The Third Rule Of Ten: A Tenzing Norbu Mystery by Gay Hendricks, Tinker Lindsay Read Free Book Online

trace, leaving out certain key details, such as who, what, and why. “The phone contract’s under my client’s name, but she can’t go the cell phone-carrier route to trace it, for reasons of acute paranoia—I mean, privacy. Otherwise, what I have to work with is a bunch of blanks.”
    “I don’t envy you,” Bill said. “Even with NamUs expanding its national database, we’ve had a helluva time tracking down unregistered aliens reported missing. I can think of maybe one success story out of hundreds, and she wasn’t even missing, just shacked up with a new boyfriend. I mean, think about it—where do you even start? Half of them have no ID, and the half that do trace back to someone who’s deceased, or living in another state, happily ignorant that his or her personal information has been hijacked. Needle in a haystack, Ten. That’s what you’ve got going on.”
    “Nobody said being a gumshoe was easy.”
    I waited. I knew Bill well.
    “Ah, crap. Give me the fucking number. I’ll see what I can do.”
    “Thanks,” I said, but he had already rung off. I texted him Clara’s number and added a smiley-face emoticon, guaranteed to make him mad all over again, in that best-of-friends way. Bill and I saw each other rarely these days, but once a partner, always a partner.
    I thought about what he’d said. If NamUs, the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, had problems tracking down illegals, my own chance of success seemed pretty slim. Everything hung on the cell phone.
    I was grateful for his help. I always had my recovering hacker, Mike, data jockey extraordinaire, on call as a backup plan, but as Bill pointed out, tracing someone else’s cell phone was illegal for anyone but the cops. I hated to knowingly ask Mike to break the law. I had kept him out of prison as a juvenile; I didn’t want to send him there as an adult.
    As I pulled up to my house, I pressed a random button on my phone. Once I reached my front door, the little genies inside the system would have already authenticated me and lowered their guns. I mentally bowed down to the genius of Mike.
    “It’s simple,” he’d said, after setting up the personalized feature for me. Mike’s phone was connected to my Guard-on breach alerts, and I’d woken him up several afternoons—Mike sleeps all day and works all night—by accidentally setting off the alarm. By the time I made it inside my house, it was too late to disarm the system. “All I had to do,” he went on, ignoring the growing glaze coating my eyes, “was assign your wireless network a static IP address and set up a Guard-on network item to ping the IP every five seconds. That way, when you’re close, you return the ping, and the system can check the MAC and initiate a bunch of macros, alerting the house you’re home. Easy-peasy.”
    Welcome to Mike’s brain—and my world.
    Tank met me at the door, his tail swishing. I reached down to pet him. He sniffed my hand and stalked away.
    “It’s horse,” I said. “And if it helps, I don’t like them any more than you do.”
    I washed my hands and made peace with a tuna-water offering. I was hungry myself and decided on peanut butter on toast. Only I couldn’t find the peanut butter, and my bread had broken out in suspicious little green splotches. I settled on a banana. As I peeled the fruit, I noticed a small yellow Post-it had fallen on the floor by the counter. I picked it up.
    “Dr. K. M F 6!!!” was inked on it, in Heather’s looping, little-girl script. A small daisy was doodled next to the time.
    Who was Dr. K.? More to the point, why did he deserve a daisy?
    My cell phone buzzed.
    “Found it,” Bill said. “I can get you within three hundred and twenty-eight feet.”
    “That was fast,” I said.
    Police used to rely on cell-tower triangulation to track down the geographic location of a phone. It wasn’t an exact science, but at least it gave us a general sense of locality and position. But the newer phone