Linda Abruzzi was a city girl, born and raised. Several times during the night she had awakened with the sense that something was terribly wrong; eventually she figured out that it was the quiet that was bothering her. It seemed unnatural, somehow-it wasn’t until the birds began singing in the gray faux-dawn light that she was able to get a few hours of uninterrupted sleep.
Unfortunately, the metallic burr of her windup Baby Ben alarm clock was among the noises that failed to interrupt Linda’s sleep, so she ended up racing through a truncated version of her morning routine, skipping her PT exercises and chasing her vitamins and supplements with instant coffee instead of a smoothie. Luckily, it wasn’t one of her Betaseron mornings (self-administered subcutaneous injection of.25 mg every other day), so she was spared that painful and time-consuming task.
She made it to the office on time. Pool handed her an old-fashioned pink while-you-were-out slip. It was the first such slip Linda had ever seen with every blank filled in-date, time, caller, reason for call, action requested, message taker’s initials-even though according to the time entered, the call, from Thom Davies, at the Criminal Justice Information System, had come in only two or three minutes ago.
“Great,” said Linda. Having struck out in her own attempts to locate someone from the PWSPD Association by phone, she was anxious to see what Thom had come up with. “I’ll call him right back.”
“I’ll get him for you.”
“No, that’s okay; I’ll call him myself.”
Fat chance-Davies was on the line by the time Linda reached her desk. “Thank you, Cynthia,” Linda called.
“No problem,” was the reply from the anteroom. “But please, call me Pool.” Then, before Linda had a chance to examine her feelings to see how badly they were bruised: “All my friends do.”
Linda felt absurdly better. “Thank you, Pool. Hi, Thom-whaddaya got?”
“Nuttin’-and plenty of it. Are you quite sure you haven’t hallucinated this entire PWSPD Association business?”
“Sure I’m sure-I was logged on to their web site just the other day. Phobia-dot-com.”
“Try it now-I’ll wait.”
Linda logged on. “I got a No URL.”
“Try a search engine-any search engine.”
She tried Yahoo, then Google. “No hits either way-not even cached pages.”
“Precisely. And I have access to some databases you’ve never heard of-and if you had, I’d have to kill you-that could tell me who your date was at the Junior Prom.”
“Tony Guglielmino. No wonder I struck out with four-one-one.”
“Whoever did this is a real wizard. So what we need now is a wizard of our own. The best one I know of is Ben Wing, with the Nerd Squad in San Jose. I left a message for him to call me when he gets in. That’ll probably be around noon, our time-if you’d like, we can make it a three-way.”
“Yes, please, a thr-I mean, a conference call would be great.”
“Oh, you’re no fun,” said Davies.
“You’d be surprised,” said Linda.