The Devil Went Down to Austin (Tres Navarre #3)(77)

He wheeled around and headed for the stairs.

I smiled apologetically at Mrs. Hayes. "Nice seeing you again, ma'am."

I could feel her eyes on my back as I left, like ice cubes pressing into my shirt.

Halfway up the stairs, one of the smaller children was blocking my path. It was Clem, Mrs. Hayes' fanwielder, watching me with feral brown eyes under a mess of brown hair. He had a shoebox pinched between his knees.

"She doesn't like you," he confided.

I looked in his box. Brown and green things moved, glistening in the bottom—things about the size of almonds. My skin crawled.

Not that I hadn't seen cicadas before, but Clem had tried a new experiment. He'd put them back into their former skins—liberally Scotchtaping their desiccated shells to their bodies. He'd left some of the legs free, so the suffocating cicadas could crawl in helpless paths, going nowhere, waiting to die.

"It's a race," he confided.

I hugged the wall as I stepped around him.

Dwight's bedroom was on the left. He sat in the dark on a trundle bed, his backpack between his knees, staring dejectedly at a dumpedover bucket of toy cars on the carpet.

A bookshelf dominated the south wall—comic books in protective plastic sleeves, science fiction paperbacks, hot rod magazines, computer programming manuals, Clive Cussler novels. There was a window on the right, light filtering through the upper branches of a redbud in the backyard. Posters were thumb tacked to the wall: Nolan Ryan, Stevie Ray Vaughan, the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. If the room had been any more Average Texan Boyhood it would've cracked the meter.

I started to reach for the light switch.

"Don't," Dwight said. "She doesn't like the lights on. Wastes energy."

I wondered how Dwight had gotten so tan growing up in a dark house. The answer immediately presented itself: Dwight would've left as soon and as often as possible.

"You okay?" I asked.

"The kids. It's like having a Little League team invited to trample over your childhood."

I went to the window, looked out at the yard. "At least they limit a Little League team to nine."

Dwight nodded sourly. He fished something out of his pack, threw it to me. "Good news. What I did this morning."

A handwritten label on the tape said TECHSAN. It looked no different from the eighttracks Garrett used to keep in his car when I was a kid—certainly nothing worth dying for.

"What did you find?"

Dwight zipped his bag. "What Pena will announce today. There's a sequence in the code that shouldn't be there. He'll blame it on the original programmers."

"The back door."

Dwight lay back on his bed, stared at the ceiling. "It's a beautiful subroutine. Elegant, really. And until it's closed, nothing is safe— not a single file on a client's server, as long as they're running Techsan's product."

I looked out the window. The yard below was balding crabgrass, lined by a wooden fence with missing planks. A barbecue pit squatted between a tool shed and scraggly hibiscus bushes.

"You said you had good news."

"It depends on whether you find Garrett," Dwight replied. "Whether he'll help. I heard—I heard about Ms. McBride. I'm sorry."

"How can Garrett help?"

"I think it would be possible to track where the stolen files were diverted to. I'm not sure. This isn't my area of expertise. But if Garrett got into the source code, if he retraced the steps of the original sender, identified the packet sniffer and the PGP key involved—he might be able to triangulate an IP address."

"In English?"

"Find the saboteur."

"Before, Garrett couldn't even find the problem in his own code."

Dwight's ears turned red. Apparently, the idea that he'd found something Garrett had missed embarrassed him.

In the backyard, one of the smaller boys—John, maybe—ducked under a loose board in the fence. He was carrying a VCR that was much too big for him. It was partially wrapped in a blue towel. He saw me watching from the window and froze. He slid the VCR behind the nearest hibiscus bush and walked toward the house, trying not to run.

The scene made me feel sad down to my bones. I'd seen my share of disturbed children in eight years of PI work, but never so many in one place.

The hell of it was, I wasn't going to talk to the kid about it. I wasn't even going to turn him in. I wondered how many days fanning the Leviathan you'd get for stealing a VCR.

"I talked to Maia this morning," I told Dwight. "She had some information about Pena."

I told him about Maia's conversation with her new pal, the deputy in Burnet County.

Dwight stared at his comic book collection, shook his head. "That doesn't mean anything."

"You knew he was adopted?"

"Of course I knew. What difference does it make?"

"The harassment of the software developers, the disappearance of Adrienne Selak—I think that's just a small sample of what Matthew's capable of. His main agenda with Techsan isn't about money. It's personal—retribution."

Dwight opened the trundle bed cabinet at his feet, yanked out an empty duffel bag. "I told you—there's no reason the deal would be personal. He never met the Techsan principals before."