Free 2 - Secrets: Ike Schwartz Mystery 2 by Frederick Ramsay Page A

could do all that for you.”
    In a minute, the program stopped and announced, NO MATCH.
    “We could go with fewer points,” Ike said.
    “That would be going in the wrong direction. These prints are clean and sharp. We’d only use fewer points if they weren’t very good.” Sam did not want to lecture her boss. She was still new to the department, having been recruited from Callend College only a few months previously. At the same time, Ike had declared her the resident expert on technical things.
    “Right. Well, log on to AFIS and see if the feds have anything for us.”
    “This could take a while,” she said.
    “Okay. Well, call me if you get anything. Back to work, Billy. And Sam, what are you planning to do with all this stuff in the hall?”
    “That’s Templeton’s computer and some discs. We picked it up when we searched his house. The place looked like he’d had it professionally cleaned. The guy was a neatnick. His cups and saucers were sorted so all the little flowers on the rim faced the same way. Amazing. It’s all we found. I’ll poke around in his hard drive and see what he was up to. Maybe that will tell us why he was killed.”
    “They should do one of them shows here,” Billy said, his eyes still fixed on the flickering screen.
    “What show?” Ike said.
    “CSI Miami, New York— you know. ”
    “You think CSI Picketsville would be a big draw in the TV ratings?”
    “Shoot, yes. All them other shows are set up in big cities. They’re all alike. Dudes in big old SUVs driving around shining their little flashlights in corners and good-looking babes taking pictures. But out here, it’s different. They could show how folks in the country without all them fancy laboratories get the job done. Maybe Ryder here has got a friend that knows about all that stuff—like she knows about computers. Do you, Ryder?”
    “You heard the man, back to work. Go away, Billy.”
    She reentered her parameters and turned her attention to Templeton’s boxes.
    She connected Templeton’s computer as part of her network. It would have been easier to remove his hard drive and open it directly. The software she needed to hack into his was installed on her own drive, and she figured she needed the challenge. He had a firewall that took her less than five minutes to breach. She’d done this before. She spent the first ten minutes just opening and closing files and inventorying his software.
    “Ike?” she said into the intercom. She waited while a series of snaps and crackles came back, mixed with at least one Anglo-Saxonism, and then he answered.
    “You there?”
    “Yes. Ike, this guy’s a hacker. He’s got some pretty sophisticated software on this machine. You want me to find out what he was after?”
    “Sure. See if he was into blackmail.”
    “My thought, too.”
    She spent most of the next two hours following his Internet history retrieved from his hard drive. Every few minutes she jotted a note and moved on. She concluded he’d been pretty good at it. Not an expert, but pretty good. When she broke into Ibex and Crane, she frowned. Something did not feel right. She downloaded the files he’d accessed and saved them to a disc. Then, unlike Templeton, she erased her tracks into the program. It would not do for a major commercial real estate developer to discover its security had been breached by the Picketsville Sheriff’s Department.
    The air seemed very close and hot. The thermometer on the wall read 85 o . She hadn’t noticed it before, but someone had turned off her air conditioner. She walked to the window and saw a note taped to it, an official-looking reprimand. Solly Fairmont, Jolly Solly, had issues with her unauthorized air mover, it seemed. He insisted she refrain from turning the unit on as it disturbed the zone reading for her area. He said it should be removed at once. He said she should call for a technician to help with adjusting the air flow. He’d written several other things she did