The Blue Nowhere

with most of my brothers.”
    “‘Two of’?” Gillette said, lifting an eyebrow. “‘Most of’?”
    Bishop laughed. “I’m the eighth of nine. Five boys and four girls.”
    “That’s quite a family.”
    “I’ve got twenty-nine nieces and nephews,” the detective said proudly.
    Gillette looked at a picture of a lean man in a shirt as baggy as Bishop’s, standing in front of a one-story building, on the façade of which was a sign, BISHOP & SONS PRINTING AND TYPESETTING.
    “You didn’t want to be in the business?”
    “I like the idea of a company staying in the family.” He picked up the picture and gazed at it himself. “I think family’s the most important thing in the world. But, I tell you, I’d’ve been pretty bad at the printing business. Boring, you know. The thing about being a cop is that it’s . . . how do I say it? It’s like it’s infinite. There’s always something new, every day. As soon as you think you’ve figured out the criminal mind, bang, you find a whole new perspective.”
    There was motion nearby. They turned.
    “Look who we have here,” Bishop said.
    A boy of about eight was peeking into the living room from the corridor.
    “Come on in here, young man.”
    Wearing pajamas decorated with tiny dinosaurs, the boy walked into the living room, looking up at Gillette.
    “Say hi to Mr. Gillette, son. This’s Brandon.”
    “Hello.”
    “Hi, Brandon,” Gillette said. “You’re up late.”
    “I like to say good night to my dad. If he doesn’t get home too late mom lets me stay up.”
    “Mr. Gillette writes software for computers.”
    “You write script?” the boy asked enthusiastically.
    “That’s right,” Gillette said, laughing at the way the programmer’s shorthand for software tripped easily off his tongue.
    The boy said, “We write programs at our computer lab in school. The one we did last week made a ball bounce around the screen.”
    “That sounds like fun,” Gillette offered, noting the boy’s round, eager eyes. His features were mostly his mother’s.
    “Naw,” Brandon said, “it was totally boring. We had to use QBasic. I’m gonna learn O-O-P.”
    Object-oriented programming—the latest trend, exemplified by the sophisticated C++ language.
    The boy shrugged. “Then Java and HTML for the Net. But, like, everybody oughta know that.”
    “So you want to go into computers when you grow up.”
    “Naw, I’m going to play pro baseball. I just want to learn O-O-P ’cause it’s where everything’s happening now.”
    Here was a grade-schooler who was already tired of Basic and had his eyes set on the cutting edge of programming.
    “Why don’t you go show Mr. Gillette your computer.”
    “You play Tomb Raider?” the boy asked. “Or Earthworm Jim?”
    “I don’t play games much.”
    “I’ll show you. Come on.”
    Gillette followed the boy into a room cluttered with books, toys, sports equipment, clothes. The Harry Potter books sat on the bedside table, next to a Game Boy, two ’N Sync CDs and a dozen floppy disks. Well, here’s a snapshot of our era, Gillette thought.
    In the center of the room was an IBM-clone computer and dozens of software instruction manuals. Brandon sat down and, with lightning-fast keystrokes, booted up the machine and loaded a game. Gillette recalled that when he was the boy’s age the state of the art in personal computing was the Trash-80 he’d selected when his father had told him he could pick out a present for himself at Radio Shack. That tiny computer had thrilled him but it was, of course, just a rudimentary toy compared with the mail-order machine he was now looking at. At that time—just a few years ago—only a handful of people in the world had owned machines as powerful as the one on which Brandon Bishop was now directing a beautiful woman in a tight green top through caverns with a gun in her hand.
    “You want to play?”
    But this brought to mind the terrible game of Access and Phate’s digital picture of the murdered girl (her name, Lara, was the same as that of the heroine in this game of Brandon’s); he wanted nothing to do with violence, even two-dimensional, at the moment.
    “Maybe later.”
    He watched the boy’s fascinated eyes dance around the screen for a few minutes. Then the detective stuck his head in the door. “Lights out, son.”
    “Dad, look at the level I’m at! Five minutes.”
    “Nope. It’s bedtime.”
    “Aw, Dad . . .”
    Bishop made sure the boy’s