Cold Case

law.”

“I think you’re the stupid one. I’ve been arranging the laws as it seems fit to me since before your parents were born. You’ve got a nerve to lecture me. Not to mention a foolish streak. The truth is what we Callivants say it is. If we say you’re an intruder—”

“I invited him,” Nikki ground out from between her clenched teeth.

“You are being just as foolish as he is, dear.” The Senator aimed a cold look at her. “You’re not thinking clearly. Sadly, it’s a trait that runs in our female line.”

“Don’t think you can do to me what you did to Aunt Rosaline,” Nikki flared. “With that convenient ‘nervous breakdown.’”

Walter Callivant’s cold eyes looked at his great-granddaughter as if she were some sort of lab specimen. “Yes,” he said, “you’re very like Rosaline. But once she’d been committed and started on medication, she became much less of a problem.”

A new voice came from the doorway. “That’s enough, Father.”

Matt remembered Megan’s description of the pleasant Walter G. Callivant she’d met at that formal hoedown. But the gray-haired man who faced them now looked more like the harassed junior senator the comedians all made fun of. It was the hunted look in his eyes. “What’s this all about, Nikki?” Walter G. asked.

“It’s about Priscilla Hadding.”

Nikki’s grandfather flinched, but he didn’t retreat. “It was an accident,” he said softly. “But I’ve never been able to forget it. All these years, it’s stuck with me. We — I was just about your age. We’d gone to a party — a pretty rowdy affair. Silly and I — that’s what we called her, you know.”

He took a deep breath. “Silly and I were out in the Corvette, arguing as usual. Then she was cursing at me, going to leave. I gunned the engine to drown out what she was saying. That Corvette — that was more car than I could handle. Somehow, it got into gear—”

Walter G. Callivant’s face was no longer bumbling or vague as he looked back on that memory. “It almost flew down the road. By the time I got it stopped — Silly’s foot — it had been caught in the door—”

His eyes squeezed shut, and he brought up his hands to cover his face. “But it was an accident,” his muffled voice came from between his fingers.

“A bad-looking accident — especially for a Callivant,” Walter Senior suddenly spoke. “He was my son. It would have reflected badly—”

“On you,” Nikki said angrily. “So you covered it up. Clyde Finch saw his chance. He got hold of a similar car and switched the license plates. It got him a new job, and, thanks to his daughter, he got into the family — sort of.”

“At least Marcia knows how to keep her mouth shut!” Walter Callivant, Sr., didn’t look so senatorial all of a sudden.

But Nikki was far from shutting up. “You let Mrs. Hadding dangle all those years to protect your lie. How —”

“Angela Hadding is a typical example of what happens if you let a woman speak her mind,” Walter Senior cut in.

I bet that attitude must have gone over well with the women voters, Matt noted silently. Then he spoke. “But freezing out a childless widow wasn’t enough. You had to keep people away from those old court records. So you overreacted when your security system sent off hacker alarms. Clyde Finch managed to trace the hacker to the D.C. area. He must have spread his search pretty wide to come up with Ed Saunders’s mystery sim.”

“I thought he was stretching things, too, when he came up with that scenario,” the senator said. “But after our legal people sent the usual letters, we suffered a major hacker attack.” He turned to Nikki. “The hacker erased our family history site, filling it with nasty questions about Priscilla Hadding. And he wanted to blackmail us.”

Matt stared at him. “And that was enough to justify killing Ed Saunders and Oswald Derbent as well as the hacker?”

The eyes of the man in the wheelchair blazed with fury. Apparently it was the first time in decades that someone had questioned Walter Callivant’s decisions. “We didn’t know who the hacker was — we only suspected it was somebody in that sim. Saunders’s death was an accident,” Callivant snapped. “Finch had arranged for him to be mugged. We wanted to get the list of sim participants from him. We figured we could step up the pressure on all of you and find the hacker.”

“It certainly stepped up the pressure on Ed,” Matt agreed ironically. “It killed him.” He shook his head. “And it was totally unnecessary. The poor guy had already sent your lawyers the letter naming the participants.”

“How were we to know?” Callivant Senior demanded. “The fool tried to run and slipped on the ice.”

Matt nodded in understanding. “Of course — it’s much more sensible to stand around and get beaten up.”

Callivant was so angry, he wasn’t censoring himself at all. “I said it was an accident. What about you? What about the threats you sent us after Saunders died? You claimed you had enough already to destroy my son’s candidacy.”

“Not me,” Matt told him. “The hacker, we suspect, was Harry Knox. You must have thought so, too, once your lawyers got Saunders’s list. If you checked people’s backgrounds, you’d have come upon the juvenile charges against Knox for hacking.” He leaned forward. “Was the failure of his truck’s brakes supposed to be another warning?”

“We were dealing with a criminal,” Callivant said stiffly. “My grandson Daniel devised a response and saw the job through.”

“Just like a spy novel,” Matt continued to needle information out of the old man. “Did Daniel get his hands dirty monkeying with the brakes, or was it a high-tech job, like what happened to the autobus? Did he use an EMP to send the truck’s circuits haywire?

“It’s a secret technology.” A little belatedly Callivant Senior clamped his lips shut.

“A government secret, you mean,” Matt said. “As opposed to a Callivant secret. By the way, Net Force is still looking at that bus. I hope Daniel hid his tracks well.”

“But you got the hacker,” Nikki burst out. “Matt told me that Knox had a computer full of information about us. Why did you continue to go after those people? Why did Oswald Derbent’s house burn down? Why did you almost kill Matt?”

“You believe him?” Scorn sizzled in the Senator’s voice. “Unauthorized access to files continued—after that Knox person was eliminated. Worse, it took place on an even more sophisticated level. We targeted those who were most likely to use hacking technology. Derbent had been a systems auditor before he devoted himself to book collecting. And the boy”—Callivant jerked his chin at Matt—“he’s an obvious danger.

“Unauthorized access,” Nikki echoed, looking numb. “That — that was me. I started looking into the files. I heard about all those people getting in trouble because of the old Hadding case, and I wanted to see what it was all about.”

“You?” Senator Callivant looked as if he were on the verge of having a stroke. “You? ”

“I got one person killed,” Nikki went on, her voice hollow. “And three more almost killed.”

“You didn’t do a thing,” Matt said grimly. “Your father did, though. I bet he had a hand in the ‘accident’ at Derbent’s. And the Senator already admitted the use of your father’s spy-toy on the bus.”

Callivant Senior was still concentrating on Nikki’s treachery. “You are no longer part of this family,” he grated. “You Judas!”

“I wish I weren’t a part of this family!”

Everyone had forgotten about Walter G. Now they turned to him. Nikki’s grandfather suddenly looked years older than he had mere minutes before. “Father, what I did was an accident. But you, Clyde…Daniel…you killed —”

“We protected you.” Years of frustration and disappointment sounded in the Senator’s voice. “We knew you needed protection.”

“Just what I needed, Father,” Walter G. said bitterly. “More blood on my hands. I feel so…safe.”

He stepped around his father’s wheelchair and strode quickly away.