All right, time for plan B.

His memory stick had reached capacity. He disengaged it, returned to the system menu, and perused the contents menu. He had removed both too much and too little. He selected half a dozen more files to delete, glancing at his watch again and feeling the urgency.

Originally, he had hoped to capture what he could, then run an official purge program. Now, however, he couldn’t bring himself to trash the hard drive, not when it might contain clues regarding Sandra’s final hours. Which created an interesting dilemma. The computer potentially held the power both to find his wife and to put him in jail forever.

He thought about it. Then he knew what to do.

He would return the old family computer from the basement to the kitchen table, uploading it with all the current software programs from the new computer. He could transfer over basic files from his memory stick, enough garbage to give the old computer the appearance of an active one.

A good evidence tech would figure it out, eventually. That there were date gaps in the computer’s memory. Perhaps even Sergeant D.D. and Detective Miller would catch the switch. He didn’t think so, however. Most people noticed a person’s monitor, and maybe a person’s keyboard, but they didn’t notice the computer itself, the functional tower that was generally propped under a desk or kitchen table. If anything, perhaps they’d noted that he owned a Dell, in which case his brand loyalty was about to be rewarded.

So the old computer would become his current computer, buying him some precious time.

Which left him with the issue of what to do with his current computer. Couldn’t put it in his house, which was probably destined to be searched a few more times. Equally risky to stash it in his vehicle, for the same reason. Which left him one option. To leave the computer right here, set up just as it was, a computer on a desk, in a room full of computers on desks. He would even connect it to the network, making it a fully functional, completely indistinguishable Boston Daily computer. Hide in plain sight, as it were.

Even if the police thought to search the Boston Daily offices, he sincerely doubted they could obtain a warrant to seize computers from a major news outlet. Why, the breach in confidentiality alone … Besides, in the modern world of “hoteling,” Jason didn’t have an official work space. Meaning there wasn’t a single computer or office space the police could definitively list in a warrant as being his. Technically speaking, all the computers were used by him, and no judge in this day and age was going to let the police carry away every single computer belonging to the Boston Daily. That just wasn’t going to happen.

At least he hoped not.