Broken Harbour

point. My girlfriend’s called Adrienne, and I’d spork my own eyes out before I’d use that for a password to anything, because I have standards. Take it from me, right: anyone clueless enough to use his kids’ freaking names as a password can barely wipe his own arse, never mind his hard drive. Someone else did this.”

“Someone with computer knowledge.”

“Well, some, yeah. More than the owners, anyway. We don’t have to be talking about a professional, but he knew his way around a machine.”

“How long would it have taken?”

“The whole deal? Not long. He shut the machine down at four seventeen. In and out in less than ten minutes.”

Richie asked, “Would this fella have known you would work out what he’d done? Or would he figure he was after covering his tracks?”

The techie made a noncommittal noise. “Depends. Plenty of guys out there think we’re a bunch of muck savages with barely enough brains to find the on button. And plenty of guys are just about computer savvy enough to land themselves in the shit, specially if they’re in a hurry, which your dude could have been, right? If he was really serious about zapping the crap out of those files, or about covering his tracks so I’d never know anyone had touched the machine, there are ways-deletion software-but that takes more time and more smarts. Your dude was short on one or the other, or both. Overall, I’d bet he knew we’d be able to see the deletions.”

But he had made them anyway. There had been something crucial in there. I said, “Tell me you can get this stuff back.”

“Some of it, sure, probably. The question is how much. We’ve got recovery software that I’m gonna try, but if this dude overwrote the deleted files a few times-and I would’ve, if I was him-then they’re gonna be kind of munged. The damn things get corrupted enough anyway, just through normal use; throw in a little malicious deletion, and we could end up with soup. Leave it with me, though.”

He sounded like he was itching to get stuck in. “Give it everything you’ve got,” I said. “We’ll keep our fingers crossed.”

“Don’t bother. If I can’t beat some half-arsed amateur and his delete button, I might as well hang up the big- boy jockstrap and find myself a job in tech-support hell. I’ll get you something. Trust me.”

“‘Half-arsed amateur,’” Richie said, as I put my phone away. He was still kneeling on the floor, absently fingering a framed photo on the bookshelf: Fiona and a guy with floppy brown hair, holding up a tiny Emma swamped by her lace christening dress, all three of them smiling. “But he managed to get past the login password.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Either the computer was already on when he got here, in the middle of the night, or he knew the children’s names.”

* * *

“Scorcher,” Larry said happily, bouncing over from the kitchen windows, when he saw us in the doorway. “The very man I was thinking of. Come here, you, and bring that young fella with you. You’re going to be very, very happy with me.”

“I could do with being very happy with something right now. What’ve you got?”

“What would make your day?”

“Don’t be a tease, Lar. I don’t have the energy. What have you magicked up?”

“No magic about it. This was good old-fashioned luck. You know how your uniforms went charging through here like a herd of buffalo in mating season?”

I wagged a finger at him. “They’re not my uniforms, my friend. If I had uniforms, they’d sneak through scenes on their tippy toes. You’d never even know they’d been there.”

“Well, I knew this lot had been here, all right. Obviously they had to save the living victim, but honest to God, I think they lay down on the floor and wallowed, or something. Anyway. I thought we’d need a miracle to get anything that didn’t come from a great big clodhopping welly, but somehow, believe it or not, they managed not to wreck the entire scene. My lovely lads found handprints. Three of them. In blood.”

“You gems,” I said. A couple of the techs nodded to me. Their rhythm was starting to slow: they were getting near the end, gearing down to make sure they missed nothing. All of them looked tired.

“Keep your powder dry,” Larry told me. “That’s not the good bit. I hate to break it to you, but your fella wore gloves.”

“Shit,” I said. Even the most moronic criminal knows to wear gloves, these days, but you always pray for the exception, the one so carried away on his surge of desire that everything else gets washed out of his mind.

“Don’t be complaining, you. At least we’ve found you proof that someone else was in this house last night. Here was me thinking that counted for something.”

“It counts for a lot.” The memory of me upstairs in Pat’s bedroom, blithely dumping everything on his shoulders, slapped me with a rush of disgust. “We won’t hold the gloves against you, Lar. I’m sticking to my story: you’re a gem.”

“Well, of course I am. Come here and have a look.”

The first handprint was a palm and five fingertips, at shoulder-height on one of the plate-glass windows looking out over the back garden. Larry said, “See the texture to it, those little dots? Leather. Big hands, too. This wasn’t some little runt of a guy.”

The second print was wrapped around the top edge of the children’s bookcase, like our man had grabbed hold of it to keep his balance. The third one was flat on the yellow paint of the computer desk, next to the faint outline where the computer had stood, like he had rested a hand on there while he took his time reading what was on the screen.

I said, “And that’s what we came down to ask you about. That computer: did you pull any prints off it, before you sent it back to the lab?”

“We tried. You’d think a keyboard would be the dream surface, wouldn’t you? You’d be so wrong. People don’t use a whole fingertip to hit the key, just a tiny fraction of the surface, and then it gets hit over and over at slightly different angles… It’s like taking a piece of paper and printing a hundred different words on it, one on top of the other, and then expecting us to work out the sentence they came from. Your best bet is the mouse-we got a couple of partials that might be almost usable. Apart from that, nothing big enough or clear enough to hold up in court.”

“What about blood? On the keyboard or the mouse, specifically?”

Larry shook his head. “There was some spatter on the monitor, a couple of drops on the side of the keyboard. No smudges on the keys or the mouse, though. No one used them with blood on his fingers, if that’s what you’re asking.”

I said, “So it looks like the computer came before the murders-before the adults, anyway. That’s some nerve he’s got, if he sat here playing with their internet history while they were asleep upstairs.”

“The computer didn’t have to come first,” Richie said. “Those gloves-they were leather, they’d have been stiff, specially if they were all bloody. Maybe he couldn’t type in them, took them off; they’d kept the blood off his fingers…”

Most rookies on their first outings keep their mouths shut and nod at whatever I say. Usually this is the right call, but every once in a while, watching other partners argue and bat theories back and forth and call each other every shade of stupid gives me a flash of something that could be loneliness. It was starting to feel good, working with Richie. “Then he sat there playing with Pat and Jenny’s internet history while they were bleeding out four feet from him,” I said. “Some nerve, either way.”

“Hello?” Larry inquired, waving at us. “Remember me? Remember how I told you the handprints weren’t the good bit?”

“I like saving my dessert for last,” I said. “Whenever you’re ready, Larry, we would love the good bit.”

He got each of us by an elbow and turned us towards the sweep of congealing blood. “Here’s where the male