“My guess is that someone left this place in a little bit of snit when he didn’t find what he was looking for,” Mark concluded. “Just like the condo.”
He reached down and picked up some of the stacks of pads and magazines.
“What gave it away for you? Because that plastic fork sticking out of the flat-screen monitor was my first clue.” Nora put down the laptop she’d brought with her and picked up the overturned chair and set it back on its wheels.
“You ever give that wise mouth of yours a break?”
She sat on the chair and pushed off with her legs to roll herself closer to the workstation. “Only when I’m sleeping. Or kissing.”
Immediately, his eyes were drawn to her mouth. Just like she knew they would be. “I hate you,” he muttered.
“No, you don’t. But let’s put that aside for now. Obviously someone was in here. And as you deftly concluded, good money says that he didn’t find it. No reason to destroy mugs and a monitor if you have what you’re looking for.”
“So get to it,” he said.
“Get to what?” she asked staring at the mess. “You need to call your crime scene people and have them look for prints here once they’re done with the condo.”
“Prints aren’t going to do me a lot of good if I can’t find out who they belong to. I need the thing this person is after. Which means I need you to act geek and figure out where our boy might have hidden it.”
As much as she wanted to be insulted, the truth was it wasn’t that hard for her to think like Denny would have in this particular situation. She’d worked on enough programs, programs that she’d poured her creative heart and soul into, to know how important backing up everything was. And knowing Denny like she did, there was probably more than one duplicate file-one off-site, in case of catastrophe and the building caught fire, and one he could easily access to restore the program in case he botched up something and wanted to start over.
She opened a drawer attached to the workstation and found about thirty flash drives tangled inside. The drawer beneath it contained a stack of CDs. Some in cases, some loose. Others had been tossed on the floor. Stepped on.
That didn’t make sense. Why hadn’t the person looking for his work taken everything? If Denny was going to back something up, make a hard copy, it would have most likely been on a flash drive. Easier to carry, easier to hide. But a CD was still possible.
Destroying the disks didn’t make sense unless the killer had already gone through each one as well as the flash drives and found nothing special on any of them. That’s a lot of time spent at a marked crime scene. “You have gloves right?”
“Yeah. In the car.”
“You should get them. Whoever was in here definitely would have handled the CDs and memory sticks. I don’t want to mess up any prints. I have to assume these have all been checked, but I’ve no choice but to go through them again.”
Mark picked up one of the sticks by the attached band that could be used to wear the device around a wrist. “Do you know what you’re looking for?”
“Not really. I’ll recognize Denny’s style. How he used to think. I should be able to read any of his programs. If something strikes me as beyond the norm, I’ll know.”
Mark saw the opened drawers filled to the top and groaned. “This is going to take forever.”
“That’s probably what the person who trashed this room thought. But I’ve got something he didn’t have.”
“What’s that?”
“Patience,” she answered smugly.
Mark left and came back with a kit that had a couple of pairs of thin plastic gloves. He called in the crime scene to headquarters and let them know that when the team was done with the condo, they had a new location to process. As Nora began to feed each of the CDs into her disk drive, her frustration grew exponentially.
“Okay, forget it. There’s no way I’m going to be able to go through all of these.”
“What happened to patience?”
“Patience split twenty CDs and ten memory sticks ago.”
“Just keep looking.”
Nora was about to ask what he was doing in the meantime and saw that he was stacking the magazines and text books and reading whatever was on the legal pads apparently without much success. She could have told him it was a waste of time. Denny had his own language. There was no way he would have left anything decipherable on paper.
When one of the piles he’d created toppled over he cursed, but then reached for something on the floor. “That’s interesting.”
“What?” Nora asked as she popped out a CD and put a new one in.
She glanced at the magazine in his hand. “Fifty ways to improve your sex life. That’s on page 162, if you’re interested.”
“It’s not the article,” he sneered. Although he immediately started flipping pages. “It’s the magazine that I’m interested in.”
“Having a fall fashion crisis?”
Mark ignored her and pointed to the fallen magazines scattered on the floor. “They’re all computer geek magazines. What’s a guy like Haskell doing with a chick magazine?”
“There’s a half-naked woman on the cover. Maybe he was interested in the pictures.”
“Trust me, if he was going to buy a magazine to look at pretty girls, there are better ones to choose from. No, this is a magazine for a woman. You think he had a girlfriend?”
“Doubtful. You had to know Denny. He wasn’t into people. Just computers. If he was having any kind of sex, it was online.”
“I’ll make sure they’re careful with this one when checking for prints. You find anything yet?”
“Nope.”
Each attempt netted her more of the same. More files. More programs. As she scanned each one looking for something unique she felt Mark hovering over her shoulder. Then she heard him breathing.
“I have a new theory,” she announced. “The person who stabbed the monitor had a partner who liked to lean over her shoulder and piss her off. Finally, she snapped. Only what you don’t realize is that before she shoved the plastic fork into the monitor, she shoved it up her partner’s…”
Hands raised in surrender he took several large steps back. “I get it, I get it,” he said. “No pestering.”
“Go kill some time. A man can always make use of fifty ways to improve his love life.”
Dominic watched Caroline in the phone booth across the street for what felt like days although he knew it was only minutes. It had taken them almost an hour to find another pay phone that worked since he didn’t want to risk a trace on his cell now that he was back in San Jose. The section of town they were in wasn’t the best, but beyond the threat of junkies and muggers was the worry of a patrol car that might wonder what a BMW was doing in the neighborhood.
Rain that had picked up since they reached the city limits started to fall harder until his vision of Caroline was almost completely obscured. He was about to go after her, not taking the chance of even remotely letting her out his sight, when he saw her dash across the empty street toward him.
“She’s not there,” she said as soon as she closed the passenger door behind her. “Or she’s not answering. Not on any of the numbers you gave me. And no answering service on the home phone, which seems odd.”
Where the hell was Serena? He’d given Caroline her direct line at the office, the cell phone he’d provided for business needs and finally her home phone. They’d tried earlier this morning as soon as they reached the city limits, again around noon and now after the office was closed. “I wanted to know more before we took the next step.”
“The next step meaning finding where Denny hid his program?” Caroline assumed.
Dominic nodded. “Our best chance is the office. Denny changed how he handled his backups. He got frustrated with the memory sticks because he was always losing them. Instead he set up a special mapped drive on the network that only he had access to. If I could get my hands on the network backup cartridge, it’s likely that Nora
