“Which makes his murder . . .”
“A coincidence,” Sikes admitted.
Angie nodded, driving the point home. “He was just the wrong guy in the wrong place at the wrong time,” she said. “If his computer had broken an hour earlier or a day later, none of this would have happened. How much more of a coincidence do you want?”
Sikes stared at the dark screen of the broken computer on his desk. It was the only thing on his desk. An ACROS 386 SX, according to the printing on it—a color monitor sitting on top of a dirty beige box with two disk drive slots, one large, one small, a mouse, and a grimy keyboard with more keys than Sikes could imagine needing on three keyboards.
“But what about where he parked?” Sikes asked, suddenly remembering his earlier suspicions. “Why did he go to the fifth level so late at night when there would be lots of other parking spaces down by the store’s walkway?”
Angie leaned forward and leaned her arms on her knees. Her chair didn’t squeak. “Sikes, you saw the car he was driving. If you had a boat like that, kept it in immaculate condition, where would you park it so it wouldn’t get its doors dinged to ratshit?”
Glumly Sikes nodded.
“He was parked across three parking spaces, Sikes, just like people park their Rolls Royces and their Porsches, right?”
And their Mustang SVO’s, Sikes thought. In public lots he always parked his pride and joy across two spaces, even if he had to pay double.
“So,” Angie said. “Did you pull anything else out of a hat today?”
Sikes shook his head. He felt like he should go back to writing parking citations.
“Not as easy as it looks, is it?” Angie asked. But she said it kindly. She knew half the other officers in the busy room were listening in to what was going on here.
“I thought I was on to something,” Sikes said. “That’s all.”
Angie unlocked a drawer on her desk and pulled out her purse. “That’s the name of the game, Sikes: thinking we’re on to something, then running smack dab down a blind alley. If you manage to get a lead to pay out one time out of twenty, you’re par for the course.” She stood; the shift was over. “You did good today, rook. You’ve got a good eye, an even better imagination, and your heart’s in the right place.” She waved her thumb over her shoulder, pointing toward the door. “Why don’t you let me buy you a beer? I think they might remember you down at Casey’s.”
Sikes made a face. He wasn’t ready to head back in there. Not for a couple of years at least. “Maybe tomorrow,” he said, knowing he should have jumped at the chance to spend more time with his partner away from work. Theo Miles had taught him the importance of that. When split-second decisions were needed on the street, the odds were a lot better if your partner was someone you could count on to be able to read your mind. “I’m not feeling all that good.”
Angie came over, leaned over, and put her hand on the arm of Sikes’s chair. “To tell the truth, rook, after last night’s wingding the station house line was five-to-one you wouldn’t make it through the whole shift without going on sick call. You just cost a bunch of your fellow civil servants a whole wad of money.” She laughed. “Watch your back, Sherlock.” And then she was gone.
Sikes sat at his desk. So much for following my instincts, he thought. He decided he wasn’t up to facing the traffic in the canyons at rush hour. He turned on the computer, just as he had back in Petty’s den.
And the same thing happened. Nothing.
The monitor screen came up blue. None of the keys registered on the screen. Something inside the box bumped and clicked for a minute or so, and that was all.
“Got a problem there, detective?”
Sikes looked up and saw an officious young man looking back. He had a white shirt, a painfully dull red-striped tie, and jet-black hair cut in an almost comically precise duplication of the official diagram in the LAPD Officer Appearance Manual. He also wore his badge and ID card around his neck, the way everyone was supposed to but few did. He thrust out his hand.
“I’m Detective Grazer,” the young man said as they shook. “Bryon Grazer. And you are . . .” He made a show of trying to find the ID that Sikes was supposed to be wearing.
“Sikes,” Sikes said. “Matt Sikes.”
Grazer nodded gravely. “Ah, yes, the new man. Welcome aboard, detective.”
“Uh, thank you . . .” Sikes had been about to add ‘sir’ to his thank you, but then he had noticed that according to his ID, Grazer’s rank was also Detective Three, even though he was acting like a bloody chief.
“So,” Grazer said imperiously as he came around to Sikes’s side of the desk to peer at the monitor screen. “What have we got going here?”
“Not much,” Sikes said. “It’s broken.”
Grazer pursed his lips. “May I?” he asked, and Sikes slid out of his way.
Grazer typed something on the keyboard. Nothing happened. “This yours?” he asked.
Sikes shook his head. “Evidence.”
“I see,” Grazer intoned. Sikes had no idea what there was to see, though. The unsmiling detective reached around to the back of the computer and turned it off. Then he made it apparent that he was counting down from ten by tapping the air with his finger with each number, silently warning Sikes not to talk so he wouldn’t lose count. At zero he flicked the computer on again. “Don’t want to cause a surge,” he said, as if that would somehow be as bad as swallowing a mouthful of broken glass, and that everyone knew it.
Then Grazer listened to the bumping and clicking coming from inside and smiled knowingly. “There’s your problem right there, detective. Your hard disk isn’t mounted.”
“Mounted?” Sikes asked.
But Grazer ignored him. “Be right back,” he said, then shoved back his chair, got up, and marched off to one of the partitioned offices at the side of the common work area. Sikes looked at his own decrepit desk and wondered how much a Detective Three had to suck up to get his own office around here. From the looks of Grazer, though, he looked capable of sucking up big time.
Grazer came back almost instantly, carrying what Sikes recognized as another type of computer peripheral. “I’ll just use my hard disk to give yours a jump start,” he said as he switched off the computer again and attached his disk drive to the back of it. Then, as he burst into a flurry of activity that instantly produced type on the screen, Grazer also launched into a long and boring lecture on the future of the computer in law enforcement. Sikes had the impression he was listening to a well-worn speech. It certainly had no effect on how rapidly Grazer’s hands flew over the keyboard.
“Yessir,” Grazer said as he squinted at a complex patterns of ones and zeros that suddenly scrolled by on the screen. “You’d be wise to get computer literate as soon as possible, detective. It’s the future, no doubt about it. And computer literacy will impact heavily on the career path of any officer who’s on the fast track to command.” He suddenly looked sideways at Sikes. “Do you have any ambitions for command?” he asked in an oddly flat tone.
Sikes shrugged. He hadn’t bothered listening to half of whatever Grazer had been babbling about. “It’s my first day,” he said. Then he looked at the screen, where ones and zeros still rolled by. “What’s all that?”
Grazer took on a professorial tone again. “Ah, well, that’s your problem, isn’t it?”
“My problem?”
“There’s nothing on your disk, detective. Hadn’t been mounted, just as I said.”
“Nothing on it?” Sikes asked. “You mean it’s been erased?” That might be something to look into.
But Grazer smiled smugly. “No, no, no, detective. Usually when a file is erased on a hard disk, the file isn’t really erased.”
“It isn’t?”
“Just the index listing is deleted. The information itself remains on the disk until another file is recorded over it.” Grazer tapped the screen knowingly. “Even if you had deleted the entire index, there would still be file f
ragments scattered over the disk, and with the program I’m using now we could read those files. But as you see, there’s nothing here but random bits. Nada.”
Sikes thought he understood. “So you’re saying that this disk has never been used.” He tried to see how that would fit in. Petty’s hard disk broke. He went out and bought a new one. Installed it. And that meant he would have had no reason for being in the parking garage except to have a meeting with someone!
But Grazer brought him down just as quickly as the idea had grown. “Oh, no. This disk has been used, all right. If it were new, let’s say, all we’d be seeing now would be whole streams of zeros broken up by occasional regular patterns of ones.”
Sikes was at a loss. “Well, if it’s not new but it hasn’t been erased, what else is there?”
Grazer leaned back and tapped his fingers on the edge of Sikes’s desk. He made his pronouncement. “It’s been overwritten.”
How about overbearing? Sikes thought. “And what does that mean?”
“Every sector on this disk has been recorded over with a random assortment of zeroes and ones. Three times is the government encryption standard.”
Sikes felt as if he were knocking down a house one brick at a time. “And why would someone want to do that?”
Grazer thrust out his bottom lip in thought. “To prevent anyone from recovering any of the information that might have been on the disk to begin with.” He pressed a key, and the screen cleared. “That’s it. There’s nothing recoverable on the disk at all.” He glanced at Sikes. “Any idea what might have been on it?”
Sikes shook his head. An old man’s computer correspondence with his daughter? Tax records? How many different kinds of information could a computer hold? “Is it hard to do? Overwriting, I mean.”
“Oh, no, not at all. There are lots of programs that do it. Utilities, they’re called. Very simple to operate.”
Sikes tried to go along with the idea to see where it might take him. “You just sort of tell the disk to erase itself, and that’s that?”
Grazer looked at Sikes with a pitying expression. “You really should try to find out more about these machines, detective. If you asked the disk to erase itself, then in most cases you’d be erasing the program that told the machine how to run. No, you’d need a second disk to erase the first—something that would not be erased itself.”
Sikes reached over to tap Grazer’s hard disk drive. “So whoever overwrote the disk in the computer needed something like this to do it.”
Grazer sighed. “It wouldn’t have to be hard drive. It could just as easily be a floppy for in here.” He pointed to the computer’s floppy disk drive ports.
That’s it! Sikes thought excitedly. He didn’t have to go back through the house with a neighbor to find out if something was missing. Something had been missing right from the start. Not only had there been no other hard disk drive on Petty’s desk, there had been no other floppy disks at all.
“You just think of something?” Grazer asked.
“Yeah,” Sikes said. “My daughter’s got a computer. An Apple—”
Grazer looked on Sikes with pity.
“—and she’s got boxes of disks all around. Start-up disks. Game disks. CDs. Graphics. Programs. Hundreds of them. At least it seems like hundreds.”
“So?” Grazer asked.
“So there were no other disks in this guy’s den. Nothing on the desk with the computer. Nothing in the drawers. I know. I went through all of them.” He looked questioningly at Grazer. “Does that sound unusual to you?”
“Oh, yes, very unusual. You almost always have at least one set of disks nearby—emergency start-up, data storage, diagnostic programs. Just in case anything goes wrong.”
“Goes wrong,” Sikes repeated dreamily. Had something ever gone wrong.
Grazer raised one eyebrow. “What kind of case are you working on, anyway?”
“Murder,” Sikes said.
Grazer’s eyes widened enviously. “But . . . you’re a Detective Three. You shouldn’t be working Homicide.”
Sikes grinned. Whatever had been stolen last night was something that could be stored on a computer. He was certain of it. Someone had set up Professor Randolph Petty in a late-night meeting, killed him, then gone back to his house to wipe out whatever was on his computer and stolen his loose disks at the same time.
“I said,” Grazer repeated, “that as a Detective Three you shouldn’t be working Homicide. Especially not on your first day.”
Sikes shrugged. “I guess you just gotta know who to suck up to, Bryon.”
Grazer leaned forward, eyes wide. “And who would that be?”
Sikes jumped to his feet, wondering if he could still catch Angie at Casey’s. Or do I want to tell her so soon? he suddenly thought. Before I’ve had a chance to check it out so she won’t shoot me down again? He still had one day left on the tight schedule she had given him.
“Sikes, c’mon. I helped you out here.”
Sikes clapped Grazer on the shoulder. “Want to help me out again?”
Grazer looked at the hand that dared touch him. “Will you put me in your report?”
“Absolutely.”
Grazer coughed. “But only . . . only if everything works out, that is.”
“Only if everything works out,” Sikes agreed. And he knew it would. It had to.
“So what do you need me to do first?” Grazer asked.
“First,” Sikes said, “we need a computer like this one that works, and that will let us talk with the victim’s daughter in Australia.”
Grazer nodded. “I’ve got a modem. Paperwork to get approvals for the long-distance charges should take more than a week to—”
“We’ve got twenty-four hours,” Sikes said.
Grazer looked panicked. “But we have to follow procedures. I mean, it’s bad enough that I’m taking time away from my assignments in forensic accounting to help you out on . . . on . . . what exactly am I helping you out on, anyway?”
Sikes patted the computer on his desk. “Twenty-four hours ago someone thought this computer held information that was worth killing a retired seventy-two-year-old astronomy professor for.”
“Good Lord,” Grazer said. “What kind of information?”
The answer to Grazer’s question was just over three billion miles away, traveling at a speed beyond human science, and heading straight for the sun, the Mojave, and the rest of Matthew Sikes’s life.
But seven days from descent and counting, Sikes still didn’t know. In fact, the only being who did know was an ancient Tenctonese priest named Moodri.
Because the youth who would be known as Buck Francisco was right.
Moodri knew everything.
C H A P T E R 5
FEW TENCTONESE HAD NEED for more than a single name. Each knew who he or she or binn was, and, to the trained eye at least, their spots told the story of their lineage, for the patterns formed by those patches of darker pigmentation were a blending of the patterns of their mother and father. In such a situation, how many names would any intelligent being need?
Thus there were hundreds of Moodris aboard the ship as it hurtled down toward its final gravity well where a single yellow star waited impassively at the center. But there was only one Moodri among them who carried the distinctive trident marking of the Family: Heroes of Soren’tzahh above his left temple counterbalanced by the graceful brushstroke of the Family: Third Star’s Ocean, that adorned the crest of his skull.
That singular Moodri was an Elder, born on the home world before the coming of the ships. In the measurement of time on the planet that would be his final resting place he was almost one hundred and forty years old. Yet his spots remained dark, his eyes alert, and his mind far sharper than any exposed to the holy gas for so long had any right to expect—and far sharper than any Overseer would suspect.
As an Elder, Moodri worked his shifts in whatever crowded day crèche had need of an extra pair of hands, tending to the podlin
gs and the toddlers of those parents who toiled elsewhere in the ship. When the Overseers came on their inspection tours he let his eyes go vacant and hummed old Tencton tunes softly to himself, changing diapers, cutting up vegrowth, playing simple games with two-year-olds who appeared to be smarter and more aware than he.
For twenty years he had played this role, until he had become nothing more than another gray wall support to the Overseers’ eyes. A babbling old fool who sometimes donned priestly robes to calculate the position of the galaxy Cen’tawrs, and who other times recut his gray tunic and trousers into a skirt, just as he had worn a century before on Tencton. To the Overseers he was harmless, he kept the cargo blinded by the false hopes of a weak and passive religion; and as long as he could lift a child, he would not be recycled.
So the shifts passed, one after another, endlessly falling into the gray mist of the gas and lost memory.
At least, to the Overseers.
This shift, Moodri sat with five sick podlings in an isolation room off the level fifty-seven day-crèche infirmary. The podlings slept deeply, in no obvious distress, but across their tiny chests and thighs distinctive fan-shaped rashes of purple speckles grew—the first symptom of what might develop into an infection of the spartiary gland called nensi fever.
Nensi fever could be fatal but not often enough for the Overseers to automatically recycle anyone with symptoms, as they did those patients with other, more vimlent diseases. More often than not, nensi patients recovered and were thereafter immune, just as Moodri was. Though because the lethargic symptoms of the disease could persist for several dozen shifts, seriously interfering with productivity, it was necessary to isolate the infected patients until the danger of contagion had passed.
From time to time an Overseer might peer through the small window on the door to the isolation room, but for the most part the sick podlings and the senile Elder dozing off in his chair among them were ignored. If the podlings lived, fine. If the podlings died, fine. The most important consideration for the Overseers was that the disease would not be permitted to spread, if in fact it was spartiary gland infection that had stricken the children. With the limited medical facilities on board the ship there was just no way to be certain.
Alien Nation #1 - The Day of Descent Page 8