The Blue Nowhere

proved that he wasn’t emotionally dead, that he had within him a vast well of love.
    Eager to read the message he logged off the P&Z network and called up the e-mail.
    But as he read the stark words the smile slipped from his face, his breath grew rapid, his pulse increased. “Oh, Christ,” he muttered.
    The gist of the e-mail was that the police were much further along on his trail than he’d anticipated. They even knew about the killings in Portland and Virginia.
    Then he glanced at the second paragraph and got no further than the reference to Milliken Park.
    No, no. . . .
    He now had a real problem.
    Phate rose from his desk and hurried downstairs to the basement of his house. He glanced at another smear of dried blood on the floor—from the Lara Gibson character—and then opened a footlocker. From it he took his dark, stained knife. He walked to the closet, opened it and flicked the light on.
    Ten minutes later he was in his Jaguar, speeding onto the freeway.
    I n the beginning God created the Advanced Research Projects Agency network, which was called ARPAnet, and the ARPAnet flourished and begat the Milnet, and the ARPAnet and the Milnet begat the Internet, and the Internet and its issue, Usenet newsgroups and the World Wide Web, became a trinity that changed the life of His people forever and ever.
    Andy Anderson—who’d described the Net thus when he taught classes on computer history—thought of this slightly too-witty description now as he drove through Palo Alto and saw Stanford University ahead of him. For it was at the nearby Stanford Research Institutethat the Department of Defense had established the Internet’s predecessor in 1969 to link the SRI with UCLA, the University of California at Santa Barbara and the University of Utah.
    The reverence he felt for the site, however, faded quickly as he drove on through misty rain and saw the deserted hill of Hacker’s Knoll ahead of him, in John Milliken Park. Normally the place would be crowded with young people swapping software and tales of their cyber exploits. Today, though, the cold April drizzle had emptied the place.
    He parked, pulled on the rumpled gray rain hat his six-year-old daughter had given him as a birthday present and climbed out of the car. He hurried through the grass as streamers of rain flew from his shoes. He was discouraged by the lack of possible witnesses who might have a lead to Peter Fowler, the gunrunner. Still, there was a covered bridge in the middle of the park; sometimes kids hung out there when it was rainy or cold.
    But as Anderson approached he saw that the bridge too was deserted.
    He paused and looked around. The only people here clearly weren’t hackers: an elderly woman walking a dog, and a businessman making a cell phone call under the awning of one of the nearby university buildings.
    Anderson recalled a coffee shop in downtown Palo Alto, near the Hotel California. It was a place where geeks gathered to sip strong coffee and swap tales of their outrageous hacks. He decided to try the restaurant and see if anyone had heard about Peter Fowler or somebody selling knives in the area. If not, he’d try the computer science building and ask some of the professors and grad students if they’d seen anybody who—
    Then the detective saw motion nearby.
    Fifty feet away was a young man, walking furtively through the bushes toward the bridge. He was looking around uneasily, clearly paranoid.
    Anderson ducked behind a thick stand of juniper, his heart poundinglike a pile driver—because this was, he knew, Lara Gibson’s killer. He was in his twenties and was wearing the blue jean jacket that must’ve shed the denim fibers found on the woman’s body. He had blond hair and was clean shaven; the beard and mustache he’d worn in the bar had been fake, glued on with the theatrical adhesive.
    Social engineering . . .
    Then the man’s jacket fell away for a moment and Anderson could see, protruding from the waistband of the man’s jeans, the knobby hilt of a Ka-bar knife. The killer quickly pulled the jacket closed and continued to the covered bridge, where he stepped into the shadows and peered out.
    Anderson remained out of sight. He made a call to the state police’s field operations central dispatch. A moment later he heard the dispatcher answer and ask for his badge number.
    “Four three eight nine two,” Anderson whispered in reply. “Request immediate backup. I’ve got a visual on a suspect in a