Tag: Null_Pointer Novel

Null_Pointer Chapter 25

KenMcConnellLeave a comment

This is the serialization of my first mystery novel, Null_Pointer.  It will be released on this blog every work day until it is complete.  You may purchase the novel at Amazon, Kindle Store, Barnes and Noble, Smashwords or order it from any brick and mortar bookstore near you.  Thank you for reading it and I hope you enjoy this free look at the book.

You can find all the chapters of this book by searching for the Null_Pointer Novel tag.

Chapter 25

Joshua dropped the mail on his counter and sorted through it. Underneath the usual assortment of bills and junk mail, was a large manila envelope. It was from Detective Bill Plait of the Boise Police Department.
Joshua had asked Plait to send him the police report from his parent’s accident. Joshua stared at the envelope for a moment before opening it. He had to know for sure whether the brake lines had been tampered with on his parent’s car.
He opened the envelope and slid out the photocopied police report. Plait had marked out some department internal details but the report was largely untouched. He sat down in the chair at the kitchen table where the old radio still sat. He skimmed over the gruesome details from the coroner and found the parts where the car was pulled from the river and inspected by Police Department mechanics.
Except for the damage to the front end of the car from impact with the water, the car was found to be in perfect mechanical order. The brake lines were even looked at closely by the lead mechanic and two wheels were found to have loose brake calipers; the mechanical clamps that closed on the disc brakes and created friction. In the opinion of the senior mechanic, that was not enough to have caused the accident. The brakes were in working order and had not failed.
The accident really was an accident. Taggert had thought he had disabled the brakes but apparently his efforts to cause the accident had failed.
Joshua sat back and put his hands on his head, staring at the ceiling before closing his eyes. He was beginning to feel a headache coming on. What really happened on that day five years ago? Did he actually distract his father or had Taggert implanted that memory? Nothing was clear to him anymore. Try as he might, he could not remember the accident clearly enough to remove all of his guilt.
Suddenly his life was complicated again, just when he thought he had found peace.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to all my writer friends at Partner’s in Crime, whose support and mentoring have been and continue to be invaluable to me. Several co-workers of mine have read this book and contributed their comments and opinions. Many thanks to Joyce Popp, Jeremy Carey Dressler, Jeremy Reeder, Mike Hachigian and Jeff Love for reading the early drafts and telling me where I was screwing up both with the story and with the technical details. A special thank you to Bill Blohm and his wife Debbie, for their contributions and support. I am especially grateful to Angela Abderhalden for her careful copy edits and wise suggestions.
For another outstanding cover design and interior layout, I once again thank my brother Byron. You always make my words look great, even if they are not always great words. As always, I would like to thank my wonderful wife Laurie, for her support and understanding of my writing habit.

Null_Pointer Chapter 24

KenMcConnellLeave a comment

This is the serialization of my first mystery novel, Null_Pointer.  It will be released on this blog every work day until it is complete.  You may purchase the novel at Amazon, Kindle Store, Barnes and Noble, Smashwords or order it from any brick and mortar bookstore near you.  Thank you for reading it and I hope you enjoy this free look at the book.

You can find all the chapters of this book by searching for the Null_Pointer Novel tag.

Chapter 24

Dancia gathered her strength and carefully stood up, using the bed to steady herself. Her head swam around for a moment as she fought to remain conscious.
She kept pressure to her wound with her right hand as she unzipped the backpack and pulled out a belt and a T-shirt. She folded up the T-shirt and applied it directly to her wound. Then she loosened a thin black belt and strapped it around her waist. Pulling the belt tight sent another sharp pain through her body. She pulled out a second shirt and carefully put it on.
She could hear Taggert talking down stairs but she was unable to pick out what he was saying. He was damn windy. Reaching into the pack she pulled out the Colt pistol. I’ll have to see about shutting him up, permanently.
Dancia took a pillow and put it over the gun on the bed. Then she pulled the slide back and chambered a round. The Colt was not an easy weapon to handle. It was heavy, intended to be used in combat by strong male soldiers.
She edged her way out of the room using the doorway to help keep her upright. Her fingers gripped the heavy pistol. At the top of the stairs she could hear what Taggert was saying. He had just confessed to killing Joshua’s parents. Dancia swallowed hard. She took the first step down the carpeted stairs. Oh God, please don’t let me fall. All I have to do is get down far enough for a good shot at him. The fire made crackling sounds that helped mask her footsteps.
She decided to lie down on the stairs, partly to lower her profile and partly because she was finding it hard to keep from passing out. As she took the second step, a sharp pain radiated from her side. She lost her footing and fell.
/*————————————————–*/
Taggert heard the commotion and spun around. He brought his pistol up as Dancia’s body tumbled down the stairs and came to rest in a pile against a bookshelf. She didn’t move after falling. Her pistol was safely tucked under her back. Taggert took a quick look back at Joshua and saw the concern on his face but he was not moving.
Taggert edged towards the base of the stairs to see if the girl was conscious. He poked her with his boot, his back to Joshua. Joshua brought up the chef’s knife and threw it over handed as hard as he could at Taggert. Taggert saw movement in his peripheral vision and stepped back out of the way as the heavy knife sailed past him. It bounced pathetically off the paneled wall of the cabin.
What the hell else can I throw at this bastard? The counter was empty. He wanted to kill Tagger and didn’t much care how. Seeing nothing useful, he ducked down behind the island.
“Nice try kid. I didn’t think you would go for the knife.”
Joshua’s heart was pounding in his chest. He tried to hear Taggert’s foot steps to see which side of the island he would come around. But Taggert was not moving. He picked up the chef’s knife and examined it closely.
“This was your father’s favorite cooking knife was it not? I don’t think he would have approved of you tossing it around like that. Not good for the edge.”
Joshua swore to himself under his breath. “He would have approved of me OJ’ing your ass with it.”
Taggert laughed out loud. “Perhaps.”
Joshua opened the cabinet door to the island and looked inside for something to use to kill Taggert with. There was an old iron skillet that looked heavy enough to crush a skull, if he got close enough. But that probably would not happen. He took it out carefully anyway, thinking it may work well enough to catch a slug.
“You never asked me if I had tried to attack you on your computer, Joshua,” Taggert taunted.
Joshua tried to think back over the past few days to see if he had in fact been attacked and did not realize it. He found it incredibly difficult to think straight through his bitter hatred.
“When did you first start having nightmares about your parent’s death? A week after they died, I attacked you over your computer. I put feelings of guilt into your head about distracting your father. You didn’t cause him to loose control on that icy road, he would have lost control at some point and his brakes would not have saved him. But I made you think it was your fault. For the past six years, I tweaked my system and played hell with your psyche in the process. How does that make you feel?”
“What do you think, you bastard?”
Joshua tightened his grip on the old iron skillet’s handle. How could anyone be so maniacal? All this time I believed I was responsible for my parent’s death. All those damn sleepless nights and horrible dreams. It was all an implanted memory. Fuck him, he’s so dead.
“You might as well just stand up and take it like a man,” Taggert said. He moved slowly towards the kitchen, handgun at the ready.
Joshua could hear Taggert’s footsteps and knew that he was coming around the far side of the island. Joshua edged himself around the island to keep himself hidden. There really wasn’t much of a chance, but he was trying to buy himself some time. Maybe the police will finally show? Fat chance that will happen, Joshua thought. If they haven’t come by now they never will. They probably think Taggert is still in Boise.
“Come on kid, stand up and let’s get this over with. I can’t linger here much longer, got the State Police, FBI and half the county looking for me.”
“They will find you, Larry, and then what will you do?” Joshua asked.
Taggert stopped at the other side of the island. He took aim and fired a shot into the floor just shy of Joshua’s feet. Joshua pulled up his feet reflexively.
“They won’t find me. I’m too smart for that,” Taggert said.
Dancia regained consciousness and lifted her head up. She could see Taggert moving closer to Joshua, who was hiding behind the kitchen island. She felt the cold pistol underneath her and reached for it with her right hand. The pain in her side was intense and her head was throbbing. The T-shirt covering her wound was sopped with her blood. She appeared to have avoided injury when she fell, other than knocking her head against the bookshelf. She slipped the lever of the safety off and raised the pistol toward Taggert. She had a shot, but it was not good enough for a kill shot.
Taggert pointed the pistol toward the opposite end of the island and shot at Joshua’s head. Joshua was already cowering on the opposite side, anticipating the shot. Joshua turned around and saw her sitting up slowly and pointing the heavy pistol at Taggert. He was relieved that she was alive and holding the gun.
She rolled the pistol around in a nod to get him to move around to the other side of the island. He looked confused at first and then seemed to figure out what she was getting at.
Taggert made it easy on her, he moved forward slowly. His back was to Dancia and she sat up straighter to get a clear shot. The Marine in her wanted to get behind some cover but she had to settle for bracing her arm against the wooden banister.
“Got any last requests, kid?” Taggert asked as he brought the pistol up for a killing shot and took a step forward.
“Yeah, as a matter fact I do.”
Joshua slowly stood up with his hands raised above his head and stared into the eyes of his killer. Taggert aimed square at Joshua’s chest.
“When you see my parents, give them my love, asshole.”
Taggert looked confused. Joshua gave him a raw grin with his teeth clenched. Taggert’s puzzled face tightened and then his eyes grew wide.
Dancia aimed the pistol and fired. The shot rang out in the tiny cabin like a canon firing. Joshua stood his ground as the shot grazed Taggert’s side, spinning him around as the forty-five-caliber bullet ripped through him. Taggert brought the Beretta up and pointed it at Dancia. Before he could get a shot off, Joshua leaped over the island with the iron skillet and brought it down hard against Taggert’s head. Taggert fell to the ground facing Dancia.
Taggert’s skull was cracked on the initial impact but he continued in vain to try and aim the pistol at Dancia. Joshua sat astride Taggert’s back and brought the iron skillet down again and again as all of his pent up rage exploded in a violent bashing. When he finally stopped, there was nothing left of the back of Taggert’s head. He dropped the skillet and pushed off the dead man’s back.
Dancia dropped the Colt pistol and fell back against the bookcase. She almost passed out again from the pain, but the smell of cordite kept her conscious. The gun had jolted her pretty well when it fired. Joshua stood up, his knees wobbly. It was over. Taggert was dead.
Joshua ran over to Dancia and put his hand behind her head. She looked up at him and smiled. They kissed passionately, both thankful to be alive and together. When they parted she motioned to Taggert.
“You’re pretty good with a skillet, for a guy.”
“We’ve got to get you some help. Can you move?”
She shook her head. “I best not. The pain is killing me.”
Joshua looked back at the kitchen. He thought about the cell phone signal and the power being out. He walked over to Taggert and looked out the kitchen window. The streetlight at the circle down the road was on, meaning that the neighborhood actually had power. He could probably walk up the street and find someone home. His foot touched the butt of Taggert’s pistol. He bent down and pulled the pistol out from under the man’s torso, trying not to look at the gory mess of bone and flesh that used to be Taggert’s head.
Joshua put the Beretta on the kitchen island and then he noticed something sticking out of Taggert’s parka. A narrow black antenna. Joshua pulled out the hand held device. A portable cell phone jammer. He turned it off and then picked up his cell phone on the counter top. It had a full signal and he had half a dozen calls waiting on him.
He dialed the last number, one that he knew to be detective Plait. The phone rang only once before Plait answered it.
“This is Plait.”
“You can send in the cavalry now. We have Taggert here and he’s dead,” Joshua said.
“Kid, are you all right? I’ve got half the state heading for your cabin!”
Joshua stepped back toward Dancia. “I hope that includes an ambulance. Dancia’s been shot, she needs medical help.”
Plait barked orders into his radio at two different agencies. “Ok, we’re about a mile out of McCall. Stay put, help is on the way.”
“Perfect,” Joshua said.
“You say you have Taggert there?” Plait asked.
“Yes, but he’s dead. Just get here as fast as you can.” Joshua closed his phone and slammed it down hard. He was still pissed at Taggert for having shot Dancia.
“How did you get the phone to work?” Dancia asked.
“He was using a cell phone jamming device. The police are on the way. How are you doing?”
She managed a weak grin. “I’ll live.”
Joshua was thankful for that, more than she would ever know. He sat down behind her and held her gently in his arms. They could hear sirens in the distance, as Joshua rested his chin on Dancia’s shoulder.
/*————————————————–*/
The silver Porsche edged off the road near a pull out and came to a stop. There was still crusted snow on the ground but it had not snowed since the late November blizzard. The Payette River was running despite being frozen in some spots. Joshua got out of the car and went around opening the door for Dancia. She got out slowly, still recovering from her wound. He helped her walk with him over to the river’s edge.
She was wearing a dark winter coat and gloves, her black hair pulled back under a scarf. He was wearing his heavy overcoat and driving gloves. He pulled out a small porcelain jar and squatted at the river’s edge. It contained the cremated remains of Unix his family’s cat. He had lived a long and happy life and Joshua felt the need to release him at the same spot he had let go of his parents six years before.
He opened the jar and poured the gray ashes into the cold water of the river. As he watched the powder swirl around in the current he said a silent goodbye to the cat and to his mother and father. He no longer clung to his guilt. He was finally at peace with their passing. There was an inner calm that came with knowing that they were not killed in an accident caused by him. There was an even greater calm in knowing that their killer was now dead.
Joshua was free.

Null_Pointer Chapter 23

KenMcConnellLeave a comment

This is the serialization of my first mystery novel, Null_Pointer.  It will be released on this blog every work day until it is complete.  You may purchase the novel at Amazon, Kindle Store, Barnes and Noble, Smashwords or order it from any brick and mortar bookstore near you.  Thank you for reading it and I hope you enjoy this free look at the book.

You can find all the chapters of this book by searching for the Null_Pointer Novel tag.

Chapter 23

The uninterruptible power supply for the computer came on with a loud wail. Dancia let out a startled cry. After a second or two the power came back on again. Joshua and Dancia stood there looking at each other for a few moments.
“I guess it was just a flutter,” Joshua said, looking around the cabin.
“Scared the hell out of me,” Dancia admitted.
She picked up her backpack off the counter and headed for the stairs with it. “I’m going to put some clothes on. Be right back.”
Joshua found his clothes on the couch and put them on. He glanced out the windows and got an eerie feeling that someone was watching him. He couldn’t see far in the snowstorm so he dismissed it.
/*————————————————–*/
As Dancia walked up the stairs to the second floor she looked up at all the family pictures on display. There were pictures of Joshua as a little boy and then a young man. She figured he had a pretty awesome childhood.
The master bedroom was most of the top floor over the living room and the kitchen. It had a solid wall of windows that faced the river and huge dark wooden beams that angled down sharply from the steep A-frame roof.
Dancia flipped on the light switch and set the backpack down on the bed. Unzipping the pack, she pulled out a blouse and some jeans and underwear.
Taking off her robe she stepped into her underpants. As she was about to put on her blouse something bit her in the side. She absently swiped at the sting. She expected to remove some kind of a bug. Her hand came up with blood on it. She had been shot. In that fleeting moment she had just enough awareness and training to throw herself to the floor.
A second shot pierced the glass windows. It impacted the bedpost. Wood shattered. Dancia dragged herself behind the bed for cover.
“Joshua, shots fired!”
No response. The power went out again. The battery backup screamed like a siren. She lay there for a few moments, holding her side to stop the bleeding.
All the time she was in Iraq she had never been shot. Friends of hers had been shot, blown up and captured by insurgents but she had escaped injury. Until now. She had always been afraid that she would be shot and not killed. She didn’t think that she had the guts to stay alert and alive after getting grievously wounded. Despite her tough girl persona, she was a real wimp when it came to pain.
Lying on her left side, she was already getting light headed. The bullet passed clean through her. The exit wound was little more than the size of her pinky finger. Her adrenaline was pumping. Her head was surprisingly clear and calm. She knew she had to apply pressure to the wound. She started looking around for something to plug the hole and let her blood clot.
“Shit, it hurts,” she mumbled.
There were no more shots coming at her but she feared that Joshua would be next. She lay on her back and shouted down the hall. “Joshua, I’m shot!”
/*————————————————–*/
Joshua wanted to respond to Dancia’s plea, but the dark figure at the back door was holding a pistol and looking right at him. The man opened the glass door and stepped inside. Damn, I forgot to lock the stupid door! Joshua felt stupid for letting his guard down. Sweat started to bead on his forehead. The man seemed completely relaxed, as if he had just come in from a walk.
“Smells good, just the way your mother used to make it,” Taggert said.
/*————————————————–*/
Dancia had her ear to the floor and she heard someone talking. It was not Joshua, so she decided to be quiet.
She found her shirt on the bed and used it to stuff into the hole in her side. Her hands were bloody and there was a small pool of red on the green shag carpet. The pain came and went in relation to how much she moved. She got still again, listening to the floor.
/*————————————————–*/
Joshua could see Taggert’s lean face lit from a sudden flare up in the fireplace. The last log he put on finally caught fire and lit the room well enough to see what Taggert was wearing. He had a black watch cap on and a solid green guide parka, black ski pants and black GORE-TEX boots. There was a hunting rifle with a scope strapped to his shoulder. Snow was melting fast off his parka and cap as he faced Joshua in a relaxed stance.
Taggert noticed Joshua’s nervous glance upwards. “Don’t worry, I only grazed her. She’ll be alright,” he said without concern.
“How many people are you going to kill Larry?” Joshua asked.
“Oh, just about one more, I reckon.”
Taggert walked over towards Joshua, who slowly backed off towards the kitchen. There was a chef’s knife still on the island cutting board. Joshua tried not to look at it. Taggert picked up a fork and motioned to the spaghetti. Joshua nodded consent. Taggert took a large bite of the still warm spaghetti and chewed it slowly.
“Good, very tasty. A tad too much oregano for my taste, but not bad.”
“Finish it, if you want,” Joshua said.
Taggert put the fork down and turned to Joshua. “I didn’t come here to eat. I came hear to kill you.”
Joshua moved slowly behind the counter, keeping something solid between him and Taggert. He tried to remain calm, which was damn near impossible after what Taggert had just said.
“But first things first. Just how exactly did you figure out it was me who killed Zemo and Glenn?” Taggert patiently waited for an answer. He gave no inclination that he was ready to shoot Joshua. Joshua stammered through his explanation, using his hands to nervously punctuate what he said.
“Ah, well. We originally had thought you were Shemp. But, I heard you two talking on the radio about making another hit and then you attacked Dancia.”
Taggert held up a hand to stop him. “Wait, how did you know I was using the radio to communicate with Shemp?”
“One of you let the frequency slip in the chat room.”
Taggert looked thoughtful. “It was just a number, how did you deduce that it was a frequency?”
“I have a friend who is a Ham and he told me it could be a forty meter frequency. After that we just listened every night until we heard you talking.” Joshua didn’t want to divulge too much about what they had done. He didn’t want to put his friends in jeopardy too.
“I see. How did you discover the methodology I used? I assume you examined Glenn’s computer closely.”
Joshua was starting to get concerned for Dancia. She had not made any noise since she had called down to him and he wondered if she was still alive up stairs.
“Yes. I found your calling card in the code. Why did you do that?”
Taggert moved slowly back towards the couch and the fireplace. Joshua watched him and didn’t move, waiting for the right moment to grab the knife on the chopping block.
“I had to convince you that Glenn was murdered and that you might be next, so that you would begin your search for his killer. You see it was you that I wanted all along. Killing Glenn and that other kid was just to get you involved. I must say, you did a bang up job. Tell me something though, how did you discover that I was using an iTunes exploit to get your girlfriend?”
Joshua shrugged. “Oldest trick in the book, buffer overflow to a null pointer. Take down the application and replace it with a compromised version. What had me confused was how you got them hypnotized. I thought you were using Flash animation. But that was not your style. You’re a Perl guy, Larry. Like so many other masters of a single language, you tend to use it to solve every problem.” He was taking a risk in angering Taggert with that remark.
Taggert shrugged. “I actually used a good bit of C on this exploit. Perl is divine but even it has limitations.”
Joshua nodded. He looked down at the knife and wanted so badly to sneak it off the table somehow. He forced himself to remain calm and patient.
“I suppose you are wondering why I have gone to such extremes just to kill you?” Taggert turned to look at Joshua again, the light from the fire giving a warm glow to his harsh face.
“The thought had crossed my mind.”
Taggert walked slowly over to the island, he still held the pistol relaxed in his hand. “Did your parents ever tell you anything about me while you were growing up?”
“No. I think I always knew that you guys used to know each other, but that’s about it.”
Taggert smiled. “Interesting. Let me tell you a story about a boy, a girl and another boy.”
Joshua was listening, but he was not sure whether to believe what he was hearing. “Your father and I went to school together in Florida. We both got into computers and programming before Gates and Jobs were out of diapers. We saw where things were headed even if nobody else seemed to realize it. Your father had a good eye for coding. Did you know he created his own language while in school?”
Joshua shook his head.
“It was crude and not very flexible but I built him a compiler for it and we soon became rather close friends. He was dating your mother back then, the two were inseparable. He had to go off for an internship one semester and while the cat was away, your mom and I played.”
Joshua could not believe he was hearing this crap about his parents. But he pretended to be interested to buy himself time to think of something. Taggert went on about how he and Joshua’s mother had screwed around and when his father got back in town the truth got out.
“Your father was not a very forgiving man. He told me one night that if I ever tried to make a move on his girl again, he would flat out kill me.”
“You’re crazy! My father would never threaten anyone like that. He was the kindest person I’ve ever known,” Joshua said defiantly.
Taggert was taking particular pleasure in revealing the story to Joshua. He started strolling around the cabin, looking at things as he told his tale. “If any of us knew our parents as they were before we were born, I’m sure it would give us all a chill. He was in love and he was young. I knew when I was not wanted and I stopped seeing both of them. Besides, I knew your mother didn’t really like me like she loved your father. We eventually graduated and got jobs out in the real world. I thought I had seen the last of both of them, until they got engaged.
“Your father invited me to their wedding in Idaho. He had his bachelor party right here in this very cabin. We fished the river. Back then there actually were fish in it and we even went hunting.” He stopped next to a wall of pictures. Looked closely at one and then took it off the wall and tossed it like a Frisbee to Joshua.
“Here we are on the back porch with the buck that your father shot.”
Joshua looked closely at the picture. Five men were standing in front of a fallen buck. Joshua had seen the picture on that wall all his life but he never knew who some of the men were until now. One was Taggert. He was even holding the same hunting riffle that he now had on him.
Taggert pulled off his watch cap and set it down on the computer desk. He touched the computer keyboard with his fingers, ever so gently. “This is an old UNIX keyboard. Your dad always preferred the positive feedback and the no arrow keys layout.” Taggert seemed lost in thought looking at the gray and white keys.
Joshua eyed the knife again, moving closer to it, trying to think of a way to use it to defend him. If he were a hero in a movie, he would just pick it up and throw it into Taggert and kill him. But he was not an action hero; he was just a geek. It was not in his nature or his realm of experience to attack and kill anyone.
Taggert turned back to face Joshua. “Your father used to be a very smart and gifted programmer. But after the wedding, he seemed to become more involved in management and spent less time actually coding. He rose quickly in the ranks at RegTech, moving from one division to another, gaining more responsibilities, earning more and growing in popularity within the company.
“Eventually, he never came around slumming with us grunts in the trenches anymore. It wasn’t expected of him by upper management I’m sure. But before long the company started to make business decisions that were more based on profit than technological know-how. They started to take away benefits and even retirement plans. RegTech grew into the faceless, international company that it is now.”
Taggert began to walk around the room again, his back to Joshua for a brief time. In that moment, Joshua grabbed the knife with his right hand and held it behind the island. Joshua’s palms were wet with sweat as he held the handle of the chef’s knife firmly. It was his father’s favorite kitchen knife. It had a heavy blade and a thick handle for big hands to easily grip.
Taggert moved in front of the fireplace and turned to face Joshua. He shifted the pistol in his hands as if it were getting heavy.
“This is all very interesting Larry, but it doesn’t explain why you want to kill me.”
Taggert grinned wryly. “My pension was just dropped. They are making me retire early by offering me a buy-out. It’s cheaper for them to send me packing with some cash than to provide for me in retirement. I got nothing left. No job, no retirement and no respect from punk coders like yourself.
“Your father was a brilliant programmer. But I was better than him, more intelligent, more insightful and more creative. Your father’s analytical skills were impressive but he let them wither on the vine when he went into management. We used to play chess with each other, even after he left our engineering team. We used to tie each other more often then not. After he got married and we drifted apart, his game became less precise, more distracted. He no longer coded at all and before long, I was beating him nearly every time we played chess.”
Joshua was becoming distracted from what Taggert was saying by thoughts of what had happened to Dancia. Was she still alive? Was she waiting for some opportune time to come down stairs? Could she even walk? He told himself to calm down and stay focused on what Taggert was saying. He squeezed the knife in his hand and tried to think of a way to disarm Taggert. Joshua was a pacifist by nature. He was not interested in killing Taggert, only disarming him and letting the police do the dangerous stuff. But the police were not here and he was bringing a knife to a gunfight. Not the smartest thing he had ever done.
“What are you getting at Larry?”
Taggert’s eyes narrowed as he stopped talking for a moment. “You are smarter than your father ever was. I’ve seen your code; it’s not brilliant. But you have very keen powers of observation and an intuition for things that make you a formidable opponent. Not everyone would have figured out that Shemp and I were communicating via Ham Radio or that he was my Stooge, as you said.
“I have very much enjoyed our little cat and mouse game and I suspect that deep down inside, you have enjoyed it too.” Taggert’s lips curled into a twisted grin that made him look truly disturbed.
Joshua had to admit to himself that the past few days had been exciting in an intellectual kind of way. But he was not getting off on it in the same way that Taggert apparently was. For Joshua, he was avenging the death of a coworker and trying to protect his own butt. For Taggert it was some kind of a game that stimulated his ego more than anything.
“You’re a sick man Larry. But I’m not as smart as you thought. I let you trap me here in the middle of a storm with no way to defend myself. Sorry I was not a better opponent for you.”
“You were good enough, son. Good enough to keep me amused for some time. That’s about all I can expect out of anyone.”
Joshua couldn’t believe how egotistical that sounded, like he was so superior to everyone else on the planet. It made him want to defeat Taggert just to bring him down a notch. But it did not make him want to kill the man. Despite what he had done to Zemo and Glenn. Despite what he had done to Dancia.
Taggert knew this. He knew that he could not get Joshua to hate him by killing his coworker or wounding his girlfriend or even by insulting his father and slandering his mother. He knew that there was only one thing that would push Joshua Jones over the edge and make him go on the offensive. He was saving it for his final play, his check move that would force his opponent into action.
“Your parents did not die by accident on that mountain road. The brakes on their car were rigged to fail when they needed them,” Taggert said.
“I killed your parents, Joshua Jones.”
Joshua’s anger clouded his face.
“John turned away from the code and became just another cog in the wheel of a big, heartless machine that is RegTech. I saved him from himself.”
“You are one twisted son-of-a-bitch, Taggert.”

Null_Pointer Chapter 21

KenMcConnellLeave a comment

This is the serialization of my first mystery novel, Null_Pointer.  It will be released on this blog every work day until it is complete.  You may purchase the novel at Amazon, Kindle Store, Barnes and Noble, Smashwords or order it from any brick and mortar bookstore near you.  Thank you for reading it and I hope you enjoy this free look at the book.

You can find all the chapters of this book by searching for the Null_Pointer Novel tag.

Chapter 21

Detective Bill Plait was in early for a Wednesday morning. He wanted to make sure the ball got rolling on the search warrant for Lawrence Taggert and that the Canadian police were alerted so that they could try and find Mike Metz. It was always interesting dealing with the Canadian authorities; they seemed to have many different law enforcement divisions and most of them overlapped in some areas. He was able to reach the S˚retÈ du QuÈbec and they were going to send a patrol car out to the kid’s residence to see if they could speak with him.
He also had to contact the “C” Division of the RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) due to the fact that this could turn into an international investigation, which meant that he would have to bring in the FBI. Something told him that it was going to be a long day. The last thing he wanted was to involve all those agencies and then have it turn out to be nothing, or a prank of some sort. Plait had a pretty good feel for people and he was confident that the kids were not pranking him last night.
Around ten that morning he got his search warrant to check out Taggert’s home. He took a squad car with him for back up and another detective. They drove out to the northern edge of Ada County to Taggert’s trailer. It was parked on top of a ridge that was part of the Boise Foothills. You couldn’t miss the forty-foot radio antenna that hung above the property. There was only one road up the side of the hill to the house and it looked like a pretty steep drop off to the far side of the ridge. The DMV had a late model Dodge Ram truck registered to Taggert but there were no vehicles to be found anywhere.
He thought about sending one of the troopers around back, in case Taggert made a dash for it on foot. The rough terrain made that a poor exit route, so he dropped the idea. They stood away from the front door with their weapons drawn, better to error on the side of caution. Everyone was wearing body armor but that didn’t always work with a large caliber rifle.
Plait pounded on the door and rang the doorbell. He was required to identify himself and his intentions before entry and he did so with authority. There was no response. The house was quiet.
He motioned for one of the troopers to open the door. It was not locked. Sensing a trap, he followed the trooper with a shotgun into the house. It was empty. They moved with caution around the various rooms and reconvened in the front living room. It may have been empty, but there were signs that someone had been home recently.
There was some camping gear strewn around on the floor and a couple of empty boxes of nine millimeter ammunition in the waste basket, but by and large the place looked normal. Plait and the other detective set about looking for anything that could link Taggert to what the kids had accused him of.
Plait had seen a computer room back down the main hall, so he started there. There was only one computer in the room. It was housed in a large server box with caster wheels on the bottom that looked like a doghouse to Plait. The monitor was on, but there was only a command line interface with a silent, blinking curser.
His eyes scanned the desk and bookshelves, mostly old UNIX manuals and some very old hardware that probably no longer functioned. It was clear the guy was an old school geek. There were a few Ham radios on the desk, again, older type gear that judging from the amount of chrome trim was new back in the seventies. None of the radio equipment was on.
Plait found a paper logbook on the desk and read some of the contacts made in pencil. It was all pretty esoteric and near as he could tell, normal. None of the latest contacts were from Canada. But that would be expected if he were covering his bases.
There were lots of wires coming out of the radio gear and going into what looked like a speaker box and an antenna-switching box. More wires went from the back of the radios to the back of the computer. The kid, Joshua, had noted in his report that he thought Muse was using voice altering software to disguise himself on the air. That would appear to be correct from what Plait could tell. He was no engineer.
The detective called for him and Plait left the room for the back yard. They had found a makeshift shooting range in the back yard. There were shell casings lying around in the dirt and snow. Plait bent down and picked one up to smell it. The brass was cold and smelled of sulfur.
It looked like Taggert was getting in a little target practice this morning. Plait studied the radio antenna while he was outside. It was made from triangular tubing and braced with four guy wires that were mounted on eyelets that were cemented into the ground. The wind was blowing pretty steady up on the hilltop and Plait guessed that during a storm the winds were quite a bit stronger.
He turned the brass over in his hand and thought about the other case he was working. A nine-millimeter bullet killed Henry Levine. He was also a Ham. Plait went back inside the computer room and looked around. There was some equipment stacked in a corner that looked like it was radio related. He picked up a metal cover that had been removed from one of the electronic boxes between the computer and the radios. Turning it over he saw Henry Levine’s call sign written inside. At that moment Taggert went from a person of interest to a suspect.
Plait took out his cell phone again and called the McCall police station. He knew the police chief there and was put through to him immediately.
“Pete, this is Bill. Yeah, doing fine, yourself?” He listened politely for a moment as Pete went on about how nice and quiet it was for early in the season.
“That’s great, listen I need you to send a car out to a cabin up there for me. Just check in on some kids and make sure they are okay.” Plait gave his friend the address to Joshua’s cabin and then hung up. He took out his notebook and a pen, and started making notes about what he found.
There was no evidence that linked Taggert to McCall. So it was a good bet that they would be safe, but he didn’t want to chance it. He radioed into dispatch to put out an APB for Taggert’s Dodge truck and a warrant for his arrest. With any luck they would find him at a local area store and bring him in.
His cell went off. “Detective Plait.”
It was the Quebec Police. Mike Metz was found dead in his apartment at his computer with no evidence of foul play. They were moving the case to homicide and the RCMP was coming in to take it over.
At his computer? Plait quickly asked if Metz was wearing head phones – he was. Plait looked around the room with renewed interest. The style of killing sounded too similar to be a coincidence.
Plait spent a good twenty minutes talking to several detectives on the Canadian side, answering all their questions to the best of his ability. His next call was to the Salt Lake City Division of the FBI. He spent another thirty minutes talking with the Special Agents assigned to both computer crimes and violent crimes divisions. When everyone had been briefed he was told by the FBI to stay at the house and that they were sending an Agent out there immediately.
It was starting to cloud up towards the West and obvious that a major snowstorm was brewing. Plait continued to look around the property, hoping to find some bit of evidence that would definitely link Taggert to Joshua Jones. It was almost noon when he called Joshua’s cell number.
“Hello?”
“Joshua Jones?” Plait asked.
“Speaking.”
“This is Detective Plait, Boise Police Department.”
“Yes sir,” Joshua replied, wiping his mouth and sitting up in the booth. He and Dancia were just finishing their burgers for lunch.
“I just got word from Canada that Mike Metz was found dead in his apartment. This is rapidly turning into a serious situation.”
Joshua blinked and stared in disbelief at Dancia. She gave him a curious look, wondering who was on the phone.
“Shemp is dead?” Joshua repeated. Dancia’s eyes grew big.
“Yes. In a few minutes the FBI will be taking over this case. I’ve already briefed them about the situation. They want you to stay put for the time being. I’ve spoken to the police chief up there in McCall and he’s agreed to send a car by your place to check on you.”
Joshua nodded, as if he were listening to the detective in person.
“You still there, kid?”
“Yes sir.”
“Good, we have an APB out on Taggert, he’s wanted in connection with another murder. We should have him located in short order. Until then, stay where you are.”
Joshua thanked the detective and then hung up. Dancia had held herself in check, but he could tell she was shocked that Shemp was dead. Joshua moved to her side of the booth and hugged her. She appreciated the support and clung to him tightly. Snow was beginning to fall in huge, gentle flakes.
“I felt like I knew him and now he’s dead,” she said.
Joshua squeezed her shoulder.
“I know. There’s been far too much death in our lives lately. But don’t worry, the cops will find Taggert and everything will be fine.”
“They always are,” she said sarcastically.
They sat there quietly for a moment, as if out of respect for Shemp. Joshua elected not to tell her that Taggert was wanted for another murder back in Boise.

Null_Pointer Chapter 20

KenMcConnellLeave a comment

This is the serialization of my first mystery novel, Null_Pointer.  It will be released on this blog every work day until it is complete.  You may purchase the novel at Amazon, Kindle Store, Barnes and Noble, Smashwords or order it from any brick and mortar bookstore near you.  Thank you for reading it and I hope you enjoy this free look at the book.

You can find all the chapters of this book by searching for the Null_Pointer Novel tag.

Chapter 20

It was still dark out when Steve dropped them off at the hangar where Joshua kept his airplane. The stars were shinning in the sky. Dancia had put the handgun in her backpack so it was out of sight. She had the backpack hanging off her shoulder as she waited for Joshua to unlock the main hangar door.
Standing in the bitter cold she was already missing the warmth of Steve’s car. It was a long drive out to Nampa and the car had become real toasty. They stopped for breakfast at a drive-through McDonald’s just off the interstate. She was still finishing her coffee.
Joshua pulled open the lock and then started to slide the metal hangar doors open. Dancia pushed on one and it seemed to travel easier than the side that Joshua was pushing. Once the doors were open Dancia opened the passenger door of the shiny metal airplane and tossed in her backpack. She looked at how tiny the cockpit was and remembered that she really didn’t like flying in small planes.
Joshua untied the ropes that anchored the plane to the concrete floor of the hangar, letting them fall back towards the rear of the hangar so that they would not become entangled in the plane’s propeller. He started going over the pre-flight checklist in his head as he moved around the plane. He checked the tires and brakes, ran his hands over the trailing edge of the wing, testing the control surfaces. Then followed the leading edge back to the nose where the engine compartment was. He unlocked the lunch box latches and opened the cowling to check the oil level, holding a small Mag light to see what he was doing. He stuck his hand in the inlets, looking for bird’s nests or spider webs. Then he ran a hand over the single propeller blade, feeling for nicks or other imperfections. The plane was inside the hangar and probably didn’t need such a thorough looking over, but he did it anyway out of habit.
He got a thin plastic beaker out of the plane and used it to drain fuel out of the wing tanks to look for water. If there were water in the tanks it would show up at the drain points. The light blue tinted aviation gas in both tanks was not tainted with water. He moved down the fuselage checking for missing rivets, broken linkage and anything not where it should be. He moved the metal control surfaces of the horizontal stabilizer and checked the hinges on the curvy rudder.
Joshua’s grandfather had purchased the plane direct from the factory in Wichita Kansas back in 1946. He had been a fighter pilot in the Second World War and he used the little metal plane to run a flight school in McCall back in the early fifties. Joshua had every annual and maintenance record the plane had ever endured for its entire life. Some time in the mid-sixties his grandfather had it upgraded to a beefier electrical system and metal covered control surfaces. In the late seventies, he sold it to Joshua’s father to keep the plane in the family. Joshua’s father invested in a complete restoration in the mid-eighties and ever since Joshua had owned the plane he maintained it as carefully as he did his Porsche.
It was a classic two-seat airplane with rounded wings and tail and a shiny metal surface set off by a sky blue stripe that came off the nose and tapered to a point about half way to the tail on both sides. Joshua’s first trip in an airplane was in the friendly old bird. His grandfather had taken him for a ride when he was four and he promptly fell asleep. He was back on the ground before he woke up, thanks to his grandfather’s light touch on landings. It was the first of many flights and the birth of the aviation bug in Joshua’s heart.
Joshua let Dancia climb in to the cabin on the starboard side so she would at least be out of the cold. When he finished his pre-flight walk around, he pushed the plane out of the hangar and stopped it just clear of the doors. Then he slid the metal doors shut and locked them.
Inside the cramped cockpit he blew some hot air onto his hands to warm them up.
“I’ll have the heat on in a moment.”
He got out a check sheet and started moving controls and tapping instrument dials in preparation for cranking the engine. Finally, he opened the window and hollered outside. “Clear!”
The engine roared to life with little coercion from him. He let it idle for a few minutes as he put on his headset and adjusted the radios. There was a second headset that he urged Dancia to put on. Engine noise was such that if you wanted to actually talk with your passenger, you both had to wear headsets and use an intercom.
Eventually, he let go of the foot brakes and the Cessna 120 started moving down the taxi strip heading for the main runway. He clicked the microphone on the tower frequency to bring up the runway lights.
Dancia liked the colored lights; they distracted her from thinking about how small the plane was. At the end of the active runway, Joshua did an engine run-up to make sure it was working correctly and then throttled down. He made a sweep of the sky around the airport, looking for any traffic in the pattern. Seeing none, he pulled out onto the active after alerting the airport on the radio.
“Cessna two five two whiskey mike, departing Nampa Municipal on two-niner.”
No one responded because the tower was unmanned. He edged the little plane out on the active and pushed the throttle forward all the way. Gently letting off the brakes, the airplane roared down the runway. Dancia felt her heart race as they gained speed. They were not really going any faster than a car on the interstate.
The tail of the Cessna rose up first, and Joshua kept the plane level with a slight upward tilt as it gained enough speed for take off. Then he gently pulled back the control yoke and they left the surly bonds of Earth and soared into the clear morning sky.
In minutes they had climbed above the city of Nampa and were heading north by northwest towards the mountains. Joshua had made this trip so many times and in so many different weather conditions, he really didn’t have to think much about where he was going. There were familiar landmarks and little mining towns along the way, but mostly he followed Highway 55 which in turn followed the Payette River that wound its way through the mountains and high plateaus all the way to McCall.
At one point along the river he pointed down to a bend in the road beside the river and said. “That’s where my parents died.” He didn’t have to say any more, Dancia knew the story. One night a few months back they were hacking on Tripp’s movie database and he had told her about the death of his parents. How the family car had slipped off the icy road and fell upside down into the freezing river. How the police had determined that his parents became trapped inside the car even as he had managed to escape and they had drowned in the cold water of the river. It was a freak accident that claimed their lives as well as countless other lives over the years. Winter driving was not to be taken lightly by Joshua again. It was many years before he could drive to McCall by himself during the winter months. He usually flew there, as if soaring above the accident site protected him from seeing that bend in the road.
Dancia looked down at the white landscape and marveled at how pristine it all looked from the air. How untouched by the hand of man. She understood a little better now why he loved to fly. It kind of separated you from the immediacy of your day-to-day grind. It put some distance from the petty little concerns of everyday life and let you see the greater scheme of life that you were a part of.
They arrived over McCall about thirty minutes later. Stiff head winds had slowed their progress, but had not rocked them hard enough to make them feel uneasy. They circled over the lakeside resort town once, so that Joshua could enter the airport flight pattern from near the center of town. Joshua touched down with as much skill and grace as his grandfather had. They weaved their way back to the main row of airplanes and parked in front of another metal hangar.
It was much colder in McCall and there were snowdrifts all around. The concrete entrance to Joshua’s hangar had been plowed; the older, icy snow was still in piles at ether side of the hangar doors. He took out his keys and opened the lock. The metal doors slid much easier and he opened one side all the way. Inside was an old Jeep Wrangler with a hard top. He climbed inside and started it up, cranking the heater for Dancia.
He drove it out past the airplane and parked it. He moved open the left hangar door and together the two of them pushed and pulled the Cessna 120 into the hangar backwards. There was a winter storm coming in the next few days, and he wanted the antique airplane out of the elements.
Dancia got into the Jeep with her backpack and waited for him to tie down the airplane and secure the hangar. When he climbed into the driver’s seat, the Jeep was warmed up.
“Ok, let’s go,” he said with a smile. She nodded. It really had been a pleasant trip and she was thankful he had insisted they fly.
They drove through McCall and commented on how dead it was for the season. The locals were battening down the hatches and getting ready for the next winter storm. Joshua pulled the Jeep into the parking lot of the largest grocery store in town and they went inside to buy some perishables. He kept the cabin well stocked with canned goods but if they wanted fresh milk and vegetables they had to get them now.
/*————————————————–*/
The family cabin was nestled into a bend beside the Payette River not far from the airport. It was an A-frame cabin with two stories and was painted dark brown. The nearest cabin was a hundred feet away but there was no one home. The owners wintered in Arizona and only spent the summer months in McCall. There was still about six inches of snow around the property from the last storm, but it had melted off the porch.
Dancia got out of the Jeep and stood on solid ground. She looked up at the cabin and smiled. There was a simple, rustic charm to the place that she instantly liked. Joshua stepped up to the front door and unlocked it. Just inside the foyer was a snow room, a place to take off your boots and change out of your winter garb. There were fishing poles in a corner and floppy fishing hats on the coat rack. An old set of wooden skies was mounted on the wall. They had belonged to Joshua’s grandfather back in the 50’s when the cabin was first built.
“Go ahead and look around, I’ll bring in the groceries,” Joshua said, heading back out to the Jeep.
Dancia walked down the hall that led to the back of the cabin. There was a small bathroom and a bedroom complete with a queen sized bed and dressers. Everything looked like it had been there for ages and held hundreds of stories of family summers and winters spent there over the years. There were a bunch of framed family pictures on the wall, a monument to the cabin’s owners and the good times had by all over the years.
The kitchen was fully loaded with modern, burnt orange appliances from the 1970’s. There was a dining table and a open family room that housed a circular fireplace against the far wall. A staircase angled around and went upstairs to more bedrooms and a second bathroom. Dancia walked to the back of the main room and looked out the sliding glass door to the wooden deck outside. You could see the river just beyond a shallow backyard.
Joshua came in and set the groceries down on the island that separated the kitchen area from the family room. He started putting away the refrigerated items. Dancia came over to help and learned where he kept things like glasses, dishes and silverware.
They decided to make a pot of spaghetti for dinner and for lunch they would go out to My Father’s Place, a local burger joint that served huge traditional burgers and really tasty fries. Joshua figured he had enough food and DVDs to keep them entertained for the rest of the week. They hoped the police would be able to bring in Taggert by then.

Null_Pointer Chapter 19

KenMcConnellLeave a comment

This is the serialization of my first mystery novel, Null_Pointer.  It will be released on this blog every work day until it is complete.  You may purchase the novel at Amazon, Kindle Store, Barnes and Noble, Smashwords or order it from any brick and mortar bookstore near you.  Thank you for reading it and I hope you enjoy this free look at the book.

You can find all the chapters of this book by searching for the Null_Pointer Novel tag.

Chapter 19

Before they left for the police station, Joshua found some nails and a hammer and did his best to repair the front door frame. It would not be as strong as it had been for him, but it would at least keep the door shut. They left a note for Stacey telling her what happened, since she was out on a date.
Joshua told Dancia to get some clothes and other things together before they left. They would be going out of town for a while. She found her book bag from school and filled it with underwear, jeans and a few different shirts. Then she raided her bathroom and took a few personal necessities. When she was ready, Joshua was finishing up with the front door.
“Where are we going to go?” she asked him.
“McCall, I own a family cabin up there. We can stay there as long as it takes the police to capture Muse and Shemp. No sense making it easy for them to find us.”
McCall Idaho was a small lakeside resort community a few hours north of Boise. Nearly everyone in Boise seemed to have a cabin there. Dancia was surprised that Joshua had never mentioned it to her before. She figured it was probably not the only thing she didn’t know about him.
They got into Joshua’s Porsche and went straight to the Boise Police station. The detective assigned to their case was not on duty and they had to wait for him to be called in. The station was nearly empty at ten on a Wednesday night. They talked about who Muse was and how Joshua figured out who he was. Everything seemed to make sense to them, whether they could convince the detective was yet to be seen.
/*————————————————–*/
Detective Bill Plait was used to being called in on a weeknight. It happened so frequently that he no longer jumped when his beeper went off at night. He called the station to get the details of the case as he drove in.
It sounded like a couple of scared kids who thought someone was trying to kill them over their computers. That was a new one.
He went straight for the coffee machine when he got in, filled up his mug and headed into the holding area where Joshua and Dancia were sitting. They certainly looked like normal kids. Both were dressed in simple jeans and T-shirts with winter coats lying on the bench beside them. The girl was wearing dark rimmed glasses and the boy looked to be slightly older but with a youthful face.
“Hello folks, I’m detective Bill Plait,” he said.
“Detective, I’m Joshua Jones and this is Dancia Rivers,” Joshua said, standing up and offering his hand.
Detective Plait shook Joshua’s hand. “I understand you kids had a scary incident on your computer?”
Joshua and Dancia looked at each other. “You could say that,” Joshua said.
They moved into a briefing room away from the lobby. Plait offered them some coffee and they both took him up on it. When they were comfortable, Joshua began by telling him about the death of his coworker out at RegTech. The detective’s expression remained indifferent as he listened to Joshua. He started taking notes on a yellow legal pad as Joshua began to explain the technical bits about computer security and how Muse was able to break into both victims’ computers.
Plait was not a computer geek, but he did know a few things about how they worked and to the best of his knowledge what Joshua was saying rang true to him. He was impressed by how detailed their efforts to find Muse were. They didn’t actually break any laws in what they did, but they probably should have come in to talk sooner.
Detective Plait jotted down some more notes after Joshua finished talking. “If what you’ve told me can be corroborated by our tech guys, this Taggert sounds pretty dangerous. However, we don’t really have any direct evidence that this Muse character is Taggert. He never said on the radio who he was going to attack and he never admitted that he had killed anyone else.”
“But who else could it be?” Joshua interrupted.
Plait sat back and looked at both of them. He could tell they were upset and their emotions were probably running high.
“Look, the best we can do is find this Taggert fellow and bring him in for questioning. Maybe I can get a warrant to search his house, but unless we find something incriminating we just won’t be able to press charges.”
Joshua looked disappointed. “He knows we know who he is. He knows we figured out how he’s done it. Don’t you think he might just come after me now?”
Plait could see the fear in the young kid’s eyes, but there really wasn’t anything they could do for him. “If you are concerned for your safety I suggest you not go home tonight. Check into a hotel and let us have some time to bring him in for questioning. If he’s guilty, he may try and run. But if he can’t find you, he can’t get to you.”
Dancia tossed up her hands in defeat. “Look, this asshole tried to kill me tonight! We’re both in danger here.”
“I understand that Miss Rivers. All I am saying is that my hands are tied until I get a search warrant.”
Joshua shook his head. “Okay, I understand. But we’re not sticking around. I’ll leave you our cell numbers and the address where we will be for the rest of the week. If you find out anything, give us a call.”
“Where will you be staying?”
“McCall, I have a cabin there,” Joshua said.
“You realize that McCall is out of our jurisdiction? I can’t protect you up there, the best I can do is make the McCall police aware of your situation.”
“I understand. Tonight we’ll stay with a friend of mine and we will head North in the morning. What are you going to do about the guy in Canada?”
“I’ll get in touch with the authorities in his home town and they will deal with it as they see fit. We have good relations with our Northern neighbors so if he’s guilty of corroboration, it should be easy enough to haul him in.”
“What about the radio violations? Muse is using bogus amateur radio call signs. The least you that you could do would be to notify the FCC about him.”
Plait put down his pen and smiled. “You’re right. I’ll start the ball rolling on that issue too. Look, you kids just need to calm down and let me do my job. Things will work themselves out, they always do.”
/*————————————————–*/
When they left the police station Joshua called Steve and asked him if they could crash at his place for the night. Steve agreed without hesitation. They arrived at Steve’s place shortly before midnight. He was rolling out some sleeping bags for them in his TV room.
“We’ve got to stop meeting like this, you guys,” Steve said as he let them inside.
Dancia gave him a weak smile as she headed for his bathroom. Joshua shook Steve’s hand and thanked him again, and then he motioned for them to go into Steve’s radio shack.
Inside the shack Joshua whispered. “I need to borrow a hand gun for a few days.”
Steve’s face came alive. He loved guns. “Personal defense?”
Joshua nodded grimly. Steve put his hand on Joshua’s back and led him over to his gun safe. He unlocked the cabinet and took out several handguns and set them on the work bench.
There was a small caliber PPK, a Colt Model 1911 and a large revolver that Joshua figured was a 357 Magnum.
“Take your pick my friend. But if you ask me, I’d use the Colt.”
Joshua knew very little about guns. He just wanted something that was easy to shoot and reliable. He picked up the Colt and held it in his hand to feel it’s weight. It was solid and cold but it felt right in his large hand.
He raised it up. “This will do, I’m sure.”
“How much ammo you think you’ll need?” Steve asked as he put the other guns back in the cabinet.
“I don’t know. How many rounds are in the clip?”
“Seven. You better take a box, you can pay me back later,” Steve said, handing him a box of forty-five caliber bullets.
If he could help it, Joshua wouldn’t be firing any shots at all. He was just being cautious. Dancia came into the room and saw him holding the Colt. She came over and looked at Joshua.
“Do you think you’ll need that?”
“The cabin is kind of remote up there, it would be prudent to be prepared.”
She agreed. He handed her the large handgun. She was trained on the Beretta nine-millimeter handgun in the Marines. The Italian gun was sleeker and more elegant, but the Colt was undeniably more powerful and masculine. She imagined pointing it at Muse and pulling the trigger. Nothing would give her more pleasure after what he tried tonight. She handed the gun back to Joshua and headed towards the TV room.
“Muse tried to kill her tonight. We’re heading out of town for a few days to give the police time to bring him in.”
Steve looked at him suspiciously. “Have you ever fired a pistol before?”
“No.”
Steve launched into his gun safety speech and Joshua listened intently. He watched as Steve broke the gun down, removed the magazine, showed him the safety, how to move the slide. He let Joshua mess with the empty gun for a while in order to get a feel for it. Convinced that his friend could handle the weapon, he set out looking for a holster. He found one under the workbench and handed it to Joshua.
“Who did it turn out to be, anyway?” Steve asked.
“Lawrence Taggert, a guy I work with.”
Steve thought for a moment. “Taggert sounds familiar. He may be in my Ham club. Wait, I think I have heard of him.”
Steve moved back to his radio table and pulled out a logbook and started flipping through the spiral bound pages. “What does he look like?”
“He’s about my height, thinning brown hair, grayish eyes. Always wears jeans and cowboy boots and a big leather belt, not very talkative, at least at work. He’s chatty on the radio.”
Steve smiled. “Ham geeks are like that. Timid and shy in real life, but get them on the radio and suddenly they have a personality. I guess I haven’t worked him lately. Are the police going to turn him in to the FCC?”
“The detective said he would handle it. Not sure if that will be a priority for him but if it gets Taggert off the streets, all the better.”
Steve put the logbook down and they moved back into the TV room. Dancia had claimed the couch and was already lying down, watching the news.
“Thanks for letting us crash Steve. We’ll be out of here early in the morning.”
“No problem. Where are you guys heading anyway?” Steve asked.
“I don’t know, one of the resorts maybe?” He didn’t want to tell anyone any more than he had to.
Steve agreed it was a good idea to lay low for a while. He left them alone and retired to his bedroom down the hall. Joshua sat down in the big easy chair and put up the footrest. The weather was on and it looked like a big winter storm was brewing in Oregon.
“We’ll head out of here early in the morning. I think we’ll fly up. I don’t want to have him follow us by car. I’ll get Steve to drop us off at the Nampa airport.”
Dancia looked at him. “You mean in your little puddle jumper?”
“Don’t worry. We’ll be fine. You’ll see.”

Null_Pointer Chapter 15

KenMcConnellLeave a comment

This is the serialization of my first mystery novel, Null_Pointer.  It will be released on this blog every work day until it is complete.  You may purchase the novel at Amazon, Kindle Store, Barnes and Noble, Smashwords or order it from any brick and mortar bookstore near you.  Thank you for reading it and I hope you enjoy this free look at the book.

You can find all the chapters of this book by searching for the Null_Pointer Novel tag.

Chapter 15

Joshua slapped the snooze bar three times then noticed he was late and rushed into the shower. He could shave, brush teeth, relieve himself, shower and dress in under 30 minutes. This morning Nix had pooped all over the floor in the hallway, so he lost some time cleaning that mess. The thought occurred to him again to get rid of the poor old animal, but he knew he could not do it. He usually didn’t bother eating breakfast just grabbed a coffee at a drive through place on his way into work.
It was a Monday and it was his first day back at work after Glenn’s death. The traffic was light to moderate heading West through Garden City. He was lucky to live down town because it meant he was commuting against the flow of traffic into Boise. He had enough time to guzzle most of his coffee before cruising into the main gate at RegTech. It was just after eight and the parking lot was full. He had to park farther out from his building, which made for a cold walk on a crisp, sunny morning. The wind was blowing harder than usual from the West, which meant a front was moving in from the Pacific coast. He noticed the high stratus clouds and understood that rain or snow was less than forty-eight hours away.
He thought about heading out to the airport after work and messing around with his dad’s Cessna 120. He liked to work on it whenever he needed to think something through. Cleaning the grease and bugs off the classic plane seemed to relax his mind and let him think without any distractions. There was no Internet, no friends popping by and no phones, provided he turned his cell off, which he frequently did while he was in the hangar. He pushed thoughts about the airplane from his head, hard as that was. He had to get back into the swing of things and focus on his work. There would be many distractions today and he knew it would be tough to concentrate.
Walking up to the outside door of building four he swiped his security badge and opened the glass door. He felt like everyone in the building was looking at him even though hardly anyone paid him any attention at all. When he got to his row, he slowed down as he passed Glenn’s cube. There it was, empty and clean. Just two days before it had been the home of someone who worked here, now it was just another empty cube, soon to be occupied by another person. Any evidence of who used to work in the space would be gone forever. He thought about the transitory nature of work cubes and how many different people had lived in each cube over the years. There was really very little of Glenn left behind in his cube. His spirit survived in the code that he had written, but even that would no doubt change over time and at some point be completely thrown out for the latest technology.
Information workers rarely had anything substantial or real that you could hold in your hands and say, ‘I worked on this item and a little bit of my soul is inside of it.’ More often then not, there were only temporary bits and bytes of information that could be lost forever with a stroke of a key or a random hardware failure. At least an Architect could point to a building and say that he designed it. Although, time and nature could render that building a pile of rubble just as easily as any careless user could destroy a code file. That thought made Joshua realize that what he did was not always as fleeting as it seemed.
He put his book bag down in his cube, sat down and turned on his PC. While he waited for it to boot up, he picked up his phone and listened to a couple voice mail messages waiting for him. One was from RegTech Security, reminding him to come down and sign something; he didn’t really care about the details. Two more were from coworkers expressing their sorrow for Glenn’s untimely passing. The phone messages got him in a down mood, so he dug his iPod out and dialed up some happy tunes. He sat and listened to “In the Garage” by Weezer, as he read through his emails and opened the programs he always used. By the time he finished getting organized he was ready for a break and a fresh cup of coffee. He locked his PC and picked up his cup that still had old coffee from Friday in it. On his way to the coffee station, he stepped into the men’s room to wash it out.
As he was rinsing the cup, someone came out of the stall and nodded to him. It was Larry Taggert, the UNIX guy from a few rows over. Taggert never said much to anyone and Joshua didn’t expect him to say anything now. Joshua wiped out the cup with a brown paper towel as Taggert washed his hands.
“Didn’t your supervisor give you some time off?”
Joshua looked up. “Huh? Oh, yeah, but I’m all right. Besides, I’ve got some work to keep me busy.”
Taggert looked at him with a concerned eye.
“You look tired. Have you been getting enough sleep?”
“I’m fine.”
Taggert nodded and managed a thin smile. “Take it easy then.”
“Thanks,” Joshua said. He ducked out of the room and headed down the hall. That was weird. Guy never speaks a word to him in years and then out of the blue is all concerned for him. Maybe he felt he should look after Joshua having been a friend of Joshua’s father years before. Joshua figured the whole day was going to be like that, uncomfortable encounters with coworkers until everyone had said their condolences.
He filled up his cup with fresh java and dumped a couple packs of sugar and a creamer in it. While he was stirring his coffee another coworker came up and offered her condolences. It was Stacy Grimes, the Copywriter on the web team. She was a bit mousy and wore wire-rimmed glasses. She hid behind straight brown hair that dropped in front of her eyes when she looked down, which see seemed to always be doing. She was painfully shy, but she knew grammar rules better than anyone he had ever known.
“Sorry about Glenn. You doing okay Joshua?”
“I’m okay. You?”
She looked up at him briefly, as if nobody ever asked her how she felt about anything. She nodded, and then quickly went back to her cube. Joshua walked back to his cube and avoided eye contact with anyone. He turned his music on again and sipped his coffee. His mind wandered as he looked over the code he had been writing on Friday, before the interruption.
He thought about how someone would write a Flash program that could hypnotize a viewer. Technically, the mechanics of Flash allowed for just about any moving image to be manipulated with underlying code. But you would have to be familiar with the technique of hypnotizing before you could design such a program. That got him thinking about what qualified someone to be a hypnotist. Did you take classes? Learn at someone’s side, like an apprentice? He did not know. Obviously, if the killer used that technique, he not only knew how to code Flash but also how to hypnotize someone.
Joshua opened a browser and started searching for anything on Flash and hypnosis. While exploring, he found that virtually anyone can learn to hypnotize themselves or others. Experts recommended that you learn from certified individuals and that you only use the condition to help improve yourself or others. He wondered what damage could be done to someone under hypnosis if your intent was to harm instead of to help. He searched for examples of people dying as a result of being hypnotized and came up empty. Either it was not easy to do, or people did not want to admit that it was possible to avoid further injuries.
His search stretched out for hours and he realized that he was getting very little work done. Then he came across a reference for something called Binaural Beat music. When the brain is presented with two beats that were below 1000 Hz and they differed no more than 30 Hz, the two beats combined and became a binaural beat that could put the brain into an altered state. This altered state, can then be used to hypnotize someone. Joshua slowly began to make connections about how Glenn and Zemo could have become hypnotized. Both of them were wearing earmuff style headphones that had the added ability to isolate them from back ground noise. If they were subjected to this binaural beat music they could have been slowly hypnotized without even realizing it. They may not have even needed a visual stimulus.
If that were the case, then Muse would not have to be a Flash programmer at all. Either that, or if he did use Flash in the seduction, it may have only helped to move the victim into a more suggestive state quicker than with only the music. He thought about that for a while. Muse would have to have possessed detailed knowledge of music and electronics to create the binaural beats. They already know that Muse was into Ham radio, which still required its participants to understand at least basic circuitry if not advanced theories about sound wave propagation and creation. So theoretically Muse would have enough know how to pull off hypnotizing someone. The only thing missing was just exactly how he was able to kill them.
Joshua could not even imagine how hypnotized people could allow themselves to die. Everything he had read suggested that the patients being hypnotized would never allow themselves to do anything that they were morally averse to doing while conscious.
Joshua googled some more for possible deadly side effects of hypnotizing a person, sifting through the returns with care and found another interesting tidbit. But it had nothing to do with hypnosis. He came across a study about death from fright. Apparently, Air Force test pilots are routinely monitored for vital signs while they put new aircraft designs through their paces. Many pilots, while trapped in fatal dives were found to have their hearts stop beating moments before impact. They were literally scared to death before they died. Rapid amounts of endorphins pumped into the body during such traumatic events could cause heart failure.
Joshua stopped reading and sat back in his chair. What if Muse was able to convince his victims that they were about to die? Could they have been frightened to death? A cold chill ran through Joshua, causing goose flesh on his bare arms. In order to pull that off Muse must have known what each person was most afraid of in such detail that he could suggest to them that their fears were real. It still sounded far-fetched to Joshua, but he knew he was on to something.
Someone stood before the entrance to Joshua’s cube, breaking him out of his thoughts. It was Nik Dean, a coder from the test team that played in a local metal band. Nik was a lean, longhaired guy dressed in torn jeans and a T-shirt that read “Me worry?”. He also wore an old leather jacket that had seen better days. He was a drummer for the band and he always seemed to be moving, keeping time to life.
“What’s sup?” Rik asked.
“Hey Nik, not much. You?”
Nik came inside Joshua’s cube and plopped down in the guest chair. He seemed to occupy the chair like a spider would – all spread out with limbs bent over it.
“I guess our little break club just got smaller.”
Joshua nodded. “You need a fix?”
“Yes, let’s go.”
They got up and headed down the rows of cubicles to the back entrance of the building. There was a designated smoking area tucked under the eve of an adjacent building. As soon as they were outside, Nik had lit up a cigarette and was puffing it as they walked over to the picnic table. Joshua stood upwind to avoid the smoke.
“I never figured anyone would die before me. You know, due to my insane lifestyle and all.”
Joshua grinned. Nik was either drunk or high depending on what time of day it was. He was real good at keeping it clean at work, but the guy could party with the best rockers. Joshua had been to several of his gigs at local clubs and took an interest in what Nik had to say about his music and life in general. For a metal head, he was pretty deep at times. Joshua liked that about Nik. To look at him you would immediately label him a loser, but he was actually a centered individual who knew where he came from and where he wanted to go. Joshua respected that about him. He also loved the band’s crazy fast drum solos that Nik pounded out with ease.
“Don’t say anything to anyone, but I don’t think Glenn died of a heart attack. I mean, he prolly died of heart failure, but I think it was induced by someone,” Joshua said, after making sure nobody was around to hear them.
Nik got a serious look on his face as he took a drag.
“You think he was murdered?”
“Yup. You hear about that coder in Germany who died?”
“No.”
Joshua could not believe someone did not know about that, but then Nik was only into coding at work. He was real good at it, but he never hung out in chat rooms or visited geek sites like Slashdot or Digg. He was more often playing games on his home PC or hanging out on his MySpace page, mixing it up with groupies of his band.
“This coder kid was found dead and the police ruled it murder because they found a calling card in his source code. It’s all over the internet man.”
Nik thought about it for a minute. “So, like you think Glenn was killed by the same guy?”
“I know it. I found the same message in the code he was working on the day he died.”
Nik shook his head in disbelief. “Man that’s messed up. You tell the cops yet?”
“No, I’m actually trying to figure out who did it first. I’m real close to figuring out how it was done and who did it. As soon as I know for sure, I’m going to the cops.”
Nik walked around, tapping his foot to some unheard beat. He smashed his cigarette in the table and took out his pack to knock out another one. After tapping on the pack a few times he took a fresh one out and lit it with a Bic lighter.
“So, how do you think he was killed then?”
Joshua sat down on the table and put his feet on the seat. “I think they were hypnotized and then while they were under a trance, the killer convinced them that they were going to die. Maybe took advantage of some fear they each had. Made them think that they could not survive something. There is some evidence that fear will send large amounts of adrenaline to the heart, enough to stop it.”
Nik started pointing for emphasis as he spoke. “I’ve heard of that man. You know what else it could have been?”
Joshua shook his head.
“Arrhythmia, the irregular heart beat. Certain snare drum rhythms have been know to cause people’s hearts to get messed up. Some have died from it.”
Joshua’s face clearly displayed his disbelief. “That’s an urban myth, has to be.”
Nik shrugged. “I’ve heard it from many musicians.”
Joshua grinned. “Whatever. Have you ever felt it?”
“No, but that’s because I’m causing it. I’ve heard bassists and leads say they can feel it if they are near the bass speakers at a concert.”
Joshua was not convinced, but he let it slide. Nik finished up his cancer stick and they walked back inside. Nik went back to his cube and Joshua loitered around the main hallway. Should I go out somewhere or just settle for a cheeseburger at the campus choke and puke? Neither sounded appetizing to him.
He strolled past Lawrence Taggert’s cube and looked at the poster of the moon on his outer cube wall. There was something familiar about that moon poster. Then it hit him. It was the same poster that was behind Ed Asner’s desk in that seventies sitcom Mary Tyler Moore. He forgot that Taggert was that old. Joshua’s parents used to watch that show and he remembered seeing it on Cable TV not too long ago. As he was standing there lost in thought, Taggert came out of his cube.
“Hey man, what’s up?”
Joshua stuttered. “Ah, I was just looking at this cool poster.”
Taggert looked at the poster and then back to Joshua. “Your dad gave me that years ago. I think I must have said something about it one night when we were watching TV. A few weeks later he came in and handed it to me in a cardboard tube.”
“Mary Tyler Moore. That was the TV show,” Joshua offered.
Taggert squinted as if he were trying to recall the show. Then he lit up. “That was it. Ed Asner had it behind his desk.”
They both nodded in agreement before falling into an awkward silence. Finally Taggert shook his head. “I used to think NASA stuff was pretty far out. Your dad did too. You know he even worked for NASA once?”
Far out. You don’t hear that phrase much anymore.
“I remember him talking about it.”
“He was too good for them. They knew it too. That’s why he came here in the seventies and helped build RegTech. I followed him out here to the middle of nowhere. I should have stayed in the Sunshine state.”
Joshua didn’t really feel like traveling down memory lane. “Well, I have to go get some lunch. See you around, Larry.”
Taggert nodded and started walking towards the cafeteria. Joshua went back to his cube and plopped down in his chair. He didn’t feel like coding. He didn’t feel like doing anything. He logged on and did some searches for snare drums causing arrhythmia. Nothing turned up, just like he figured. He probably should not have told Nik about the murder plot. He hoped his friend kept his mouth shut, at least for another day or so.
Joshua considered going to the police after lunch, but he just couldn’t bring himself to do it until he knew who Muse was. It was starting to bother him more and more.

Null_Pointer Chapter 14

KenMcConnellLeave a comment

This is the serialization of my first mystery novel, Null_Pointer.  It will be released on this blog every work day until it is complete.  You may purchase the novel at Amazon, Kindle Store, Barnes and Noble, Smashwords or order it from any brick and mortar bookstore near you.  Thank you for reading it and I hope you enjoy this free look at the book.

You can find all the chapters of this book by searching for the Null_Pointer Novel tag.

Chapter 14

<shemp> No, I have never met Muse. Why do you ask?
<nooblet> I was just curious how old he was. He seems to come off as one of those longhaired, bearded types in tie died T-shirts and sandals.
<shemp> LOL
<mostaban> Yes, he lives in his cube at his office and showers in the men’s room.
<nooblet> Don’t laugh, I used to know a guy like that at my last job. He was a UNIX hippy. Not all there upstairs sometimes, but he sure as shit knew his way around the file system.
<shemp> Muse is not like that. He’s pretty much a normal guy like any of us.
Dancia smiled. What a stooge, he even protects his master. She was sitting on the floor in her room, still wearing Joshua’s T-shirt, with a hoodie over it to keep her arms warm. Her laptop was running Gentoo Linux. Gentoo was a custom Linux distribution that was favored by system administrators because it let you build nearly everything from scratch, thereby making the software conform to the hardware like a fitted T-shirt to a body.
It was getting close to the diner hour and she was starting to get hungry. She was due back on shift in a couple hours, but she really didn’t want to go in. She was having too much fun chatting with her new Perl buddies and trying to find a motive for which one was a killer. Muse was not in the chat room so they all felt comfortable with talking about him.
<nooblet> So just how good a coder is Muse anyway? What has he done that would garner the kind of loyalty you guys all have for him?
<mostaban> He’s never not had an answer for any problem we have had. You know he knows his shit. He’s a national treasure for what he knows.
<losing> The guy really knows programming. He’s an old school Hacker.
<shemp> He was in Nam, towards the end during the pull out. He has seen some bad shit. But he never talks about it, at least not to any of us. I found a post he wrote on a Veteran’s board once about living with the bad memories.
<mostaban> I didn’t know he was in Nam.
<shemp> Like I said, he never talks about it.
<nooblet> I was in the sandbox. I’ve seen some shit. Not something I talk about either.
<shemp> Really? Army or Marines?
<nooblet> Never mind.
<losing> Nooblet, you don’t have to talk about it man. Just know that we all appreciate what you did.
<mostaban> Not everyone has the balls to go fight for their country. Thanks man!
Dancia swallowed hard. She had never talked about her military career since getting out. In many ways it was like a bad dream but she did appreciate the kind sentiments of most people when they found out she had served in Iraq. The experience had hardened her to the dark side of human nature. It had forced her to see the good and the bad in herself and her fellow Marines. Her way of dealing with it was to try and forget it, even though she knew that those experiences would be forever with her and had changed her for better or worse. She knew that people were capable of doing some pretty horrific things and that kind of scared her sometimes.
Her own war experience had given her a new found respect for older war veterans. She no longer looked at them as freaks or as damaged goods for what they had been through. She didn’t want recognition in the form of medals or coverage in the press, she just wanted to live her life to it’s fullest and never have to be in a situation where she was forced to take life and to be staring at death’s face again until she was very old.
<shemp> None of us have even been in the military.
<nooblet> What else can you tell me about muse? Where does he live?
<mostaban> Montana or Colorado maybe. I heard him mention some mountains and sage brush around his place once.
<shemp> Somewhere in the American West. He’s pretty tight lipped about exactly where. Where do you live Nooblet?
Dancia hesitated; she didn’t want to let them know exactly where she was either. She tried to think of someplace that she knew well enough to lie convincingly about. She had never lived anywhere but Idaho and a few Marine bases. She decided to be evasive.
<nooblet> Western US. I’m trying not to let the world know how cool my home town is, so that nobody will want to come here. Know what I mean?
<mostaban> Ha. I know what you mean.
<shemp> You Yanks can come up to the Great White North.
<nooblet> Where are you at in Canada, Shemp?
<shemp> Central Canada, Tri-Rivers area. It’s an old town with lots of history and beautiful buildings. We get plenty of tourists, especially for the festival.
<mostaban> Don’t even get him started on poetry. Hey Nooblet, heard any news on that German kid who died?
Dancia took her fingers off the keyboard and stared at the chat window. Nobody had talked about that before in this channel, at least not when she was on. She wondered if Mostaban was a stooge too or maybe he was actually Muse. Maybe they were all in on it and she was the stooge. No way, she was letting her imagination get the best of her. She put her hands back on the keyboard and started to type.
<nooblet> What German kid?
<mostaban> Are you kidding me? Everyone knows about Zemo getting murdered at his computer last week.
<nooblet> Oh yeah, I think I saw something on Digg about that.
<mostaban> The police think he was murdered, but they can’t find any suspect and they don’t have a clue how it was done.
<nooblet> Sounds fishy to me.
<mostaban> I think he was killed by a Hacker; someone who can kill with code, like some kind of mutant from the X-Men or something.
<shemp> Mostaban, you’re a nerd. You can’t kill someone with code; this is reality here. Put away the comic books.
<nooblet> What kind of dork are you anyway?
<mostaban> Whatever, but I can’t see any other way to reach through someone’s computer and kill them.
<nooblet> I’m sure the police will find something. No crime goes unpunished.
<shemp> Eventually the grim reaper gets all.
There he goes, evading the topic and adding a dramatic flare. She slid the laptop to the floor and stretched her arms. Her cell phone started playing a jazzy tune from her pocket.
“Hello.”
“Dancia, you going into work tonight?”
It was Joshua. She loved the sound of his voice.
“Yeah.”
“Me too, in the morning. I’m going to listen to the short wave as late as I can, see if I can catch them chatting again.”
“But they talk in French, how are you going to know what they are talking about?”
“I won’t. I’ll record them and let you listen to it later and translate it.”
Oh, well there’s a thought. She wanted to come over to his place and hang out until she had to go in. But she was having trouble thinking up a good excuse to come over.
“Have you been monitoring IRC?”
“No, been doing laundry and listening to the radio.”
“Have you had diner yet?” It was just after seven in the evening.
“No, you?”
“No. I’m coming over.” She decided to just be forward and not explain anything.
“Okay.”
She packed a book bag with a change of clothes and some makeup and her toothbrush and threw it in her KG before leaving. She didn’t want to be caught without it again. On the short drive over, she stopped at the pizzeria behind the Flying M coffee house and got a medium pie to go.
They ate the pizza at the kitchen table, while they listened to the radio and talked. Joshua opened some beers for them.
“I learned that Muse is a Vietnam veteran. Shemp offered that tidbit this afternoon,” Dancia offered.
“Really? I suppose we should be putting together a psychological work-up on the guy to try and find out what would make him a murderer. I never took any psychology classes in college.”
“I did. Not that that makes me any kind of expert. Let’s see, we know he’s in his fifties, possibly early sixties to have been in that conflict. Everyone in that room thinks very highly of him and his hacker skills. So he’s probably been in the IT field since its origins.”
Joshua finished chewing. “So he prolly started on main frames. Man, I can’t even imagine living in those days.”
Dancia smiled, she couldn’t either. They thought they had it bad on a 486-based chip in the early nineties. “Neither can I. I tried to paint a portrait of him as some kind of Berkley hippie, but Shemp shot me down. He insists that Muse is a normal guy like any of them. But still, how would he know for sure, he’s never met Muse?”
Joshua thought about that for a moment. If they have been chatting on Ham radio, and in a chat room, they may indeed know each other pretty well and still never have met in person. Like two people who meet online and get to know each other with intentions of meeting in person and getting married. Many times they think they really know the person and then when they finally meet, the other person has an annoying personal habit that never came out in correspondence and the marriage is called off.
“I don’t know, maybe Shemp is lying. Maybe they have met and he’s trying not to let anyone know.”
Dancia remembered something “Oh, Shemp said he was from the Tri-Rivers area of Canada. Let’s look that up and see what we can find. Nobody seemed to know exactly where Muse lived, other than out West.”
“Did you tell them where you lived?”
“Nope.”
Joshua wiped his hands on a napkin and left the table to get his MacBook. When he returned, she had made a space for him to set it down next to her. He moved his chair around and sat down, opening the laptop. He opened Firefox and typed the Canadian city into the Wikipedia search box. She helped him spell it, as it was a French word. Trois-Riviers sits at the confluence of the three prongs of the Saint Maurice and the Saint Lawrence Rivers in Quebec. They both read the Wikipedia article in silence, neither one of them had been to Canada.
“International Poetry Capital of the World?” Joshua intoned. They both looked at each other. Shemp was talking about poetry to the other guy on the radio.
“Perhaps our Muse is really a muse,” Dancia stated. “I would have to say there is a strong possibility that they have met at this festival on at least one occasion.”
Joshua nodded in thought. “We should see what we can find about a poet that goes by the name Muse.”
Dancia glanced at the kitchen clock and then back to Joshua. “I have to get to work. You going to google Muse then?”
“Go ahead. If you get bored tonight, you can monitor the IRC and do some searches.”
She helped him clean up the pizza and beer before she left. Joshua appreciated her help and he told her to stop by when she got off work, he would be going in a little later this week so they could compare notes. After she left, he sat down at the radio and tuned around for a while. He didn’t hear anything so he retired to his computer room for a few hours of googling.
The first thing he did was write a program. A small Ruby script that parsed a Wikipedia page for words that were links and then searched Wikipedia for all the definitions found on the single page. The program kicked out a simple text file with all the definitions found on a single Wikipedia page. The file was updated whenever the Wikipedia page was altered. It actively polled the live page and adjusted its results in real time. It didn’t have to be that elaborate, but once he started writing the script, he could not finish until it was the best he could make it.
Two hours later, he hit the Muse article on Wikipedia and within seconds had a text file with all the many definitions of Muse found on the page. Then he set about doing searches on each word that interested him. He briefly thought about adding a search engine parser to the script, but realized that he would be programming more than actually trying to find what he was looking for – a connection behind any of the names of the Muses with a programmer whose hacker handle was Muse.
He took a break and went back into the kitchen for a drink of water. While he was filling his glass, he heard the radio come alive with conversation. It was Shemp and Muse; he knew it because they were speaking French. Following Amateur Radio protocol, they said their call signs in English.
Joshua scrambled to get his digital tape player and started recording as he sat down and listened. He had very little clue as to what they were saying, but he could tell that Muse was coming in much louder. He wondered if Muse was closer to him. She did say that he lived out West; maybe he was real close. That thought was not too comforting.
Joshua turned the fine tuner knob to see if he could bring in the signals better. He was having trouble hearing Shemp due to a wavering signal that seemed to fade in and out. An idea occurred to him as he found a cleaner signal. He wondered if Steve could some how locate Muse’s signal. Steve used to talk about doing something called Fox Hunts using his Ham radio gear. A bunch of guys with special antennas would drive around town looking for a hidden transmitter using triangulation and signal strength meters. Could something like that be done with High Frequency signals?
He pulled out his cell phone and dialed Steve’s number.
“Hello.”
“Steve, this is Joshua. Is it possible to locate a HF signal? You know like when you do those Fox Hunts?”
“Well, those are done using VHF or UHF signals, much closer to home. I suppose one could do something similar on HF, but you would need to have many Hams located all around the country or the world to isolate the signal. Even then you would most likely just be able to get the general area down to a few states.”
Joshua dropped his shoulders. “Oh.”
“Are you listening to your suspect?”
“Yeah right on the same frequency.”
“Is one of them coming in more powerful than the other for you?”
Steve was silent for a moment as he dialed in the frequency on his fancy modern rig. “Yep, but sometimes when conditions are bad, like right now, signal strength is not a reliable indicator of how close a signal is to you. Radio is kind of fickle in that way. He is coming in a solid S9. He could be local.”
“Do you mean local as in state or city?”
“Either.”
Joshua sighed. “He’s using a bogus call sign. I looked it up and it’s from a silent key.”
“Really? We could turn him in to the FCC, but it would be difficult to find out whom he really is. That whole process could take a while to resolve. His voice sounds funny to me. Like he’s talking through some kind of…”
“What?” Joshua asked.
“I think he’s masking his voice through a filter of some kind. Notice how he sounds like a really fat robot?”
Joshua was not sure if it were normal behavior for HF signals or not. “I did notice that.”
“I bet he’s using some kind of electronic voice scrambler, like they use on TV when a victim does not want to be identified.”
“That would fit. He’s using multiple methods to mask his identity.”
Steve sighed. “Damn idiot. People like him give Ham Radio a bad name.”
“Yeah well, he’s done more than break a few radio rules. He’s also a killer.”
“Right. You going to the police in the morning?”
“Yes. I just hope I can give them enough information to find this slime ball.”
“Good luck man. I gotta get to bed.”
“Me too, thanks Steve.”
“No problem, later.”
Joshua put the phone down and continued to listen to the radio. They talked for another ten minutes before signing off. Joshua turned off the recorder and then shut down the radio. He padded back to his room and went to bed. It was a little past midnight when he dozed off. Within an hour he was awake again tormented by the car accident. He lay in his bed and tried to forget the terrible images by reading Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother.

Null_Pointer Chapter 13

KenMcConnellLeave a comment

This is the serialization of my first mystery novel, Null_Pointer.  It will be released on this blog every work day until it is complete.  You may purchase the novel at Amazon, Kindle Store, Barnes and Noble, Smashwords or order it from any brick and mortar bookstore near you.  Thank you for reading it and I hope you enjoy this free look at the book.

You can find all the chapters of this book by searching for the Null_Pointer Novel tag.

Chapter 13

It was a little past noon when Joshua awoke. It was the first time he had slept for more than a few hours in as many days. He felt rested and refreshed. He was on his side and looking across the room when he felt the presence of someone else in bed. The steady rhythmic motion of someone breathing beside him caused him to open both eyes wide and slowly turn over.
It was Dancia. She was lying on her side facing away from him. Wearing only her underwear! Joshua’s mind raced. Did they hook up last night? He could not remember anything happening; surely he would have remembered something like that. He started thinking about what happened last night, going over everything in his mind. After a few minutes he realized that he was panicking for no reason. He had come to bed by himself.
Why was she in bed then? Perhaps she was tired and cold. He thought about that for a moment. Usually, when she spent the night at his apartment, she slept on his couch, like all his other friends did — his guy friends anyway. She had never done anything this brazen before. Perhaps she was trying to tell him something. Perhaps she was hoping that something would happen. His heart started racing again. He really liked Dancia as a friend and he wanted to keep her as his friend. If they slept with each other; they would be more than just friends, they would be lovers. He was not ready to be her lover. Not until he figured out who was trying to kill them.
It was kind of weird, but he felt as though he were on a mission to find the murderer and anything he did for himself, only got in the way of that mission. He never realized that he could be so committed to anything like that before; then again his life was never threatened like it was now. He felt like he was acting as some kind of Dudley Do Right. Not that he was ever more than a straight arrow kind guy before, it’s just that he never really cared that much about anyone other than himself. He did his own thing and if someone was into that, then he let them come along, otherwise, he didn’t care what they did as long as they didn’t get in his way. For now, a relationship with Dancia would be getting in his way.
She began to stir and rolled over on her side facing him, he rolled over on his back and watched her sleep. He used to watch his old girlfriend sleep all the time. Lindsey was not a morning person. She liked to sleep in as late as possible on weekends. He was a morning person and would always wake up before her and sometimes he would just lie in bed and watch her sleep. She was so peaceful and content when she slept. So was Dancia. Her breathing was calm and her black hair fell loosely across her face covering an eye and part of her mouth. Lindsey was a brunette and her hair was much longer and thinner than Dancia’s.
He had not thought about Lindsey in a few days, ever since Glenn had died. Which was a good thing, he reckoned. They had split several months ago under less than favorable circumstances and he had not even seen her in passing since that time. She was a career woman climbing the corporate ladder and she felt that he was holding her back. He was not ready to commit to marriage and she was not willing to ride along in a relationship with no clear purpose other than to just be together. She needed a husband to get to the next rung of the ladder and he was not the man for the job. She dumped him and he didn’t put up much of a fight.
But he continued to think about her off and on for weeks after they split. The fact that he had not thought about her in a few days was a good sign. It meant that he was starting to get over her and get on with his life. He always knew that she was not the one for him, but sometimes when you are with someone for a long time, you find it hard to let them out of your life. He often wondered where she was, what she was doing; who she was with, but it never gave him any satisfaction thinking about her. It was not worth his time and energy and he knew that eventually he would stop thinking about her and move on. In that respect, the time he spent figuring out who killed Glenn and Zemo was therapeutic for him.
Dancia’s eyes fluttered open and she looked up at Joshua, watching her. He smiled down at her and she pulled the covers up and managed an embarrassed grin.
“Good morning,” Joshua said.
“I’m sorry, I just didn’t feel like spending the night on your couch.”
“Not a problem.”
“Are you sure?” she asked, adjusting the covers and trying not to be exposed.
“You sleep like an angel; I didn’t realize you were there right away.”
She became defensive. “Nothing happened last night, I can assure you.”
“Too bad,” Joshua said, with a warm laugh.
Dancia looked at him oddly. Joshua saw the look and decided to get back to the business at hand. “Did you hear anything useful on the radio last night?”
She pushed the cover against her chest and sat up to face him. “Yes! I was listening to two guys talking French. They were having a very interesting conversation about Beatnik poetry. After they signed off, I found our man Shemp online in the chat room. I think he was one of the men I heard on the radio and he mentioned he was from Canada.”
Joshua sat up while she was talking and his dark eyes narrowed as he listened to her.
“Canada. Did you write down their call signs?”
She nodded. “They are on your lappy desktop. I didn’t think to look them up.”
Joshua flung back the comforter and slid out of bed. He was wearing boxers as he padded down the hall and snagged the laptop from the kitchen table. Unix was standing at his water bowl. Joshua reached down and pet the cat’s back and was rewarded with a quiet purr. He came back to bed with the laptop and slid under the warm blanket.
“Damn cold this morning.”
“You mean this afternoon,” she corrected him.
He opened the computer and added the first call sign, W5ZPGC, to the search box in his browser. Then he selected a browser search engine that Steve had written that let him search the FCC database for Amateur Radio call signs.
The results came back empty. He searched for inactive call signs only. Bingo. It was registered to a man in Florida who was listed as a silent key – meaning he had passed away. It was doubtful that Dancia was listening to a dead man talk last night. Something fishy was going on.
He entered the second license, which was the call sign – VE2SHM. It came back with Mike Metz, from Trois-Riviers Canada. Dancia glanced over his shoulder at the return.
“See, I bet that’s our man Shemp. He said he was from Canada last night on IRC.”
“Did you write down what band you heard them on?”
Dancia shook her head. “No, but the radio is still on frequency. It was a little lower than the number we got from IRC.”
“Must have been a code for another band or something, I guess we can just keep it there and listen again tonight.”
Dancia nodded. She lay back down and covered up. “I have to go back to work tonight. Are you staying up to listen? I heard them around three in the morning.”
Joshua nodded, laid back and pulled the covers up over his chest. “I wonder if they are both up that late on a work night. Maybe if I listen as late as I can, I’ll hear them earlier tonight. Heck, they may only talk on certain days of the week. It’s going to be hit and miss.”
Dancia sighed. “I’m not sure Shemp is capable of killing. He doesn’t strike me as someone who is psychopathic. Actually, neither man sounded crazy in any way to me.”
“I know what you mean. But maybe that’s why no one has suspected them. I’ve been thinking about a motive for the murders and try as I might, I can’t find anything about the two victims that someone would want to kill them over. They were programmers but aside from that, they had little in common, except being a member of our web project.
“One was a brilliant coder and the other one was not. One was a loved member of the community and the other was just a middle aged corporate hack. Neither one talked to the other on IRC that we know of. I could find no emails between them or even between Shemp and them.”
Dancia yawned. “Maybe the killer doesn’t want us to go public.”
Joshua had no idea how the mind of a crazy person worked. It may be that he didn’t have to have any connection to them, but somehow that did not feel right. Something inside Joshua was telling him it was another programmer. He was so convinced of it, he refused to even consider anyone else.
“I think he’s a programmer and I think he wants to kill us because we are programmers,” Joshua said.
“The killer needed someone to be at their computer in order to strike. Computer geeks are always at their computers. He also needed them to be online and using headphones. Again, what coder doesn’t have a broadband connection and listen to music?”
She stared at the ceiling and scrunched her face as she figured. “So we’re looking for a programmer who likes to kill other programmers?” There was a note of disbelief in her tone.
“It sounds weak, but that’s because we just don’t have a motive,” Joshua insisted.
They lay there in silence, both of them thinking.
“Maybe he’s trying to prove himself,” Joshua said, breaking the silence. “Like a hotshot kid who wants to show how l33t his skills are.”
Dancia looked at him, a sly grin spreading on her face. “Killing someone with code would be a pretty bold statement for a cocky young coder.”
Joshua agreed. “The ultimate hack.” They were both well steeped in Hacker lore and they knew how common it was for new Hackers to feel the need to prove themselves. Traditionally, it was pulling off a technically difficult prank on someone or some group, but lately it was more about writing an application that other Hackers used or admired for its technical excellence and its creative elegance.
This was not to be confused with writing programs that defaced web sites or that let script kiddies hack into school computers or data centers, that was cracking and most real Hackers were as far removed from that behavior as you could get. A Hacker was someone who was at a different level of skill and understanding.
Dancia winced. “How are we going to prove that to the police? They don’t know anything about Hacker culture.”
“We just have to find out more about how he managed to kill them and hope that we turn up something damning on Shemp. I still have issues with using Flash animation to hypnotize someone. Unless he was talking to his victim through the headsets they wore and was able to offer spoken suggestions.”
Dancia turned to face him. “Wouldn’t he have to know what the person was afraid of in order to use that to kill them?”
“Maybe we can look for something in the chat logs about fears or phobias? I still got a problem with the motivation thing. Proving yourself by killing seems very brutal even for a nut job programmer. There has to be some kind of a connection between our group and the killer.”
Dancia agreed with a nod. Joshua got out of the bed headed for his dresser. “Lets get clean and have some breakfast then we can get to work on finding a motive.”
/*————————————————–*/
After his shower Joshua headed to the kitchen to start the pancakes and more importantly, the coffee pot. As he waited for the griddle to warm up, he pushed the oil around making sure to cover the whole cooking surface. His mom had first taught him to make pancakes when he was six years old. He was too short to reach the stove, so she let him stand on a footstool. It was one of the first times he remembered cooking with his mother – something the two of them would do a lot of as he grew up. She was a fine cook and loved to improve her craft by watching cooking shows and making new dishes every once in a while. Joshua’s dad was always ready with a technical explanation of why things were done the way they were in the kitchen, but his mom tended to cook on instinct. She could make just about anything in the kitchen and her instincts were passed on to her son who found that cooking relaxed him and gave him a creative outlet that was outside the world of bits and bytes.
There was knocking at the door and Joshua knew by the sound that it was Tripp. He unlocked the door and Tripp entered, his nose immediately smelling the coffee and the heating oil. “Pancakes for lunch?” he asked.
“Yeah, well, it was a long night.”
Tripp came into the kitchen and noticed the big radio on the kitchen table. “What’s with the antique?”
“I was listening for someone to talk on the Ham bands last night. It’s a long story. What are you up to today?”
Tripp stood beside him at the stove, looking around at the two plates and two coffee cups set out. He looked at Joshua who seemed not to notice anything wrong.
“Were you expecting company?” he asked, nodding to the counter.
Joshua tried to come up with an explanation that would satisfy his curious friend.
“Sure smells good in here,” Dancia stated before she came into the kitchen and saw Tripp.
Tripp’s eyes bugged out as he immediately put the clues together. She was wearing a towel on her head and one of Joshua’s long sleeve T-shirts that read, “Code Monkey”.
“Oh, hi Tripp. Joshua, do you happen to have a hair dryer?”
“Sure, in the cabinet under the sink.”
“Thanks, tootles,” she teased as she headed back down the hall towards the master bedroom. Both men stared at her bare legs as she strode down the hall.
Tripp and Joshua exchanged looks. “You dog, you finally hooked up with her!”
“No, really. That’s not what happened.”
“Right, dude. She’s wearing your clothes and using your bathroom.” Tripp slapped his friend on the back and started to head for the door. “I’ll leave you love birds alone. Catch you later man.”
“Tripp, don’t go. It’s not what you think, really. I have plenty of pancakes. Please, stay.”
Tripp paused, the pancakes did smell pretty good and he hadn’t had any lunch yet. Joshua flipped the pancakes on the griddle. “Grab a plate and sit down.”
You didn’t have to bend his arm to get Tripp to eat. He turned around and came back to the kitchen.
“Alright, but I feel like a third wheel.”
“Don’t. Nothing happened, we were working late last night and I offered to let her use the shower.”
Tripp motioned to the radio. “What’s got you two so busy, not getting busy, anyway?”
Joshua poured four more pancakes on the griddle and handed Tripp a plate with the first batch on it. Tripp helped himself to a fork and brought the butter plate and syrup to the table.
Joshua poured Tripp and himself a cup of coffee. “Remember those programmers that died Friday?”
Tripp nodded as he stuffed a fork full of pancakes in his mouth. The sound of Joshua’s old hair dryer came from the back bathroom.
“They were murdered. I found evidence on Glenn’s computer that someone killed him. It’s a bit complicated, but it looks like the killer used a program to somehow hypnotize Glenn and then kill him at his computer.”
Tripp listened intently as he chewed. “Have you gone to the police yet?”
“No, I wanted to give myself the weekend to look through his computers and see if I could ascertain who might have gotten on his system. I don’t think the police have much of a computer crimes department. If I can get a suspect and or a good motive, I’ll go in and tell them what I know. Until then, we really don’t have much of a case.”
“Still, you better be careful, messing with evidence.”
“I have not modified his system, just copied some log files. Technically, it’s not a crime until the case is declared a murder. Either way, I think we are on the trail of someone, so it may not be too much longer before we find out who it was and inform the police. If I’m right, the killer may be wanted for both murders.
Tripp smiled. “Maybe you should be going to the CIA or Interpol or something. You could be on the trail of an international terrorist.”
Joshua slid the next batch on a plate and poured some more pancakes on the griddle. “Maybe, but until we catch our man in some incriminating way, we don’t have anything.”
“Who is your suspect?”
Dancia came back into the kitchen. “Some hacker named Shemp.” Her black hair was freshly styled and she smelled soapy clean.
Tripp looked at her and stopped chewing. “His name is Shemp?”
“No, that’s his alias, his real name is Mike Metz and he’s from Canada. Thanks,” she said, taking a plate full of pancakes from Joshua. She sat down at the table opposite Tripp.
“I don’t think he’s your man,” Tripp said.
Joshua turned around. “Why do you say that?”
“Shemp was one of the three stooges.”
Joshua and Dancia exchanged looks of astonishment. Dancia smiled, she knew Shemp was not the one. Joshua looked back at Tripp. “Curly, Moe and Larry. Who was Shemp?”
“He was one of the original stooges, but he left the group before they became famous. They replaced him with Curly.”
Joshua looked back at the griddle and watched as the tiny bubbles formed in the pancakes he just poured. If Shemp was a “Stooge” then who was controlling him? He tried to remember the conversation on IRC when they first started monitoring it late Saturday night. Who was the older guy that everyone considered a Perl guru? Muse.
“It’s Muse, he’s the killer. He’s using Shemp as his stooge.”
Tripp swallowed and brought his fork up to point at Joshua. “Who’s Muse?”
“Another participant in an IRC chat room we’ve been monitoring,” Dancia said. She had stopped eating and was thinking about that first night. “He was someone that the other guys all respected because he was a Perl guru.”
Tripp continued eating while he spoke. “Always there is an apprentice and a master. Sounds like you guys were going after the apprentice.”
Joshua grinned; Tripp was always ready with a nerdy Star Wars quote. Sometimes hanging out with him was like being in a Kevin Smith movie. You never knew when he would launch into a lengthy dissertation on why Han shot first. At least he didn’t try to sound like Yoda – this time.
Joshua turned off the stove and flipped his serving of pancakes onto a plate. He covered them with butter and then poured some maple syrup on them. He ate standing up, and facing his friends. He sipped his cup of coffee between bites.
He and Dancia exchanged glances, now they had to look for a connection between Zemo, Themis, Dancia, Joshua and Shemp.
Tripp finished eating. He stood up and brought his plate to the sink, letting Joshua sit down at the table. “Well kids, it’s been interesting, but I have to be going.”
“Where you off to?” Joshua asked.
“Gotta make a quick stop off at the Flying M to pick up Dave and then we’re off to a movie. I was going to see if you wanted to come with us, but you guys are busy playing Clue.”
“Can you drop off Dancia at her place? She doesn’t have her car.”
Dancia finished her last bite and brought her plate to the sink.
“Sure, no problem.”

Null_Pointer Chapter 11

KenMcConnellLeave a comment

This is the serialization of my first mystery novel, Null_Pointer.  It will be released on this blog every work day until it is complete.  You may purchase the novel at Amazon, Kindle Store, Barnes and Noble, Smashwords or order it from any brick and mortar bookstore near you.  Thank you for reading it and I hope you enjoy this free look at the book.

You can find all the chapters of this book by searching for the Null_Pointer Novel tag.

Chapter 11

It was a short ride down Federal Way past the Boise Depot to Steve’s house. The heater in Joshua’s Porsche barely had time to get warmed up. Steve’s house was a three-story custom home that over looked the city and the surrounding foothills. It was built in the mid 70’s and updated through the years by his parents. When they wanted to retire and move to Arizona, they sold the house to their only son.
Steve moved into the basement and rented out the main two floors. He charged outrageous rent and people paid for the spectacular views and close proximity to the down town area. He could almost live off the rent, but chose instead to keep his System Administration job at a local business.
He usually worked the graveyard shift, which left his evenings off free to talk all night on his Ham radios. The best propagation occurred at night on most High Frequency or HF bands. His position along the Boise Bench also aided in getting his signal out to the world and in bringing in signals from all over the planet. He had made contacts with other Hams in all 50 states including Hawaii and Alaska and was starting to work other countries in Asia and Europe. There was something about talking to another human being who lived far away by bouncing your signal off the upper atmosphere that was both technically cool and fashionably quaint in the modern world of instant digital communication.
In the back yard he had raised a forty foot main tower with a rotating beam for 20, 40, 60 and 80 meters, letting him point the antenna he was using in any direction by remote control. The setup was not uncommon for Hams active in HF signal chasing. He was in the process of raising a second tower that would be for 6, and 10 meters. Right now he was using a simple inverted dipole wire antenna for those bands. The backyard of his house looked like a small antenna farm, with guide wires running all over the yard. It made mowing the grass a bit tricky, but his renters didn’t have to worry about that, because Steve gladly did the yard work so they didn’t have to. He preferred that the renters didn’t even go in the back yard. There was a large wooden deck on the main level of the house and a small deck on the top level, so they could get outside without going down to the backyard.
Joshua parked in the roundabout in the front yard, leaving the main driveway free. He and Dancia got out and walked to the side of the house down a narrow footpath to concrete steps that lead to the basement level door. Steve had turned on the porch light for them so they could see to walk down the stairs. Joshua rapped his knuckles on the door a few times and after a minute Steve opened the door to let them in.
Steve was in his late thirties and wore black-framed “geek” glasses. His hair was salt and pepper where it once had been black and was cut military short, he wore the fashionable goatee and side burns popular with younger men. He was slim and stood a few inches over six foot. His face had a ready smile as he recognized Dancia.
“Hey guys, come on in.”
“Hi Steve,” Dancia said, as she came inside before Joshua. She waltzed into the place like it was her own home, as she often did at Joshua’s place. “Hey pug,” Steve casually said as she passed.
“Hope we’re not intruding,” Joshua said, wondering what that exchange was all about.
“Oh no, I never turn down visitors on a Saturday night, or is it morning now?”
Steve’s basement was the ultimate nerd pad. There was a small kitchenette off to the right and a narrow home theater to the left of the entrance with a fireplace in the corner and a plasma screen tuned to a Right Wing news channel. They followed Dancia down the short hall that lead to the main room where he had all his radio and computer gear. Dancia glanced briefly across the hall where Steve’s bedroom was. The door to his Ham shack had a picture of a big red circle with a line through a Microsoft Windows logo on it. Steve was somewhat fanatical about his dislike for the software giant.
Steve called the room a “shop” as it was still unfinished and had thick throw rugs on top of the concrete floor. A space heater was running near his main workbench. The room had large picture windows that looked out over the city and the surrounding foothills. It was an impressive view during the daytime, but not at night. Only their own reflections looked back at them through the windows like a mirror.
The lighting was from over head fluorescent tubes of the kind most people used in their garages. He had one old black desk with a matching wooden chair with springs that let you lean back comfortably in it. He had two twenty one inch LCD monitors on swing out metal mounts and a wireless keyboard with a trackball mounted to the right arm of the chair. His computers all ran Linux, of course, and the monitors displayed custom programs that let him monitor his radios and his servers remotely.
Behind the monitors were several custom built black wooden shelves containing high-end Japanese amateur radio gear. He had the latest and most expensive gear money could buy; the kind of radios that most Hams only dreamed about owning. He had them hooked up to antenna switch boxes and rotators. A nice cordless headset rested next to the keyboard.
His workbench was about twelve feet long and ran along the same wall facing the city. It had all manner of electronic test equipment. Everything from simple meters to advanced waveform monitors and temperature controlled soldering irons. Much of his equipment was new but a good bit of it was old and probably no longer manufactured. He loved to recondition old tube radios and he had some ancient devices that looked like they came from an old black and white science fiction movie.
Every few feet along the bench there was another unfinished radio or electronics project of some kind. Miles of coax cables and hundreds of test leads and cables with different connectors on them lined the space under the bench hanging from nails. All along the length of the bench were miss matched drawers filled with little electronic bits and pieces, tiny plastic drawers that fishermen used to keep their lures in, Steve stored – ceramic insulators, resisters, capacitors and tiny knobs.
There was an entire corner dedicated to old antennas and the parts for fabricating antennas out of metal tubes and rolls of wires from heavy gauge electrical wire to thin electronics wiring. Several antennas lay unfinished and waiting for some attention.
The middle of the room was filled with metal racks full of old radios and miscellaneous electrical devices making the room look like either a radio repair shop or a swap meet for electronics geeks. Towards the far right there was a rudimentary machine shop where Steve was known to build his own radio cases and just about anything that he dreamed up that needed a box to live in.
The back of the room seemed to be dedicated to a completely different hobby – guns. Steve was a proud member of the NRA and owned a respectable little collection of firearms. He had a bench dedicated to cleaning and working on his guns. He even had a nice Dillon Progressive reloading press in the corner. There was an American flag pinned to the back wall, just in case anyone questioned his loyalties.
“So what can I do for you guys?” Steve asked. He was wearing jeans and a black T-shirt that had a penguin armed with a big machine gun from a video game.
“We need to listen to that frequency to see if we can hear anyone talking.”
Steve moved over to his Ham station and plopped down in the chair. Its springs creaked under his weight. He moved a monitor up out of his way and fiddled with a digital radio dial.
“I’ve been monitoring it ever since you asked about it, nothing going on. Tuning around, I found some chatter a few clicks up the dial but they were talking French or Spanish or something.”
Dancia and Joshua looked at each other and frowned. If they were referring to a Ham frequency there was no guarantee that it was somehow code for another band. They may have been intending to talk at a different time on the given frequency. There were just too many possibilities.
“Steve, do you need all this fancy gear to just listen to that band?”
“Heck no, you could listen to this on a commercial receiver with a simple wire antenna,” Steve replied, still tuning around the band.
Joshua looked around the room at the stacks of old radios, “Do you think we could borrow a radio to do some listening with? It would only be for a few days, maybe a week.”
Dancia started to wander around the room, her dark eyes washing over in all the details. Steve got up and headed for the racks. “Sure, I got plenty of old rigs that would work for you.”
He pulled an old brown radio with a big dial on its face off the rack and hauled it over to an empty spot on the long test bench. Moving around the bench like a surgeon around an operating table, he quickly assembled the parts and pieces for a complete radio.
“You can set this up just about anywhere and it should work with a simple dipole antenna. Hang on a few and I’ll make you one.”
Joshua nodded as he watched Steve pull some coax cable and start building the wire antenna. Joshua never really was into radio technology, it all seemed too old fashioned and low tech to him. But he loved to watch a skilled tech build something from nothing. He often spent many hours watching shows on TV that were about people making things like motorcycles or cars. It was a part of the unwritten Hacker ethos that fueled his curiosity for things mechanical as well as things digital. When he was a kid, he lived inside those books with detailed exploded views of everything from microwave ovens to aircraft carriers. If it were manmade, Joshua was always curious about how it was put together.
/*————————————————–*/
Dancia was over looking at the open gun locker. She noticed a few new additions to Steve’s collection. There was a nice new Ruger 10/22 with a black laminate stock sitting in a cleaning rack. She ran her fingers down the metal barrel and took in the smell of the laminate and the gun oil. It brought back very real experiences that she had tried unsuccessfully to lay to rest. She recalled the last time she and Steve were on the local outdoor range plinking with rifles. Steve loved guns and was very macho about his knowledge of them, but he was a lousy shot. He preferred making modifications and cleaning his pieces to actually putting rounds down range at a target. He didn’t even like to hunt.
That was fine by her, since shooting was more than enough to trigger uncomfortable memories from her time in the sand box.
She had first met Steve a few years ago when she was hired to assist him in the UNIX shop where he worked. She was the gofer and back up tape jockey, eager to learn UNIX and system administration. He was the wise, older guru who seemed to know all the obscure inside knowledge about computer systems. She was a quick apprentice and after about six months she had learned more than he knew and had bagged him in the process. Not only was he limited in his computer skills; he was not that interesting physically for her to bother with for too long. She realized he compensated for not knowing everything he claimed about computers, by dazzling people with his knowledge about radios and electronics. Whenever anyone got too deep in the details of something that he didn’t really know very well, Steve would somehow manage to steer the conversation back to radio theory, his comfort zone.
To Dancia, once she figured this out about Steve, she became less interested in him and soon broke off their relationship. She quickly got a better job and was making more than him even though her computer experience was about one quarter that of his. Guys like Steve found their little niche and then never cared to advance further, fearing the ranks of management or change in general. Steve was in charge of the UNIX group at his company and he had no ambitions to move up or move on. He was a big fish in a little pond and he liked it that way. Not two months after she had moved on, he had hired another newbie girl and was cheerfully passing on his wisdom to her.
/*————————————————–*/
Steve finished up the antenna and started going over how to tune the radio and set it up with Joshua. Joshua listened very astutely, making Dancia smile as she watched them. She knew enough about radios from working with Steve to have confidently set up the little Hallicrafters receiver by herself. But it was still cute the way Joshua soaked up new and interesting things. He was like a kid on Christmas day, waiting for his father to finish building a new toy, so he could play with it.
They were just finishing up as she came back to them. Joshua picked up the radio and Steve gathered up all the accessories.
“Looks like we’re set. Steve, thanks again for your help man.”
“No problem. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to call.”
“Thanks Steve, it looks like we’ll be busy for a few days anyway,” Dancia commented as she held the door for them.
Joshua headed out the side door and up the stairs to the car, Steve and Dancia held back. He waited until Joshua was out of earshot before speaking.
“So, are you two seeing each other?” Steve said his tone smug.
“Maybe. It’s really not your business, Steve.”
“You’re right. Does he know about us?”
“No, and please keep it that way for now, okay?” She glanced at him over the top of her black rim glasses. He laughed and headed out the door first. “No problem, Pug.”
“Stop calling me that,” she said, hitting him in the back. Pug was his nickname for her when they were going out together. He thought she was a little firecracker, which reminded him of a fireplug and somehow he managed to get pug out of all that. She really didn’t like pet names and that one really annoyed her. It reminded her that she was short and possibly fat. He liked using it because it annoyed her. They made for a real dysfunctional couple, which had a lot to do with why they broke up.
Out at the car Joshua had tucked the radio into the back seat and covered it with a throw blanket that he kept in the trunk. Steve handed Joshua the antenna parts. “Give me a buzz if you have any troubles.”
“Will do. Thanks a bunch Steve.”
“No problem, just remember to tune around, you may get lucky, providing they stay on that band. Let me know how it goes, you got my curiosity up too.”
Joshua shook Steve’s hand as Dancia got into the Porsche.
“We will,” Joshua said, stepping into the driver’s seat.
Steve watched them pull out and then went back inside.