it in Simon’s computer it would get the key automatically.

“Riley!” I called. She’d been sitting quietly at her desk fiddling with a stack of CDs the entire time we’d been back at the office. Probably working on her thesis, I assumed. She was in my doorway in a flash.

“What is it Dag?” she asked. “Are you okay.”

“Yeah, don’t worry,” I said. “I’d just like you to open the vault for me.” She looked at me a little strangely.

“‘I don’t know how to open the vault, Dag,” she said hesitantly.

“I thought you would have figured it out by now,” I said with a smile. “Well that means I still have something I can teach you.” I handed her the remote control. She took it with the kind of expression that showed she didn’t really want to learn this. She turned that reluctance around on me.

“Are you sure you want to show me this, Dag?” she asked.

“Consider it an insurance policy, Riley. I don’t want to worry about people having to tear down the walls if anything should happen to me. It would ruin the decorating.” We laughed. I was reminded of the time, such a short time ago when I’d gotten the news that I needed a heart transplant and had discovered 42 fuzzed files on Simon’s computer. Forty-two—according to Douglas Adams, the answer to life, the universe, and everything. But we never found out the question. We’d laughed that night until tears ran down my cheeks and had chased away the specter of death in the shadows.

I was drifting off subject again.

Damn.

I showed her what channel to turn to and what sequence to key in. The panel that led to the vault slid open. Riley started humming “Secret Agent Man.”

“That reminds me,” I said, “Have you seen the new Bond? We should go on Thanksgiving.” Riley brightened considerably, apparently figuring that I wasn’t planning to die that soon at least. I decided to go a step further. “You can come to Thanksgiving Dinner with me if you’d like to see how a bunch of Swedes celebrate. Of course, don’t feel obligated if you have other plans.”

“Sounds like fun,” she said. “Let me check my busy social calendar. Yup all free.” She shot it all out in one breath and we both had a chuckle. If I really thought she was as socially inept as she sometimes lets on, I’d worry.

I decided I needed to give Riley a little tour around the Vault. I explained how the servers were arrayed and the security safeguards I’d put in place around them. There was an alert beacon and back-up power supply if either the main power or the cooling system failed. On various shelves were neatly arranged hard drives that were backups of all the systems I’ve investigated over the past ten years. The current investigations were whirring away on a shelf including Simon’s computer and Oksamma’s computer borrowed from BKL.

“The last thing you need to know is that you can’t move or open one of these boxes,” I said, “unless you enter its code on the panel inside the door. It’s a tripwire that I learned in the Navy for wiring explosives. If you disconnect the computer case from the shelving, like opening the box where it sits, an electrical charge will trigger a spray mist of hydrochloric acid over the hard drive. That will physically pit the drive so it can’t be read. It is much more effective than trying to erase the data quickly.”

“And too bad if your hands happen to be in there,” she said thoughtfully. “Dag, this all scares me a little bit. What if you had… if you hadn’t… come back from this trip?”

“Well, a clever partner would have simply sucked all the data off the disks onto her own backup system and then would have erased the whole system remotely. If anyone ever managed to get into the vault, even the dataless disks would have been destroyed. But the clever partner would have everything that was running in the vault long before that could have happened.”

“You’ve got a lot more confidence in me than I do,” Riley said thoughtfully. “Unless you’ve got another partner you are thinking of.”

“You deserve the confidence I place in you, Riley. Now let’s plug this USB drive into Simon’s computer,” I said handing it to her.

“Directly?” she asked.

“I wish I knew a better way,” I said. “But the truth is, we’ve got all his data backed up onto separate hard drives, and I didn’t find encrypted data on his laptop. Sometimes an encryption key is tied to the hardware ID number. If he just put the device in and had it encrypt automatically, that’s likely the case. In that way, it’s encrypted if it is separated from the computer and accessible if you log-in with Simon’s password. He gave me the password before he… left.”

Something about the new disappearance of Simon gnawed at my mind, but I still couldn’t place what it was. He’d been spooked by the news that Bradley probably knew where he was. He decided to run for it again and couldn’t risk Angel or me knowing where he was headed. Then he filed a flight plan for Jamaica and blew up over Cuba, nearly creating an international incident. No. Something was wrong.

There were no storms in that area of the Caribbean. The Cubans denied shooting him down. What happened to his plane? It was going to be doubly hard for authorities to investigate since it occurred over Cuba. It bothered me.

I’d been running on automatic as I fired up Simon’s laptop and entered the password that brought it to life. I saw it identify the new device and tell me it was ready to use. I opened the file system. An immediate alert box appeared stating that the file was encrypted and to enter the code. Riley and I both groaned at the same time.

“It looks as though Simon outsmarted himself this time,” I said. I went wearily back to my desk and sat down. Riley came up quietly behind me and rubbed my neck. It was uncomfortably reminiscent of my evening at The Condo. She came around to the front of my desk and perched on the edge in her most usual position.

“I have some news from my research,” she said. I raised an eyebrow. “The muffin-top’s little vacation was in Cabo San Lucas. She rented a condo there for a week.”

“Well, she told us she was going,” I said.

“Yes, but she didn’t tell you that she was meeting Bradley Keane there.”

Apparently Simon was right about Brenda and Bradley hooking up. I kept waiting for her to continue, but she seemed to be finished.

“How did you get all this information?” I asked.

“I paid an unauthorized visit to the Barnett home yesterday. Bradley and Brenda both left at the same time.”

“I’m not sure I want to know any more about your unauthorized visit,” I said. Riley was slightly more free with the latitude that the law allows than I was. I knew she had plucked an ID from a nurse once and altered it to her own. We were all taught how to do things like that in Lars’s classes. But of course it was for information purposes only, not because we would actually do it.

Then she asked me the question that I knew had to be on her mind from the start.

“Dag, the company name is Barnett, Keane, and Lamb Ltd. All this time we’ve been dealing with Barnett and Keane. Who is Lamb?” she asked. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she already knew but was waiting for me to come clean.

“Lamb is my ex-wife’s maiden name. The company was supposed to be Barnett, Håmar, and Lamb. We had a falling out.”

“Brenda Lamb?”

“Yes.”

“You were married to that? I mean her?” Riley exclaimed.

“No. I was married to the most fiery, fun, and intelligent woman I’d ever met. She made instant friends with everyone she came in contact with. But people change. If anything, she was too gregarious. She was free with her love and she loved freely. That’s not that out of character with my generation in the 70s. But the one that I couldn’t stand sharing her with was Simon Barnett. So there you have it. But for one infidelity, I would be the multi-millionaire partner of Simon and Brenda and you’d be chasing me down instead of Bradley.”

She looked at me intently for a moment and I held her eyes. I don’t really want to get involved in telling about her eyes. Once you locked with her, it was really hard to look away.

“I don’t believe it for a minute,” she said.

“It’s true,” I said, somewhat taken aback.

“No,” she answered. “The story may be true, but I don’t believe you would ever be the person who would make deals with who-knows-what mobster and attempt to do away with your partner. For that, I would never be chasing you down.”

The phone rang and mercifully cut our conversation short. It was Silas.

“Dag, I thought you should know,” he said. “We’ve confirmed that Oksamma was seen sneaking around Simon’s plane late Sunday night. It seems he was interrupted and a night watchman was found stuffed in an oil drum in the hangar where the plane was kept. The FBI has a warrant out for the arrest of Oksamma for the murders of the watchman and Simon Barnett, and the attempted murder of Dag Håmar.

“He’s still on the loose, friend. Be careful.”