I grasped the canister in both hands and poured, focusing on the flour cascading over its rim. A white cloud billowed up, dusting my face and hands.

A sneeze threatened.

I set down the canister. Waited. The sneeze made no move.

I resumed pouring. Half. Three-quarters.

The flour was nearly gone when an object dropped into the bowl. Setting the canister on the counter, I studied the thing.

Dark. Flat. About the size of my thumb.

I felt a fizz of excitement.

Though sealed in plastic, the item was familiar.

22.

I HURRIED TO THE BEDROOM, FLOUR-COATED HANDS HELD AWAY HURRIED TO THE BEDROOM, FLOUR-COATED HANDS HELD AWAY from my body. from my body.

"Find something?" Chenevier asked.

"In a canister. Better shoot it in situ then dust for latents."

Chenevier followed me back to the kitchen. Scribbling an evidence label, he photographed the bowl from several angles. When he'd finished, I extracted the object, tapped it on the rim, and laid it on the counter.

Chenevier snapped more photos, then checked for prints on the object's outer surface. There were none. Twirling a finger, he indicated that I should unroll the plastic. I did. He photographed every few inches.

Within minutes, a baggie, an eight-inch length of clear plastic wrap, and a thumb drive lay side by side on the Formica. None yielded prints.

"Got something," I called into the living room.

Ryan joined us. Floating one brow, he brushed flour from my nose.

I narrowed my eyes in a "don't say it" warning.

Ryan handed me a towel, then scanned the small a.s.semblage beside the bowl.

"USB flash drive," I said. "Sixteen gigabytes."

"That's ma.s.sive."

"You could store the national archives on this thing."

Ryan indicated that I should bring the thumb drive to the computer. Chenevier returned to the bedroom.

I pa.s.sed the drive to Lesieur. She thumbed a b.u.t.ton, and a USB connector slid from one end.

"We got paper for this?"

Ryan nodded Reaching under the workstation, Lesieur inserted the drive into the CPU tower.

The computer ding-donged, then a box appeared requesting a pa.s.sword.

"Try using Cormier," Ryan said.

Lesieur shot him a "you've got to be kidding" look.

"Try it."

Lesieur typed C-O-R-M-I-E-R. C-O-R-M-I-E-R.

The screen changed. A new box stated that a removable device had been detected, and that the disk contained more than one type of content.

"What a bonehead." Lesieur hit several keys.

Columns of text appeared. Folders. Files. Dates.

Lesieur opened a file. Another. Ryan and I leaned in for a better view of the screen.

"I'll be at this awhile." As before, her message was not subtle.

Ryan and I returned to the kitchen.

Several cabinets and a silo of cereal and cracker boxes later, Lesieur spoke. Ryan and I went to her.

"OK. Here's my take. Everything looks innocent enough on the surface. Tax returns. Business files. But I think your guy's got another whole layer buried in the unused s.p.a.ce of his thumb drive."

Ryan and I must have looked blank.

"Some of the newer encryption programs provide plausible deniability by creating two layers. The user stores some innocuous files in the first layer. Tax returns, business contacts, information a reasonable person might want to encrypt. The second layer is a disk volume hidden in the 'unused' s.p.a.ce of the drive."

"So Cormier uses a simple pa.s.sword for layer one because he doesn't really care about those files," I guessed. "It's a cover. He's really concerned about layer two."

"Exactly. With this type of setup, if someone starts poking around, they see some files, some open s.p.a.ce, everything looks copasetic. When they view the open area of the disk byte by byte, all they find is gibberish."

"That's not suspicious?" Ryan asked.

Lesieur shook her head. "Operating systems don't normally delete deleted files. They just change a marker that says, 'This file has been deleted and can be written over.' Everything that was in the file is still on the drive until its s.p.a.ce is needed, so if you look at the unused areas on a normal disk drive, you'll see bits and pieces of old files. Remember Ollie North?"

Ryan and I both said yes.

"That's how Irangate investigators recovered information Ollie had deleted. Without those chunks of old files, whether plain text or recognizably patterned computer data, pure gibberish stands out for what it lacks."

Lesieur c.o.c.ked her chin at the monitor. "The giveaway with your guy is that I'm finding megabyte after megabyte of gibberish."

"So you suspect there are encrypted files, but you can't read them."

"C'est ca. Your guy's running Windows XP. When used with a sufficiently long and completely random pa.s.sword, even the tool that comes with XP Pro creates encryption that can be a b.i.t.c.h to crack."

"You tried typing in 'Cormier'?" Ryan asked.

"Oh yeah."

Lesieur checked her watch, then stood.

"A mondo thumb drive stashed in a flour bin. Double-layered encryption. This guy's hiding something he sincerely doesn't want found."

"Now what?" Ryan asked.

"If your warrant allows, confiscate the hardware. We'll get whatever it is he's snaked away."

At one, Ryan and I left Chenevier and Pasteur to finish and lock up. I drove straight to Cormier's studio. It was like moving from the cool of the arctic to the heat and grime of the tropics.

Hippo was wearing another aloha shirt. Red turtles and blue parrots, all damp and wilted. He'd finished two more cabinets.

I told him about the thumb drive. His response was immediate.

"The guy's into p.o.r.n."

"Maybe."

"What? You think he's storing church music?"

Since images and videos require a lot of disk s.p.a.ce, I, too, suspected p.o.r.n. But I bristle at knee-jerk reactions.

"We shouldn't jump to judgment," I said.

Hippo blew air through his lips.

To avoid an argument, I changed the subject.

"Ever hear of an island called ile-aux-Becs-Scies?"

"Where?"

"Near Miramichi."

Hippo thought a moment, then shook his head.

"What does the name mean?"

"I think a bec scie bec scie is some kind of duck." is some kind of duck."

Something rolled over in my hindbrain.

Duck Island? What?

I chose a cabinet and began pulling file after file.

Kids. Pets. Couples.

I found it hard to concentrate. Was I really championing judicious thinking? Or was I in denial? Cormier a p.o.r.nographer. Cormier a photographer of women and children. Were the implications simply too awful?

And why the heads-up from my subconscious? Duck Island?

Partly heat. Partly hunger. A headache began organizing on the right side of my skull.

Ryan was to have bought lunch and come directly from Cormier's apartment to his studio. Where the h.e.l.l was he? Cranky, I continued plowing through folders.

It was two-thirty before Ryan made his appearance. In lieu of the salad and Diet c.o.ke I'd requested, he'd gotten hot dogs and fries from Lafleur's.

As we ate, Ryan and Hippo discussed the thumb drive. Ryan agreed that Cormier was probably hiding s.m.u.t. Hot, irritable, and stuffed with greasy wieners, I played devil's advocate.

"Maybe Cormier got sick of dealing with this disorganized mess." I waved an arm at the cabinets. "Maybe he was scanning all his old images and files."

"To a thumb drive stashed in his flour bin."

Ryan had a point. It irked me.

"OK, so it's p.o.r.n. Maybe Cormier's just a perv trying to hide his dirty little secret."

Both men looked at me as though I'd suggested anthrax was harmless.

"Think what you want." I bunched my wrappers and shoved them into the greasy brown bag. "I'll wait for proof."

Cabinet twelve. I was looking at a photo of an exceedingly unattractive baby when my cell phone chirped.

Two-eight-one area code. Harry.

I clicked on.

"You certainly were up early this morning."

"I'm up early most mornings."

"How's that French buckaroo?"

"If you mean Ryan, he's a jerk."