The Cat Dancers

18

That night, Cam called Annie from home. She must have looked at her caller ID, because the first thing she said was, “They’re already here.”

“Your baby-sitters.”

“Yeah, my favorite people. Manceford County SWAT deputies.”

“ In the house?” Cam asked.

“Does it matter?” she said with an almost audible grin.

He thought for a moment. She was in lockdown for the night, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to traipse over there for a quickie. “Consider it a refreshing break,” he said.

She laughed out loud this time. “I would,” she said, “except for why they’re here.”

“It’s a precaution we have to take, Annie,” Cam said, not joking now. “That guy pretty much guaranteed there’d be another one.”

“He sure as hell has,” she replied.

“What?” Cam asked.

“I’ve got mail,” she said, imitating the AOL greeting. “Would you believe an E-mail message, complete with picture of a hooded guy sitting in that goddamned chair, pointing at me, the viewer?”

Cam sat up in his chair. What the hell was this? And why hadn’t he known about it? “When?” he asked.

“Late this afternoon, on my workstation computer. In chambers, no less.”

“God Almighty. I thought the courthouse system was really secure.”

“Apparently not,” she said “It was an attachment to an E-mail purporting to be from Steven Klein. Subject line was ‘Simmonds Ruling Appeal.’ Of course I opened it. We’d all heard that Raleigh’d told him not to bother. And for the record, no, Steven didn’t send it. Nor did his computer.”

“Son of a bitch! But how the hell did someone get that into the courthouse system?”

“Into the courthouse LAN and the state judiciary’s very private wide-area network,” she said.

“Your system administrator get on it?”

“Yeah, buddy,” she said. “Plus some very nice nerdlings from your Computer Crimes division. They’re baffled, or so I’m told. At first blush, the implications are not good.”

“Shit, I guess not,” Cam said, thinking immediately of the chair. He heard a click on the line.

“Gotta take this,” she said.

He said good night and hung up. Maybe someone inside the courthouse system had sent the E-mail. And wherever James Marlor was, chances were he wasn’t hiding out in the Manceford County courthouse basement-unless, of course, he had him some inside help.

The next morning, Cam ran into the sheriff and told him about the E-mail getting into the judges’ network. Bobby Lee was quick to see the implications. He immediately started talking Internal Affairs, but Cam turned that off for the moment. “Let me get some facts, identify the technical parameters, and then I’ll brief you,” he said. That seemed to mollify the sheriff for the moment. The term technical parameters was one of Bobby Lee’s favorites. No one in the Sheriff’s Office understood precisely what it meant, but Bobby Lee was always willing to wait for those boundaries to be identified.

Cam met with Kenny in his office and asked why he hadn’t been informed that the judicial network had been penetrated. Kenny said he hadn’t gotten the word until earlier that morning.

“If Judge Bellamy’s hate mail came from the Web,” Kenny said, “it had to get past both the honcho server in the sky and its fire wall, and then past the courthouse LAN server and its fire wall, and he also had to know her address on the state judiciary network.”

“She said the attached file format was improper, that it shouldn’t have come through.”

“Right,” Kenny said. “The system is set up for official business only, so baby pictures, porn, streaming audio for your MP-three player-that shit gets stopped at the fire wall. Only the human system administrator can make exception to the rules, and that person has to be sitting at the honcho server’s keyboard to make that happen when the message first appears.”

“But this one just appeared in Bellamy’s desktop terminal?”

“Yup,” Kenny said. “So somebody inside the system had to know a lot, and fool all those fire walls.”

Cam went to get some coffee. Even talking about computers gave him a headache. “What do the guys in Computer Crimes say?” he asked.

“Not guilty?” Kenny offered. “I mean, if anybody could do it, those guys could do it.”

Cam looked at him. “You mean like some kind of sick joke?”

Kenny shrugged his shoulders. “Bellamy’s not in any cop’s top ten on the judicial hit parade just now,” he said. “Could have been another judge, too, for that matter. Anybody who has access to their private little judiciary network.”

Cam sat down in his chair and slowly rotated in place behind his desk. “So what’s this all mean, Kenny?” he asked. “This can’t be Marlor.”

“Not likely,” he said. “I’m leaning toward the ‘sick joke’ angle-somebody who knows what’s going on, and who’s really pissed off about what she did in the first place.”

“Somebody who also knows that we have her under protection?”

Kenny sat down in the one chair Cam had in the office. “No, probably not. That just happened.” He hesitated. “People are pissed, boss. She didn’t have to dismiss. Klein showed his ass, she had a migraine, who the fuck knows, but when she turned those little pricks loose, that was definitely not righteous.”

“What will it take to find out who did this?” Cam asked. “The sheriff wants the shooflies in.”

“Mostly, it would take a lot of time and some really expert people,” Kenny said. “Maybe we ought to go hire that Bawa honey.”

“At two grand a day? I don’t think so.”

He told Kenny he’d talk to the sheriff some more, and he asked him to generate a memo covering what he had just explained about the networks.

“Technical parameters?” Kenny asked with a grin.

“Just so,” Cam said. Horace stuck his head in and said, “The fling-wing is set up. Time on top at the Detention Center helipad is eleven hundred hours.” Like Cam, Horace was ex-Army and loved his military lingo.

“Don’t you think a police helo appearing overhead might spook the guy?” Kenny asked. “Especially if he’s been frying guilty bastards?”

“Maybe,” Cam said. “But if he runs, he’s more likely to bump up against the grid, and then we’ll know he’s alive and operational. Right now, that’s almost as important as finding him.”

Kenny nodded slowly, a distant expression on his face. “You think he’s dead?”

“I don’t know,” Cam said. “He could have flipped out. Living out there, growing a long beard, communing with the wildlife, and studying Buddhism.”

“And if that’s what he’s doing…”

“Right,” Cam said. “If that’s what he’s doing, then someone else is doing this shit. Someone a lot closer to home than Marlor. And I don’t even want to think about that.”