Донна Эндрюс - Delete all suspects

"If you'll show me where the systems are?" Maude asked, raising one eyebrow.

"Oh," Mrs. Stallman said, starting slightly. "Of course. I'm sorry," she added, as she led Maude to the kitchen and indicated a door. "It's just that you're not what I expected at

all. Nothing like Eddie's computer friends. Right down there."

"Thanks," Maude said, as she began descending the stairs.

"Would you like some tea?" Mrs. Stallman called down after her.

"Please," Maude called over her shoulder.

She heard things rattling in the kitchen above and then she reached the point where the side wall ended and she could look over the stair rail into the basement.

"Good heavens," she exclaimed.

Eddie's basement lair made her skin crawl.

Alan Grace Corporation had a few employees who seemed prone to creating this kind of ghastly squalor in their offices and cubicles. She occasionally wondered if they only did it at the office, because it wasn't really theirs, or if they acted the same at home. She hoped she could put this room out of her mind before seeing some of her messier employees again. The thought that they might spend their free time in conditions like this could drive her to an unhealthy dependence on Handi Wipes and Purell hand sanitizer.

"It's a bit messy," Mrs. Stallman said, appearing behind Maude.

"I see," Maude said.

"I don't get down here much." Mrs. Stallman patted her hair absently and looked around with some signs of embarrassment, Maude was glad to see. "I like to give Eddie his privacy. Though perhaps I should have asked if he wanted any help."

"I gather he's been preoccupied with his business," Maude said. "I know it can be hard to keep things tidy when you're that busy."

Hard, but not impossible, if you make an effort, she thought. But Mrs. Stallman smiled gratefully.

"Yes, exactly," she said. "After all, he's very young."

Not too young to pick up after himself, Maude thought, but again she smiled and nodded.

"I'll get the tea," Mrs. Stallman said, as she hurried back up to the kitchen.

Maude shook her head slightly as she surveyed the room. Her first impulse was to roll up her sleeves and begin scrubbing and throwing things out. She started when she heard a toilet flush. She leaned over the rail and looked to her right, where the sound had come from. The bathroom doorknob rattled several times but the door remained closed. Then someone pounded several times on the inside of the bathroom door, which flew open and hit the wall behind it. A cheap, flimsy door, by the sound of it. Tim emerged from the bathroom.

"Amazing, isn't it?" he said.

"That's one word for it," Maude said. "My first impulse is to go out and buy a huge box of trash bags and start purging."

"We can't do that," Tim said, sounding alarmed. "Everything here—"

"Is potentially evidence," Maude said. "I know. Not to mention the fact that how he lives is nobody else's business. With the possible exception of the health department. No, I won't do anything drastic. Just venting."

"Okay," Tim said. He looked around for a minute, then shook his head and lifted the camera that dangled by its strap around his neck. "I don't mean you can't touch anything; obviously, you'll have to reach the computers, and we might be able to find evidence somewhere in all that junk—"

"But don't throw anything away," Maude said. "Check."

"Keep taking photos," he said. The flash went off several times as he followed his own advice. "If you find anything interesting, call me. I'll keep my cell phone on."

"Where are you going?" Maude asked.

"To grab some lunch," Tim said. "Then I thought I'd inspect the crime scene. Not that it has all that much to do with Eddie's business, but I want to see it. After that, I'll

Delete All Suspects 3?

talk to Casey, and then ... I'd like to interview Eddie's friends, if we can find out who they are. Mrs. Stallman's not much help."

"I can see that," Maude said, through gritted teeth.

"If the rest of Eddie's friends are anything like Casey, we should sic Claudia on them," Tim said.

Maude smiled. Eighteen-year-old Casey's unrequited crush on Tim's partner was an open secret. Not surprising, since Claudia was undeniably beautiful; but she was also twelve years older and half a foot taller than Casey, so Maude doubted anything would ever come of his infatuation.

"She's out in Fairfax," Tim said. "Working on another batch of background investigations. But she can put that on hold whenever we come up with anything for her to do."

"In other words, Turing and I should work on finding you some names and addresses pretty soon or you'll be spinning your wheels."

"Not spinning my wheels," Tim said. "But back here searching for information, getting in your way. Learning bad habits from Eddie's housekeeping."

"Shoo, then," Maude said, with a laugh. "I'll call you when I have something useful."

She was amused to see how eager Tim was to leave the basement.

She opened her briefcase, found her own camera, and took a few shots of the room from the foot of the stairs.

The first thing she had to do was find Eddie's desk, if he had one. Find his business records.

No, she thought, pulling the laptop case off her shoulder. The first thing was to set the computer up and get Turing in here.

Friday i 1:30 p •n .

Not that I'm losing my enthusiasm for helping Tim with his case, but I'm beginning to nalizt bow difficult it

will be. Largely due to Eddie Stallmaris extremely unbusinesslike behavior. Surely be must have made some provision for emergencies. Someone who could fill in for him. At a minimum, he should leave a way for someone to retrieve his passwords. A list of the sites he manages, with client contact information, would also be nice. Surely, he can't keep it all in his memory?

Of course, it's possible that any number of useful documents might be lurking beneath the reams of paper and mounds of assorted hardware strewn about this basement.

Even more likely is that he keeps all this information in his computer network, where we can't yet look. Not the passwords, of course; that would be like hiding the combination in the safe. But everything else is probably in documents on his desktop computer, or more likely in the network.

If necessary, we can get into the network by brute force sooner or later — rebooting a server, for example — but we're hoping to avoid that. It would interrupt whatever services he's running and it could change or eliminate useful data. So we're trying less extreme methods first. Maude will search the basement for clues to his passwords. Tim will interrogate his business associates, assuming he has business associates that we can find. On the cybernetic side, KingFischer will probe Eddie's network from the outside, while I work from the basement.

I was about to say "while I work from the inside," but the basement isn't the inside, by my definition. The network is. I had Maude connect a spare computer we brought along to Eddie's network, to see what we could learn by passively observing traffic.

I may even try a few innocuous commands, which is the reason for the second computer. I could hook up the laptop to learn about the network, but I'd worry that the network would learn something about me, and if there's even a remote chance of a police computer expert coming along behind me, I don't want to risk that.

My first impression was that Eddie had*don&a good job with his systems. Of course, all I had to judge from was what I could observe from having a machine passively attached to his network — not logged in — and sniffing the network traffic. But he seemed to have

configured his firewall properly. Instill led all tbe necessary patches. He'd been gone for over a day and the network was humming along fine without him. Not that that's difficult to achiei>e, hut a surprising number ofsys admins don't.