Darwin grunted. “Can you check for it here?”

  “Sure,” Rooker said, and he typed in a “dir” command that would search all the subdirectories on the network drive for the program. After a minute, three instances were listed.

  “Want me to get rid of them?” Rooker asked.

  “No,” Darwin said, making notes. “I’ll take care of it.”

  Rooker was about out of things to do when he noticed something strange. There was a directory entry that appeared empty yet at the same time the computer was showing it as occupying some space, as if it contained some files. Ah, now this is clever, he thought as it dawned on him what someone had done. This entry that appears as a directory with no files is really a file by itself. It wasn’t actually a directory at all.

  Darwin was still in the cubicle but had stepped back to have a conversation with someone who had come looking for him. Rooker quickly slipped the blank floppy disk he usually carried in his shirt pocket into the drive on the computer. Within twenty seconds he had made a copy of the file and returned the disk to its home in his shirt. Rooker just couldn’t resist anything this clever. Something worth hiding was too often worth money.

  He glanced over his shoulder. Darwin was still speaking with the other person and had been joined by another. Rooker deftly typed in a command that displayed the contents of the mystery file on the screen. It was a short list of four names followed by a twelve digit hyphenated number, something he hadn’t seen before.

  “Are you almost through here, Mr. Rooker? I’m afraid I have to get back to work.”

  Rooker cleared the screen and swivelled around in the chair. If Darwin suspected anything untoward, he gave no sign. “Of course. I’ve got what I need, Mr. Darwin.” He stood and handed the man another business card. “If anything comes up in the future, I look forward to the opportunity of doing business with you.” They shook hands and Darwin showed him to the door.

  Outside, in his car, Rooker sat and adjusted the air conditioning so it blew across his face. For some reason he tended to perspire when he got excited. He had only had a quick look at the names in the computer file, but something about one or two of them had struck him as familiar. He touched the plastic disk in his pocket to reassure himself it was still there.

  Obviously, someone had tried to disguise the existence of this file. If he hadn’t been so familiar with how some viruses make files appear after they had been infected, he never would have noticed it. Had it been Clayton? And if so, why? Rooker put the car in gear and slowly began to drive. Somehow he had to find a way to identify those four names.

  Chapter Nine

  The church parking lot was full but not overflowing. O’Neil sat in his car and watched the people entering through a set of iron-bound doors with inlays of stained glass. He recognized a lot of them as people he knew, although most not well. It was amazing how many friends a good man has when he dies, he thought. He wondered how many would show up at his funeral.

  He wasn’t ready to go inside yet. Funerals were for the living, not the dead, and whatever catharsis they provided he had gone though during the flight of a small airplane and a night spent on his little boat. Still, he wasn’t ready to say goodbye, not while whoever had killed his friend went unaccountable. You don’t just walk away from something like this, smooth the hurt over with a funeral service and a wreath and get on with your life. At least O’Neil couldn’t, not in a situation like this.

  He thought about Tim’s wife, Marie. He still hadn’t spoken with her since the murder but he knew he would have to today. God, what she must be going through. O’Neil felt a little guilty for not spending some time with her, but he knew she was being well taken care of. And although he hadn’t spoken with Katy since that night when he called at her sister’s, he knew that his wife would have taken the time to get down here and see Marie.

  “Fuck it,” he said angrily and reached forward to start the car. He drove slowly out of the parking lot. It’s Tim I want to see, not his family and a bunch of his goddamned friends.

  His mood, not good to begin with, turned bitter and dark as he drove toward the cemetery where Tim’s body would be buried. Alone with the demons in his mind and the ghosts in the ground, he would wait until everyone else showed up.

  The cemetery itself was an old one, but it was nice. O’Neil wondered if there was such a thing as a new cemetery; he had never heard of someone buying land and starting one.

  Large oak trees provided a measure of relief at sporadic intervals from the Florida sunshine. The plot awaiting Tim Clayton touched a small patch of the shade offered by an ancient scarlet oak. Not mindful of his black cotton suit, O’Neil sat with his back against the trunk of the great tree, careful to check for ants. Surprisingly, there didn’t seem to be any.

  He sat that way for two hours, his mind drifting over mostly nothing as he contemplated the hole in the ground that would accept the body of his friend. Absurdly, he wondered what they did with the soil that would be displaced by the presence of the casket.

  Eventually the long train of cars arrived and quiet mourners began to make the slow twenty yard walk along a gravel path toward the plot. Pallbearers carried the casket from the hearse and placed it on the belts that would lower it into the ground, to be buried beneath sandy dirt and bittersweet memories. O’Neil stood and brushed pieces of dried grass from his trousers. Without removing his Carerra sunglasses, he moved to the rear of the gathering crowd and tried to disappear.

  It didn’t work. A gentle pull at his elbow and he turned to find the veiled face of Marie Clayton looking up at his. “Frankie,” she said.

  Around them, the other mourners eased away slowly, allowing the two of them the grace of some privacy. “Hello, Marie.” He reached for her and she came into his arms for a brief embrace. They held each other for several breaths until Marie backed away and took hold of O’Neil’s wrists.

  “I was going to call you,” he said.

  “I know you were. I talked to Katy. She said you were taking it hard.”

  “All of us are, Marie.” O’Neil couldn’t help scanning the crowd.

  “She’s not here. She said she didn’t want to get in your way. Are things okay with you two?”

  Good God, O’Neil thought. With all her problems she’s worried about my marriage. “We’re doing fine, Marie. Really, we are.”

  She nodded and looked down. “I watched for you at the service but I didn’t see you. It was beautiful.”

  “I’m afraid I only made it as far as the parking lot.”

  “Oh, God, Frankie,” she said and moved herself closer again. Her hair smelled like salty tears and lilacs. “What happened?”

  What could he tell her? Instead of talking, he concentrated on holding her tightly.

  “I know you want to ask,” she said into his shoulder. “And I want to tell you. But if he was in any trouble, he never mentioned anything to me about it. Nothing at all. I have no idea why anybody would have wanted to do this to him.”

  O’Neil shushed her, told her she didn’t have to say anything. “I’ll be all right,” she said. She let O’Neil go and stepped backwards, dabbing her eyes with a balled up handkerchief. “He loved you, you know. He said you and he should have been brothers.”

  Emotion welled up in O’Neil’s eyes and he struggled to contain it behind the lenses of his glasses. We were brothers. Marie reached forward and held one of his hands. “I have to go,” she said. “Promise me you’ll come down to dinner soon.”

  O’Neil tried his best to manage a nod.

  “Promise,” she repeated.

  “Yes, I will,” he half croaked. Marie nodded and turned to make her way to the side of the casket which hung, poised for eternity, above its grave.

  Somewhere in front of him, a priest from the church began a prayer. Without listening to the words, he let his mind slip into the cadence of the speech as the rest of the group joined in.

  His peace only lasted a few minutes. A gruff whisper erupted in his left ear. “Something wrong with your phone you don’t return your calls, O’Neil?”

  “Hill.” O’Neil turned his head and looked at the detective. There were breakfast stains on his tie but at least he had managed a black suit. Fetterman stood behind him, an indecipherable grin plastered across his lips.

  “I’m not too happy about this lack of communication. I thought we had an understanding going, that we’re working on the same team.”

  “Take it easy, Hill.” He stepped away from the funeral so as not to disturb the ritual with their conversation. “Things have been a little hard lately. It hasn’t been all that easy to concentrate on things.”

  “And in the meantime you want us to sit back and wait for you to feel all better before we move ahead on this thing.”

  “Give me a fucking break, Hill. This is the goddamn funeral of my best friend and you’re here busting my balls. If you were a little more human and not so much of a baboon, you might understand what the hell I’ve been going through.”

  That had the effect on Hill that O’Neil had been trying for. The detective looked at his partner then brought both hands up to his throat to fix an imaginary problem with his tie.

  “All right, O’Neil.” He backed off. “But better sooner than later, you know what I’m saying?”

  Yes, I know what you’re saying, O’Neil told him. “I’ve been working on a few things but I need some more time to put them together. When I do I’ll call you so we can talk about how to use them to get at Lankford.”

  “You sound just like your dead buddy. Just be sure to call soon. We’ve got some other avenues we’re looking into.”

  “Do you have more to go on?”

  Hill sent a thin stream of saliva squirting through the space between his two front teeth into the soft grass between his own feet. “Not really. We cleared the brothers who found the body and we haven’t been able to track the plane. Might have been a smuggling plane on its way out of the country. Who knows?” He motioned to Fetterman with his head and they started to walk off toward the lines of parked cars. “Clayton had valium in his blood, too. A lot of it. We’re checking his medical records. We’ll be waiting for your phone call. See you at the reception.”

  The burial ceremony broke up a few minutes later, most of the words had already been spoken at the church. Several people found their way to O’Neil and they shared their condolences and asked if he would be going to the reception after the service. It was being held at someone’s house in Bradenton and was on O’Neil’s way back to Tampa. “No,” he told them. He wouldn’t be going to any reception. He had work to get to. He didn’t speak again to Marie.

  On the ninety minute drive back to Tampa, he found himself thinking about Hill and Fetterman. If you don’t have any new clues, he thought, just what ‘other avenues’ are you pursuing?

  There was a message from Reed on the answering machine when O’Neil got home. He had gotten the job with Bay Area Cleaning but he wouldn’t find out what they wanted his schedule to be for another day or two. He’d check back later to see what O’Neil wanted him to do next.

  O’Neil pressed the button to reset the tape and walked into the room he used for an office when he worked at home. So far, so good, he thought. But the next step is up to me.

  He hung his jacket over the back of his chair and removed his tie as he waited for his computer to boot up. He had a lot of programming to do before they were ready for Lankford and even then it would be a crap shoot. He had no illusions about what they were doing. Whether they were successful or not he knew what the consequences would be if they were caught. He wondered if Tim Clayton had known, too.

  Writing a computer program can be a grueling, demanding task that often requires long periods of solitude and intense concentration. It is an uncommon mix of technical skill and artistic creativity that turns long hours into brief minutes, drawing the programmer deep into a place far separated from the world around him.

  Alone in his home office, O’Neil had tapped into this electronic Nirvana and for the first time in days had not been consciously aware of the terrible events that had recently affected his life. The afternoon had raced by at light speed, blurred but productive, and he had made good progress on the program he needed for Lankford’s.

  The phone on his desk rang just after seven o’clock. O’Neil’s mind jerked back to real time as he reached for a pencil and wildly jotted a note to himself so he wouldn’t lose his current thought. He picked up the phone on the fourth ring and said hello.

  “Hey, bud, it’s me.” Reed. “What’s up, were you sleeping?”

  O’Neil rubbed his eyes as if he had been. “No, I’m just here coding away.”

  “Good, I’m glad to hear I’m not the only one getting things done. How was the funeral?”

  “Fine,” he said. He told him he hadn’t seen much of the ceremony, but he had put in an appearance and spoken to Tim’s widow. That was enough. “Hill and Fetterman were there, too.”

  “Your two cop friends?”

  “Yeah. They were leaning on me pretty heavily to tell them what I was doing for them. They don’t know about you and they certainly don’t know about Lu, and that’s the way I want to keep it. I didn’t tell them much.”

  “How come? They’re going to get at you sooner or later, aren’t they?”

  “You’ve got to think about what we’re doing here. Not only are we talking about breaking a couple of dozen state and federal laws, Lu Bates is likely violating parole and I’m paying her to do it. If somebody at Bay Area Cleaning or, heaven forbid, Lankford’s, came across what we we’re trying to do, we’d be so far up Shit Creek we wouldn’t need paddles because there wouldn’t be anywhere to go. Hill and Fetterman may be cops, but that doesn’t automatically qualify them for the Good Guy Hall of Fame. My gut tells me that the less they know, the better this thing will be. For all of us.”

  “What about if something goes wrong and we need their help?”

  “Ask me that again if something goes wrong and we need their help.”

  “I get your point.” O’Neil couldn’t tell if Reed was bothered by his opinion of Hill and Fetterman but there wasn’t anything he could do about it. Reed would just have to trust him. “Did you get the message I left earlier? I got the job with the cleaning company.”

  “Yes, I did,” said O’Neil. “Congratulations.”

  “Thank you very much. They are a little short-handed, which means the owner and his wife are having to go out and clean the buildings themselves, so they loved me. They’ll come up with a schedule for me tomorrow, probably.”

  “How about not working Wednesdays and Fridays?”

  “I asked, but they said they couldn’t promise. I didn’t want to push it too hard. I’m the new low guy on the totem pole, remember. We should talk about what you want me to do next.”

  O’Neil’s stomach had begun to let him know what it wanted him to do next. “I want you to pick up a couple of large pizzas and a six pack and get over here. We can talk more about it then,” he said.

  It took Reed an hour to get the food and appear at O’Neil’s house. O’Neil had taken a shower and changed clothes, having somewhat reluctantly powered off his computer. It was hard to walk away from a program once you were heavily into it. Leaving it behind became easier when you were nearly finished and most of what was left was filling in the cracks and tweaking the small details that were necessary to present a finished product. That was the grunt work of computer programming and O’Neil had never met anyone who enjoyed it. Most of them just skipped doing as much of it as possible.

  They watched the Orlando Magic play the Chicago Bulls on television while they ate. “I’m not much of a fan,” Reed said.

  “Hell, without basketball, there’d be no reason for cable TV,” O’Neil told him.

  “Not counting the Playboy Channel, you mean.”

  O’Neil smiled. “Of course.” Reed had a knack for keeping a conversation light, a talent O’Neil admired. The more he got to know the young man, the more he liked him. That led him to think about the situation at Lankford’s and what they had ahead of them. “We need to talk about where we go from here.”

  Reed knew instantly what O’Neil was referring to and washed down the last of the pizza with a mouthful of light beer. “Okay, let’s hear it,” he said.

  O’Neil used the remote to lower the volume of the TV. “There are a number of things that we could try to break into Lankford’s computer system and look for evidence we could use to bring them down, maybe find out what happened to Tim. But what you have to understand is that where computers are concerned, no matter what we do, we’re going to leave traces of ourselves behind. That’s just the nature of the beast. So the trick is to try something they probably haven’t thought of, something outside normal security precautions that they might not notice.”

  “How could they overlook something that could cause them so much damage?”

  “Good question. Remember they’re supposedly doing everything illegal over their wide area network, or WAN. This is what you call it when you link one computer network to another over a phone line or some other kind of connection. From their point of view, security mostly means protecting how that connection is made and to whom the connection is with. Since they don’t store any of this information on their own computers, they already feel very secure every time they simply turn off their computers. It’s the equivalent of hanging up the phone. Whatever they were doing just goes away.”

  “And we’re going to ignore all that, for the reasons we talked about before?”

  “Exactly. Even if I could think of a good way to do it, we’d be dealing with all kinds of legitimate as well as illegitimate data, cable taps, and last but not in any way least, encrypted data that would probably be impossible for us to read. So we’ll be taking a different approach.”

  “Through the monitor and the keyboard.”

  “And that’s why I need you at Lankford’s. No matter what we do, we’re going to need physical access to the computers. We need a door key, we need the pass code for their security system, and we need to establish a semi-plausible excuse for one of us to be in there after hours.”

 

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