Read Online You Think You Know Me Pretty Well aka Mercy by David Kessler - Free Book Online Page A

echoed.
    “The hard disk has been wiped.”
    Alex looked at the screen. Juanita was using Norton Utilities to inspect the disk content at a raw-data and deleted-file level.
    “So how come it’s still working?”
    “I don’t mean they reformatted it. I mean that all the deleted files have been overwritten. Normally the deleted files remain on the hard drive until the space is needed. It just deletes the directory entry and tells the directory that the space is available. But there are programs that overwrite the deleted files completely – sometimes making several passes with the erase head just to make sure.”
    “And why would anyone do that?”
    “What kind of a chicken-shit question is that?” She sounded cute when she was angry. “To delete any trace of the files and stop them from being recovered!”
    “That implies there was something in them worth deleting.”
    “No shit, Sherlock.”
    Alex leaned forward, peering at the screen with growing excitement.
    “Making it all the more important that we recover their contents.”
    “Which would be very nice, except there’s no way we can do that.”
    “Maybe there is.” The phone was already in his hand by the time he said it. “Let’s call my son.”
    “The one at Berkeley?”
    Alex’s son David was a theoretical physicist.
    “I only have one son.”
    “How do you know?” she asked with a cheeky grin. Alex sensed that there was more to Juanita’s displays of impertinence than mere mockery. Melody had been just like that. It was her way of flirting with him. He wondered if it was the same with Juanita. She had certainly given him a few hints. He wondered how much of it was real and how much was just his imagination.
    The lawyer in him knew that office romance was a dangerous game at the best of times – especially with a subordinate. If he did decide to go down that road, he’d have to tread carefully. But in any case it was a bit too early: the pain of losing Melody was still too raw … and today was hardly a day to be thinking about that sort of thing.
    Juanita pressed the speed dial button and then handed Alex the phone.
    “Hi, Dave … Yes, I am, but I need your help ... We have a computer with a hard disk that’s been wiped … No, I don’t mean reformatted, just the deleted files have been overwritten … How many passes?”
    Alex looked inquiringly at Juanita. She shook her head.
    “We don’t know. But what I want to know is … it is ? Scanning tunneling…”
    Juanita mouthed the word “microscope” to show that she understood.
    “You mean only if she just wiped it once? Oh I see. Okay, I’m sure you know what you’re doing. I’ll courier it over.”
    And with that he put the phone down.
    “He can recover the data,” said Juanita.
    “How d’you know?”
    “When I hear one side of a phone conversation, I can usually figure out the other. Read Godel, Escher, Bach.” She started walking away.
    “I tried. I couldn’t get beyond the dialogue between Achilles and the Turtle.”
    “Besides - you’re smiling.”
     
     
     

12:20 PDT
     
    “Mrs. Burrow?” Nat called out nervously through the closed door of the mobile home. No answer. “Anyone home?” Still no answer.
    Nat opened the door, tentatively, and gingerly stepped inside. Technically it was trespassing, but the door was unlocked and time was of the essence. He looked round nervously. The living room was a mess. Surveying the ashtrays and half-empty plates with three-day-old, dried-out food encrusted on them, the words “trailer trash” came to mind.
    He was about to start looking round when he was shocked to hear the sound of a flushing cistern – and he realized that he was not alone after all. For a few seconds, he waited with some degree of trepidation, looking in the direction of the bathroom and wondering if he was going to be confronted by a Stanley Kowalski type in a wifebeater.
    To his relief, the figure that emerged was female, albeit the female