The Blue Nowhere

  No, you sure as hell hadn't, Gillette thought.

  They'd been so close.

  In a soft, discouraged voice, Bishop said, "Recall SWAT."

  Shelton pulled out his cell phone and made the call.

  Bishop asked, "That other thing TripleX typed. 'ESAD.' What does that mean?"

  "Just a friendly acronym," Gillette said sourly. "It means Eat shit and die."

  "Bit of a nasty temper," Bishop observed.

  Then a phone rang--it was his cell--and the detective answered. "Yes?" Then tersely he asked, "Where?" He jotted notes and then said, "Get every available unit in the area over there now. Call the San Jose metro police too. Move on it and I mean big."

  He hung up then looked at the team. "We got a break. There was a response to our emergency vehicle locator. A traffic cop in San Jose saw a parked gray late-model Jag about a half hour ago. It was in an old area of town where you don't see expensive cars very often." He walked to the map and made an X at the intersection where the car had been seen.

  Shelton said, "I know the area a little. There're a lot of apartments near there. Some bodegas, a few package stores. Pretty low-rent district."

  Then Bishop tapped a small square on the map. It was labeled "St. Francis Academy."

  "Remember that case a few years ago?" the detective asked Shelton.

  "Right."

  "Some psycho got into the school and killed a student or teacher. The principal put in all kinds of security, real high-tech stuff. It was in all the papers." He nodded at the white-board. "Phate likes challenges, remember?"

  "Jesus," Shelton muttered in fury. "He's going after kids now."

  Bishop grabbed the phone and called in an assault-in-progress code to central dispatch.

  No one dared to mention out loud what everybody was thinking: that the EVL report had placed the car there thirty minutes ago. Which meant Phate had already had plenty of time to play his macabre game.

  It was just like life, Jamie Turner reflected.

  With no fanfare, no buzzing, no satisfying ka-chunks like in the movies, without even a faint click, the light on the alarmed door went out.

  In the Real World you don't get sound effects. You do what you set out to do and there's nothing to commemorate it except a light silently going dark.

  He stood up and listened carefully. From far off down the halls of St. Francis Academy he heard music, some shouting, laughter, tinny arguing on a talk-radio show--which he was leaving behind, on his way to spend a totally perfect evening with his brother.

  Easing the door open.

  Silence. No alarms, no shouts from Booty.

  The smell of cold air, fragrant with grass, filled his nose. It reminded him of those long, lonely hours after dinner at his parents' house in Mill Valley during the summer--his brother Mark in Sacramento where he'd taken a job to get away from home. Those endless nights. . . . His mother giving Jamie desserts and snacks to keep him out of their hair, his father saying, "Go outside and play," while they and their friends told pointless stories that got more and more fuzzy as everybody guzzled local wines.

  Go outside and play. . . .

  Like he was in fucking kindergarten!

  Well, Jamie hadn't gone outside at all. He'd gone inside and hacked like there was no tomorrow.

  That's what the cool spring air reminded him of. But at the moment he was immune to these memories. He was thrilled that he'd been successful and that he was going to spend the night with his brother.

  He taped the door latch down so that he could get back inside when he returned to the school later that night. Jamie paused and turned back, listening. No footsteps, no Booty, no ghosts. He took a step outside.

  His first step to freedom. Yes! He'd made it!

  It was then that the ghost got him.

  Suddenly a man's arm gripped him painfully around the chest and a powerful hand covered his mouth.

  God god god. . . .

  Jamie tried to leap back into the school but his attacker, wearing some kind of maintenance man uniform, was strong and wrestled him to the ground. Then the man pulled the thick safety glasses off the boy's nose.

  "What've we got here?" he whispered, tossing them on the ground and caressing the boy's eyelids.

  "No, no!" Jamie tried to raise his arms to protect his eyes. "What're you doing?"

  The man took something from the coveralls he wore. It looked like a spray bottle. He held it close to Jamie's face. What was--?

  A stream of milky liquid shot from the nozzle into his eyes.

  The terrible burn started a moment later and the boy began to cry and shake in utter panic. His worst fear was coming true--blindness!

  Jamie Turner shook his head furiously to fling off the pain and horror but the stinging only got worse. He was screaming, "No, no, no," the words muffled under the strong grip of the hand around his mouth.

  The man leaned close and began to whisper in the boy's ear but Jamie had no clue what he said; the pain--and the horror--consumed him like fire in dry brush.

  CHAPTER 00010001 / SEVENTEEN

  Frank Bishop and Wyatt Gillette walked through the old archway of the entrance to St. Francis Academy, their shoes sounding in gritty scrapes on the cobblestones.

  Bishop nodded a greeting to Huerto Ramirez, whose massive bulk filled half the archway, and asked, "It's true?"

  "Yep, Frank. Sorry. He got away."

  Ramirez and Tim Morgan, who was presently canvassing witnesses along the streets around the school, had been among the first at the scene.

  Ramirez turned and led Bishop, Gillette and, behind them, Bob Shelton and Patricia Nolan into the school proper. Linda Sanchez, pulling a large wheelie suitcase, joined them.

  Outside were two ambulances and a dozen police cars, their lights flashing silently. A large crowd of the curious stood on the sidewalk across the street.

  "What happened?" Shelton asked him.

  "As near as we can tell, the Jaguar was outside that gate over there." Ramirez pointed into a yard separated from the street by a high wall. "We were all on silent roll-up but it looks like he heard we were coming and sprinted out of the school and got away. We set up roadblocks eight and sixteen blocks away but he got through them. Used alleys and sidestreets probably."

  As they walked through the dim corridors Nolan fell into step beside Gillette. She seemed to want to say something but changed her mind and remained silent.

  Gillette noticed no students as they walked down the hallways; maybe the teachers were keeping them in their rooms until parents and counselors arrived.

  "Crime scene finding anything?" Bishop asked Ramirez.

  "Nothing that, you know, jumps up and gives us the perp's address."

  They turned a corner and at the end of it saw an open door, outside of which were dozens of police officers and several medical technicians. Ramirez glanced at Bishop and then whispered something to him. Bishop nodded and said to Gillette, "It's pretty unpleasant in there. It was like Andy Anderson and Lara Gibson. The killer used his knife again--in the heart. But it looks like it took him a while to die. It's pretty messy. Why don't you wait outside? When we need you to look at the computer I'll let you know."

  "I can handle it," the hacker replied.

  "You sure?"

  "Yep."

  Bishop asked Ramirez, "How old?"

  "The kid? Fifteen."

  Bishop lifted an eyebrow at Patricia Nolan, asking her if she too could tolerate the carnage. She answered, "It's okay."

  They walked inside the classroom.

  Despite his measured response to Bishop's question Gillette stopped in shock. There was blood everywhere. An astonishing amount--on the floor, walls, chairs, picture frames, white-board, the lectern. The color was different depending on what substance the blood covered, ranging from bright pink to nearly black.

  The body lay under a dark green rubberized blanket on the floor in the middle of the room. Gillette glanced at Nolan, expecting her to be repulsed to
o. But after a glance at the crimson spatters and streaks and puddles around the room, her eyes simply scanned the classroom, maybe looking for the computer they were going to analyze.

  "What's the boy's name?" Bishop asked.

  A woman officer from the San Jose Police Department said, "Jamie Turner."

  Linda Sanchez walked into the room and inhaled deeply when she saw the blood and the body. She seemed to be deciding if she was going to faint or not. She stepped outside again.

  Frank Bishop walked into the classroom next door to the murder site, where a teenage boy sat clutching himself and rocking back and forth in a chair. Gillette joined the detective.

  "Jamie?" Bishop asked. "Jamie Turner?"

  The boy didn't respond. Gillette noticed that his eyes were bright red and the skin around them seemed inflamed. Bishop glanced at another man in the room. He was thin and in his mid-twenties. He stood beside Jamie and had his arm on the boy's shoulder. The man said to the detective, "This is Jamie, that's right. I'm his brother. Mark Turner."

  "Booty's dead," Jamie whispered miserably and pressed a damp cloth on his eyes.

  "Booty?"

  Another man--in his forties, wearing chinos and an Izod shirt--identified himself as the assistant principal at the school and said, "It was the boy's nickname for him." He nodded toward the room where the body bag rested. "For the principal."

  Bishop crouched down. "How you feeling, young man?"

  "He killed him. He had this knife. He stabbed him and Mr. Boethe just kept screaming and screaming and running around, trying to get away. I . . ." He lost his voice to a cascade of sobbing. His brother gripped his shoulders tighter.

  "He all right?" Bishop asked one of the medical techs, a woman whose jacket was adorned with a stethoscope and hemostat clamps. She said, "He'll be fine. Looks like the perp squirted him in the eyes with water that had a little ammonia and Tabasco mixed in. Just enough to sting, not enough to do any damage."

  "Why?" Bishop asked.

  She shrugged. "You got me."

  Bishop pulled up a chair and sat down. "I'm sorry this happened, Jamie. I know you're upset. But it's real important you tell us what you know."

  The boy calmed and explained that he'd broken out of the school to go to a concert with his brother. But as soon as he'd gotten the door open this man in a uniform like a janitor's grabbed him and squirted this stuff in his eyes. He'd told Jamie it was acid and that if the boy led him to where Mr. Boethe was he'd give him an antidote. But if he didn't the acid'd eat his eyes away.

  The boy's hands shook and he started to cry.

  "It's his big fear," Mark said angrily, "going blind. The bastard found that out somehow."

  Bishop nodded and said to Gillette, "The principal was his target. It's a big school--Phate needed Jamie to find the victim fast."

  "And it hurt so much! It really, really did. . . . I told him I wasn't going to help him. I didn't want to, I tried not to but I couldn't help it. I . . ." He fell silent.

  Gillette felt there was something more that Jamie wanted to say but couldn't bring himself to.

  Bishop touched the boy's shoulder. "You did exactly the right thing. You did just what I would've done, son. Don't you worry about it. Tell me, Jamie, did you e-mail anybody about what you were going to do tonight? It's important that we know."

  The boy swallowed and looked down.

  "Nothing's going to happen to you, Jamie. Don't worry. We just want to find this guy."

  "My brother, I guess. And then . . ."

  "Go ahead."

  "What it was, I kind of went online to find some passcodes and stuff. Passcodes to the front gate. He must've hacked my machine and seen them and that's how he got into the courtyard."

  "How about you being afraid of going blind?" Bishop asked. "Could he have read about that online?"

  Jamie nodded again.

  Gillette said, "So Phate made Jamie himself a trapdoor--to get inside."

  "You've been real brave, young man," Bishop said kindly.

  But the boy was beyond consoling.

  The medical examiner's technicians took the principal's body away and the cops conferred in the corridor, Gillette and Nolan with them. Shelton reported what he'd learned from the forensic techs. "Crime scene doesn't have dick. A few dozen obvious fingerprints--they'll run those but, hell, we already know it's Holloway. He was wearing shoes without distinctive treads. There're a million fibers in the room. Enough to keep the bureau's lab techs busy for a year. Oh, they found this. It's the Turner kid's."

  He handed a sheet of paper to Bishop, who read it and passed it on to Gillette. It appeared to be the boy's notes about cracking the passcode and deactivating the door alarm.

  Huerto Ramirez told them, "Nobody was exactly sure where the Jaguar was parked. In any case, the rain's washed away any tread marks. We got a ton of trash by the roadside but whether our perp dropped any of it or not, who knows?"

  Nolan said, "He's a cracker. That means he's an organized offender. He's not going to be pitching out junk mailers with his address on them while he's staking out a victim."

  Ramirez continued, "Tim's still pounding the pavement with some troopers from HQ but nobody's seen anything at all."

  Bishop glanced at Nolan, Sanchez and Gillette. "Okay, secure the boy's machine and check it out."

  Linda Sanchez asked, "Where is it?"

  The assistant principal said he'd lead them to the school's computer department. Gillette returned to the room where Jamie was sitting and asked him which machine he'd used.

  "Number three," the boy sullenly replied and continued pressing the cloth into his eyes.

  The team started down the dim corridor. As they walked, Linda Sanchez made a call on her cell phone. She learned--Gillette deduced from the conversation--that her daughter still hadn't started labor. She hung up, saying, "Dios."

  In the basement computer room, a chill and depressing place, Gillette, Nolan and Sanchez walked up to the machine marked NO. 3. Gillette told Sanchez not to run any of her excavation programs just yet. He sat down and said, "As far as we know the Trapdoor demon hasn't self-destructed. I'm going to try to find out where it's resident in the system."

  Nolan looked around the damp, gothic room. "Feels like we're in The Exorcist. . . . Spooky atmosphere and demonic possession."

  Gillette gave a faint smile. He powered up the computer and examined the main menu. He then loaded various applications--a word processor, a spreadsheet, a fax program, a virus checker, some disk-copying utilities, some games, some Web browsers, a password-cracking program that Jamie had apparently written (some very robust code-writing for a teenager, Gillette noticed).

  As he typed he'd stare at the screen, watching how soon the character he typed would appear in the glowing letters on the monitor. He'd listen to the grind of the hard drive to see if it was making any sounds that were out of sync with the task it was supposed to be performing at that moment.

  Patricia Nolan sat close to him, also gazing at the screen.

  "I can feel the demon," Gillette whispered. "But it's odd--it seems to move around. It jumps from program to program. As soon as I open one it slips into the software--maybe to see if I'm looking for it. When it decides that I'm not, it leaves. . . . But it has to be resident somewhere."

  "Where?" Bishop asked.

  "Let's see if we can find out." Gillette opened and closed a dozen programs, then a dozen more, all the while typing furiously. "Okay, okay. . . . This is the most sluggish directory." He looked over a list of files then gave a cold laugh. "You know where Trapdoor hangs out?"

  "Where?"

  "The games folder. At the moment it's in the Solitaire program."

  "What?"

  "The card game."

  Sanchez said, "But games come with almost every computer sold in America."

  Nolan said, "That's probably why Phate wrote the code that way."

  Bishop shook his head. "So anybody with a game on his computer could have Trapdoor i
n it?"

  Nolan asked, "What happens if you disabled Solitaire or erased it?"

  They debated this for a moment. Gillette was desperately curious about how Trapdoor worked and wanted to extract the demon and examine it. If they deleted the game program the demon might kill itself--but knowing that this would destroy it would give them a weapon; anyone who suspected the demon was inside could simply remove the game.

  They decided to copy the contents of the hard drive from the computer Jamie had used and then Gillette would delete Solitaire and they'd see what happened.

  Once Sanchez was finished copying the contents Gillette erased the Solitaire program. But he noticed a faint delay in the delete operation. He tested various programs again then laughed bitterly. "It's still there. It jumped to another program and's alive and well. How the hell does it do that?" The Trapdoor demon had sensed its home was about to be destroyed and had delayed the delete program just long enough to escape from the Solitaire software to another program.

  Gillette stood up and shook his head. "There's nothing more I can do here. Let's take the machine back to CCU and--"

  There was a blur of motion as the door to the computer room swung open fast, shattering glass. A raging cry filled the room and a figure charged up to the computer. Nolan dropped to her knees, giving a faint scream of surprise.

  Bishop was knocked aside. Linda Sanchez fumbled for her gun.

  Gillette dove for cover just as the chair swung past his head and crashed into the monitor he'd been sitting at.

  "Jamie!" the assistant principal cried sharply. "No!"

  But the boy drew back the heavy chair and slammed it into the monitor again, which imploded with a loud pop and scattered glass shards around them. Smoke rose from the carcass of the unit.

  The administrator grabbed the chair and ripped it from Jamie's hand, pulling the boy aside and shoving him to the floor. "What the hell are you doing, mister?"

  The boy scrambled to his feet, sobbing, and made another grab for the computer. But Bishop and the administrator restrained him. "I'm going to smash it! It killed him! It killed Mr. Boethe!"

  The assistant principal shouted, "You cut that out this minute, young man! I'm not going to have that kind of behavior in my students."

  "Get your fucking hands off me!" the boy raged. "It killed him and I'm going to kill it!" The boy shook with anger.