With the two of them gone, I could have gone back for a more thorough search of Murray’s office, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. As I told Thaddeous when I got back to my apartment, I didn’t think it would be the safest place to be. Besides, the murderer had had plenty of time after killing Murray to take anything incriminating out of his office.
Thaddeous and I kicked around a few ideas that afternoon, but really didn’t come up with anything. So he kept me company while I ran a few errands that had been piling up.
Michelle came over after work and caught me up on news from my real job. It was getting busy there and I was going to be pushing my luck if I stayed away much longer.
The three of us were discouraged that night and decided to eat out to try to cheer ourselves up. Unfortunately, I think the boisterous atmosphere at the Hard Rock Cafe did us more harm than good. Too many people were having a good time, and we weren’t. After a while we quit trying to yell over the music, and just ate. That made me feel awful, because Thaddeous had been looking forward to eating at the Hard Rock, and now it was no fun at all.
Michelle took off for home straight from dinner, while Thaddeous and I walked back to my place. It was a long walk for a cold night, but I wanted the chance to clear my head.
We were about halfway home when I said, “I’m sorry I’ve spoiled your vacation, Thaddeous.”
“You haven’t spoiled a thing, Laurie Anne. I’m the one who talked you into getting involved in this—I should be apologizing to you.”
“I should have known better. You didn’t know what you’d be letting yourself in for.”
“Well, that’s true enough. It’s not a bit like the Hardy Boys books I read.”
“Not much like Nancy Drew, either. She always found nifty clues like secret passages and hidden compartments.”
“Or codes—they were always decoding codes in them books.”
“Well, we’ve got code, but it’s not the kind you can decode.”
“Not hardly,” Thaddeous said.
Neither of us said anything for a while. I don’t know why Thaddeous was quiet, but I was thinking about something. Maybe I couldn’t decode the StatSys source code the way Nancy Drew would have, but I could do something a lot like that. I said, “Maybe we can decode something.”
“I don’t think I follow you.”
“Philip liked to keep secrets and hide things. What if he hid information as comments in the code for StatSys?”
“What’s that mean?”
“You know that a program is just a set of instructions telling a computer what to do, right?”
“Right.”
“It’s possible to stick all kinds of stuff in a program without actually affecting what the computer is doing. You can type in lines and mark them so the computer knows to ignore them.” I tried to think of something similar. “Like in a script, there are stage directions or instructions that you don’t read out when you’re acting out the play. Stuff like, ‘Exit stage left,’ or ‘Pick up book.’ ” The analogy would have been more appropriate for Richard than for Thaddeous, but he seemed to understand.
“So how does this help us?”
“Maybe Philip put something in the comments in StatSys.”
“Like what?”
“Like anything. The secrets about people he was using to blackmail them, or instructions for finding proof of something illegal—anything.”
“He could have done that?”
“Absolutely. He’d have gotten a big kick out of it. And that would explain why he wouldn’t let anybody at SSI look at his code.” Then I stopped dead in my tracks. “Thaddeous, I just thought of something. Neal finally got all the booby traps out of StatSys yesterday, and Murray was real excited about having a chance to look at the code. He was probably looking at it just before he was killed. What if he found something in the code and confronted somebody about it, and that’s why he was killed?”
“But Neal would have seen whatever it was first. Or do you think he was the killer?”
“Not necessarily. If he was, why would he have given Murray the code with the information in it? He could have just deleted the incriminating part.”
“So you’re saying that Neal didn’t see it, but Murray did.”
“Maybe it was hidden in such a way that Neal didn’t understand it. Or maybe he just missed it—StatSys is a good-sized program, with hundreds and hundreds of lines. I don’t know, but I do know that I want to look at that code.”
“You better be careful,” Thaddeous warned. “Looking at that code might just be what got Murray killed.”
Chapter 34
With Thaddeous’s warning fresh in my mind, I decided not to go through the StatSys files right there in the office. Instead, I figured the thing for me to do would be to copy the latest set of files from the network onto diskettes. So the first thing next morning, I stuck a diskette into my computer and accessed Murray’s network directory. The only thing was, the directory was empty.
I tapped my fingers on my desk. At my real job, we keep all working files backed up on the network in case our individual hard drives crash. But I’d been told that the programmers at SSI tended not to keep much on the network because Philip had planted viruses in people’s files as a joke, never caring how much work it took to clean things up afterward. Folks had gotten into the habit of only using the network to transfer files. When asked for the files, Neal would have copied them into Murray’s directory, and then Murray would have copied them onto his hard drive, eventually intending to remove them from the directory.
Murray had been particular, but I wouldn’t have expected him to delete the files from the network directory so quickly. He had gotten them from Neal Tuesday afternoon, and he died Tuesday evening. Why would he have been in such a rush? Or had it been Murray? Anybody could have trashed the files on the network. Did that mean somebody was trying to keep anybody else from looking at the code? With deadlines so tight, nobody else was likely to look anyway. Except me.
Unfortunately, now it was going to be harder for me to get the files. I was going to have to do one of two things: either check Murray’s hard drive to see if the files were still there, or ask Neal for a copy of them. I didn’t care for either idea. I sure didn’t want to get caught in Murray’s office again, and I didn’t want Neal, or anybody else, to know I was that interested in the files.
Of course, I had the version of StatSys we were currently shipping to customers, and I could probably decompile it. But Neal had spent the better part of two weeks cleaning out the booby traps Philip had left in that code. I definitely didn’t want to spend time duplicating his effort, and I wasn’t even sure that I could. That kind of debugging isn’t my specialty. What I wanted were nice, clean files, and I silently cussed out Philip for not keeping proper backups.
I spent a while weighing my choices, and when I made up my mind which to try, spent more time coming up with a cover story in case I got caught doing what I wanted to do. Then I waited until lunch, thinking that there wouldn’t be many people around. I let myself into Murray’s office and quietly closed the door behind me.
Murray’s family must have come in already because the few personal items were gone now, and somehow it didn’t seem as much like his office anymore. I booted the system and started looking through directories. I turned on the light, hoping nobody would see it through the crack at the bottom of the door, but no such luck. I had been in there for only five or ten minutes when the door opened.
“Laura?” Jessie said. “What are you doing?”
“Trying to find Murray’s QA log,” I said, as casually as I could. “He gave me a printout the other day, but I lost a couple of pages. Besides, it’ll be easier to keep track of them online.”
She looked mostly relieved, but not completely.
So I tried to sound embarrassed as I said, “He really wanted some issues taken care of for the next release. I thought this would be a way for me to say goodbye.”
Dar
ned if her eyes didn’t tear up. “Oh, Murray would really appreciate that. Let me know if you need any help finding what you need.”
“I will. Thanks.”
She left, and I took a deep breath. The story had passed muster. Of course, Jessie was probably the easiest one to convince, but maybe nobody else would notice my being in there.
It took me another ten minutes to be fairly sure that there were no new StatSys files on Murray’s hard drive. He could have worked from floppy disks, but that would have been slower because a floppy drive isn’t as fast as a hard drive. It was more likely that somebody had erased the files, both from the network and from his hard disk.
The door opened again. This time it was Sheliah.
She blinked a few times. “I didn’t expect anyone to be in here.”
“Just getting a copy of the QA log,” I said. “Stuff Murray wanted to be sure made it into this release.”
She nodded, apparently satisfied. “Have you seen any draft documentation in here? He was supposed to be reviewing some material for me, and I wasn’t sure if he got to it before …” She didn’t bother to finish the sentence.
“It could be in here, but I don’t know where.” I rolled the chair back from Murray’s desk and said, “Maybe you should look for yourself.”
She didn’t seem to think it odd that I waited until she found what she wanted, and didn’t even look to see what I was doing on the computer. Still, I was relieved when she left and I closed the door again.
Murray had the usual complement of utility programs installed, so I used one to find out if any files had been deleted in the past few days. I wasn’t surprised to find out that a fair number of files had been, or that they were the StatSys files.
Normally, recovering a recently deleted file isn’t that big a deal. Any reasonably knowledgeable user with a decent utility program can do it. That is, unless the files had been systematically destroyed, with every character erased. And that’s what had been done to these files—I could access the file names, but I had more chance of bringing back the Old South than I did of getting those files back.
I checked the file modification dates and found out that the files had been deleted at seven-thirty Wednesday night, the day after Murray was killed. I had to be on the right track. The files had been there, and since somebody had gone to the trouble of deleting them, there had to be something interesting in them.
I was about to shut down the system when I remembered my cover story. Since I’d told both Jessie and Sheliah I was after the QA log, I really ought to get it. So I started it copying over to my directory on the network, and leaned back in Murray’s chair while waiting for it to finish.
It was so ironic that Murray had been done in by being painfully thorough. Most QA people wouldn’t have bothered to look at source files. They’re only interested in the result, not the mechanism. But Murray was the kind of man who dotted every i and crossed every t, as my Aunt Maggie would have said.
I sat up sharply. Some programmers get lazy and only back up once a week, but as meticulous as Murray was in every other respect, surely he would have backed up his work every night. And didn’t I remember seeing a set of backup disks in his desk?
I pulled open the middle drawer, where I thought they’d been, but it was empty now. So I tried the other drawers, but there weren’t any diskettes in any of them. I was sure I’d seen them the day before! That meant that the killer had gone in behind me and cleaned up the last tracks. Damn, damn, damn! If only Neal hadn’t caught me in there I could have grabbed the disks then. Or if I’d come back inside after Neal and Jessie left.
That got me thinking. Neal knew I’d been in Murray’s office, and Jessie could have seen me come in or leave with Neal. Didn’t that make it likely that one of them had been alarmed to see me in there, and therefore was the killer?
I shook my head. Though I was darned tempted to accept the idea just so I could eliminate some of the suspects, I couldn’t. Anybody could have been waiting for the office to empty out to come back and delete those files and grab the diskettes. I messed up high, wide, and handsome, and I didn’t know a bit more than I had before.
The QA log had just finished copying when the door opened one more time.
“Hi, Vincent,” I said, deciding to beat him to the punch. “What are you doing in here?”
“I saw the light.”
“It’s just me. I’m copying the QA log to my directory.”
“Good idea. I suppose somebody will have to maintain that until we replace Murray.” I guess he realized that sounded cold, because he added, “Not that we can ever truly replace him, of course. But we will need somebody in this office.”
“Absolutely,” I said and looked down at the screen. “I’m done. Did you need this, or shall I shut it down?”
“Shut it down.” He left without saying anything else, and I was more than happy to get out of there. I was so disgusted. Here I had meant to sneak in there to get those files, but I hadn’t got a thing. And worse, now more people had seen me snooping in Murray’s office. If they were innocent, maybe they believed my reason for being in there. But if either of them was the killer, I could be darned sure that he or she hadn’t. I tried to tell myself that it didn’t matter anyway, because the killer was already asking questions about me, but that wasn’t very comforting.
Chapter 35
I went back to my desk, but goodness knows my heart wasn’t in my work. I felt like I was being watched, but I didn’t know if I was just being paranoid or if my subconscious was picking up something. So many people had seen me in Murray’s office. Even if none of them was the murderer, they might have said something to the murderer. My best bet was to do nothing else even vaguely suspicious. So I sat at my desk and tried to look like I was working hard.
Thank goodness it was a short day. Vincent came around and told everybody to leave at one to make sure that we had time to get ready for Murray’s funeral, and Inez came around after him to tell us to leave an hour earlier than that.
Thaddeous was waiting for me at home, and I told him about the deleted files and missing disks. Then he fixed grilled cheese sandwiches for our lunch while I changed clothes. Michelle had wanted to go with us to listen to the voices of the SSI crew to see if the man who’d called her was there, but we decided that that would be too suspicious. Roberta might show up, and we didn’t want her seeing Michelle. So she settled for our promise to call her as soon as we got back.
Murray’s funeral wasn’t much like Philip’s visitation. This time I could tell that the folks there felt real grief, not just regret and awkwardness. There were lots of mourners, most of them related to Murray, and many tears.
There was one thing the services had in common. I felt the same nagging guilt about Murray that I had had about Philip. Rationally, I knew that neither death was my fault, but … In some ways, this time was even worse, because I couldn’t help thinking that if I’d been a little quicker or a little smarter, I could have caught Philip’s killer before Murray had died.
Thaddeous looked as ill at ease as I felt, so we left as soon as the services were over. Though Vincent had halfheartedly suggested that folks could go back to work after the funeral, I think he knew that nobody was going to take him up on it.
As soon as we got back to my apartment, we called Michelle at GBS, me on the phone in the bedroom and Thaddeous on the one in the living room.
“What happened?” she asked.
“A whole lot of nothing,” Thaddeous said. Then realizing that didn’t sound right, he added, “I mean, nothing to do with what we’re doing. The service was very nice.”
“Oh,” Michelle said, sounding disappointed.
I said, “What did you expect? That the killer would confess in a fit of remorse? If he or she didn’t break down at Philip’s funeral, why do you think he would at Murray’s?”
“I knew that,” she said indignantly, but I had a hunch she’d been hoping for something dramatic. “What about th
e StatSys files? Have you had a chance to look at them?”
“I didn’t get them,” I said, and explained why not.
“Jeez! What are we going to do now?”
“I don’t know,” I said, feeling more than a little sorry for myself.
“Hey now, Laurie Anne, there ain’t no call for that. You know where those files are. All we have to do is come up with a way of getting at them.”
“I could ask Neal for a copy,” I said.
“I don’t think you should, Laurie Anne. We don’t want anybody knowing you’re interested in them. Can’t we sneak into the office and get them?”
“That’s an idea!” Michelle said. “We could wait until tonight.”
I said, “We can’t. There’s an alarm system, and Jessie and Roberta are the only ones who know the code to turn it off.”
“They didn’t give you the code? That’s nuts!” Michelle exclaimed.
“I know.” Everybody at GBS has the security code so we can come in whenever we want—the last thing the boss wants to do is to discourage us from working extra hours. “But we don’t have anybody like Philip. They all used to have the code, but then people started finding surprises when they got to work. Would you believe doggie doo in Murray’s trash can, and a plastic spider in Jessie’s coffee cup? Philip denied it, of course, but as soon as they changed the code and made sure only Jessie and Roberta knew it, the pranks stopped.”
Thaddeous said, “That boy never grew up.”
I agreed with him there. “Anyway, they bought everybody modems so folks could work at home if they really wanted to burn the midnight oil or work weekends.” Then I stopped. “They work at home!”
“So?” Michelle said.
“Don’t you get it? Philip worked at home, and I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts that he had a copy of the source files on his hard disk at home.”
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