Cold Case

14

“Your problem,” Leif Anderson told Matt, “is that you were thinking of the wrong tools. You don’t capture images with your hands. You use a carefully targeted computer program.”

“And you have a computer program that will catch Deep Throat for us?” Matt asked skeptically.

“I have one that will make a good try at tracing Deep Throat, if he or she virtmails you again,” Leif replied. He didn’t mention that the program would also alert him that such a trace was in progress.

In the end everybody had a job. Leif would get the tracing program to Matt — and it was unspoken but expected that he’d also try a raid on the D.M.V. records. Andy would take a whack at Clyde Finch and his background. Matt would get in touch with Mrs. Knox to arrange a look at her late husband’s computer. And he, Megan, and David would do the looking on Saturday.

Leif cut his connection, returning to his own virtual workspace, an Icelandic stave house. Wind-driven snow howled past the windows, but Leif ignored the show outside. He went to a set of floor-to-ceiling shelves, shallow ones, broken up into small niches. Each open box held a program icon.

Reaching the center of the shelves, Leif searched for and found an icon that looked like the carving of a Chinese demon in a very bad mood. Rather than picking it up, Leif hooked a finger behind it and pulled. A whole section of shelving swung away, revealing a hidden set of niches set into the wall. This was Leif’s combination treasure chest and armory. It held the tracking program he was going to lend Matt, and several tools that might make his visit to the Delaware Department of Motor Vehicles much simpler — and untraceable.

Leif’s first choice was an icon shaped like a fishhook. That was the program that would catch on and leave a line to the mystery virtmailer. Then he got one that looked like a miniature hand at the end of a stick, another that looked like a tiny statue of Dracula peeking over his cape, and last, a tiny gold badge. That one was a last resort. It was supposed to contain police codes for demanding information. That would get Leif in real trouble if somebody found it in his possession.

However, he’d have to be caught first, and he’d do his best not to be. Closing the door on his secret hideout, he went to the living room couch. Composing a virtmail message for Matt, he gave an order, holding out the fishhook. A second later there were two in his hands. He put one down, sent off the message with another order, and the icon in his hand vanished.

That was the easy part of the job. Next Leif commanded his computer to contact the long-term record storage system of the Delaware state government. “Maximum confusion,” he added, bracing himself.

The light show of the Net was hallucinatory enough when visitors traveled through it using their normal visualization techniques. Leif’s “Maximum confusion” order implemented a program designed to frustrate any attempts to backtrack his visit to the state government’s computers. To do that, the program bounced him at high speed from Net site to Net site to Net site, sending his connection randomly among millions of data and holographic transmissions. The experience was like participating in a really garish pinball game with a thousand paddles — as the ball.

Just when he thought he couldn’t take it anymore, Leif’s virtual journey ended — right outside yet another of those blank-sided boxes where old, computerized information went to die. Leif didn’t want to try going in yet — if he had, his connection would have been tagged and recorded. Acting more on instinct than on any plan, Leif moseyed away from the front of the construct, heading around to the left side.

It was blank, of course — you weren’t supposed to come in this way. Leif got out the hand-on-the-stick icon. It represented a universal handshaking program, which he now inserted into the glowing neon wall in front of him. It sank in, and then so did Leif. The plan was to blend in with any regular information traffic and make his way to the records he wanted.

Along the way Leif activated his vampire program, which was supposed to make him invisible and help him suck up any information he wanted.

Now came the difficult part. Would there be any protection for information relating to the Callivants? Leif could imagine guarding sealed court records. But forty-year-old car registrations? It seemed safe enough. Still, the body count on Matt’s sim was getting awfully high — it might pay to be careful. And he’d hate to get caught hacking — it would get him booted out of the Net Force Explorers, at the very least.

The Callivant compound apparently was home to a fleet of cars at any given time. Tracking back through the old records, he came across a 1965 Corvette registered to Walter G. Callivant in 1981. Nothing in 1980. Nothing in 1982. No, wait — there was the transfer of registration — to Clyde Finch. A month later the car was junked.

That might explain the picture of Finch in the car, Leif thought. But it raises another question. If you were the proud owner of such a hot set of wheels, happily photographed showing them off, why would you get rid of them?

Friday afternoon came, and Matt felt pretty pleased with himself. He was still alive, and none of the other sim participants had had any trouble. He’d aced a history quiz this morning, and during lunch he’d made the necessary plans with Megan and David for their visit tomorrow with Mrs. Knox.

The widow had sounded pretty harassed when he called. She’d answered on her wallet-phone, but what Matt had mostly gotten was an earful of wailing baby. On hearing that he was calling for Father Flannery, however, the woman had nearly broken down herself.

“It would be such a help,” Mrs. Knox said. “The bank won’t do anything over the phone, and with two kids, it’s hard to get down there. I don’t like computers, but we really need the stuff that was trapped in there.”

She eagerly agreed to having Matt and his friends over on Saturday afternoon. “You know where it is, right? I’ll take the kids out so there’ll be no distractions.”

Most people would be more worried about having near-strangers alone in the house than about the noise level distracting those near-strangers, Matt thought. I guess Mrs. K. figures we’re already digging through all the family secrets in the computer, so she can trust us with the good china.

If there was any in the house.

Matt pushed that downer of a thought away, determined to hold on to his good mood. Dismissal finally came, and he walked to the corner, ready to cross and wait for the autobus home.

A car pulled up at the intersection and honked at him. It was the bronze Dodge concept car. The driver wore oversized sunglasses. This time, however, Nikki Callivant had a khaki cotton hat crammed down on her head.

The horn sounded again, and Nikki beckoned to him. Sighing, Matt went round to the passenger side and climbed in.

“Where to this time?” he asked. “The park again?”

“I thought I’d give you a lift home,” Nikki Callivant said.

“How nice. Would it ruin the mood if I asked why?”

The girl slipped off her shades and gave him a look with those incredible blue eyes. “If you think it’s because I can’t keep my hands off you — you’d be very wrong.”

“A lot of guys think that around you?” Matt asked.

“Too many,” she said curtly. “Maybe it’s a rich-guy thing.”

“Yeah,” Matt said. “I hear their feelings get hurt very easily. In fact, it happens with rich kids in general. Look at the way Priscilla Hadding stormed off on your grandfather, or vice versa.”

“Have you found out any more about that?” It was lucky they’d stopped at a red light. Nikki was staring at his face instead of the road.

“If I found out anything, you’d be the last person I’d tell,” Matt finally said.

A horn sounded behind them, and Nikki had to turn her attention back to traffic. “Why?” she asked as they started moving again.

“Flattered as I am by your attention, you’re the enemy,” Matt told her. “Your family is threatening me and everyone else connected with a dopey little mystery sim with nasty legal stuff for showing any interest whatsoever in what happened in Haddington forty years ago.”

“More than forty years now,” Nikki corrected. She sighed. “Why can’t people let the past be?”

Matt bit his tongue to hold back the traditional P.I. answer—“There’s no statute of limitations on murder.”

“From what the senator — my great-grandfather — says, the media people were actually a bit more decent back then. They still knew some shame and weren’t quite as intrusive.”

“Oh? News feeding frenzies weren’t quite as frequent in the good old days?”

“It’s easy for you to laugh. You don’t spend half your life with your face in someone’s viewfinder. As long as I can remember, I’ve had people poking at me, training me how to behave in public. Don’t show too much emotion. Don’t get into fights. Before you do anything, think how it would look to eighty million people seeing it on a holo display. I can’t even go out on somebody’s yacht without being shadowed by some cameraman in a boat or copter, his telephoto lens at the ready, just hoping I’ll take off the top of my bathing suit.”

“Must be awful, trying to get a tan.”

“See? You just don’t understand!”

“I understand this much about celebrity,” Matt replied. “For fame, fortune, or public service — which is another way of saying power — people court public attention. They hire people to get them news coverage, they dream up publicity stunts. Then, when whatever they do is sure to be deemed newsworthy, they complain about the invasion of their privacy. If your name was Nikki McGillicuddy and you wanted to break into Hollywood, your manager would probably be telling you to drop the top of your bathing suit wherever you went.”

Dull red glowed on the tops of Nikki’s cheekbones. “I never asked—”

“No, previous generations have set up the publicity apparatus for you,” Matt cut in. “But you’re ready to use it — didn’t I hear you talking about being the first female Callivant in the family power-brokering business?”

“You make it sound — I’m a Callivant!”

“And what’s that?” Matt demanded. “A brand name in American politics? Somehow the republic got along for more than a hundred years before a Callivant appeared in Washington. Do you think civilization will collapse if one of your relatives isn’t running things?”

“You dare—”

“Normally, I wouldn’t dare to talk to a Callivant this way,” Matt cut in. “The fact that you’re letting me get away with it, throwing only a mild huff, makes me suspect you want something from me.”

He stared at her finely chiseled profile while she kept her eyes on the road. “The problem is, I’m not all that sure what it is you want.”

“I wanted to see why your friends went out of their way to help you,” Nikki snapped. “What was there about you that inspired such loyalty?”

“And?”

“Frankly, I don’t see it.”

“Well, you know, we children of the lower classes get prickly when our betters take an interest in us,” Matt said pointedly.

Nikki’s voice got soft. “It’s just that you were in trouble, and your friends — no one would do that for me.”

“What are you talking about? You’ve got a house full of security guards to make sure trouble never comes close.”

“Mercenaries,” Nikki said bitterly. “They get fired if people think they’re getting too close.”

“It doesn’t have to be that way.” Matt thought of the stories Leif told about his father’s chauffeur/security guy. Thor Hedvig had been almost as much of a father figure for Leif as Magnus Anderson. “Wait a minute,” he said, “your great-grandfather is in charge of all those mercenaries.”

“Grandpa Clyde.” Nikki’s voice was still soft, but there was a subtle shift…a hardening. “His loyalty is to the family—” her breath caught—“not to me.”

However she’d learned that, it must have been a pretty severe lesson.

Nikki Callivant pulled over to the side of the road. “I wanted you to have this,” she said, passing him a card with her name and a Net address. “I thought that maybe I could help you — or at least talk to you.”

“Yeah,” Matt said, ripping out a notebook page and scribbling his communications code. “Maybe it’s a good idea if we kept in touch. At least this way, you won’t have to honk at me.”

That got a ghost of a smile from her. They sat in the parked car in silence for a while. For Matt, it was a weird feeling. He felt as if he’d really communicated with the rich girl at last, but they weren’t saying anything.

Finally he said, “It’s getting late, and you have a trip back to Haddington.”

“Oh!” Nikki went to start the car.

Matt pointed to the next corner. “There’s an autobus stop over there. That will take care of me. You head for home.”

Moments later he stood at the stop, watching the bronze Dodge slide away into traffic.

She wants to help me, he thought, smiling. But she can’t even get me home.

Leif sighed when he saw Andy Moore’s face swim into being in his computer’s display. Bad enough he was grounded and unable to go anywhere this Friday night. But being the target of one of Andy’s pranks — or having to lend an ear to some of his awful jokes — that verged on cruel and unusual punishment.

Andy looked very satisfied with himself.

“What’s up, Moore?” Leif said warily.

“I took care of my part,” Andy reported.

“Your part of what?” Leif wanted to know.

“Clyde Finch. I was supposed to check him out, remember? That little meeting we had? You got the car? I got the guy? All I needed was a D.O.B., and that I managed to get from one of the books on the Callivants.”

Leif nodded. With a date of birth, it would be easy enough to search for a birth certificate. And nowadays there weren’t that many children being named Clyde. Once he had a location, it wouldn’t be too tough for Andy to find other Finches in the locality.

“So,” he said, “is our boy one of the illustrious Delaware Finches?”

Andy shook his head. “Nope. He’s a New Jersey Finch, born in a lovely town called Carterville. The main local business is a branch of the New Jersey Department of Corrections. Apparently, the Finch family took it as their mission to provide the place with inmates.”

“Really?” Leif said. “That’s a rather interesting background for a cop.”

Grinning, Andy nodded. “Looks like Clyde’s parents moved out of state to save the poor boy from evil influences. By the time he was fourteen, he had already had a few run-ins with the law. In one of them his sixteen-year-old cousin got nailed for car theft. The young genius didn’t have his record sealed because he fought the case on one of those old flatscreen TV shows—Everybody’s Courtroom. Ronnie Finch tried to blame everything on his cousin and lost.”

“Any more on Clyde from Delaware records?” Leif asked.

“He seems to have cleaned up his act after his family moved to Haddington,” Andy said. “Maybe he decided that if you couldn’t beat the cops, you might as well join them.”

“Maybe,” Leif said, his mind already busy trying to see if the new piece of data fit with everything else he’d learned about Priscilla Hadding’s death.

So that was no hick cop who was first to see the death scene, he thought. Instead, we’ve got a pretty streetwise former punk who stumbles across a case involving rich, powerful people.

And a couple of months later he was working for the Callivants and driving a classic muscle car. All the pieces might not yet fit together on that particular puzzle. But Leif already didn’t like the picture he was seeing.

Megan wrinkled her nose. The Knox house smelled of baby food and used diapers, perhaps only to be expected with two really little kids on the premises. In one end, and out the other, she thought.

The place was so small that a smell in any room was soon shared with the others. At least the kids were out. Mrs. Knox had met them at the door with a double-barreled stroller. She’d shown them the computer and bailed, saying she’d be back in a couple of hours. Megan, Matt, and David went into the postage-stamp living room. A swaybacked sofa faced a dedicated holo unit. Squashed in the corner was Harry Knox’s computer console and a worn but good quality computer-link couch.

David frowned as he looked over the hardware. “This looks like a pretty ancient system. If he was trying to hack his way into anything using this junk, it’s a wonder he wasn’t caught on his first try.” He pointed. “It’s like a first-generation Net system, with a docking port for old-style laptops.” Then he looked harder. “Huh. The external adapters have been changed to accommodate machines like this.” He pulled out his own laptop computer, a last shot at the technology devised and marketed by Anderson Investments Multinational. The failure to generate a market had resulted in bargain prices for many Net Force Explorers.

“Maybe Knox didn’t have the money for a brand-new computer system after he got his truck,” Megan suggested. “So he bought himself a laptop and adapted an older model.”

David had already removed the console’s front panel. “Yeah,” he said. “We’ve got ourselves a hobbyist here. All sorts of circuit boards, different makes and models — aftermarket stuff.”

“These were on the kitchen counter where Mrs. Knox said they’d be,” Matt said, offering a double handful of crumpled papers. “Whenever her husband changed the passwords, she’d write them down on scratch pad sheets and stick them in a drawer.”

“Great security,” Megan muttered, glancing over some of the scrawled notations: Icarus287, WILDEYEZ. “Would have been better if she’d put dates on them.”

David continued to poke around in the guts of the system. “This may be more straightforward that I thought,” he said. “I’ll power this sucker up, hook in my laptop, and boot from that.”

With the system up and running, he began running through Mrs. K.’s collection of passwords. A couple of them actually worked, letting him into some of the data areas.

After that the job was to get into the areas that were still marked with virtual “no trespassing” signs. But David had programs to crack his way in — some of them donated by Leif Anderson.

“How’s it going?” Megan asked, watching a hail of strange characters scroll down the system’s holographic display.

“This stuff is encrypted, so I’m just piping it into my laptop,” he said. “Decoding it is going to take some time — but I bet I’ll be able to crack it on my system back home.”

David gestured to the computer in front of them. “Nothing in here is what you’d call cutting edge.” He grinned. “I’m betting it will be the same with his security.”

“If Hard-Knocks Harry’s system is so rickety, how did he get away with his hacking?” Matt asked.

“Two words come to mind,” David said. “Sheer luck.” He pointed again at the hodgepodge of circuits. “I think that when he cobbled this together it gave Mr. Knox a totally unfounded sense of confidence — he began branching out.”

“Until he began jangling somebody’s alarms. Hey!” Megan said, pointing to the display. “Now we’re getting pictures.”

David took a squint at the title of the file. “Oh, yeah. The Cowper’s Bluff Nature Preserve of Chesapeake Bay. There’s a whole bunch of files about this place. This is a public promo.”

Megan frowned. “Was he thinking of taking a vacation there?”

David shook his head. “Almost nobody gets in. It’s a wildlife sanctuary.”

“But he has a bunch of files about it.” Matt repeated. “I hope you’re getting copies.”

“If I copy them, the question will be what don’t we take,” David complained. “This guy stored data the way squirrels store nuts. He’s got stuff from public-access Net sites — everything from P.R. handouts to nonsensical conspiracy theories, jumbled in cheek by jowl with encrypted data he stole but couldn’t translate. And stuck in between, like raisins in an oatmeal cookie, nuggets of court records, police memos, and who knows what else?”

By the time Mrs. Knox and the kids turned up — two and a half hours later — Megan and her friends had printed out the records and saved them to datascrips, as well as putting the home system back online, and the family financial records in a format that made sense.

They also had their laptop computer and a bunch of datascrips filled with as much of Harry Knox’s mishmash of data and misinformation as seemed relevant — and in David’s opinion, a lot that wasn’t.

Mrs. Knox had tears of gratitude in her eyes as they left. Megan felt an uncomfortable mix of emotions. On the one side, she was sorry for a woman who found herself in such a terrible position. But how could the woman live in such — such ignorance? And how had she let herself get in that position, where both she and her children were at risk because of technology she didn’t understand?

Megan didn’t say a word all the way to the autobus stop.

They had a bit of a wait — the Saturday schedule was much more limited than on weekdays. Even though the automated vehicles didn’t require drivers, they did need maintenance. Most of it was taken care of on weekends.

At last the right autobus came up. They were all ready with their universal credit cards to flag the vehicle down, slipping them in the slot by the entrance door to pay their fare.

The autobus was empty — again, not a surprise. This wasn’t a route that led to a mall or amusement center, so Saturday afternoon ridership would be sparse.

“Well, we’ve got our pick of seats,” Megan said, moving along the bus aisle. She waited till David picked a seat, dropping into the one behind him. Matt chose the seat in front. It was the sunnier side of the bus, offering a little more watery, winter sunlight.

As Megan expected, David fired up his laptop as soon as he was seated. “I still think we’ve got the equivalent of Hard-Knocks Harry’s junk-mail file,” he complained, bringing up another view of the bird sanctuary. It showed a reedy inlet as seen from the top of a hill or cliff over-looking an expanse of water.

“There’s nothing to connect birdland here with the Callivants,” David went on.

Matt shook his head. “The preserve is on the Chesapeake. Where?”

David brought up some flowery text.

“There,” Megan said, pointing at a map. “It’s in Maryland.”

Matt, however, pointed to another part of the display. “But the foundation that supports it is headquartered in Delaware. What a surprise! Haddington, Delaware.”

“Silly me,” David grumped. “Of course! This is where they buried the body. But wait! The body wasn’t buried. It was found — about forty years ago!”

Megan looked out the window to ignore David’s sarcasm. That’s why she saw the black car with tinted windows that pulled up beside them — so close, it almost sideswiped the autobus. The rear window was open, but she didn’t see a face. Instead, Megan saw a pair of hands — actually a pair of shiny black gloves — holding up a complicated-looking metal grid. Some sort of antenna assembly?

“Whoa!” Matt called out as the autobus swerved slightly, trying to maintain a safe distance from the car. “Crazy drivers—” he began.

His words were cut off by the sudden scream of the autobus’s turbine engine. The vehicle lurched ahead, pressing Megan and her friends back against their seats while it cut off a car to the right.

These buggies aren’t supposed to do that, Megan thought in surprise. And they’re certainly not supposed to go this fast. What—?

Matt took the words right out of her brain. “What the frack is going on?” he shouted.