Cold Case

16

On Monday afternoon the stream of students coming out of Bradford Academy generally moved quickly — happy to escape the first day of the school week. Matt Hunter was at the tail end of the rush. While he was glad that classes were over, he wasn’t exactly eager to face another ride on an autobus.

Physically he was okay. The cut on his head was bandaged, and had developed a Technicolor bruise that pained him whenever he touched it. The good news was that David hadn’t broken his leg again. David’s recovery was still on track, and he now had a much fancier cane, courtesy of Captain Winters.

While the media had kept the kids’ names out of the fairly sensational story of the autobus run amok, the Bradford rumor mill had been working overtime. According to the rumors, not only had Matt, Megan, and David been passengers on the mad bus, but apparently they were supposedly responsible somehow for the disaster. If the questions he was hearing were any guide, the kids at school thought they had somehow reprogrammed the bus into believing it was a race car. They also seemed to think that doing so was really, really cool. Nobody seemed to realize how close to getting killed they’d come — or to be able to explain why something that stupid would be cool.

Matt had kept his own opinions away from his new fan club — that anybody who tried that experiment while riding the bus deserved a broken head for their efforts. The only thing he regretted was that none of his new friends had offered him a lift home.

On the other hand, who’d want a ride from someone who admired people who destroyed safety interlocks?

Matt’s mother had given him a lift to school this morning. But now Matt had to face the autobus alone.

It’s just like the guys at the rodeo, he told himself. You’ve got to get back on the horse that threw you.

That didn’t quiet the little voice in the back of his head that whispered, What if another car comes by with one of those trick antennas?

The thought of going through the same adventure, this time on a bus jammed with students, made him shudder. On the other hand, waiting for an empty bus didn’t seem like the answer, either.

What I really need, he thought, is for Nikki Callivant to come by and —

His thoughts were interrupted by the beep of a car horn. Matt turned to see the now-familiar bronze car. Behind the wheel, Nikki Callivant had reduced her disguise to a baseball cap and sunglasses.

She pushed the shades up on her forehead to get a good look at him. “What happened to you?” she asked.

Matt came around and got in the passenger door. “Did you hear about the suburban autobus that went on the fritz? I was riding it. Quite a coincidence, huh?”

Nikki took her glasses off to stare at him. “I saw that on the news. What—”

“Here’s something that never made the evening report. I was riding home with two friends. We’d spend the afternoon poking around in a computer that belonged to Harry Knox. You remember Hard-Knocks Harry? The truck driver whose big rig decided to take a dive?”

The rich girl continued to stare.

“By the way, I think he’s the one your family had the problem with. He must have obsessed on you Callivants. Had all sorts of crap he’d gotten off the Net — in addition to material he must have hacked.”

“And now you have it—?”

“No, we’ve spread it out as much as we could,” Matt told her. “It seemed a little safer that way.”

“Safer,” she repeated, sounding almost dazed.

“I’ll share one of the less earth-shaking tidbits he collected,” Matt went on. “What does the Cowper’s Bluff Nature Preserve mean to you?”

Nikki blinked. “It’s a — well, it’s a major Callivant cause. The Senator — my great-grandfather — started it. Years ago he saw the way things were going with the Chesapeake Bay. He bought some shoreland that was little more than a dump, fenced it off, and started the preserve. He used our family prestige to recruit other wealthy contributors. Some have even donated adjoining parcels of land. Now the preserve is a major bird sanctuary.”

She spread her hands. “It’s one of the reasons I was at the Junior League event where I met your friend Megan. Quite a few socially prominent families support Cowper’s Bluff.”

“How nice for the birds,” Matt said.

“Why would that man have anything about the preserve in his computer?” Nikki asked.

“You’ve got me there,” Matt admitted. “But he had all sorts of stuff. Publicity. Maps. Pictures. We were looking at them on the autobus — before things got exciting.”

“What—” She stopped to swallow. “What happened?”

“The unofficial version?” Matt asked. “We think somebody came up in a car and scrambled the bus’s electronic brains. Net Force is looking into it.”

“Net Force?”

“Anything weird that happens with computers brings Net Force in,” he explained. “Even if you might expect the National Transportation Safety Administration instead.”

“How did you manage to keep the media people away?” Nikki asked.

“Easy,” Matt replied. “We’re not Callivants, and we’re underage. The underage part is also good for court records. You can ask your grandfather about that.”

A faint reddish tinge crept onto her cheeks when she heard that. But Nikki shrugged and started the car. “I guess you’d be glad of a lift all the way home this time,” she said. Then, touching on Matt’s last verbal dart, “I think Grandpa Clyde could talk more about youthful offenses.” Nikki managed a grin. “To listen to him, he had a pretty colorful time growing up.”

Matt shook his head. “Maybe it’s because I’ve been reading too many detective novels lately,” he said. “But you make Clyde Finch sound like the Great Detective’s butler — the reformed safecracker.”

Nikki’s grin faded. “What do you mean?”

“I hear how you speak about the Callivant side of your family. Your great-grandfather is still the Senator, capital S. And Walter G. is Grandfather. But when it comes to Grandpa Clyde — you sound more like you’re talking about a servant than a relative.”

A full flush came to Nikki’s cheeks. “You mean I’m a snob? Maybe. But so is Grandpa Clyde, in his own way. He told me years ago, ‘Every family has its in-laws and its outlaws. I know where I fit — I’m definitely the Callivant outlaw.’”

She glanced over at Matt. “He was never going to fit into society. My grandmother Marcia kept at it, and she’s a Callivant now.”

“You make it sound like a disease,” Matt said. “‘Can-she-ever-be-cured’ kind of stuff.”

Nikki Callivant sat very straight behind the wheel. “Now you’re just being insulting,” she said.

“Okay, I’ll apologize for that,” Matt said. “But you haven’t answered my question. Is Clyde Finch family or just a servant?”

She was silent for a long moment. “I guess he’s the closest thing we’ve got to an old family retainer,” Nikki finally replied. “Servants never stay. Never have. We weren’t encouraged to get — personal — with them. When I got too attached to a nanny, she was replaced. But Grandpa Clyde was always around. A lot of the time he seemed to be the only non-Callivant I could talk to.”

“But how did you feel about him?” Matt pressed.

Nikki Callivant didn’t look at him, keeping her eyes on the road. “Maybe — maybe I looked down on him. But I also envied him. He wasn’t a Callivant. He was free. Not a captive, like me.”

After that, except for a few brief directions offered by Matt, they drove in silence.

Leif was working on some programmed classwork when the display on his computer suddenly went blank — everything saved and shelved. The audio cue that sounded — a shrill “peep-peep-peep!”—told him what was going on. The program he’d given to Matt had initiated a trace. Now it was sending to Leif to see if he wanted to join the hunt.

He gave his computer a few orders, adding its resources to the tracing job. That was just machine versus machine, anyway — trying to backtrack along the message’s programmed zigzags through the Net. No need for a