The Blue Nowhere

diving outside her house 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, Restore8 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.
    Anderson didn’t respond to Shelton. He added to Gillette, “But you get your machine only after you analyze the Gibson woman’s computer and give us a complete report.”
    “Absolutely,” the prisoner said, eyes glowing with excitement.
    “Her machine’s an IBM clone, off the shelf. We’ll get it over here in the next hour. We’ve got all her disks and software and—”
    “No, no, no,” Gillette said firmly. “I can’t do it here.”
    “Why?”
    “I’ll need access to a mainframe—maybe a supercomputer. I’ll need tech manuals, software.”
    Anderson looked at Bishop, who didn’t seem to be listening to any of this.
    “No fucking way,” said Shelton, the more talkative of the homicide partners, even if he had a distinctly limited vocabulary.
    Anderson was debating with himself when the warden asked, “Can I see