Pearl thought about going back and asking Rudd where Quinn’s old computer might be, but she decided against it. She had a pretty good idea.
She sat down at one of the new computers and booted it up. “Programs the same on all of these?” she asked another of the teenage techies. This one was a boy with a bad complexion and a bushy unibrow over watery brown eyes.
“Just like your old one only bigger and faster, ma’am. Sort of like a second marriage to a younger man.”
Pearl looked at the pimply punk, wondering if he might be coming on to her. But he seemed oblivious as he did something to the back of one of the tower units with a screwdriver. He removed the cream-colored metal shell case which was apparently attached only by a few small screws, then began tinkering with the computer’s electronic guts.
Pearl leaned to the side so she could see. “That the hard drive?”
“Hard as you like it, ma’am.”
Pearl stared at the kid. He smiled and went back to his work.
What’s with me this morning? Does the male sex somehow smell recent activity?
Pearl keyed in her PIN and went to the software program that matched items in the evidence room with dates and case numbers. As soon as she typed in Quinn’s name, a reference number came up that would act as a guide, much as the Dewey decimal system helped to locate library books.
She copied the number on a Post-it, then shut down the computer and walked back to the evidence room.
A sleepy-eyed sergeant was on duty behind a counter, sitting down and engrossed in a New York Post. Pearl flashed her shield and logged in, and the sergeant went back to reading what looked like yet another piece on Anna Caruso.
Pearl pushed through a wooden swing gate and entered a caged-in area in a windowless room built onto the back of the precinct house over twenty years ago.
It wasn’t hard to find the computer, wrapped in plastic on the second shelf of a tier of metal shelves. Pearl glanced around. At this hour she was alone. She had privacy.
She made sure the tag on the computer matched the reference number, then dragged it over to the edge of the shelf and turned it around. After peeling back about a yard of masking tape, she slipped the plastic wrapping from the computer.
Pearl had been afraid to borrow a screwdriver from one of the techies, but she’d brought the Swiss Army knife she carried in her purse.
Its screwdriver worked just fine. It took her less than ten minutes by her watch to detach and lift off the computer’s rectangular metal case, remove the hard drive, then replace the case. Within another few minutes she had the computer rewrapped and taped, and back in its original spot on the steel shelf.
The hard drive was shiny steel and about the size and shape of a paperback book. She tucked it into her waistband beneath her blouse, then returned to the squad room.
“Going out,” she said to Sergeant Rudd, who was still busy with his paperwork.
“Why? Those kids making you feel dumb?”
“’Fraid so.” She grinned.
“Used to be,” Rudd said, “people got smarter as they got older.”
“That was always just a rumor,” Pearl told him as she pushed open the heavy door and went out into the morning heat.
As she walked toward her unmarked, she glanced at her watch. Not yet eight o’clock. If she remembered correctly, the stock market didn’t open till nine-thirty. If she drove fast and didn’t get bogged down in traffic, she should have time.
Of course she could make her destination in plenty of time if she used the light and siren. Trouble was, she wasn’t on a call, and it wasn’t an emergency, so strictly speaking, it was against regulations.
Pearl decided to use the light and siren.
When she turned the car onto Michelle Quinn’s block, the dashboard clock said it was eight-fifty. The stock market wouldn’t open for another forty minutes, so it was possible that Michelle was still in her apartment.
Pearl left the unmarked in a no-parking zone and jogged across the street toward Michelle’s building. It was the first time she’d seen it. Her other meetings with Michelle had been at a coffee shop near her office in the financial district. It was an obviously expensive building, with a uniformed doorman who looked like the dictator of a small country. Michelle must know her stuff as a stock analyst. In fact, from what Pearl had heard, any analyst out of prison and still employed after the recent bear market must know his or her stuff.
She gave the doorman her name and told him who she was here to see. He studied the tiny screen of a personal digital assistant he produced from a secret pocket in his tunic. One of his eyebrows arched.
“She isn’t expecting me,” Pearl said.
She stood back and admired his epaulets as he phoned upstairs to see if Michelle Quinn was home and receiving visitors dressed like Pearl.
She was, and she was.
Quinn’s sister was standing with her door open so Pearl would locate the apartment easier. Michelle was dressed for work in a pinstripe gray skirt and blazer, a lighter gray blouse, with a red-and-gray tie-or rather dressed for going to work, with her white sneakers sharply contrasting with the somber outfit. Pearl knew that like many New York career women, Michelle would carry her conservative, uncomfortable shoes in her purse until she reached her office.
When Pearl approached, Michelle smiled and extended her hand. “Something important?”
“Maybe. I don’t want to take up a lot of your time,” Pearl said as they shared a handshake.
“If it’s about Frank, go ahead and take it up.” Michelle ushered her into a spacious and tastefully furnished apartment with a magnificent sun-touched vista of the city and the Hudson River beyond. The air, which seemed fractured by the crystalline light made somehow more intense by passing through the slanted panes, carried a faint, pleasant lilac scent.
“Nice place,” Pearl said, wincing inwardly at her understatement. Most people in Manhattan would kill to live here. Pearl, maybe.
Michelle offered her coffee, which Pearl declined; neither woman had time to waste.
They went through the living room into a book-lined den furnished in rich wood and soft leather of the sort that looks worn-out the day it’s bought. On a wide walnut desk sat a blue-and-gray computer-it might have been lifted from the control panel of the starship Enterprise. Michelle motioned toward a chair, but Pearl declined again and reached into her purse. She drew out the hard-disk drive she’d removed from Quinn’s old computer. “This is-”
“I know what it is,” Michelle interrupted. Caution had crept into her voice. She gave Pearl a look, something like the one Quinn sometimes gave her.
“I won’t tell you how it came into my hands,” Pearl said, seeing Michelle’s problem, “but I will tell you where it’s from. It was part of the computer that was on your brother’s desk in the squad room when he had his problem.”
Michelle stared at the tiny steel rectangular box and frowned. Pearl wasn’t sure what she was thinking, but she felt like telling Michelle not to fret so much. This was something she was getting from a cop; it wasn’t Enron all over again.
Of course, on a personal level, it might be worse.
Michelle moved closer and reached out and accepted the hard drive, gripping it firmly, obviously keenly aware that her fingerprints were now on it. This was a woman who sized up the game and didn’t make a move lightly.
“I’m sure a lot’s been deleted,” Pearl said, feeling better about Michelle now. Quinn said she could be trusted all the way, his good true friend as well as his sister.
“Not much actually gets deleted,” Michelle said, “unless whoever’s doing it really knows how. Or whoever’s trying to recover it doesn’t know. Prisons are full of people who mistakenly thought they deleted incriminating evidence on computers.”
“I remember from seeing on my own computer how it keeps a kind of log-times and sites visited on the Internet. A chronological record of where I’ve been. If you were to arrange them chronologically…” Pearl was
