Dark Rivers of the Heart

brewed a pot of coffee. For Rocky, he set out a bowl of orange juice.
        The mutt had many peculiarities besides a taste for orange juice.
        For one thing, though he enjoyed going for walks during the day, he had none of a dog's usual frisky interest in the nocturnal world, preferring to keep at least a window between himself and the night; if he had to go outside after sunset, he stayed close to Spencer and regarded the darkness with suspicion. Then there was Paul Simon.
        Rocky was indifferent to most music, but Simon's voice enchanted him; if Spencer put on a Simon album, especially Graceland, Rocky would sit in front of the speakers, staring intently, or pace the floor in lazy, looping patterns-off the beat, lost in reverie-to "Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes" or "You Can Call Me Al." Not a doggy thing to do.
        Less doggy still was his bashfulness about bodily functions, for he wouldn't make his toilet if watched; Spencer had to turn his back before Rocky would get down to business.
        Sometimes Spencer thought that the dog, having suffered a hard life until two years ago and having had little reason to find joy in a canine',s place in the world, wanted to be a human being.
        That was a big mistake. People were more likely to live a dog's life, in the negative sense of the phrase, than were most dogs.
        "Greater self-awareness," he'd told Rocky on a night when sleep wouldn't come, "doesn't make a species any happier, pal. If it did, we'd have fewer psychiatrists and barrooms than you dogs have-and it's not that way, is it?"
        Now, as Rocky lapped at the juice in the bowl on the kitchen floor, Spencer carried a mug of coffee to the expansive L-shaped desk in one corner of the living room. Two computers with large hard-disk capacities, a full-color laser printer, and other pieces of equipment were arrayed from one end of the work surface to the other.
        That corner of the living room was his office, though he had not held a real job in ten months. Since leaving the Los Angeles Police Department-where, during his last two years, he'd been on assignment to the California Multi-Agency Task Force on Computer Crime-he had spent several hours a day on-line with his own computers.
        Sometimes he researched subjects of interest to him, through Prodigy and Genie. More often, however, he explored ways to gain unapproved access to private and government computers that were protected by sophisticated security programs.
        Once entry was achieved, he was engaged in illegal activity. He never destroyed any company's or agency's files, never inserted false data.
        Still, he was guilty of trespassing in private domains.
        He could live with that.
        He was not seeking material rewards. His compensation was knowledge-and the occasional satisfaction of righting a wrong.
        Like the Beckwatt case.
        The previous December, when a serial child molester-Henry Beckwatt-was to be released from prison after serving less than five years, the California State Parole Board had refused, in the interest of prisoners' rights, to divulge the name of the community in which he would be residing during the term of his parole. Because Beckwatt had beaten some of his victims and expressed no remorse, his pending release raised anxiety levels in parents statewide.
        Taking great pains to cover his tracks, Spencer had first gained entry to the Los Angeles Police Department's computers, stepped from there to the state attorney general's system in Sacramento, and from there into the parole board's computer, where he finessed the address to which Beckwatt would be paroled. Anonymous tips to a few reporters forced the parole board to delay action until a secret new placement could be worked out. During the following five weeks, Spencer exposed three more addresses for Beckwatt, shortly after each was arranged.
        Although officials had been in a frenzy to uncover an imagined snitch within the parole system no one had wondered at least not yet, if the leak had been from their electronic-data files, sprung by a clever hacker. Finally admitting defeat, they paroled Beckwatt to an empty caretaker's house on the grounds of San Quentin.
        In a couple of years, when his period of post-prison supervision ended, Beckwatt would be free to prowl again, and he would surely destroy more children psychologically if not physically. For the time