Rick Riordan - The Devil went down to Austin

As we walked through Faye's house, Blood on the Tracks was winding down to the final, desolate chords of "Buckets of Rain."

Maia and I went out to my truck, Maia reading the police report as she walked. She got into the Ford. I got into the driver's side.

"Supposedly we work well together," I said.

"An amateur's deduction."

Maia flipped to the back page of the police report, scanned it, then handed it to me.

"The first officer at the scene of Clara Doebler's death-how do you read that signature?"

I looked at the bottom of the paper. The signature stood out like a familiar spider-one I'd hoped I'd squashed. "Looks like Deputy Victor Lopez."

"That's what I thought," Maia said.

We sat there, watching dragonflies going giddy above Faye Ingram's sage plants.

Detective Lopez wasn't answering his phone. Probably keeping his lines open for Garrett's confession.

After some deliberation, Maia and I decided to swing by Tech san's offices, see if we could find Garrett, maybe take a look around before Matthew Pena claimed his billiondollar prize.

If you think of Austin as a Rorschach test, downtown would be a little blob in the centre, framed above and below by enormous, mirrorimage crescents of black-Research Boulevard to the north, Ben White to the south.

Both were former country roads transformed into multilevel highways. Both had superheated with development over the last two decades, and there seemed to be some unspoken rule that the two areas had to be developed at equal speed. If a new chain store went up in the north, an identical store had to open in the south, as if the developers were afraid lack of balance would tip over the city.

Construction spilled into valleys and over hills like a stuccoand limestone fungus, leaving small islands of ranch land surrounded by apartment blocks, shopping centres, industrial parks. An occasional horse pasture gasped for life between a Starbucks and a Best Buy? turkey buzzards circled over ravines once full of coyotes, now crammed with office buildings.

Techsan Security Software had commandeered space in one such facility in the southern sprawl.

The building was a wedge of red brick and blackmirrored glass, rising from a hillside in the middle of ten wooded acres. The sign out front bore the name of a bankrupt software company.

Garrett's van sat at the curb in a red zone, the side door open.

I parked next to a Lexus with a SOUTH PARK bumper sticker and a Ren and Stimpy suckercup animal on the window. Give an adolescent screen head $80,000 a year to start and you'll get cars like that.

A few gangly developer types who looked like they hadn't seen the sun in months were shooting hoops on the outdoor basketball court.

In the front lobby, the directory was an object lesson in Austin high tech. The building's original occupants had confidently engraved their names on brass plaques. All those names had since been covered with masking tape. For the replacement companies, a newer set of cheap, plastic plaques had been mounted. These in turn were taped over, replaced with printed cardboard signs of the thirdgeneration businesses, and three of these were crossed out. One of the crossouts was Techsan.

Matthew Pena had wasted no time moving in, and he hadn't opted for cardboard. A large red and gold canvas banner, pinned above the elevator, read AccuShield, Austin Division, Top Floor.

"He commissioned that back in March," I told Maia. "What do you bet?"

She nodded. "Probably got Tshirts made, too. Let's go see."

The fourthfloor hallway was Lshaped, with the reception office at the crook. Maia and I walked past the entrance, turned, went to the other end of the hallway. Restrooms, a stairwell, an employee door with a combination lock.

Under normal circumstances, Maia and I would've gone through the front, simply asked the receptionist if we could see Garrett. AccuShield's banner out front had changed that. Without any discussion, Maia and I both understood we did not want to enter these premises on Mr. Pena's terms.

I tried the employee entrance. It was locked.

Maia punched 12345, turned the knob. No luck. We hung out at the stairwell for a minute, hoping somebody would come out the door. Nobody did.

"Plan B?" Maia asked.

I took off my tie, tossed it to her. "Be right back."

I walked down to the receptionist's office.

The receptionist had a novel propped on her desk like a shield between her and any potential interruptions. The cover said THROBBING EDEN in gold letters on a field of roses. Either a romance novel or a frightening new trend in inspirational literature.

There were two empty desks, an interior door with a deadbolt, and a corner table heaped with technical manuals and donut boxes and brochures. Draped over one of the empty desks was an extra red and gold AccuShield banner, just in case morale got so high somebody wanted to run down the hall waving it.

The receptionist's computer screen saver was bouncing around the words Ms. Negley.

I knocked on the open door. "Hey, Ms. Negley?"

She checked me out over the top of her book, smiled. She was brunette, midtwenties, a hundred ten pounds with an extra fifteen in makeup and hair spray. Her fingernails were royal purple. She said, "Hey, yourself."

"I'm supposed to move out the rest of that old Techsan hardware and I can't remember what the hell they told me for the combination. Do you want me to just lug it through the front?"

Her eyes got very wide. "No, no. Mr. Pena would kill me. 55555. How could you forget that?"

I slapped my head. "And here I am trying to remember-jeez. Thanks …"

"Krystal," she offered.

Aha. The famous Krystal.

I pointed to my chest. "Tres. Guess this means I have to haul that stuff out after all."

"Guess so."

"Friday yet?" I asked.

She laughed.

I went back to the employee entrance, smiled at Maia, and let us in.

The door opened into the network centre-a walkin closet with a blinking hub, splays of cabling, backup units for the software.

The next door opened into the main work area.

It was big enough to play soccer in-cool, dark, nearly empty. Low ceilings, fluorescent lights, chocolate brown dividers breaking the room into cubicles. The fact that Garrett and his partners had leased such a large space told me a lot about their early optimism, and their acute lack of business acumen.

A young Latina was hunched over a glowing screen, quietly clacking at a keyboard. A few more cubicles down, two Anglo guys in their twenties were leaning over another guy, looking at something on his computer screen. All three of them had dyed purplish black hair, cut like halfeaten artichokes. They wore gold and red AccuShield Tshirts, oversized khakis, love beads. DVD players were clipped to their belts, headphones around their necks.

The only other people in the room were packing up their boxes-Techsan's dazed temporary employees, learning what temporary means.

On the far wall, shadows moved behind frosted glass windows of a conference room.

Maia gestured in that direction. I was about to follow when my brother wheeled himself out from behind a cubicle at the far end of the room, dumped some books into a cardboard box.

"Garrett," I called.

He watched us approach as if each of our steps inflicted a small amount of pain in his right eye. "You trying to make things worse, little bro?"

His cubicle was a corner spot, the window behind him looking out over live oaks and the basketball court and rolling hills. Through the heavily tinted glass, the scene looked like a winter evening. Not an executive office, but a definite step up from Garrett's old box at RNI.

His bookshelf held a potted fern in an advanced stage of mummification, several tomes on C++ Visual Basic and Java, and a careful lineup of Chinese bronze warriors. He'd stuck his carving knife in the side of his cubicle wall, impaling this morning's newsAccuShield to Buy Out Troubled Techsan.