The Blue Nowhere

theMARINKILL 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 lean 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, this victim, Lara Gibson, ran a Web site and lectured about how women can protect themselves. 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 thevictim was going to meet for dinner last night. Randolph wasn’t involved—he’s been in New York for a week—but we found a digital picture of him on the victim’s computer and they look alike, the suspect and Randolph. We think that’s why the perp picked him to impersonate.
    “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 conning somebody, pretending you’re somebody you’re not. Hackers do it to get access to databases and phone lines and passcodes. The more facts about somebody you can feed back to them, the more they believe you and the more they’ll do what you want them to.”
    “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 dinner plans. She tried to call Lara but her phone was out.”
    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