Page 185 - Labelle Gramercy, Detective

Slow Burn

Suddenly I became aware of an insistent pressure on a nerve in my
right shoulder. Labelle had unerringly poked me in a very sensitive
location. My hand jerked involuntarily off the mouse.
“Had enough, Sergeant Donat? Then we can continue with Mr.
Carbone. Where were you yesterday between 4:30 and 5:30?”
“Right here, working. I keep no regular hours.”
“Can you prove that? Did you have any visitors?”
“No. At least, not in the physical sense. But I was in touch with
lots of people out in cyberspace. One of them is a professor of
psychology at the university. I’m pretty sure he will remember
exchanging E-mail with me around five o’clock. Our computers date-
and time-stamp all messages. Of course, we can set the internal
clocks on our PC’s to any time we want, but I doubt if Dr.
Homunculus does any fooling around with his machine. Let me
check my message log.”
Quentin rolled his mouse around like a planchette on a ouija
board, laying menu upon menu at a dizzying pace. No doubt Labelle
was memorizing his every move.
“Yep. Here it is. I sent him a message at 4:51. He responded at
5:03, and I acknowledged it at 5:14.”
“Please print that out for me,” said Labelle. “And a copy of all
three messages. If your story checks out, we will not have to
impound your hardware.”
That got him hopping. We had the printout five minutes later and
were ready to leave. Then I noticed a framed photograph on the wall.
It showed two major league baseball players shaking hands; both
were in Kansas City Royals uniforms, one also wearing a catcher’s
chest protector.
“Who are those guys?” I fancied myself knowledgeable in sports
history and its spinoffs, statistics and trivia, but I couldn’t identify the
significance of the occasion.
“Oh, that is baseball’s only Q-to-Q battery: Dan Quisenberry and
Jamie Quirk, on April 13, 1980.”
We departed, descending the five flights of stairs slowly.
“My faith in human nature is restored,” I said, as we removed
flyers for student activities from our windshield. “He intends to go
through the proper channels with his computer games this time.”
“The channels he is employing are not exactly ethical.”

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