Cockatiels at Seven by Donna Andrews

at Walker, not you. How did you hear about this so fast, anyway?”
    Ashok visibly relaxed.
    “Some friends texted me the news about an hour ago. They couldn’t even IM me because the police had seized their computers.”
    Text, IM—I found myself wondering if it would ever occur to any of them to pick up the phone and call each other to gossip, which would be my first instinct. And was the fact that I thought this a sign of culture clash or generation gap?
    “What could he possibly have done?” I wondered aloud. “I mean, it must be something big, or the policewouldn’t be that hot about it, but if it’s big, it’s hard to believe it took them two years to discover it.”
    Unless, of course, someone who still worked at the college had been covering it up for two years. Someone like Karen. Had she disappeared because she’d been covering up for Jasper and knew the police were about to pounce? Or had the crime come to light because her disappearance interrupted her cover-up? Of course, it was always possible that she’d disappeared for some other reason, and the police raid on the data center happening just after her disappearance was only a coincidence. Possible, but not, alas, very likely.
    “What kind of system was Walker working on?” Jack asked. “I don’t mean the technical specs—what was it designed to do?”
    “Financial stuff,” Ashok said. “Keeping track of vendors and contracts and generating checks and electronic payments and a lot of stuff with bank accounts and investments. Sort of a complete system for all the money stuff. Sorry,” he said, seeing both Jack and me frown. “I know that’s kind of vague, but Walker just treated me like a code monkey, and I tried to keep my head down. He didn’t like it if you asked too many questions.”
    “No, if I were an embezzler, I’d try to keep my staff from learning too much,” Jack said. “Especially if I’d been lucky enough to get my larcenous little paws on the code that runs the college’s central financial systems. Talk about a gold mine.”
    “But if Jasper’s been gone for two years, then he has to have a confederate who’s still on the inside, right?” I asked.
    From the look on Jack’s face, I suspected he understood why I was asking.
    “Not necessarily,” he said. “He could have left himself a back door. A way of getting back into the system without anyone knowing about it,” he added, before I had to ask.
    Ashok looked solemn.
    “That was one of the rumors that went around when they fired him,” he said. “That they’d uncovered a back door he’d coded into the system.”
    “They’d have fixed that, surely, after he was fired,” Jack said.
    “Yeah but what if Jasper was sneakier than any of us realized,” Ashok said. “What if he programmed an obvious back door—maybe a couple. And when someone found them and fired him, all he had to do was sit and wait till the system went on-line and he could milk it.”
    “Not sure that’s plausible,” Jack said, shaking his head.
    “It’s a classic game technique,” Ashok said. “Put the players off guard by giving them a trap that’s easy to avoid. They’re so busy patting themselves on the back, they don’t notice until the last minute when you spring the real challenge.”
    “Yeah, but the first thing any sane IT department would do if they found one back door is search for others. Of course it’s also possible that they focused too much on looking for back doors and overlooked other sneaky things he could have done.”
    “Like having a confederate to let him in the front door.”
    “It’s possible,” Jack said. “Of course, it’s not the onlypossibility,” he added. No doubt he’d seen the look on my face at Ashok’s suggestion and remembered who Jasper’s confederate might be.
    “And it’s not as if they have anyone left over there with the brains to spot a back door,” Ashok said. “Of course, I think there’s still a limit to how long you