The Blue Nowhere

with a z on the end, not an s , and you’re not talking about housewares but about stolen software. When it comes to hacking it’s all in the spelling.”
    Shelton shrugged and remained unimpressed by the distinction.
    The identification techs from the California State Police Forensics Division returned to the main part of the CCU office, wheeling batteredsuitcases behind them. One consulted a sheet of paper. “We lifted eighteen partial latents, twelve partial visibles.” He nodded at a laptop computer case slung over his shoulder. “We scanned them and it looks like they’re all the victim’s or her boyfriend’s. And there was no evidence of glove smears on the keys.”
    “So,” Anderson said, “he got inside her system from a remote location. Soft access—like we thought.” He thanked the techs and they left.
    Then Linda Sanchez—all business at the moment, no longer the grandmother-to-be—said to Gillette, “I’ve secured and logged everything in her machine.” She handed him a floppy disk. “Here’s a boot disk.”
    This was a disk that contained enough of an operating system to “boot up,” or start, a suspect’s computer. Police used boot disks, rather than the hard drive itself, to start the computer in case the owner—or the killer, in this case—had installed some booby trap software on the hard drive that would destroy data.
    “You probably know all this too, but keep the victim’s machine and any disks away from plastic bags or boxes or folders—they can create static and zap data. Same thing with speakers. They have magnets in them. And don’t put any disks on metal shelves—they might be magnetized. You’ll find nonmagnetic tools in the lab. I guess you know what to do from here.”
    “Yep.”
    She said, “Good luck. The lab’s down that corridor there.”
    The boot disk in hand, Gillette started toward the hallway.
    Bob Shelton followed.
    The hacker turned. “I don’t really want anybody looking over my shoulder.”
    Especially you, he added to himself.
    “It’s okay,” Anderson said to the Homicide cop. “The only exit back there’s alarmed and he’s got his jewelry on.” Nodding at the shiny metal transmission anklet. “He’s not going anywhere.”
    Shelton wasn’t pleased but he acquiesced. Gillette noticed, though,that he didn’t return to the main room. He leaned against the hallway wall near the lab and crossed his arms, looking like a bouncer with a bad attitude.
    If you even get an itchy look that I don’t like you’re going to get hurt bad . . . .
    Inside the analysis room Gillette walked up to Lara Gibson’s computer. It was an unremarkable, off-the-shelf IBM clone.
    He did nothing with her machine just yet, though. Instead he sat down at a workstation and wrote a kludge—a down-and-dirty software program. In five minutes he was finished writing the source code. He named the program Detective then compiled and copied it to the boot disk Sanchez had given him. He inserted the disk into the floppy drive of Lara Gibson’s machine. He turned on the power switch and the drives hummed and snapped with comforting familiarity.
    Wyatt Gillette’s thick, muscular fingers slid eagerly onto the cool plastic of the keys. He positioned his fingertips, callused from years of keyboarding, on the tiny orientation bumps on the F and J keys. The boot disk bypassed the machine’s Windows operating system and went straight to the leaner MS-DOS—the famous Microsoft Disk Operating System, which is the basis for the more user-friendly Windows. A white C: prompt appeared on the black screen.
    His heart raced as he stared at the hypnotically pulsing cursor.
    Then, not looking at the keyboard, he pressed a key, the one for d —the first letter in the command line, detective.exe, which would start his program.
    In the Blue Nowhere time is very different from what we know it to be in the Real World and, in the first thousandth of a second after Wyatt Gillette pushed that key, this happened:
    The voltage flowing through the circuit beneath the d key changed ever so slightly.
    The keyboard processor noticed the change in current and transmitted an interrupt signal to the computer itself, which momentarily sent the dozens of tasks it was currently performing to a storage area known as the stack and then created a special priority route for codescoming from the keyboard.
    The code for the letter d was directed by the keyboard processor along this express highway