Rick Riordan - The Devil went down to Austin

"She doesn't like you," he confided.

I looked in his box. Brown and green things moved, glistening in the bottom-things about the size of almonds. My skin crawled.

Not that I hadn't seen cicadas before, but Clem had tried a new experiment. He'd put them back into their former skins-liberally Scotchtaping their desiccated shells to their bodies. He'd left some of the legs free, so the suffocating cicadas could crawl in helpless paths, going nowhere, waiting to die.

"It's a race," he confided.

I hugged the wall as I stepped around him.

Dwight's bedroom was on the left. He sat in the dark on a trundle bed, his backpack between his knees, staring dejectedly at a dumpedover bucket of toy cars on the carpet.

A bookshelf dominated the south wall-comic books in protective plastic sleeves, science fiction paperbacks, hot rod magazines, computer programming manuals, Clive Cussler novels. There was a window on the right, light filtering through the upper branches of a redbud in the backyard. Posters were thumb tacked to the wall: Nolan Ryan, Stevie Ray Vaughan, the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. If the room had been any more Average Texan Boyhood it would've cracked the meter.

I started to reach for the light switch.

"Don't," Dwight said. "She doesn't like the lights on. Wastes energy."

I wondered how Dwight had gotten so tan growing up in a dark house. The answer immediately presented itself: Dwight would've left as soon and as often as possible.

"You okay?" I asked.

"The kids. It's like having a Little League team invited to trample over your childhood."

I went to the window, looked out at the yard. "At least they limit a Little League team to nine."

Dwight nodded sourly. He fished something out of his pack, threw it to me. "Good news. What I did this morning."

A handwritten label on the tape said TECHSAN. It looked no different from the eighttracks Garrett used to keep in his car when I was a kid-certainly nothing worth dying for.

"What did you find?"

Dwight zipped his bag. "What Pena will announce today. There's a sequence in the code that shouldn't be there. He'll blame it on the original programmers."

"The back door."

Dwight lay back on his bed, stared at the ceiling. "It's a beautiful subroutine. Elegant, really. And until it's closed, nothing is safe- not a single file on a client's server, as long as they're running Techsan's product."

I looked out the window. The yard below was balding crabgrass, lined by a wooden fence with missing planks. A barbecue pit squatted between a tool shed and scraggly hibiscus bushes.

"You said you had good news."

"It depends on whether you find Garrett," Dwight replied. "Whether he'll help. I heard-I heard about Ms. McBride. I'm sorry."

"How can Garrett help?"

"I think it would be possible to track where the stolen files were diverted to. I'm not sure. This isn't my area of expertise. But if Garrett got into the source code, if he retraced the steps of the original sender, identified the packet sniffer and the PGP key involved-he might be able to triangulate an IP address."

"In English?"

"Find the saboteur."

"Before, Garrett couldn't even find the problem in his own code."

Dwight's ears turned red. Apparently, the idea that he'd found something Garrett had missed embarrassed him.

In the backyard, one of the smaller boys-John, maybe-ducked under a loose board in the fence. He was carrying a VCR that was much too big for him. It was partially wrapped in a blue towel. He saw me watching from the window and froze. He slid the VCR behind the nearest hibiscus bush and walked toward the house, trying not to run.

The scene made me feel sad down to my bones. I'd seen my share of disturbed children in eight years of PI work, but never so many in one place.

The hell of it was, I wasn't going to talk to the kid about it. I wasn't even going to turn him in. I wondered how many days fanning the Leviathan you'd get for stealing a VCR.

"I talked to Maia this morning," I told Dwight. "She had some information about Pena."

I told him about Maia's conversation with her new pal, the deputy in Burnet County.

Dwight stared at his comic book collection, shook his head. "That doesn't mean anything."

"You knew he was adopted?"

"Of course I knew. What difference does it make?"

"The harassment of the software developers, the disappearance of Adrienne Selak-I think that's just a small sample of what Matthew's capable of. His main agenda with Techsan isn't about money. It's personal-retribution."

Dwight opened the trundle bed cabinet at his feet, yanked out an empty duffel bag. "I told you-there's no reason the deal would be personal. He never met the Techsan principals before."

"Matthew's age," I said. "Born around '67. Clara Doebler, Jimmy's mother-she supposedly had an abortion around then, but just before Jimmy died he was searching birth certificates, asking questionslooking for that lost child. He was told that the child had been bornand I think Pena was the one who told him."

"And you think…" Dwight's throat seemed to be closing up. He shoved underwear into his bag. "That's nuts."

"Clara had already lost custody of one child," I said. "She couldn't bear to lose another one-not completely. She never had the abortion. She gave the child up instead. You said it yourself: Pena is treating this takeover differently. He's making it the centrepiece of his career. What better way to get revenge on your birth family than building on their ashes?"

"I've known Matthew almost fifteen years. He's never given any indication. He would never-"

His voice faltered.

"The night Adrienne drowned," I said. "You weren't with Pena, were you?"

Dwight yanked a Hawaiian shirt from the drawer-the blue one with the yellow lotus designs.

"All right," he admitted. "I lied. I lied to protect a guy who's helped me ever since college. When I walked aft that night, I ran into Matthew. I didn't see Adrienne go over.

I just saw Matthew, frantic-coming my way, looking for help. We roused the whole damn ship together, didn't have time to talk about exactly what had happened. Later, when people started questioning us, I saw a kind of fear sink into Matthew's eyes, like he was suddenly realizing what they'd accuse him of. He said that I'd been with him when Adrienne fell. He told what had happened, only as if I'd arrived a few moments earlier. I had to make a splitsecond decision. I went along with it. I didn't know what else to do. But he didn't kill her, Tres."

I'd spent years listening to people's stories, learning to separate out the lies. There wasn't anything suspicious in Dwight's voice. The night of Adrienne's drowning, some cop had merely committed the cardinal sin of interrogation-not isolating the witnesses prior to questioning. Somebody had done that, given Pena the chance to shape Dwight's testimony before he made it.

"You're chasing ghosts," he told me. "If you want me to, I'll go to the police, change what I said about that night on the boat. I'll help in any way I can. But if you go to them, say this is about some longlost child-"

"They'll think what the police have thought all along. That the obvious answer is the right answer. And all along, they've been wrong."

He threw his duffel bag on the bed. He went to the bookshelf, pulled out a drawer, and began tossing papers and pictures. There were photos from Dwight's childhood, report cards, Christmas cards, college transcripts.

"You want to save your brother," he said.

"Of course."

"But you don't want the truth."

My face turned hot. "What are you not telling me, Dwight? What's got you so upset?"

He shoved the drawer closed, stared at the documentation of his childhood on the shabby carpet. He kicked an old report card. "I was trying to get up the nerve, Tres.