Speak to Me In the Middle of the Night
By Lady Chal
Part Three: Speak to Me In the Middle of the Night
23 May, 2003
University of Georgetown
Computer Science Lab
The skinny blonde kid with the stringy hair and the Grateful Dead T-Shirt shoved back from his computer keyboard and looked up at Mallard. "I think I found it for ya, Doc. I checked out that airline ticket you told me about. You were right. It was an e-ticket. She bought it over the internet, which meant I was able to find a personal email account."
"Dare I ask how you went about it?"
The kid looked mildly uncomfortable. Mallard sighed and decided it was just better he didn't know. His nephew had a habit of poking his nose into things it was sometimes better he shouldn't.
"Never mind, Stuart," he said dismissively. "Just tell me what you found."
Stuart's fingers flew over the keyboard as he called up the AOL website, and logged in a username and password. After a moment a familiar chime sounded with the too cheery tone…
"You've got mail."
"She's got a lot of mail." Stuart said. "Most of them are junk mail. Her mail box has been filled to capacity since about the middle of January."
"I'm surprised her account is still active," Mallard said. "She's been dead since early January. I'd have thought that AOL would have cut her off by now."
Stuart shrugged. "She might have had it debited from her checking account. And if like you say, nobody had noticed she was dead until a couple weeks ago, even AOL wouldn't have noticed as long as they were getting paid."
Mallard studied the list of emails. Stuart was right. There were a lot of them. It would take hours to wade through them all, even if one started by just deleting the ones that were obviously junk.
"Can you copy these off onto a disk?"
His nephew grinned and held up jewel case lettered in his own crude hand writing. "Already done. I copied her favorite web pages and her address book too."
"Thank you Stuart," Ducky said. "I'll be sure to give your mother your regards the next time I talk to her. –And I won't tell her about the little chat I had with the Dean on your behalf."
"Thanks Uncle D," Stuart said, looking sheepish. "You really didn't have to bail me out like that."
"Tit for tat," Ducky said smoothly, pocketing the CD. "But next time, you might want to reconsider hacking your professor's email accounts and forwarding the details of their illicit affairs with nubile young students to the rest of the entire student body." "Uncle D?" Stuart called to him as he was turning to leave. "Can I ask why you came to me for that? –I mean, don't you have a whole bunch of computer whizzes at work who could have found out that information?"
"Oh, we have dozens of them," Ducky agreed.
His nephew frowned. "You're not supposed to be working on this, are you?"
Ducky smiled. "Let's just say that this one makes us even."
It was after midnight when he finished reading the last email and ejected the CD from his computer. Stuart had been right. It was mostly junk mail, interspersed with postings from various military and legal mailing lists. There had been the odd email from a colleague and one from Admiral Chegwidden regarding his approval of her extended leave. As a result, the boldly worded header stood out starkly when he had finally deleted enough of the junk mail to see it.
RE: NEED TO SEE YOU.
There was no salutation, only a tersely worded note.
Received your message. Will not be able to see you while you are in DC. Am working out of the country for an unspecified length of time. Have a small window of opportunity if you can travel. Have a four day layover in Ireland the second weekend of January, but not enough time to come home. Arrive in Limerick on the 10th.
No closing signature, either, he noted, but there could be no doubt that this was the person she had intended to meet. He glanced at the email address. It was a generic personal account from one of the websites that handed out free email addresses and web pages like candy at Christmas. It would be impossible to track him through that. He studied the name that comprised the beginning of the email address: eldesdichado. Mallard frowned. He didn't speak Spanish but it rang a bell. He'd heard it somewhere before –a literary reference perhaps—it would come to him eventually.
He scrolled up a few more messages until he found yet another one from eldesdichado. He clicked on it. Again, there was no greeting, but another quickly worded message, confirming her flight information for Shannon. He would meet her at the plane.
There were only three more messages. One, a bit perturbed.
On the 10th:
Met your plane. You weren't on it.
On the 12th:
Tried calling. Your phone has been disconnected. Lauren, where are you?
And the last one, on the 14th of January:
The window has closed. When you're serious about talking, call me. I'll be back in five months.
He deleted all the rest of the messages, save for the five from the mysterious eldesdichado. His back ached from sitting too long in the cheap office chair he'd bought for his computer table and his eyes were starting to blur from the hours of staring into the monitor. He really must get some sleep tonight. He actually did have to go into work tomorrow. Still, he felt restless as he climbed between the cotton sheets worn smooth and soft with numerous washings. Whoever the man in Ireland had been, he hadn't been completely indifferent. He had tried to call her. He had cared enough to email her three times. Likely he still did not know what had happened to her …or what it was she wanted to discuss with him. …He had said he was going to be gone for five months. Not many people spent that much time out of the country –unless they were in the military, or perhaps worked for a large international corporation.
Mallard punched his pillow into a more comfortable position and regarded the slightly stained plaster of his bedroom ceiling. From somewhere below came the throbbing strains of music. Probably the girl in 4B again, he thought. She was about Abby's age, and had the same deplorable taste in music. Also like Abby, she seemed to only be capable of playing it on one volume setting: loud. He sighed as he tried and failed to tune out the muted sound. It wasn't loud enough to warrant calling the police, but enough that he could clearly make out the singer's throaty words…
Speak to me baby, in the middle of the night…
The lyrics were oddly compelling and it made him think of Lauren Singer. She hadn't "spoken" to him lately. Not, in fact, since that night ten days past when he had dreamed of her. He hadn't dreamed since. In fact, he had been refreshingly alone since he had ignored Gibbs' advice and continued to follow his nose down the path of the airline ticket. He wasn't entirely certain what to make of that. There were two ways to look at it, he supposed. The more rational one being the fact that he had allowed himself to get caught up in the aftermath of a very emotional case and allowed his imagination to run away with him. Or, the raving lunatic within him argued, perhaps she had been content to leave him be once she had known he would pursue the matter for her.
--Not that he'd really had to pursue it very hard. It had really been more of a hobby as of late, like trying to solve the Sunday crossword in the Post. In the end it had only taken a couple of phone calls. The first had been to the airline, checking in to how and when the ticket was purchased. The second had been to his nephew, Stuart, a computer science major at Georgetown with a fragile academic record and a noted skill for hacking.
He wondered, not for the first time, if maybe Gibbs was right and he should just let it drop. What was the use of it? Would it really make a difference to tell the man? –And he could tell him, Mallard knew. He had his email address, after all. It would be simple enough to do. But now that he stood on the threshold of the act, he found himself of two minds about the matter.
He sighed and rolled over, his eye falling on the flag still propped against the back of his dresser. From somewhere below the music began to fade.
"Speak to me baby," he murmured, and dropped off to sleep.
It came to him at 2:30 in the morning. The passage swam up so clearly from the dusty edges of his memory that as he sat, bolt upright in bed he almost thought he could see the words painted against the pale wall of his bedroom.
As far as could be judged of a man sheathed in armor, the new adventurer did not greatly exceed the middle size, and seemed to be rather slender than strongly made. His suit of armor was formed of steel, richly inlaid with gold, and the device on his shield was a young oak tree pulled up by the roots, with the Spanish word Desdichado, signifying disinherited…
"Of course," he muttered, "Ivanhoe. El Desdichado: The Disinherited Knight. –Great Scott!" he said dryly, "How could I have forgotten?"
In response, he felt a small tinge of amusement not entirely his own. He looked to the dresser. Even in the darkness he could just make out the dim spots of the stars on the flag. So… she was speaking to him again. He lay back against the pillows and looked at the ceiling.
A man of the classics, was he? He thought. And who were you my dear? His Rebecca? Or his Rowena?
It was late when he got home that night. He'd spent most of the day performing an autopsy on two Marine Corps divers who had been the unfortunate victims of a schooling accident. Both of them had died due to a severe buildup of gasses in the blood, more commonly known as the bends. He left it to Dinozzo and Blackadder to sort out whose fault that one was. Moving to the kitchen, he made himself a sandwich and a pot of tea and carried it into the small spare bedroom that doubled as his study. He stood for a long moment over the computer, then sat down and switched it on. Signing on to the internet, he brought up the AOL webpage and then logged in with Lauren's username and the password that Stuart had provided him.
Scrolling down through the long lists of messages, he selected the one from the 10th of January. The simple words stood out boldly against the white background of his screen.
I met your plane. You weren't on it.
He stared at the words for a moment and then clicked "reply." After another moment's hesitation, he dropped his fingers over the keyboard and typed.
It wasn't because she didn't want to be.
He felt his thud wildly in his chest. He suddenly understood the anxiety she must have felt, standing there at the edge of that footbridge, fingering the ticket in her pocket. He drew a deep, steadying breath and then with a deliberate move of his mouse, he clicked "Send."
He meant to log out then, but before he could a bell chimed faintly and an instant message box flashed near the bottom of his screen. His mouth was suddenly dry and he reached for his tea cup and took a sip of the dark, bracing liquid before rolling his mouse over the box and clicking on it.
The word appeared in small black letters, and he could almost hear a tentative note in them.
Lauren?
Slowly, he brought his hands back to the keyboard and typed his reply.
No.
Who is this?
He thought about it for a long moment. Who was he, really? --An overambitious Medical Examiner about to get fired? --A raving lunatic? --A foolish old man? Likely, he decided, all of the above. In the end, however, he gave the same answer he had given to Commander Turner that day by her grave.
A friend.
A full two minutes passed before there was a response to this. It was enough to make Ducky even more nervous than he already was and he was considering logging out when the computer chimed again.
Where is she?
He could almost hear the soft note of resignation in those words, though he had no idea if the voice behind it was tenor, baritone or bass. He thought about it for another long moment. It was a dreadful way to break it to the man, but his sense of her was strong and he knew she would have wanted to be straightforward about it.
Section 31, Lot 57-22, Arlington
Another long silence, and then…
What happened?
Are you in town? Mallard wrote back.
Yes.
Meet me there tomorrow at 2PM and I will tell you.
Then, before he lost his nerve, or did something even more foolish than he had already done, he logged out and shut down the computer.