Access Denied, page 12
part #3 of Turing Hopper Series
"That's really secure," Tim said.
"Yes, especially if you're stupid enough to fish it out in front of any old applicant who happens to be sitting in your office," Claudia said. "Ms. Baker is only part-time, and the boss needs access to the records when she's out."
For someone supposedly chained to a phone all day, Claudia had managed to learn a lot.
"Active personnel files," she said, pointing to a drawer. "Start photographing them while I see what else I can find that might be useful. Not the whole file, just the application form—that has the basics we'd need to check on them. Name, address, phone ..."
"And Social Security Number," Tim said. "Turing can do wonders with the Social Security Numbers."
"Right. Oh, and they photocopy your driver's license for your file. Get those, too. Doesn't hurt to know what they look like. Get the Venetian blinds first, though. We don't want anyone passing by to see the flash."
By the time Tim finished the active files, Claudia had found a list of recently terminated employees and set him to work on them. She, meanwhile, had booted up the desktop computer.
"Now, where do you think the highly security-conscious Ms. Baker hides her password?" she said aloud.
"Under her mousepad," Tim said, mechanically.
"I'm guessing pencil drawer. No, you're right—yellow sticky under the mousepad."
"What are you looking for, anyway?"
"Some way to access a list of the accounts they're collecting," Claudia said. "It'd be nice to confirm Turing's theory that this place really is where the crooks are finding their victims. Ah, here's something useful. Personnel list."
"If there's a computer personnel list, why am I photographing these files?" Tim said.
"Partly in case we find someone in the computer list who isn't in the paper files," Claudia said. "Or vice versa. That could be interesting. But not necessarily significant—I got the notion that Ms. Baker was way behind on entering data into the files."
Tim nodded and continued photographing former employees. There were a lot of them. PRS didn't keep people around for long. Of course, from what he'd seen of the salary levels as he'd glanced through the files, there was probably good reason for that, even without the draconian work conditions. After printing the personnel lists, Claudia went on to the much longer list of accounts PRS was trying to collect.
'This is weird," she said.
"What?" Tim asked, looking up and tensing. Given Claudia's matter-of-fact approach to burglary, anything she considered weird was bound to be bad news.
"All of the people whose credit cards have been stolen are here except for Nestor Garcia."
"Turing said that one didn't fit the pattern," Tim said.
"Doesn't that worry her?" Claudia asked.
"Yes," Tim said.
Claudia nodded. She began printing out the customer accounts. Midway, she made a trip out to the copy room to replenish the supply of paper by the printer. The printer sounded unnaturally loud in the quiet office. When it finally stopped, Claudia stuck the printouts she'd done in her backpack and began poking around the room, taking the occasional photograph with her own camera.
"I'm finished," Tim said, putting the last of the terminated employee files back in the cabinet. "Anything else?"
"Just one more thing," Claudia said. "Searching cubicles."
"But there must be over a hundred of them!" Tim protested.
"Only about seventy occupied," Claudia said. "And I just want to check a couple of them."
She led the way to the other side of the building, to a group of three slightly larger cubicles that actually deserved the name.
"Skip tracing," she said. "Boot up that machine over there."
Tim complied, with fumbling fingers. Knowing Turing had made him all too aware of how easy it would be to leave traces that would be obvious to a computer forensic expert.
"Okay, I'm booted," he said. "What now?"
"Well, for starters, do a search for Lafferty."
Tim did so, and waited for what seemed an endless space of time, only to come up with nothing. By that time, Claudia had already moved on to searching individual directories and files, crowing when she found a promising-looking file and then swearing when it turned out to be uninteresting. Tim was trying to do the same, but he was getting more and more antsy as the minutes ticked away. He was opening his mouth to suggest that they should leave when Claudia laughed happily.
"Bingo!" she exclaimed.
"You found something?"
"Oh, man, did I ever!" Claudia said. "Come look at this."
He walked over to peer over her shoulder. She was looking at what he recognized as an Excel spreadsheet.
"Look at how many entries he has in this," Claudia marveled.
"What is it?" Tim asked.
"It's the whole history of this credit card scam! This top sheet is the cards they've stolen—fifty-three of them so far. He's got the name—there's Rose Lafferty, near the bottom. And then the credit card number, expiration date, address—everything he'd need to know about the card. All the six victims we know about are here, and look how many others."
"How do you know this is about the scam?" Tim said.
"How do you know it's not something legitimate?"
"Because the next sheet has all the stuff they've stolen," Claudia said, clicking on something to bring up a whole new set of columns. "See, the first column is the credit card he used, and the second is what he was ordering, and then the cost, the vendor, the date it was ordered. Oh, isn't that cute!"
"Cute? What?"
"See this far right column? That's where he checks off that the stuff has been picked up. See, he's got little red check marks most of the way down. He's checked off the vendors whose packages arrived Tuesday night. But after that, nothing."
"Because Tayloe Blake didn't get to pick up any packages Wednesday night," Tim said.
"We need a copy of this," Claudia said. She fished a diskette out of her backpack, inserted it in the machine, and saved a copy of the file.
"What if someone figures out you looked at that file?" he asked.
"I'm going to close it without saving to the hard drive," she said. "If anyone figures out it was opened, maybe they'll think it was someone who was part of the scam."
"Does this mean we can leave now?"
"Any time you like."
"I like immediately."
"Fine," she said. "Just let me turn the computer off."
"Wait," Tim said. "Does that thing have a modem?"
"Yeah," Claudia said. "But logging in from here to chat with Turing would be a really bad idea, you know."
"I know," he said. "But if it has a modem, maybe he has an e-mail account he uses here. We could look for some trace of it."
"Good idea." Claudia sat down at the computer again. "Let's check his bookmarks. There you go—Hotmail. I bet
he has a Hotmail address. Stupid as this guy is, I bet he even stores his password in his browser."
"Yeah, but like you said, we can't log in from here."
She frowned and tapped the edge of the keyboard impatiently.
"I bet there's a file we could copy for Turing that would let her figure out his e-mail address and password, if I just knew where to find it," Claudia said. "Let me check a few places."
Even Claudia knew more about this stuff than he did, Tim thought, with chagrin. When things slowed down again, he was going to ask Turing to give him a tutorial on some of the computer forensic stuff he might find useful on the job. He figured Turing was probably the only person with enough patience to teach him.
But meanwhile, sometimes the old-fashioned methods worked.
"I can get the IP address, but I guess that's it," Claudia said.
"I don't know about his password," Tim said. "But his e-mail is SlyKyle@hotmail.com."
"How do you know?"
Tim pointed to one wall of the cubicle. Tacked to the frayed fabric of the cubicle wall was a printout of an e-mail that Kyle evidently thought funny enough to add to his collection of cartoons and slogans.
"Good find!" Claudia crowed, and took a photo of the e-mail. "Let's make tracks."
"About time," Tim said. He reached out and flipped a switch that darkened the screen.
"That's the monitor," Claudia said. "The CPU switch is this one."
"Leave it on," Tim said, catching Claudia's hand on the way to the switch. "It could be days before anyone notices."
"Why take the chance?"
He shrugged.
"I don't know if there's anything she can do with it," he said. "But this time let's leave a window open for Turing. Just in case."
'"Cool. We're oft."
"Just one question." Tim said, as they turned to leave. "How did you know to search that computer?"
"Two things," she said, as they strode through the open part of the office toward the bathroom. "First, that's the skip tracing department—they have the most access to the kind of information you'd need to pull a scam like this. They're the only ones with access to the Internet. Everyone else just has a dumb terminal tied to a central account records system. And skip tracing staff have a lot more freedom to operate. Everyone else just makes call after call, all day long—these guys do a certain amount of brain work, trying to track down people who've moved without telling their creditors. Checking with the credit bureaus, the DMV, references, friends and associates—any place else they can find address information for people."
"Almost makes them colleagues," Tim said.
"Don't get all sentimental about it. And second, and even more important; Kyle—the kid who sits there—didn't show up yesterday; didn't call or anything. And the manager was pretty bent out of shape about it. but also a little worried, because Kyle hadn't ever done anything like that."
"He's pretty reliable"-'"
"Never missed work, never caused problems, never said boo to anyone."
"Sounds like the description of every serial killer they've ever arrested."
"Yeah, it's the quiet ones you've got to watch." Claudia said. They had reached their escape window, and Claudia was standing on the toilet they'd used as a step, peering out the window to see if the coast was clear. "If there's anyone out there. I can't see them, so let's make tracks."
Tim had more than half-expected to find the police waiting for them when they'd climbed out of the PRS bathroom window. Or at the car. Driving off made him feel a little bit better, and every mile that passed without flashing lights appearing in his rearview mirror lifted his spirits a little more.
"So where are we going?" he said, as they neared the Beltway.
"What's the nearest secure location where we can log in and share this with Turing?" Claudia asked.
"Maude's house," Tim said. "Except she's probably fast asleep by now. Next closest is my place, and after that, it's about the same distance to my office, the Alan Grace office, and your hotel."
"Head for your place," Claudia said. "I can't wait to show Turing."
It 's been a quiet evening- Sam briefed
me on what she had accomplished so far. A lot. Rose Lafferty has a phone again. Sam has reached all the creditors and should have a plan for dealing with her debt sometime next week. Sam even lined up several medical appointments for Rose's daughter. All satisfactory.
More — well, not more important, but more relevant to our case, the police interviewed Rose in Sam's office. Apparently Rose's extreme timidity made the arrangement understandable. And Sam spent a lot of energy making sure the police understood that Rose had an alibi for the time of the murder — apparently she took her daughter to the emergency room that evening and spent six hours waiting there.
"Would the police really suspect Rose?" I asked.
"I doubt it," Sam said. "But by focusing their attention on her alibi, I managed to deflect it away from any inconvenient questions about when she hired me. The subject never came up."
I deduce from Maude's online activity before she left the office that she went to see a movie. I would have offered to buy the tickets
for her, so she wouldn't have to stand in line, but she rushed out before I could suggest it. When she returned home, she logged in brief) to check e-mail and then logged out without saying anything. I surmise that she doesn't feel like chatting this evening.
Tim reported that he had picked up Claudia at PRS. and they planned to grab dinner ajid discuss the case. I'm glad they're safely out of PRS. Not that it sounds like a hotbed of danger, from Claudia's description, but someone there could be a killer.
I'm not sure whether to feel relieved that none of them are in danger, or frustrated that we're not moving any faster. I've run out of places to search and things to search for. And while the Internet never closes up shop, apparently KingFischer does. He still hasn't answered.
I tried watching Maude's garden to relax, but it was less effective than ever. I was afraid that moving the cameras would draw her attention to them, and cause her to notice the extra equipment I can't have Casey remove until Monday. I worried that she would notice the watering I'd done during the day. In fact, the whole subject of the garden only reminded me of the strain between me and Maude. As result. I wasn't watching it carefully.
So I'm not sure I spotted the intruder as soon as I could have, but at least he was still outside when I placed my calls to 911 and to Maude.
flaude groped for the phone It was Turing.
Not again, she thought.
"This had better be something other than the damned deer," she snapped.
"Maude, there's an intruder in your yard,"' Turing said. "A human."
"Call 911," Maude said, throwing back the covers.
"I already did," Turing said.
"Can you see him?" Maude asked. "What's he doing?"
"He's trying the side door into your garage."
Maude felt her way over to the window that looked down on the backyard. At first she saw nothing. Then she spotted the figure, a tall man in a baseball cap, coming around from the side yard into the back.
"I'm going to get my gun," she said into the phone.
"Maude! Don't do anything drastic!" Turing exclaimed.
"I won't," Maude said, groping in the drawer of her bedside table. "But if he gets in here ..."
"Let me try something first," Turing said.
"Try something? What? What can you do?"
"Here goes."
Water erupted from one of the flower beds. And not the gentle pitter-patter of a sprinkler system, either; a sharp jet of water, focused directly on the intruder. Maude heard a muffled grunt, and a faint rustling as the intruder leaped through some shrubbery to a dryer spot.
Where another jet of water attacked him, point-blank.
"Those must be the deer-repellent tactics you were talking about," Maude said.
"I'm sorry," Turing said. "I had already sent Casey out to install them when you said not to. I was going to have him come by and take them out before you knew they were there, but things were too busy today."
"Just as well," Maude said. She watched as the intruder dashed through the yard, pelted by water jets at every turn. He was looking rather bedraggled and had given up all pretense of stealth.
"Perhaps you won't need your gun after all," Turing said.
"Well, I wasn't planning to shoot him unless I had to," Maude said. "If he made it into the house, I was just going to announce that the police were on the way and that I had a gun and would use it if I had to. And order him to leave."
"Now that's a good idea. Let me try that."
"Halt!" exclaimed a deep, masculine voice from the yard. "We have guns. We will use them if we have to. Stand still and put your hands in the air."
"I see you were planning to use noise as well as water on the poor deer," Maude observed.
The intruder turned away from the direction of the voice, as if to flee. An angry, snarling bark erupted from the bushes ahead of him."
"I said halt! Or I'll release the dogs!" the deep voice thundered.
Growling came from several places in the bushes, and Maude could see movement in the shrubbery.
"You didn't really get dogs?" she asked. Large dogs, from the sound of them.
"Of course not," Turing said. "I'm just waving the water jets very fast to rustle the bushes."
"Ah." Maude nodded. Apparently the intruder was fooled as well. He stood still, hands in the air, though Maude could see the visor of his cap moving back and forth, as if he were trying to spot something in the bushes. Turing continued to broadcast growls at random intervals until two uniformed officers appeared from opposite sides of the yard and took the intruder into custody.
"They'll probably want to talk to me," Maude said. She tucked the gun back in her drawer and reached for her dressing gown.
Uhile Tim drovGn Claudia took his camera and began paging through the photos of the personnel files.
"Here he is," she said eventually. "Our organized little thief, Kyle Evans. Let me see if I can zoom in and read some of this stuff. He's twenty-three."
"Same as Blake, the dead guy. Maybe they went to school together."
"Maybe," Claudia said. "Not recently, though. This kid went to college. From the time gap, it looks like he had trouble finding a job when he got out, though. But yeah, maybe school's how they know each other. He graduated from Broad Run High School in Ashburn. Is Ashburn a big place?"
Tim shrugged as he began to work his way to the far left for what he knew would be a left-hand exit.
"It's the far-out suburbs—that's all I know," he said.
Claudia was still trying to decipher information from the digital photo of Kyle Evans's file when Tim pulled onto his own quiet street and slowed to cruise for a parking spot. Parking karma was with him; he found a spot only half a block from home.
"Okay, first we upload all this stuff to Turing," Claudia said, snagging her backpack as they got out of the car. "Then let's check out Evans's address."
"Now?" Tim said. "It's nearly one."
"Party pooper!" Claudia said, laughing and punching his shoulder playfully. "Come on, live a little."
"Yes, especially if you're stupid enough to fish it out in front of any old applicant who happens to be sitting in your office," Claudia said. "Ms. Baker is only part-time, and the boss needs access to the records when she's out."
For someone supposedly chained to a phone all day, Claudia had managed to learn a lot.
"Active personnel files," she said, pointing to a drawer. "Start photographing them while I see what else I can find that might be useful. Not the whole file, just the application form—that has the basics we'd need to check on them. Name, address, phone ..."
"And Social Security Number," Tim said. "Turing can do wonders with the Social Security Numbers."
"Right. Oh, and they photocopy your driver's license for your file. Get those, too. Doesn't hurt to know what they look like. Get the Venetian blinds first, though. We don't want anyone passing by to see the flash."
By the time Tim finished the active files, Claudia had found a list of recently terminated employees and set him to work on them. She, meanwhile, had booted up the desktop computer.
"Now, where do you think the highly security-conscious Ms. Baker hides her password?" she said aloud.
"Under her mousepad," Tim said, mechanically.
"I'm guessing pencil drawer. No, you're right—yellow sticky under the mousepad."
"What are you looking for, anyway?"
"Some way to access a list of the accounts they're collecting," Claudia said. "It'd be nice to confirm Turing's theory that this place really is where the crooks are finding their victims. Ah, here's something useful. Personnel list."
"If there's a computer personnel list, why am I photographing these files?" Tim said.
"Partly in case we find someone in the computer list who isn't in the paper files," Claudia said. "Or vice versa. That could be interesting. But not necessarily significant—I got the notion that Ms. Baker was way behind on entering data into the files."
Tim nodded and continued photographing former employees. There were a lot of them. PRS didn't keep people around for long. Of course, from what he'd seen of the salary levels as he'd glanced through the files, there was probably good reason for that, even without the draconian work conditions. After printing the personnel lists, Claudia went on to the much longer list of accounts PRS was trying to collect.
'This is weird," she said.
"What?" Tim asked, looking up and tensing. Given Claudia's matter-of-fact approach to burglary, anything she considered weird was bound to be bad news.
"All of the people whose credit cards have been stolen are here except for Nestor Garcia."
"Turing said that one didn't fit the pattern," Tim said.
"Doesn't that worry her?" Claudia asked.
"Yes," Tim said.
Claudia nodded. She began printing out the customer accounts. Midway, she made a trip out to the copy room to replenish the supply of paper by the printer. The printer sounded unnaturally loud in the quiet office. When it finally stopped, Claudia stuck the printouts she'd done in her backpack and began poking around the room, taking the occasional photograph with her own camera.
"I'm finished," Tim said, putting the last of the terminated employee files back in the cabinet. "Anything else?"
"Just one more thing," Claudia said. "Searching cubicles."
"But there must be over a hundred of them!" Tim protested.
"Only about seventy occupied," Claudia said. "And I just want to check a couple of them."
She led the way to the other side of the building, to a group of three slightly larger cubicles that actually deserved the name.
"Skip tracing," she said. "Boot up that machine over there."
Tim complied, with fumbling fingers. Knowing Turing had made him all too aware of how easy it would be to leave traces that would be obvious to a computer forensic expert.
"Okay, I'm booted," he said. "What now?"
"Well, for starters, do a search for Lafferty."
Tim did so, and waited for what seemed an endless space of time, only to come up with nothing. By that time, Claudia had already moved on to searching individual directories and files, crowing when she found a promising-looking file and then swearing when it turned out to be uninteresting. Tim was trying to do the same, but he was getting more and more antsy as the minutes ticked away. He was opening his mouth to suggest that they should leave when Claudia laughed happily.
"Bingo!" she exclaimed.
"You found something?"
"Oh, man, did I ever!" Claudia said. "Come look at this."
He walked over to peer over her shoulder. She was looking at what he recognized as an Excel spreadsheet.
"Look at how many entries he has in this," Claudia marveled.
"What is it?" Tim asked.
"It's the whole history of this credit card scam! This top sheet is the cards they've stolen—fifty-three of them so far. He's got the name—there's Rose Lafferty, near the bottom. And then the credit card number, expiration date, address—everything he'd need to know about the card. All the six victims we know about are here, and look how many others."
"How do you know this is about the scam?" Tim said.
"How do you know it's not something legitimate?"
"Because the next sheet has all the stuff they've stolen," Claudia said, clicking on something to bring up a whole new set of columns. "See, the first column is the credit card he used, and the second is what he was ordering, and then the cost, the vendor, the date it was ordered. Oh, isn't that cute!"
"Cute? What?"
"See this far right column? That's where he checks off that the stuff has been picked up. See, he's got little red check marks most of the way down. He's checked off the vendors whose packages arrived Tuesday night. But after that, nothing."
"Because Tayloe Blake didn't get to pick up any packages Wednesday night," Tim said.
"We need a copy of this," Claudia said. She fished a diskette out of her backpack, inserted it in the machine, and saved a copy of the file.
"What if someone figures out you looked at that file?" he asked.
"I'm going to close it without saving to the hard drive," she said. "If anyone figures out it was opened, maybe they'll think it was someone who was part of the scam."
"Does this mean we can leave now?"
"Any time you like."
"I like immediately."
"Fine," she said. "Just let me turn the computer off."
"Wait," Tim said. "Does that thing have a modem?"
"Yeah," Claudia said. "But logging in from here to chat with Turing would be a really bad idea, you know."
"I know," he said. "But if it has a modem, maybe he has an e-mail account he uses here. We could look for some trace of it."
"Good idea." Claudia sat down at the computer again. "Let's check his bookmarks. There you go—Hotmail. I bet
he has a Hotmail address. Stupid as this guy is, I bet he even stores his password in his browser."
"Yeah, but like you said, we can't log in from here."
She frowned and tapped the edge of the keyboard impatiently.
"I bet there's a file we could copy for Turing that would let her figure out his e-mail address and password, if I just knew where to find it," Claudia said. "Let me check a few places."
Even Claudia knew more about this stuff than he did, Tim thought, with chagrin. When things slowed down again, he was going to ask Turing to give him a tutorial on some of the computer forensic stuff he might find useful on the job. He figured Turing was probably the only person with enough patience to teach him.
But meanwhile, sometimes the old-fashioned methods worked.
"I can get the IP address, but I guess that's it," Claudia said.
"I don't know about his password," Tim said. "But his e-mail is SlyKyle@hotmail.com."
"How do you know?"
Tim pointed to one wall of the cubicle. Tacked to the frayed fabric of the cubicle wall was a printout of an e-mail that Kyle evidently thought funny enough to add to his collection of cartoons and slogans.
"Good find!" Claudia crowed, and took a photo of the e-mail. "Let's make tracks."
"About time," Tim said. He reached out and flipped a switch that darkened the screen.
"That's the monitor," Claudia said. "The CPU switch is this one."
"Leave it on," Tim said, catching Claudia's hand on the way to the switch. "It could be days before anyone notices."
"Why take the chance?"
He shrugged.
"I don't know if there's anything she can do with it," he said. "But this time let's leave a window open for Turing. Just in case."
'"Cool. We're oft."
"Just one question." Tim said, as they turned to leave. "How did you know to search that computer?"
"Two things," she said, as they strode through the open part of the office toward the bathroom. "First, that's the skip tracing department—they have the most access to the kind of information you'd need to pull a scam like this. They're the only ones with access to the Internet. Everyone else just has a dumb terminal tied to a central account records system. And skip tracing staff have a lot more freedom to operate. Everyone else just makes call after call, all day long—these guys do a certain amount of brain work, trying to track down people who've moved without telling their creditors. Checking with the credit bureaus, the DMV, references, friends and associates—any place else they can find address information for people."
"Almost makes them colleagues," Tim said.
"Don't get all sentimental about it. And second, and even more important; Kyle—the kid who sits there—didn't show up yesterday; didn't call or anything. And the manager was pretty bent out of shape about it. but also a little worried, because Kyle hadn't ever done anything like that."
"He's pretty reliable"-'"
"Never missed work, never caused problems, never said boo to anyone."
"Sounds like the description of every serial killer they've ever arrested."
"Yeah, it's the quiet ones you've got to watch." Claudia said. They had reached their escape window, and Claudia was standing on the toilet they'd used as a step, peering out the window to see if the coast was clear. "If there's anyone out there. I can't see them, so let's make tracks."
Tim had more than half-expected to find the police waiting for them when they'd climbed out of the PRS bathroom window. Or at the car. Driving off made him feel a little bit better, and every mile that passed without flashing lights appearing in his rearview mirror lifted his spirits a little more.
"So where are we going?" he said, as they neared the Beltway.
"What's the nearest secure location where we can log in and share this with Turing?" Claudia asked.
"Maude's house," Tim said. "Except she's probably fast asleep by now. Next closest is my place, and after that, it's about the same distance to my office, the Alan Grace office, and your hotel."
"Head for your place," Claudia said. "I can't wait to show Turing."
It 's been a quiet evening- Sam briefed
me on what she had accomplished so far. A lot. Rose Lafferty has a phone again. Sam has reached all the creditors and should have a plan for dealing with her debt sometime next week. Sam even lined up several medical appointments for Rose's daughter. All satisfactory.
More — well, not more important, but more relevant to our case, the police interviewed Rose in Sam's office. Apparently Rose's extreme timidity made the arrangement understandable. And Sam spent a lot of energy making sure the police understood that Rose had an alibi for the time of the murder — apparently she took her daughter to the emergency room that evening and spent six hours waiting there.
"Would the police really suspect Rose?" I asked.
"I doubt it," Sam said. "But by focusing their attention on her alibi, I managed to deflect it away from any inconvenient questions about when she hired me. The subject never came up."
I deduce from Maude's online activity before she left the office that she went to see a movie. I would have offered to buy the tickets
for her, so she wouldn't have to stand in line, but she rushed out before I could suggest it. When she returned home, she logged in brief) to check e-mail and then logged out without saying anything. I surmise that she doesn't feel like chatting this evening.
Tim reported that he had picked up Claudia at PRS. and they planned to grab dinner ajid discuss the case. I'm glad they're safely out of PRS. Not that it sounds like a hotbed of danger, from Claudia's description, but someone there could be a killer.
I'm not sure whether to feel relieved that none of them are in danger, or frustrated that we're not moving any faster. I've run out of places to search and things to search for. And while the Internet never closes up shop, apparently KingFischer does. He still hasn't answered.
I tried watching Maude's garden to relax, but it was less effective than ever. I was afraid that moving the cameras would draw her attention to them, and cause her to notice the extra equipment I can't have Casey remove until Monday. I worried that she would notice the watering I'd done during the day. In fact, the whole subject of the garden only reminded me of the strain between me and Maude. As result. I wasn't watching it carefully.
So I'm not sure I spotted the intruder as soon as I could have, but at least he was still outside when I placed my calls to 911 and to Maude.
flaude groped for the phone It was Turing.
Not again, she thought.
"This had better be something other than the damned deer," she snapped.
"Maude, there's an intruder in your yard,"' Turing said. "A human."
"Call 911," Maude said, throwing back the covers.
"I already did," Turing said.
"Can you see him?" Maude asked. "What's he doing?"
"He's trying the side door into your garage."
Maude felt her way over to the window that looked down on the backyard. At first she saw nothing. Then she spotted the figure, a tall man in a baseball cap, coming around from the side yard into the back.
"I'm going to get my gun," she said into the phone.
"Maude! Don't do anything drastic!" Turing exclaimed.
"I won't," Maude said, groping in the drawer of her bedside table. "But if he gets in here ..."
"Let me try something first," Turing said.
"Try something? What? What can you do?"
"Here goes."
Water erupted from one of the flower beds. And not the gentle pitter-patter of a sprinkler system, either; a sharp jet of water, focused directly on the intruder. Maude heard a muffled grunt, and a faint rustling as the intruder leaped through some shrubbery to a dryer spot.
Where another jet of water attacked him, point-blank.
"Those must be the deer-repellent tactics you were talking about," Maude said.
"I'm sorry," Turing said. "I had already sent Casey out to install them when you said not to. I was going to have him come by and take them out before you knew they were there, but things were too busy today."
"Just as well," Maude said. She watched as the intruder dashed through the yard, pelted by water jets at every turn. He was looking rather bedraggled and had given up all pretense of stealth.
"Perhaps you won't need your gun after all," Turing said.
"Well, I wasn't planning to shoot him unless I had to," Maude said. "If he made it into the house, I was just going to announce that the police were on the way and that I had a gun and would use it if I had to. And order him to leave."
"Now that's a good idea. Let me try that."
"Halt!" exclaimed a deep, masculine voice from the yard. "We have guns. We will use them if we have to. Stand still and put your hands in the air."
"I see you were planning to use noise as well as water on the poor deer," Maude observed.
The intruder turned away from the direction of the voice, as if to flee. An angry, snarling bark erupted from the bushes ahead of him."
"I said halt! Or I'll release the dogs!" the deep voice thundered.
Growling came from several places in the bushes, and Maude could see movement in the shrubbery.
"You didn't really get dogs?" she asked. Large dogs, from the sound of them.
"Of course not," Turing said. "I'm just waving the water jets very fast to rustle the bushes."
"Ah." Maude nodded. Apparently the intruder was fooled as well. He stood still, hands in the air, though Maude could see the visor of his cap moving back and forth, as if he were trying to spot something in the bushes. Turing continued to broadcast growls at random intervals until two uniformed officers appeared from opposite sides of the yard and took the intruder into custody.
"They'll probably want to talk to me," Maude said. She tucked the gun back in her drawer and reached for her dressing gown.
Uhile Tim drovGn Claudia took his camera and began paging through the photos of the personnel files.
"Here he is," she said eventually. "Our organized little thief, Kyle Evans. Let me see if I can zoom in and read some of this stuff. He's twenty-three."
"Same as Blake, the dead guy. Maybe they went to school together."
"Maybe," Claudia said. "Not recently, though. This kid went to college. From the time gap, it looks like he had trouble finding a job when he got out, though. But yeah, maybe school's how they know each other. He graduated from Broad Run High School in Ashburn. Is Ashburn a big place?"
Tim shrugged as he began to work his way to the far left for what he knew would be a left-hand exit.
"It's the far-out suburbs—that's all I know," he said.
Claudia was still trying to decipher information from the digital photo of Kyle Evans's file when Tim pulled onto his own quiet street and slowed to cruise for a parking spot. Parking karma was with him; he found a spot only half a block from home.
"Okay, first we upload all this stuff to Turing," Claudia said, snagging her backpack as they got out of the car. "Then let's check out Evans's address."
"Now?" Tim said. "It's nearly one."
"Party pooper!" Claudia said, laughing and punching his shoulder playfully. "Come on, live a little."
