Karen Vail 01 - Velocity by Alan Jacobson Page B

her. The way he folds his towels, his laundry, his clothing. Are his shirts on hangers in closets? Neatly arranged on shelves? Are there dishes in the sink?
    Does he hoard newspapers, magazines, odd trinkets?
    Everything she saw before her was like words in a novel; each room a chapter.
    Overal , that book told an important story about this offender. Who he was, at the core of his daily existence, unfiltered. Because he never expected to get caught, he had no reason to hide who he was.
    And Vail was not disappointed. She had anticipated a neat, orderly living environment. Possessions wel cared for. Trophies and framed certificates of his accomplishments. And nothing to suggest anyone else was responsible for, or had contributed to, his achievements.
    After walking through the living room—dominated by an intricately carved walnut table with matching formal chairs—she moved into the hal and then the family room.
    Dixon cal ed out to her from the den. On a couch in the corner was a box containing an unopened pay-as-you-go phone. “No surprise there. I’m sure the one he’d been using is here somewhere, if he didn’t already dump it before we grabbed him up.”
    “Even better,” Vail said, heading toward a desk along the far wal . “His PC.”
    Dixon joined her by the window, which looked out at the mountains.

    “Does the Sheriff’s Department have a cyber crime division that can go through the hard drive?”
    “Yeah, but I don’t know if it’s as good as what you’ve got at the Bureau. You want to wait, or do you want to see if there’s anything on here about Robby?”
    All questions should be that easy. Vail turned on the monitor and flicked the keyboard. The computer fan whirled to life and the screen read, “Windows is resuming.” She looked over at Dixon. “It was on standby.”
    “How’d you know?”
    “Narcissists tend to leave their computers asleep so they can get right to work when inspiration stirs them.”
    Dixon squinted. “Real y?”
    “No,” Vail said. “I just made that up.”
    Dixon suppressed a smile, then nodded at the desktop, which had loaded.
    “But narcissists think they’re immune to the consequences of their own actions, functioning on almost a delusional sense of omnipotence.”
    “Meaning?”
    “Meaning,” Vail said, “I didn’t think his PC would be password protected. He never expected to be outsmarted. To be caught.” She sat down and moved aside a bottle of half-drunk Cakebread Cabernet. Moused over to the Computer icon and opened Windows Explorer. The familiar file tree appeared and she scrol ed to Documents.
    “You think there’l be anything incriminating on here?”
    Vail leaned closer to the screen. “Count on it. Because he didn’t expect us to catch him, there’s no need to take safeguards or use deceptive techniques to protect his information from the police. Besides, if it got to the point where the cops were doing what we’re doing and poking around his house and computer, he’d be in deep shit. In which case he wouldn’t care what we found.”
    Vail used the document preview feature in Explorer to quickly scan the files without opening them. She pointed at the screen. “Here’s the ad he sent to the Press .” Then she remembered reading something in an FBI forensics bul etin.
    “COFEE.”
    Dixon looked at her. “Now?”
    “No, no, not the drink. COFEE’s an acronym for a forensic tool Microsoft developed for cops, so they can copy evidence off a computer before it’s turned off and moved to the lab. Once a computer’s shut down, this kind of data vanishes.”
    “You have any idea how to use it?”
    “It’s just a thumb drive. You plug it in and a few minutes later, it’s captured al the data. Aaron’s on his way over; he can do it and send it to the FBI’s cyber crime unit.” She gestured at the PC. “Who knows what’s on here? What websites he’s visited, who he’s been communicating with. From what I remember reading, some