Alien Nation #1 - The Day of Descent (10 page)

Disappointed, but not yet frustrated, Sikes stood out on the porch of Petty’s house, watching as the uniformed officers sealed the door with their rolls of yellow tape. He had a wealth of leads, and he looked forward to having Angie Perez go over them with him, suggesting which ones might be the best to follow. He was going to get this guy. He knew it.

It was then that a second police car arrived, from Westwood Division.

Like wary dogs checking each others’ tails, the five cops showed their badges and gave their precincts. Officer Rubia of Westwood Division was the officer in charge of this new call. She was a tough, no-nonsense Patrolman Two who seemed to be able to smell the fresh paint on Sikes’s badge.

“What are you guys doing so far from home?” she asked suspiciously. She actually checked the ID photograph in Sikes’s badge case.

“Randolph Petty was found murdered this morning in a parking garage by the Beverly Center,” Sikes said.

Rubia pushed back her cap. “Well, that explains it.” She glanced at her partner, a grim rookie who reminded Sikes of himself about five years ago. “Got a call from Dr. Petty’s daughter asking us to look in on him.”

Sikes’s eyes narrowed. According to the letters and postcards he had found, the daughter was in Australia—some town called Woomera. How did she know her father was in trouble? Unless she had decided to speed up her inheritance.

“Did you talk to the daughter?” Sikes asked.

But Rubia hadn’t. “The call came in to Dispatch about an hour ago. Seems the daughter’s in Australia, talks with her father every day on some sort of computer network. Hadn’t heard from him yesterday. He’s seventy-two. She just wanted us to drive by and look in.”

Sikes thought Angie was going to be proud of him. “The computer’s broken,” he said.

Rubia and her partner blinked without understanding what Sikes meant.

“If Petty talked with his daughter every day,” Sikes explained, “doesn’t it seem unusual that he gets killed
and
that his computer breaks at the same time?” Sikes felt a rush of adrenaline almost strong enough to wash away the dull throbbing pain of his slowly diminishing hangover. How many times had the lesson been pounded into him at the academy? In police work there are no coincidences.

Sykes told his uniforms to unseal the door. The broken computer in Randolph Petty’s den had just become his first clue.

Angie Perez wrinkled up her face and frowned. “What the hell are you talking about, Sikes?
Everything
in police work is a coincidence.”

That was the last thing Sikes wanted to hear. It was five-thirty. He had lugged Petty’s computer, monitor, and keyboard back to the station house and set it up on what he had thought was his desk, just across from Angie’s desk. That had been news to Sergeant Amrico, who had given Sikes one minute to find another desk, preferably in another precinct. And before Sikes had been able to straighten out his desk assignment—his was the beat-up one
beside
Angie’s—Angie had come in with a fifteen-year-old boy in gang colors and booked him for murder. Not for Petty’s murder, but for one she had been working on since last week. “I’ve been out earning my keep,” she had said to Sikes as she walked by with her prisoner. “What the hell have you been up to all day?”

Now, half an hour later, she wasn’t at all impressed by the broken computer.

“C’mon,” Sikes said as he fiddled with an extension cord, making sure all the peripherals were plugged in. He knew the word “peripherals” because his daughter had taught it to him while he watched her set up her new Nintendo beside her Apple IIGS. “Don’t you think that’s just a little bit suspicious? Petty talks to his daughter every day on a computer network, and then the one day his computer breaks, he gets killed?”

Angie settled back in her chair and folded her arms. “Do they sell computers at the Good Guys, Sikes?”

Sikes hesitated. He thought back to the counter where he had bought Kirby’s birthday present. What else had been there? He remembered. He frowned. “Yeah. They had a few.”

Angie grinned. “Quite a coincidence that, hmm? Finding a guy murdered exactly where you bought something a few weeks ago.” She rubbed her chin thoughtfully, exaggerating each motion. “Hmm. Hmm. Wonder what Lieutenant Columbo might make of that.”

Sikes sat back in his chair, and it creaked ominously. “Okay, you made your point.”

“And what point is that?” Angie asked like the teacher she was.

Sikes sighed. “That Petty’s computer broke last night, and since he talked to his daughter every day, he went to the one store he knew would be open to buy a new one.”

“Which makes his murder . . .”

“A coincidence,” Sikes admitted.

Angie nodded, driving the point home. “He was just the wrong guy in the wrong place at the wrong time,” she said. “If his computer had broken an hour earlier or a day later, none of this would have happened. How much more of a coincidence do you want?”

Sikes stared at the dark screen of the broken computer on his desk. It was the only thing on his desk. An ACROS 386 SX, according to the printing on it—a color monitor sitting on top of a dirty beige box with two disk drive slots, one large, one small, a mouse, and a grimy keyboard with more keys than Sikes could imagine needing on three keyboards.

“But what about where he parked?” Sikes asked, suddenly remembering his earlier suspicions. “Why did he go to the fifth level so late at night when there would be lots of other parking spaces down by the store’s walkway?”

Angie leaned forward and leaned her arms on her knees. Her chair didn’t squeak. “Sikes, you saw the car he was driving. If you had a boat like that, kept it in immaculate condition, where would
you
park it so it wouldn’t get its doors dinged to ratshit?”

Glumly Sikes nodded.

“He was parked across
three
parking spaces, Sikes, just like people park their Rolls Royces and their Porsches, right?”

And their Mustang SVO’s, Sikes thought. In public lots he always parked his pride and joy across two spaces, even if he had to pay double.

“So,” Angie said. “Did you pull anything else out of a hat today?”

Sikes shook his head. He felt like he should go back to writing parking citations.

“Not as easy as it looks, is it?” Angie asked. But she said it kindly. She knew half the other officers in the busy room were listening in to what was going on here.

“I thought I was on to something,” Sikes said. “That’s all.”

Angie unlocked a drawer on her desk and pulled out her purse. “That’s the name of the game, Sikes: thinking we’re on to something, then running smack dab down a blind alley. If you manage to get a lead to pay out one time out of twenty, you’re par for the course.” She stood; the shift was over. “You did good today, rook. You’ve got a good eye, an even better imagination, and your heart’s in the right place.” She waved her thumb over her shoulder, pointing toward the door. “Why don’t you let me buy you a beer? I think they might remember you down at Casey’s.”

Sikes made a face. He wasn’t ready to head back in there. Not for a couple of years at least. “Maybe tomorrow,” he said, knowing he should have jumped at the chance to spend more time with his partner away from work. Theo Miles had taught him the importance of that. When split-second decisions were needed on the street, the odds were a lot better if your partner was someone you could count on to be able to read your mind. “I’m not feeling all that good.”

Angie came over, leaned over, and put her hand on the arm of Sikes’s chair. “To tell the truth, rook, after last night’s wingding the station house line was five-to-one you wouldn’t make it through the whole shift without going on sick call. You just cost a bunch of your fellow civil servants a whole wad of money.” She laughed. “Watch your back, Sherlock.” And then she was gone.

Sikes sat at his desk. So much for following my instincts, he thought. He decided he wasn’t up to facing the traffic in the canyons at rush hour. He turned on the computer, just as he had back in Petty’s den.

And the same thing happened. Nothing.

The monitor screen came up blue. None of the keys registered on the screen. Something inside the box bumped and clicked for a minute or so, and that was all.

“Got a problem there, detective?”

Sikes looked up and saw an officious young man looking back. He had a white shirt, a painfully dull red-striped tie, and jet-black hair cut in an almost comically precise duplication of the official diagram in the LAPD Officer Appearance Manual. He also wore his badge and ID card around his neck, the way everyone was supposed to but few did. He thrust out his hand.

“I’m Detective Grazer,” the young man said as they shook. “Bryon Grazer. And you are . . .” He made a show of trying to find the ID that Sikes was supposed to be wearing.

“Sikes,” Sikes said. “Matt Sikes.”

Grazer nodded gravely. “Ah, yes, the new man. Welcome aboard, detective.”

“Uh, thank you . . .” Sikes had been about to add ‘sir’ to his thank you, but then he had noticed that according to his ID, Grazer’s rank was also Detective Three, even though he was acting like a bloody chief.

“So,” Grazer said imperiously as he came around to Sikes’s side of the desk to peer at the monitor screen. “What have we got going here?”

“Not much,” Sikes said. “It’s broken.”

Grazer pursed his lips. “May I?” he asked, and Sikes slid out of his way.

Grazer typed something on the keyboard. Nothing happened. “This yours?” he asked.

Sikes shook his head. “Evidence.”

“I see,” Grazer intoned. Sikes had no idea what there was to see, though. The unsmiling detective reached around to the back of the computer and turned it off. Then he made it apparent that he was counting down from ten by tapping the air with his finger with each number, silently warning Sikes not to talk so he wouldn’t lose count. At zero he flicked the computer on again. “Don’t want to cause a surge,” he said, as if that would somehow be as bad as swallowing a mouthful of broken glass, and that everyone knew it.

Then Grazer listened to the bumping and clicking coming from inside and smiled knowingly. “There’s your problem right there, detective. Your hard disk isn’t mounted.”

“Mounted?” Sikes asked.

But Grazer ignored him. “Be right back,” he said, then shoved back his chair, got up, and marched off to one of the partitioned offices at the side of the common work area. Sikes looked at his own decrepit desk and wondered how much a Detective Three had to suck up to get his own office around here. From the looks of Grazer, though, he looked capable of sucking up big time.

Grazer came back almost instantly, carrying what Sikes recognized as another type of computer peripheral. “I’ll just use my hard disk to give yours a jump start,” he said as he switched off the computer again and attached his disk drive to the back of it. Then, as he burst into a flurry of activity that instantly produced type on the screen, Grazer also launched into a long and boring lecture on the future of the computer in law enforcement. Sikes had the impression he was listening to a well-worn speech. It certainly had no effect on how rapidly Grazer’s hands flew over the keyboard.

“Yessir,” Grazer said as he squinted at a complex patterns of ones and zeros that suddenly scrolled by on the screen. “You’d be wise to get computer literate as soon as possible, detective. It’s the future, no doubt about it. And computer literacy will impact heavily on the career path of any officer who’s on the fast track to command.” He suddenly looked sideways at Sikes. “Do you have any ambitions for command?” he asked in an oddly flat tone.

Sikes shrugged. He hadn’t bothered listening to half of whatever Grazer had been babbling about. “It’s my first day,” he said. Then he looked at the screen, where ones and zeros still rolled by. “What’s all that?”

Grazer took on a professorial tone again. “Ah, well, that’s your problem, isn’t it?”

“My problem?”

“There’s nothing on your disk, detective. Hadn’t been mounted, just as I said.”

“Nothing on it?” Sikes asked. “You mean it’s been erased?” That might be something to look into.

But Grazer smiled smugly. “No, no, no, detective. Usually when a file is erased on a hard disk, the file isn’t
really
erased.”

“It isn’t?”

“Just the index listing is deleted. The information itself remains on the disk until another file is recorded over it.” Grazer tapped the screen knowingly. “Even if you had deleted the
entire
index, there would still be file fragments scattered over the disk, and with the program I’m using now we could read those files. But as you see, there’s nothing here but random bits.
Nada
.”

Sikes thought he understood. “So you’re saying that this disk has never been used.” He tried to see how that would fit in. Petty’s hard disk broke. He went out and bought a new one. Installed it. And that meant he would have had no reason for being in the parking garage
except
to have a meeting with someone!

But Grazer brought him down just as quickly as the idea had grown. “Oh, no. This disk has been used, all right. If it were new, let’s say, all we’d be seeing now would be whole streams of zeros broken up by occasional regular patterns of ones.”

Sikes was at a loss. “Well, if it’s not new but it hasn’t been erased, what else is there?”

Grazer leaned back and tapped his fingers on the edge of Sikes’s desk. He made his pronouncement. “It’s been overwritten.”

How about overbearing? Sikes thought. “And what does that mean?”

“Every sector on this disk has been recorded over with a random assortment of zeroes and ones. Three times is the government encryption standard.”

Sikes felt as if he were knocking down a house one brick at a time. “And why would someone want to do that?”

Grazer thrust out his bottom lip in thought. “To prevent anyone from recovering any of the information that might have been on the disk to begin with.” He pressed a key, and the screen cleared. “That’s it. There’s nothing recoverable on the disk at all.” He glanced at Sikes. “Any idea what might have been on it?”

Sikes shook his head. An old man’s computer correspondence with his daughter? Tax records? How many different kinds of information could a computer hold? “Is it hard to do? Overwriting, I mean.”