The Blue Nowhere-SA (6 page)

He now scrolled through more files. These, which had been e-mailed to him by Shawn, gave detailed information about the boy's school - St. Francis Academy.

The boarding school was renowned academically but, more important, it represented a true tactical challenge to Phate. If there was no difficulty - and risk to him - in killing the characters in the game then there was no point in playing. And St. Francis offered some serious obstacles. The security was very extensive because the school had been the scene of a break-in several years ago in which one student had been killed and a teacher severely wounded. The principal, Willem Boethe, had vowed to never let that happen again. To reassure parents, he had renovated the entire school and turned it into a fortress. Halls were locked down at night, the grounds double-gated, windows and doors alarmed. You needed passcodes to get in and out of the tall razor-wired wall surrounding the compound. Getting inside the school was, in short, just the right kind of challenge for Phate. It was a step up from Lara Gibson - moving to a higher, more difficult level in his game. He coulda--
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Phate squinted at the screen. Oh, no, not again. Jamie's computer - and therefore his too - had crashed. It'd happened just ten minutes ago too. This was the one bug in Trapdoor. Sometimes his machine and the invaded computer would simply stop working. Then they'd both have to reboot - restart - their computers and go back online.

It resulted in a delay of no more than a minute or so but to Phate it was a terrible flaw. Software had to be perfect, it had to be elegant. He and Shawn had been trying to fix this bug for months but had had no luck so far.

A moment later he and his young friend were back online and Phate was browsing through the boy's machine once more.

A small window appeared on Phate's monitor and the Trapdoor program asked: Target subject has received an instant message from MarkTheMan. Do you want to monitor?

That would be Jamie Turner's brother, Mark. Phate keyed Y and saw the brothers' dialogue on his screen.

MarkTheMan: Can you instant message?

JamieTT: Gotta go play sucker I mean SOCCER.

MarkTheMan: LOL. Still on for tonight?

JamieTT: You bet. Santana RULES!!!!!

MarkTheMan: Can't wait. I'll see you across the street by the north gate at 6:30. You ready to rock n roll?

Phate thought, You bet we are.

Wyatt Gillette paused in the doorway and felt as if he'd been transported back in time. He gazed around him at the California State Police Computer Crimes Unit, which was housed in an old one-story building several miles from the state police's San Jose headquarters. "It's a dinosaur pen."

"Of our very own," Andy Anderson said. He then explained to Bishop and Shelton, neither of whom seemed to want the information, that in the early computing days huge computers like the mainframes made by IBM and Control Data Corporation were housed in special rooms like this, called dinosaur pens.

The pens featured raised floors, beneath which ran massive cables called "boas," after the snakes, which they resembled (and which had been known to uncurl violently at times and injure technicians). Dozens of air conditioner ducts also criss-crossed the room - the cooling systems were necessary to keep the massive computers from overheating and catching fire.

The Computer Crimes Unit was located off West San Carlos, in a low-rent commercial district of San Jose, near the town of Santa Clara. To reach it you drove past a number of car dealerships - EZ

TERMS FOR YOU! SE HABLA ESPANOL - and over a series of railroad tracks. The rambling one-story building, in need of painting and repair, was in clear contrast to, say, Apple Computer
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headquarters a mile away, a pristine, futuristic building decorated with a forty-foot portrait of cofounder Steve Wozniak. CCU's only artwork was a broken, rusty Pepsi machine, squatting beside the front door. Inside the huge building were dozens of dark corridors and empty offices. The police were using only a small portion of the space - the central work area, in which a dozen modular cubicles had been assembled. There were eight Sun Microsystems workstations, several IBMs and Apples, a dozen laptops. Cables ran everywhere, some duct-taped to the floor, some hanging overhead like jungle vines.

"You can rent these old data-processing facilities for a song," Anderson explained to Gillette. He laughed.

"The CCU finally gets recognized as a legit part of the state police and they give us digs that're twenty years out of date."

"Look, a scram switch." Gillette nodded at a red switch on the wall. A dusty sign said EMERGENCY

USE ONLY. "I've never seen one."

"What's that?" Bob Shelton asked.

Anderson explained: The old mainframes would get so hot that if the cooling system went down the computers could overheat and catch fire in seconds. With all the resins and plastic and rubber the gases from a burning computer would kill you before the flames would. So all dinosaur pens came equipped with a scram switch - the name borrowed from the emergency shutdown switch in nuclear reactors. If there was a fire you hit the scram button, which shut off the computer, summoned the fire department and dumped halon gas on the machine to extinguish the flames.

Andy Anderson introduced Gillette, Bishop and Shelton to the CCU team. First, Linda Sanchez, a short, stocky, middle-aged Latina in a lumpy tan suit. She was the unit's SSL officer - seizure, search and logging, she explained. She was the one who secured a perpetrator's computer, checked it for booby traps, copied the files and logged hardware and software into evidence. She also was a digital evidence recovery specialist, an expert at "excavating" a hard drive - searching it for hidden or erased data (accordingly, such officers were also known as computer archaeologists). "I'm the team bloodhound," she explained to Gillette.

"Any word, Linda?"

"Not yet, boss. That daughter of mine, she's the laziest girl on earth." Anderson said to Gillette, "Linda's about to be a grandmother."

"A week overdue. Driving the family crazy."

"And this is my second in command, Sergeant Stephen Miller." Miller was older than Anderson, close to fifty. He had bushy, graying hair. Sloping shoulders, bearish, pear-shaped. He seemed cautious. Because of his age, Gillette guessed he was from the second generation of computer programmers - men and women who were innovators in the computer world in the early seventies.

The third person was Tony Mott, a cheerful thirty-year-old with long, straight blond hair and Oakley sunglasses dangling from a green fluorescent cord around his neck. His cubicle was filled with pictures of him and a pretty Asian girl, snowboarding and mountain biking. A crash helmet sat on his desk, snowboarding boots in the corner. He'd represent the latest generation of hackers: athletic risk-takers,
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equally at home hacking together script at a keyboard and skateboarding half-pipes at extreme-sport competitions. Gillette noticed too that of all the cops at CCU Mott wore the biggest pistol on his hip - a shiny silver automatic.

The Computer Crimes Unit also had a receptionist but the woman was out sick. CCU was low in the state police hierarchy (it was referred to as the "Geek Squad" by fellow cops) and headquarters wouldn't spring for a temporary replacement. The members of the unit had to take phone messages, sift through mail and file documents by themselves and none of them, understandably, was very happy about this. Then Gillette's eyes slipped to one of several erasable white-boards, against the wall, apparently used for listing clues. A photo was taped to one. He couldn't make out what it depicted and walked closer. Then he gasped and stopped in shock. The photo was of a young woman in an orange-and-red skirt, naked from the waist up, bloody and pale, lying in a patch of grass, dead. Gillette had played plenty of computer games - Mortal Kombat and Doom and Tomb Raider - but, as gruesome as those games were, they were nothing compared to this still, horrible violence against a real victim. Andy Anderson glanced at the wall clock, which wasn't digital, as would befit a computer center, but an old, dusty analog model - with big and little hands. The time was 10:00 A.M. The cop said, "We've got to get moving on this Now, we're taking a two-prong approach to the case. Detectives Bishop and Shelton are going to be running a standard homicide investigation. CCU'll handle the computer evidence with Wyatt's help here." He glanced at a fax on his desk and added, "We're also expecting a consultant from Seattle, an expert on the Internet and online systems. Patricia Nolan. She should be here any minute."

"Police?" Shelton asked.

"No, civilian," Anderson said.

Miller added, "We use corporate security people all the time. The technology changes so fast we can't keep up with all the latest developments. Perps're always one step ahead of us. So we try to use private consultants whenever we can."

Tony Mott said, "They're usually standing in line to help. It's real chic now to put catching a hacker on your resume."

Anderson asked Linda Sanchez, "Now, where's the Gibson woman's computer?"

"In the analysis lab, boss." The woman nodded down one of the dark corridors that spidered out from the central room. "A couple of techs from crime scene are fingerprinting it -just in case the perp broke into her house and left some nice, juicy latents. Should be ready in ten minutes." Mott handed Frank Bishop an envelope. "This came for you a few minutes ago. It's the preliminary crime scene report."

Bishop brushed at his stiff hair with the backs of his fingers. Gillette could see the tooth marks from the comb very clearly in the heavily sprayed strands. The cop glanced through the file but said nothing. He handed the thin stack of papers to Shelton, tucked his shirt in once more then leaned against the wall. The chunky cop opened the file, read for a few moments then looked up. "Witnesses report the perpetrator was a white male, medium build and medium height, white slacks, a light blue shirt, tie with a cartoon character of some kind on it. Late twenties, early thirties. Looked like every techie in there, the
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bartender said." The cop walked to the whiteboard and began to write down these clues. He continued.

"ID card around his neck said Xerox Palo Alto Research Center but we're sure that was fake. There were no hard leads to anybody there. He had a mustache and goatee. Blond hair. Also there were several frayed blue denim fibers on the victim that didn't match her clothes or anything in her closet at home. Might've come from the perp. The murder weapon was probably a military Ka-bar knife with a serrated top."

Tony Mott asked, "How'd you know that?"

"The wounds're consistent with that type of weapon." Shelton turned back to the file. "The victim was killed elsewhere and dumped by the highway."

Mott interrupted. "How could they tell that?'"

Shelton frowned slightly, apparently not wishing to digress. "Quantity of her blood found at the scene." The young cop's lengthy blond hair danced as he nodded and seemed to record this information for future reference.

Shelton resumed. "Nobody near the body drop site saw anything." A sour glance at the others. "Like they ever do Now, we're trying to trace the doer's car - he and Lara left the bar together and were seen walking toward the back parking lot but nobody got a look at his wheels. Crime scene was lucky; the bartender remembered that the perp wrapped his beer bottle in a napkin and one of the techs found it in the trash. But we printed both the bottle and the napkin and came up with zip. The lab lifted some kind of adhesive off the lip of the bottle but we can't tell what it is. It's nontoxic. That's all they know. It doesn't match anything in the lab database."

Frank Bishop finally spoke. "A costume store."

"Costume?" Anderson asked.

The cop said, "Maybe he needed some help to look like this Will Randolph guy he was impersonating. Might be glue for a fake mustache or beard."

Gillette agreed. "A good social engineer always dresses for the con. I have friends who've sewed together complete Pac Bell linemen uniforms."

"That's good," Tony Mott said to Bishop, adding more data to his continuing education file. Anderson nodded his approval of this suggestion. Shelton called homicide headquarters in San Jose and arranged to have some troopers check the adhesive against samples of theatrical glue. Frank Bishop took off his wrinkled suit jacket and hung it carefully on the back of a chair. He stared at the photo and the white-board, arms crossed. His shirt was already billowing out again. He wore boots with pointed toes. When Gillette was a college student he and some friends at Berkeley had rented a skin flick for a party - a stag film from the fifties or sixties. One of the actors had looked and dressed just like Bishop.

Lifting the crime scene file away from Shelton, Bishop flipped through it. Then he looked up. "The bartender said that the victim had a martini and the killer had a light beer. The killer paid. If we can get a hold of the check we might lift a fingerprint."

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"How're you going to do that?" It was bulky Stephen Miller who asked this. "The bartender probably pitched them out last night - with a thousand others."

Bishop nodded at Gillette. "We'll have some troopers do what he mentioned - Dumpster diving." To Shelton he said, "Have them look through the bar's trash bins for a receipt for a martini and a light beer, time-stamped about seven-thirty P.M."

"That'll take forever," Miller said. But Bishop ignored him and nodded to Shelton, who made the call to follow up on his suggestion.

Gillette then realized that nobody had been standing close to him. He eyed everyone else's clean clothes, shampooed hair, grime-free fingernails. He asked Anderson, "If we've got a few minutes before that computer's ready I don't suppose you have a shower 'round here?" Anderson tugged at the lobe that bore the stigmata of a past-life earring and broke into a laugh. "I was wondering how to bring that up." He said to Mott, "Take him down to the employee locker room. But stay close."