Cold Case

16

On Monday afternoon the stream of students coming out of Bradford Academy generally moved quickly — happy to escape the first day of the school week. Matt Hunter was at the tail end of the rush. While he was glad that classes were over, he wasn’t exactly eager to face another ride on an autobus.

Physically he was okay. The cut on his head was bandaged, and had developed a Technicolor bruise that pained him whenever he touched it. The good news was that David hadn’t broken his leg again. David’s recovery was still on track, and he now had a much fancier cane, courtesy of Captain Winters.

While the media had kept the kids’ names out of the fairly sensational story of the autobus run amok, the Bradford rumor mill had been working overtime. According to the rumors, not only had Matt, Megan, and David been passengers on the mad bus, but apparently they were supposedly responsible somehow for the disaster. If the questions he was hearing were any guide, the kids at school thought they had somehow reprogrammed the bus into believing it was a race car. They also seemed to think that doing so was really, really cool. Nobody seemed to realize how close to getting killed they’d come — or to be able to explain why something that stupid would be cool.

Matt had kept his own opinions away from his new fan club — that anybody who tried that experiment while riding the bus deserved a broken head for their efforts. The only thing he regretted was that none of his new friends had offered him a lift home.

On the other hand, who’d want a ride from someone who admired people who destroyed safety interlocks?

Matt’s mother had given him a lift to school this morning. But now Matt had to face the autobus alone.

It’s just like the guys at the rodeo, he told himself. You’ve got to get back on the horse that threw you.

That didn’t quiet the little voice in the back of his head that whispered, What if another car comes by with one of those trick antennas?

The thought of going through the same adventure, this time on a bus jammed with students, made him shudder. On the other hand, waiting for an empty bus didn’t seem like the answer, either.

What I really need, he thought, is for Nikki Callivant to come by and—

His thoughts were interrupted by the beep of a car horn. Matt turned to see the now-familiar bronze car. Behind the wheel, Nikki Callivant had reduced her disguise to a baseball cap and sunglasses.

She pushed the shades up on her forehead to get a good look at him. “What happened to you?” she asked.

Matt came around and got in the passenger door. “Did you hear about the suburban autobus that went on the fritz? I was riding it. Quite a coincidence, huh?”

Nikki took her glasses off to stare at him. “I saw that on the news. What—”

“Here’s something that never made the evening report. I was riding home with two friends. We’d spend the afternoon poking around in a computer that belonged to Harry Knox. You remember Hard-Knocks Harry? The truck driver whose big rig decided to take a dive?”

The rich girl continued to stare.

“By the way, I think he’s the one your family had the problem with. He must have obsessed on you Callivants. Had all sorts of crap he’d gotten off the Net — in addition to material he must have hacked.”

“And now you have it—?”

“No, we’ve spread it out as much as we could,” Matt told her. “It seemed a little safer that way.”

“Safer,” she repeated, sounding almost dazed.

“I’ll share one of the less earth-shaking tidbits he collected,” Matt went on. “What does the Cowper’s Bluff Nature Preserve mean to you?”

Nikki blinked. “It’s a — well, it’s a major Callivant cause. The Senator — my great-grandfather — started it. Years ago he saw the way things were going with the Chesapeake Bay. He bought some shoreland that was little more than a dump, fenced it off, and started the preserve. He used our family prestige to recruit other wealthy contributors. Some have even donated adjoining parcels of land. Now the preserve is a major bird sanctuary.”

She spread her hands. “It’s one of the reasons I was at the Junior League event where I met your friend Megan. Quite a few socially prominent families support Cowper’s Bluff.”

“How nice for the birds,” Matt said.

“Why would that man have anything about the preserve in his computer?” Nikki asked.

“You’ve got me there,” Matt admitted. “But he had all sorts of stuff. Publicity. Maps. Pictures. We were looking at them on the autobus — before things got exciting.”

“What—” She stopped to swallow. “What happened?”

“The unofficial version?” Matt asked. “We think somebody came up in a car and scrambled the bus’s electronic brains. Net Force is looking into it.”

“Net Force?”

“Anything weird that happens with computers brings Net Force in,” he explained. “Even if you might expect the National Transportation Safety Administration instead.”

“How did you manage to keep the media people away?” Nikki asked.

“Easy,” Matt replied. “We’re not Callivants, and we’re underage. The underage part is also good for court records. You can ask your grandfather about that.”

A faint reddish tinge crept onto her cheeks when she heard that. But Nikki shrugged and started the car. “I guess you’d be glad of a lift all the way home this time,” she said. Then, touching on Matt’s last verbal dart, “I think Grandpa Clyde could talk more about youthful offenses.” Nikki managed a grin. “To listen to him, he had a pretty colorful time growing up.”

Matt shook his head. “Maybe it’s because I’ve been reading too many detective novels lately,” he said. “But you make Clyde Finch sound like the Great Detective’s butler — the reformed safecracker.”

Nikki’s grin faded. “What do you mean?”

“I hear how you speak about the Callivant side of your family. Your great-grandfather is still the Senator, capital S. And Walter G. is Grandfather. But when it comes to Grandpa Clyde — you sound more like you’re talking about a servant than a relative.”

A full flush came to Nikki’s cheeks. “You mean I’m a snob? Maybe. But so is Grandpa Clyde, in his own way. He told me years ago, ‘Every family has its in-laws and its outlaws. I know where I fit — I’m definitely the Callivant outlaw.’”

She glanced over at Matt. “He was never going to fit into society. My grandmother Marcia kept at it, and she’s a Callivant now.”

“You make it sound like a disease,” Matt said. “‘Can-she-ever-be-cured’ kind of stuff.”

Nikki Callivant sat very straight behind the wheel. “Now you’re just being insulting,” she said.

“Okay, I’ll apologize for that,” Matt said. “But you haven’t answered my question. Is Clyde Finch family or just a servant?”

She was silent for a long moment. “I guess he’s the closest thing we’ve got to an old family retainer,” Nikki finally replied. “Servants never stay. Never have. We weren’t encouraged to get — personal — with them. When I got too attached to a nanny, she was replaced. But Grandpa Clyde was always around. A lot of the time he seemed to be the only non-Callivant I could talk to.”

“But how did you feel about him?” Matt pressed.

Nikki Callivant didn’t look at him, keeping her eyes on the road. “Maybe — maybe I looked down on him. But I also envied him. He wasn’t a Callivant. He was free. Not a captive, like me.”

After that, except for a few brief directions offered by Matt, they drove in silence.

Leif was working on some programmed classwork when the display on his computer suddenly went blank — everything saved and shelved. The audio cue that sounded — a shrill “peep-peep-peep!”—told him what was going on. The program he’d given to Matt had initiated a trace. Now it was sending to Leif to see if he wanted to join the hunt.

He gave his computer a few orders, adding its resources to the tracing job. That was just machine versus machine, anyway — trying to backtrack along the message’s programmed zigzags through the Net. No need for a human brain to get involved yet.

Using the trace program’s connection like a backdoor into Matt’s system, Leif went into the virtmail files. There it was — another message from “Dave Lowen.” Unless Andy Moore was trying some stupid prank, this had to come from the mysterious Deep Throat.

Working together, Matt and Leif’s computers ground along the virtmail message’s back trail. As he watched their progress along the twisty course, Leif found it reminded him of someone—

With a shock, he realized who that someone was — himself. The way the message bounced at high speed through heavily trafficked Net sites — the way it tried to camouflage itself within that traffic — he was looking at a near-copy of his Maximum Confusion program. And while Leif had tweaked it with a couple of additions he found useful, he hadn’t created it. He wasn’t a hacker, and neither, it seemed, was Deep Throat.

Maximum Confusion had cost him enough when he bought it from one of his less shadowy hacker contacts. By extension, the person he was looking for was probably a rich kid who liked to play on the Net. That knowledge was useful when the computers began having trouble figuring out some of the message’s wilder hops. Understanding how he’d tweaked the program helped him work back for a couple of more bounces — in fact, right to the point where the message had originated.

Unfortunately, that turned out to be a remote location, an empty suite in a no-name virtual office building. Again, that was a rich person’s response to maintain anonymity, actually renting a space. A real hacker could have wormed his way into a corporate address to download his naughty pictures, launch flame-mail attacks on rivals…or post virtmail messages to stir up the receiver without letting him know who the sender might be.

Okay, Leif told himself. Do we know of anyone with more money than sense who might be obsessed with the Callivants and the death of Priscilla Hadding in particular?

He was glad he didn’t have to raise the question with his Net Force Explorer friends. Megan O’Malley would have had an immediate answer—“Leif Anderson!”

Was he missing some obvious connection? Who had brought him into contact with Nikki Callivant, in Haddington of all places, with even the late Priscilla’s mother in attendance?

I always figured Charlie Dysart for the rich-and-brainless category, Leif thought. Maybe I’ll have to reconsider. The guy might be more subtle than I ever suspected.

Doubling back on his failed trace, Leif reentered Matt’s computer. He’d only made sure that the virtmail posting came from Deep Throat. This time he’d read what the mystery meddler had to say.

The body of the message was a simple police report from forty-four years ago. Some hacking skills had probably been necessary to get it — much as Leif had abstracted information from the defunct files of the Delaware D.M.V.

What was the big deal with a New Jersey State Police bulletin? Leif read on. Apparently a classic car had been stolen in the town of Rising Hills — a red Corvette Stingray, 1965 model.

Leif checked the date. It was the day after Priscilla Hadding’s body had been found.

All of a sudden Leif remembered his last conversation with Andy Moore.

I wonder, he thought, how far Carterville is from Rising Hills?

Matt frowned at the split display floating over his computer. The moment he’d come home, his system had told him to call Leif. Now Leif’s face took up the left-hand side of the display while the State Police report occupied the right.

The latest Deep Throat virtmail, even though the trace had petered out, offered serious food for thought. Matt was also annoyed that Leif had used the program he’d lent to get into Matt’s computer.

“It’s not as though I went on the unguided tour,” Leif said, beginning to sound annoyed. “I didn’t paw through your collection of bimbo-rock singers posing in swim-suits.” He grinned. “Or without.”

That was almost enough to make Matt check a few files, but he held back. “I don’t like people in my system — period,” he said.

Leif sighed. “Fine. Point made. But I thought it just might be an emergency — the way this case is going, the sooner we solve it, the sooner we’re all out of danger. So read your message. I’ll talk to you later.” He cut the connection.

Matt read the police report. Then he called up Andy Moore’s virtmail describing the life and times of young Clyde Finch, scowling as he winnowed the facts from between Andy’s wisecracks and self-congratulatory comments.

Finally Matt commanded his computer to project a map of New Jersey. “Locate Rising Hills,” he commanded. Then, “Locate Carterville.” He squinted as two red dots appeared on the map — quite close together. “Give me the distance between the two townships.”

“Distance approximately 13.72 miles,” the computer’s silver-toned voice replied.

Matt sat in silence, his eyes staring unfocused at the map. A real-life noir mystery story was playing itself out inside his head. Once upon a time, back in 1982, a rich girl died in Haddington, Delaware. First on the scene was a smart cop with a shady past. It took three days for investigators to get to the young man most likely to be connected with the girl’s death — and to get their hands on his car.

Meanwhile, just one day after the incident and three states away, an identical car disappears — where? Right near the clever cop’s old hometown, where he apparently has lots of car-thief connections. These were the days before people got fanatical about part serial numbers. With a change of license plates, the clean but stolen Corvette could become Walter Callivant’s car.

Add it all together, and what have you got?

For one thing, you’d have an explanation as to why the Callivants took on Clyde Finch as part of their security setup. He’d neatly packaged things so that an unpleasant scandal didn’t turn into a nasty court case.

Fast-forward about forty-odd years. Some person or persons unknown (aka Harry Knox) starts setting off alarms around the records dealing with Priscilla Hadding’s suspicious death.

Clyde Finch sees his work unraveling. What’s the worst-case scenario? More scandal for the Callivants. Finch losing his cushy job. Legal repercussions? He’s probably well past the statute of limitations for evidence tampering. But…if Walter G. Callivant turned out to be a murderer, there were no statutory limitations on that crime. He could still be tried for it. And Clyde Finch could be an accessory after the fact.

Matt blinked. It made an interesting story. Vivid characters, a couple of plot twists, conspiracy theory…there was even a little gore, if you threw in the “accidents” claiming the mystery gamers’ lives.

Unfortunately, Matt didn’t know the ending. And all he had was a wild bunch of theories with no actual proof. If he went to Captain Winters with this, the Net Force agent would recommend Matt for a future career as a mystery novelist. But he wouldn’t be able to use Net Force to take on Finch — or the Callivants — without a lot more evidence and a whole lot less conjecture than Matt could currently provide.

What would Monty Newman do in a case like this?

He’d admit he was stumped and hope that Lucullus Marten’s big, fat brain would get them out from behind the eight ball, Matt told himself.

Lacking Lucullus Marten — or even Oswald Derbent — there didn’t seem much that Matt could do with his suspicions.

That was when the virtmail message came in. It just took over Matt’s computer, extinguishing the map of New Jersey and replacing it with a display of floating letters — no posting, no headings:

Even as Matt sat, gawking, the individual letters making up the message began to dissolve. The message turned into a gray smudge, then the display went completely clear.

Matt still sat, staring. Except for the fact that the Jersey map was gone, he could almost believe he’d been having some sort of daydream.

“Computer,” he suddenly snapped. “Display my most recent virtmail message.”

The item that swam into view was the “Dave Lowen” ancient police report, the time stamp falling during the time Matt had ridden home with Nikki Callivant.

“Not that,” Matt said, “the next one.”

“No other items received,” the computer replied.

“Oh, no?” Matt growled. “Computer, what happened to the New Jersey map projection?”

“That display was terminated,” the computer’s silver voice reported.

“How?”

“The display was terminated,” Matt’s computer repeated.

Matt rose from his chair. Great. He didn’t have the cryptic message. He didn’t even have a record of it. And, of course, he didn’t have a clue as to who sent it. Could it be the second hacker in the group of mystery enthusiasts? Could it be Deep Throat?

Whoever sent the message might be all of the above. The thing was, he or she wanted a physical meeting. No hiding behind virtual masks or proxies. The setting was the Buffalo Bridge, a landmark spanning Rock Creek — right on the border of Georgetown. It was within walking distance from Georgetown University, and not all that far from Father Flannery’s parish. It was probably one of the simmers — and Matt wanted to talk to them, too….

Matt wrote a note to his parents, explaining that he had some important research to do. Then he slipped on a coat. If he expected to get down to the Buffalo Bridge in time, he’d have to push it—

Dashing out of the house, Matt had reached the sidewalk before he became aware of the man running up behind him. Actually, the guy was hard to ignore. He was puffing like a set of bellows.

And the gun he held was boring into Matt’s back, right through his coat.

“Turn. Slowly.” Matt didn’t know what made it scarier — the one-word commands, or the fact that the gunman was still gasping for breath.

“Walk. It’s the open car door.”

Matt did as he was commanded, retracing his steps. He couldn’t miss his destination. The late-model black car had its door open, throwing a funnel of light into the winter evening darkness.

“Inside.”

The pistol stayed in Matt’s back all the way down. Then it transferred to his ear as he sank into the plushly upholstered seat. He kept his head still, but his eyes ached as they strained to the left for a glimpse of his kidnapper.

It was an old guy, once athletic, now fat, and red-faced from the brief run from his car to intercept Matt. The man was bald, with iron-gray hair, and looked vaguely familiar. Where had Matt seen him before?

Not him, but a younger version, grinning in a faded flatfilm photograph.

“Clyde Finch,” he gasped.

“You don’t know when to stop, do you, Junior?” Finch’s gun hand stayed rock-solid against Matt’s head while his other hand fumbled in his pocket. It came out holding a fistful of clinking metal that Finch tossed into Matt’s lap. “Put ’em on.”

Matt glanced down. Handcuffs! Stiffly, unwillingly, he again did as he was commanded.

Still holding the gun on Matt, Finch brought his free hand down hard on each of Matt’s wrists, squeezing the cuffs tightly so they bit into Matt’s flesh.

“Now you’ll be less likely to try something stupid.” Finch used a foot to push Matt to the far side of the car. He grunted as he joined his prisoner in the back seat.

The snub-nosed pistol that covered Matt was right out of an old detective flick. It had none of the clean lines of the automatics favored by the stars of cop shows and spy movies. No, this was an ugly old Smith & Wesson, a nasty little machine built to create death at close ranges.

“That cannon you’re carrying has to be ancient.” Matt forced the words out between dry lips.

“More than twice as old as you are,” Finch replied. “It was my backup piece when I was on the Haddington force. But don’t worry. The ammo is new. And this old fart knows a few new tricks. I sent you that message to see if you were too nosey to live. And you took the bait. Since you recognized me, it’s time to take you out.”

“Don’t be crazy,” Matt replied. “You can’t shoot me in a car.”

“Why not?” the old man demanded. “This sucker has tinted windows, and it’s soundproofed better than some places I’ve lived.” He grinned, showing off a set of tobacco-stained teeth. “Besides, cars are always disposable — and replaceable.”

“I guess, nowadays, that’s not as easy,” Matt sniped back — the only thing he could do with his hands cuffed. “Not as easy, say, as ditching a red ’65 Corvette in a wildlife sanctuary, and stealing a replacement.”

Finch jumped as if he’d been stabbed, his red face going pale. He brought up the pistol. Matt had no doubt where he was about to aim. He stared at the stubby little weapon as it swung toward him.

But Finch’s gun arm suddenly twitched back the way it had come. The man’s whole body hunched forward, his hand like a claw on the butt of the gun. The pistol went off, its discharge deafening in the small area of the closed car. A bullet tore into the upholstery of the car seat back in front of them.

Recoil sent the snub-nosed pistol flying from Clyde Finch’s hand. But he didn’t go for the gun. Instead, Finch slumped back in his seat, clutching at his chest, his breath coming in shallow, agonized pants.