‘‘And even if your people,’’ I said, turning to Hester, ‘‘had rights to the stuff, they’d just hand it over to Eff Bee One.’’ I used the derogatory term for the FBI. Well, one of them.
‘‘Sure,’’ said Hester. ‘‘No administrator can take the hard decision. Even if it kills the investigation. He’s still ‘done the right thing.’ ’’ She shrugged. ‘‘That’s a lot better than trying to explain why you permanently screwed up the evidence.’’
It was quiet in our little room.
‘‘Well,’’ said Sally, ‘‘that’s terrible.’’
It was quiet again, for what seemed like a minute.
‘‘Are we agreed,’’ I asked, ‘‘that there’s likely to be stuff on those machines we need to see?’’
‘‘Oh, sure,’’ said George. ‘‘No doubt.’’
‘‘Yeah,’’ said Hester. ‘‘Probably quite a bit. For all the good it’ll do us.’’
‘‘Well,’’ I said, ‘‘do we agree that Herman is probably not a computer genius?’’
We did.
‘‘And even if his wife is ten times brighter, he’s still going to have to be able to run it without screwing it up too bad if he makes a mistake?’’
We agreed about that too.
‘‘So just how heavily encrypted can this be? Just a simple password, probably?’’
Probably would be. We agreed on that too. In fact, we also agreed that it wouldn’t be too complex, and would be something that Herman couldn’t possibly mess up.
‘‘Like,’’ said Sally, ‘‘his name?’’
I’d almost forgotten she was there. But she was probably right.
It was silent for a few seconds more.
‘‘Is it time to eat supper yet?’’ I asked.
‘‘That all you think of?’’ asked George.
Eighteen
The plan was this: When the two agents from the lab crew got in, they’d have several priorities. First of all, they’d be thinking both about supper and about their motel room. Fine. George, as the resident agent, would offer to take them to a good restaurant. Actually, the only restaurant. But, given the press being all over the place, they surely couldn’t leave their evidence in their car. Nor, given the sensitivity, could they very well leave it at their motel. Especially after George would explain that we thought we’d seen some known extremists in the area. Where would they store the evidence until they could get it to the lab? Why, at the Sheriff’s Department, that’s where. Where else?
George was really funny, saying things like ‘‘I can’t believe you’re actually going to go through with this,’’ and ‘‘I can’t believe I’m going to be a party to this,’’ and things like that. His own curiosity, however, was the deciding factor. He was totally suave with the lab guys.
I didn’t do too bad myself, writing out a receipt for each separate component of the computers they’d brought in: a tower, a desktop, and a laptop. Two monitors, one printer, and one external modem. And one external 5?-inch disk drive.
‘‘Must have been running old software,’’ I said, writing the serial number of the drive on my sheet.
The youngest of the lab agents glanced at me when I said that. Suspicious of people, he wasn’t too happy leaving the equipment with someone who knew what it was. Like I’d do anything…
Anticipating that they’d be polite and ask Hester and me to go with them, we decided we had already eaten. We were also busy. But ‘‘thanks anyway.’’
After the computers were in our padlocked evidence room, the absent Lamar and I being the only two officers with a key to the heavy padlock, and while the agents were eating and then sleeping, what would the local homicide unit be doing? Slick, no? I doff my hat…
About an hour later, Hester and I were sitting in the tiny evidence room, with almost no ventilation, locked in by Sally, who had been entrusted with my key to the padlock, and whom I would contact via walkie-talkie to let us out. Having finished taking three Polaroid shots of the computers just the way the FBI agents had placed them in the room, and then struggling with the extension cords we’d had to scrounge up to even get power to the computers, not to mention having to sit on the floor with the machines, as there were no tables in the room, only shelves, I was having second thoughts about the whole business.
We had finally completely assembled and wired up two of the machines, leaving the laptop aside. It appeared to have a dead battery, and we sort of thought that it would likely just have copies of the stuff in the desktop anyway. The lab crew had seized the printer, thank God. And now we were into the machines at last.
‘‘Well,’’ I said, turning on the tower, ‘‘let’s see what he’s been running…’’
A mouse click on ‘‘Start… Documents’’ showed us the last fifteen documents that had been opened. Most of them started with ‘‘ltr’’ and had a date. All we had to do was click on one of them, and the word processor of choice automatically loaded from the hard drive. Click on ‘‘save as’’ and we had a complete list of documents. We printed them all.
Next, on to ‘‘the Net.’’ Click on ‘‘Properties… Navigation. .. View History’’ and we got the ‘‘www’’ addresses of every site the machine had accessed in the last twenty days. Almost six hundred of them. Print ’em, Dano.
Next, I went to the e-mail section. That was where we hit the dread ‘‘Crypto’’ device. It said ‘‘Enter Password for Access.’’ There were two boxes. I typed in ‘‘Herman’’ on the top, and ‘‘Nola’’ on the bottom. That’s all there was to it. Got every message they’d sent or received since, apparently, April 11, 1995. I started the printer, a neat little ink-jet. Quiet too. I began with the ‘‘Messages Sent’’ list. I had to print them out individually, so it took a while. Had to reload the paper twice.
‘‘Well, damn,’’ said Hester.
I chuckled. ‘‘Easy as pie…’’
‘‘Now for the hard part,’’ she said. ‘‘Will the lab team be able to figure out we were in?’’
‘‘Oh,’’ I said, ‘‘probably.’’ I got busy bringing up the ‘‘Messages Received’’ section. ‘‘ ’Cause if we erase the record of our entry, we erase all of ’em. To do that, we have to go one layer further down than the ‘clear entry’ boxes, and that gets easy to grunge up.’’
‘‘Grunge up? Is this, like, a computer term?’’
‘‘Well, kind of. What I mean is, if we do that, and it hasn’t been done on anything else, it looks like somebody did something really different on the box… and this setup is so simple, it would look funny if somebody cleaned it up.’’
‘‘Oh.’’
‘‘So,’’ I said, inordinately pleased with myself, ‘‘shall we try the next one?’’
Since it was so easy, and neither of us really had to do anything, we started reading the received messages. They started with the most recent, and progressed in reverse order to the first received. It was about the third one down. It looked like this:
FROM: BRAVO6@XII. COMONCOMON. COM
TO: STRITCHHERMN@WIDETALK. COM
SUBJECT: YOUR GUEST
DATE: WEDNESDAY, JULY 24, 1996 2:31 PM
DON’T LET HIM IN. HE’S GOT A BOMB. BE SAFE. KILL HIM.
We looked at each other. I spoke first. ‘‘Son of a bitch.’’
‘‘Yeah,’’ said Hester, with a long breath. ‘‘Son of a bitch.’’
‘‘We should get a long sheet…’’ I said.
‘‘We don’t need one,’’ said Hester. ‘‘Wednesday. Two-thirty. Two thirty-one. Adjusting for the time…’’
‘‘God…’’
‘‘Right when they shot Philip Rumsford.’’
‘‘Remember,’’ I said, ‘‘remember when Nola spoke to somebody inside and then they shot him?’’
‘‘Oh, yeah…’’
