Page 93 - Labelle Gramercy, On the Case

Overtime

receive computer-generated reports, and I did file those reports—
knowing, deep in my heart, that filing was a dying art and that after I
was gone my successor would send my filing cabinets unopened to
the recycling center.
“Yes. Most of your employees might not know it, but a monitor
has been attached to their internet connection. I have downloaded
the addresses of the websites Kates browsed in the past month—and
Hardin’s, as well. I will run them against national databases for
significance.”
That didn’t sound good. Terrorism? Child pornography? Off-
shore gambling? What could these people be doing online? The
monitor provided a report of employees visiting known web
addresses considered by our security consultants to be indicative of
antisocial tendencies in the person repeatedly browsing them, but I
couldn’t remember Kates or Hardin being on that list.
“Hmm. Anything else?”
“Certain anomalies in one folder: some documents appear smaller
than their disk storage justifies. I do have access to them, and I am
copying those files to my own machine to protect against anyone else
with update authority changing them. I will analyze the data later. Let
us move on and interview some other people.”
I didn’t think Hardin had been interrogated enough, not by half;
but I dutifully waited until she did some trick with a computer cable
she had in her shoulder bag and logged off Kates’s machine. She
pulled a pair of thin latex gloves out of her bag, donned them and
quickly but methodically went through Kates’s assortment of papers
and files, even riffling through computer manuals for loose sheets. I
felt impelled to stand guard in front of the cubicle, painfully aware of
the lack of privacy afforded occupants of such exposed work
stations. Mercifully, nobody came down the hallway to witness this
odd procedure. My mind wandered, unsuccessfully seeking some
synthesis of the information with which it had been assaulted.
A slight tearing sound brought me back to earth: I turned to see
Labelle at my side, applying strips of yellow tape across the entrance
to the dead man’s domain. Many surfaces were covered with a fine
powder: dusting for fingerprints, I guessed; nothing seemed wiped
clean here, for what it was worth. The cubicles of the technical
personnel generally did not adhere to the strictest standards of

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