Death of an Escort Read Online Free

and then
had to dig around for coins for the parking meter.
    That's why I never came down here. It was
always a pain to pay for parking, but I found a dime and nickel.
That should cover it, I thought.
    After paying for my parking, I went
inside.
    Jackie, she was wearing a handmade name tag,
wasn't as old as I thought. In fact, she was probably about ten
years older than me or so, putting her in her very early
forties.
    "Hello. How may I help you?"
    "By telling everything you know about this
button," I said. "And hopefully you know something."
    She looked at it. "You want to know about
this button?"
    I did. That's why I'd said I did. "Yes, I
do," I said and tried to be nice about it.
    "I can't tell you much," she said.
    That's it. I wasn't chasing around with this
stupid button anymore. It was a dumb idea to begin with.
    "But I know who made it," she said.
    "You know who made it?" I asked. Now I was
doing it, repeating what had just been clearly stated. Maybe being
around fabrics did that to you.
    "Yes," she said. "He comes in here and makes
them."
    "Is he here now?"
    "No, but he'll be here tomorrow," she said.
"He makes these by hand. Each one."
    "Sounds expensive," I said.
    "Fine quality often has a higher investment,"
she said. "Can I tell him to expect you tomorrow?"
    I took out a business card. "I'll be here," I
said.
    She read it. "A private investigator?"
    I nodded and walked out before she could ask
any more questions. The meter said I had only a minute-and-a-half
left. I guess fifteen cents doesn't buy much time.
    To get back to where my office was, I had to
do a u-turn and go back to the main highway. I don't have an
assistant, so I couldn't call the office to look something up for
me, so I had to go there myself.
    My office is about four miles down at the far
end of the main highway, and I had to drive past all the button
stops that hadn't proved fruitful to get to my building.
    It's not really my building. I have one
office in a building of a bunch of privately divided offices. It
would be cheaper to have office at home, but never, ever would I do
that.
    I'm not going to make it easy for them to
find me, if they're still looking.
    At my office I used the internet to look up
Carlie Smith here in town. She had an apartment address. I wrote it
lightly in pencil on the back of one of my business cards.
    Then I used an online map service to map out
the quickest route there from where I was.
    When I was done I shut the internet browser
down and completely cleared the history, cache, and cookies. Then I
disconnected from the proxy service that I had been using (SOCKS
proxy, not HTTP proxy as I felt the SOCKS proxy was more
secure).
    Finally, I didn't shut the computer down, but
instead I started up a program that I had commissioned to be
created for me especially at eLance.com. It had cost about seven
hundred dollars and some guy in Virginia had programmed it for
me.
    It was called Scrambler. When you delete a
file on your computer, it's not really gone. It sits there on your
hard drive, and anyone with an ounce of determination can get
it.
    Call me paranoid, but I want no one being
able to tell what I'm up to on the computer. The scramble program
creates a bunch of nonsense files of varying size and deletes them
for as along as I set it to.
    I leave it on the one hour setting. So, for
one hour now, it will run and be creating and deleting random,
gibberish files. That uses up all the hard drive space that the
recently deleted files were using.
    It makes them unrecoverable, and covers my
tracks, like the SOCKS proxy hides my online activity.
    Then after running for one hour, the program
terminates and shuts the computer down automatically.
    I turned the computer monitor off and locked
the office door on my way out.
    Hurrying down the hall, I glanced at my
watch. It was past three in the afternoon.
    I hadn't called ahead because I didn't want
to alert or alarm anyone, but that did mean that this could be a
wasted trip. I