The Hanged Man's Song

we’re gonna get a homicide guy with a notebook or maybe a desk computer, but most of what he figures out he’ll keep in his head. Calling up people on the phones and so on. There won’t be any way to track the investigation. If the killer-guy is a sophisticated outsider, which he probably is . . . they’re not going to come up with anything.”
    “How do you know that?”
    “Because I’ve gone into enough places to know the signs. The guy didn’t leave much. Besides, I was dating a cop, remember? And I’ve done some, mmm, preliminary research into the Minneapolis cops’ computer system.”
    “That’s cold, Kidd.” He was a romantic, and offended.
    “Hey, I wasn’t dating her to get at the system,” I said defensively. I fumbled around for the defroster and turned it on, blowing hot air on the windshield. All the heavy cogitation was steaming things up. “I was dating her because I liked her. It just happens that the system was sitting there.”
    “All right.” He wasn’t sure he believed me. “So what do we do?”
    “If we call in the FBI and tell them that the dead guy is the Bobby that everybody’s been looking for, they’ll be all over thecase. Then, we might be able to track the investigation—half the people in the ring are inside the FBI system. But what if they find the laptop? The worst thing that could happen to us is to have the laptop land at a computer forensics place, and have it turn out that the files aren’t encrypted.”
    “Even if they are encrypted, the FBI’s got those big fuckin’ computers. They’ll crack it like a walnut.”
    John’s not a computer guy. I said, “No, not really. If Bobby encrypted the files, and kept the keys in his head, they’re safe.”
    “Really?” A little skeptical. “What about the CIA and the NSA and the FBI and those other three-letter agencies?”
    “Some of the software that Bobby used—that everybody uses, now—can encrypt stuff so deeply that if the entire universe was made of computers, and they did nothing but try to crack the message, there wouldn’t be enough time in the life of the universe to do it.”
    He thought about that, then laughed. “You’re bullshitting me.”
    “Nope.”
    “Why would anybody encrypt something that deep?”
    “Because they can. It’s easy. So why not?”
    “Okay. But still, the idea of calling in the feds is scary,” he said. “I hate messing with those guys. If we only knew what was on the laptop. . . .”
    “That’s the problem,” I agreed.
    “Maybe, as a security thing, Bobby kept all the good stuff on the DVDs.”
    We bumped across a set of railroad tracks. I wasn’t sure, but I thought I was lost. I did a U-turn and headed back the way we’d come. I picked up on John’s suggestion: “I don’t think so. Accessis too slow. No computer guy wants to thumb through a stack of DVDs and then wait for ten seconds for something to load when he can get it in a half-second. That’s just the way it is. He’d keep the good stuff on the laptop.”
    “Then maybe he backed up the laptop on the DVDs, so we can figure out what’s on it, without finding it.”
    I shook my head. “There are what, seventy DVDs? That’s a huge amount of stuff. You could probably put the Library of Congress on those things. There’s so much stuff that we won’t even have time to read the indexes, if there are indexes.”
    “I could take some time off . . .”
    John used to work on a law firm’s computer system, and he was about as far into computers as a typical high school teacher. He didn’t have any notion of what I was talking about, and I struggled around to find an explanation.
    “Look,” I said finally. “A few weeks ago, I put the Encyclopaedia Britannica on my laptop, since I had lots of space. Okay? That’s seventy-five thousand articles, thirteen hundred maps, ten thousand photos. That’s what the advertisement says. Something like that. It sucked up about 1.2 gigs. That means you could put about, uh . . .”—I did some quick calculation—“something like thirteen Encyclopaedia Britannica s on one DVD. And we have seventy DVDs. They might not be full, but if they are, that’ll be like paging through what, sixty-seven million articles and eight million pictures, looking for your name or your picture. You don’t have enough time left in your life to do it.”
    “Then what use are they?”
    “Bobby didn’t look piece by piece. He knew what he had. I’d bet he’s