The Blue Nowhere

bore the stigmata of a past-lifeearring and broke into a laugh. “I was wondering how to bring that up.” He said to Mott, “Take him down to the employee locker room. But stay close.”
    The young cop nodded and led Gillette down the hallway. He chattered away nonstop—his first topic, the advantages of the Linux operating system, a variation on the classic Unix, which many people were starting to use in place of Windows. He spoke enthusiastically and was well informed.
    He then told Gillette about the recent formation of the Computer Crimes Unit. They’d been in existence for less than a year. The Geek Squad, Mott explained, could easily have used another half-dozen full-time cops but they weren’t in the budget. There were more cases than they could possibly handle—from hacking to cyberstalking to child pornography to copyright infringement of software—and the workload seemed to get heavier with every passing month.
    “Why’d you get into it?” Gillette asked him. “CCU?”
    “Hoping for a little excitement. I mean, I love machines and guess I have a mind for ’em, but sifting through code to find a copyright violation’s not quite what I’d hoped. I thought it’d be a little more rig and rage, you know.”
    “How ’bout Linda Sanchez?” Gillette asked. “She a geek?”
    “Not really. She’s smart but machines aren’t in her blood. She was a gang girl down in Lettuce Land, you know, Salinas. Then she went into social work and decided to go to the academy. Her partner was shot up pretty bad in Monterey a few years ago. Linda has kids—the daughter who’s expecting and a girl in high school—and her husband’s never home. He’s an INS agent. So she figured it was time to move to a little quieter side of the business.”
    “Just the opposite of you.”
    Mott laughed. “I guess so.”
    As Gillette toweled off after the shower and shave Mott placed an extra set of his own workout clothes on the bench for the hacker. T-shirt, black sweatpants and a warm-up windbreaker. Mott was shorter than Gillette but they had basically the same build.
    “Thanks,” Gillette said, donning the clothes. He felt exhilarated, having washed away one particular type of filth from his thin frame: the residue of prison.
    On the way back to the main room they passed a small kitchenette. There was a coffeepot, a refrigerator and a table on which sat a plate of bagels. Gillette stopped, looked hungrily at the food. Then he eyed a row of cabinets.
    He asked Mott, “I don’t suppose you have any Pop-Tarts in there.”
    “Pop-Tarts? Naw. But have a bagel.”
    Gillette walked over to the table and poured a cup of coffee. He picked up a raisin bagel.
    “Not one of those,” Mott said. He took it out of Gillette’s hand and dropped it on the floor. It bounced like a ball.
    Gillette frowned.
    “Linda brought these in. It’s a joke.” When Gillette stared at him in confusion the cop added, “Don’t you get it?”
    “Get what?”
    “What’s today’s date?”
    “I don’t have a clue.” The days of the month aren’t how you mark time in prison.
    “April Fools’ Day,” Mott said. “Those bagels’re plastic. Linda and I put ’em out this morning and we’ve been waiting for Andy to bite—so to speak—but we haven’t got him yet. I think he’s on a diet.” He opened the cabinet and took out a bag of fresh ones. “Here.”
    Gillette ate one quickly. Mott said, “Go ahead. Have another.”
    Another followed, washed down with gulps from the large cup of coffee. They were the best thing he’d had in ages.
    Mott got a carrot juice from the fridge and they returned to the main area of CCU.
    Gillette looked around the dinosaur pen, at the hundreds of disconnected boas lying in the corners and at the air-conditioning vents, his mind churning. A thought occurred to him. “April Fools’ Day . . . so the murder was March thirty-first?”
    “Right,” Anderson confirmed. “Is that significant?”
    Gillette said uncertainly, “It’s probably a coincidence.”
    “Go ahead.”
    “Well, it’s just that March thirty-first is sort of a red-letter day in computer history.”
    Bishop asked, “Why?”
    A woman’s gravelly voice spoke from the doorway. “Isn’t that the date the first Univac was delivered?”

CHAPTER 00000110 / SIX
    T hey turned to see a hippy brunette in her mid-thirties, wearing an unfortunate gray sweater suit and thick black shoes.
    Anderson asked, “Patricia?”
    She nodded