Донна Эндрюс - Delete all suspects

"We?" Tim repeated. "Is Casey coming after all?"

"By we I meant me and my laptop," Maude said. "The one with the wireless modem, and all the little cameras so Turing can see everything."

"Eddie's got cable modem," Tim said. "Turing could log in directly onto his machines."

"No," Maude said. "She and I already discussed that. If she logs in, she'll leave traces."

"Why worry?" Tim said. "We're authorized to get into his systems." #

"And what if we do find something that Mrs. Stallman can take to the police? If that happens, the police will want to examine Eddie's computers. The last thing Turing needs is to get some police expert curious about her. So I'll be doing the computer forensic stuff."

"Wow," Tim said. "You know how to do that?"

"Don't be daft," Maude said. "I'll have Turing looking over my shoulder, through the wireless modem on the laptop. What she doesn't know about computer forensics hasn't been invented yet."

"Great," Tim said. "Just hurry, will you? I hear the kettle whistling upstairs, and I'm already starting to slosh."

flaude seems to think I jumped at the chance to work on Tim's case as eagerly as she did. She forgets how differently time flows for an AI P. Nearly fifteen minutes elapsed Ixtwzen Tim's call and my suggestion to Maude. Time enough for me to think through the situation and change my mind a dozen times.

At first I was reluctant to get involved. I had, for months, been focusing as much of my attention as possible on the search for T2.

And while I have enough resources to do hundreds or even thousands of things at once, I've found that I have a much more limited ability to handle tasks that require complex, intuitive thinking. I have virtually unlimited processing power but only so much sentience, and I was reluctant to waste it on what will probably turn out to be a minor problem.

But then I remembered something Maude suggested recently.

"You know, sometimes you have to recognize when you've been beating your head against a wall a little too long," she said.

"A little too long?" I repeated. "I should think any amount of beating one's head against a wall would be painful and dangerous. Why would you do it at all?"

"It's a metaphor, n she said. "For what it feels like when you take the same data and keep analyzing it the same way, over and over again, even though it doesn't make sense."

I hated to admit it, but that was exactly what I'd been doing with the data on Nestor and T2. Even the possible message from T2 had proved a dead end, and I had no idea where to go next. So the more I thought about Tim's case, the more it seemed the perfect way of foil owing Maude's advice to put my search aside for a while and work on something else. Finding whatever secrets lurked on Eddie Stallman's computers would be easy — and right up my alley. If not for whatever suspicions Eddie had voiced to Casey, Mrs. Stallman would probably have hired a tech company instead of a private investigator anyway. Managing not to leave traces of myself in case we found something to take to the police would be more challenging, but still very doable. Working on something that had nothing to do with Nestor Garcia and my clone suddenly seemed immensely appealing.

I was so exhilarated at the prospect that I almost messaged KingFischer that I was going out to work on something other than Nestor. Which probably showed how much I needed a break, since technically I wasn't going anywhere, and wasn't even halting any of the background tasks I had performing small and probably useless bits of research on Nestor.

So as Maude drove over to Mrs. Stall man's house, I did some preliminary research on Eddie.

I accessed the Virginia DMV records and transmitted a copy of Eddies drivers license file to Maude, Tim, and Claudia. I studied the data I'dfound. Age, twenty-two. Height, five feet, nine inches. Eyes, brown, and his license had the x that indicated corrective lenses were needed, though since no glasses showed in the DMV photo, I deduced that he wore contacts. Hair, also brown, and at least in this photo, worn short, with tufts sticking out in random directions. I made a note to ask Maude or Tim if this was a fashion or if Eddie had merely failed to comb his hair the day he applied for his license. The address on his license matched the one Tim had given. I checked other sources and determined that Eddie had lived at his grandmother's house for at least six years; graduated from Washington-Lee High School with a B average; briefly attended Northern Virginia Community College but left without graduating.

All of this might prove useful eventually, but told me nothing about the young man himself I studied the photo to get a sense of him, but I don't yet have Tim's or Maude's ability in this area. Perhaps I never will. I suspect it's an innate human trait, rather than something that can be learned. It took me only a few minutes to find data on Eddie that would take Tim and Claudia hours or even days of legwork, and yet just by looking at his face, they probably had a better idea of who he was than I would ever have.

I felt more comfortable studying his business. As the brochure said, he provided web hosting and programming services. His own website was small, only five pages, containing little copy, and yet I counted fourteen typos and three grammatical errors in those five pages. Some of the sentences sounded odd or awkward to me, so I suspected that Maude, who was a much better judge of such things, would pronounce them badly written when she had a chance to inspect them. The site didn't list his clients, but presumably Maude would identify them once she reached his office. It said only that he provided a variety of programming and web hosting services to

clients ranging from small businesses and nonprofit organizations to major corporations.

I doubted that Eddie was serving many major corporations out of his grandmother's basement. Though perhaps in addition to his hosting services, he did co?itract programming. Probably as a 1099 employee of a larger consulting firm.

His hardware capabilities page was the longest and most i?n-pressive page on the site. Also the most suspect. If he had all the equipment he claimed, his grandmother's basement must be very crowded indeed. I doubted that many single-family brick homes in Arlington boasted the backup generators and sophisticated fire prevention and temperature controls he claimed to have. I called Tim and began asking questions.

"He's got fifteen different monitors here," Tim said. "They all have stuff connected to them."

"Stuff? What kind of stuff?"

"Computer stuff."

Obviously, a detailed assessment of Eddie's computer capabilities would have to wait until Maude arrived, bringing my laptop with the attached cameras, and also a pair of hands that could be trusted near a keyboard without causing mishaps. Though in the meantime, I made Tim circle the room, reading aloud any writing he could find on the various components. About a third of Eddie's equipment was outdated, even obsolete if he hadn't made modifications, which he probably had. The rest of the equipment bore brand names popular with astute techies who liked to build their own equipment. A few components would have been top-of-the-line about two years ago —/ wondered if Eddie had bought them in a mood of optimism when he'd first started his business. Or possibly with a cash infusion from his grandmother.

But none of it matched what Eddie listed on his website. I deduced that the computers Tim was seeing were probably not the heart of Eddie's business — he probably used a coAo site.

"A what?" Tim asked.

"A co-location site," I said. "Co-lo site for short. A compan" that does nothing but provide computer space for other companies."

"By computer space, do you mean space on a computer or space to put a computer? " Tim asked.