5
Ten minutes later he was in the bathroom, taking a shower.
Hed resisted the idea at first, deeming it a waste of time, but what else was he going to do with his time? Waste some more of it staring at the TV, switching channels until he found one that would proclaim his innocence? Hop in the car and make a run for it? Drive over to Dowlings house and strangle him with his garden hose? Hed showered that morning, he didnt really need a shower, but who could say when hed get the chance to shower again? Maybe hed be living in subway tunnels and sleeping in his clothes, maybe hed be hopping freight trains. He might as well stay as clean as possible for as long as he could.
Or was he running a risk by showering? Hair from his head or his body could wind up going down the drain and get caught in the trap, and a CSI crew could recover it and determine his DNA. But hed already showered several times in the course of his stay, so the trap was probably overflowing with his DNA.
For a moment he considered opening the drain himself and trying to get rid of the evidence, but then it struck him that DNA was the least of his worries. They already had his fingerprints, so what possible difference could it make if they had his DNA as well? Once they picked him up, once they got their hands on him, he was finished. DNA wasnt going to figure in the equation.
He got out of the shower and stood in front of the sink and shaved. Hed already done so a few hours ago, he could barely feel any stubble even against the grain, but when would he get to shave again? And why not leave a little more DNA in the sink trap, just for the hell of it?
He got dressed, and packed his bag. He might not be going anywhere, not until he figured out what to do next and when to do it, but it wouldnt hurt to be ready to leave at a moments notice.
His bag was black, like everybody elses, and had wheels and a handle. It was small enough to carry onto an airplane, and would fit easily in an overhead compartment, but nowadays he always checked it because anything as dangerous as a pair of stamp tongs or as potentially explosive as a tube of hair gel would send the airport security people into a frenzy. And when they spotted his Swiss Army knife theyd call out the National Guard.
If hed known he was going to be checking it all the time, hed have bought another color. It seemed to him that three out of four bags coming down the baggage carousel were essentially indistinguishable from his, and hed come to envy the few garishly colored ones that you saw now and then. To make it a little easier to find his own bag, hed bought a flame-orange device to wrap around the handle, and it helped. Dot had assured him it would serve a dual purpose; it might help keep some hunter from mistaking his suitcase for a deer.
Dot. He picked up the phone, hesitated, then hit Redial. It rang four times and switched him to voice mail, with a computerized voice inviting him to leave a message. Once again he decided against it, and was about to ring off when he noticed an icon on the screen indicating that hed received a voice mail message himself. It took him a moment to remember how to retrieve it.
You have one messages, a recorded voice informed him. First message.
First and only, he thought.
And then there was silence, ten or fifteen seconds of it, enough to make him wonder if there was going to be a message after all. And then a computer-generated voice, completely uninflected and straight out of a science-fiction movie,
pronounced a series of words one at a time:
Ditch. The. Phone. Repeat. Ditch. The. Damn. Phone.
He stared at the phone as he might have stared at a talking dog. It was Dot, it could only be Dot. Nobody else had his cell number, and who else would have repeated the message and inserted damn the second time around? But how had Dot managed to turn herself into a robot?
Then he remembered. A neat trick shed discovered in one of the applications she ran on her computer. You highlighted a piece of text, pressed something or other, and the computer read the words aloud in a voice all its own. Just. Like. That. One. Robotic. Word. At. A. Time.
Voiceprints, he thought. Thats what she was guarding against. You could beat voiceprint identification by whispering, or at least you used to be able to, but who knew how much better theyd made the mousetrap?
He called voice mail again, listened to the message again, and this time when the voice mail lady offered him the options of repeating or saving or erasing the message, he chose Erase. Message is erased, she told him, and the little voice mail icon vanished from the screen.
Ditch the phone. Ditch the damn phone.
How? Just toss it?
If someone found it, and if FBI technicians went to work on it, who could say what it would tell them? They could find out the number hed called and when hed called it. They couldnt recover the actual conversations, at least he didnt see how they could, but why leave anything to chance?