Gillette. He laughed. “The CCU finally gets recognized as a legit part of the state police and they give us digs that’re twenty years out of date.”
“Look, a scram switch.” Gillette nodded at a red switch on the wall. A dusty sign said EMERGENCY USE ONLY. “I’ve never seen one.”
“What’s that?” Bob Shelton asked.
Anderson explained: The old mainframes would get so hot that if the cooling system went down the computers could overheat and catch fire in seconds. With all the resins and plastic and rubber the gases from a burning computer would kill you before the flames would. So all dinosaur pens came equipped with a scram switch—the name borrowed from the emergency shutdown switch in nuclear reactors. If there was a fire you hit the scram button, which shut off the computer, summoned the fire department and dumped halon gas on the machine to extinguish the flames.
Andy Anderson introduced Gillette, Bishop and Shelton to the CCU team. First, Linda Sanchez, a short, stocky, middle-aged Latina in a lumpy tan suit. She was the unit’s SSL officer—seizure, search and logging, she explained. She was the one who secured a perpetrator’s computer, checked it for booby traps, copied the files and logged hardware and software into evidence. She also was a digital evidence recovery specialist, an expert at “excavating” a hard drive—searching it for hidden or erased data (accordingly, such officers were also known as computer archaeologists). “I’m the team bloodhound,” she explained to Gillette.
“Any word, Linda?”
“Not yet, boss. That daughter of mine, she’s the laziest girl on earth.”
Anderson said to Gillette, “Linda’s about to be a grandmother.”
“A week overdue. Driving the family crazy.”
“And this is my second in command, Sergeant Stephen Miller.”
Miller was older than Anderson, close to fifty. He had bushy, graying hair. Sloping shoulders, bearish, pear-shaped. He seemed cautious. Because of his age, Gillette guessed he was from the second generation of computer programmers—men and women who were innovators in the computer world in the early seventies.
The third person was Tony Mott, a cheerful thirty-year-old with long, straight blond hair and Oakley sunglasses dangling from a green fluorescent cord around his neck. His cubicle was filled with pictures of him and a pretty Asian girl, snowboarding and mountain biking. A crash helmet sat on his desk, snowboarding boots in the corner. He’d represent the latest generation of hackers: athletic risk-takers, equally at home hacking together script at a keyboard and skateboarding half-pipes at extreme-sport competitions. Gillette noticed too that of all the cops at CCU Mott wore the biggest pistol on his hip—a shiny silver automatic.
The Computer Crimes Unit also had a receptionist but the woman was out sick. CCU was low in the state police hierarchy (it was referred to as the “Geek Squad” by fellow cops) and headquarters wouldn’t spring for a temporary replacement. The members of the unit had to take phone messages, sift through mail and file paperwork by themselves and none of them, understandably, was very happy about this.
Then Gillette’s eyes slipped to one of several erasable white-boards against the wall, apparently used for listing clues. A photo was taped to one. He couldn’t make out what it depicted and walked closer. Then he gasped and stopped in shock. The photo was of a young woman in an orange-and-red skirt, naked from the waist up, bloody and pale, lying in a patch of grass, dead. Gillette had played plenty of computer games—Mortal Kombat and Doom and Tomb Raider—but, as gruesome as those games were, they were nothing compared to this still, horrible violence against a real victim.
Andy Anderson glanced at the wall clock, which wasn’t digital, as would befit a computer center, but an old, dusty analog model—with big and little hands. The time was 10:00 A.M. The cop said,
“Look, a scram switch.” Gillette nodded at a red switch on the wall. A dusty sign said EMERGENCY USE ONLY. “I’ve never seen one.”
“What’s that?” Bob Shelton asked.
Anderson explained: The old mainframes would get so hot that if the cooling system went down the computers could overheat and catch fire in seconds. With all the resins and plastic and rubber the gases from a burning computer would kill you before the flames would. So all dinosaur pens came equipped with a scram switch—the name borrowed from the emergency shutdown switch in nuclear reactors. If there was a fire you hit the scram button, which shut off the computer, summoned the fire department and dumped halon gas on the machine to extinguish the flames.
Andy Anderson introduced Gillette, Bishop and Shelton to the CCU team. First, Linda Sanchez, a short, stocky, middle-aged Latina in a lumpy tan suit. She was the unit’s SSL officer—seizure, search and logging, she explained. She was the one who secured a perpetrator’s computer, checked it for booby traps, copied the files and logged hardware and software into evidence. She also was a digital evidence recovery specialist, an expert at “excavating” a hard drive—searching it for hidden or erased data (accordingly, such officers were also known as computer archaeologists). “I’m the team bloodhound,” she explained to Gillette.
“Any word, Linda?”
“Not yet, boss. That daughter of mine, she’s the laziest girl on earth.”
Anderson said to Gillette, “Linda’s about to be a grandmother.”
“A week overdue. Driving the family crazy.”
“And this is my second in command, Sergeant Stephen Miller.”
Miller was older than Anderson, close to fifty. He had bushy, graying hair. Sloping shoulders, bearish, pear-shaped. He seemed cautious. Because of his age, Gillette guessed he was from the second generation of computer programmers—men and women who were innovators in the computer world in the early seventies.
The third person was Tony Mott, a cheerful thirty-year-old with long, straight blond hair and Oakley sunglasses dangling from a green fluorescent cord around his neck. His cubicle was filled with pictures of him and a pretty Asian girl, snowboarding and mountain biking. A crash helmet sat on his desk, snowboarding boots in the corner. He’d represent the latest generation of hackers: athletic risk-takers, equally at home hacking together script at a keyboard and skateboarding half-pipes at extreme-sport competitions. Gillette noticed too that of all the cops at CCU Mott wore the biggest pistol on his hip—a shiny silver automatic.
The Computer Crimes Unit also had a receptionist but the woman was out sick. CCU was low in the state police hierarchy (it was referred to as the “Geek Squad” by fellow cops) and headquarters wouldn’t spring for a temporary replacement. The members of the unit had to take phone messages, sift through mail and file paperwork by themselves and none of them, understandably, was very happy about this.
Then Gillette’s eyes slipped to one of several erasable white-boards against the wall, apparently used for listing clues. A photo was taped to one. He couldn’t make out what it depicted and walked closer. Then he gasped and stopped in shock. The photo was of a young woman in an orange-and-red skirt, naked from the waist up, bloody and pale, lying in a patch of grass, dead. Gillette had played plenty of computer games—Mortal Kombat and Doom and Tomb Raider—but, as gruesome as those games were, they were nothing compared to this still, horrible violence against a real victim.
Andy Anderson glanced at the wall clock, which wasn’t digital, as would befit a computer center, but an old, dusty analog model—with big and little hands. The time was 10:00 A.M. The cop said,
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