You Think You Know Me Pretty Well aka Mercy by David Kessler Page A

sometimes it’s harder for a man because he’s culturally indoctrinated not to show it.”
    “Are we still in English Lit class? Or have we moved on to Sociology 101?”
    “I’m just saying that monsters are created, not born. And it was Sally Burrow who created Clayton, both the boy and the monster. And all because she couldn’t love him.”
    Juanita had picked up on something in Nat’s words.
    “You feel sorry for him, don’t you?”
    “I don’t really know. It’s the old free will debate. At what point do we stop feeling sorry for the wrongdoer and start blaming him?”
    “And when do we?” asked Juanita as Nat brought in the coffee.
    Nat opened his mouth, but nothing came out. The issue wasn’t quite as straightforward as it sounded. After a second or two, he found his voice.
    “In the immortal words of that guy from Kung Fu : ‘I seek not to know all the answers…’”
    Juanita held up her right hand and put on a mock Chinese accent.
    “‘… but rather to understand the questions.’”
    They burst into childish laughter.
    “You may know your books,” said Juanita. “But I know my TV.”
    “In that case, you should remember that Kwai Chang Caine didn’t have a Chinese accent!”
    And with that, Nat scooped up his coffee and went to his small office. Juanita took a sip of her coffee and then put in a call to Esther Olsen. She introduced herself and quickly came to the point.
    “Look, one of the things we’ve found on the hard disk of Dorothy’s computer is a booking with an online travel agent. But some of the data is missing and we don’t know where it was to. I was wondering if you could help us out.”
    There was silence on the other end of the phone.
    “Mrs. Olsen?”
    “I’m sorry. I don’t know.”
    Juanita thought quickly. There had to be a way to get some more information.
    “In order to make an online booking one normally needs a credit or debit card. Do you know if your daughter had one?”
    “She had a debit card. She got it with her new bank account when she gained control of her trust fund from her grandfather. Jonathan did too.”
    “Do you, by any chance, have any of her old bank statements?”
    Again there was hesitation.
    “Er, no … she used to shred everything.”
    “You’re sure she didn’t leave anything or maybe forget to shred something?”
    “Positive.”
    “Okay, thank you.”
    Juanita put the handset down with the uneasy feeling that Esther Olsen was holding something back.
     
     
     

13:51 PDT
     
    David opened the second button of his short-sleeved shirt against the sweltering heat. The air conditioning had broken down again and the early afternoon sun was getting to him. He wished he had worn a loose-fitting T-shirt. Hot weather didn’t agree with him – something Debbie used to tease him about when they were children. But right now he needed his concentration more than ever.
    He had already established that Dorothy had bought a ticket from a now defunct Mexican airline company, Quetzalcoatl Airlines. The receipt was from the EasySabre electronic booking system. And as he had told Juanita, the first company to offer self-service online booking through EasySabre was Compuserve Information Services.
    If Dorothy had a Compuserve account, then it might still have a record of the booking or a copy of the receipt. He also knew that CIS had been taken over by AOL in February, 1998, in a complex three-way deal. Because the Compuserve brand was still popular in its own right, it continued to function under AOL and so David knew that there was a chance that Dorothy’s account might still exist in some passive form even now.
    So after telling Juanita what he had discovered, he logged on to the Compuserve website and spent the better part of the next hour trying to track down and get into her account.
    The difficulty was how to find it. When Compuserve started out, they used ten digit numbers: six digits, then a comma, then four more digits. But then they