‘What about his mother?’
‘What you mean—like, “how dare you be nasty to my son!” kind of thing?’
‘Okay, you’ve made your point,’ Alex replied, embarrassed.
‘No, I’m not saying you should drop it altogether. It might be worth checking her out. Just let’s not put too much hope in a long shot.’
Before Alex could reply, the intercom buzzer sounded.
‘Yes?’ Juanita answered.
‘UPS. We have a special delivery from Sunnyvale.’
Juanita looked up.
‘Dorothy’s laptop,’ she said. Alex nodded. ‘Bring it up,’ she said into the intercom, pressing the buzzer to open the door.
Five minutes later Juanita was looking through the folders and files on the laptop, while Alex was in the other room with Nat.
‘Listen, I was talking to Juanita about Clayton’s mother. I think we should check her out. Clayton lived in the apartment with her and she had access to everything that he had access to.’
‘Like what?’ asked Nat.
‘The knife he kept under his pillow, the floorboards, the freezer.’
‘Yes, but she wouldn’t have had access to Dorothy. She’d’ve had to find her and either kill her and dispose of the body, or force her to some location and then kill her.’
‘Well maybe she did. I mean, we don’t know when or where Dorothy was killed. Or how.’
‘Not to mention the small matter of motive.’
Alex felt like he was facing a wall of resistance on all fronts.
‘The point is, we don’t know enough to rule his mother out a hundred percent! And right now it’s all we’ve got!’
Nat backed off from Alex’s display of frustration.
‘Okay, so how do you want to play it?’
‘I want you to go over there and talk to her.’
‘Where does she live?’
‘San Pablo. The Circle S Mobile Home Park.’
‘The one they’re closing down?’
‘Right.’
‘You sure she hasn’t moved on already?’
‘There’s only one way to find out.’
‘I’ll get right on it.’
Nat grabbed his keys and jacket and was out the door within five seconds. Alex returned to the reception area to find Juanita pounding at the laptop with an unusual amount of aggression, while peering at the screen with a look of intensity that he didn’t often see in her.
‘Has that computer disrespected your family?’ he asked, putting on his croakiest Brando/Don Corleone accent.
She looked round, her expression a mixture of confusion and anger, to see a puerile grin on his face.
‘Ha fuckin’ ha.’
Alex walked up to see what was going on.
‘There’s something strange about this computer.’
‘Strange?’ he echoed.
‘The hard disk has been wiped.’
Alex looked at the screen. Juanita was using Norton Utilities to inspect the disk content at a raw-data and deleted-file level.
‘So how come it’s still working?’
‘I don’t mean they reformatted it. I mean that all the deleted files have been overwritten. Normally the deleted files remain on the hard drive until the space is needed. It just deletes the directory entry and tells the directory that the space is available. But there are programs that overwrite the deleted files completely—sometimes making several passes with the erase head just to make sure.’
‘And why would anyone do that?’
‘What kind of a chicken-shit question is that?’ She sounded cute when she was angry. ‘To delete any trace of the files and stop them from being recovered!’
‘That implies there was something in them worth deleting.’
‘No shit, Sherlock.’
Alex leaned forward, peering at the screen with growing excitement.
‘Making it all the more important that we recover their contents.’
‘Which would be very nice, except there’s no way we can do that.’
‘Maybe there is.’ The phone was already in his hand by the time he said it. ‘Let’s call David.’
‘David?’
‘My son.’
‘The one at Berkeley?’
‘I only have one son.’
‘How do you know?’ she asked with a cheeky grin. Alex sensed that there was more to Juanita’s displays of impertinence than mere mockery. Melody had been just like that. It was her way of flirting with him. He wondered if it was the same with Juanita. She had certainly given him a few hints. He wondered how much of it was real and how much was just his imagination.
The lawyer in him knew that office romance was a dangerous game at the best of times—especially with a subordinate. If he did decide to go down that road, he’d have to tread carefully. But in any case it was a bit too early: the pain of losing Melody was still too raw…and today was hardly a day to be thinking about that sort of thing.
Juanita pressed the speed dial button and then handed Alex the phone.
‘Hi, Dave…Yes, I am, but I need your help…We have a computer with a hard disk that’s been wiped…No, I don’t mean reformatted, just the deleted files have been overwritten…How many passes?’
Alex looked inquiringly at Juanita. She shook her head.
‘We don’t know. But what I want to know is…it is? Scanning tunneling…’
Juanita mouthed the word ‘microscope’ to show that she understood.
‘You mean only if she just wiped it once? Oh I see. Okay, I’m sure you know what you’re doing. I’ll courier it over.’
And with that he put the phone down.
‘He can recover the data,’ said Juanita.
‘How d’you know?’
‘When I hear one side of a phone conversation, I can usually figure out the other. Read Godel, Escher, Bach.’ She started walking away.
‘I tried. I couldn’t get beyond the dialogue between Achilles and the Turtle.’
‘Besides—you’re smiling.’
‘Mrs Burrow?’ Nat called out nervously through the closed door of the mobile home. No answer. ‘Anyone home?’ Still no answer.
Nat opened the door, tentatively, and gingerly stepped inside. Technically it was trespassing, but the door was unlocked and time was of the essence. He looked round nervously. The living room was a mess. Surveying the ashtrays and half-empty plates with three-day-old, dried-out food encrusted on them, the words ‘trailer trash’ came to mind.
He was about to start looking