P Deutermann - The Cat Dancers

“Into the courthouse LAN and the state judiciary’s very private wide-area network,” she said.

“Your system administrator get on it?”

“Yeah, buddy,” she said. “Plus some very nice nerdlings from your Computer Crimes division. They’re baffled, or so I’m told. At first blush, the implications are not good.”

“Shit, I guess not,” Cam said, thinking immediately of the chair. He heard a click on the line.

“Gotta take this,” she said.

He said good night and hung up. Maybe someone inside the courthouse system had sent the E-mail. And wherever James Marlor was, chances were he wasn’t hiding out in the Manceford County courthouse basement-unless, of course, he had him some inside help.

The next morning, Cam ran into the sheriff and told him about the E-mail getting into the judges’ network. Bobby Lee was quick to see the implications. He immediately started talking Internal Affairs, but Cam turned that off for the moment. “Let me get some facts, identify the technical parameters, and then I’ll brief you,” he said. That seemed to mollify the sheriff for the moment. The term technical parameters was one of Bobby Lee’s favorites. No one in the Sheriff’s Office understood precisely what it meant, but Bobby Lee was always willing to wait for those boundaries to be identified.

Cam met with Kenny in his office and asked why he hadn’t been informed that the judicial network had been penetrated. Kenny said he hadn’t gotten the word until earlier that morning.

“If Judge Bellamy’s hate mail came from the Web,” Kenny said, “it had to get past both the honcho server in the sky and its fire wall, and then past the courthouse LAN server and its fire wall, and he also had to know her address on the state judiciary network.”

“She said the attached file format was improper, that it shouldn’t have come through.”

“Right,” Kenny said. “The system is set up for official business only, so baby pictures, porn, streaming audio for your MP-three player-that shit gets stopped at the fire wall. Only the human system administrator can make exception to the rules, and that person has to be sitting at the honcho server’s keyboard to make that happen when the message first appears.”

“But this one just appeared in Bellamy’s desktop terminal?”

“Yup,” Kenny said. “So somebody inside the system had to know a lot, and fool all those fire walls.”

Cam went to get some coffee. Even talking about computers gave him a headache. “What do the guys in Computer Crimes say?” he asked.

“Not guilty?” Kenny offered. “I mean, if anybody could do it, those guys could do it.”

Cam looked at him. “You mean like some kind of sick joke?”

Kenny shrugged his shoulders. “Bellamy’s not in any cop’s top ten on the judicial hit parade just now,” he said. “Could have been another judge, too, for that matter. Anybody who has access to their private little judiciary network.”

Cam sat down in his chair and slowly rotated in place behind his desk. “So what’s this all mean, Kenny?” he asked. “This can’t be Marlor.”

“Not likely,” he said. “I’m leaning toward the ‘sick joke’ angle-somebody who knows what’s going on, and who’s really pissed off about what she did in the first place.”

“Somebody who also knows that we have her under protection?”

Kenny sat down in the one chair Cam had in the office. “No, probably not. That just happened.” He hesitated. “People are pissed, boss. She didn’t have to dismiss. Klein showed his ass, she had a migraine, who the fuck knows, but when she turned those little pricks loose, that was definitely not righteous.”

“What will it take to find out who did this?” Cam asked. “The sheriff wants the shooflies in.”

“Mostly, it would take a lot of time and some really expert people,” Kenny said. “Maybe we ought to go hire that Bawa honey.”

“At two grand a day? I don’t think so.”

He told Kenny he’d talk to the sheriff some more, and he asked him to generate a memo covering what he had just explained about the networks.

“Technical parameters?” Kenny asked with a grin.

“Just so,” Cam said. Horace stuck his head in and said, “The fling-wing is set up. Time on top at the Detention Center helipad is eleven hundred hours.” Like Cam, Horace was ex-Army and loved his military lingo.

“Don’t you think a police helo appearing overhead might spook the guy?” Kenny asked. “Especially if he’s been frying guilty bastards?”

“Maybe,” Cam said. “But if he runs, he’s more likely to bump up against the grid, and then we’ll know he’s alive and operational. Right now, that’s almost as important as finding him.”

Kenny nodded slowly, a distant expression on his face. “You think he’s dead?”

“I don’t know,” Cam said. “He could have flipped out. Living out there, growing a long beard, communing with the wildlife, and studying Buddhism.”

“And if that’s what he’s doing…”

“Right,” Cam said. “If that’s what he’s doing, then someone else is doing this shit. Someone a lot closer to home than Marlor. And I don’t even want to think about that.”

Cam wasn’t fond of helicopters, especially when they were of the two-seater variety, where you sat up there underneath those rotors, surrounded by what looked like semirigid Saran Wrap. Yes, you could really see; he’d grant you that. But his pilot for this little jaunt had flown warbirds of some kind in a past life and obviously missed it. Cam wasn’t airsick. He was afraid, especially when the pilot would drop down to treetop level to enter a canyon, without possibly being able to know what happened to the available airspace at the end of said canyon. He guessed wrong a lot, so then Cam was treated to that nifty sensation one got as a roller-coaster car flattened itself in the valley and then went up and over the top of the next hump. Each time he did it, Cam’s cranial helmet would drop down over his eyes. The pilot said he liked canyon hopping because that meant he would just appear over the target area without announcing that they’d been inbound for a half hour. That was when Cam realized the guy was doing this scary shit on purpose, and enjoying it.

They popped out of the final canyon after about fifty minutes of evading enemy missile sites and flared into a high hover over a patch of dense forest that stretched down the side of Blackberry Mountain. It was as clear a day as one got on the edge of the Blue Ridge, which was to say that it was clear where they were but not in the distance. The trees below were large and numerous, their foliage just beginning to turn to fall colors.

“Mark on top,” the pilot called cheerily over the intercom. He pointed to the small circle on his chart, which corresponded with the position given in the plat. Cam looked down and then stretched in his straps to see if he could spot the cabin. He couldn’t see a damned thing except more trees. The pilot obligingly tilted the aircraft, so now Cam was hanging sideways from his straps, but he could also see right below the aircraft. A small freshet sparkled through what looked like a crack along the face of the slope, and, yes, there was a structure of some kind down there in all those trees. But it wasn’t big enough to be a cabin. An outbuilding? They were not directly on top of it, so Cam asked the pilot if they could drop down so he could see better through the trees-an entirely wrong choice of words, as it turned out.

“No problem,” the pilot said, and then the helicopter dropped like a stone and flared out practically on top of the structure, sending clouds of leaves and other forest debris roiling through the rest of the trees as the chopper bounced gently from side to side, its rotors chopping frantically at the thin mountain air. There was a faint path leading from the structure, which looked now like a lean-to toolshed. At the end of the path was the cabin.