Page 158 - Labelle Gramercy, On the Case

Jury-rigged

his time usage: it covers the hours during which he would need an
alibi. Did he time out at all?”
“No. He was never disconnected as a result of inactivity. Someone
was online, interactively, doing something at least once every thirty
minutes—the default maximum allowed by his ISP. Not long enough
to leave, kill Ms. Lustig and get back to the keyboard.”
“‘Someone’ is rather vague, Duncan. I will have to examine those
ISP records. Patterns of usage vary between individuals, you know.
And he might have defeated the time-out by linking to a self-
updating website or temporarily resetting his browser to poll the e-
mail server at intervals shorter than the connection expiration limit.
Too bad the courts won’t let us put Carnivore on his hook-up. Then
we’d know what he was doing.”
Damn! I should have gotten a glimmer of those possibilities from
the geeks in the basement. All I could lamely say was, “Well, we did
confiscate his equipment long enough to verify that all the software
and their settings were lost along with his files. He quickly got a court
order to have it returned, on the grounds we could not demonstrate
its use for any criminal activity. Of course, he had destroyed the only
part of it capable of bringing him up on some charge other than
murder.”
Labelle tapped the sheet of paper in front of her with a forefinger
as rigid as a rebar. I ought to know, having had it half-seriously poked
into vulnerable parts of my anatomy several times over the years.
“This mangled disk drive: you’re implying that was the only storage
medium he had on the machine?”
“Yes. Rather unusual, particularly for a person who does not need
to transport files between home and office computers. He was a little
slow answering the door, and when we got into his bedroom, where
he keeps his electronic gear, we found an empty drive bay on the PC,
a smashed removable drive on the floor and a hammer on the table.
He told us that he thought the late night callers were strong-arm men
sent by his enemies to steal valuable or sensitive facts about his
business affairs. Alexander knew what he was doing: our lab boys—
and their consultants—couldn’t put Humpty-Dumpty together
again.”
A more human human being might have sighed at that point,
expressing some minimum of disappointment at losing such a

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