What Have You Done(32)

As dawn broke on a new day, the Homicide Division was relatively empty. There were a few detectives at their desks, but for the most part, the floor was dark and quiet with changeover from the midnight to day shift still about an hour away. Liam quietly slipped through the double doors and hid behind a row of filing cabinets. He made his way to the opposite end of the room and sidled up to the last row of desks in the far corner. Keenan’s desk was one in from where he stood. He looked from behind the cabinets and saw two detectives, three rows away, hardly moving, their heads buried in their computer screens. The entire floor was deadly quiet. There was no way he could come out from where he was without being seen. One wrong step on the ancient hardwood floors and all heads would turn. It was too dangerous.

Plan B.

Liam retraced his steps, walked back out into the hallway, and made his way down to the first-floor back entrance, where he was alone. He leaned against the wall and ran through his contingency plan once more in his head.

There wouldn’t be much time once things began. He’d have to act quickly and with purpose. The next few minutes could dictate the rest of his life.

The fire alarm was just outside the stairwell that led up to the second and third floors of the department. The nearest fire department was five blocks away, which meant arrival time would be about ten minutes. He’d have ten minutes to get this done. Anything more, and he’d be caught. And if he were caught, things would be revealed, which would mean the end of him trying to find the truth. Trembling fingers wrapped around the alarm’s tiny glass handle. One more breath, then he pulled it.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, Liam knew the siren ripping through the station house was deafening, but his focus was solely on the metal stairs he climbed two at a time. When he got to the second floor, he was met by about a dozen officers and detectives making their way out of the green steel fire door and onto the stairs that would bring them to the lobby and out onto the street, where they would await further instructions. Liam could hear some of the men mumbling profanities under their breath while others wondered if the alarm was a drill or the real thing.

It took some effort to swim against the current of bodies pouring against him, but he stepped to the side and moved ahead as they passed by without so much as a glance. He waited until the last man remaining from the second floor began to make his descent and then ran down the hall into the Homicide Division, which was now void of anyone other than himself.

The clock was ticking. Liam scurried to Keenan’s desk at the far end of the room and turned on his computer. In the moments it took the computer to boot up, he finally noticed the volume of the alarm as well as the flashing strobe lights coming from the fire monitors that were mounted on the walls.

The computer was on.

Unlike the simple method of copying files from a computer that Don had done on Kerri’s laptop, this process required complete stealth and had to leave files intact. Keenan couldn’t know Liam had ever touched his keyboard, let alone been inside his system. Therefore, this was a procedure that needed to be done physically at Keenan’s desk. There was no other way around it, and time was of the essence.

Beads of perspiration slipped down his forehead as Liam took the CD from his pocket and placed it in the disc sleeve on the side of the laptop. He pushed the sleeve back in and checked his watch. Eight more minutes. By his estimation, the emergency responders were already suiting up, and an EMT unit was being dispatched from one of the area hospitals. This had to work quickly. Police personnel would stay out of the building until the fire department gave them the all clear, so he didn’t need to worry about anyone else sneaking up on him. Still, the clock was ticking.

As soon as the CD loaded, a series of numbers and letters flashed onto the screen too fast for the human eye to keep up with. Alphanumeric combinations came, one after the other, in nanoseconds. After about two minutes, the screen went black, and then Keenan’s desktop appeared. Liam slid the mouse over to the email file and clicked on it. The computer opened the file, and Keenan’s inbox appeared. He was in.

Just as Nelson had promised, the phone records sat at the top of the list, unread. Liam clicked on the email and forwarded it to himself.

“Floor Captain!” a voice cried over the unrelenting alarm. “Anyone up here?”

Liam’s heart skipped a beat as he slid off the chair he was sitting on. He hid the best he could while trying to delete the email from Keenan’s inbox as well as delete the email he’d sent himself from the Sent file.

“Hello! Anyone here?”

The department had assigned several officers to be floor captains in the event of a fire drill. Their job was to be the last people out to ensure everyone else was evacuated and accounted for. He’d forgotten about them.

“Hello!”

Both emails were deleted. Fumbling hands moved the mouse over to the deleted files, and with a few key strokes, he purged those as well. Almost done.

The beam of a flashlight bounced off the wall as it approached from down the hall. It was time to go. Liam ejected the CD from the sleeve and shut down the computer. Just as he stood up, the flashlight hit him square in the chest.

“What’re you doing here?” the floor captain asked.

The man behind the flashlight was an older sergeant he recognized by face, but he couldn’t place the name. Liam made a circular motion with his hand. “All clear,” he replied.

“What?”