Cold Case

“And what’s that?” Matt demanded. “A brand name in American politics? Somehow the republic got along for more than a hundred years before a Callivant appeared in Washington. Do you think civilization will collapse if one of your relatives isn’t running things?”

“You dare—”

“Normally, I wouldn’t dare to talk to a Callivant this way,” Matt cut in. “The fact that you’re letting me get away with it, throwing only a mild huff, makes me suspect you want something from me.”

He stared at her finely chiseled profile while she kept her eyes on the road. “The problem is, I’m not all that sure what it is you want.”

“I wanted to see why your friends went out of their way to help you,” Nikki snapped. “What was there about you that inspired such loyalty?”

“And?”

“Frankly, I don’t see it.”

“Well, you know, we children of the lower classes get prickly when our betters take an interest in us,” Matt said pointedly.

Nikki’s voice got soft. “It’s just that you were in trouble, and your friends — no one would do that for me.”

“What are you talking about? You’ve got a house full of security guards to make sure trouble never comes close.”

“Mercenaries,” Nikki said bitterly. “They get fired if people think they’re getting too close.”

“It doesn’t have to be that way.” Matt thought of the stories Leif told about his father’s chauffeur/security guy. Thor Hedvig had been almost as much of a father figure for Leif as Magnus Anderson. “Wait a minute,” he said, “your great-grandfather is in charge of all those mercenaries.”

“Grandpa Clyde.” Nikki’s voice was still soft, but there was a subtle shift…a hardening. “His loyalty is to the family—” her breath caught—“not to me.”

However she’d learned that, it must have been a pretty severe lesson.

Nikki Callivant pulled over to the side of the road. “I wanted you to have this,” she said, passing him a card with her name and a Net address. “I thought that maybe I could help you — or at least talk to you.”

“Yeah,” Matt said, ripping out a notebook page and scribbling his communications code. “Maybe it’s a good idea if we kept in touch. At least this way, you won’t have to honk at me.”

That got a ghost of a smile from her. They sat in the parked car in silence for a while. For Matt, it was a weird feeling. He felt as if he’d really communicated with the rich girl at last, but they weren’t saying anything.

Finally he said, “It’s getting late, and you have a trip back to Haddington.”

“Oh!” Nikki went to start the car.

Matt pointed to the next corner. “There’s an autobus stop over there. That will take care of me. You head for home.”

Moments later he stood at the stop, watching the bronze Dodge slide away into traffic.

She wants to help me, he thought, smiling. But she can’t even get me home.

Leif sighed when he saw Andy Moore’s face swim into being in his computer’s display. Bad enough he was grounded and unable to go anywhere this Friday night. But being the target of one of Andy’s pranks — or having to lend an ear to some of his awful jokes — that verged on cruel and unusual punishment.

Andy looked very satisfied with himself.

“What’s up, Moore?” Leif said warily.

“I took care of my part,” Andy reported.

“Your part of what?” Leif wanted to know.

“Clyde Finch. I was supposed to check him out, remember? That little meeting we had? You got the car? I got the guy? All I needed was a D.O.B., and that I managed to get from one of the books on the Callivants.”

Leif nodded. With a date of birth, it would be easy enough to search for a birth certificate. And nowadays there weren’t that many children being named Clyde. Once he had a location, it wouldn’t be too tough for Andy to find other Finches in the locality.

“So,” he said, “is our boy one of the illustrious Delaware Finches?”

Andy shook his head. “Nope. He’s a New Jersey Finch, born in a lovely town called Carterville. The main local business is a branch of the New Jersey Department of Corrections. Apparently, the Finch family took it as their mission to provide the place with inmates.”

“Really?” Leif said. “That’s a rather interesting background for a cop.”

Grinning, Andy nodded. “Looks like Clyde’s parents moved out of state to save the poor boy from evil influences. By the time he was fourteen, he had already had a few run-ins with the law. In one of them his sixteen- year-old cousin got nailed for car theft. The young genius didn’t have his record sealed because he fought the case on one of those old flatscreen TV shows—Everybody’s Courtroom. Ronnie Finch tried to blame everything on his cousin and lost.”

“Any more on Clyde from Delaware records?” Leif asked.

“He seems to have cleaned up his act after his family moved to Haddington,” Andy said. “Maybe he decided that if you couldn’t beat the cops, you might as well join them.”

“Maybe,” Leif said, his mind already busy trying to see if the new piece of data fit with everything else he’d learned about Priscilla Hadding’s death.

So that was no hick cop who was first to see the death scene, he thought. Instead, we’ve got a pretty streetwise former punk who stumbles across a case involving rich, powerful people.

And a couple of months later he was working for the Callivants and driving a classic muscle car. All the pieces might not yet fit together on that particular puzzle. But Leif already didn’t like the picture he was seeing.

Megan wrinkled her nose. The Knox house smelled of baby food and used diapers, perhaps only to be expected with two really little kids on the premises. In one end, and out the other, she thought.

The place was so small that a smell in any room was soon shared with the others. At least the kids were out. Mrs. Knox had met them at the door with a double-barreled stroller. She’d shown them the computer and bailed, saying she’d be back in a couple of hours. Megan, Matt, and David went into the postage-stamp living room. A swaybacked sofa faced a dedicated holo unit. Squashed in the corner was Harry Knox’s computer console and a worn but good quality computer-link couch.

David frowned as he looked over the hardware. “This looks like a pretty ancient system. If he was trying to hack his way into anything using this junk, it’s a wonder he wasn’t caught on his first try.” He pointed. “It’s like a first-generation Net system, with a docking port for old-style laptops.” Then he looked harder. “Huh. The external adapters have been changed to accommodate machines like this.” He pulled out his own laptop computer, a last shot at the technology devised and marketed by Anderson Investments Multinational. The failure to generate a market had resulted in bargain prices for many Net Force Explorers.

“Maybe Knox didn’t have the money for a brand-new computer system after he got his truck,” Megan suggested. “So he bought himself a laptop and adapted an older model.”

David had already removed the console’s front panel. “Yeah,” he said. “We’ve got ourselves a hobbyist here. All sorts of circuit boards, different makes and models — aftermarket stuff.”

“These were on the kitchen counter where Mrs. Knox said they’d be,” Matt said, offering a double handful of crumpled papers. “Whenever her husband changed the passwords, she’d write them down on scratch pad sheets and stick them in a drawer.”

“Great security,” Megan muttered, glancing over some of the scrawled notations: Icarus287, WILDEYEZ. “Would have been better if she’d put dates on them.”

David continued to poke around in the guts of the system. “This may be more straightforward that I thought,” he said. “I’ll power this sucker up, hook in my laptop, and boot from that.”

With the system up and running, he began running through Mrs. K.’s collection of passwords. A couple of them actually worked, letting him into some of the data areas.

After that the job was to get into the areas that were still marked with virtual “no trespassing” signs. But