Half Moon Investigations - Eoin Colfer [17]
I sighed, just like a twelve-year-old who wasn’t getting his way would.
‘OK, sergeant. I’ll forget about the Sharkeys.’
The sergeant closed one eye, focusing the other on me. ‘You’re not lying, are you, Fletcher? My policeman’s eye always knows.’
‘No, sergeant. I’m not lying.’
Of course, I was lying.
I ran home, and managed to make it upstairs without the third degree from Mam and Dad. My sister, Hazel, was waiting on the landing, chewing on a pencil.
‘Fletcher, what’s another word for rejected?’
I thought for a second. ‘Erm… How about unwanted?’
Hazel jotted it down. ‘Good. And how about a rhyme for pathetic?’
That was a bit harder. ‘Ah… would prosthetic do?’
‘I could work it in.’
I paused by my door. ‘What are you working on, anyway? Something about you and Stevie?’
‘No,’ said Hazel innocently. ‘An epic poem about your date with April Devereux.’
I scowled at her, but realized there was no percentage in answering back. God only knew how long Hazel had been waiting for me to come home. She would have all her bases covered.
Inside, I sat on my office chair, rolling over to the desk. A quick tap on the trackpad woke up my iBook laptop. I stared at the FBI wallpaper on the screen and thought about what I intended to do.
If I planned to proceed with this case, I needed information, and the only way to get that information was to access the police website and download the Sharkey file. Did I want to break the case that much? Or was I doing it for my shield?
A thought struck me. Maybe there was a way to get a new shield. I logged on to the Bernstein website and typed ‘replacement shield’ into their search engine. The paragraph that popped up was not encouraging. Any requests for a replacement shield must be accompanied by 200 dollars and a police incident report. Maybe I could scrape together the money after a year or so, but forging a police document was a serious crime.
I had only two choices: give up now or hack the site. No need to choose just jet, I told myself. Maybe you won’t be able to access the site and the choice will be taken out of your hands.
I opened the guards’ site welcome page. I needed a name, rank, number and password to proceed. I had three out of four. Name, rank and number were easy. Password was a different matter, but I had a hunch.
Sergeant Murt Hourihan had two passions. One was law enforcement, which he was much better at than he pretended. The second was greyhound racing. He loved the sport so much that he had joined a guards’ syndicate to buy a dog. The dog’s name was Blue Flew. I typed in the words.
The iBook clicked and whirred for a moment, then welcomed Sergeant Hourihan to the site. I was in.
The site was based on a common law-enforcement template used by police forces worldwide and had several sections, including resources, keyword search, county by county, recent arrests and incident reports.
I felt a slight thrill of guilt. What I was doing was not illegal as such: citizens were entitled to access these files under the Freedom of Information Act. But a minor certainly should not be trawling through active files without supervision.
I selected our county, then chose Lock from the drop-down menu. I narrowed the search further by typing the surname Sharkey in a flashing box. A coloured circle whirled on the screen while the site compiled a list of Sharkey-related incidents. Eventually a relevant list opened on a fresh page. There were over a hundred open cases with a Sharkey tag attached to them. This was incredible. Sergeant Hourihan had shown me closed case files before, and nobody came near to a hundred tags. Even Dublin’s notorious General was only associated with fifty unsolved cases.
I scanned the file headings briefly. Nearly all of the offences were grand or petty larceny. It looked as though the Sharkeys were responsible for an