When I leave the cemetery and the Headstones behind I have made a deal with myself. 

 I can’t face Weaver or fix things with Legaspi but I have a clear shot at making them better for Exstead and I have to take it; even if it means disobeying Sarge, even if it means taking one of my wee slides off the beaten blue (or in my case, khaki) path.  It isn’t like I haven’t skidded way off it already out here.  There’s probably a warrant for assault being typed up for me this minute. 

 And I deserve it. 

 Back at the penthouse I power up my laptop and settle myself to what will be at least a ten hour jaunt on line weaving, hunting, searching, peering, dodging and jagging through the eerie electric realm of cyber space on the trail of the only person I know who can help me do what I need done right now. 

 I consider leaving the penthouse but decide against it for several reasons. 

 The first is it would signal Massey of a change in plans and alert him and this isn’t something I can play around with now.  It’s not just Exstead’s job at stake.  It’s her life.  

 The second is I am not going to play fair and use only local service for my modem and I don’t care to have my Department fork the dough out for the long-distance charges I am going to accrue in the next long hours.  Let the Chandlers pay out the nose.   

And there’s the matter of that assault charge I’m sure is looming on my immediate horizon.     I don’t want to hide or run.  I’ll sit here and wait for it.   It’s the least I can do.   

The question which has been pestering me this entire time, since the first days at the Marriott to an hour ago sprawled out on damp grass across the grave of Leander R. Millican and Beloved Wife Georgia K. has finally clicked into place with the resounding, unmistakable sound of a clip slid into place in an automatic weapon.   

Jinny had said it herself, albeit unknowingly.   

“Face it Coop.  We’re both fuck ups on paper.”  

That’s why I’m here.  Massey is leading the investigation for Internal for what is supposed to be missing evidence but it’s obvious to me he is merely Chandler’s figurehead puppet at SFPD.  I don’t know exactly how my name got dropped into the hat but they have done their homework and background investigating.  The two of them knew about Jase and about my subsequent inability to deal with reality since.  They knew McCafferty and her relationship to Jase would ensure I was thrown for an immediate mental somersault the moment I began opening files and flipping through papers and had to speak to her.  They’ve taken it for granted that I won’t be able to handle this, that I won’t piece together what is going on behind the façade he has structured.   And they knew I would throw Exstead off balance as well.  

I’d known from the first meeting with Massey at the penthouse that I was bait.  I just hadn’t understood exactly for whom or what or why.  And now I do.   

I am the exact combination of angst and tortured psyche to guarantee Jinny Exstead is put into a mental and emotional tail spin.  I’m everything she trusts and everything she instinctively puts herself in front of to protect, laced through with all the silent deadly bombs that detonate unseen and do the most damage.   

I’m here because at the moment I can’t investigate my way out of a wet paper sack.  I’m here because I’m the one they picked to make sure Exstead goes down.  And I’ve been doing a fucking splendid job of it too.   

I resist the urge to beat myself up over it.  That’s a wallow in self-pity and disgust I simply can’t take time for now.  I don’t know how long I have before the warrant is served.  I have to use the time left to fix as much as I can of the mess I helped create.   

In the computer world I am a total Lamer.  No doubt.   

I can spout some of the jargon and do enough posing in chat rooms to seem legit but one moment alone in ICQ with a real Guru or Wizard and I am revealed as the faker I am. 

 I’d got sucked into the world of Cyber Crime a few years ago during an investigation which had begun in an attempt to trace the illegal promotion of controlled substances over the Internet through spam e-mail offers and websites.  

 There were a rash of deaths resulting from the ingestion of a supposedly safe herbal form of Ecstasy and a cursory review of the victim’s computers revealed they had ordered the substance on line.  One of the victim’s had a code slinger for a brother, a brilliant, reclusive computer geek who took it upon himself to trace the headers and IP addresses back to their source and reveal the people who supplied the deadly combination of substances (including rat poison) to the Department.  And he had picked me to help nail the bastards, had refused to deal with anyone else.   

More than one person in the Department had demanded to know why, including me.   

I’d done my share of surfing on line; had browsed and shopped a bit, had read and posted on bulletin boards and dropped in on chat rooms, turned down invitations to cyber and in the process made a few friends on line as well as leaving what S’PhearHead had termed “delectable cookies” strewn behind me.   

I’d never made any attempt to cover my tracks or “cloak” or “go stealth”.  I’d never known such things were possible or what the terms for them were.  I went on line as myself using my own email and never thought about attempting to obscure who I was or what I did although there were certain boards I would refrain from flat out announcing, “I’m the heat.  Five-oh.  A COP.”   

But face it-- It’s a sneaky, insidious thing and we all of us are afflicted with “cop mouth”.  It makes itself known whether you like it or not; you inadvertently drop in words like “substance”, “violator”, “white male subject” and “suspect”.    

When I was found out I’d come clean and ‘fess up and just shrug off the subsequent negative hatred.   You get used to it.  It’s like when you get out at a convenience store in uniform and there’s always some jolly moron who takes it upon themselves to point out where the doughnuts are located.  You grin and make a mental note and run their license plate, get probable cause to ask for ID or run the registered owner through DDL files and let it go.  Unless they’re wanted in which case you cheerfully bust their ass.   

The first time I met S’PhearHead was in a chat room.  He’d been a lurker and so was I, wasting time in a room where wanna be cyber punks traded home made bomb secrets and new and better ways to thwart Five-O and all the various hacks they’re supposedly working on to invade the FBI and the CIA and NASA.   

My computer chimed and opened an ICQ from S’PhearHead whose name I recognized as one of the forty seven lurkers in the #Cops Suck Dick chat channel on IRC.  I’d been reading some bullshit account of what all some teenage moron was going to do to fuck up the cops should anyone realize he was the notorious perp who had slid in the back door of TLETS  and crashed the system for sixteen hours a month ago, rolling my eyes.  No true Hacker brags that much.  It’s unseemly.  It violates the Hackers Code of Ethics.   

S’PhearHead: Hey, Huckleberry. 

There’s no quicker way to get my attention.  My first name is not on anything I have any control over.   

 I blinked and sat up straighter and typed in:  

 Who the fuck is this? 

There was no response for several moments.  The cursor on my screen seemed to blink erratically a few times and then evened out.  Then:  

S’PhearHead:  You should run some kind of hacker protection, Huckleberry.  

In front of me, on my computer screen, I watched myself log out of the chat room and then begin opening directory trees and folders, then within the folders themselves I am fascinated to see my Word documents open.   

How the hell are you doing that? 

Instead of being alarmed I am intrigued, something I find out later he was counting on.   

S’PhearHead: That’s nothing, Huckleberry.  Watch this. 

I watched as a new program suddenly pops up on my toolbar.  It was entitled “RitZ”.  A few seconds later I deduced it was some type of password cracking program being run to dig up what I have protected my documents with. 

 Ritz.  As in crackers.  Or in this case, crackerz.  You’ve got to admire brilliance when it’s liberally laced with humor. 

  The program had run spitting out every combination of keystrokes possible and I watched as asterisk after asterisk lined up in the box Microsoft opened until the magic combo was reached and then my report on the Cyber Dealer was opened.  My cursor flit at light speed down the page until the name “Tracye Hall” was suddenly highlighted and put in bold.  A moment later my angry written statement to my Captain was highlighted as well and then pasted into the ICQ box. 

“The website these substances were sold from was intentionally designed to appeal to the eleven to seventeen age brackets and was accessed by pop up ads it had linked to from a Discovery Channel homework help site.  

Thirteen year old Tracye Hall was killed by keystrokes. This type of drug dealer is no less responsible for her death than if he had lined her up in his sights and pulled the trigger of a more conventional weapon, than if he had personally handed her the baggie of tablets on some street corner.  Backing down or out of this type of investigation because it took place in a realm you are not comfortable or familiar with is simply not acceptable. I ask that you reconsider pulling the Department’s resources, both monetarily and in manpower, from this.” 

One of my more restrained responses which Jase had actually approved me sending, not that it had done any good.   

 S’PhearHead: You mean this?

 I typed in:  Yes. 

S’PhearHead:  I can help you nail these assholes. 

 And just like that I had a White Hat on my side.  

 S’PhearHead had delivered source codes and ISP’s to me, had traced the webmaster through his anonymous, phony headers and handed us a name and an apartment number on a street in Munich, Germany.  Search warrants had ensued and he had not, in all his hacker brilliance, realized S’PhearHead had invaded his system and disabled the nine sweep shredder program he thought he’d been running every ten hours and all the little details in regards to location of the lab and identities of the actual manufacturers were only mere keystrokes away.    

I was up for a Director’s Citation for that one.  Didn’t get it and wasn’t too surprised about it.  Jase hadn’t been able to stop me sending in my little rant and diatribe to the quarter annual DPSOA magazine.  That little Finn Spin had about clinched my career.  You can’t refer to the higher ups in your chain of command using words like “technologically constipated” and not expect some fall out.   

S’PhearHead had loved it though.   Jase said he was in love with me.  I think a lot of it was hero stuff and he just didn’t know what to do with it because infatuations can’t be laid out and explored and explained in a line of code or a script.  The combination of gratitude and the thrill of revenge and justice were just not something S’PhearHead was programmed to deal with.   

There’d been an email where he came probably as close to saying it as he could and I had carefully avoided responding to it.  Several weeks later I had sent him a brief cheery e-card and had it bounced back to me, user unknown.   

When Jase died there was a generous donation made in his name to the White Shaman Tours at Seminole Canyon, Comstock, Texas.   The donor wished to remain anonymous but I’d known who it was.  In one of those early morning ICQ’s he and I had discussed the ways communication had evolved from petroglyphs and rock art to e-mail and ICQ.   S’PhearHead believes hackers are the shamans of our generation; they are the ones seeing the future and the dreams of the collective.   

A cyber search isn’t that much different from what you do in a gasoline powered vehicle or on your own two feet; you canvass a particular neighborhood and then move on.  There are hours of boredom mingled intermittently with moments of dazzling, terrifying breakthroughs of discovery and potential terror.  Even the food is the same; sugar and caffeine.  The staples of both cops and hackers.   

I’d stopped for Mountain Dew on the way back to the penthouse.  There’s a certain mind frame you have to assume for every job when you go undercover and I cannot convince my brain that cyber is any different.  I’m assuming a role and taking on a mask the same as with any other job.   

When I lean over my laptop an hour later with my ice cold, sweet, caffeine packed drink at hand I do so in a hacker’s slouch and can feel my face arranging itself into the intense, squint-eyed hacker stare S’PhearHead had described to me, the face he sees in the mirror.  I look at my hands on the keyboard in the gloomy blue-white-gray light of the computer universe which never varies twenty four seven and I will my way through the circuits searching, keying, lingering and moving on through IRC and message boards, Google searches and aimless random clicks on banners praying for instinct to click in for me and lead me to him. 

In the near silent humming world of cyber space, S’PhearHead is a God.  He is a Guru who writes elegant code and is as far removed from the average code crunching chip jockey as I am from the recruit saluting for the first time as a Trooper I after the Academy.   

No one will be giving S’PhearHead away, no one will do a single thing they think will end in hardship for him, not that think for one single moment that I could catch him.  Even the ones who envy his brilliance, who view his having helped the Department and me bag the ring of cyber dealers as a sort of betrayal don’t want to mess with him for the simple reason that S’PhearHead pissed at you is a perilous way to dwell.  Five keystrokes and he can invent a failed marriage complete with the divorce and the unfair settlement from the judge.  Fifty and he can have slung enough shit into a life to cancel credit cards, terminate bank loans, call mortgages due, invent pages of 900 numbers on a phone bill and convinced your boss you have been using your Mac to write an ode on the Wonders of Pedophilia.  Illustrated.  

It’s five and a half hours before I find even a trace of him, even a single small glimpse of him on line and then it isn’t much; a solitary terse reference to some inept lines of code some wanna be has written; I’m stunned to see I see immediately what has pissed S’PhearHead off about it.  It isn’t that it won’t work.  It’s just lame.  He’s used twice the amount of script needed and it’s just clumsy.   

Sheeeesh. I could write script better than that and S’PhearHead hasn’t been able to resist commenting on it, probably drawn in from a bot search on the word “daemon” which obviously means something different to this poser.   

I right click and try to trace where he’s come from but there’s nothing of course; he’s too smart for that.  So I post back to him banking that he’s embedded flags and ordered some daemon there to notify him when anyone lingers too long at any site he’s actually graced with his presence.  

Then I open another Mountain Dew and stretch out on one of Sylvie’s extravagantly dyed oriental carpets and prop the lap top of my chest and begin zipping from chat to chat in IRC, occasionally playing a hand of Spider Solitaire, hoping I’ll see someone or that someone will see me and S’PhearHead will come find me. 

At 0326 hours my laptop suddenly decides to log me off line and start playing Spider Solitaire, four suites, the most difficult and I sit up, grinning. 

He’s found me. 

I watch the cards move and shuffle and flick across my screen with blinding speed and he wins, of course.  When the fireworks explode and the game asks if he’d like to play again he responds no and the IM box finally opens. 

S’PhearHead:  What the fuck are you doing in California, Huckleberry?

I am ridiculously near tears as I read it.  I know I should probably feel invaded, since I have been, but all I feel at the moment is gratitude that he’s out there.   

H_Cooper_Finn:  So, what’s with the Spider Solitaire game? 

S’PhearHead: Like that?  New backdoor. Invade through some code lines in MS Games but to gain access I have to play the PC & WIN.  

H_Cooper_Finn:  Like that was hard.  

S’PhearHead:  What are you doing in California?  You a CHiP instead of a DiP now? 

I consider all sorts of responses to that one but the only thing I end up typing is:  

H_Cooper_Finn: I need help.   

S’PhearHead:  Knew that already.  Why else would you hunt me down?  

Ouch.  I put my head down for that one and take a deep breath.  Now I want to cry for a different reason.   

The cursor blinks, waiting.  I consider half a dozen apologies and none of them ring true and none say what I’m feeling.   

Finally I suck it up and put my hands back down on the keyboard.  

H_Cooper_Finn:  Someone I know is in trouble.  In some deep shit.  You are the only one I know who can help her.

S’PhearHead:  Her?   

I hear the hard drive on the computer grind away as he begins picking through my files and folders and I sit back and wait.  This is the price I pay.  He gains access.  I let him sort and read and rummage.  If I can talk him into doing what I want it will be well worth it.   I’ve fucked up but maybe I can salvage something.    

I know that before, when we were working together on the cyber dealer case, he had gained such access and had read my emails, the saved love letters from and to Jase, the rather detailed and graphic sexual exploits and fantasies included.  I hadn’t been exactly thrilled but in some strange way I’d grasped the inclination and known too there was no surer way to convince him I was happily mated.   

S’PhearHead:  SFPD, eh?   

H_Cooper_Finn:  Yeah.   

S’PhearHead:  What’s with the shrink?  

Oh fuck.  Of course he’s gone unerringly straight to Legaspi.   

H_Cooper_Finn:  Yeah.  The shrink.  They made me go.  I went.   

There’s a moment of silence and I sit and watch the cursor blink and wait. 

S’PhearHead:  You okay?  

Well, that’s debatable.  Let us count the ways I am not and let us list the ways I have fucked up.  But not right now.  Right now the answer is the standard, “I’m fine.”

I have this running joke with an on line ER nurse friend of mine in Australia.  She’s come from the same sort of home as I had and taken that same path against it only her fork branched into emergency medicine while mine zagged into law enforcement.  The initial mental/emotional thrust was the same though; fix things.  Rescue people.  And in the doing of that there is a silent compact made with the self that personal wounds must just be let to bleed and fester and there is only one answer to that question invariably asked after some trauma.   

“I’m fine.”  And to that she and I would add, “Hand me my arm.”   

Interesting how similar the twisted humor of Texans and Australians has evolved.  

 I resist the urge to type this to S’PhearHead.  He’d probably get it though.  He’s probably read the freaking emails to Perth. 

 H_Cooper_Finn:  I’m not the one with the problem.   

S’PhearHead:  Got that.  Exstead?  Jinny?   

H_Cooper_Finn:  Yeah.  You’re in my fucking email, aren’t you?   

S’PhearHead:  The better to assimilate your drama, my dear. 

Good.  That’s flippant.  He’s backed off.   

H_Cooper_Finn:  I need to get into this Massey’s computer.  At home.   

S’PhearHead:  He’s what?  A cop?

I type in an assent and sit back and wait, hoping he’s doing whatever it is he does to gain access to a personal computer knowing the odds of Massey being on line right now are nil.  This is the witching hour for dealers and pill heads and freaks and hackers.  Not for people like Massey.   

S’PhearHead:  You got anything for me?   Phone #? Email? Or you just expect me to conjure this up out of air? 

Hmmm.  Is that a little peevish, or what?   

H_Cooper_Finn:  Conjure?  Isn’t that a little witch-doctorish for a Guru? 

S’PhearHead:  Waiting.   

Shit.  He’s definitely unhappy with me.  I feel like crying but I’ve consumed too much liquid caffeine for that.  I grind my teeth instead and give him what I have on Massey; name, rank, department at SFPD, home address, phone numbers.   

Then I sit back and wait.   

S’PhearHead:  Not on line.  Want me to keep trying?  I can write a kludge to tell me when he boots up, send a message to you at the same time. 

Oh, that’s good.  What I wouldn’t give to possess the brain to write a script like that.

 I thank him and he tells me to give him fifteen to write it.  I lean back and rub my bleary eyes and yawn, trying to imagine what S’PhearHead looks like, try to picture him right now hunched over an off white keyboard, fingers flying, face intent on the screen—

H_Cooper_Finn:  “S’Phear, what do you look like?  

For several moments there’s nothing.  I’m beginning to think he’s either so into his code or has decided to not answer.   

But then: 

S’PhearHead: I’m nobody you’d look at twice.  Believe me.   

H_Cooper_Finn:  That’s certainly arrogant of you, telling me who I’d look at.   

S’PhearHead:  Yeah, well.  I’m the Guru, remember.   

I laugh.  I’d forgotten he was funny as well as fucking brilliant.   

H_Cooper_Finn:  Where are you?  In RL?  

S’PhearHead:  You want this kludge, Huckleberry?  You need to let me write it.   

I settle back to wait him out but am surprised a moment later when a new text message pops into the ICQ box.   

S’PhearHead: You’re asking me to invade the home computer of Congressman Chandler’s brother in law.  You know that, right? 

I respond that yes, I do indeed know this.   

It’s several moments before he has anything else to say.  I cross my fingers he’s still there pounding out the kludge for me and look at the time at the bottom right of my toolbar.  0418.  Finally I catch movement on my screen and see he’s back in ICQ. 

S’PhearHead:  You want to tell me what kind of shit you’ve stepped in this time, Huckleberry? 

H_Cooper_Finn:  How much time do you have, S’Phear?

End of Twenty