Sally hadn’t been home more than an hour before the phone rang.
“I hear Bea Preston’s launched a crusade to clean the devil worshippers out of the university,” Delice Langham told Sally.
“How’d you hear already?” Sally asked.
“A bunch of ’em came in all fired up after the memorial service for Brad Preston,” Delice told her. “They were denouncing you all over their chicken-fried steaks.”
“Me?” Sally asked.
“Well, feminists. And evolutionists. And I forget what all else. Evidently old Bea was on fire,” Delice said.
“I was there,” said Sally. “It was everything you imagine and more.”
“I don’t like this.” Delice fumed. “This town’s full of people who manage not to hate each other, mostly by ignoring each other. This kind of stupidity brings out the nut-cases and puts all the bad shit on the surface. People get all righteous and start subjecting each other to tests nobody can pass.”
“And what, precisely, do you suggest I do about it?” Sally said.
“Hell if I know. This could get out of hand pretty quickly, especially if Bea keeps beating the drum. She looks sweet and delicate, but when she gets her teeth in something, she’s like a fucking Gila monster. You’d have to cut her head off before her jaws would let go. And she’s got a lot of influence with the Holy Roller crowd. There’s got to be some way to get her to back off.”
“I seriously doubt that I’m the one to do that,” said Sally. “You know her, right?”
“Not really. I mean, I’ve known her most of my life and all. She went to Laramie High. But she’s younger than me, and we didn’t exactly hang out. I was beads and bongs, and she was Campus Crusade. Once Brad hooked up with her, we didn’t see much of him around the watering holes. Oops—my dishwasher’s about to quit again. Gotta go.”
The phone rang almost immediately. “Just got off the phone with a guy who was a little incoherent,” said Edna McCaffrey, “but as I pieced it together, he’s under the impression that women’s studies is the academic equivalent of the KGB. And that was the third call today.”
“This is ridiculous,” said Sally. “It’ll blow over.”
“I devoutly hope so,” Edna agreed. “In the meantime, I’d advise you to keep your mouth shut and be nice to people.”
“I’m always nice to people,” said Sally.
“Hah!” Edna replied, and hung up.
Ring, ring!
“Heard about the memorial service,” said Maude Stark. “Guess we’re in for it.”
Sally took a deep breath and actually prayed for patience. “Look, you guys want me to be a women’s historian, that’s what I’m going to do,” she said. “I just ask myself what Susan B. Anthony would have done.”
“Myguess? She’d have launched a counterattack. Susan B. never stepped back and never looked back,” Maude said.
Sally sighed. Sometimes, Susan B. (and Maude, for that matter) made her tired. “For the moment, I want to concentrate on being a good college professor.” And of course, finding and assisting one promising student, recently gone missing. “So I think I’d better quit talking and get after the mountain of work that’s piling up. I’ll leave the counterattacking to you.”
As she hung up, Sally reflected that maybe that wasn’t such a good idea. Maude was a good Wyomingite. Her idea of a counterattack might involve live ammunition. She comforted herself with the thought that Maude was too smart to get into a shooting war when she’d be out-gunned ten to one. No point fretting about it now.
And she’d worry about Charlie Preston later too. She had plenty to do. Papers to grade. Programs to plan. People to schmooze. Books to write.
She didn’t feel like doing any of those things, so she took the slacker’s way out. She decided to check her email.
She made herself a cup of coffee, set her laptop on the kitchen table, sat down, and dialed up her Internet connection. The weasel in the machine screeched, and she was wired to the world.
If she was looking to avoid work and controversy, checking email might not be the best course of action. Since the last time she’d checked, less than twenty-four hours earlier, fifty messages had piled up in her already overstuffed inbox. A dozen of them were junk—daily blab from airlines and travel sites, offers of great deals on wine, flowers, books, and home furnishings. Just the nuisance cost of the convenience of online shopping. She knew she could have blocked them, but she’d never bothered. She deleted the messages without reading.
Half a dozen were from addresses she didn’t recognize, with subject headings like “Bring God Back to the Classroom.” Looked like the crusaders had gotten her email address. No surprise. It was available through the university website. She hit the delete button again and again.
As she scrolled down what remained, one return address caught her eye: Dhag@legalequal.org. She located the business card Dave Haggerty had given her at the eviction: yep. That was his address. The subject line read, “Re: Projects.” Haggerty was a lawyer. He understood discretion. He wouldn’t headline a message, “Your Search for Charlie Preston.” Or “Our Dinner Date,” for that matter.
She clicked on the message. “Nice to see you,” it read. “Please open the attached for information about your projects.”
She clicked on the little paperclip symbol, to open the attachment.
The attachment screen appeared, with a very brief message, written in red letters. “Stop looking. Next time it won’t be just a machine. You’ve been fried.”
Suddenly her laptop began spewing out incomprehensible code. Then the screen went black. She tried to reboot, but nothing happened.
“Shit,” she grumbled. Stared at the screen and said, “What?” And then, “Crap!” And then, “Hawk!”
Fried. The attachment had been infected. She’d been victimized by a virus.
“What happened?” Hawk asked, walking in and sitting down.
“Fucking virus. Shit shit shit.”
They had a pattern. When things went wrong, the crazier one got, the calmer the other. “Take a deep breath, Sal,” said Hawk, the voice of cool for this crisis. “We can take your laptop to a computer geek, and they’ll probably be able to fix it in a day or two. The more you can remember exactly what happened, the easier time the geek will have.”
She sucked in air, blew it out. “Okay. Okay. I’m an idiot. I should have known. I opened a contaminated attachment. There was a message, then the machine started spitting gobbledygook, then it shut down.”
“What did the message say? You should write it down,” he told her.
“Let me get this right.” She pulled a pencil and pad out of her laptop case and wrote as she spoke. “It said, ‘Stop looking. Next time it won’t be just a machine. You’ve been fried.’ ”
Hawk frowned. “Stop looking? Looking for what? What was the return address on the message?”
She showed him Haggerty’s card still sitting on the table, beside the now forlornly silent laptop. “That’s the address. I got the card from Dave Haggerty when I went out to see Billy Reno, and caught that eviction instead. Turns out Haggerty’s representing the renters. Since Charlie’s name is on the lease, he needs to find her. And I’m trying to hustle him for moneyfor the center, so we’re trying to schedule a dinner.”
“So the ‘stop looking’ part could be about Charlie Preston.” Hawk gave her a measuring look. “When you told me about the eviction and about Charlie having signed the lease, you didn’t mention Dave Haggerty. Or dinner. How come?”
“I don’t know. Slipped my mind, I guess.” Of course it had. No deliberate evasion there.
“So...have you been emailing with Haggerty, then?” Hawk asked, voice in neutral.
“No!” said Sally.
“I’m not accusing you of having cybersex with him, darlin’. Just want to know if you’re in his address book, or vice versa. That’s how worm viruses work. They get into somebody’s Internet address book and send themselves to everybody,” he said reasonably.
“Oh. Sorry. But really, no. This is the first message I’ve gotten from him, and I’ve never sent him anything. I just got the card yesterday.”
“Hunh. This is weird.” Hawk picked up the open laptop, held it high, looked at the bottom, like a guy checking under the hood. “You know what I think?” he asked.
“You think,” she said, “that I should call the police.”
“You should call the police,” he replied. “And we should also called the computer support desk at the U. and let them know you’ve got a worm. They’re going to need to send out a warning and get everybody to update their virus protection.”
An hour later, an Albany County patrol car pulled up in front of the house. A very young, crisply uniformed deputy got out, opened the back door, pulled out a large, rectangular toolbox and a laptop case. She introduced herself as Sally opened the door. “I’m new to the force,” she told Sally. “IT specialist.”
Information technology specialist. Crime fighting in Laramie. It wasn’t just for cowpokes anymore.
The IT specialist set up her own laptop at the kitchen table, along with some kind of machine that made Sally think of fifties sci-fi flicks, plugging cables into boxes and ports and holes, testing this, trying that. Sally’s laptop remained obstinately dead. “Hmph,” said the high-tech deputy at one point. “This is a tough little mother of a virus. Think I’d better take your laptop to my shop. I need to put it up on the bench and see what’s what.”
“How long will it take?” Sally asked, trying hard not to whine. A uniformed deputy was not, after all, some spotty-faced twenty-year-old with a computer science degree and enough credit card debt to float an aircraft carrier, the usual kind of person who came to the rescue when Sally’s techno-structure crapped out.
“Can’t say. Maybe a couple days, maybe a couple weeks. We’ve got a lot on our plate,” said the deputy.
“Look, it’s probably just a garden variety pain-in-theass virus. Maybe I should just take the machine to somebody who can get to it quickly. I’ve got a lot of work to do.” Sally gave in and whined.
“Not an option,” said Scotty Atkins, striding into the kitchen. “Figured you wouldn’t mind if I came in without knocking, since you called us,” he told Sally. “And don’t bother objecting. If there’s any possibility that what happened to your machine has anything to do with what’s happened with Charlie Preston or her father or her trashy boyfriend, we want to take a look at it.”
“Will you fix it?” she asked.
“We can give it a try. But as you can probably guess, Dr. Alder, we’re not in the computer repair business. We’re a lot more interested in identifying a virus-writing pattern that might lead us, eventually and with a lot of luck, to the hacker.”
“You could start with the threat that appeared before the thing started chucking out flames and fire, Scotty,” Sally told him. She was feeling pretty crabby. There were files on that computer that existed nowhere else, and she hated the thought of losing them. Not to mention certain emails that might prove embarrassing, if not exactly actionable.
“Always the drama queen, aren’t we,” said Atkins.
She showed him the message she’d written down. “The flames and fire might be a slight exaggeration,” she said.
“The return address belongs to David Haggerty, the defense lawyer,” Hawk told Scotty.
Scotty squinted at her. “That doesn’t mean anything where viruses are concerned. Generally, the return address is a blind, an address-book link, though sometimes it helps with tracing. But having said that, how well do you know Mr. Haggerty, Professor?”
Sally put on a disgusted look, spoke with disdain. “You guys make me feel like I’ve been caught necking with him at the park! Come on. I barely know the guy. He’d have no reason to mess with my computer, or anybody’s.”
“How the hell do you know that?” Hawk said, revving up as she ratcheted down. “You say you’ve barely met the guy—for all you know, he might spend his spare time hacking into Justice Department files and dropping charges on political prisoners. For that matter, he could be an axe murderer for the ACLU.”
“Oh yeah,” said Sally. “I hear that’s pretty common.”
“Hmph!” said the techie deputy from the kitchen table. “This is weird.”
“What’s that?” Scotty asked.
“I sent a message to the university tech support, letting them know about the virus. And I just got a message back saying that their diagnostic indicates that the thing isn’t acting like a worm.”
“What do you mean?” Sally said.
“It doesn’t appear to be replicating itself at random,” said the deputy. “The problem is localized.”
“What’s the pattern?” Scotty inquired.
“They didn’t send that information.”
Hawk said, “Excuse me a minute. I think I’d like to check my email.” He headed toward his desk in the corner of the living room.
“Thanks,” said Scotty. “Let’s get packed up and get out of here,” he told the deputy, motioning to Sally as he walked toward the front hall.
“Look,” Scotty continued. “I know you’re worried about your student...”
“Yes, as it happens, I am. And about finding her father, dead. And about this new crusade her stepmother is launching against godless commie college professors. And maybe five or six other things. Do you really think I have the option of laying low at this point, Scotty? Apart from that virus message, my inbox was full of stuff from people who want me fired unless I hold revivals in my classroom. Do you really think I can just lie back and nibble on bonbons?”
Scotty’s face didn’t change, but he was giving what she said some thought. “Okay,” he said at last. “I’m not going to tell you how to do your job. But don’t do mine. We’ll find Charlie Preston. We’ve got some leads.”
“What leads?” Sally asked.
“I can’t tell you that. And if I could, I wouldn’t, because the next thing I knew, you’d be barging in and getting in my way.”
That hurt. She didn’t think of herself as getting in the way. In fact, she rather thought she’d been a help a time or two. “I don’t think that’s fair,” she told him.
Scotty ignored the remark, pressed on. “We will also find out who killed Brad Preston. And if it should turn out that the girl is involved in the father’s murder, you’re going to have to figure out a way to deal with that.”
Was that a glimmer of compassion on his hard face? Impossible. “I can deal with it. I just can’t believe it,” she insisted.
“Doesn’t matter whether you do or not,” he said. Nope. Not compassion.
“Hey, look at this,” Hawk called from the living room. They went to look at his screen, along with the deputy. “A bunch of messages from addresses I don’t recognize. Some God Squad stuff in the title lines, and this one headed ‘Family Photos,’ with a series of attachments.”
“Did you get that message?” Scotty asked Sally.
She thought a moment. “No. I’d remember. But it could have been sent after my computer crashed.”
“Don’t open it,” said the IT deputy. “Forward it to this address, with all the attachments, and then delete the whole thing. I’ll check it out. Dr. Alder, you’d better give me your password, so I can access your account and see if more funny stuff has showed up.” She put a business card on Hawk’s desk.
“Family photos?” said Sally. “Wonder what that’s about.”
“Maybe just the hook to get you to open another bad attachment. We’ll find out,” said Scotty.
“If they really are photos,” Hawk told him, “and either of us are in them, that’d be pretty weird. We’ll hear from you, right?”
Scotty pressed his lips together. “If they’re photos of you or your families,” he said, “you can bet you’ll hear from us.”