"How long will this take?" whispered Kurtz.
"Depends on how many files she has," whispered
Arlene, tapping her gloved fingers on O'Toole's keyboard. "It took me forty-eight minutes to back up the WeddingBells-dot-com files."
"We don't have forty-eight minutes!" hissed Kurtz.
"That's all right," said Arlene. "WeddingBells has three thousand, three hundred and eighty files. Ms. O'Toole has one hundred and six." The backup disk drive blinked a green light and began to whir. "Eight minutes and we're out of here."
"What if they're encrypted or password protected or whatever?" whispered Kurtz.
"I don't think they will be," said Arlene. "But we'll deal with that when we get the drive back to the office. Go do your file thing." She handed him the travel scanner.
The files were locked. He had them open in twenty seconds. He used the penlight to look over several years worth of parolees' thick files. What he needed was a recent list here it was. Peg O'Toole currently had thirty-nine active "clients," including one Joe Kurtz. He made a space, plugged in the digital copier/scanner, and began running pages through the small device. There were smaller scannerssome pen-sizedbut this one was reliable and gobbled entire documents quickly, eliminating the need to run the scanner tip over lines of type. Kurtz fed in lists of current clients, addresses, phone numbers.
Arlene looked around the office and found a cassette tape recorder and racked stacks of cassettes. "She must record her notes, Joe," whispered Arlene. "Then transcribe them. And the last three weeks of cassettes are missing."
"Cops," whispered Kurtz. He was digitizing O'Toole's DayMinder, using the slower wand, playing the light over O'Toole's handwritten entries. "We'll just have to hope she had time to type her notes into the computer files." He finished copying the top three pages in each of the active thirty-nine cons' files, including his own, set the originals back, locked the file cabinets and came over to the desk.
The disk drive had already blinked that it was finished. Arlene left it attached and set a CD into the tray on O'Toole's computer. "I want her e-mail," whispered Arlene.
Kurtz shook his head. "That'll be password protected for sure."
Arlene nodded. "The program that I just loaded ah there it is. Will lie hidden in there and if anyone else knows her password and uses this computer, the program will quietly e-mail us a record of all the keystrokes."
"Is that possible?" whispered Kurtz. The idea appalled him and made his headache worse.
"I just did it," whispered Arlene. She unloaded the CD and put it in her bag.
"So all the hard-drive stuff is on the CD now?"
"No. Officer O'Toole didn't have a writable CD drive on this old machine. I just sent the data to the hard drive backup."
"Won't the cops find your keystroke program if they look again?"
Arlene smiled. "It would eat itself first. God, I wish I could smoke in here."
"Don't even think about it," whispered Kurtz. "Now move, I need to get into that desk."
"It's locked," whispered Arlene.
"Uh huh," said Kurtz. He used two bent pieces of metal and had the drawers open before Arlene got completely out of his way. The usual desk bric-a-brac in the center drawerpens, paper clips, a ruler, pencils. Stationery and official stamps in the top right drawer. Old appointment journals in the right center drawer.
O'Toole had pulled the amusement park photographs out of the lower right drawer yesterday.
There were a few personal things theretampons modestly pushed to the back, toothpaste, a toothbrush in a travel tube, some cosmetics, a small mirror. No photos. No envelope of the kind she'd taken the photos from. Kurtz checked everything again to make sure and then closed the drawers. The photos hadn't been among the loose paperwork or in the recent files he'd checked.
"Police?" whispered Arlene. She knew what he was looking for.
Kurtz shrugged. She could have had the photos in her purse when she was shot. "We done here?"
When Arlene nodded, he relocked everything and checked the infrared digital photos on the LCD screen to make sure everything looked the same. He went back to the desk and adjusted a pencil. They opened the door a crack, made sure the hallway was empty, and stepped out.
Seven minutes twelve seconds.
Kurtz unlocked Ms. Feldman's office and clicked off the lights. Locked the door.
They passed the other guard, Leroy, coming out of the elevator. "Phil told me you folks were here. Done already?"
Arlene held up the thick file of old SweetheartSearch-dot-com papers she'd taken from her briefcase. "We have what the D.A. needs," she said.
Leroy nodded and moved down the hall to check
the doors.
Outside, Arlene didn't wait until they got to her Buick. She handed Kurtz the bag and lit a Marlboro. When they got in the car, Kurtz said, "You enjoy that?"
"You bet I did. It's been more than a dozen years since I helped in the fieldwork."
Kurtz thought about that. He didn't remember ever using Arlene in the field.