The Blue Nowhere

Anderson had also heard that Bishop himself didn't even want to be working with Computer Crimes. He'd been lobbying for the MARINKILL case – so named by the FBI for the site of the crime: Several days ago three bank robbers had murdered two bystanders and a cop at a Bank of America branch in Sausalito in Marin County and had been seen headed east, which meant they might very well turn south toward Bishop's present turf, the San Jose area.

Now, in fact, the first thing Bishop did was to check the screen of his cell phone, presumably to see if he had a page or message about a reassignment.

Anderson said to the detectives, "You gentlemen want to sit down?" Nodding at the benches around the metal table.

Bishop shook his head and remained standing. He tucked his shirt in then crossed his arms. Shelton sat down next to Gillette. Then the bulky cop looked distastefully at the prisoner and got up, sat on the other side of the table. To Gillette he muttered, "You might want to wash up sometime."

The convict retorted, "You might want to ask the warden why I only get one shower a week."

"Because, Wyatt," the warden said patiently, "you broke the prison rules. That's why you're in administrative seclusion."

Anderson didn't have the patience or time for squabbles. He said to Gillette, "We've got a problem and we're hoping you'll help us with it." He glanced at Bishop and asked, "You want to brief him?"

According to state police protocol, Frank Bishop was technically in charge of the case. But the detective shook his head. "No, sir, you can go ahead."

"Last night a woman was abducted from a restaurant in Cupertino. She was murdered and her body found in Portola Valley. She'd been stabbed to death. She wasn't sexually molested and there's no apparent motive.

"Now, the victim, Lara Gibson, ran this Web site about how women can protect themselves and gave lectures on the subject around the country. She'd been in the press a lot and was on Larry King. Well, what happens is, she's in a bar and this guy comes in who seems to know her. He gives his name as Will Randolph, the bartender said. That's the name of the cousin of the woman the victim was going to meet for di

"So, he knows all this information about her. Friends, where she's traveled, what she does, what stocks she owns, who her boyfriend is. It even looked like he waved to somebody in the bar but Homicide canvassed most of the patrons who were there last night and didn't find anybody who knew him. So we think he was faking – you know, to put her at ease, making it look like he was a regular."

"He social engineered her," Gillette offered.

"How's that?" Shelton asked.

Anderson knew the term but he deferred to Gillette, who said, "It means co

"Now, the girlfriend Lara was supposed to meet – Sandra Hardwick – said she got a call from somebody claiming to be Lara's boyfriend canceling the di

Gillette nodded. "He crashed her mobile phone." Then he frowned. "No, probably the whole cell."

Anderson nodded. "Mobile America reported an outage in cell 850 for exactly forty-five minutes. Somebody loaded code that shut the switch down then turned it back on."

Gillette's eyes narrowed. The detective could see he was growing interested.

"So," the hacker mused, "he turned himself into somebody she'd trust and then he killed her. And he did it with information he got from her computer."

"Exactly."

"Did she have an online service?"

"Horizon On-Line."

Gillette laughed. "Jesus, you know how secure that is? He hacked into one of their routers and read her e-mails." Then he shook his head, studied Anderson 's face. "But that's kindergarten stuff. Anybody could do that. There's more, isn't there?"

"Right," Anderson continued. "We talked to her boyfriend and went through her computer. Half the information the bartender heard the killer tell her wasn't in her e-mails. It was in the machine itself."

"Maybe he went Dumpster diving and got the information that way."

Anderson explained to Bishop and Shelton, "He means going digging through trash bins to get information that'll help you hack – discarded company manuals, printouts, bills, receipts, things like that." But he said to Gillette, "I doubt it – everything he knew was stored on her machine."

"What about hard access?" Gillette asked. Hard access is when a hacker breaks into somebody's house or office and goes through the victim's machine itself. Soft access is breaking into somebody's computer online from a remote location.

But Anderson responded, "It had to be soft access. I talked to the friend Lara was supposed to meet, Sandra. She said the only time they talked about getting together that night was in an instant message that afternoon and Lara was home all day. The killer had to be in a different location."

"This's interesting," Gillette whispered.

"I thought so too," Anderson said. "The bottom line is that we think there's some kind of new virus the killer used to get inside her machine. The thing is, Computer Crimes can't find it. We're hoping you'd take a look."

Gillette nodded, squinting as he looked up at the grimy ceiling. Anderson noticed the young man's fingers were moving in tiny, rapid taps. At first the cop thought Gillette had palsy or some nervous twitch. But then he realized what the hacker was doing. He was unconsciously typing on an invisible keyboard – a nervous habit, it seemed.

The hacker lowered his eyes to Anderson. "What'd you use to examine her drive?"

"Norton Commander, Vi-Scan 5.0, the FBI's forensic detection package, Restores and the DoD's Partition and File Allocation Analyzer 6.2. We even tried Surface-Scour."

Gillette gave a confused laugh. "All that and you didn't find anything?"

"Nope."

"How'm I going to find something you couldn't?"

"I've looked at some of the software you've written -there're only three or four people in the world who could write script like that. You've gotta have code that's better than ours – or could hack some together."

Gillette asked Anderson, "So what's in it for me?"

"What?" Bob Shelton asked, wrinkling up his pocked face and staring at the hacker.

"If I help you what do I get?"

"You little prick," Shelton snapped. "A girl got murdered. Don't you give a shit?"

"I'm sorry about her," Gillette shot back. "But the deal is if I help you I want something in return."

Anderson asked, "Such as?"

"I want a machine."

"No computers," the warden snapped. "No way." To Anderson he said, "That's why he's in seclusion. We caught him at the computer in the library – on the Internet. The judge issued an order as part of his sentence that he can't go online."

"I won't go online," Gillette said. "I'll stay on E wing, where I am now. I won't have access to a phone line."

The warden scoffed. "You'd rather stay in administrative seclusion-"

"Solitary confinement," Gillette corrected.

"-just to have a computer?"

"Yes."

Anderson asked, "If he was to stay in seclusion, so there was no chance of going online, would that be okay?"

"I guess," the warden said uncertainly.

The cop then said to Gillette, "It's a deal. We'll get you a laptop."

"You're going to bargain with him?" Shelton asked Anderson in disbelief. He glanced at Bishop for support but the lean cop brushed at his anachronistic sideburns and studied his cell phone again, waiting for his reprieve.