The Blue Nowhere

around the dinosaur pen.
    The energy was low in the room. Linda Sanchez was on the phone with her daughter. Stephen Miller sat sullenly by himself, looking over notes, perhaps still troubled by the mistake he’d made with the anonymizer, which had let Triple-X get away. Gillette was in theanalysis lab, checking out the contents of Jamie Turner’s computer. Patricia Nolan was in a nearby cubicle, making phone calls. Bishop wasn’t sure where Bob Shelton was.
    Bishop’s phone rang and he took the call. It was from the highway patrol.
    A motorcycle officer had found Phate’s Jaguar in Oakland.
    There wasn’t any direct evidence linking the car to the hacker but it had to be his; the only reason to douse a $60,000 vehicle with copious amounts of gasoline and set it aflame was to destroy evidence.
    Which the fire did with great efficiency, according to the crime scene unit; there were no clues that might help the team.
    Bishop turned back to the preliminary crime scene report from St. Francis Academy. Huerto Ramirez had compiled it in record time but there wasn’t much that was helpful here either. The murder weapon had again been a Ka-bar knife. The duct tape used to bind Jamie Turner was untraceable, as were the Tabasco and ammonia that had stung his eyes. They’d found plenty of Holloway’s fingerprints—but those were useless now since they already knew his identity.
    Bishop walked to the white-board and gestured to Mott for the marker, who pitched it to him. The detective wrote these details on the board but when he started to write “Fingerprints,” he paused.
    Phate’s fingerprints . . .
    The burning Jaguar . . .
    These facts troubled him for some reason. Why? he wondered, brushing his sideburns with his knuckles.
    Do something with that  . . .
    He snapped his fingers.
    “What?” Linda Sanchez asked. Mott, Miller and Nolan looked at him.
    “Phate didn’t wear gloves this time.”
    At Vesta’s, when he’d kidnapped Lara Gibson, Phate had carefully wrapped a napkin around his beer bottle to obscure his prints. At St. Francis he hadn’t bothered. “That means he knows we have his real identity.” Then the detective added, “And the car too. The only reason to destroy it is if he knew that we’d found out he was driving a Jaguar. How’d he do that?”
    The press hadn’t mentioned his name or the fact that the killer was driving a Jaguar.
    “We have ourselves a spy, you think?” Linda Sanchez said.
    Bishop’s eyes fell again on the white-board and he noticed the reference to Shawn, Phate’s mysterious partner. He tapped the name and asked, “What’s the whole point of this game of his? It’s to find some hidden way of getting access to your victim’s life.”
    Nolan said, “You’re thinking Shawn’s a trapdoor? An insider?”
    Tony Mott shrugged. “Maybe he’s a dispatcher at headquarters? Or a trooper?”
    “Or somebody from California State Data Management?” Stephen Miller suggested.
    “Or maybe,” a man’s voice growled, “ Gillette is Shawn.”
    Bishop turned and saw Bob Shelton standing in front of a cubicle toward the back of the room.
    “What’re you talking about?” Patricia Nolan asked.
    “Come here,” he said, gesturing them toward the cubicle.
    Inside, on the desk, a computer monitor glowed with text. Shelton sat down and scrolled through it as the others on the team crammed into the cubicle.
    Linda Sanchez looked over the screen. With some concern she said, “You’re on ISLEnet. Gillette said we weren’t supposed to log on from here.”
    “Of course he said that,” Shelton spat out bitterly. “Know why? Because he was afraid we’d find this—” He scrolled a little further down and gestured toward the screen. “It’s an old Department of Justice report I found in the Contra Costa County archives. Phate might’ve erased the copy in Washington but he missed this one.” Shelton tapped the screen. “Gillette was Valleyman. He and Holloway ran that gang—Knights of Access—together. They founded it.”
    “Shit,” Miller muttered.
    “No,” Bishop whispered. “Can’t be.”
    Mott spat out, “ He fucking social engineered us too!”
    Bishop closed his eyes, seared by the betrayal.
    Shelton muttered, “Gillette and Holloway’ve known each other for years. ‘Shawn’ could be one of Gillette’s screen names. Remember that the warden said they caught him going online. He was probably contacting Phate. Maybe this whole thing was a