The Heist

losses by cutting jobs, so it wouldn’t just be people with fat stock portfolios who’d feel the pain, but average middle-class families struggling to pay their mortgages.
    Kate understood all that, in an abstract way. Maybe if the pirate looked like Johnny Depp, or maybe if the guy they were chasing was actually stuffing those millions of dollars in cold hard cash into his pockets, then she could get into it. But this guy wasn’t making a buck off his thievery or doing it for some greater evil purpose, like delivering a crippling blow to the American economy by making it possible to download every episode of
Will & Grace
for free. He was doing it because … well … Kate didn’t know and didn’t give a hoot. She just wanted this incredibly dull investigation to end before she put a gun into her mouth and pulled the trigger.
    It wasn’t hard for Sharon Cargill, the investigator from the Motion Picture Association of America, to pick up on Kate’s discontent, mainly because Kate kept expressing it. The bulk of their investigation over the last five days had consisted of sitting together in the basement of the Federal Building on Wilshire, looking over the shoulder of a computer tech as he followed the cyber clues and devoured Hot Pockets.
    The pirate was copying screeners—DVDs supplied to entertainment industry professionals for Oscar and Emmy award voting—and uploading them under the name Nanatastic74 to a file-sharing site. Digital watermarks in the files and Nanatastic74’s IP address led them to Pete Debney, a forty-eight-year-old struggling screenwriter living in an apartment in Castaic.
    Debney was a member of the Writers Guild of America, which explained how he got access to the screeners, but he didn’t have any of them in his house, and there were no digital movie files on his computer. That’s because he’d given all of his screeners to his mother, Janice, who lived in a retirement home in Ventura. He’d opened the broadband account for her and paid her bill.
    So that’s what brought Kate and Sharon to Sunny Vistas Active Senior Living Center. The lobby was like a hotel’s, with a reception desk to the right and an open dining area to the left, a row of walkers parked like cars along the low wall. There were a dozen old folks sitting at tables, picking at plates of meat loaf and peas. A few of them were sleeping in their seats, their heads slumped onto their chests. Or maybe they were dead, Kate thought with a shudder.
    Sharon went to the receptionist and asked where they could find Janice Debney.
    “Down the hall in the community computer room,” the receptionist said. “She’s almost always there.”
    The computer room turned out to be a bank of four desktops in a room with shelves lined with DVDs. There were four seniors hunched over the computers, two men and two women, one of whom had an oxygen tank. Movies were playing silently on two of the flat screens as they were being encoded and converted from DVDs into digital files. Sharon went straight to the shelves of DVDs and started sorting through them.
    “Excuse me,” Kate said to the computer users, “I’m looking for Janice Debney.”
    The woman with the oxygen tank turned around. She was wearing a bad wig and fake eyelashes. Her skin looked like parchment paper. “That’s me.”
    “FBI. We’re here about the movies,” Kate told her.
    “What movies?”
    “These,” Sharon said, holding out a DVD. “They’re all Academy screeners.”
    “They’re mine,” Janice said.
    “Actually, they belong to the studios and are loaned to Academy members for screening purposes only. You are not an Academy member.”
    “My son gave them to me. He’s so sweet. We show them here on Saturday nights.”
    “And you copy them and post them on the Internet,” Sharon said.
    “So other people our age can see them without having to go to a movie theater,” Janice said.
    “It’s a crime,” Sharon said.
    “It certainly is,” Janice said. “Movie theaters are horrible. The ticket prices are outrageous and the movies are way too loud.”
    “Or they aren’t loud enough,” one of the men said.
    “You have to climb a bunch of stairs to get to your seats now,” the other man said. “Whose brilliant idea was that? I have a hip replacement.”
    Kate squelched a grimace. Her life was over. As long as she was here, she might as well see if they had any vacancies.
    “You could buy DVDs,” Sharon said. “Or rent