Tom checked the machine again. Satisfied, he sat back down on the edge of the couch. "Still, every now and then, there's something that just smells different from the usual thing. A teacher from Milwaukee in town to see her cousins disappeared on her way to a mall and wound up naked in a field, with her hands and legs tied together. There was an internist murdered in a men's room stall at the stadium at the start of a ball game. Paul Fontaine solved those cases—he talked to everybody under the sun, tracked down every lead, and got convictions."
"Who were the murderers?" I asked, seeing Walter Dragonette in my mind.
"Losers," Tom said. "Dodos. They had no connection to their victims—they just saw someone they decided they wanted to kill, and they killed them. That's why I say Fontaine is a brilliant street detective. He nosed around until he put all the pieces together, made his arrest, and made it stick. I couldn't have solved those cases. I need a kind of a paper trail. A lowlife who stabs a doctor in a toilet, washes the blood off his hands, buys a hot dog and goes back to his seat—that's a guy who's safe from me." He looked at me a little ruefully. "My kind of investigation sometimes seems obsolete."
Tom took the original stack of papers from the copier and put them back into the satchel. One of the copies he put on his desk, and the other he gave to me.
"Let's leaf through these quickly tonight, just to see if anything will set off some sparks."
I was still thinking about Paul Fontaine. "Is Fontaine from Millhaven?"
"I don't really know where he's from," Tom said. "I think he came here about ten-fifteen years ago. It used to be that policemen always worked in their hometowns, but now they move around, looking for promotions and better pay. Half of our detectives are from out of town."
Tom left the couch and went to the first workstation and turned on the computer by pressing a switch on the surge protector beneath it with his foot. Then he moved to the second and third workstations and did the same at each and finally sat down at his desk and bent over to turn on the surge protector there. "Let's see what we can come up with for that license number of yours."
I took my notebook out of my pocket and went over to the desk to see what he was going to do.
Tom's fingers moved over the keys, and a series of screens flashed across the monitor. The last one was just a series of codes in a single line. Tom put a plastic disc into the B drive—this much I could follow from my own experience—and punched in numbers on the telephone attached to his modem. The screen went blank for a moment and then flashed a fresh C prompt.
After the prompt, Tom typed in a code and pushed ENTER. The screen went blank again, and LC? appeared on the screen. "What was that number?"
I showed him the paper, and he typed in the plate number under the prompt and pushed ENTER again. The number stayed on the screen. He pushed a button marked RECEIVE.
"You're in the Motor Vehicle Department records now?"
"Actually, I got to Motor Vehicles through the computer at Armory Place. It runs on a twenty-four-hour day."
"You got directly into the police department central computer?"
"I'm a hacker."
"Why couldn't you just get the Blue Rose file from the computer?"
"The computerized records only go back eight or nine years. Ah, here we go. It takes the system a little while to work through the file."
Tom's computer flashed READY RECEIVE, and then displayed: ELVEE HOLDINGS, CORP 503 s 4TH ST. MILLHVEN, IL.
"Well, that's who owns your Lexus. Let's see if we can get a little farther." Tom pushed enter again, rattled through a sequence of commands I couldn't follow, and typed in another code. "Now we'll use the police computer to access Springfield, and see what this company looks like."
He bounced past a blur of options and menus, going through different levels of state records, until he came to a list of corporations that filled the screen. All began with the letter A. The names and addresses of the officers followed the corporate names. He scrolled rapidly down the screen, reducing the names and numbers to a blur, until he got to E. EAGAN CORP EAGAN MANAGEMENT CORP EAGLE CORP EBAN CORP. When we got to ELVA CORP., he bumped down name by name and finally reached ELVEE HOLDINGS CORP.
Beneath the name was the same address on South Fourth Street in Millhaven, the information that the company had been incorporated on 23 July 1973, and beneath that were the names of the officers.
ANDREW BELINSKI 503 s 4th st MILLHAVEN, P
LEON CASEMENT 503 s 4th st MILLHAVEN, VP
WILLIAM WRITZMANN 503 s 4th st MILLHAVEN, T
"Mysteriouser and mysteriouser," Tom said. "Who is the fugitive LV? I thought one of these guys would be named Leonard Vollman, or something like that. And does it seem likely that the officers of this corporation would all live together in a little tiny house? Let's take this one step further."
He wrote down the names and the address on a pad and then exited back through the same steps he had used to access the state records. Then he switched from the modem to a program called network. He punched more buttons and pointed at the computer at the first workstation, which began to hum. "I can use all my machines through this one. To keep from having to use a million different floppies, I have different kinds of information stored on the hard discs of these other computers. Over there, along with a lot of other stuff, I have reverse directories for a hundred major cities. Now let's punch up Millhaven in the reverse directory."
"God bless macros." He punched in a few random-looking letters, typed in the South Fourth Street address, and in a couple of seconds the machine displayed: EXPRESSPOST MAIL & FAX, along with a telephone number.
"Damn."
"Expresspost Mail?" I said. "What's that?"
"Probably an office where you rent numbered boxes—like private post office boxes. Considering the address, I think it's a storefront with rows of these boxes and a counter with a fax machine."
"Is it legal to give a place like that as your address?"
"Sure, but we're not done yet. Let's see if these characters ever popped up in the ordinary Millhaven telephone directory over, let's say, the past fifteen years."
He returned to the network slogan, punched in the same terminal code and more internal directory files. He keyed in the number 91, and a long list of names beginning with A followed with addresses and telephone numbers floated up on the monitors of both the first workstation and his desk computer.
"Go over to that station and make sure I don't miss one of these names."
I sat down before the subsidiary computer and watched the screen jump to the B listings. "We want Andrew Belinski," Tom said, and rolled down the Bs until he came to BELI. Then he dropped line by line through BELLIARD, BELLIBAS, BELLICK, BELLICKO, BELLIN BELLINA, BELLINELLI, BELLING, BELLISSIMO, BELMAN.
"Did I miss it, or isn't it there?"
"There's no Belinski," I said.
"Let's try Casement."
He scrolled rapidly to the Cs and flipped down a row of names to case, casement followed, CASEMENT, ARTHUR; CASEMENT,HUGH; CASENENTM ROGER. There was no Leon.
"Well, I think I know what we're going to find, but let's just try the last one."
He jumped immediately to W, and rolled electronically through the pages. One Writzmann was listed in the 1991 Millhaven directory, Oscar, of 5460 Fond du Lac Drive.
"What do you know? Either they don't exist, or they don't have telephones. Which seems more likely to you?"
"Maybe they have unlisted numbers," I said.
"To me, no numbers are unlisted." He smiled at me, proud of his toys.