We needed more than ideas and suppositions. We had to hear the answers to our questions directly from Sutman himself.
Only he could confirm or refute the fear that had grown in us that someone, Sutman or someone just like him, had already worked their way into our hearts and was coloring and manipulating our deepest reserves of feeling, so that we couldn’t know what came from ourselves and what was a transplanted idea.
Going back to our friendly source, we were able to acquire a copy of the contract signed by SKC and the beverage distributor. To be forthright, the source had stopped being “friendly” and had asked us not to contact him again. But since we knew his identity and could expose him to huge liability by naming him, he was compelled to help us.
This contract spelled out Sutman’s services, confirming what we’d already learned. But it also unlocked fascinating new details. For instance, Section 12 (c) indemnifies SKC against complaints by third parties for “any use or misuse of third-party data provided by client.” In context we read this to say that companies are stealing each other’s data to provide it to Sutman. The contract also gives SKC the right to retain all of the data provided during the course of the engagement, with the only protection for the client company being a twelve-month non-compete clause. This tells us two additional things: 1- the terms of the contract all favor SKC, meaning that Sutman must have great leverage over his clients; 2- SKC must be building a vast data set—greater than any one client company will ever hold. Sutman could well have a strategy in mind for SKC that goes beyond servicing client companies.
The contract had a mailing address for SKC in southern Connecticut. Of course, we rushed there at the first opportunity, an hour of exhilaration in the thrumming car, music loud on the radio, certain we were riding toward new answers. But the address turned out to be a business services outfit in a low strip mall.
We sat in the car for a few minutes, sipping coffee that had been cold a long time and watching the door. No one went in or came out. Without the AC on, the car became sweltering and intolerable. But we don’t like to waste gas idling. The sun slowly arced over the roof of our car and was soon beaming directly onto our left side. We decided to investigate the store.
We opened the door and found an almost blank cube. There was a standing-height table with packing slips and FedEx envelopes, a display of shipping boxes of different sizes next to it. Two walls had banks of inset mailboxes. We walked in; the clerk was in a back room visible through a plate window, but didn’t bother to come out. We went to the table to appear occupied.
Then someone else entered. I wish our language had grander words to describe this act, to give a sense of how her entrance actually split the air like lightning. I swear you could smell the zinging ions. And you could sense that a huge gash had been opened in the world you thought you understood. All this I felt, and I only glanced at her through the corners of slitted eyes.
Anyone would say she was beautiful, with hair that, while dark, seemed infused with crystalline light, and a finely cut jaw under large sunglasses. But I think it was her carriage that gave her such presence. Slim and so erect, almost floating as if she wasn’t affected by our field of gravity but had some more exclusive rule of physics reserved for her. She wore a dress that pinched at the waist and then draped over her hips. It was almost demure, and yet it provoked heated, yearning, writhing, inarticulately lascivious thoughts.
After checking a mailbox, she came toward me. The chasm in the air deepened and pulled at me. I wanted her desperately, impossibly.
“This slip says I have a package,” she said.
Ah, she mistook me for the clerk. I had come directly from my morning shift at a used book store, and I had my minimally respectable wrapper of collared shirt and old corduroys over my bohemian scruff—the uniform of disaffected clerks everywhere. I might hate being a clerk, but her I wanted to serve. I held out my hand for the slip.
It had the box number I had seen on the SKC contract. She was here for SKC. She worked for them. Or could she be otherwise associated with Sutman? He had a wife, I knew.
“Oh this,” I said. I didn’t recognize my own voice, the tension in my shoulders, chest, and throat making it vibrate in new octaves. “Hmm, it’s much too big for you to carry. Do you have a van?”
“No,” she answered and smiled, clearly never having been asked that question before. I could picture the bedizened Mercedes she normally drove.
“Well then, give me the delivery address, and we’ll send it around.” I took a pen from the table and handed it to her with the slip.
She tucked her hair behind one ear and tightened her lips while she wrote. As she concentrated, I could pore my gaze down the curves of her face and the slight impressions of tendons in her neck until they disappeared under a stiff collar. I no longer knew why I was getting her address. I didn’t know what I was pursuing. I was in the glare of a lightning flash that wouldn’t end.
Finally the real clerk came out. He had on a uniform, with a logo over the heart, and I had to hope she didn’t notice that.
“Do you need anything?” the real clerk asked.
She finished writing and handed slip and pen back to me. Our hands almost touched. God, I stared at the half inch between our cooperating fingers. The soothing and the scathing distance from my object of desire.
“No, no, she’s fine, dude,” I called to the clerk.
She smiled at me as she let go. She smiled at the clerk. She must not have suspected anything because she turned and walked out the door, taking all the luster and energy out of the room with her.
I caught one glimpse of her navigating the parking lot, but I didn’t see what car she got in. As she disappeared, my mind made a strange shift, and I began tallying the many pieces of clothing and other accessories she had had on, as if they could add up to explain her. I don’t know much about these things, but that dress, with its dark blue gloss and inimitable sheen, had to be some sort of designer item. You just didn’t see things like that in the stores I knew about. I hadn’t paid attention to it exactly, but there had been a bright sparkle in her earlobe. It must have been a diamond. I had no doubt of its purity or rare size. Her sunglasses had had gold in the hinges. The shoes I’d noticed as she tapped away were polished and trim and luxurious. Her purse… the spa labor that went into her complexion, her eyelashes, and her hair… The tally grew in my head, as if she were a walking sum. The strange thing was that I wanted her more and more; as the sum got higher, she grew even more beautiful.
Desire like this had to be the oldest and purest of feelings. A god to the ancients! I felt helpless and inspired. And yet I couldn’t help but notice that this desire was strangely tied to the quest to find Sutman. I wanted him out of my desires.
The address was 14 Amber Point. I found it easily enough on the map on my phone, where it showed up as the apex of a curve projecting into the Long Island Sound.
We will have the third and final part of our ongoing investigative series “Ex-Professor Exploits Big Data to Turn Crime into Profit Center” next week. Sign up for our email digest below to be sure you don’t miss anything.
