The Blue Nowhere

walked up to them and ushered them out of sight.
    The pleasant suburban street was clear.
    “Looks good,” Johnson said, then ran in a crouch toward the house.
    “It all comes down to this. . . .” Bishop muttered.
    Linda Sanchez overheard him and said, “Ain’t that the truth, boss.” Then she gave a thumbs-up to Tony Mott, who was kneeling, along with a half-dozen tactical troopers, behind a hedge bordering Phate’sproperty. He nodded at her and turned back to Phate’s house. She said in a soft voice, “That boy better not hurt himself.”
    Bob Shelton returned and dropped heavily into the seat of the Crown Victoria.
    Gillette didn’t hear any commands given but all at once the SWAT troopers emerged from their hiding places and raced toward the house.
    Suddenly there were three loud bangs. Gillette jumped.
    Bishop explained, “Special shotgun shells. They’re shooting the locks out of the doors.”
    Gillette, his palms sweating, found himself holding his breath, waiting for gunshots, explosions, screaming, sirens. . . .
    Bishop remained motionless, keen eyes on the house. If he was tense he didn’t show it.
    “Come on, come on,” Linda Sanchez muttered. “What’s happening?”
    Long, long moments of silence, except for the hollow tapping of the rain on the car’s roof.
    When the car’s radio crackled to life the sound was so abrupt that everyone jumped.
    “Alpha team leader to Bishop. You there?”
    Bishop grabbed the microphone. “Go ahead, Alonso.”
    “Frank,” the voice reported. “He’s not here.”
    “What?” the detective asked in dismay.
    “We’re scouring the place now but it looks like he’s gone. Just like at the motel.”
    “Fucking hell,” Shelton snapped.
    Johnson continued. “I’m in the dining room—it’s his office. There’s a can of Mountain Dew that’s still cold. And the body-heat detector shows he was in the chair in front of the computer as of five to ten minutes ago.”
    In a desperate voice Bishop said, “He’s in there, Al. He’s got to be. He’s got a hidey-hole somewhere. Check in the closets. Check under the bed. ”
    “Frank, the infrareds aren’t picking up anything except his ghost in the chair.”
    “But he can’t’ve gotten outside,” Sanchez said.
    “We’ll keep at it.”
    Bishop’s body sagged against the door as despair eased into his hawklike face.
    Ten minutes later the tactical commander came back on the radio.
    “The whole house is secure, Frank,” Johnson said. “He’s not here. If you want to run the scene, you can.”

CHAPTER 00100101 / THIRTY-SEVEN
    I nside, the house was immaculate.
    Completely different from what Gillette had expected. Most hacker lairs were filthy, impacted with computer parts, wires, books, tech manuals, tools, floppy disks, encrusted food containers, dirty glasses, books and just plain junk.
    The living room of Phate’s house looked as if Martha Stewart had just finished decorating. The CCU team looked around them. Gillette wondered at first if they had the wrong house but then he noticed the framed pictures and saw Holloway’s face in many of them.
    “Look,” Linda Sanchez said, pointing at one framed snapshot. “That woman must be Shawn.” Then she glanced at another. “And they’ve got kids? ”
    Shelton said, “We can send the pictures to the feds and—”
    But Bishop shook his head.
    “What’s the matter?” Alonso Johnson asked.
    “They’re fake, aren’t they?” Bishop glanced at Gillette with a raised eyebrow.
    The hacker picked up one frame and slipped a picture out. They weren’t on photo lab glossy paper but had been printed out on a color computer printer. “He downloaded ’em from the Net or scanned them from a magazine and added his face.”
    On the mantel, next to a picture of the happy couple sitting in beach chairs beside a pool, was an old-fashioned grandmother clock, showing the hour as 2:15. The loud ticking was a reminder that Phate’s next victim, or victims, at the university might die at any minute.
    Gillette looked over the room, which smacked of affluent suburban living.
    Troubadour. . . . The dream house that you and your family will enjoy for years to come. . . .
    Huerto Ramirez and Tim Morgan had canvassed the neighbors but nobody offered anything that suggested any leads to other locations he might have a connection to. Ramirez said, “According to the neighbor across the street, he was going by the name Warren Gregg and telling