The Blue Nowhere

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."

"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 hementioned – 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."

The young cop nodded and led Gillette down the hallway. He chattered away nonstop – his first topic the advantages of the Linux operating system, a variation on the classic Unix, which many people were starting to use in place of Windows. He spoke enthusiastically and was well informed.

He then told Gillette about the recent formation of the Computer Crimes Unit. They'd been in existence for less than a year. The Geek Squad, Mott explained, could easily have used another half-dozen full-time cops but they weren't in the budget. There were more cases than they could possibly handle – from hacking to cyberstalking to child pornography to copyright infringement of software – and the workload seemed to get heavier with every passing month.

"Why'd you get into it?" Gillette asked him. "CCU?"

"Hoping for a little excitement. I mean, I love machines and guess I have a mind for 'em but sifting through code to find a copyright violation's not quite what I'd hoped. I thought it'd be a little more rig and rage, you know."

"How 'bout Linda Sanchez?" Gillette asked. "She a geek?"

"Not really. She's smart but machines aren't in her blood. She was a gang girl down in Lettuce Land, you know, Salinas. Then she went into social work and decided to go to the academy. Her partner was shot up pretty bad in Monterey a few years ago. Linda has kids – the daughter who's expecting and a girl in high school – and her husband's never home. He's an INS agent. So she figured it was time to move to a little quieter side of the business."

"Just the opposite of you."

Mott laughed. "I guess so."

As Gillette toweled off after the shower Mott placed an extra set of his own workout clothes on the bench for the hacker. T-shirt, black sweatpants and a warm-up wind-breaker. Mott was shorter than Gillette but they had basically the same build.

"Thanks," Gillette said, do

On the way back to the main room they passed a small kitchenette. There was a coffeepot, a refrigerator and a table on which sat a plate of bagels. Gillette stopped, looked hungrily at the food. Then he eyed a row of cabinets.

He asked Mott, "I don't suppose you have any Pop-Tarts in there."

"Pop-Tarts? Naw. But have a bagel."

Gillette walked over to the table and poured a cup of coffee. He picked up a raisin bagel.

"Not one of those," Mott said. He took it out of Gillette's hand and dropped it on the floor. It bounced like a ball.

Gillette frowned.

"Linda brought these in. It's a joke." When Gillette stared at him in confusion the cop added, "Don't you get it?"

"Get what?"

"What's today's date?"

"I don't have a clue." The days of the month aren't how you mark time in prison.

"April Fools' Day," Mott said. "Those bagels're plastic. Linda and I put 'em out this morning and we've been waiting for Andy to bite – so to speak – but we haven't got him yet. I think he's on a diet." He opened the cabinet and took out a bag of fresh ones. "Here."

Gillette ate one quickly. Mott said, "Go ahead. Have another."

Another followed, washed down with gulps from the large cup of coffee. They were the best thing he'd had in ages.

Mott got a carrot juice from the fridge and they returned to the main area of CCU.

Gillette looked around the dinosaur pen, at the hundreds of disco

"Right," Anderson confirmed. "Is that significant?"

Gillette said uncertainly, "It's probably a coincidence."

"Go ahead."

"Well, it's just that March thirty-first is sort of a red-letter day in computer history."

Bishop asked, "Why?"

A woman's gravelly voice spoke from the doorway. "Isn't that the date the first Univac was delivered?"

CHAPTER 00000110 / SIX

They turned to see a hippy brunette in her mid-thirties, wearing an unfortunate gray sweater suit and thick black shoes.

Anderson asked, "Patricia?"

She nodded and walked into the room, shook his hand.

"This's Patricia Nolan, the consultant I was telling you about. She's with the security department of Horizon On-Line."

Horizon was the biggest commercial Internet service provider in the world, larger even than America Online. Since there were tens of millions of registered subscribers and since every one of them could have up to eight different usernames for friends or family members it was likely that, at any given time, a large percentage of the world was checking stock quotes, lying to people in chat rooms, reading Hollywood gossip, buying things, finding out the weather, reading and sending e-mails and downloading soft-core porn via Horizon On-Line.

Nolan kept her eyes on Gillette's face for a moment. She glanced at the palm tree tattoo. Then at his fingers, keying compulsively in the air.

Anderson explained, "Horizon called us when they heard the victim was a customer and volunteered to send somebody to help out."

The detective introduced her to the team and now Gillette examined her. The trendy designer eyeglasses, probably bought on impulse, didn't do much to make her masculine, plain face any less plain. But the striking green eyes behind them were piercing and very quick – Gillette could see that she too was amused to find herself in an antiquated dinosaur pen. Nolan's complexion was loose and doughy and obscured with thick makeup that would have been stylish – if excessive – in the 1970s. Her brunette hair was very thick and unruly and tended to fall into her face.