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She left the rest of the boxes for later—all were dust-covered, none looked promising—and walked down a short hallway past a small bathroom with a sink and a toilet, to a closed door. There was a light switch next to the door, and she turned off the lights behind her. She opened the door as slowly and quietly as she could, and found herself looking into a small office, and down another short hallway, into the shop itself.
She exhaled in relief—she was in the right place, Tarantula Cards, and it was unoccupied. There was an open door separating the officefrom the shop, and the front windows provided a dim illumination in both the shop and the office.
She walked through the office and into the shop. Despite its name, the place was a head shop, with very few cards. The were no drugs in sight, but there was a selection of glass bongs, a rack of Zig-Zags, books and magazines about the benefits of weed and other hallucinogens.
She went back to the office, closed the door between the office and the shop, and turned on the lights. The room held a chipboard desk, the surface lightly patinated with dust, and on the desk, an older Apple iMac computer with a printer to one side.
Letty turned on the Mac, which asked for a password. She went through the desk, looking for random words on pieces of paper, but other than personal contents—floss, sunburn lotion, a bottle of Scope, a fingernail clipper, miscellaneous drawer junk—she found nothing that resembled a password. She pulled out the drawers, looking for something hidden, without luck.
Like Magda Rice’s shop in Oxford, there were psychedelic-style posters on the walls of the office, most showing drawings, paintings, or photographs of overly healthy marijuana plants. Her eyes were caught by one centered on the desk, called Terra Mater, which the poster translated for you: Mother Earth, in Latin. The poster showed a mature, slightly heavy woman in a Roman robe, sitting in a garden, holding a cornucopia.
The three lab employees she’d interviewed that morning thought the shop owner’s name was Rose. Letty stared at the poster, thinking that Rose (if that was her name) must have looked at it for hours. She typed “TerraMater,” “Terra Mater,” and “terramater” into the Mac, and was rejected all three times. She tried “cornacopia,” was rejected, looked down at the keyboard, wrinkled her forehead, got out herphone and typed in “cornacopia,” and found that it was actually spelled with a U, not an A.
She typed in “cornucopia,” and the Mac opened up.
—
She went tothe email search function and typed in “Terra Mater” and got nothing. “Gaia,” though, got fifty-three hits. She went on to “Scott” and found forty-two more incoming emails, and sixty-three outgoing.
She got on her phone and called Lucas. When he answered, she said, “Remember that lock rake you gave me for my birthday?”
Tentatively: “Yes?”
“I’m in the shop. It’s been closed for a while—everything has dust on it. But. I managed to get in the back door, and then into her computer, and found a whole bunch of emails to and from Scott, and more about Gaia. If the printer works, I’m going to start printing them out. I think you and Rae should get over here.”
“Packer is suggesting we might not want to have close contact with people…you know, like you.”
“But he thinks there’s almost no chance you’re infected because the virus dies after a few days. It’s a risk I think we take,” Letty said. “We need to go through this shop, and through this computer, and do it in a hurry.”
“Ahhh…” Lucas said, then, “Give me the address.”
She gave him the address and added, “Park in front, come around back. The door marked ‘8’ will be open.”
“Of course it will be,” Lucas said. “While we’re on the way, why don’t you call Greet and see if she can get one of those ‘top secret’ judges, whatever they’re called, the FISA judges, to give us a searchwarrant. Just in case we need one.” FISA: Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
“I’ll ask.”
“We’re on the way,” Lucas said.
Letty called Greet and told her that she needed a fast search warrant. “This woman who owns the place, Rose, I think her name is, isn’t in the shop, and the shop looks like it’s been closed for a while. She may be another lover, and she may be with Scott. We gotta get inside.”
“You’re not inside now?” Greet asked.
“Of course not,” Letty lied. She trusted Greet more than most bureaucrats, but the trust never got to a hundred percent. “Get me the warrant. This is critical. I’ll wait at the front door.”
“Right,” Greet said. Because while she was a bureaucrat, she wasn’t stupid.
—
Lucas and Raeshowed up fifteen minutes later, entering through the back door as Letty was printing out emails. Letty gave them the ones that were finished, and Lucas said, “Take a break from the emails for a minute. Go to her browser and find a history.”
Letty went to Safari, clicked on “history.” They scrolled down through at least a hundred Internet hits, including a dozen in the most recent grouping that said “Santa Fe—Google Maps.” Most of the dozen were apparently only selected seconds apart, focusing on a house on Camino del Monte Sol.
The precise address was on the image and Rae said, “We need to go there.”
“After we finish here,” Lucas said. “There’s a lot of stuff to sort through.”
“It would be nice if we haven’t left before we get the search warrant,” Letty said. “You know, in case somebody’s looking at my phone location.”
