Alien Nation #1 - The Day of Descent (17 page)

Kirby rested her head on her hand again, interest flagging. “How do you do that?”

“A lot of people who use computer-mail services will send copies of electronic mail to themselves or store copies of their own or others’ letters in the system’s memory. I’m going to take a look for any copies.”

“Don’t you need a search warrant or something?” Kirby pulled the remnants of the Doritos bag away from her father. Orange crumbs sprayed out across the smudged surface of the table’s glass top.

“That’s a gray area,” Grazer said, looking up from the keyboard. “Your father has a search warrant for Dr. Petty’s house—that’s automatic in a murder investigation. It covers correspondence, even from third parties. But there’s never been a case to establish if such a warrant applies only to correspondence that
exists
in the searched premises as opposed to correspondence that can be
read
in the searched premises.” Sikes recognized the familiar glassy look that came into Grazer’s eyes. “You see, under current precedent, if correspondence can be read in the searched premises, then the court presumes that the correspondence
exists
within said premises. Technically, however, electronic correspondence
doesn’t
exist in the premises—”

“Uh, Bryon,” Sikes said, trying to break the detective’s rhythm while there was still a chance.

“—even though it
can
be read there. It’s actually quite a fascinating legal conundrum. One that I’ve devoted considerable study to because of the way it will impact on future cases. Interestingly enough, it goes back to a case in Boston in 1892 when a Civil War veteran—”

“Uh, Bryon, I think the computer wants you to do something.” Sikes waved his hand back and forth at Grazer to bring him back to the here and now. Something was making that strange electronic rushing sound again, and it wasn’t stopping.

“Oh, yes, of course,” Grazer said. He turned over the keyboard, looked at something on its bottom, then flipped it right side up again and typed. The rushing sound ended. “That should do it.”

“Do what?” Kirby asked.

Sikes glared at his daughter. “I don’t think you should ask Detective Grazer any more questions,” he warned. “You’re distracting him.”

But Grazer had no compunctions about undermining parental authority. “Not a problem, Sikes. How’s she expected to learn if she doesn’t ask questions?” Kirby smiled smugly at Sikes. “The first time I logged onto the service I did it under my own account so I could get Dr. Petty’s user number from the public membership index. What I’ve just done now,” Grazer continued, obviously pleased with himself, “is to sign on to the service under Dr. Petty’s account so that the service will think I’m Dr. Petty and give me full access to his mail.”

Kirby lifted her head from her hand. “Don’t you need a password or something to do that?” she asked in a strangely formal way.

“Of course,” Grazer answered. “User number and password.”

Kirby’s eyes were wide. “And . . . you know how to figure out people’s passwords?”

“There are certain psychological techniques that can be applied to recreate likely choices,” Grazer said pompously as he stared at the screen.

“What are they?” Kirby asked with admiration in her voice.

“Didn’t I ask you about your homework?” Sikes said. The last thing he needed was a hour’s lecture on psychological techniques.

“Daddy, this is important. I take computer science in school. This counts as homework.”

Sikes narrowed his eyes. “Nice try, but I don’t think so.”

“I’ll tell you one technique,” Grazer said, as if Sikes didn’t exist. “A lot of people are afraid of forgetting their passwords, so they write them down. All you have to do is go looking for them someplace near the computer.” He flipped over the keyboard again and showed it to Kirby. Sikes saw there was a piece of beige masking tape stuck to the bottom with handwriting on it. “Red motor. As easy as that.”

“Under the keyboard,” Kirby repeated. “All right.”

“Other good places to look are on disk labels, inside a drawer, bottom of the monitor or a desk lamp.”

“How’s it going, Bryon?” Sikes felt that Kirby had had enough of an education for one night. He tried to put together her interest in overcoming computer password protection, her knowledge of erasing hard disk drives, and her familiarity with making international phone calls. He wasn’t able to decide what she was doing with all that information, but whatever it was, he was certain he wouldn’t like it.

“Disk labels,” repeated Kirby. “Great idea. People would think it was just a file name or something.”

Grazer tapped at the keyboard again. “It’s going fine, Sikes. You might want to make a note of this.” He read from the screen. “The last time Dr. Petty logged on was at two-thirty-seven yesterday afternoon. The way his account is set up, that would have been during the peak rates, so unless the guy was rolling in money you could probably conclude that he was logging on for an important reason. Something that wouldn’t wait for six o’clock.”

Sikes wrote that down. For all of Grazer’s overbearing self-importance, Sikes grudgingly had to admit that the forensic accounting detective had a fine eye for detail.

“Okay,” Grazer said, “now I’m going into the mail, and . . . there we go.” He tapped at a few more keys. “He’s got two unread letters waiting for him and . . . five older letters stored.” Grazer slipped a floppy disk into one of the computer’s drives. Sikes didn’t know why they called it a floppy because it was in a hard plastic case. But he knew that if he asked Grazer how the name came about, Grazer would probably start his answer with the social implications of the invention of electricity and move on from there.

“I’ll save the letters on this disk, and then I can print them out for you back at the station tomorrow,” Grazer said.

Kirby was running a moistened finger through the few remaining Doritos crumbs in the bag. “Hey, if this is an official investigation, how come you’re doing this here and not at the station?”

Sikes looked at his daughter. If only she would pay attention like that in school. “Like the man said,” Sikes told her, “it’s a gray area.”

“By accessing the mail from here,” Grazer added, “your father can make the case that he was following his own interpretation of his search warrant. If we had logged on under Dr. Petty’s account at the station and a higher-ranking officer had looked over our shoulders, we might have had to desist until we got a definitive ruling from a judge that the search warrant applied to the computer system. Since the system might only store letters for a few days after they’ve been read, we might have lost important information.”

Kirby stared at her father knowingly. “In other words, you didn’t want to get caught. I can understand that.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Sikes asked.

“Nothing,” Kirby said innocently. “So what do the letters say?”

“We’ll read them off-line,” Grazer said. “No sense adding a lot of time charges to the poor guy’s last computer bill.”

Two minutes later Grazer had logged off, and Sikes sat beside him so they could read the letters together. Kirby politely asked if everyone would like a beer from the kitchen, and after a moment’s hesitation both men said yes. The regular work day was long over, and Sikes thought a beer might be just the thing to take the edge off the remaining roughness from last night’s celebration. Come to think of it, he hadn’t noticed any remaining ill effects from the party at Casey’s since Victoria’s passionate farewell at the elevators. Could be proof of our love, Sikes thought dreamily. Either that or my hormones have overwritten my brain three times at random.

The first unread letter was from Petty’s daughter—a short note asking her father to at least send back a “hello” even if he didn’t have time for a full note. She was worried about him, she said. The time code on the message showed it had been sent about five hours after Petty had been killed and about twelve hours before she had called the Westwood police station. There was nothing unusual or suspicious about its contents.

“Did she have to be in Australia to send this from her computer?” Sikes asked. Grazer said that the daughter could have sent it from anywhere. All she needed was a portable computer. Then he scratched at his chin and said that the computer system could probably run a trace to see which communications port had accepted the message and began to explain how that might lead to them identifying in which area code the message had originated, but before he could launch into all the stupefying technical details Kirby returned with the beers. Sikes took a grateful swig from his. Grazer stared at the second bottle Kirby held, then asked her if she could bring him a glass as well.

Kirby looked at Sikes. “Daddy, do you
have
any glasses?”

“Kids,” Sikes muttered after he had told her where to find them and she returned to the kitchen. “How about the second letter?”

Grazer brought it to the screen. It was a sales message from the computer service itself informing “R.R. Petty” that he could qualify for a trip to Hawaii by logging on to another part of the service each day during the coming month. A new prizewinner would be randomly chosen daily from all participants.

“Electronic junk mail,” Sikes said, grateful that there appeared to be at least one benefit of not being computer literate.

“Maybe,” Grazer said. “Could be a coded message, too. Tomorrow we’ll have to check to see if everyone else on the service got the same message.”

Sikes looked at Grazer and took another sip from his beer. He would never have thought of that on his own. Grazer was good.

Kirby returned with a glass for Grazer. Grazer glanced at it, frowned, carefully put the glass down beside the computer, then drank from the bottle after all. “Now I’ll call up the stored letters.”

A list of five messages appeared on the screen, none older than five days. One was from Petty’s daughter. Two were from Petty to his daughter—copies, Grazer said, to confirm delivery of the originals. The fourth letter was from Petty to someone called Amy. And the last was from Amy to Petty. That final message was the most recent of the five, having been sent about two o’clock yesterday afternoon. Grazer said that it was probably the last letter Petty read when he had logged on thirty-seven minutes later. Apparently Petty had never had the chance to send a reply.

“Which one first?” Grazer asked, holding his fingers poised above the keyboard like a concert pianist about to explode into a scherzo by Liszt.

Sikes shrugged. “Start with number one, I guess.”

As Sikes had feared, the boredom of being a detective set in early, as the first three letters between father and daughter contained only inconsequential trivialities. Isabel Petty, apparently an astronomer herself, recounted her days at Woomera, where the most exciting event seemed to be going to the pub where astronomers went early each morning after long nights of observation. Randolph Petty wrote in return about the trouble he was having getting his doctor to do anything about his arthritic knee, and—

“Hold it!” Sikes said excitedly. He began to scrawl a note to himself as he explained his excitement to Grazer. “If Petty had a bum knee, then there’s no way he would have parked at the top level of the garage.” Let’s see Angie talk her way out of that one, he thought happily. “Okay, keep going.”

But there were no other important details in any of the first three letters. Petty talked about food shopping, a restaurant he had been to recently, working with a group of graduate students, and his beloved car. That was all. There was no sign of any conflict between father and daughter.

“Next letter,” Sikes said. His beer bottle had only one more swallow in it, and he told himself to slow down.

But Grazer hesitated. “Didn’t you say Dr. Petty was retired?”

“Yeah, so?”

“So how come he’s working with students?”

Sikes nodded and made another note to himself. “Good point. Maybe he was advising them or something. I’ll check it out.”

“Do that,” Grazer said. “Students coming over to his house. Maybe they see something they want. Cash. Coin collection. You never know.”

Sikes half expected Kirby to chime in with some observation about students killing an old man and was surprised when he didn’t hear anything. He shifted around in his seat as Grazer called up the next letter in the list.

“Hey, Sikes, this might be something,” Grazer said.

Then Sikes saw what his daughter was doing. “Kirby Sikes! Put that down!”

Kirby instantly slammed a beer bottle down on a small table beside the living room chair she sat in, looking up guiltily from a copy of
Penthouse
magazine. Sikes was instantly out of his chair and in front of his daughter. “And put that down, too!”

Kirby slapped the magazine shut. Sikes grabbed it from her. “You don’t need to be reading that.”

“I think I really got something here, Sikes,” Grazer said, apparently oblivious to the scene taking place five feet away in the living room half of the tiny apartment.

“Well, you read it,” Kirby said. “It’s not like I don’t know what the letters are about or—”

“And who told you you could have a beer?” Sikes rolled the magazine into a tube. All he could think of was that somehow Victoria’s flight had been canceled and that any second she would walk through the front door and see her daughter in her father’s capable care—swilling beer and reading a skin magazine.

“You
said it was okay,” Kirby said.

“When did
I
say it was okay?”

“I asked if everyone could have a beer, and you said yes, so—”

Sikes put a hand over his eyes and groaned. “You and your mother. I can’t stand it.”

“Definitely we got a possible motive here, Sikes,” Grazer called out.

“What’s wrong with drinking a beer?” Kirby asked.

“You’re not twenty-one.”

“That’s just in bars and restaurants, Dad. At home, with my parents’ permission, I—”

“You don’t
have
your parents’ permission. You will
never
have your parents’ permission.”

Kirby folded her arms obstinately. “Fine. You want me to drink beer at raves, then that’s what I’ll do.”