The Blue Nowhere

conflicts shut you down?”
    The boy looked through his notebook. He showed a page to Gillette. The crashes were carefully noted. “Good.” Gillette nodded and said to Tony Mott, “Call Garvy Hobbes. Get him on the speakerphone.”
    Mott did this and a moment later the security chief from Mobile America was connected.
    “Howdy,” Garvy Hobbes said. “You got a lead to our bad boy?”
    Gillette looked at Bishop, who deferred to the hacker with a waveof his hand and said. “This’s new -fashioned police work. It’s all yours.”
    The hacker said, “Try this on, Garvy. If I give you four specific times and dates that one of your cell phones went down for about sixty seconds then went back on, calling the same number, could you identify that phone?”
    “Hmmm. That’s a new one but I’ll give it a shot. Gimme the times and dates.”
    Gillette did and Hobbes said, “Stay on the line. I’ll be back.”
    The hacker explained to the team what he was doing: When Jamie’s computer froze, the boy would have to reboot the machine again to get back online. That’d take about a minute. This meant that Phate’s cell phone call was interrupted for the same period of time while the killer also restarted his machine and reconnected. By cross-checking the exact times Jamie’s computer froze and then went back online against the times a particular Mobile America cell phone disconnected and reconnected they’d know that cell phone was Phate’s.
    Five minutes later the security specialist came back on the line. “This’s fun,” Hobbes said cheerfully. “I got it.” Then he added with some troubled reverence in his voice, “But what’s weird is the numbers of his phone are unassigned.”
    Gillette explained, “What Garvy’s saying is that Phate hacked into a secure, nonpublic switch and stole the numbers.”
    “Nobody’s ever cracked our main board yet. This boy is something else, I’ll tell you.”
    “But we know that,” muttered Frank Bishop.
    “Is he still using the phone?” Shelton asked.
    “Hasn’t since yesterday. The typical profile for a call jacker is if they don’t use a stolen unit for twenty-four hours that means they’ve switched numbers.”
    “So we can’t trace him when he goes online again?” Bishop asked, discouraged.
    “Right,” Hobbes confirmed.
    But Gillette shrugged and said, “Oh, I figured he’d changed the numbers once he found out we were on to him. But we can stillnarrow down where he was calling from in the past couple of weeks. Right, Garvy?”
    “You betcha,” Hobbes offered. “We have records of what cells all of our calls originate from. Most of the calls on that phone came from our cell 879. That’s Los Altos. And I narrowed it down further from the MITSO data.”
    “The what?”
    Gillette said, “The mobile telephone switching office. They’ve got sector capability—that means they can tell what part of the cell he’s located in. Down to about one square kilometer.”
    Hobbes laughed and asked warily, “Mr. Gillette, how is it you know as much about our system as we do?”
    “I read a lot,” Gillette said wryly. Then he asked, “Give me the coordinates of the location. Can you give us the information by street?” He walked to the map.
    “Sure thing.” Hobbes rattled off four intersections and Gillette connected the dots. It was a trapezoid covering a large portion of Los Altos. “He’s in there someplace.” The hacker tapped the map.
    Within this perimeter were six new housing developments whose addresses Santa Clara planning and zoning had given them.
    It was better than twenty-two but was still discouraging.
    “Six?” asked a dismayed Linda Sanchez. “Must be three thousand people living there. Can we narrow it down any more?”
    “We can try,” Bishop said. “Because we know where he shops.” On the map Bishop tapped the development that fell halfway between Ollie’s costume store and Mountain View Music and Electronics. Its name was Stonecrest.
    A flurry of activity ensued. Bishop told Garvy to meet them in Los Altos near the development, then he called Captain Bernstein and briefed him. They decided to use plainclothes officers to canvass door-to-door throughout the development with Holloway’s picture. Bishop came up with the idea of buying small plastic buckets and handing them out to the troopers, who’d pretend to be soliciting money for some children’s cause, in case Holloway saw them on the street. Hethen alerted the