Blood on My Hands

into his room.
    It’s a shrine to OCD. Everything is in its place—books, in neat alphabetical order, computers, screens, printers, hard drives, phone-docking station, fax machine, tools. In two corners of the room, air purifiers hum and emit an antiseptic scent. The basement feels like a cross between a hospital operating room and a nuclear command post, and at its center is a high-backed black leather office chair and a desk with four computer screens stacked two and two. On two of the screens are cyber representations of green oval card tables with gambler avatars. On the third screen is a street scene from Second Life with voluptuous female avatars in skintight clothes and muscular young male avatars with cyber testosterone coursing through their veins. On the fourth is an episode of South Park .
    Jerry watches me uncomfortably while I gaze around. It’s clear that the source of his discomfort isn’t that I’m a suspect in Katherine’s murder but that I’m standing in his private inner sanctum, where so few have been allowed over the years.
    “Okay if I sit?” I ask.
    He tilts his head uncertainly, then pulls an empty blue plastic milk crate from a corner and flips it over. I sit down and he slides into the leather office chair and quickly studies the screens of the poker games. With rapid movements he adjusts his mouse and flicks his keyboard.
    “So if you didn’t do it, who did?” His bluntness catches me by surprise. Social graces were never his strong suit. Still, it’s a logical question. I don’t want to tell him what I suspect, so I just say I’m not sure but I’m following some leads. He looks askance at me, and I continue. “I know that must make you wonder if I’m lying. I’d probably be more believable if I said I had no idea, but I do have an idea. I just don’t want to say right now.”
    His gaze stays on me, making me feel uncomfortable. Finally he glances at the screens, makes some more adjustments. “So you said you had some kind of problem?”
    “About six months ago someone sent anonymous text messages to someone I know. He erased them from his phone. Is there any way to track down those messages and find out what they said?”
    Without taking his eyes from his screens, Jerry shakes his head. “They’re gone. Phone companies can’t store content. It’s not only a privacy issue but a logistical nightmare.”
    He moves the mouse, still playing two poker games at once. The games may exist in the ethereal world of cyberspace, but the money involved is cold hard cash. When that public defender wanted my brother to cop an attempted manslaughter plea and do eighteen to twenty-five years, Jerry paid for the lawyer who got the sentence down to eight to fifteen. The money came from online gambling.
    “That’s all you wanted to know?” he asks, and I can’t help getting the feeling that he’s a little disappointed that I didn’t bring a more exciting techno challenge for him to solve. But there’s another one.
    “When I turn on my phone and make a call, the police show up. I assume they’re tracing my calls.”
    “Yeah, they trace the pings through the phone company and know what tower you’re near. And if your phone has GPS, they pretty much know exactly where you are.”
    “How do I know if my phone has GPS?”
    Jerry tugs a couple of Purell wipes out of a container, lays them flat on his palm, then extends his hand to me. I place my phone on the wipes and watch while he swipes the outside of it, then carefully opens it and wipes the inside. At no point does he touch the phone with his bare fingertips. Once the phone is completely germ free, he quickly inspects it and shakes his head. “Not this piece of junk.”
    It may be a piece of junk, but I suspect that it’s good news that there’s no GPS. “So if I use it, the police just know the area I’m in, but not exactly where I am?”
    “Right. Unless you’re moving. Then they can track you from tower to tower and triangulate.” He pauses and stares down at the phone. “I can make this untraceable if you want.”
    “Really?” I didn’t expect that. “How?”
    “Easy.” He pries off the back and removes a small green-and-white card, which he slides into something that looks like an overgrown memory stick. He pauses momentarily to review his positions in the poker games, then plugs the thing into a USB port. In a flash the Second Life scene is replaced by computer gobbledygook. It looks a little like the