Steve Martini - Prime Witness

“I wouldn’t push too hard if I were you, Adrian.”

He turns and fixes me with a stare, all the intensity he can muster in his mean eyes.

“Why not?”

“Because if you’re not careful you’ll flush the best part of yourself down that hole in there.”

The kid laughs, out loud, from the belly, the first thing he’s understood.

I grab my briefcase from the top of the towel holder and walk out, leaving the pimply wonder standing there alone, chortling to himself, fighting with the zipper, and looking at the closed door of the stall which has now been slammed in his face.

But Chambers is right about one thing, though as yet he doesn’t know the half of it. I do have a problem. With the looming discrepancies in the Scofield murders, even with hard evidence on the Russian, his defense will be able to play upon the thesis that somebody else committed these murders, that they did them all, and that the police are still looking for the real killer. Given time and his nimble mind, he will, I am sure, have handy explanations for the rope and stakes found in the Russian’s van. With this as a growing backdrop, the Scofield murders are now poised, like a wrench waiting to be wedged into the cogs of my case.

They say that time cures all. My relationship with Nikki is not healed, a long way from it, but it seems that maybe we have passed over the rockiest part of my latest lapse in judgment, picking up the pieces of Mario Feretti’s life. It has taken nearly two months to reach this point, but tonight she has even deigned to help me with one aspect of the Putah Creek cases. “A family outing,” she calls this. More than a little sarcasm to her words.

I have offered to entertain Sarah in my office while Nikki works on the computer. Sarah skipped through the door like she was entering Disneyland North.

“There it is,” I say.

Sitting forlorn in the center of one of the empty desks in the clerical pool is a small desktop computer from Karen Scofield’s apartment.

Denny Henderson and Claude spent the better part of an afternoon searching her place for leads as to what she and Abbott were working on at the time of the murders. They came up empty, except for a few papers which Claude is studying, and the computer, which he delivered here.

Rather than screw with this little desktop machine and risk the loss of vital information, I have called on Nikki. In her various jobs she has touched every computer known to mankind. She had been making plans to go for her master’s degree in computer science, but this is on hold now, until I can find the time to take some of the load at home.

“Do you know what software she was using?” she asks. Nikki’s talking about Karen Scofield and her little computer.

I shrug my shoulders and point to a pile of little cardboard boxes and books that Claude seized from the apartment when he took the machine.

She starts flipping pages, looking at the indexes to these books. I stand there for several minutes, feeling like a potted plant.

She looks over her shoulder at me. “Go play with your daughter,” she says.

Sarah is at my desk, stapler and hole punch in hand, an assortment of pads and pencils at the ready. Every few minutes I am called in and handed important slips of paper covered in gibberish she claims she can read, numbers and a few letters, some of these are still written backwards. Tonight we are playing bank. She is the teller. This goes on for the better part of an hour until she bores with this game. Nikki is still fighting with the machine in the other room. Finally a few yawns from my daughter and she is pulling her shoes off, the sign that sleep is not far off. I put her on the couch in the reception area and cover her with my coat. In five minutes she is asleep.

I head for my office and settle into the chair behind the desk, pick up the phone and dial. On the second ring Claude answers.

“It’s me,” I say. “Did you find anything?”

“Not much,” he says. Claude is home poring through a stack of papers taken from Karen Scofield’s apartment.

“Mostly personal correspondence. A few letters,” he says. “There was something.”

“What’s that?”

“Two letters to a laboratory supply company down south ordering some live mice.”

“Mice?” I say.

“Yeah. The lady was into mice in a big way.”

“Probably experiments. Scofield was a scientist.” My deep, impenetrable knowledge of things scientific.

“Could be,” says Claude, “but three thousand of ’em. In a four-month period?”

“Three thousand? What could anybody do with three thousand mice?”

He makes a noise on the other end of the line, like search me. “Maybe they were eating the things,” he says. “Could be the latest hors d’oeuvre among the college crowd.”

“Did you find any sign of them at the university, in Scofield’s office or his lab?”

“No. But it explains the pellets.”

“What pellets?”

“Grain, feed pellets for livestock. We found two hundred-pound sacks still stitched up, and a lot of grain dust, like there may have been more bags at one time, in the corner of the lab.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Mice love the stuff,” he says. “My dad used to use it to feed hogs. Had it by the ton. The mice always burrowed their way into the bags when he stored it in the barn. They feasted on it.”

“You think Scofield was feeding the grain to the mice?”

“I don’t know. There’s a couple of kids, undergraduates I’m told, who worked with him on projects from time to time. I’m gonna send Henderson over tomorrow to see if he can track ’em down. Maybe they can enlighten us.”

“Anything else?”

“That’s it,” he says.

“Is that everything from her office?”

“Read it all, three times,” he says.

“Put the documents in the evidence locker for now,” I tell him. “I’ll see you in the morning. By then I should know whether we’ve got anything in the computer.”

We sign off. I hang up.

I can hear the clicking of keys outside as Nikki works away. I head out to see what she has. The little screen is all lit up with menus. I move in over her shoulder and get a quick glance, long lists of backlit words as she flashes through screens.

“I assume you want data files, things she loaded in for storage or to be printed out?”

“Right.”

Halfway down the screen something sticks out, more than the standard three- or four-letter symbols-the word “PEREGRINE.”

“There,” I say. “What’s that?”

She punches some more keys and comes up with a clean screen. Up at the top is the name of the directory-“PEREGRINE” with the hard disk drive designation, the little prompt letter “c:”.

“Can we get into the directory?” I say.

“This is the menu,” she says. “We can go in, but it won’t do us any good.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s empty,” she says.

“I don’t understand.”

“If there were any files they’d be listed here, on the menu, by file name.”

She flashes back to the parent directory one more time. “There it is, big as life, but no files,” she says. “What about this?” She points to another entry. “PEREGRINE.42”

“What is it?”

“It’s not a directory listing. No DIR designation. It looks like a data file that got misplaced,” she says. “Maybe somebody hit the wrong key and dumped it into the root directory by mistake.”

“Can we call it up?”

Again she punches buttons and this time a letter appears on the screen. There’s no salutation other than the name “Bill” and no address as to whom it was sent.

I read it. The letter is like walking into a room in the middle of a conversation. It refers to subjects in past correspondence without any clue as to the substance of those items. I try to read between the lines as best I can.