Lisa Gardner - The Neighbor

“Tell me I’m dreaming,” Bobby groaned into the phone.

“I don’t know. Am I naked and covered in whipped cream?”

“D.D., I just talked to you eight hours ago.”

“Well, that’s the thing about crime. It never sleeps.”

“But detectives do.”

“Really? Must’ve missed that class at the Academy. So, I have a question for you about another statie. Name of Wayne Reynolds. Ring any bells?”

There was a long pause, which was better than the usual click of Bobby hanging up. “Wayne Reynolds?” he repeated at last. “No, can’t think of any detectives by that name.”

D.D. nodded, remaining quiet. Both the BPD and Massachusetts State Police were sizable organizations, but they still retained a family-enterprise sort of feel. Even if you didn’t work directly with every officer, chances were you’d caught a name in the hall, read it on top of a report, even heard a juicy bit of gossip in the latest rumor mill.

“Wait a minute,” Bobby said shortly. “I do know that name, but he’s not with the detectives unit. He’s at the Computer Lab. He handled the forensic analysis of some cell phones for last year’s bank robbery.”

“He’s an electronics geek?”

“I think they prefer the term ‘forensic specialist.’”

“Huh,” D.D. said.

“You seize some computers and ask for state assistance?”

“I seized some computers and asked for BRIC assistance, thank you very much.” BRIC was the Boston Regional Intelligence Center at BPD headquarters, basically BPD’s geek squad, because like all good bureaucracies, the Boston police believed they needed to have all their own toys and specialists. It went without saying.

“Well, call someone in BRIC, then,” Bobby grumbled. “They’ve probably worked with Wayne. I haven’t.”

“Okay. Good night, Bobby.”

“Crap, it’s already morning. Now I’ll have to get up.”

“Then good morning, Bobby.” D.D. hung up before he could swear at her again. She clipped her cell to her waist and contemplated her empty mug. Wayne Reynolds was a professional nerd with an amateur nerd nephew. She refilled her cup. Interesting.

Wayne Reynolds walked through the door of Mario’s at precisely eight A.M. D.D. knew it was him by his burnished red hair, not so unlike his nephew’s. All resemblance to a thirteen-year-old boy however, began and ended with the coppertop.

Wayne Reynolds was tall, six one, six two. He moved easily and athletically. Definitely a guy who worked in a daily run, despite the pressing demands of ripping apart various hard drives. He wore a camel-colored light wool blazer that set off a forest green shirt and dark-colored slacks. More than one head turned when he walked in, and D.D. felt a slight bit of thrill when he headed for her, and only for her. If this is what Ethan Hastings was going to grow into one day, then maybe Sandy Jones had been onto something.

“Sergeant Warren,” Wayne greeted her, extending his hand.

D.D. nodded, accepting the handshake. He had calloused palms. Short buffed nails. Positively beautiful fingers that didn’t wear a wedding ring.

Honest to God, she was going to need some bacon.

“Want food?” she asked.

He blinked his eyes. “Okay.”

“Great. I’ll get enough for both of us.”

D.D. used her time at the order counter to control her breathing and remind herself that she was a trained professional who absolutely, positively was not affected by having breakfast with a David Caruso look-alike. Unfortunately, she didn’t believe herself; she’d always had a weakness for David Caruso.

She returned to the tiny table with napkins and silverware for both of them, as well as a cup of black coffee for him. Wayne accepted the oversized white ceramic mug with his beautiful fingers, and she bit the inside of her lips.

“So,” she began tersely, “you work for the state?”

“Computer Forensic Unit in New Braintree. We handle the majority of the electronic analysis, as you can guess by the title.”

“How long you been there?”

He shrugged, sipped his coffee black, eyes widening briefly at the dark roast. “Five or six years. I was a detective before that, but being a geek at heart, had a tendency to focus on the technology aspects of the cases. Given that everyone from a drug dealer to a crime lord is using computers, cell phones, or PDAs these days, demand for my technical skills grew. So I completed the eighty-hour course to become a CFCE-Certified Forensic Computer Examiner-and switched over to the Computer Lab.”

“You like it?”

“I do. Hard drives are like piñatas. Every treasure you ever wanted is stored in there somewhere. You just gotta know how to break it open.”

The food had arrived. Scrambled eggs with a side of grilled pancetta for both of them. The smells were rich and savory. D.D. dug in.

“How do you investigate hardware?” she asked, her mouth full.

Wayne had forked up a pile of eggs; he regarded her thoughtfully, as if trying to gauge the seriousness of her interest. He had deep hazel eyes with specks of green, so she made sure she looked interested.

“Take the rule of five-twelve. That’s the magic number in forensic computer analysis. See, inside a hard drive are round platters that spin around to read and write data. These platters contain chunks of five hundred and twelve bytes of data, and they’re constantly whirling under the seeker head. The seeker head, then, must divide all information into five hundred and twelve byte chunks in order to store the data onto the platters.”

“Okay.” D.D. went to work slicing up her pancetta.

“Now, say you’re saving a file to your hard drive that doesn’t divide neatly into five hundred and twelve byte chunks. It’s not one thousand and twenty-four bytes of data, it’s eight hundred bytes. The computer will fill one whole data chunk, then half of another available chunk. Then what? The computer doesn’t pick up where it left off, mid-data chunk. Instead, a new file will start with a fresh five-twelve byte space, meaning the previous file has excess storage capacity, or what we call ‘slack space,’ in the existing data chunk. Often, old data gets left in that slack space. Say you called up that file, made some changes, then resaved it. The overwrite might not go exactly on top of the old data the way most people assume. Instead it might be tucked somewhere else inside the same data chunk. Then a guy like me can search that five-twelve chunk. In the slack space I might find the old document where you wrote the original letter asking your lover to murder your spouse, as well as the revised doc, where you deleted that particular paragraph. And voila, one guilty conviction is born.”

“I don’t have a spouse,” D.D. volunteered, having another bite of eggs, “though I’m now deeply suspicious of my computer.”

Wayne Reynolds grinned at her. “You probably should be. People have no idea how much information is retained unknowingly on their hard drives. I like to say a computer is like a guilty conscience. It remembers everything and you never know when it might start to speak.”

“You been teaching your skills to Ethan?” D.D. asked.

“Haven’t had to. Kid absorbs it on his own. If I can corral his skills for good versus evil, he’ll be a hell of an investigator one day.”

“What constitutes the dark side for computer technology?”

Wayne shrugged. “Hacking, code breaking, illicit data-mining. Ethan is a good kid, but he’s also thirteen, so following in his uncle’s footsteps doesn’t sound as exciting as it once did. Join the state police or join the Internet underground. You be the judge.”

“He seems to have valued Sandy Jones’s opinions.” D.D. had finished her food; she pushed back the white ceramic plate.