garden variety geeks

The two cross country pane flights and the weekend with his folks left Littlegirlcop feeling groggy and disconnected. That and very little sleep the night before his trip. His evening with assistant DA Kowalczyk was exciting and thoroughly enjoyable but not restful. They were at the site of the murder from two to three AM. They got about as much sleep after as they did before, though after was decidedly less amorous. Still, thought Murphy, there were worse way to spend the early morning hours than lying in bed with the DA talking about a murder. It was a standard gang hit, but the John Doe didn't fit the pattern. He was early thirties, pasty, doughy, long hair, shorts, sandals, laptop in a messenger bag, a garden variety tech geek. The guy looked like the two guys Marty and Murphy just hired to work on the Fencebuster. If the cops needed database guys and sysadmins, the gangs did too. Sleep is what Murphy needed. And talking to the new guys about search parameters and methodologies wasn't helping to wake him up.

"Stay with us Murphy," said Eric, the one that talked; the other one, Brian, did not. "We can build the search, but we're not cops, you need to tell us what we're looking for."We'll need to know what we can access. Can you get us into the servers at the FBI and DOJ?

"What I want," said Brian, "is a list IP addresses and URLs with know criminal associations." This was the first thing Brian had said all day.

The statement from the usually mute man snapped Murphy awake. The geeks began to chatter and white-board furiously. Brian and Eric ran off and in an hour they'd written some sort of test script that crawled all known and associated Hells Angels web address with data from last months theft reports. As it turned out there was a watch shop in the foothills that shared a server with the Angels, for a small shop they had a surprising amount of inventory, and the prices were a steal. That collar made the boys downtown take notice. And it made Murphy, Marty and the geeks, go-to guys.