Private Lives nfe-9 Read online

  What in he hiding? Leif wondered.

  Then the idea that had been tickling around the back of his brain began to come into focus. Take the stuff he’d been hearing about I-on Investigations. Mix it with what the Squirt had to say earlier this evening…

  “Computer,” he suddenly ordered, “Net search, public databases, concentrating on news sources. Images, Michael Steele, former Net Force specialist agent. Time frame—” He turned to Megan. “When was the captain’s wife killed?”

  “July 21, 2021,” Megan said, baffled.

  “Time frame, third and fourth week of July, 2021,” Leif finished. “Execute.”

  “Working,” a silvery female voice replied.

  Megan rolled her eyes. “Even your computer has to be sexy.”

  “It’s a proven fact,” Leif said stiffly, “that men hear female voices more clearly.”

  “Unless they’re saying something the men don’t want to hear,” Megan shot back.

  Long minutes ticked by in silence. Leif had expected a bit of a wait — his search engine would probably have to access dead storage to dig up a four-year-old news story. But their prickly exchange made the down time seem interminable.

  “All right,” Megan finally said, “I’ll bite. What are you doing?”

  “It’s a long shot,” Leif had to admit. “We’ve got the head of a detective agency who creates evidence for a living. Four years ago we had a Net Force operative who got bounced from the agency for false evidence. Do you see a connection?”

  “A very hazy one,” Megan replied. “After all, one of those people is dead.”

  “Reported dead,” Leif corrected her. “Suspected of having a Viking funeral far out at sea. How much would be left to identify after that?” He frowned. “A lot of Marcus Kovacs’s past can’t be checked, either. So I thought it would be interesting to see what both of our mystery men looked like, side by side.”

  “You did, did you?”

  Before she could tell him what she thought of that idea, the computer’s silvery voice chimed in. “Search completed. Eighteen matches.”

  “Have her say, ‘Oh, baby,” Megan suggested. “Just once.”

  Leif studiously ignored her, looking at the first of Megan’s captured portraits of Marcus Kovacs. “Computer, are any of the matched images three-quarter views of the face?”

  “Three,” the computer responded.

  “Display each. Format, nine inches by twelve inches,” Leif said.

  Three portraits popped into existence in front of them, all of them apparently shot on the fly. Each image showed the same grim-looking man, his hair cut so short it looked like a sandy fuzz on his skull. In contrast, Mike Steele’s eyebrows were long and tangled, a solid line of darker hair stretching over his broken nose.

  Megan made a raucous sound, somewhere between a buzz and a hoot. “AAAaaaarrrrkkkkk! You lose, monkey-boy. If you were ever hoping for a match with Marcus Kovacs, you definitely didn’t get one!”

  13

  Megan cut the phone connection and scowled at her computer. Maybe she shouldn’t have mocked Leif Anderson and his idea quite so heartlessly. She hadn’t had a bit of luck in the two days since.

  Leif had only shrugged at her laughter and downloaded a facsimile of the scrap of paper Bodie Fuhrman had given him — her name and number, a New York City phone code.

  Megan glared at the printed flatcopy printout lying in front of her. The name and numbers were half printed, half cursive, in a round, bold, extremely feminine handwriting. It could be worse. At least Bodie didn’t use a little heart to dot the i in her name.

  The number turned out to be a phone in a Columbia dorm. The past few days hadn’t exactly been a game of phone tag. It had been more like phone hide-and-seek. Megan would call and leave a message with one of Bodie’s roommates. But Bodie herself would never call back.

  What was the problem with these people? Megan wondered. Did they forget to pass the messages along? Megan had a couple of older brothers who had the same problem. Or was there a black hole in Bodie’s computer memory that ate any trace of call-back records? Maybe the roommates just left a paper note somebody’s dog scarfed up.

  Or could it be that Bodie Fuhrman was simply trying to duck her?

  Whatever the reason, Megan’s patience was wearing pretty thin by the time she finally caught up with the seemingly shy college girl.

  Megan watched the image of a short, round-faced redhead in a tight purple sweater giving her a blank look. “Oh, yeah,” Bodie finally said. “You’re the kid who’s been calling from Washington.”

  Kid? Megan thought, bristling at the older girl’s condescending attitude. I’m the same age as Leif. And you certainly didn’t seem to think he was a “kid.”

  Of course, she couldn’t say that, not without calling attention to the Anderson connection. Instead, Megan introduced herself as a Net Force Explorer trying to help Captain Winters.

  “You mean the guy who killed the gangster? I can’t imagine that anyone named Steve the Bull didn’t get what was coming to him,” Bodie said. “But this country has a little thing called due process. You’ve got to be able to prove the guy guilty in court before you start punishing him. Besides, do-it-yourself executions can be kind of rough on innocent bystanders.”

  “My friends and I don’t think the captain killed anybody,” Megan began.

  “Oh, please — he’s innocent?” Bodie scoffed. “You sound like the neighbors in any big ax-murder case. ‘He was such a nice, quiet man,’” she said in a quavering falsetto. “‘Always kept the lawn neatly mowed.’”

  Bodie sneered. “Right. Until he mowed down half his family — or, in this case—”

  “We think your former boss framed him,” Megan interrupted.

  Well, at least Bodie wasn’t laughing at her anymore. The girl in the holographic display suddenly looked wary. “What do you mean?”

  “Tori Rush has been trying to turn herself into a star attraction, churning out scandal stories for the past few months. The question is, did she order her pit-bull detectives to do a job on someone from Net Force? Or did they come to her, offering Captain Winters’s head on a silver platter? And just how far did I-on Investigations go to set up the story in the first place?”

  Bodie Fuhrman’s green eyes flared, but her voice was almost prim as she answered. “It would certainly be inappropriate for me to comment on that. I have no knowledge one way or the other.”

  Megan wanted to reach through the holo connection and shake the other girl. A man’s life and freedom were on the line here. And Bodie was treating the whole situation as if she were on some stupid interview show.

  Interview…Suddenly Megan understood it all. Why Bodie was so hard to get hold of. Why she’d tried to blow Megan off, feeding her heaping helpings of hot and cold attitude. Why she was playing word games instead of answering Megan’s questions now.

  Bodie had obviously had a chat with Professor Arthur Wellman. The college girl was trying to maintain a low profile until her big Tori Rush story broke in The Fifth Estate.

  I’ll give her a low profile, a furious Megan thought. In fact, I’ll flatten that fat face for her.

  She took off the verbal gloves, mentioned Wellman’s name, pressed hard — and got a raised voice, a rather uninspired collection of curse words, and a quick cutoff for her trouble.

  What a bitch! Megan thought. How could Leif stand her?

  She was still scowling at her system when the chimes rang, indicating an incoming message. She picked up and got a glimpse of red hair as the image swam into resolution. For an instant she thought it was Bodie Fuhrman calling back for round two.

  Instead, it was Leif Anderson.

  “I finally got to talk with your girlfriend,” Megan announced ominously. “All I can say is, I hope you’ve been spending your time more constructively than I have.”

  Leif shrugged. “Can’t exactly say that. I’m still playing with those pictures you gave me.”

  Megan r
olled her eyes. “Trying to prove that a pair of guys who could win the Tag-Team Least Lookalike Award are in fact the same person? You’re wasting—”

  “Am I?” he asked. “Synch in and come to my place. You have to take a look at this.”

  Muttering, Megan sank into her computer-link couch and let her implanted circuits take over. An instant later she opened her eyes in the living room of Leif’s virtual dream house.

  Instead of lounging on one of the pieces of furniture, as he usually did, Leif was on his feet and facing her. Everything about him — his expression, his posture — showed his eagerness over what he was about to show her.

  Megan hoped he wasn’t about to make a fool of himself — or of her.

  Leif gave a command to his computer, and two headings appeared on either side of him in glowing light: “Marcus Kovacs” and “Michael Steele.” Then lists appeared under each name.

  Megan dismissed the list with a glance. “Very nice,” she said. “Are you going to do one for the two of us now? We’ve got about as much in common.”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” Leif said. “Take a closer look. The first four features on the list — the externals — couldn’t be more different. But they’re also easily handled by artificial means. Hair dye, eyebrow clipping, plastic surgery, and contact lenses—”

  “Eyebrow clipping?” Megan scoffed.

  “Oh, right, as if girls never reshape their own eyebrows,” Leif replied. “I know of at least one male Hollywood star who had to have his eyebrows plucked, or they made him look like the Wolf Man.” He pointed to the lower part of the list. “The things down here — fundamentals — are things you can’t change so easily. And every characteristic matches perfectly.”

  Megan stared at Leif. He’d certainly gone off the deep end this time. “How many people are a size forty-four in this country? In the world? And even if AB negative is a comparatively rare blood type, when you look at the blood type as a proportion of the current U.S. population, millions of people have it. That’s not a small number.”

  “I’m aware of that,” Leif said. “That list just represents the groundwork.”

  She looked at him. “For what?”

  “With the help of your pictures, the ones I searched out — and some holo imagery I managed to dig up — I created these.”

  The lists on either side disappeared. Now Leif was flanked by two men — Marcus Kovacs and Michael Steele.

  “What—” Megan began.

  “Three-D sims,” Leif interrupted with some satisfaction. “Life-size, so we can really start looking for similarities. By the way, did you know that Kovacs and Steele are the same height and wear the same size shoe?”

  “Tell me more, Sherlock,” Megan said in a resigned kind of voice. “At least they’re wearing clothes, so I guess you didn’t find any identifying moles on somebody’s butt.”

  “They tell me you can find lots of revealing pictures on the Net.” Leif grinned. “But certainly not of either of these guys.”

  “Thank heaven,” Megan muttered.

  Leif gave another order, and his new friends swung around to present their profiles. “It’s hard to tell because of that full beard that Kovacs wears, but I think both men have the same basic shape face and chin.”

  “At least, you’d like to think so.” Megan tried to choose what she was about to say carefully. It wasn’t easy: words like silly, stupid, and crackpot came all too easily to her sometimes too-blunt tongue. “Leif, you want to find someone behind all the merde Captain Winters is going through. I might even say you’re desperate. So am I. If you can’t convince me, when I want to clear the captain, how are you going to convince Matt, or David, or…say…Captain Steadman?”

  “Let me show you one other thing,” Leif begged. “Remember how bent out of shape Kovacs got in the last picture you showed me? The one where he stuck his hand over the camera lens?”

  Megan felt a surge of hope. “Fingerprints?”

  Leif shook his head. “Nothing but the lines on the palm — although they do match. But remember what Kovacs was doing in the picture before that?”

  “Brushing his hair back—”

  “So you could see his ear.” Leif murmured another command. Both sims wheeled around to face his left. “This is the side the camera-person caught.” He reached over to the make-believe Kovacs and pulled back the thick, graying mane to reveal the simulacrum’s left ear. Another command, and the sim of Mike Steele disappeared.

  No, wait, Megan realized, it wasn’t gone. It had been superimposed over the Kovacs clone. The end result was sort of surprising. The lines of the men’s foreheads matched, except for the differing eyebrows. The noses were different, but the lips were the same, as far as she could tell beneath that beard.

  “What am I supposed to be looking for?” she asked.

  “The ears,” Leif said excitedly. “They’re supposed to be the most difficult part of the body to disguise.”

  Megan peered hard at the superimposed holograms. To her surprise, the two men’s ears matched perfectly.

  “It may not be a set of matching moles on their butts, but I think it’s pretty convincing.” Leif gave her a smug smile.

  Megan had to admit, Leif had come up with a good presentation with the two images occupying the same space. Where their shapes disagreed, the image was misty and insubstantial. For instance, Kovacs’s beard was a gossamer gray outgrowth surrounding the equally ghostly chin of Michael Steele.

  The forehead and lips — and the placement of the eyes, she now noticed — looked as concrete as if a real person stood before her.

  Megan turned her attention back to those ears. They were large enough but didn’t stick out as much as, say, Agent Len Dorpff’s.

  The tops of Kovacs’s and Steele’s ears were slightly pointed, giving just the hint of elf ears. The skin-covered cartilage, with its bumps, twists, and ridges, even the fleshy earlobe below, looked exactly solid. No trace of ghosting or double image betrayed any differences, standing up even to her most searching gaze.

  Megan felt a little weird, peering so intently into somebody’s ear, even if it was a sim. Well, it wasn’t as if the Kovacs-Steele sim was going to turn around and yell “Boo!”

  At least, it better not, she told herself, if Leif values his health.

  “Amazing,” she finally said, turning to Leif. “They even seem to have the same amount of ear wax.”

  More seriously, she went on. “I have no idea what the chances are of identical ears turning up on people. But I suspect it narrows the field a lot more than shoe size or blood type. And you say it’s almost impossible to disguise an ear? Where did you learn that?”

  Leif’s smug expression slipped a little. “I think it was an old flatfilm movie — or was it a TV show?”

  Megan sighed. “Let’s see if you can back that up with something a little more scientific. Then we’ll take your wax museum to Matt Hunter for a look-see.”

  14

  Leif looked back and forth between the two friends sitting in his virtual living room.

  Megan looked as though she were having second thoughts about discussing the mysterious similarities between Marcus Kovacs and “Iron Mike” Steele.

  And Matt Hunter acted more as though Leif were burglarizing the house instead of paying a friendly visit over the Net.

  Matt must have caught Leif’s surprised look. “My parents think I’m studying,” he said. “With all the stuff I’ve been doing to help the captain — well, I really got nailed on a couple of tests.”

  Leif and Megan nodded somberly. Their grades, too, had suffered as a result of all-nighter Net sessions, long-distance calls, and meetings over how to help Captain Winters.

  “I know what you mean,” Megan said. “My folks are just about ready to lower the boom on me, too. Unless something looks as if it’s going to pan out, and really quickly, this will be my last full-scale shot at helping the captain for a while. I’ve got to get my grades up, or I’ll be grounded so long
I’ll be collecting retirement before I can venture out again.”

  Matt nodded unhappily. “Me, too. So, you two, what have you got?”

  “Tell him, Leif,” Megan said.

  Leif glanced at her. Yes, she was definitely getting cold feet. He’d only half-convinced her last night, and now her confidence was leaking like a soda bottle hit with a load of buckshot. Even though he’d shown her the passage in the FBI manual about ear shape being a prime identifier, and admissible in court. The usefulness of ear shape in identifying a disguised suspect was why people in mug shots and on wanted posters had their hair pulled back in the profile shot. The authorities wanted that information on record. Meg had heard, she had read, but she was obviously having a hard time believing.

  Calling up his lists of similarities, Leif began his dog-and-pony show.

  Megan was also right. Matt was even harder to convince than she was.

  “Do I get what you’re trying to say here?” Matt said in disbelief. “You want me to believe that these two people are the same guy? Or, rather, that Marcus Kovacs is ‘Iron Mike’ Steele?”

  “Let me just point out a couple of things,” Leif replied to his skeptical friend. “According to his paper trail, Marcus Kovacs is supposed to be a financial guy — what my father calls a bean-counter. Yet he’s going great guns as the head of a detective agency. That would sound like more of a job for Mike Steele, late of Net Force, trained in the special facilities at the FBI’s Quantico Academy.”

  “‘Late’ is right,” Matt shot back. “Mike Steele is dead, remember? He had a Viking funeral.”

  “Correction. Mike Steele was declared dead on an island down in the Caribbean, because people saw his boat burn up and sink. Nobody actually saw him die. I checked the story out with some insurance-company people. They mentioned that that part of the world is a favorite place for people to go to pretend they’ve kicked the bucket so they can collect on their life insurance policies. The water’s warm enough, and plenty of other islands are close enough for the ‘corpse’ to make a nice, easy swim to another waiting boat. If Iron Mike wanted to bail, he chose the perfect place to do it.”