Cold Case

7

Matt was actually sitting in Leif’s room — as he said to Leif, getting in a little face time despite the risk of infection — when Father Flannery called back. At the first sound of his voice Matt knew immediately who he played in the sim.

The priest was younger than his counterpart. He had the same pinkish coloring as Spike Spanner, but was much slimmer, with a head of wavy reddish-brown hair. His eyes were much milder than the two-fisted P.I. he portrayed. But they sharpened when they focused on Matt. “Mr. Anderson, I presume?”

“A reasonable assumption,” Leif said, “considering that you saw him unmasked at Mr. Saunders’s virtual office. But I’m Leif Anderson, and I’m just an interested bystander in the situation. My friend is Matt Hunter.”

“Young man, are you sure you aren’t a party to our sim? You don’t look like Lucullus Marten, but you certainly managed to sound like him right then,” the priest said suspiciously. “You also sound like this note I just got via virtmail.”

He held up a printout of the same message that had sent Matt out into the cold to confer with his friend. It was simple enough:

Beneath that were the coordinates for a Net site. No letterhead, no return address, and as far as the boys had been able to trace it back, the message had apparently bounced at random through the international webwork of computers for hours without ever initiating from anywhere.

“I got one of those, too,” Matt said.

“The wording sounds like something a golden age detective would use in a newspaper ad looking for a witness.” Father Flannery still regarded them suspiciously. “I could see it coming from Lucullus Marten.”

“Or from Milo Krantz,” Matt replied.

“Let’s face it. Notes like that go back to Sherlock Holmes. We have to expect that whoever is playing the characters in this sim would know about that tradition.” Leif nodded politely. “Including you, Father.”

“I can assure you I had nothing to do with the illegal computer entries which started this trouble,” Father Flannery said stiffly. “I’m willing to open my computer for an audit to prove my statements.”

Matt looked at Leif, who looked away. Not many people would allow their private files to be pawed open by strangers.

“I’m inclined to accept Father Flannery’s word,” Matt said.

“Then we know the true identities of two of the six players in Ed Saunders’s sim,” Leif said. “Matt, I know you’re too much of a straight arrow to go hacking in government files, or even in Mr. Saunders’s computer. Somebody, most likely the original hacker, must have raided Saunders’s files. That would be child’s play, if what Sauders told us is correct, compared to some of the official record storehouses that were cracked before the sim was shut down and this whole mess started. Saunders’s computer is the most likely source of the address list for your virtmail messages. And I’d bet that most, if not all, of the participants in the sim got the same message.”

Father Tim nodded, obviously following Leif’s logic. “But I would guess you’re innocent of sending the message, because you called me and left your number before I received the message. Why go through such an elaborate rigamarole when you’d already contacted me directly?” He still didn’t look friendly or happy. “That only leaves the question of how you got my real identity and address when you’ve only seen me in proxy form in the sim.”

“Father Tim, I don’t know if you’ve heard this, but Ed Saunders is dead. My father and I were the ones who discovered the body,” Matt said. “I had discussed the problem of the potential lawsuit with my parents, and when the deadline passed with no word, we went out into some nasty weather for a little face-to-face.” He shuddered. “But we were too late to talk with him.”

“A horrible accident,” Father Tim said gently. “I read about it in The Washington Post.”

“While they were questioning me, the police showed me the hard copy of a letter Ed had been drafting to answer the lawyers,” Matt went on. “I managed to see two names and one address. Yours.”

“Lucky me,” the priest said. Then he laughed and shrugged. “Two out of six. Monty Newman would say that was good baseball, but poor detecting.”

Leif chuckled. “Spike Spanner might get away with a crack like that, too.” He paused. “How did you wind up choosing a rough diamond like the Spikester, Father Flannery?”

“I discovered the Spikester, as you call him, in an old flatfilm television series in the last century.” The priest shrugged. “I became a fan. Over the years I tracked down all the episodes and the various films and books.”

“Wasn’t there also a Spike Spanner holo series a little while back?” Matt asked.

Father Flannery made a disgusted noise. “It had a former male model prancing around in it, trying to convince people that he was tough. The old versions were much better.” Then he shrugged and grinned. “Still, I decided that if a silly male model could do it, why couldn’t I?”

Leif chuckled. “Spanner isn’t exactly a ‘turn the other cheek’ kind of guy.”

“More like a ‘kick rump before somebody tries to kick thine,’” the priest said with a laugh. “Playing the character helped me vent off some of the frustration of my job, I admit. Some of my friends from the seminary play sports to do the same thing.”

“So your superiors would have no problem with what you were doing?” Leif pressed.

“About what I do for entertainment, no,” Father Flannery’s face darkened. “About being accused of illegally hacking into secure government databases to win a sim mystery — now that would bring up lots of problems.”

Matt pointed to the printout still in Flannery’s hand. “Will I see you — or rather, Spike — at seven o’clock?”

Father Flannery nodded unhappily. “I’m curious enough, or desperate enough, to go. Although I’d prefer to know who my host was.”

“If I were you, I’d like to know who the whole cast of characters was, while I was at it.” Leif’s eyes got a faraway look. “Maybe I’ll take a whack at that myself.”

For someone actually traveling its electronic pathways, the Net could be a neon kaleidoscope, an ever-shifting cityscape whose vibrant colors glared against a blacker-than-black backdrop.

Leif had decided to take a crack at the offer he’d made while Matt was visiting. He waited until Matt left, shortly after Father Flannery had cut his Net connection. Matt was a little annoyed, since Leif wouldn’t discuss how he intended to expose the identities of the mystery role-players. But Leif figured some things were easier if you didn’t know all the details. That was especially true of Mr. Straight-Arrow Matt Hunter, who’d told Martin Gray and his father about the anonymous message before heading over to tell Leif. Not that the cops were likely to tell Matt what — if anything — they planned to do with the information. Or whether they’d in fact decide to take action. Matt said that Mr. Gray hadn’t been too interested — it seemed that the police were leaning very strongly toward accidental death rather than homicide in the case of Ed Saunders. No, Leif figured, if he and Matt wanted a real answer to the mystery, they’d have to find it themselves.

As soon as Matt was out the door, Leif warmed up his computer. The person he wanted to contact was not at the last address Leif had for him, so he had a little searching to do.

Finally Leif got what he wanted, sat in his computer-link couch, closed his eyes, and gave the order. After a moment of nasty mental static, he was flying through the Day-Glo buildings of the Net. His hurtling course took him to a relatively quiet section of the garish metropolis, far from the fanciful sites of the big corporate players. His destination was in one of the much simpler, almost boxlike virtual constructions that offered a Net presence for smaller businesses.

A glance at the target building’s directory showed an importer of skimpy Brazilian beachwear (complete with picture), a genealogist, and a craftsman devoted to repairing mechanical wristwatches.

Talk about your obsolete technologies, Leif thought. What’s next? A blacksmith in the basement?

Some of the listings gave only a vague company title or someone’s name. The suite Leif was headed for—1019—had only a blank space showing.

Leif hurtled up to the tenth level and went down an anonymous hallway past door after identical glowing door. The entrance to suite 1019 was unlocked. No security worries here. Uninvited intruders would just have to suffer the consequences to their computer files, their systems, and — knowing the guy behind this front — maybe to their health.

Taking a deep virtual breath, Leif moved in. The place was Spartan — an empty space that would have echoed in real life. Walls, ceiling, and floor were bare. Leif saw a single desk, equipped with what looked like a turn-of-the-century computer system. A flatscreen monitor glowed over the box of the central processing unit. In front lay an old-fashioned keyboard.

As Leif came closer, the screen suddenly lit up.

Letters appeared on the glowing display. Long time no see.

“Do I have to type in a reply?” Leif asked the empty air.

We hear all, even if we don’t necessarily know all, the screen flashed back.

Leif shook his head. This particular hacker was never easy to get a hold of. He changed his virtual address often. In fact, he moved so often that Leif wondered if he really paid for his office space. And he (at least, Leif thought it was a he) never dealt face-to-face with his clients. Communication was always arranged though some sort of weird cutout. Once, Leif had entered a door like the one he’d just gone through and found a perfect replica of a starship bridge from an old sci-fi show. A silvery female voice had answered him then.

So what’s the problem at hand? the unknown hacker asked. I already said we don’t know all.

“I have a friend who’s going to be meeting some people tonight,” Leif said. “He doesn’t know them, and they’ll be all proxied up. What he needs is a tracer to find out who they really are.”

I hope your “friend” has a fat credit line, the hacker’s response blinked onto the screen.

“I’ll freight it — within limits,” Leif hastily added. “Is it a technical problem, or just a question of speed?”

After prompting Leif for the time and location of this meeting — and getting his answer — the computer screen was blank for a while. Six hours from now — not optimal. But it may be possible to adapt an already existing product.

The next few exchanges broke down to the sort of haggling done eight thousand years before computers existed. After taking a bigger hit in his credit account than he liked — but contingent on timely delivery — Leif got ready to leave.

But the computer wasn’t done with him. The existing program requires contact with the virtual form of the people to be traced. The monitor blinked at him. Any suggestions as to a delivery vector?

Leif began to grin. “As a matter of fact, I can suggest one,” he said.

As Matt came to his destination, the Net’s usual brilliant colors faded to the dimmest of outlines. Not surprising. Out here in the middle of virtual nowhere, there was no need for advertising, no need to catch the eye. Not enough eyes came through here to be caught. Below him, a faint white glow delineated a vista of featureless black boxes. They stretched, row after row, to the virtual horizon, like chips on a monstrous circuit board — or more poetically, like mausoleums in a cemetery.

This is where information went to die. Officially it was known as long-term filing, but most people called it dead storage.

Matt had suspected this was where he’d be heading, even before he and Leif had decoded the address on the virtmail invitation. Each of these mammoth boxes represented an archive of government or corporate records, stuff that wasn’t needed except maybe once in a blue moon. The data was supposed to lie here, safe and quiet, in the unlikely eventuality that someone would want to look at it again.

However, hackers sometimes worked their way into these boxes, deleting the data and using the space for programs of their own, virtual meeting rooms, sometimes even illegal sims.

I suppose that’s okay if they’re eliminating what people owe in library fines from 2013, Matt thought. But what if somebody has to prove military service from twenty years ago, or that they filed the correct forms on a claim way back when?

He throttled back the spurt of anger he always felt when people fracked around where they shouldn’t have. In a bizarre way, this obviously clandestine meeting place was reassuring. Since the message arrived, he’d had the niggling fear that this was actually a setup by the Callivant lawyers. But this felt like a hacker’s work — an amateur hacker pushed to the limit.

Matt finally arrived at a big, dim box, apparently no different from the ones on either side of it. But this was the address on the virtmail invitation. Let’s hope whoever sent it doesn’t suffer from typos, Matt told himself as he went inside.

This was the place. The interior had been programmed into a shadowy warehouse. Which, Matt suddenly thought, is really what these places are. But it was also just the sort of meeting place a fan of 1930s mysteries would create. The echoing space was almost pitch-black, with a few pools of light from single bulbs in tin shades like flattened cones.

You could hide an army out in the darkness, but Matt figured there were only five other people out there. He could even hear them breathing. Problem was, nobody wanted to announce him- or herself, because the others would then think that person had called the meeting. And then that person would be accused as the hacker who’d gotten the names for this meeting — and probably gotten everyone into trouble in the first place.

Looks like it’s amateur night all around, Matt thought. Lucky thing I talked this over with Leif and Martin Gray.

Matt reached into the satchel dangling from his shoulder and drew out a flashlight. Switching it on, he speared the blackness with a fan of brilliance. “Anybody here?” he called.

The flash immediately caught two figures — the Slimms. “See, Mick?” Maura said to her husband. “I told you we should have brought one of those.”

Now that Matt had initiated things, Marten, Krantz, and Spanner also stepped into the light.

“I won’t express any surprise that we’re all here,” Marten said, leaning his weight on his cane. “Certainly, I didn’t hesitate to clear my desk and plan to come when I got an anonymous invitation this morning. Self-protection is a strong incentive for appearing.”

“You mean from the lawyers?” Krantz asked.

“I mean protection of our lives,” Marten replied. “The circumstances of Mr. Saunders’s death—”

“Oh, come on!” Matt burst out. “He slipped on the ice in front of his house and cracked his skull. I was there — and how do you know so much about it?”

Marten glared at him. “I have my methods. I’m sure we are all sufficiently aware of cases where cracked skulls were not the result of falls, but rather, the cause. We must consider the probability that the recent storm merely offered a convenient opportunity for someone to conceal a murder.”

“M-murder?” Maura Slimm echoed in an uneasy voice.

Mick Slimm took her arm. “All right, Marten, or whoever you are. Sure, we’re aware of cases like you’ve described — but most, if not all, took place in books…as fiction.”

“You offer Saunders’s murder as a probability,” Krantz horned in. “Shouldn’t you say ‘possibility?’ According to what I’ve found out, even the police think it was probably an accident.”

“And when will the probability of accident shift into the possibility of murder?” Marten demanded. “When another of us suffers an unexpected ‘accident’? Or a third?”

“You’re raving. We’re all here, aren’t we? I think you are borrowing trouble here — and we have enough trouble with just the lawyers going after Ed’s sim. So what do you want to do?” Spike Spanner looked uncomfortable. Or rather, Matt suspected, Father Flannery was wrestling with some unpleasant prospects. “Do you intend to go to the cops and rile them up about a possible murder case? Who are you going to give them as a suspect?”

“Those lawyers who were badgering him?” Maura Slimm offered hopefully.

Milo Krantz gave Marten a squinty-eyed look. “Or do you propose to give them one of us, killing to keep the lawyers away?”

Matt said nothing, aware that the police were aware of the game-players and this motive. Detective Martin Gray wasn’t questioning anyone because the case was still officially an accident, and would remain so unless the medical examiner found some evidence to the contrary.

In holo-dramas, the coroner’s report always seemed ready within minutes of the victim’s death. From what David and his father had to say, however, even speedy results took days.

“What I propose,” Marten said, “is a defensive alliance. Each of us needs someone to guard our backs. As it stands now, if one of us is threatened, how will the others know?”

Krantz got icy. “You expect us to reveal our true identities?”

“Of course. How else would we know of further ‘accidents’?” Marten leaned his bulk forward. “I will reveal myself, but not unilaterally. It must be all or nothing.”

“You know, for somebody who claims he was just invited here this morning, you’ve wound up running the meeting,” Spanner said suspiciously.

“Right.” Mick Slimm gave Marten a long stare. “All or nothing means one person can veto the deal. Since the hacker already knows our names, that person benefits if everybody else remains suspicious — and ignorant. What better way to drive a wedge between us all than to try stampeding us into dropping our masks immediately?”

Marten glared at him. “What better way to invite suspicion than to vote against my idea?”

“This is the part I hate in every mystery story!” Maura burst out. “The bad guy knows that we can only guess who he is. But we know that he knows, or at least we guess that he knows, or he guesses that we’re guessing—”

“Bah, madam,” Marten interrupted, “what you’re doing is called attempting a deduction without facts.” He looked around at the other sleuths. “If all agree to my suggestion, we’ll have a few facts to work with. If only one person objects, that becomes a fact in itself.”

“I think two people are going to object,” Mick Slimm said. “Maura and I know each other in real life. We can guard each other’s backs.”

“It may be all over, now that Saunders is—” Maura broke off. “We don’t even know he sent anything to those lawyers.”

“You don’t think that law firm could get access to the late Mr. Saunders’ computer?” Marten rumbled. “The police certainly could.”

“Only if they think there was a crime involved,” Milo Krantz coolly pointed out. “From the news reports, it’s being treated as an accident. As the situation stands, one irresponsible hacker has our identities. Your plan opens the possibility of other irresponsible parties using that information. I fear I’d have to reject that.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Spanner growled.

Marten merely nodded — a tiny shift of his great head. “Just for the record, what is your opinion, Mr. Spanner? Mr. Newman?”

“I never thought I’d say it, but I’m with the big man,” Spanner said. “All, or nothing at all.”

Matt shrugged. “You all saw me without my mask on, but I’m not giving out a name and address without getting everyone else’s in return.” He reached into his satchel again. “But there’s no reason for everybody to go away mad. I’m betting that whoever brought us here will arrange for regular meetings. Call it the sleuth’s club.”

He came out with a bottle of champagne and some glasses. “What do you say? If we can’t have an alliance, let’s go for friendly suspicion.”

Matt sat the glasses from his satchel down and popped the cork on the bottle. Champagne gushed out to spatter on Marten’s shoes.

“Must you act like a jackass, Monty?” the big man angrily demanded.

“Sorry, boss,” Matt said with a grin. “Care for a bit of the bubbly?”

“You know my preferences,” Marten snapped. “I don’t like the stuff.”

Matt shrugged. “I know hard cider is your drink of choice, but I figured I’d be just about as successful at convincing you to try it as you were with your proposal.”

The Slimms each took a glass. So did a squinty-eyed Spike Spanner. He also handed one to Krantz, who shook his head. “I, too, must decline. It reduces the faculties.”

“Don’t be a party poo — whoops!” The glass Spanner held out tipped, dribbling champagne down the front of the man-about-town’s exquisite vest.

Krantz whipped the fluted handkerchief from the breast pocket of his jacket, dabbing at the stain. “Another reason why I don’t care to indulge. And you’ve barely had a sip!”

Matt touched the glass to his lips. The bubbles really did come up to tickle his nose. And it tasted rank to him. Leif claimed that the bottle was programmed to taste like the very best stuff. Matt didn’t care. The champagne was only the delivery vector. Everybody whose identity they didn’t know had been marked.

Marten had to know his suggestion was doomed from the start, Matt thought. Krantz called it. Not one of the folks behind these proxies wants irresponsible people, maybe even litigious or murderous people, knowing who they really are.

Raising his glass in a mock toast, he gave the other sleuths a Monty Newman grin. Too bad that’s just what’s going to happen.