Tess sat alone in a squad room of the Westwood field office, staring at a computer monitor as she studied the results of another database search.
She had waited at the Life Sciences Center for nearly two hours. First Larkin had arrived to ferry the tape player, sealed in its plastic bag, to the AD. A long time later the forensics team had finally showed up. Tess had left them at their work and driven the short distance to the field office.
In the hallway she’d run into the Nose, the last person she wanted to see.
"Hard on the case, McCallum?" Michaelson had asked.
She said something noncommittal. He studied her shrewdly.
"You don’t have to be evasive with me. I know what’s going on."
Tennant brought you in? she almost asked, but of course no one had brought him in. He was fishing for information.
"Going on?" she said innocently.
"The other squad. You know."
Yes, she thought. I do know. And you don’t.
"The other squad’s not talking to me." The lie came easily to her. "If they’ve opened up to you, I’d like to hear about it."
He stood there, frustrated, evidently pondering several possible comebacks before settling on "Never mind."
She watched him walk away. His shoulders, she noticed, seemed to be sagging a little. He was out of the loop, and he knew it. She would have felt sorry for him if he wasn’t such a jerk.
She’d found an empty squad room, commandeered a computer, and set to work.
"Wipe Out" was the song title. It had to mean something to Mobius. Maybe she could find out what. But it wouldn’t be easy.
The idea that there was a vast searchable computerized archive of crimes and criminals, and that anyone with a badge could type a few keywords into a search box and obtain instant results, was unfortunately a myth. The reality was that most law enforcement databases were useful only for a fingerprint search, in which case the FBI’s NCIC system was the best bet, or a search by the suspect’s name. There was no nationwide archive at all, merely a variety of more or less inclusive databases run by states and counties, accessible only by dedicated terminals within courthouses and halls of records.
Tess, of course, had neither a fingerprint nor a suspect’s name. She had the name of a song that might or might not be connected to a crime Mobius had committed early in his career-perhaps in his youth, even before he was Mobius.
The only official database that might be of help was VICAP, short for Violent Criminal Apprehension Program. VICAP listed crimes by modus operandi, including any signatures-distinctive peculiarities of the crime scene, such as notes or messages left by the perpetrator. But when she typed in the Boolean search term "wipeout OR wipe out," she got no hits.
This meant she would have to try other databases not specifically designed for law enforcement. LexisNexis, a repository of newspaper articles, was her first stop. Her initial search yielded a number of hits, too many to peruse. When she narrowed the search to eliminate irrelevant articles, she came up dry.
The same thing happened when she visited the major Web search engines. There were thousands of Web pages containing the term "wipeout" or "wipe out," but nothing that seemed relevant to her needs.
So what now? She had to conduct a more focused search, and she had to cover the entire Web.
Most people didn’t realize it, but even the most popular search engines scratched only the surface of the vast pool of material available online. There were millions-actually billions-of Web pages that had never been collected and indexed by any standard search engine. This mass of material was sometimes known as "the deep Web."
There were ways of accessing the deep Web. Just as it was possible to send a robot probe into ocean trenches, exploring realms off-limits to human beings, so it was possible to launch a software robot-a bot, in computerese-into the deep Web. A bot was a program that searched for specific keywords in specific contexts. The search could be as narrow or as broad as the user desired. It could take a long time-hours, even-because the bot was simply set free to follow link after link, collecting any data that matched the search criteria, crawling automatically and unsupervised through myriad uncharted Web pages.
Tess had downloaded a bot program in Denver for use on a case last year. It had spidered across the Web for twenty hours before finally returning the hit she needed, a site unlisted in any of the brand-name search engines. She decided to try it again.
Since this wasn’t her own computer, she had to find the shareware site where she had obtained the bot, then download the software and install it. This took only ten minutes, thanks to a high-speed connection. Next she set the search parameters, trying to include only pages in which "wipe out" was mentioned in conjunction with criminal activity. If she set the parameters too wide, she would haul up a mass of junk she could never sift through. Too narrow, and she might miss what she was looking for.
Before initiating the search, she instructed the program to place any Web links that it found in an online storage service she used, rather than on the desktop’s hard drive. That way she could access the search results from her laptop or any other computer.
When she was ready, she launched the bot. Nothing to do now but wait, maybe get some coffee or something to eat. It occurred to her with a touch of surprise that she had eaten absolutely nothing all day, and it was now nearly seven o’clock. She was about to go in search of a vending machine when the squad room door opened and Andrus walked in.
"Gerry," she said with a smile. "You get the evidence from Larkin okay?"
"I got it," he said, but he looked strangely unsettled, and there was a coldness in his tone she hadn’t heard before.
She frowned. "There a problem?"
"Problem?" He took a chair near her desk and swiveled restlessly. "No problem. What could possibly be a problem?"
Sarcasm was a blunt instrument in his hands. He rarely wielded it.
She shut off the monitor on her computer, leaving the machine at work without a display, and pushed her chair away from her desk. She looked at him, saying nothing. Whatever was on his mind, he would give voice to it soon enough.
"You always have to do things your way," he said, "don’t you, Tess?"
This was so unexpected, so incomprehensible, that she had no answer.
"No one else can be right if they disagree with you. It’s your judgment and only yours that counts. Why is that? Is it because you’re so much smarter than all the rest of us, or do you just think you’re the only one whose intentions are sufficiently pure?"
"I…I don’t know what-"
"You’ve always had this, I don’t know, cowboy streak in you. Black Tiger, for instance. Sometimes I think you actually wanted to go mano a mano with that scumbag. You wanted to be Wyatt Earp at the OK Corral. And last night when you said you were looking for a chance to take down Mobius-you weren’t kidding, were you? You want to be judge, jury, and executioner. You want to make all the rules."
"Gerry-"
"You basically blackmailed me into including you in the EOC briefing. Said you’d investigate on your own if I didn’t go along. You forced my hand, made me tangle with Tennant-and my relations with him were none too friendly to begin with. And after all that, you still weren’t satisfied. You had to start freelancing. You had to go behind my back, behind everybody’s back. Thanks a lot, Tess. Thanks for fucking me over, big time."
"Gerry, I honestly have no idea what you’re talking about."
"Don’t you? Okay then, I’ll explain." He leaned forward, the chair creaking on its casters. "A half hour ago the mayor of Los Angeles got a call from the news director at KPTI-TV, Channel Eight. The station’s getting set to run with an exclusive report on, quote, ‘a city under siege. Deadly nerve gas in the hands of a psychotic serial killer.’ Does the mayor have any comment?"
"So it got out," Tess said softly, still not seeing what this had to do with her.
"Yes, it got out. And yes, the mayor did have a comment. He spent fifteen minutes begging the station to kill the story. Mayors don’t like to beg, Tess. They like it even less when they beg and come away empty-handed. The story is set to run as a special report in about half an hour. Be sure to tune in. You can admire your handiwork."
" My handiwork?" Suddenly things were coming together.
"We told you we didn’t want the story out there. You put it out anyway. Tell the people-that’s your mantra, right? The people need to know the truth, they can handle it, they won’t panic. Well, maybe they will, maybe they won’t. Thanks to you, now we’ll all get to find out."
"You think I leaked the story…?"
"Oh, gosh. Did I give you that impression?" Sarcasm again. "Well, possibly the thought had occurred to me, seeing as how you made that eloquent plea for the public’s right to know at the EOC briefing."
"For God’s sake, Gerry-just because of that? Because I made a suggestion?"
"No, not just because of that. KPTI knows things they had to have gotten from you."
"What things?"
"The fire in the chemistry lab. And its connection to this case. You were the only one working that angle."
"In case you’ve forgotten, that’s because I’m the one who made the connection in the first place."
Andrus ignored her. "And then you spilled it to a reporter, along with the rest of the story, so it wouldn’t be hushed up. So you could get your way."
"This is crazy. I’ve only been in town twelve days. How would I have any contacts with the local media?"
"Does the name Myron Levine mean anything to you?"
She almost said no, then realized the name was familiar. "TV guy, used to work out of Denver," she said slowly.
"He interviewed you there, as I recall."
"Not exactly. He tried to. I wasn’t interested."
"Not interested in going on the record, anyway. Off the record-who knows?"
"What are you saying?"
"I’m saying, Tess, that Levine is in LA now, and he’s the one with the story, and you knew him in Denver, and it doesn’t take a genius to put two and two together."
"I didn’t talk to Levine. I didn’t even know he was here. And besides, I’m not the only person who knew about the lab."
"Who else knew? Besides me, I mean."
"The cop I was working with." She’d disliked him from the moment she saw him in his cheap suit. "Detective Dodge, West LA. That’s who my money’s on."
"Well, that’s great, Tess. But my money is on you."
"Gerry, you know me…"
"Exactly. I know you. I know that you and Paul Voorhees were more than partners and more than friends. I know what his death did to you. And I know you’ve never been the same. This case-it’s so personal for you, so raw and painful, you’ve lost all perspective. You think it’s just about you and Mobius. You think it’s not a team effort. But it is. And I can’t afford you on the team anymore."
She let a moment pass in the squad room, the silence occupied only by the hum of her computer’s hard drive as the bot continued its search.
"No, Gerry," she whispered.
"I shouldn’t have brought you back in. It was an error on my part."
"It wasn’t."
"I’m sending you back to Denver."
"Please."
He stood. "End of discussion."
"Gerry-"
"I’ll protect you as best I can. I haven’t mentioned your name to the mayor or to anyone else. Officially I have no idea where the leak originated."
"It was Dodge, God damn it."
"If there’s an investigation, I’m sure we’ll look at Detective Dodge and any other possible source. And if my suspicions about you are proved wrong, you’ll have my sincere apology."
"I don’t want to leave this case."
"Should have thought about that before you sabotaged it." He moved toward the doorway. "Get out of here, Tess. If you’re not gone in five minutes, I’ll have you removed."
He left, and she was alone.
The door opened again, and she had time to think Andrus was coming back to inflict one more blow. But it wasn’t Andrus. It was the Nose.
"Couldn’t help overhearing the last part of your conversation," he said with a cool, sickly smile.
"It’s none of your business." She got up and slung her purse over her shoulder.
"Probably not. Nothing seems to be my business these days."
She ignored him, but when she tried to leave, he blocked the exit. His smile was gone, and there was pure malice on his face.
"You’ll talk to the media but not your own colleagues. Is that the way it is?"
"I didn’t talk to the media."
"Save it."
"I was under orders not to share any information with you or the other RAVENKIL investigators."
"And you always follow orders. Isn’t that right?"
"In this case I did. I wasn’t eager to share with you anyway."
"No? Why not?"
"Because you’re an asshole."
She took advantage of his surprise to slip past him into the hall, but he wasn’t through with her. He grabbed her by the arm.
"You’re finished, McCallum."
She shook him off and walked away. He called after her, his voice higher and more nasal than usual.
"You think your career was stuck in neutral before this? Just wait."
She kept walking, not looking back.
"By the time we’re through with you, you’ll be lucky to get a post at a resident agency in the fucking Ozarks."
Michaelson’s voice rose to cover more distance as she continued down the hall. She thought of a sheep bleating.
"You’re done. It’s over for you. It’s over."