"Thanks, John," Bolinger said, standing to leave.
"Why you thanking me?" the captain asked.
"It's better when it's official," Bolinger said with a grin.
"You were gonna do it whether I said you could or not," the captain complained as Bolinger went out the door. "I know you, Bob. You're the most stubborn son of a bitch I've ever known."
Bolinger headed for the law school in an attempt to find out the seminar schedule that Lipton had kept over the past several years. On his way there, he indulged himself with a detour to Lipton's neighborhood. The professor's stately manor was lifeless. Bolinger parked across the street and wandered up the pretty stone drive. On the far side of the house was a landscaper's truck, and from the back, Bolinger could hear the sound of a weed eater.
The rich smell of freshly cut grass filled his nose. As he approached a young Mexican man in a green jumpsuit, he eyed the back of the house for any sign of Lipton. Although wrought-iron furniture adorned the patio surrounding the pool, the pool itself was covered. Bolinger tapped the landscaper's back amid the high-pitched drone of his tool. The man jumped in the air and spun around in alarm. Bolinger disarmed him with a smile. The man shut down the weed eater and in broken English asked how he could be of help.
"Anyone home?" Bolinger asked, casually showing the young man his badge.
The man's eyes widened. He wiped his sweaty forehead with his cap and looked from the cop to the house and back to the cop. "No. No one home for much times."
"Never home?" Bolinger asked.
"No," the man said, fervently shaking his head. "I go here two times every week. No person live here."
"Do you have a card?" Bolinger asked as he removed a cigarette from his pocket. The man looked at him as if he were from Mars.
"Business card," Bolinger said carefully as he lit the Winston. "El nombre de su company."
"Oh, si," he said and led Bolinger to the truck. On the other side was the name Conquest Landscapes along with the phone number. Bolinger wrote it down and thanked the man. He took a tour around the house before he left and saw nothing that indicated Lipton had been around.
No one had seen Lipton at the law school, either. Bolinger got in to see the dean, a stern-looking overweight woman with two last names.
"Obviously, he's not teaching this semester," she told him curtly. She also either didn't know or wouldn't say whether or not he'd be back in the fall.
There wasn't a question he asked that wasn't met with an abrupt answer full of mistrust. The dean apparently had no knowledge of the way in which Lipton scheduled his seminars.
"This is a university," she reminded him, "not a police force. Our professors have private lives outside of the university. Many of them are consultants to businesses or have their own independent undertakings."
In the eyes of such a place, Bolinger thought, he was obviously a bad guy, an overzealous cop, the kind of prying monster that innocent citizens had to be protected from. On his way out of the building, he saw a nerdy-looking kid with a crew cut who reminded Bolinger of his brother when he was a student until the kid opened his mouth.
"You go to school here?" Bolinger asked the kid, who was reading on the steps.
The kid marked his spot in his book with a finger and looked up through his glasses.
"Looks that way."
"You know Professor Lipton?"
"I know who he is, sure, the crim law guy in the murder trial."
Bolinger could tell from his tone that the kid hadn't taken a class with Lipton. There wasn't a hint of the recognition that a student would display for a teacher he'd studied under. Bolinger nodded and said, "If I was a guy who wanted to know about those seminars he teaches… you know what I'm talking about?"
"No."
"Professor Lipton went around the country," Bolinger explained patiently, "giving seminars on his specialty, on criminal law."
"Yeah," the kid said, obviously impatient now to get back to his work.
"How would I find out about something like that?"
"What are you, a cop?" the kid said derisively.
"That's me," Bolinger said.
The kid shrugged and, turning back to his book, he said sarcastically, "How about the Internet? You know… computers."
"I know," Bolinger said gruffly. "I'll let you get back to your studies so you can go out and sue somebody."
The kid might have been a smart-ass, but Bolinger wasn't above taking an idea from anyone. Back at the station, he looked up Rutlege, the department's version of a computer geek. Rutlege was a muscular guy who did triathlons in his spare time. He was the best the Austin police department had in the way of a hacker. Whenever a crook had a computer, chances were Rutlege saw it.
"You remember when we pulled in Professor Lipton?" Bolinger asked.
Rutlege leaned back in his chair and tilted his head back until Bolinger could see the Adam's apple bobbing in his neck.
"Yeah," he said, dropping his head back into place. "I don't remember everything on his machine, but I remember we looked at it."
"Any chance he had his business records on there?" Bolinger said. "He ran these seminars all over the country, and I want to find out where it was he was going. I wondered if you had anything or saw anything that could help me or if you could find some stuff about his seminars on the Internet."
"I could do a search on-line for you, Sarge," Rutlege said. "But as far as his computer, if anything turned up pertinent to the murder we would have told you back then. I don't remember any office files or anything. There could have been. I'll get you my report. It was just a little four- or five-sentence deal, I think, saying that I didn't find anything that would help in the case. I do remember one thing, though."
Rutlege snickered and said, "The guy had some porn files in there. It was funny. I remember the file name, Roman Empire Limited."
"What do you think that means?" Bolinger asked, searching his brain for some connection and coming up with none.
Rutlege shrugged. "I don't know. You could ask the guys in vice. It's nothing I ever heard of, just a file name, I guess. I thought it was kind of unusual, though, the name. So I opened it, and there was some kinky stuff, whips and leather and shit like that with the professor right in the middle of it all. Nothing too crazy, but I remembered it because I was talking to Delucca about it and he wanted me to copy them off for him. He likes that kind of crap. Well, I went back to the property section to get the machine and it was gone."
"Gone?"
"Yeah, seems Lipton's lawyer showed up and demanded if the DA wasn't going to use it as evidence that he get it back."
"Why would the lawyer want the computer?"
Rutlege shrugged. "I don't know. The porn stuff was kinky, but it's not like the DA could have used it. And it's not like Lipton could have used the computer in jail, either. They gave it back, of course. I didn't know about it until it was already gone. Made me think I must have missed something, you know?"
"Could you have?"
Rutlege shrugged. "I hope not, but you know, people have files they can hide and you can't get at them unless you know they're there or unless you look hard enough. I go through so many machines I pretty much just see what files turn up in the regular directories unless someone tells me there's a chance something could be hidden that's important to the case. Then I'll take the damn thing home with me and hack on it over the weekend."