The Blue Nowhere

going to kill it! ” The boy shook with anger.
    “Mr. Turner, you will calm down this instant! I’m not going to tell you again.”
    Mark, Jamie’s brother, ran into the computer room. He put his arm around the boy, who collapsed against him, sobbing.
    “The students have to behave,” the shaken administrator said, looking at the cool faces of the CCU team. “That’s the way we do things around here.”
    Bishop glanced at Sanchez, who was surveying the damage. She said, “Central processor’s okay. The monitor’s all he nailed.”
    Wyatt Gillette pulled a couple of chairs into the corner and motioned Jamie over to him. The boy looked at his brother, who nodded, and he joined the hacker.
    “I think that fucks up the warranty,” Gillette said, laughing and nodding at the monitor.
    The boy flashed a weak smile but it vanished almost immediately.
    After a moment the boy said, “It’s my fault Booty died.” The boy looked at him. “I hacked the passcode to the gate, I downloaded the schematic for the alarms. . . . Oh, I wish I was fucking dead!” He wiped his face on his sleeve.
    There was more on the boy’s mind, Gillette could see once again. “Go on, tell me,” he encouraged softly.
    The boy looked down and finally said, “That man? He said that if I hadn’t been hacking, Mr. Boethe’d still be alive. It was me who killed him. And I should never touch another computer again because I might kill somebody else.”
    Gillette was shaking his head. “No, no, no, Jamie. The man who did this is a sick fuck. He got it into his head that he was going to kill yourprincipal and nothing was going to stop him. If he hadn’t used you he would’ve used somebody else. He said those things to you ’cause he’s afraid of you.”
    “Afraid of me?”
    “He’s been watching you, watching you write script and hack. He’s scared of what you might do to him someday.”
    Jamie said nothing.
    Gillette nodded at the smoking monitor. “You can’t break all the machines in the world.”
    “But I can fuck up that one!” he raged.
    “It’s just a tool,” Gillette said softly. “Some people use screwdrivers to break into houses. You can’t get rid of all the screwdrivers.”
    Jamie sagged against a stack of books, crying. Gillette put his arm around the boy’s shoulders. “I’m never going on a fucking computer again. I hate them!”
    “Well, that’s going to be a problem.”
    The boy wiped his face again. “Problem?”
    Gillette said, “See, we need you to help us.”
    “Help you?”
    The hacker nodded at the machine. “You wrote that script? Crack-er?”
    The boy nodded.
    “You’re good, Jamie. You’re really good. There are sysadmins who couldn’t run the hacks you did. We’re going to take that machine with us so we can analyze it at headquarters. But I’m going to leave the other ones here and I was hoping you’d go through them and see if there’s anything you can find that might help us catch this asshole.”
    “You want me to do that?”
    “You know what a white-hat hacker is?”
    “Yeah. A good hacker who helps find bad hackers.”
    “Will you be our white hat? We don’t have enough people at the state police. Maybe you’ll find something we can’t.”
    The boy now seemed embarrassed he’d been crying. He angrily wiped his face. “I don’t know. I don’t think I want to.”
    “We sure could use your help.”
    The assistant principal said, “Okay, Jamie, it’s time to get back to your room.”
    His brother said, “No way. He’s not staying here tonight. We’re going to that concert and then he can spend the night with me.”
    The assistant principal said firmly, “No. He needs written permission from your parents and we couldn’t get in touch with them. We have rules here and, after all this”—he waved his hands vaguely toward the crime scene—“we’re not deviating from them.”
    Mark Turner leaned forward and whispered harshly, “Jesus Christ, loosen up, will you? The kid’s had the worst night of his life and you’re—”
    The administrator responded, “You have no say about how I deal with my students.”
    Then Frank Bishop said, “But I do. And Jamie’s not doing either—staying here or going to any concerts. He’s coming to police headquarters and making a statement. Then we’ll take him to his parents.”
    “I don’t want to go there,” the boy said miserably. “Not my parents.”
    “I’m afraid I don’t have any choice, Jamie,”