Murder at the B-School Read online

  Oddly, though, there was no pass card for Eric’s apartment. And despite a careful search, none had turned up in his apartment. Had he lost it? Loaned it to someone? Hidden it under a doormat somewhere? Dropped it down a storm drain as a symbolic gesture on his way to committing a lonely suicide?

  Suicide. The crumpled note in Eric’s trash can certainly hinted at some kind of deep trouble, even desperation. But not necessarily a self-destructive streak. Jeannette Bartlett’s anguished testimony, too, argued against suicide.

  The thought of Bartlett prompted Brouillard to run through the cast of characters. Again, there wasn’t much to work with. The thuggish brother with the wispy wife. The sister, mostly an afterthought. Both sibs would benefit from Eric’s death, going from real rich to real rich. The angry father and the sedated mother. The Harvard crowd, deans and professors, playing their institutional roles, covering their institutional butts, mainly wishing that she would disappear from their busy and important lives. And Bartlett herself, either legitimately torn up or going for her first Oscar.

  Brouillard’s thoughts drifted back to her meeting with Bartlett in the fancy lunchroom. Bartlett’s hasty departure, and the chair thudding heavily on the carpet in the sunlight.

  The fact was, Brouillard knew, she would never get the full picture of what Eric MacInnes was all about. She could only get inside the head and heart of this dead rich kid vicariously and selectively, through the eyes of people who didn’t think like she did or ask the kinds of questions she asked or sift information the way she did.

  But Bartlett, distraught as she appeared to be, had more insight than most. More than once, Brouillard had reviewed her notes summarizing Bartlett’s version of Eric MacInnes. It fit with all the physical clues he had left behind: self-absorption, tidiness, an obsession with life as a sort of continuous performance. And loneliness. That fit, somehow.

  Had Eric been planning to marry that drab classmate of his, so far “beneath” his appointed station in life? Brouillard doubted it. Had he confided in her? Brouillard was sure of it. Bartlett knew Eric—at least Business School Eric—far better than did the members of his clannish, above-the-fray family.

  And this brought her thoughts back to that crumpled note in the trash can, the note that had sent Bartlett rushing to puke in the bathroom.

  What was it about that note that felt wrong? The introduction of some love angle that no one seemed to know anything about? The misspellings? The effort to wax poetic? The bare-wire language from a spoiled brat who seemed to specialize in the superficial?

  No, she concluded again as she pulled up in front of an ugly one-story storefront on Hillside Street, she didn’t like that note.

  And that was one reason why she was meeting with Art Deming, deep computer nerd.

  In his early thirties, he was some kind of permanent graduate student who was loosely associated with Tufts. And he was more than that.

  Here in this crummy storefront, the windows of which still bore sagging vinyl signs advertising the talents of the previous proprietor—who had fixed VCRs until something bad had happened to him or to the business—Deming also ran a one-man data-recovery service.

  Deming was very, very good at what he did. He charged his private-sector clients exorbitant sums to grab critical data off damaged hard drives. He probably made as much in a couple of days, Brouillard guessed, as your average Boston detective made in a month.

  As a rule, Deming didn’t do police work. But Brouillard had helped him out of a minor possession situation a few years earlier—more of a misunderstanding, really. For the rest of his days he was prepared to offer any assistance he could to the rumpled, closemouthed detective who had single-handedly rescued him from what he saw as the black hole of the Boston criminal court system.

  Brouillard saw it differently, but didn’t always remind him of that.

  She pushed open the door of the shop, setting the small bell above the door to dancing and jangling. Moving from bright sunshine to the gloom of the shop, she was momentarily blinded. But she knew from past visits that there wasn’t much to see here anyway: waist-high counters along three sides of the tiny shop, mostly bare. Floor-to-ceiling shelves behind the counters—probably original equipment from the turn of the previous century, although recently buttressed with shiny new angle irons to help support the weight of the computers that lined them. Some of these objects looked familiar to Brouillard, as her eyes adjusted. But others looked exotic. She had no idea whether that meant they were very old or very new.

  “Hey, Captain.” Deming’s reedy voice emerged from a room off the rear of the shop. He didn’t get a lot of visitors. “Come on back. For you, the inner sanctum.”

  Although the back room was only a quarter the size of the front, this was where the real work took place. Electronic testing equipment, entangled in great snarls of cables, covered the back half of a huge workbench that spanned the entire side wall. Lights glowed here and there. Fans hummed. Two ugly round fluorescent fixtures with concentric tubes buzzed overhead, throwing down cones of stark, greenish-white light, but the overall atmosphere was still gloomy. A lone window on the far side of the room was completely shrouded by light-tight curtains. Daylight was something to be managed.

  Deming was seated at the far end of the workbench with Eric MacInnes’s Gateway computer sandwiched between two huge, mismatched monitors. He had wispy black hair and high cheekbones that protruded too far from a pale and gaunt face. His skin seemed to be stretched a little too tight. His wrinkled chinos and clear-rimmed glasses fit the nerd profile, Brouillard noted. His starched blue dress shirt did not.

  “So come over and sit down, O my savior,” he said, pulling a second chair alongside his own and dusting off the seat with his shirtsleeve.

  “For the record, I think we should just agree that you saved yourself,” Brouillard replied.

  “Yeah, yeah. Except for the fact that you told me what to say and when to say it.”

  “Well, then, it’s our little secret.” The truth was that Brouillard couldn’t even remember the specifics of his drug bust, beyond the fact that he had been in the wrong place at the wrong time with a satchelful of someone else’s goods: quantities sufficient to get him into some serious trouble. He had been overwhelmingly contrite and needed a break. She had given him one.

  She draped her trench coat over the back of the empty chair and sat down. “So what can we learn from Eric MacInnes’s computer?”

  He looked sideways at her. “A lot. Or at least enough to make you want to learn more.”

  After an exchange of e-mails the day before, she had retrieved Eric’s computer from Evidence and sent it over to Deming’s shop. In a follow-up phone call, she had described to him the cast of characters and asked him to keep an eye out for anything out of the ordinary. If there were any Word documents, spreadsheets, or other files that didn’t seem to be strictly routine, she wanted to know about it. If the computer had been tampered with in any way, she wanted to know about that. If he could retrieve anything that Eric might have tried to get rid of, she wanted to know about that, too.

  To the side of the computer, she had taped a manila envelope, sealed with strapping tape, with Deming’s name on it. Inside the envelope was a photocopy of the crumpled note from Eric’s trash can. “You haven’t seen this,” she cautioned him on the phone. “But I want you to find it. And anything else that feels anything like it.”

  She knew she didn’t have to tell him the rest of the things she was interested in: the great motivators of sex, money, and power. She knew she didn’t have to ask him to review Eric’s e-mail. He would do that as a matter of course.

  Most of this work, especially the reviewing and sampling aspects, was far below his skill levels. In addition to being extremely systematic in his thinking, he had surprisingly good people instincts. He was at the same time nosy and discreet—two qualities that Brouillard rarely found in the same package. And, of course, he believed that he owed her big-time.

/>   Deming now waved at his electronic array. “Basically,” he said, “there’s a couple of levels of intervention that are possible. I’ve done the easy stuff—top-level content and first-line technology tricks. You could dig a lot deeper on both fronts. On the content side, if you had a couple of days or weeks, you could read everything on his machine. That’s not what you pay me for.” It was a lame joke; she didn’t pay him.

  “On the technology side,” he continued, “if you decide you want to go further, there’s ways to do that, too. I could do some of it, but at some point I’d have to start charging you for it. There are other people out there who could go down even further, and they’d charge you way more than me. If you went that route, it would take time and it would get expensive. You’re looking at a whole lot of ones and zeros. And at the end of the day, you might not learn anything more from them than I’m about to tell you.”

  “So tell me first what you’ve got, Art, and then we can talk about what else might be needed.”

  “Right, right,” he said. “Getting ahead of myself, as usual. Okay. So, the first thing I did to Electronic Eric”—he nodded toward the machine—“was to check out his e-mail situation. I just did some sampling. Nothing much to report there. I printed you out a complete log, in and out, and also a representative batch of some incoming and outgoing. Long story short: He likes his family but doesn’t go out of his way to hook up with them. He seems pretty tight with sister Libby. He has a pal with the lame screen name of ‘downhilldave13740,’ who comes to him courtesy of AOL, and who I take to be a guy who he’s known forever. Maybe a drinking-buddy type, a ski bum, whatever. They confide in each other, but within solid guy boundaries. Eric complains to him that his finance elective is boring, worries that there’s a little too much hair in the shower drain—that sort of stuff. Not a high emotional quotient.”

  Art, on a roll, moved along. “What else? He likes this woman Jeannette, but maybe not as much as she likes him—hey,” he said, noticing Brouillard’s raised eyebrow, “just a guess. Whatever. He bids on the occasional tchotchke on eBay, but good stuff—no junk. The average number of spammed e-mails slipped through his filters, including some pushing porno sites and member enlargers, but there’s nothing to indicate that he’s paid any money to slobber over or buy any kinky stuff.

  “And his housekeeping isn’t too great. There’s quite a backlog—more than a thousand e-mails in each direction. So you can go back more than a year, if you’re so inclined. I mostly sampled stuff that looked promising.”

  Brouillard quickly scanned the sheaf of printouts. Deming seemed to have summarized them accurately. On first blush, Eric appeared to be a careful and competent writer. No misused words. Very few typos, even on notes that appeared to be dashed off. Later she would work through this cache more carefully.

  “What’s your confidence level,” she asked, “that you’re seeing the whole volume, incoming and outgoing?”

  Again he shrugged. “Hard to say. I thought about that. There’s little things that might raise a question. Like, sometimes there’s days missing, and occasionally a whole week. But he could have been out of town; it could have been school vacation. You’d have to sync all that stuff up. And I didn’t see any conversations with obvious holes in them. When he says, ‘Got your note,’ the note seems to be there. But no way did I match ’em up one-for-one. That’s a drudge job, frankly—not my thing. And again, we’re talking days to do it right.”

  “Let me ask it a different way. If messages had been deleted, could you tell? And could you reconstruct them?”

  “The short answer is no. E-mails aren’t saved as separate files. They’re part of a database that’s accessed by your e-mail program. When you dump data from a database, that information is gone. Period. It’s like a sentence in the middle of a Word document—you decide you don’t like it, and you delete it? It’s gonzo. The document is there, but that little piece is gone.”

  “That’s the short answer. What’s the long answer?”

  He smiled. “Yeah, well, I was pretty sure you’d ask. The long answer is only a little better, for your purposes. The basic thing to remember is that there’s more than one machine involved when you do e-mail. Say you send a message to your girlfriend. It goes to the outgoing mail server, which packages up the message and sends it off to its destination. On the other end, you’ve got your girlfriend’s incoming mail server, which receives the message and delivers it to your girlfriend’s machine.

  “Every server administrator configures their system differently. But most systems are set up to keep a log of the network traffic. On the other hand, they don’t generally keep the body of the message you send to your girlfriend. Nobody wants all that junk lying around in their systems. And anyway, there are some privacy issues, right?

  “But they do tend to keep track of the sender’s name, the recipient’s name, the subject of the e-mail—assuming you bothered to write something on the subject line—and the date and time you sent it.”

  “So,” she interrupted, “I need a copy of the server’s log of e-mail to and from Eric. Which Harvard is supposed to be pulling together for me.”

  “Right. Well, you can bet that Harvard’s intranet has enough bells and whistles to give you at least the stuff I mentioned. And at the same time, I’d bet that Mother Harvard isn’t storing private e-mail messages. Too messy. Too many liberals and law school professors in the neighborhood with time on their hands.”

  She pursued her own line of thought. “And then I sit down and compare that log with these printouts, and see if they match up.”

  “Well, yeah, but like I said, that’s a truly crappy job. Especially since this kid hasn’t dumped much of anything for more than a year. Aren’t there police cadets, or something like that, who you could hand this kind of stuff off to?”

  “That would be nice,” she said dryly. “What else? What about spreadsheets, Word files, and so on?”

  “No spreadsheets, databases, or exotic stuff, beyond what he needed for school. I’m no expert, but I don’t think he knew a spreadsheet from a bedsheet.”

  Nerd humor. She smiled. “So far, Art, you’re not telling me much I don’t already know.”

  “Yeah, but the best is yet to come. I went spelunking for that little ‘tennis bubbles’ note you sent over. And what do you know?” He paused for effect. “It wasn’t there.”

  When she didn’t respond, he continued. “Okay, not too surprising, right? You figure Eric writes it, prints it out, decides for whatever reason that it’s a really bad idea, crumples it up, and deletes the file. What he doesn’t know is that we can come along behind him and get it back.”

  “It’s deleted, but it’s not gone? How does that work?”

  “Because he hasn’t really deleted it. Word files are different from e-mails. They’re actually pretty hard to get rid of. Of course, he could sit down and reformat his hard drive. That would get rid of the document more or less permanently. But it’s also the most drastic way imaginable. It’s like burning down your house to solve your cobweb problem. You basically only do that if you want to start life over again, and reload all your software, and re-create your Internet preferences, and so on, and so on. It’s the get-a-new-life mode. Very bad.

  “The other way to make a document go away permanently,” he went on, “is the way most of us do it—gradually. We just keep adding stuff to our hard drives, and sooner or later, the computer decides it needs that disk space that has a big ‘Available’ sign hanging over it, and overwrites it.

  “So anyway”—he saw the impatient look on her face—“I ran a utility that looks for ghosts—the afterimages of deleted documents. That program turned up thirteen ghosts, including the one you were specifically interested in. I can call them up for you.”

  He pointed to the monitor closer to her. She watched as he clicked open a folder. She saw only a list: “Document 1,” “Document 2,” and so on, up to “Document 13.”

  “Again, most of these f
iles aren’t very interesting,” he continued. “Schoolwork. Ho hum. Blah, blah, blah. Reminds me that I’m glad I never went to business school. I can print them out if you want. But Document 11 is the one you were looking for. There.” He double-clicked. Up it came. “Same as the photocopy you sent over.”

  She could see that. “What do we know about when the document was created?”

  “Unfortunately, nothing. Deleting the file doesn’t necessarily get rid of it, but it usually strips the date and time stamps off. That’s what it did in this case. Gonzo.”

  “Is Document 11 newer than, say, Document 10?”

  “Not necessarily. Luck of the draw.”

  She pondered the screen for a minute. “So what you’re telling me, Art, is that there’s not much to learn here.”

  He grinned. “So far, all we’ve learned is that there’s not much to learn from the tennis bubbles note. Which, as you say, I haven’t seen. But there’s one other thing.” He pointed to the icon for the recycle bin. “Let’s look in here and take a peek at the trash that he hasn’t even bothered to take out of the house yet.”

  This time a series of Word and Excel icons came up. There appeared to be about two dozen of them. “Again,” he said, “mostly boring stuff. Odd that he doesn’t empty the trash for weeks on end, but I guess that’s consistent with how he handles his e-mails. Memory is cheap, right? You get a big enough hard drive, and you’re a low-level user, you almost never have to clear it out.

  “This one here,” he continued, tapping on an icon and talking a little faster, “this one I think you’ll like.” He dragged it onto the desktop and double-clicked to open it. “I printed you out a copy.” He handed her a single sheet.