Gideon's Corpse

“Yeah, but I’ve got an idea about that. Chalker was kind of scatterbrained, and he often misplaced his cell phone or forgot to charge it. He was always borrowing phones.”

Now Fordyce looked up, faintly interested. “From who?”

“Various people. But mostly from this woman who worked in the cubicle next to his.”

“Her name?”

“Melanie Kim.”

Fordyce frowned. “Kim? I recall that name.” He snapped opened his briefcase, took out a file, and flipped through it. “She’s already on the witness list—which means we have to get official permission to talk to her.”

“We don’t need to talk to her. We just need to get her phone records.”

Fordyce shook his head. “Talk about scraping the bottom of the barrel. So how are we going to tell her calls from his?”

Gideon frowned, thinking back. It was a good question. Fordyce went back to tapping his cup.

“About six months ago,” Gideon said slowly, “Chalker dropped his iPhone. Busted it. For a week he kept borrowing her phone to make his calls.”

Fordyce seemed to brighten. “You got a time frame on this?”

Gideon racked his brains. “Wintertime.”

“That’s a help.”

Gideon cursed his poor memory. “Wait. I remember Melanie got all pissed off because she was trying to plan a New Year’s Eve party and he kept borrowing her phone and not returning it for hours on end. So it was before New Year’s.”

“And it must have been before Christmas, then. You wouldn’t have been at work between Christmas and New Year’s.”

Gideon nodded. “Right…And Christmas vacation began December twenty-second last year.”

“So we’re talking the week or so before that?”

“Exactly.”

“I guess we’d better start the paperwork,” said Fordyce wearily.

Gideon stared at him. “Screw the paperwork.” He took out his own iPhone, began dialing.

“Waste of time,” said Fordyce. “By law a telecom provider can’t release cell phone records, even to the customer, except by mail to the customer’s address of record. On top of that, we’d need a subpoena.”

Gideon finished dialing. He punched through the menu selections and finally ended up with an operator.

“Hello, dear?” he asked, putting on an old lady’s quavering voice. “This is Melanie Kim. My phone was stolen.”

“Oh no,” said Fordyce, plugging his ears. “I’m not hearing this. No way.”

The operator asked for the last four digits of her Social Security number and her mother’s maiden name. “Let’s see…” warbled Gideon. “I can’t seem to find it…I’ll have to call you back with that information, dear.” Gideon hung up.

“That was lame,” said Fordyce, removing his fingers with a snort.

Gideon ignored him and called Melanie Kim herself, whose number he had on his own cell. She answered.

“Hey, it’s Gideon.”

“Oh my God, Gideon,” said Kim, “you won’t believe it, but the FBI have been here questioning me all day—”

“Tell me about it,” Gideon said, gently interrupting her, keeping his voice at a whisper. “They’ve been giving me the third degree, too, and you know what? All the questions are about you.”

“Me?” There was instant panic in her voice.

“They seem to think you and Chalker were…well, you know, an item.”

“Chalker? That asshole? You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Listen, Melanie, I got the distinct impression they’re going to steamroll you. I felt like I had to warn you. They’re out for blood.”

“No way. I had nothing to do with him. I hated the guy!”

“They were even asking me questions about your mother.”

“My mother? She died five years ago!”

“They hinted around that she was a communist while a student at Harvard.”

“Harvard? My mother didn’t come here from Korea until she was thirty!”

“Your mother was Korean?”

“Of course she was Korean!”

“Well, they kept pressing me and I finally told them I thought she was Irish, you know, mixed marriage and all…I don’t know where I got that impression. Sorry.”

“Irish? Irish? Gideon, you moron!”

“What was her maiden name? So I can straighten this out.”

“Kwon! Jae-hwa Kwon! You’d better straighten it out!”

“I’ll fix it, I promise. One other thing…”

“Oh please, no.”

“They asked a lot of questions about your Social Security number. They said it wasn’t a valid number, hinted that you might have committed identity fraud, you know, like to get a green card or something.”

“Green card? I’m a damn citizen! I can’t believe these idiots. What a horror show—”

He’d really gotten her going now, pushing all her hot buttons. Gideon felt a pang of guilt. Again, he gently interrupted her. “They were especially focused on the last four digits of your Social. Thought they were weird.”

“Weird? What do you mean?”

“That they would just happen to be one two three four. Sounds, you know, made up.”

“One two three four? It’s seven six zero six!”

Gideon cupped the phone and whispered hoarsely, “Oh no, gotta go, they’re calling my name again. I’ll do what I can to defuse this. Listen, whatever you do, don’t let on that I warned you.”

“Wait—!”

He shut the phone, leaned back in the chair, exhaling. He could hardly believe what he had just done. And the next step was going to be even worse.

Fordyce stared at him, an unreadable expression on his face.

Gideon called the phone company back. In his little-old-lady voice, cracking with confusion and upset, he gave the operator Kim’s personal information and reported that her phone was stolen; he wanted the phone canceled, the cell number, data, and address book all switched over to her son’s iPhone, who was getting a BlackBerry and wanted to move his account. Then Gideon gave her his own phone number, Social, and mother’s maiden name. When the operator said the transfer would take up to twenty-four hours, Gideon began to cry and in a weepy voice told a confused tale of a baby, a deformed puppy, cancer, and a house fire.

A few minutes later, he hung up. “Expedited. We’ll have the info in thirty minutes, max.”

“You’re one rotten SOB, you know that?” And Fordyce smiled approvingly.

16

In the week before December twenty-second, Kim’s call register listed seventy-one outgoing calls during work hours. They quickly discarded the calls that came from numbers in Kim’s address book and focused on the rest. There were groups of them, implying Chalker had borrowed the phone to make bunches of calls at the same time.

When they listed all of these calls, there was a total of thirty-four.

They divvied up the work, Gideon calling while Fordyce used his computer to access an FBI reverse-lookup database and gather personal information on the numbers. In half an hour they had identified each number and compiled a list.

They both stared at the list in silence. It seemed i

“He called the Bjornsen Institute of Writing three times,” said Gideon.

Fordyce grunted.

“Maybe he was writing something. Like I said, he had an interest in writing.”

“Call them.”

Gideon called. He spoke for a moment, hung up, gave Fordyce a smile. “He took a writing workshop.”

“Yeah?” Fordyce was interested.

“It was called Writing Your Life.”

Another long silence. Fordyce gave a low whistle. “So he was, what, writing his memoirs?”

“Seems so. And that was four months ago. Six weeks later, he dropped out, disappeared, and joined the jihad.”

As this sank in, Fordyce’s face lit up. “A memoir… That could be pure gold. Where’s this institute?”