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Rae and Letty took turns reading the emails; a dozen emails in, they’d determined that the woman’s name was Rose Turney, and that Turney almost certainly knew what Scott was up to in the lab, although neither she nor Scott put any details in type.
“It’s all like, ‘with what happened last night,’ or ‘since I last saw you.’ They never come out and say what he’s doing,” Letty said. “The closest they come is when Rose asks about ‘progress.’ She gets back an email saying, ‘Talk tonight? Pizza?’ ”
“They’re being careful. Like crooks, like the Mafia,” Rae said.
Lucas was going through a plastic box of paid bills and found receipts for Verizon and two Visa credit cards. He wrote the phone number and the Visa numbers in his notebook, and said, “We need to get these to Greet as soon as we have a warrant.”
—
They were stillworking when Greet called and asked Letty if she had her iPad with her.
“I do,” Letty said.
“See if you can find a Wi-Fi. I’ve sent you the warrant.”
“Thank you. I’ll get it and go in,” Letty said.
“Right. Don’t let the door hit you in the eye,” Greet said.
Letty smiled: “I’ll be careful.”
Hooking into Verizon with the iPad, Letty went to her email, found the warrant, dragged it to the desktop and opened it. “There it is,” she said to the others. “We’re legal to go in.”
“You make me proud,” Lucas said.
—
An hour later,Rae said, “Look in her documents file. See if you’ve got a file called TSCI.”
Letty looked, and said, “Yup.” She clicked on it and found an invoice from a biological supply company. “Anybody know what biological reagents are?” Letty asked.
“Sounds scientific,” Rae said. “Ask us about reloading ammo. Or windage.”
“Print it out,” Lucas said. “Packer will want it.”
“Assuming he doesn’t die of a strange disease,” Rae added.
“As long as I’m sitting here,” Letty said, and rattled across the keyboard and brought up the Zillow real estate site. She entered the address of the Santa Fe house, and a minute later said, “Wow. Three-point-one million. The inside looks really nice.”
Lucas stepped over to look. “Says it’s off market, so those must be the original sales photos. That was what…eight years back?”
“Probably a rich left-wing trust-funder who provided the funding for the lab,” Rae said. “You know—when he wasn’t at his drum circle.”
“You think you’re being funny, but you could be exactly right,” Lucas said. “I’m done here. We got the house in Santa Fe, we know that Rose was hooked up with Scott and knew what he was doing, and she’s been gone for a while, so might be with him. Easier to find two people than one. Letty, talk to Greet. She might have to go to the FBI, but we need to see Rose’s credit cards and get those phone records.”
“As soon as I’m finished with the Gaia files,” Letty said. There were fifty-three of them, most of it chit-chat about Gaia, Gaia books, Gaia websites, and people who linked up personally through a Gaia website. One of the emails was from a woman that Rose referred to as anewbie, who said she must have gotten the link wrong, because nothing happened when she put it in. Rose sent her the link, which was simply a long list of numbers, letters, and symbols. Letty copied the link, pasted it into the browser, and popped up on a Gaia dark website.
She clicked through it and found emails for members. “They all go to Gmail, so I suspect that they’re all secondary emails that could be hard to trace back to the owners. Except, of course, I have a friend at NSA,” Letty said.
“Call him up,” Lucas said. “Or her.”
“I’ll ask Greet to do it,” Letty said. “They’ll track these Gmails in about two minutes. It’s gonna be a long list, so if we find anything suspicious, we’ll need more people working with us.”
She read some of the posts at the website, and said, “Okay, these people are nuts. They’re talking about ways to cleanse Gaia, and viruses are mentioned.”
Rae: “We sort of knew that, right?”
When they were as done as they were going to get, Lucas said, “Let’s get down to Santa Fe and jack up this richie left-wing trust-funder pal of Rae’s.”
