The Blue Nowhere

engineering, were the sort of things he wouldn’t normally wear.
    He paid with money he’d lifted from a jacket in CCU and started toward the door. He paused and turned back to the clerk. “Excuse me. There’s a bus stop around here, isn’t there?”
    The old man pointed to the west of the store. “Fifty feet up the street. It’s a transfer point. You can get a bus there that’ll take you anywhere you want to go.”
    “Anywhere?” Wyatt Gillette asked cheerfully. “Who could ask for more than that?” And he stepped back into the rainy night, opening his borrowed umbrella.
    T he Computer Crimes Unit was mute from the betrayal.
    Frank Bishop felt the hot pressure of silence around him. Bob Shelton was coordinating with the local police. Tony Mott and Linda Sanchez were also on the phones, checking leads. They spoke in quiet tones, reverent almost, suggesting the intensity of their desire to recapture their betrayer.
    The more I know you, the more you don’t seem like the typical hacker  . . .
    After Bishop, it was Patricia Nolan who seemed the most upset and took the young man’s escape personally. Bishop had sensed a connection between them—well, she at least was attracted to the hacker. Thedetective wondered if this crush might’ve fit a certain pattern: the smart but ungainly woman would fall hard and fast for a brilliant renegade, who’d charm her for a while but then would slip out of her life. For the fiftieth time that day Bishop pictured his wife Jennie and thought how glad he was to be contentedly married.
    The reports came back but there were no leads. No one in the buildings near CCU had seen Gillette escape. No cars were missing from the parking lot but the office was right next to a major county bus route and he could easily have escaped that way. No county or municipal police cars reported seeing anyone fitting his description on foot.
    With the absence of hard evidence as to where Gillette had gone Bishop decided to look at the hacker’s history—try to track down his father or brother. Friends too and former coworkers. Bishop looked over Andy Anderson’s desk for copies of Gillette’s court and prison files but he couldn’t find them. When Bishop put in an emergency request for copies of the files from central records he learned that they were gone.
    “Someone issued a memo to shred them, right?” Bishop asked the night clerk.
    “As a matter of fact, sir, that’s right. How’d you know?”
    “Wild guess.” The detective hung up.
    Then an idea occurred to him. He recalled that the hacker had done juvenile time.
    So Bishop called a friend at the night magistrate’s office. The man did some checking and learned that, yes, they did have a file on Wyatt Gillette’s arrest and sentencing when he’d been seventeen. They’d send a copy over as soon as possible.
    “He forgot to have those shredded,” Bishop said to Nolan. “At least we’ve got one break.”
    Suddenly Tony Mott glanced at a computer terminal and leapt to his feet, shouting, “Look!”
    He ran to the terminal and started banging on the keyboard.
    “What?” Bishop asked.
    “A housekeeping program just started to wipe the empty space onthe hard drive,” Mott said breathlessly as he keyed. He hit ENTER then looked up. “There, it’s stopped.”
    Bishop noted the alarm in his face but had no clue what was going on.
    It was Linda Sanchez who explained. “Almost all the data on a computer—even things you’ve deleted or that vanish when you shut the computer off—stay in the empty space of your hard drive. You can’t see them as files but they’re easy to recover. That’s how we catch a lot of bad guys who think they deleted incriminating evidence. The only way to completely destroy that information is to run a program that ‘wipes’ the empty space. It’s like a digital shredder. Before he escaped Wyatt must’ve programmed it to start running.”
    “Which means,” Tony Mott said, “that he doesn’t want us to see what he was just doing online.”
    Linda Sanchez said, “I’ve got a program that’ll find whatever he was looking at.”
    She flipped through a box containing floppy disks and loaded one into the machine. Her stubby fingers danced over the keyboard and in a moment cryptic symbols filled the screen. They made no sense whatsoever to Frank Bishop. He noticed though that this must have been a victory for their side because Sanchez smiled faintly and motioned her colleagues over to