by Donn Taylor
I decided to keep digging, and pointed my metaphoric shovel toward the gymnasium and Brenda Kirsch. Her office door stood open and I found her seated behind her desk. Her emerald-green warm-ups emphasized her roseate complexion, and her black eyes glittered as they had at our surreal tea party.
“Hello, Press,” she said. “What brings you to the low-rent side of the campus?”
That was a smart opener. The new gymnasium complex had cost more than the sum of half the other buildings on campus. Brenda was serving catnip for my envy, but I hadn’t come to argue about the administration’s spending priorities.
I tried my own opener. “Tell me what happened to the blackjack you keep in your desk.”
Surprise flickered across her face, quickly replaced by studied impassiveness. “What blackjack?”
“The one you keep in your desk drawer,” I said.
She showed a coy smile. “How would you know what I keep in my desk?”
“Look,” I said, “two people on this campus have been murdered, and I’ve been attacked in my own home. I know you kept a blackjack in your desk. What happened to it?”
She smiled again. “Now I know who stole the dean’s passkeys.”
“What happened to the blackjack?”
She looked down and opened the middle desk drawer. “It’s gone,” she said. She didn’t look surprised.
“Suppose you tell me where you got it and why you kept it.”
For once she seemed sincere. “You heard that two football players had a fight a couple of weeks ago? I broke it up right after one used a blackjack to split the other’s scalp. Having any kind of weapon on campus would get him expelled, and the team needed him. So I kept the blackjack and only reported the fight. President Cantwell put both boys on probation and that was the end of it.”
“What happened to the blackjack?” I was getting tired of asking.
Brenda again looked coy. “I don’t know. I looked for it after you got slugged—that is, after you said you did—and it wasn’t there. Some other thief with a passkey must have stolen it.”
“Did the sap have blood on it?”
“I didn’t examine it.” The black eyes flashed. “Now tell me, Press. Who poked around in my office? Was it you or that blonde Wiccan who stays nights at your house?”
“She doesn’t stay nights at my house. We were supposed to meet with Dr. Sheldon at his nursing home. When I didn’t show and didn’t answer my phone, she came to check on me. She found me unconscious and looked after me till I could care for myself.”
“Which conveniently took all night.”
“I got struck pretty hard.” For emphasis, I touched the still-swollen knot on my head. When I did, I wished I hadn’t.
“Struck by what?” Brenda laughed. “She is very attractive.”
“There is nothing between us,” I said.
She cocked an eyebrow in disbelief. “It’s too bad, Press. I can understand why you prefer a blonde, but you and I could have had a beautiful friendship.” She gestured expansively to match her flight of rhetoric. “Why, with your historical imagination and my . . . attractive qualities, we could have matched the greatest friendships of history, like . . .”
“Hansel and Grendel,” I said.
“Yes. . . . No, that doesn’t sound quite right. But you know what I mean.”
“I know exactly what you mean,” I said. “Were you the one who slugged me?”
The black eyes flashed again. When angry, she looked as fierce as Threnody Harkins. “Professor Barclay, I’d never in my life do anything like that.”
“Never in your life? Was it in some other incarnation you brained that boy in Prosperity with a two-by-four?”
Her face reddened. “I’d heard you took your little Wiccan for another overnight out west. You’ve both been snooping where you have no business. That can be dangerous.”
I didn’t let the reference to Mara sidetrack me. “What did that boy in Prosperity say that you wanted to put him in the hospital for three weeks?”
“That wasn’t my intention,” she said, and I had a momentary vision of her black-widow image among the china cups. “I didn’t want to put him in the hospital. I wanted to kill him.”
“Like you killed Laila Sloan?”
She laughed again. A derisive, humorless laugh. “So we’re back to that. No, I didn’t kill Laila, though in the old days I sometimes wanted to. And I didn’t even know Marcus Fischbach.”
“Are you the one who slugged me?”
“If I had hit you, Press, you wouldn’t be here to ask. The boy in Prosperity wouldn’t have lived, either, if someone hadn’t grabbed my arm when I swung.”
She showed a bitter smile. “You’re in over your head, Professor Barclay.” She turned the formal title into an insult. “If you and your blonde companion keep poking into other people’s business, someone’s going to send you to join Laila and Marcus Fischbach.”
“And who might that someone be?”
“I wouldn’t know, Professor.”
So now I didn’t even have a name.
“You’re the one playing detective,” she said. “But if you and your pagan professor friend keep doing what you’re doing, you’re going to find out who it is. The hard way.”
That ended the interview. As I wandered back home, I evaluated my afternoon’s work. I’d talked with each of our five main suspects and hadn’t turned up a single bit of usable information. All I’d accomplished was to make them angry. Angry enough for each to issue a warning that could be interpreted as a threat.
I wondered which one really meant it.
CHAPTER 38
When I arrived at Dr. Sheldon’s room that night, the others had already gathered. Our host’s wheelchair occupied the usual spot, and Richmond Seagrave sat facing him. His copper goatee glistened and, as always, I wondered if he waxed it. Mara’s chair formed a triangle with the other two, though she’d backed off more than the usual distance. I placed my own chair opposite hers, expanding their triangle into a diamond.
“Let’s get started, children,” Dr. Sheldon said. “I believe Mara has new information.”
Her chin raised the familiar fraction that meant she had her wind up. I wondered what had set her off.
“Sergeant Spencer called,” she said. “Morris Wimberly’s alibi checks out. He really was in Denver when Laila was killed. That takes us back to our original five suspects.”
“Except for Marcus Fischbach’s murder,” Dr. Sheldon said. “The field remains wide open on that one.”
“Not quite,” I said. “Someone tried to make it look like Mara killed Fischbach, and someone had already tried to throw suspicion on her for Laila’s murder. That suggests a link between the two.”
“Suggests,” Dr. Sheldon repeated. “Not proves. Where is your historian’s sense of fact?”
“Historians entertain working hypotheses,” I said. “That one is logical enough until a better one comes along.”
Dr. Sheldon knew when to change the subject. “Well, Preston, before we approach our chief subject of the evening, suppose you educate us on your accomplishments since my distinguished barrister sprang you from the hoosegow.”
“I’ve managed to make a lot of people mad,” I said. “Mad enough to threaten me. But I haven’t learned one bit of new information. I might as well have stayed in jail.”
Dr. Sheldon raised his eyebrows. “I daresay Captain Staggart can arrange that.” With Dr. Sheldon, the eyebrow habit wasn’t irritating, as it had been with Brice Funderburk.
He opened his mouth for further comment, but Seagrave interrupted. “You amateur Sherlocks can chase murderers on your own time. My interest is computer capers.”
“Enlighten us, then, dear boy.” Dr. Sheldon wasn’t going to be oneupped by people he defined as children.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Seagrave said. “If you’d told me beforehand, I wouldn’t have believed it.” He gave me a pitying look. “Your colleague Earl-George
doesn’t have sense enough to come in out of the rain.”
“He’s not my colleague,” I said. “He’s staff, not faculty.” Standing on protocol is always a good move when you don’t know what’s coming next.
“You do Earl-George an injustice.” Dr. Sheldon assumed his platform-lecture voice. “He does indeed know enough to come in out of the rain. It is true, however, that he needs a qualified meteorologist to tell him when it’s raining.”
“Be that as it may,” Seagrave said, “he let a stranger sell him the Brooklyn Bridge.”
Dr. Sheldon would not be denied. “I take it he should have preferred the Golden Gate?”
Mara’s foot beat a light tattoo on the floor. “If you learned gentlemen have finished insulting poor Earl-George, I’d like to hear what’s wrong with the computer network.”
“Glad to oblige.” Seagrave stroked his goatee and looked at Mara, who responded by studying the wall above my head. “When I debugged your computers last week, I suspected something wasn’t right with the network. Part of Press’s hard drive had been scrubbed, yet he said he hadn’t done it. He also said the computer was new when he got it, and he was the only person who used it. That didn’t prove anything, of course, but it suggested someone was entering his computer from the network or perhaps somewhere outside of it. That’s why I dropped everything and came when President Cantwell requested my services.”
His tone grew ironic. “Press, you’ll be happy to know your boss didn’t hire me on your word alone. He asked for references and checked with them before he committed.”
“President Cantwell has complete confidence in me,” I said. “That’s why I’m on suspension.”
Dr. Sheldon harrumphed. “Less byplay, children, and more substance.”
“It seems that your network added another server about three years ago,” Seagrave said. His voice carried to all of us, but his eyes focused on Mara.
Seagrave continued. “You know Earl-George’s reputation for scrounging equipment. So when a well-dressed stranger walked in, claiming to be an alumnus, and offered him a late-model server with free software and other goodies, Earl-George didn’t ask foolish questions. He did think to ask his benefactor’s name. The stranger said his name was Joe, and Earl-George was too polite to ask, ‘Joe Who?’”
“What did this ‘Joe’ do?” Dr. Sheldon leaned forward in his wheelchair.
“He installed the server and software and the other stuff,” Seagrave said, still speaking to Mara, who continued her study of the wall. “And he worked too fast for Earl-George to keep up. Earl-George didn’t worry about that, though. He was getting free equipment from an alum, so how could he lose? Sure enough, the network immediately speeded up.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “The alumni donors I know want their gifts documented as deductions for income tax. Most of them want photos of themselves shaking the president’s hand while a covey of good-looking college girls throws admiring glances at them.”
“Not this fellow,” Seagrave said, stroking his beard and looking at Mara. “Joe said he liked to remain anonymous while he performed his ‘random acts of kindness.’ All he wanted was a signed receipt, which Earl-George was happy to give him. Earl-George had his equipment and the network ran better than ever, so why should he tell anyone where the stuff came from? He kept his mouth shut, accepted compliments for the improved network, and never saw Joe again.”
Mara lowered her gaze from the wall and turned her acetylene torch on Seagrave. “Earl-George should have known to ‘fear the geeks, even when they bring gifts.’ ”
It was a bad pun on a good translation of The Aeneid. Virgil would have approved of it, but it went right over Seagrave’s head. I wondered what he’d done to raise Mara’s ire.
Dr. Sheldon wasn’t going to be upstaged. “Seagrave,” he said, “I have revised my estimate of Earl-George. It is quite possible he wouldn’t know what to do when the meteorologist told him it was raining.” He paused for effect, then asked, “So what did this anonymous Joseph do to the network?”
“Something I’ve never seen before,” Seagrave said, “and several things I still haven’t figured out. But here’s the general outline. There’s supposed to be a record of everything that goes out of a network or comes into it. This network does produce a record, but the record doesn’t stand up under examination. As near as I can figure, that new server leaves the network around eleven every night and does its own thing until about six the next morning. But there’s no record to show what it does.”
“Wouldn’t the lack of a record be pretty obvious?” Mara asked.
Seagrave beamed like a professor rewarding a bright student. “It certainly would. So Joe set up a program to create a false record. I almost didn’t find it. At first glance, the rogue server’s record seemed good enough. But I noticed that a couple of its entries looked like some I’d seen for the network’s other servers.”
“That’s a fantastic memory job,” I said.
Seagrave stroked his goatee and showed a self-satisfied smile to Mara. “I get paid for noticing things,” he said. “But my memory wasn’t conclusive—only good enough to create suspicion. For proof, I ran a matching program.”
He glanced at each of us in turn. I confess I was hanging on every word.
“My program,” Seagrave continued, “showed that, in the last month, every log entry for that server between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m. duplicated a log entry from another server.”
I whistled. “Setting that up must have taken some fancy programming.”
“Joe knew his computers,” Seagrave said. “I haven’t yet found the program he used. As a matter of fact, there are several areas of the network I haven’t been able to access at all. Tomorrow I’ll test my hacking skills on them.”
Dr. Sheldon cleared his throat. “What do these irregularities add up to?”
Seagrave frowned. “I’m not sure. I do know that some of the campus computers have been zombied—controlled from a remote location and used for heaven knows what. It’s what I suspected, Press, when I found part of your hard drive scrubbed. That opens up all sorts of possibilities for computer crime: information or identity theft, changing or deleting important documents, denial-of-service attacks on commercial Web sites, and the like.”
“Information theft?” I mused. “Bob Harkins wondered how another researcher duplicated his research and beat him to the patent office.”
I was ready to scratch Bob off our list of suspects until Mara spoke up. “When Professor Harkins became a victim, he may have decided to victimize someone else.”
Seagrave continued his recitation as if we hadn’t spoken. “Computer crimes don’t have to be new. Old crimes like fraud, forgery, extortion, and blackmail can be adapted to computers. Let’s say you’re a moderate-sized firm doing a lot of business through a Web site. One day so many computers access that Web site at once that it goes down—a classic denial-of-service attack by an army of zombied computers. That happens a couple of times, and the company loses several days’ revenue. Then someone contacts the company and offers to keep it from happening—for a price. That’s the old extortion racket adapted to the computer age.”
Dr. Sheldon’s jaw flexed. “Are you implying that some criminal organization—?”
Seagrave shrugged. “I don’t know what’s going on, except that it’s not legitimate. Tomorrow I’ll try to find out.”
“One thing I don’t understand,” Mara said. “If someone on the network is misusing it, couldn’t you tell which computer it was coming from?”
“You should be able to.” Seagrave repeated his praise-for-a-bright-student smile. “But Joe was a very clever fellow. He also gave Earl-George a wireless connection.”
“Wait a minute.” Dr. Sheldon looked like a thundercloud. “When Earl-George and President Cantwell talked with me about classes on the Internet, they both said wireless access had been added within the last month.”
“Cantwell thought he was telling the truth,”
Seagrave said, “but Earl-George knew better. Part of his bargain with Joe was to keep quiet about the wireless access, and Joe promised to secure the wireless connection with a complex password.”
I felt like I’d been hit with Brenda Kirsch’s two-by-four. “So anyone with the password, a car, and a wireless-capable laptop could drive within range and connect.” I could see my list of suspects fading into irrelevance—assuming, of course, that both murders were somehow related to the network irregularities.
“Exactly.” Seagrave looked at me but withheld the bright-student smile. He didn’t stroke his goatee, either. “The intruding computer would almost certainly be a laptop. I scanned the hardware and software configurations of all the campus computers. None of them have been upgraded for wireless capability.”
We all exchanged glum looks, and no one said anything.
“Well, children,” Dr. Sheldon said presently, “we seem to have reached an impasse. Let us adjourn for now and reconvene when one of us has learned something new.”
He wheeled his chair toward the door. I don’t think anyone ever accused him of being subtle. The rest of us stood and drifted in that direction.
“Mara,” Seagrave said, “I saw that someone drove you out here. Do you need a ride home?”
Her smile stopped short of her eyes. “That’s very kind of you, Mr. Seagrave, but I’ve already accepted Press’s offer.”
I tried not to look surprised. To change the subject, I said to him, “Sorry I was out of pocket when you arrived in town. I’d planned for you to stay at my place.”
He showed a wry grin. “From what I hear, your place is too hazardous for a peace-loving guy like me. Some people get assaulted there, some get their cars bombed, and others get killed. I’ll stick with the motel, where it’s safe.”
“The motel may be safe now,” I said, “but remember what happened to Marcus Fischbach when he started poking around the computer network.”
Seagrave’s grin disappeared. “I’m always prepared.” He patted the left breast of his coat where in the old days he’d carried an Army Colt .45 in a shoulder holster. With a final frown at Mara, he departed.
