partition pivoted on a support pole, and the opening allowed access to the third stall, the one without a toilet. There was a hole torn in the wall, revealing a closet that had been hidden by a layer of paper made to look like painted stucco. The sounds of gastrointestinal distress had covered the noise Nick made tearing open the sealed doorway.
Odell climbed through the center divider into the third stall, drew his gun, and went into the closet, which was full of mops, brooms, and cleaning supplies. He groaned at the sight of a second door, yanked it open, and found himself standing in the women’s restroom. The two restrooms shared the same utility closet. He ran through the restroom and burst out the door into the courthouse hallway, much to the astonishment of the two other marshals, who were still standing guard outside the men’s room.
“Hey, Odell, how’d you get over there?” one of them asked.
In that split second, Odell Morris saw his entire career pass before his eyes and even glimpsed his future working in mall security.
“Why me?” Odell asked, and grabbed his radio to raise the alarm.
There wasn’t anything sexy, or even remotely interesting, to Kate about chasing down guys who copy movies and make them available for free on the Internet. Sure, the stakes were high. The studios were losing millions of dollars in revenue from movies and TV shows that wouldn’t be purchased or rented because they were available for free. They’d probably cover those losses by cutting jobs, so it wouldn’t just be people with fat stock portfolios who’d feel the pain, but average middle-class families struggling to pay their mortgages.
Kate understood all that, in an abstract way. Maybe if the pirate looked like Johnny Depp, or maybe if the guy they were chasing was actually stuffing those millions of dollars in cold hard cash into his pockets, then she could get into it. But this guy wasn’t making a buck off his thievery or doing it for some greater evil purpose, like delivering a crippling blow to the American economy by making it possible to download every episode of
Will & Grace
for free. He was doing it because … well … Kate didn’t know and didn’t give a hoot. She just wanted this incredibly dull investigation to end before she put a gun into her mouth and pulled the trigger.
It wasn’t hard for Sharon Cargill, the investigator from the Motion Picture Association of America, to pick up on Kate’s discontent, mainly because Kate kept expressing it. The bulk of their investigation over the last five days had consisted of sitting together in the basement of the Federal Building on Wilshire, looking over the shoulder of a computer tech as he followed the cyber clues and devoured Hot Pockets.
The pirate was copying screeners—DVDs supplied to entertainment industry professionals for Oscar and Emmy award voting—and uploading them under the name Nanatastic74 to a file-sharing site. Digital watermarks in the files and Nanatastic74’s IP address led them to Pete Debney, a forty-eight-year-old struggling screenwriter living in an apartment in Castaic.
Debney was a member of the Writers Guild of America, which explained how he got access to the screeners, but he didn’t have any of them in his house, and there were no digital movie files on his computer. That’s because he’d given all of his screeners to his mother, Janice, who lived in a retirement home in Ventura. He’d opened the broadband account for her and paid her bill.
So that’s what brought Kate and Sharon to Sunny Vistas Active Senior Living Center. The lobby was like a hotel’s, with a reception desk to the right and an open dining area to the left, a row of walkers parked like cars along the low wall. There were a dozen old folks sitting at tables, picking at plates of meat loaf and peas. A few of them were sleeping in their seats, their heads slumped onto their chests. Or maybe they were dead, Kate thought with a
Odell climbed through the center divider into the third stall, drew his gun, and went into the closet, which was full of mops, brooms, and cleaning supplies. He groaned at the sight of a second door, yanked it open, and found himself standing in the women’s restroom. The two restrooms shared the same utility closet. He ran through the restroom and burst out the door into the courthouse hallway, much to the astonishment of the two other marshals, who were still standing guard outside the men’s room.
“Hey, Odell, how’d you get over there?” one of them asked.
In that split second, Odell Morris saw his entire career pass before his eyes and even glimpsed his future working in mall security.
“Why me?” Odell asked, and grabbed his radio to raise the alarm.
There wasn’t anything sexy, or even remotely interesting, to Kate about chasing down guys who copy movies and make them available for free on the Internet. Sure, the stakes were high. The studios were losing millions of dollars in revenue from movies and TV shows that wouldn’t be purchased or rented because they were available for free. They’d probably cover those losses by cutting jobs, so it wouldn’t just be people with fat stock portfolios who’d feel the pain, but average middle-class families struggling to pay their mortgages.
Kate understood all that, in an abstract way. Maybe if the pirate looked like Johnny Depp, or maybe if the guy they were chasing was actually stuffing those millions of dollars in cold hard cash into his pockets, then she could get into it. But this guy wasn’t making a buck off his thievery or doing it for some greater evil purpose, like delivering a crippling blow to the American economy by making it possible to download every episode of
Will & Grace
for free. He was doing it because … well … Kate didn’t know and didn’t give a hoot. She just wanted this incredibly dull investigation to end before she put a gun into her mouth and pulled the trigger.
It wasn’t hard for Sharon Cargill, the investigator from the Motion Picture Association of America, to pick up on Kate’s discontent, mainly because Kate kept expressing it. The bulk of their investigation over the last five days had consisted of sitting together in the basement of the Federal Building on Wilshire, looking over the shoulder of a computer tech as he followed the cyber clues and devoured Hot Pockets.
The pirate was copying screeners—DVDs supplied to entertainment industry professionals for Oscar and Emmy award voting—and uploading them under the name Nanatastic74 to a file-sharing site. Digital watermarks in the files and Nanatastic74’s IP address led them to Pete Debney, a forty-eight-year-old struggling screenwriter living in an apartment in Castaic.
Debney was a member of the Writers Guild of America, which explained how he got access to the screeners, but he didn’t have any of them in his house, and there were no digital movie files on his computer. That’s because he’d given all of his screeners to his mother, Janice, who lived in a retirement home in Ventura. He’d opened the broadband account for her and paid her bill.
So that’s what brought Kate and Sharon to Sunny Vistas Active Senior Living Center. The lobby was like a hotel’s, with a reception desk to the right and an open dining area to the left, a row of walkers parked like cars along the low wall. There were a dozen old folks sitting at tables, picking at plates of meat loaf and peas. A few of them were sleeping in their seats, their heads slumped onto their chests. Or maybe they were dead, Kate thought with a
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