Darker Than Night (21 page)

“New computers,” said Sergeant Rudd, who was manning the precinct desk when Pearl walked in. He was an aging, broad-shouldered man, with white hair, a whiskey nose, and eyes the color of lead bullets. “We need to keep up with the feds when it comes to technology.”

Pearl looked over to where the clerk sat and saw him wrestling a keyboard out of a box. The computer on his desk did indeed look new, and had a monitor featuring an impressively large flat screen.

“How are they preserving our information?” Pearl asked.

Rudd stared at her.

“I mean, are they transferring all the data from the old computers to the new ones?”

“Oh, sure. I overheard the technicians talking about some kind of ZIP drive thing. Nothing to it, according to them. But far as an old cop like me's concerned, a computer makes a good boat anchor.”

“Dinosaur,” Pearl said, walking on toward the squad room.

“You too,” Rudd said behind her. “You're just a smaller, prettier one. 'Specially this morning.” She turned and saw his seamed face split into a grin. “There some kinda reason for that?”

Holy Christ!
Was it that obvious to the trained eye? Pearl felt herself blush and pressed on, ignoring Rudd's chuckle.

The squad room was a mess. Half a dozen technicians who looked like teenagers in pale blue blazers were setting up new computers on the old steel gray desks, or on typing tables beside the desks. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries were colliding here. There were only two detectives around, a smarmy little creep named Weatherington, and a large, potbellied man she knew only as “Big Mike.” They were both undercover vice, which as far as Pearl was concerned was exactly where they belonged.

She stood still for a moment, taking in the electronic carnage. Then she went back to the booking area.

“Looks like some kinda college frat prank goin' on in there, don't it?” Rudd said.

“Maybe it is.” Pearl motioned toward the squad room with her thumb. “Which of those desks used to be Quinn's?”

Rudd returned his attention to the paperwork that occupied him. It was almost as if he expected the question; he'd been day desk sergeant for over five years and had the answers. “Second on the left as you walk in the door.”

He didn't ask Pearl why she'd asked. She thanked him and returned to the squad room.

She went to the second desk and saw the new computer on it, but there was no old one sitting on the floor to be removed later.

“What happened to the computer that was on this desk?” she asked the young technician who was working at the desk two over.

“Didn't replace that one,” the young woman said. She weighed about seventy pounds and had glasses the size of CD-ROMs. “It was new enough that we just ramped up the memory. Five-twelve RAM now.”

“Wow,” Pearl said. “How new?”

“Three or four years old is all.”

“Any of the others like that? New enough they were kept?”

“Not to my knowledge,” the young woman said, and began undoing a tangle of cables.

Pearl thought about going back and asking Rudd where Quinn's old computer might be, but she decided against it. She had a pretty good idea.

She sat down at one of the new computers and booted it up. “Programs the same on all of these?” she asked another of the teenage techies. This one was a boy with a bad complexion and a bushy unibrow over watery brown eyes.

“Just like your old one only bigger and faster, ma'am. Sort of like a second marriage to a younger man.”

Pearl looked at the pimply punk, wondering if he might be coming on to her. But he seemed oblivious as he did something to the back of one of the tower units with a screwdriver. He removed the cream-colored metal shell case which was apparently attached only by a few small screws, then began tinkering with the computer's electronic guts.

Pearl leaned to the side so she could see. “That the hard drive?”

“Hard as you like it, ma'am.”

Pearl stared at the kid. He smiled and went back to his work.

What's with me this morning? Does the male sex somehow smell recent activity?

Pearl keyed in her PIN and went to the software program that matched items in the evidence room with dates and case numbers. As soon as she typed in Quinn's name, a reference number came up that would act as a guide, much as the Dewey decimal system helped to locate library books.

She copied the number on a Post-it, then shut down the computer and walked back to the evidence room.

A sleepy-eyed sergeant was on duty behind a counter, sitting down and engrossed in a
New York Post.
Pearl flashed her shield and logged in, and the sergeant went back to reading what looked like yet another piece on Anna Caruso.

Pearl pushed through a wooden swing gate and entered a caged-in area in a windowless room built onto the back of the precinct house over twenty years ago.

It wasn't hard to find the computer, wrapped in plastic on the second shelf of a tier of metal shelves. Pearl glanced around. At this hour she was alone. She had privacy.

She made sure the tag on the computer matched the reference number, then dragged it over to the edge of the shelf and turned it around. After peeling back about a yard of masking tape, she slipped the plastic wrapping from the computer.

Pearl had been afraid to borrow a screwdriver from one of the techies, but she'd brought the Swiss Army knife she carried in her purse.

Its screwdriver worked just fine. It took her less than ten minutes by her watch to detach and lift off the computer's rectangular metal case, remove the hard drive, then replace the case. Within another few minutes she had the computer rewrapped and taped, and back in its original spot on the steel shelf.

The hard drive was shiny steel and about the size and shape of a paperback book. She tucked it into her waistband beneath her blouse, then returned to the squad room.

“Going out,” she said to Sergeant Rudd, who was still busy with his paperwork.

“Why? Those kids making you feel dumb?”

“'Fraid so.” She grinned.

“Used to be,” Rudd said, “people got smarter as they got older.”

“That was always just a rumor,” Pearl told him as she pushed open the heavy door and went out into the morning heat.

As she walked toward her unmarked, she glanced at her watch. Not yet eight o'clock. If she remembered correctly, the stock market didn't open till nine-thirty. If she drove fast and didn't get bogged down in traffic, she should have time.

Of course she could make her destination in plenty of time if she used the light and siren. Trouble was, she wasn't on a call, and it wasn't an emergency, so strictly speaking, it was against regulations.

Pearl decided to use the light and siren.

 

When she turned the car onto Michelle Quinn's block, the dashboard clock said it was eight-fifty. The stock market wouldn't open for another forty minutes, so it was possible that Michelle was still in her apartment.

Pearl left the unmarked in a no-parking zone and jogged across the street toward Michelle's building. It was the first time she'd seen it. Her other meetings with Michelle had been at a coffee shop near her office in the financial district. It was an obviously expensive building, with a uniformed doorman who looked like the dictator of a small country. Michelle must know her stuff as a stock analyst. In fact, from what Pearl had heard, any analyst out of prison and still employed after the recent bear market must know his or her stuff.

She gave the doorman her name and told him who she was here to see. He studied the tiny screen of a personal digital assistant he produced from a secret pocket in his tunic. One of his eyebrows arched.

“She isn't expecting me,” Pearl said.

She stood back and admired his epaulets as he phoned upstairs to see if Michelle Quinn was home and receiving visitors dressed like Pearl.

She was, and she was.

Quinn's sister was standing with her door open so Pearl would locate the apartment easier. Michelle was dressed for work in a pinstripe gray skirt and blazer, a lighter gray blouse, with a red-and-gray tie—or rather dressed for
going
to work, with her white sneakers sharply contrasting with the somber outfit. Pearl knew that like many New York career women, Michelle would carry her conservative, uncomfortable shoes in her purse until she reached her office.

When Pearl approached, Michelle smiled and extended her hand. “Something important?”

“Maybe. I don't want to take up a lot of your time,” Pearl said as they shared a handshake.

“If it's about Frank, go ahead and take it up.” Michelle ushered her into a spacious and tastefully furnished apartment with a magnificent sun-touched vista of the city and the Hudson River beyond. The air, which seemed fractured by the crystalline light made somehow more intense by passing through the slanted panes, carried a faint, pleasant lilac scent.

“Nice place,” Pearl said, wincing inwardly at her understatement. Most people in Manhattan would kill to live here. Pearl, maybe.

Michelle offered her coffee, which Pearl declined; neither woman had time to waste.

They went through the living room into a book-lined den furnished in rich wood and soft leather of the sort that looks worn-out the day it's bought. On a wide walnut desk sat a blue-and-gray computer—it might have been lifted from the control panel of the starship
Enterprise.
Michelle motioned toward a chair, but Pearl declined again and reached into her purse. She drew out the hard-disk drive she'd removed from Quinn's old computer. “This is—”

“I know what it is,” Michelle interrupted. Caution had crept into her voice. She gave Pearl a look, something like the one Quinn sometimes gave her.

“I won't tell you how it came into my hands,” Pearl said, seeing Michelle's problem, “but I will tell you where it's from. It was part of the computer that was on your brother's desk in the squad room when he had his problem.”

Michelle stared at the tiny steel rectangular box and frowned. Pearl wasn't sure what she was thinking, but she felt like telling Michelle not to fret so much. This was something she was getting from a cop; it wasn't Enron all over again.

Of course, on a personal level, it might be worse.

Michelle moved closer and reached out and accepted the hard drive, gripping it firmly, obviously keenly aware that her fingerprints were now on it. This was a woman who sized up the game and didn't make a move lightly.

“I'm sure a lot's been deleted,” Pearl said, feeling better about Michelle now. Quinn said she could be trusted all the way, his good true friend as well as his sister.

“Not much actually gets deleted,” Michelle said, “unless whoever's doing it really knows how. Or whoever's trying to recover it
doesn't
know. Prisons are full of people who mistakenly thought they deleted incriminating evidence on computers.”

“I remember from seeing on my own computer how it keeps a kind of log—times and sites visited on the Internet. A chronological record of where I've been. If you were to arrange them chronologically…” Pearl was increasingly aware that she didn't know what she was talking about. Not enough, anyway. But then, wasn't that why she was here?

Michelle was staring at her, waiting.

Pearl pressed on. “If you could somehow recover those times, dates, and places on the Internet, the child porn sites, and compare them with when your brother was on duty, we might be able to prove he was somewhere else when at least some of those sites were visited.” Pearl gave her a level look, trying to appear intelligent. This Michelle was intimidating. “Is any of this even remotely possible? Might that information still be accessible?”

“It probably is.”

The woman's face didn't give away much, Pearl thought. Mount Rushmore with makeup. “So what would you have to do to get to it?”

“Risk my career.”

“Like I'm risking mine,” Pearl said. “And Quinn's not even my brother.”

Michelle smiled. And in that instant Pearl knew her romantic relationship with Quinn was no secret. Maybe Michelle had talked to Quinn. Or Sergeant Rudd. Or maybe Michelle somehow had read her, simply figured it out. Maybe it had been on the damned radio.

“Good point,” Michelle said. She examined the disk drive more closely. “It's an internal drive, so it doesn't simply slide in a computer bay ready to go. Somebody must have used a screwdriver to remove it.”

“You're the expert,” Pearl said.

“I can reinstall it in another computer and examine it. There are ways, software programs, that can retrieve almost anything supposedly deleted. And most people—probably the ones we're dealing with—think once they've pressed the delete key, they've actually irretrievably deleted whatever it is they want to get rid of.”

“You have this software?”

“If I need it, I can obtain it. But I might be able to get to what we need using another computer's system programs. It might take some time.”

“When can you start?”

Michelle removed her blazer and carefully folded it inside out and draped it over the back of a chair. “Now. This morning. It promises to be a quiet day in the markets. Money's on the sidelines waiting to see what the Fed's going to do.”

“Yeah,” Pearl said, “the feds.”

Michelle grinned. “I'll make a few phone calls, then set to work on this. Don't expect anything right away—like today. Where can I get in touch with you?”

Pearl leaned over the wide, polished desk and wrote her name and cell phone number on a tablet. “Here, or you can try Quinn's number.”

“Uh-huh.” But while her tone was dubious, Michelle appeared secretly pleased. Pearl thought it was nice to be approved of.

“You have my word the source of any information you come up with will remain confidential if at all possible. But the truth is, that's all I can promise.”