The Blackbird Papers

by Ian Smith

  “The building's open twenty-four hours, seven days a week, except Christmas and New Year's.”

  “What about the administrators?”

  There was a slight pause on the other end. “I'm not sure if anyone's still here. They usually leave around four.”

  “But that's ten minutes from now.”

  “Well, four, ten of four, same thing.”

  “If you see anyone from administration, please ask them to wait five minutes. I'm on my way over.”

  “Who should I say is coming?”

  “Agent Sterling Bledsoe, FBI.”

  Sterling and Sean quickly closed the lab and raced down the hall. They took the stairs rather than wait for the elevators.

  “I'm going to do this alone,” Sterling said as they walked through the front door.

  “I'm willing to help,” Sean offered.

  “You already have. I'll call you if anything else comes up.” Sterling could see the disappointment on Sean's face, but at this point in the investigation, information containment was critical. He was also hoping to find the blackbird paper Wilson had been writing, and there was a good chance he might uncover it while at Kiewit. It was best to keep it all under wraps until he had a better handle on it.

  As Sterling drove to Kiewit, his cell phone rang. It was Wiley.

  “Where are you right now?” he asked.

  “Just following up on some leads.”

  “Well, we've got some results from the lab today that might be of interest to you. Can you talk?”

  “For a few. I'm all ears.”

  “Remember when you asked us to sweep the lab for fingerprints?”

  “That's right, and compare them to everyone known to have entered the lab in the last month or so.”

  “Well, we did that. We got a list of everyone who might've entered the lab the last couple of months and fingerprinted them. Our guys entered the prints in the computer and ran a program that matched them against those collected in the lab.”

  “How many matches did you get?” Sterling raced to Kiewit, ignoring the red lights, stop signs, and one-way arrows.

  “We were given a roster of eleven people that had entered the lab recently. But we found thirteen different sets of prints in the lab and his office.”

  “Two people unaccounted for.”

  “That's what's troubling us.”

  “Let me guess where you found one of those prints,” Sterling said. “The computer keyboard in Wilson's office.”

  Sterling could hear Wiley shuffling papers. “How the hell did you guess that, Agent?”

  “Let's just call it a hunch. Did you run prints on the custodial staff?”

  “We've printed over a hundred people, everyone who cleans even a sidewalk on this campus. Nothing's turned up.”

  “Maybe they belong to people who visited the lab a while ago and no one remembers them. Are all the prints in the computer?”

  “Yup, the matched and the two unmatched.”

  “Tell Brusco to transmit them down to the lab in Quantico and have them enter the unmatched prints into the federal computers. Our database will match them against prints of felons from every police station and law enforcement authority in the country.”

  “Do you really think that will tell us something?” Wiley asked.

  Sterling slammed the Mustang to a stop in front of Kiewit. “It's a long shot, but it's worth a try. I've been surprised before. No reason why it can't happen again.”

  “I'll get on it right away.”

  “One more thing, Lieutenant. Any word yet on that saw blade?”

  “I think they found the manufacturer. Now they're trying to find the shipping information to see if they can figure out which batch it was in and where it was sold.”

  “Thanks, Lieutenant.”

  Sterling jumped out of the car and raced into Kiewit. He followed the administration signs and ran down the narrow hall. The door was still open when he arrived at five minutes to four.

  30

  A woman with reading glasses perched on the tip of her nose sat behind a big metal desk that dwarfed her tiny frame. She looked up at Sterling, then impatiently at the clock. “May I help you, sir?”

  “I'm Agent Sterling Bledsoe,” Sterling said. Her expression suddenly grew cooperative. “I need to speak with someone who understands the networking of the campus computers.”

  “I think everyone might've left for the day,” she said, stretching her neck to look down the back hallway. “Let me see if I can find someone.” She looked at Sterling again, almost as if she were about to offer an apology, but instead stood up and walked through an open door in the back of the room.

  Sterling looked around the office for any big computers or some indication that this was the campus computing hub. If the computers were networked, there had to be a large space where they kept the system hardware. Back at Hunter College, the network administrators occupied an entire floor of the IT building. Several students and managers sat in a dark room around the clock, budgeting their time between solving computer problems and playing video games when the phone lines fell silent.

  The woman returned a few minutes later accompanied by a tall man with a thin build and white-blond hair that looked like it had been bleached in his kitchen sink. He had two-day-old beard stubble that seemed more calculated than accidental. His right earlobe had multiple piercings and was pulled down by a strip of alternating silver hoops and heavy studs. His black shirt bore an image of a rock band that Sterling didn't recognize.

  “How can I help you, sir?” the man asked. He couldn't have been more than thirty. A hint of California slowed his delivery.

  “I'm Agent Sterling Bledsoe.”

  “You're the one who called a few minutes ago?”

  “That's right. I'm investigating Wilson Bledsoe's murder. I have some questions about his computer and the information that was stored on it. What's your name?”

  “Jeff Cullins. I'm one of the system administrators.”

  “Just the person I need. Are the academic computers networked?”

  “It all depends.” The diminutive woman lost interest and disappeared through the back door. “We don't network all the computers, only those issued by the college and wired into the system.”

  “How do you know if the computer is on the network?”

  “That's easy. Each computer has an inventory stamp on the hard drive beginning with DC. Stands for Dartmouth College. We keep a list of all the computers and where they're located.”

  “Does your office have a way of backing up the information stored on those computer hard drives?”

  “Absolutely. That's a major reason why we networked everyone. Too many professors were forgetting to save their data and losing information. Then we had problems with viruses. People were downloading infected programs and crashing their hard drives.”

  “Can you retrieve the backed-up files from here?”

  “Yes, but it takes some time to go through all the files. We have hundreds of computers on the network.” Cullins looked down at his watch. “And we're just on our way out the door.”

  The woman returned wearing her coat and a straw hat with a fake butterfly attached to the side. “Good night, Jeffrey,” she said as she left. “Good night, Mr. Bledsoe. My sincerest condolences. Professor Bledsoe was a beloved member of our community.” Sterling acknowledged her sympathy with a nod, then she hung the closed sign and pulled the front door shut behind her. The echo of her clicking heels faded down the long, empty hallway.

  “Let me be blunt, Mr. Cullins. I'm not here to learn how to change fonts and margins.” Sterling flashed his tin for emphasis. “This is an official investigation, dammit, and I'm looking for a killer, some heartless bastard who carved my brother up like he was turkey on a dinner table. Now the sooner you cooperate and answer my questions, the sooner both of us can be on our way. Am I clear?”

  Cullins looked back at the wall clock, then shrugged. He picked up the nearest phone and
informed someone that he was going to be late. “Follow me,” he said to Sterling. They walked through a maze of small rooms stuffed with large monitors and cables, then descended a long staircase. They passed through two unmarked doors and entered a large oval room crammed with computer equipment—everything from large flat-screen monitors to stacks of hard drives and switchers connected with an array of multicolored cables and tangled cords.

  The terminals had been set up adjacent to one another around the perimeter. A row of printers sat on a long table in the middle of the room as did several trays of food that had been picked over. Six people were glued to the monitors—most of them young—but a couple of older men who looked like they were in charge sat behind a glass partition in what seemed to be a master control center. Soft-rock music buzzed over the din of noisy printers and fingers tapping on keyboards. Most of those working didn't acknowledge Sterling's presence, and those that did barely gave him a nod of welcome.

  “We call this the wire hub,” Cullins said. There was a hint of pride in his voice. “We're able to handle the entire campus network out of this one room.” He took Sterling to an unoccupied terminal. “I'll begin a program to search for Professor Bledsoe's computer.”

  “I actually have the inventory number, if that'll make it faster,” Sterling said, pulling out his book. “DC 1617.”

  “That's the easy part,” Cullins said. “The key will be finding where his information is stored on our backup drives.”

  Cullins punched the keys with a flurry of movements. He bobbed his head to the music as hundreds of files and directories scrolled across the screen.

  “How long do you save the backed-up files?” Sterling asked.

  “Two months. There's a limit to how much we can store before we reach capacity. We figure sixty days is enough for someone to report missing data.”

  “Does the computer user have to do anything special to get their files backed up on your hard drives?”

  “Nothing at all. Backups are automatic. We've configured the system so that every hour all files stored on each computer get saved here. We've also been testing a program that allows us to save not only the hard drive but every version of a document, for the entire two-month period.”

  Cullins worked in silence for the next twenty minutes, bringing up a series of screens with jumbled text messages that would only make sense to a techie. While Cullins continued his search, Sterling took a few minutes to reflect on the investigation. Tex Norkin and Buzz Gatlin had finally been released and were now back to barn rallies and preaching hate in Claremont. Many of the local officers had argued that they were making a big mistake letting them go, but Sterling held his position. He was sure that Wilson was murdered because of what he knew or had on those tapes. Why else would someone break into the lab hours after his death? And why were all of his files deleted from his computer?

  Then the second murder. A young woman, decapitated and dumped in a trash bin. Norkin and Gatlin were in custody when it happened. It could be the random work of a serial killer, but more likely than not, the two murders were connected. Sterling's theory had the truck that Miles Borwind had seen behind the Grand Union as the same truck that Wilson had stopped to help the night he was murdered. All of this was somehow connected to the killing of hundreds of blackbirds. Dots of information, but still nothing certain enough to connect them.

  “Shazam!” Cullins shouted. His face almost touched the computer screen. “She was hidden in the wrong directory. I don't know how that happened, but here it is.”

  “How much is there?”

  “Let me see.” Cullins searched through four screens of document titles. “There must be a good two hundred documents.”

  “Does that include his e-mails?”

  “No, those are in another directory. What we have here are just the documents that he worked on the last couple of months.”

  Sterling leaned closer to the screen. He wasn't surprised to see that Wilson had been working on so many things over the last couple of months. Unlike many other intellectuals, Wilson actually produced results. With two textbooks and over two hundred articles to his name, he had accomplished in a short time what most scientists couldn't dream of accomplishing in two careers.

  “Is there any way to check which documents he worked on last?” Sterling asked.

  “We don't have a program pre-designed to do that, but let me try something.” Cullins's fingers danced across the keyboard. He twisted his face into a grimace as the computer sent back an error message. A few minutes later, a smile of confidence. “Voilà,” he said, pushing back from the terminal so that Sterling could get a better view of the monitor.

  “What did we do before we had technology?” Sterling said. He began reading the titles of the last one hundred documents, looking for anything that might have alluded to the blackbirds. Nothing caught his attention. “Are you sure these are all the documents?”

  “One hundred percent. Anything your brother worked on over the last two months would be here in this directory.”

  “What if he erased a document? Would that also show up?”

  “Yup. That's the beauty of this software. Even if he deleted a file, our system still keeps a backup here. Many professors have accidentally deleted manuscripts, grading reports, even their address books, and we've been able to restore them from our computers.”

  Sterling shook his head, still reading the titles but having no luck finding a document that sounded like it might have anything to do with the blackbirds. “How can I get a copy of these files?”

  “Which ones?”

  “All of them.”

  Cullins looked at his watch. “I could print them, but that could take at least half an hour. Could we do this first thing tomorrow morning?”

  “Hell, no!” Sterling said. “There's already been two murders. I'm trying to prevent a third.”

  Cullins opened his eyes wide. “Another murder?”

  Sterling continued to work him. “That's right. A young woman was found in the dumpster of the Grand Union this morning.” Sterling spared him the details.

  “This is fucking radical, man. Two murders here at Dartmouth? It's like something out of a bad movie.”

  “It's anything but a movie. A killer is on the loose, and we need everyone's cooperation to catch him before he strikes again.”

  Cullins didn't need any more prompting. He turned back to the monitor. “I'm gonna print them over there,” he said, pointing to the long row of printers. “I'm also gonna condense all the files and save them on some zip disks so you have an electronic backup.”

  Sterling watched as Cullins furiously tapped the keys and made the printers in the middle of the room jump to life. “What about his e-mails?” Sterling asked. “How difficult would it be to get those?”

  “A piece of cake,” Cullins replied. “The blitzmail files are much easier to access.”

  “What's blitzmail?”

  “Our e-mail system. It was one of the first college-wide e-mail systems in the country. A couple of students were trying to figure out a way to send messages to each other and ended up inventing our e-mail program. You can access it from any computer on the network.”

  Cullins tapped the keys with a renewed sense of purpose. His eyes remained glued to the screen. “I can give you all the blitzmail files from his very first one,” he said. “We store them on a different server. Printing them is gonna be a bear.” He pressed several keys. “Professor Bledsoe has over eighty thousand e-mails.”

  “Then save them to a zip disk and just print the last two hundred.”

  “On its way to the printer,” Cullins said.

  After an hour and a half of papers flying out of the printer with Cullins inserting and ejecting disks, the task was complete. Sterling had a box full of documents and e-mails and a box of disks.

  “I hope you find what you're looking for,” Cullins said.

  “There's not a doubt in my mind that I will.”

  Cullins w
alked Sterling upstairs and led him to the front door. “One question, Agent Bledsoe. If there's a killer on the loose, how safe are the rest of us?”

  Sterling looked hard into his eyes. “We don't know when or even if this killer will strike again. If your front door has a lock, use it.”

  Sterling slipped out the front door of Kiewit and loaded the box and disks into the trunk of the Mustang. He hadn't had this much reading ahead of him since studying for his doctorate.

  31

  Forty-eight hours after the headless body had been discovered in the Grand Union dumpster, the police still hadn't identified it. Then the call arrived from Mrs. Nel Potter. Her live-in student, Heidi Vorscht, was missing. Mrs. Potter had last seen her two mornings ago as she left for class. It wasn't uncommon for Heidi to spend the night at a friend's apartment, especially if she had been studying late in the library. But two days of no contact was worrisome. “She never would have stayed away that long without having someone come by and check on me,” Mrs. Potter said.

  Sterling walked into the pit as the dispatcher finished the call.

  “Nel Potter's girl is missing,” Wiley said.

  “The student we spoke to?” Sterling asked.

  “Heidi Vorscht. Mrs. Potter hasn't seen her for a couple of days.”

  “Does the body fit her description?”

  “Hard to say. Probably the same height. Young enough to match.”

  “Has she heard anything from the girl?”

  “Not a word.”

  “Let's go.”

  Sterling and Wiley rushed over to the Potter farm, followed by a couple of cruisers. The door to the rambling farmhouse was slightly ajar when they arrived. Sterling knocked loudly, called out Mrs. Potter's name, and then pushed the door open. They found Mrs. Potter in the kitchen, standing over a sink full of dishes. Her hair was disheveled and her clothes unkempt. The stress of Heidi's disappearance made her look even older than her advanced years.

  “Mrs. Potter,” Sterling said, startling her. She turned off the running water and faced the group of officers who had rushed into her kitchen.

  “This awful weather is a sign from God,” she said, pointing out the window at the furiously gray sky. “It was just like this the day they killed Ezra on the back of the property. Shooting accident my foot.”