The second note said, check: endodays, exdeus, fillyjonk, laguna8, omeomi, pixystyx.
More hacker names? They sounded right. Was this some kind of security thing? Was AmMath worried about Firewall, or dealing with Firewall? Or maybe it was Firewall.
I started browsing the rest of the files, all under the general heading of OMS, and twice found the heading "Old Man of the Sea." They'd gotten the Hemingway title wrong, if that's, what it was meant to be. Anyway, the only easily comprehensible part of the files was a huge batch of e-mail and memos that Jack had apparently copied out raw. I looked at maybe three hundred pieces of it, out of fifteen thousand or so, and all of it was routine company stuff: days off, raises, complaints, scheduling.
Of the twenty gigabytes of information on the four disks, the most interesting files I couldn't really open at all. They were five hundred megabytes each and Lane's computer only had 384 megs of RAM. I looked at the first few blocks of each, though, and figured out that the files were graphics of some kind, probably photographs.
Bored and frustrated, I spent a while making two copies of each of the Jaz disks. As I finished, Lane got up, wandered out to the kitchen and began dabbing anesthetic on her burns. I shut down the computer and went out to tell her what I'd found.
"Did his work file. did that have a time stamp on it?" she asked.
"I didn't even look," I said, and we headed back to her office, and cranked the computer up. Lane was standing four inches away from me, looking at the screen, waiting through all the stupid Windows-opening stuff. She was an attractive woman; she looked like she'd feel good. I had the sudden feeling that if I touched her, somehow, something might happen.
But I didn't; I sat looking at the screen, and the moment passed. She moved a little, and wound up a few extra inches away. And when we opened Jack's work file, it did have a time stamp. It was last closed on Sunday, five days before he was killed.
"So he did go in on Sunday," she said.
"You said the cops said he made a phone call from his house and turned off the security system, a camera, and motion detectors," I reminded her.
"Yes."
"That's something we could check," I said.
"How?" She reached down to her arm, unconsciously, to scratch the burns; and caught herself.
"The phone company has these things called Message Unit Details or Message Unit Records," I said. "We called them Mothers back in the bad-old-phone-phreak days. They'll tell you where all the phone calls from your telephones went."
"How do we get them?"
"That guy I called from St. PaulBobby, the one I didn't want you to know aboutcould get them in two minutes," I said.
"So let's get them," she said.
"I have to go out to a pay phone," I said. "You wouldn't want to call that number from here."
"And if we go out to a pay phone, then I won't know it," she said. "It won't be on my long-distance bill."
"That, too," I said.
We went out to a mall and I hooked up my own laptop at a pay phone using a pair of old-fashioned acoustic-adapter earmuffs. After going through the security rigamarole, I got Bobby online and asked him to get me the numbers dialed from all phones at Jack's house on Sunday night, and then on Friday night, when he was killed. He said it would take a few minutes, but he should have them by the time we got back to the house. I said fine, and then added that I needed a mailing address to send him a package.
what?
4 2-Gb jaz disks. need more eyes looking at them. come from stanford.
send to john. he will bring to me.
Lane was looking over my shoulder and said, "So he doesn't mind calling in, as long as we don't call out."
"If you managed to trace the incoming call, it'd probably go back to the local bagel bakery, or Pontiac dealer, or something. He's weird about telephones," I said.
"What does this guy do for a living? Bobby?"
"Databases. Thousands of them. He still does some phone work, but mostly to cover up his database entries. About the only things he can't get into are the ones without an outside connection, and that's damn few of them, anymore. Maybe some military or national security computers; stuff at that level would be pretty tough, though I know he's in some of them. He's been there forever. He's like an unknown, unofficial systems administrator."
The phone was ringing when we got back to the house. Not Bobbyit was an air freight place: Jack's body would arrive the following day, and would be taken to a local funeral home. Lane put the phone down to say something, but it rang against almost instantly. Again, not Bobby.
"Yes, this is Lane. yes? What! What do you mean? Burned down? Well, how much is left? Did it get all of his personal stuff? Well, how bad? Aw, jeez. I told you guysI hold you guys responsible, I'm gonna talk to an attorney, you never let me in there and then I told you somebody killed my brother, and now they burned his house, and you guys didn't even have time to look into it. Bullshit. BULLSHIT! I'm gonna come there, I'm gonna come there as soon as the funeral is over, and I'm going to want to talk to whoever is in charge."
"Was I good?" she asked when she hung up.
"You were very good," I said.
Bobby called ten minutes later. We got the tone, I hastily slapped the muffs on, and two columns of numbers popped up. Between six and midnight Sunday, Jack made three phone calls. On Friday, he made a long-distance call to California at seven o'clock, that lasted twenty minutes: "That's our ISP, I have the same one," Lane said. He made another call at nine forty-five, and nothing later.
"So the nine forty-five call must be the one to the security computers," I said. "We can check that."
"But he didn't call that number on Sunday night," Lane said.
"Which means he didn't turn off the camera on Sunday night," I said.
"Which means that maybe he hadn't found the security system. I wonder if the camera's out in the open?"
I scratched my head and thought about it for a couple of minutes, and finally said, "You know, I think maybe they killed him."
"I've been telling you that."
"Yeah, but I didn't believe you," I said. "There was too much weight on the other side. But if Jack knew about the security system on Sunday, he would have turned it off before he went in. If he found out about the system between Sunday night and Friday night, he'd have known he was in troublethat the camera would have picked him up. If he knew all that, then why didn't he add anything to the letter he sent me? If they scared him, and he knew he was in trouble."
"I just thought of something else," Lane said. "They say he broke into the secure area on Friday night. Well, if he went in there on Sunday night. why didn't he have to break in that time? Why was the first break-in on Friday, when we know he was there on Sunday?"
"One of the first things we do is try to figure out how to get into a place without anybody knowing," I said. "LuEllen and I talked to Jack about that, a little, about not leaving a mark. that's why I looked for the house key at Jack's place. Better to ease your way in, than to break something, and he knew that." I took a turn around the kitchen, working it through, finally shook my head. "I can see how they could have set it up. It'd take two guys, but they'd have to be brutal assholes to shoot that old man, the guard."
"Two guys came to burn down the house," she said. She said it quietly, like a scholar making the killing point.
"Goddamnit," I said after a while. "I think they killed him."
CHAPTER 7
We sent the second copies of the Jaz disks off to Bobby's friend John Smithalso a friend of mine, and an artist himselfand I spent the next two days trying to find something that made sense on the Jaz disks, and working along the edges of the bay, with watercolor. Salty water has a different quality from fresh water, a heavier, more viscous feel. The heaviness was compounded by the light, which was very green and hard. I never got it quite right.