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Corbett's phone rang as he was sliding his service pistol into the holster on his belt. He didn't want to answer it, but he had to keep the charade going for as long as possible. One look at the screen showed exactly what he was expecting. The caller was listed as a number with all zeroes. He looked around, making sure Jennifer was still in the shower and then answered it.

"Congratulations on the conviction, inspector," came the now familiar voice of Lewis' bodyguard. "Our friend is very impressed with how quickly everything happened, and he wanted to show his gratitude."

"What the hell are you talking about?" Corbett asked, feeling the anger rise in his breast. He had to focus on unclenching his fists as he talked.

"Just have a look out your front door, Inspector. I think you'll be quite satisfied with his generosity, and he told me to tell you that if you ever need something that he owes you a favor."

The line went dead and Corbett looked dumbly at the screen for a moment, wondering if he could find any way to trace that number back to the senator, but then he realized that it wouldn't do a damn bit of good, anyway, so there really wasn't any point in trying. He just shook his head and put the phone in his pocket.

Hearing the water still running in the shower, he made his way down the stairs to the front door. When he opened it, he about choked on the bile that rose in his throat. Sitting in the driveway was the newest and most advanced model of the car he'd bought his wife years ago. Under the windshield wiper, in the same place he originally found the note threatening his daughter, was another note, in an envelope that looked very familiar.

He shook his head and walked to the car to pluck the envelope out of its resting place. When he opened it, the key to the car fell out in his hand and inside the envelope he found a small type-written note.

Corbett -

Thanks for your help. The mechanics couldn't find anything wrong with your wife's car, and I wouldn't want such a lovely lady driving something that might break down on her and leave her at the mercy of our city's undesirable element. Consider this my gift to her for lending me your assistance.

Oh, and don't forget to check the trunk. There's a little something for you.

The note wasn't signed, but that hardly mattered. Corbett knew who it was from and there wasn't any point in trying to run any forensics on it. Just like the photo, he knew that the note would never have touched the senator's hands, so there wasn't anything to find on the thing. The most he was going to be able to get would be one of his henchmen, and after everything that had been going on, that wasn't nearly enough to make up for it.

He slowly crumpled the note in his hand and stuffed it into his pocket. Then he walked around to the trunk of the car, using the new key to open it. Inside was a large leather bag that looked a lot like the one he carried his weapon in when he went to the range. He unzipped it and took a step back when he saw the bank notes stacked neatly within.

Fists balled again and he looked up and down the street to see if there was anyone watching, maybe one of Corbett's goons waiting to make sure that he took the bribe, ready to film him when he did. He didn't see anything out of the ordinary, but that didn't mean that they didn't have someone watching him, and he decided that he couldn't stumble up now or everything that he wanted to accomplish would go up in flames.

Without taking anything out of the bag, he zipped it back up and closed the trunk. Then he took the key and put it in his jacket pocket while he walked back into the house.

The running water had stopped and he made his way back upstairs. He walked casually, as if nothing was wrong. He was well aware that Sylvester wasn't in place to disrupt the cameras again, so he still had to be circumspect. As he climbed the stairs an idea occurred to him and he smiled a little. If Lewis was going to be so generous as to give him a new car, then he could very well oblige and make it his own tool in bringing the senator down.

He walked into the bedroom just as his wife was coming out of the bathroom and she looked up at him when he came in. He smiled and raised his eyebrows at her, inviting her to do the same thing. Remember, he thought, there's nothing going on here.

She seemed to take the hint and smiled back at him, though he could tell that she was upset and scared by the way the smile didn't make it all the way to her eyes. Still, though, it was something that would be hard to tell on a screen over the camera. Corbett crossed the room and drew Jennifer into his embrace.

"God, I'm sorry, Jen," he whispered in her ear. "We'll make this work and we'll all be safe, I promise."

"I trust you," she whispered back, "and I love you always."

Just those words, that little validation that she loved him and thought that he was doing the right thing lifted his heart a little and eased his anger. He held her there for a minute before he let her go.

"I've got a car from work for the day, so if you need to go anywhere, my car is in the driveway and the keys are on the counter," Corbett said. "Don't forget that Sylvester's uncle is coming by to give you a ride to dinner tonight. Wouldn't want to get me pulled over driving drunk, now would we?"

He tried to make the chuckle sound normal and easy, but to his ears it sounded forced. He could only hope that the person on the other end of the camera didn't know him well enough to know that the laugh was fake.

"Don't worry, honey," Jennifer said, "Angela and I will be ready to go."

Corbett nodded and then kissed his wife on the cheek.

"Have a good day, Jen. I'll see you this evening."

Then he turned and walked out the door, still questioning if he'd made the right choice, and really, what other choice he would have if he hadn't. At the very least, Duke would take care of his wife and his daughter if this all went sideways.

He took his usual mug off the counter and walked out the door. On the stoop, he looked again at the car that was sitting in his driveway. He'd been proud when he bought Jennifer the little sports car convertible. It was a sign that he was moving up and that he was starting to get places. She'd been so happy with that car. Now, looking at the new one in the driveway, it had turned to a symbol of shame. It was something that he would always look at and remember how he had corrupted his wife's trust in him, hell, how he'd corrupted his own trust in himself. Lewis had taken even that away from him, and the hatred inside him grew just a little more.

Sighing to himself, he opened the door and drove out of his neighborhood with a silent vow to do everything that he could to make sure that Lewis never forgot him or his family.

---

Sylvester was waiting for him in the driveway when he turned in off a shady, quiet neighborhood street. He knew where the other officer lived, and this wasn't it, but Sylvester had told Corbett to meet him here, and it was part of the plan.

"Nice car," Sylvester said when Corbett pulled into the driveway.

Corbett kept the engine running and gestured to the passenger door.

"Yeah, gift from Louie," Corbett responded. "Speaking of which, let's go for a ride."

Sylvester's eyebrows raised, but he didn't say anything, just climbed into the car.

Corbett pulled out of the driveway and drove for a few blocks, making a few random turns to make it look like he was going someplace purposeful, and then he pulled into a parking lot.

"Want to tell me what's going on?" Sylvester asked.

Corbett shook his head and got out of the car, motioning for Sylvester to do the same. Then he took a few steps away from the car and dropped his voice to a whisper.

"Lewis sent the car for my wife. Can you tell me if it's bugged?"

Sylvester gave Corbett and incredulous look and reached into his jacket to pull out a little box with an antenna.

"I can do more than that," he said as he turned on the box. It made a small beep and the screen on the front lit up. "I can tell you its address on the network and block it, and when we get back to the house, I can figure out some more things to do with it."

Corbett laughed and watched as Sylvester ran his box over the car and paid closer attention to when it alarmed. When he was done, Sylvester pressed a couple of buttons on the screen and then smiled.

"All right, blocked all three of them. One's just a location transmitter, but the others were voice and audio. I just disconnected their network signal so it looks like they're out of range."

Corbett nodded, impressed, then climbed back into the car and waited for his new friend to hop in the other side before he drove them back to the house.

He pulled into the driveway and looked over the home. There was nothing about the place that would separate it from any of the others on the block, or really have it stand out from anywhere else.

"What the hell is this place?" Corbett asked.

"This is one of Stringbean's safe houses, inspector," Sylvester said with a smile. "One of six, actually."

Corbett frowned as he started to realize just how deep and wide Duke had spread himself and his paranoia.

"Wait. Beanpole owns six houses?"

Sylvester nodded and smiled, then turned to walk towards the door of the house. "He owns at least six. These are the ones I know about, and I'm pretty sure that he owns a few that I don't know about. This one is kind of special, though."

While he was speaking, he pointed to a large cable that snaked its way up the side of the house before disappearing into the wall.

"This one is set up for me."

Corbett frowned and looked at the cable, wondering just what that meant, but when he stepped inside after the younger officer, he found his question answered straightaway. The living room of the house was stuffed wall to wall with computer equipment. There was no carpet, just a cement floor that supported racks and racks of equipment. Server racks sat in the corner and one entire wall was covered with wall-mounted monitors over more monitors that rested on desks. Corbett saw a window when he was walking up the driveway, but it must have been covered when the place was converted, because he couldn't see any sign of it now.

Sylvester saw him looking and grinned, pointing to a little switch on the wall behind one of the monitors.

"We can turn on a light here that makes it look like whoever is home is just watching television. The light flickers and everything in time to some popular sitcom." Sylvester laughed, "Don't ask me which one, I never watch the things, anyway."

Corbett looked at Sylvester and had to grin at the humor in his voice.

"All right, I won't ask you."

He took a look around the room, taking in all the technical equipment. He'd seen the lab at the station, and he didn't think even it came all that close to what Duke had built here.

"He built this all for you?" Corbett asked.

Sylvester nodded and then started walking around, pressing power buttons and turning everything on. The sound of whirring fans came to life with every press and by the time he had turned on the last of the computers, the room was feeling a little warmer. The last thing he hit was a switch by the thermostat in the room, and Corbett heard a larger fan starting up just before cold air began to blow in haste out of the vents in the ceiling.

"Uncle Duke paid for my degree on the condition that I spend some time every now and again working with him on some of his projects. This house was one of the projects."

Sylvester looked around proudly while he spoke.

"He bought this house, and me and a couple other boys from the two three gutted it and rebuilt it almost from the ground up. The only thing that's original in the house is the outside wall. You could look at pictures from when it was first built and the only thing that might be different is the paint color. Everything else is exactly the same, except the inside."

Corbett looked around again, and he realized that Sylvester was telling the truth. He hadn't noticed before because the equipment took up so much of the available space that it looked a lot smaller than it was, but now that he really looked, he could see that there weren't any separate rooms. The division in the space was all carried out by racks of equipment. All the interior walls had come down except for what he assumed to be the bathroom in the corner and a couple walls dividing a very small kitchen from the rest of the equipment.

"There's also a basement that has all the crypto gear," Sylvester said as he pulled a chair out from the desk.

That last comment finally lost Corbett and he gave up and let the other officer sit while he looked around. He could hear Sylvester starting to type as he wandered around a couple of the racks and to the back of the house.

What he saw on the other side of the servers made him stop and stare. Sylvester must have heard him because after a couple seconds he was there.

"Oh, yeah, and that's uncle Duke's touch right there, though I really didn't have too much to complain about."

The thing that stopped Corbett in his tracks was the far wall, hidden out of view from the front door, covered from floor to ceiling in weapon racks. Half of them were empty, but the other half held an assortment of weapons that Corbett thought only law enforcement and military could get their hands on. There were automatic rifles, a selection of pistols, some shotguns, and something that looked strangely like a grenade launcher mounted under one of the rifles.

"Where the hell did he get all this stuff?" Corbett asked.

"I never asked," Sylvester said, "mainly because I didn't want to know."

Corbett nodded. "I retract my question. I don't think I want to know, either."

"Good choice, though I'm sure he'd tell you if you asked."

"I try to stay away from his ramblings as much as I can, thanks," Corbett said with a little laugh.

"Yeah, but you might try listening to him on occasion. You would have known something like this was coming down the pipe. I've been expecting this for a couple years now."

"What, Lewis framing someone?"

"Well, not Lewis specifically, but when you really listen to Uncle Duke, you start to realize just how much power men like Lewis have, and I'm kind of shocked that it took this long for him to find someone who would push back."

Corbett looked at Sylvester with an incredulous look on his face.

"So, what, you've watched them do something like this before?" he asked.

"Yep," Sylvester said with a nod. "Couple of guys in my department ended up about twenty thousand richer one day, and when I went back and looked at all the logs, I found out that they'd been drumming up evidence on someone. Wasn't my problem, though, so I just kept my head down."

Corbett wanted to say something about the injustice or the corruption, but then he thought about it. Wasn't he just ready to do the same thing? Do what he had to do to protect his family? And when he did, the senator showered him with gifts. He could suddenly see why things had gone the way they did for the people Sylvester was talking about. He was the one with the new car and the trunk full of cash.

"I'm just glad they found someone willing to push back, inspector. It burned me to watch people fold," Sylvester said.

Corbett turned and looked at Sylvester and had to look away from his gaze because of what he saw there.

"Don't you dare, kid," Corbett growled. "I was going to do the same thing. I was going to let the girl die and I was going to do it happily because I didn't want anything to happen to my own little girl. I ain't no goddamn hero, so don't you fucking dare."

Sylvester shrugged.

"All right, inspector, but you've still got more backbone than any of the other ones I've seen. Now, are we going to do this or not?"

Corbett nodded and walked back to the computer desk with Sylvester. The younger man pulled out a chair for Corbett to sit in when they got there, and Corbett started to watch the screens. The way Sylvester moved through the software was something to behold. Quickly, one after another, he began opening windows on each of six screens in front of him. While he ran a piece of code from one screen, he focused on another that was running still other programs. After only a couple seconds, Corbett couldn't keep track of it any longer.

Little holographic displays and controls appeared on the desk over the keyboard and Sylvester moved from the traditional keyboard to the holo controls with a practiced ease, settling his fingers in precisely the correct place every time. Every motion was accounted for as he worked. Every blink, every twitch of his eyebrow, every tilt of his head and flinch of his fingers all did something on the screens above.

"All right, inspector," Sylvester announced after a minute, "I'm on Central. What do we need?"

Corbett looked up at the screen directly above his head and he saw the logo that was so familiar to him, the one that came up every time he booted his tablet. They were looking in the central archives, the brain of the entire country's network, the sum of everything that had ever been written down, all conglomerated into this one system.

"Start with my case file," Corbett said. "I want to see every version of it that central has recorded. Put them on my tablet."

With a few gestures and a little typing, Sylvester moved the prompt expertly through the menus and the system and Corbett felt the tell-tale vibration under his coat as his tablet notified him of an update.

While Sylvester worked, Corbett pulled out his tablet and started going through all the different versions of his case file. He could see every notation made by everyone who had ever touched the case, along with any revisions that might have been made.

"Can you compare versions and just give me the summary of changes between them?" he asked.

Sylvester smiled and moved just a little more and before Corbett could even think about the differences between the first two files, he had the summary of the changes on his screen. The screen filled with comparisons of ones and zeroes, but then it resolved into something more substantial, and he could see all the revisions in every part of the case file highlighted with all of the previous versions in different colors after the final version.

He scanned the documents, looking for the original medical exam file.

While Corbett worked on his tablet, Sylvester was busy working on the bugs in the car. He mused quietly to himself while he worked about the quality that went into designing the software for them. The person who wrote the code must have been fairly proficient, but he was still easily able to get past the protection.

"What would you like me to do with the bugs in the car, Pack Rat?" he asked, smiling at the nickname that his Uncle had told him about.

Corbett looked up in surprise and grinned when he figured out how Sylvester knew the name. "Can you just disable them or would that look too suspicious?"

"I could," Sylvester said, "but that wouldn't be nearly as much fun as some of the other things that I could do with them. The guy who built these things has everything on the same network. How about I switch it with the Captain's car?"

"The captain's car?!" Corbett asked, completely taken aback. "He's got the captain's car wired?"

"Well I kind of figured that he did, and it only took a little digging to be sure. After all, you know they have to have him wired. He's in their pocket. He told you that."

Corbett nodded and wondered why that hadn't even crossed his mind. He thought in terms of how things worked in the world outside computers, and Sylvester thought of all the ways that technology worked.

"Remind me to send Duke some kind of really expensive gift when we get done with this," Corbett said with a laugh. "I've got to do something with the pile of cash in the trunk."

Sylvester laughed and went back to his screens while Corbett started looking through his file again.

Finally, he found the lab results and he frowned. There were all the revisions highlighted, and they were right where he expected them to be, but when he looked back through the revisions, there was only one revision to the values he cared about, and the history showed it as blank, as if nothing had been entered initially, and then it had been updated to a positive value.

"This isn't right," he muttered.

"What've you got, Inspector?" Sylvester asked.

"The lab reports. They all show that they were initially uploaded all blank, but they never upload a report unless it's got something in it, so someone's gone back and erased the revision."

Sylvester frowned and pulled up the report himself. Some movements of his fingers and his head later, he was digging down through the lines of code and the data itself, watching numbers scroll past on one screen while the holographic display showed the data in a three dimensional representation. Whole sections had been overwritten with all zeroes, rendering the original data unreadable.

Corbett watched it all in silence and leaned back in his chair with a grunt.

"There's nothing you can do, is there?" he asked.

"Not on this system, but hold on to your horses, Inspector. We can do this another way."

Corbett watched as Sylvester backed out of the central database and after a couple minutes of scrolling numbers and symbols that meant less to Corbett than a foreign language, he saw the logo for Sisters of Charity appear on the screen.

"If they deleted it from Central, what makes you think that you'll find anything on Charity's servers?" Corbett asked.

"Trust me, Inspector," Sylvester said with a grin. "Hospitals have a whole different way of dealing with data. It's actually easier to get into their computers than it is to get into Central because the government won't let them update their software to the latest, most secure version. Something about privacy laws or something."

As he was talking, his fingers were moving on the keyboard and little windows flashed open on the screens. Corbett could feel himself getting dizzy trying to keep up with it all. Finally, he saw what he was looking for when Sylvester displayed the familiar form of the lab report that he'd almost memorized during the last couple days.

"Fortunately for us, there's also so many laws on the books for healthcare that every hospital has two off-site backups for their stuff, and they keep every single revision."

With another few flicks of Sylvester's practiced fingers, more pages appeared on the screen in front of Corbett, each one showing the first entered values of the lab reports.

Corbett frowned as he read through the unearthed versions, seeing the change that the doctor had made in the positive drug analysis from Rohypnol to C, and the DNA profile that came from Kincaid's assault exam.

Then he looked at the bottom of the page and his elation sank when he saw that Amine hadn't signed the initial report. So now he had the data that showed Kincaid wasn't high, and it also explained her amnesia. But all of it was worthless without the doctor's signature or his word.

Sylvester was looking at his own versions on his screen and he noticed the same thing about the same time.

"Well, at least we've got somewhere to start."

Corbett frowned and stared at the screen while he thought about how he could get the doc to admit to the false lab reports. Lewis obviously had something on him, and the doc had already admitted that much in the bar. That meant that Corbett had to make him more scared of what he had than what Lewis had.

Or maybe, if he had the same things on Amine that Lewis did, that would even the tables enough that he could lead the doc through the same change of heart that he'd have. He sensed that Amine was a decent sort when he spoke to him at the bar, he was just scared of what he'd gotten involved with.

"Can you find a security camera view of Doctor Amine's office?" Corbett asked.

Sylvester looked at him curiously, but then turned back to the computer and started working. After a couple minutes, pictures from the security camera network started showing up on the screens. Just a moment later, one split and grew on the screen showing the doctor leaning over his microscope in his office.

"There he is. What are you looking for?" Sylvester asked.

"We need to scan back. Can the computer look through the footage and identify if there is more than one person in the office?"

Sylvester nodded. "Sure, we use a program like that on the task force. Makes it a lot easier to go through hours of tape if you know you're looking for two subjects, or three."

"All right," Corbett said, "set it to look for two people in the room and if you can match it against his schedule, we can rule out meetings and conferences."

Then he paused and thought about it a little more.

"What about facial recognition?"

Sylvester looked back at the camera view and frowned. "Well, I can probably give it an initial scan and see if we get lucky, but that'll only work if they looked at the camera."

"That gets us a little closer than we were to start with, so let's get it started. Go back six months and run the program. Let's see what we get."

Sylvester went back to his typing. Before he got too far into it, Corbett tapped him on the shoulder.

"While you're doing that, I need to call Duke."

Sylvester pulled a phone over the table and set it in front of Corbett. "It's secure," he said even before Corbett could ask. "Encryption I designed for the twenty third. Higher than government level. Now, let me work, that's a lot of footage, and we don't have the time to sit and jabber."

Corbett smiled and picked up the phone, going through the same routine that he did at Jimmy's.

"Beanpole, it's Pack Rat. We're working it, and the mice will be ready for pickup like we talked about."