Farewell, Friend

Everyone showed up. Lars and Silas, of course. Everyone I’d ever met at the Swedish American Center and dozens more. Teri came to be with me, and I wasn’t surprised to find Angel and Cinnamon there, too. The four of us—blondes in black dresses—must have looked unusual to many who were there, based on the number of stares we got. But there were so many blondes among the Swedish contingent that I don’t think we were at all out of place. Maybe it was just the way our dresses fit.

1:00 p.m.

I saw the obituary and funeral announcement in the paper last night, but I had no idea how many people Dag touched. There were people there that he must not have seen in years—certainly not in the last six months. Reverend Olson gave a kind eulogy that didn’t come across as too religious. It was really about Dag. People at the Center had put together a display board with pictures from various events over the years that showed Dag playing cards with the older men, and sitting on the floor amidst a huge pile of Legos with children. There were pictures of him teaching computer classes filled with older people at the Center and a beautiful picture of Dag at the top of Mount Rainier taken by one of his climbing friends twenty years ago. It was so incredible to see him as a young man, so full of vitality and so… sexy. There was really no other way to put it. Dag as I knew him was kindly, sophisticated, and distinguished. The young Dag was nothing short of a hunk.

I made my own contribution to the display. I had the picture of the two of us that was taken in the photo booth on Pier 57 blown up and framed. But I also brought the picture from Dag’s wall with me and set it in front of the memorial urn that held his ashes.

It was all about remembering all the wonderful things that Dag was to so many people.

And then it was over.

Lars pulled me to the doorway of the chapel and there, flanked by my blonde posse, people stopped to offer me condolences as they left. They treated me like I was more than his partner. Sometimes it was embarrassing to imagine what they must have thought, but everyone was polite. Rhonda stopped and held my hand for a long moment while tears streamed down her cheeks. Eventually she pointed at the picture she’d painted and just mouthed, “Thank you,” and then left.

It was obvious that my buddies were not intending to leave me alone for a while, but Silas managed to cut me out of the crowd when I went to retrieve the urn.

“I’ve brought you something,” he said. “I don’t think I should actually be giving this to you, but I’m going to file a statement that this is official business.” He handed me a manila folder filled with the dossier on Brenda. “She’s gone,” he said flatly. “We don’t know where or when, but we haven’t seen her come out of the house in two days. I got a warrant and we went in this morning on the grounds of being concerned for her well-being. She was gone. The entire house was immaculate except the bedroom. It looked like it had been ransacked. But we determined that she had packed one suitcase and left. The other matching pieces were out on the bed.”

“Can I say I told you so?” I asked. I suppose it wasn’t kind, but I had told him Monday morning that she would run. He’d lost her that very day.

“I’d rather you said you’ll help. I can bring you the laptop and backup disks if you need them, but I’m betting you either know where she is, or could find her.”

“And then what?” I asked. “Are you going to tell me that there is enough evidence to get an extradition from an unfriendly country?”

“No. I’m going to say that you will find the evidence.” Silas looked around. “Dag and I didn’t share everything either of us knew,” he continued quietly. “But we shared enough that I’m sure he was onto something more than Bradley’s little scheme to counterfeit software. I’m guessing that you are pursuing his leads. We always had a tacit agreement—don’t interfere with each other and we’ll share the results. Oh, and don’t go in without backup,” he finished.

“I suspect that the two billion that Simon disposed of before he got himself killed is just the tip of the iceberg,” I answered. “If so, there’s a Titanic about to find it.”

“I’ll bring the laptop and disks by this afternoon,” Silas said.

“Don’t bother,” I answered. “I’ve got all I need.” He looked at me a little strangely, but said okay. I told him I’d let him know when I’d found her and how bad it really was.

I turned to join my friends. They wanted to take me out for a drink, but I said absolutely not. Instead we four went down to the pier and they joined me in the office. Mrs. Prior dropped Maizie off after the funeral. The five of us sat on the sofa and chairs and I set the urn in front of the window.

“Ginger snaps for everyone,” I announced, getting the jar from the desk. Dag always liked the crisp spicy cookies. We each reached in and I tossed a cookie to Maizie. She took it to her bed and lay down. We all took a bite. There were various expressions ranging from disbelief to disgust. “I guess they are an acquired taste,” I said, laughing. Let’s just say that Maizie had a lot of treats that afternoon.

After assuring my friends that I was all right, I got them out of the office and settled down to do some work.

10:00 p.m.

The databases of United States Customs and Immigration are not exactly public, but they aren’t impenetrable, either. I knew that if I really wanted to I could get into it and find out if there was any record of Brenda’s travel under her aliases. But the truth is that we don’t check on people leaving the country. We only check on those entering. The fastest way for Brenda to get out of the country was to go to Canada. There is always traffic moving across the border, and a middle-aged woman crossing from the US into Canada isn’t going to raise any flags if she has some cockamimi story about going to Vancouver to shop for her grandchildren.

But Brenda didn’t take her car. That meant that she took some form of public transportation (or had a confederate hook up with her) and the most likely place to go would be to the airport. Once there she could either rent a car or board a plane. If the choice was the latter, it didn’t make any difference where she went. Out of the country was out of the country. That’s what I was betting on. I pulled up the OAG guide and looked at the flights normally leaving from Seattle with non-stops out of the country. There are a lot. I was guessing that she would head south rather than to Canada. It was always possible that she would catch a flight to Amsterdam or to Tokyo, but I couldn’t picture Brenda risking a really long flight. She would want to be on the ground someplace by the next morning.

Airplane passenger lists are actually harder to hack into than US Immigration.

Mexican Immigration, however, is a breeze.

I set up remote routines to scan every port of entry with direct flights from Seattle starting with the last time that Silas actually saw Brenda forward. There are twenty-one different international ports of entry with direct flights from Seattle. Four are in Mexico and six are in Canada. The rest are scattered throughout the world. I entered the passport numbers off the three identities that I’d seen in Brenda’s drawer. Someplace one or more of those people were going to show up entering a foreign port. The number would be scanned and entered in the immigration database.

It wasn’t child’s play. Before I finished, I had to take Maizie out for a walk and feed her dinner. She was getting impatient when I set the programs to run and started pulling apart Brenda’s file.

There were huge amounts of written evidence that had yellow stickies on them marked “circumstantial,” “unconfirmed,” and “hearsay.” I had to admit that the case against her looked shaky. No wonder Silas wasn’t getting any support from the authorities on his search for her; they considered it a waste of time.

The ferries were almost shielded by the nighttime fog over the harbor by the time I found something useful. If you commit a burglary, speed, rape someone, or even murder someone, they are going to do a pretty thorough job of marking down your identifying characteristics and getting your fingerprints. Age, weight, height, eye and hair color, race. But if you are accused of a Federal money crime, your file is going to have birthmarks, shoe size, ring size, moles, and tattoos.
“Tattoo at base of spine in red and black depicts a pillow with the characters E18d2bMe.”

Holy shit! Brenda has a tattoo with eight characters. Substituting “1” for “L” and what for “M?” It had to be a 3 laid on its side. e-1-8-d-2-b-3-e. I had a few more combinations to try out for my encryption key. Let me see, with four sets in all possible combinations of one, two, three, and four sets—I only had 16 possible combinations when there were three sets—there were 64 possible combinations. It was going to take a little longer, but I had the makings of a 512 bit encryption key.

It’s going to be a long night.