Maude and Claudia both snickered.

  "Took him a couple of minutes to figure out he'd been had," Claudia said.

  "Okay, maybe after your memorable educational efforts I should have suspected that e-mail wasn't taking me to the real eBay site," Tim said. "But I didn't."

  "So you entered your credit card number," Maude said. "How many thousands of dollars did the crooks run up on your credit card?"

  "Only five thousand," Tim said. "I've learned my lesson now. Don't click on the link in the e-mail, go to the site and log in normally."

  "Good," Maude said. "You've learned something important then."

  "Yes, and I figure in another ten years or so, I'll convince the bank that those weren't my charges."

  "Are they still giving you problems?" Maude said.

  "Sic Sam on them," Claudia suggested.

  "I just did," Turing said. "We'll talk later. But it's starting to make sense. If Eddie thought one of his friends was running a phishing scheme using one of his systems, he'd be plenty worried."

  "Can you figure out if something like that happened?" Maude asked.

  "Not yet," Turing said. "Not from the outside, and after the fact. If they had tried it since KingFischer and I began sniffing the network, we'd have noticed. And once we get in, we can look for clues that someone did it in the past. But for now—"

  "We'll worry about it tomorrow, then," Claudia said, picking up her purse. "Get some rest, Turing. You've had a long day. Don't stay up too late working."

  Tim suppressed a smile at the thought of Claudia worrying over Turing losing sleep.

  "We're off, then," he said aloud, and turned for the stairs.

  "What a day-/' Maude said to the laptop- "Do you believe that woman?"

  Then she remembered that she was in the car, not Mrs. Stallman's basement, and the laptop was turned off. Turing couldn't hear her. *

  She suddenly felt rather lonely. Perhaps when she got home, she should log in and talk over the case'with Turing. Not the way she'd planned on spending the evening.

  As if on cue, her cell phone rang. She scrambled to pull it out of her purse and glanced at the caller ID. Dan.

  "I'm driving," she said, as she answered it. "Can I call you back in five minutes when I'm home?"

  "That's fine," he said.

  Actually, it was more like ten minutes, but she took the time to change into her slippers and put on a kettle before calling back from the phone in her breakfast nook.

  "So how's the weather there in your top secret location?" she asked.

  "Seasonable," he said. "About what I expected. I tried to call you at the office a couple of times."

  "I left early," she said. "To help Tim with a case."

  "I see."

  "Nothing dangerous," she said, quickly. "In fact, nothing particularly interesting. I spent the whole afternoon sorting paper. Heaps and heaps of unfiled, unsorted paper, most of it probably useless. Like Dumpster diving, only indoors."

  "And a lot less smelly," Dan said, laughing.

  "Not a lot," she countered. "The owner of the papers was a pig. I'm only halfway through the cleanup."

  "Tim's given up PI work for running a maid service?"

  He sounded as if he thought it was a good idea, Maude thought with a twinge of annoyance. She gave him a brief outline of the case, glossing over the possible homicide and stressing that they were investigating the business—though not going into as much detail as she might if he were in another profession. The Dan Norris who was beginning to share a large portion of her life could turn into Special Agent Norris at the slightest hint that she and her friends were stepping onto his or some other law enforcement officer's turf.

  "Of course, Tim can probably carry on without me if I tell him I've got something better to do," she said. "If you're heading home, for instance."

  "Sorry. You could always do the winery tour yourself."

  "Without a designated driver? Bad idea/'

  He laughed, and she decided to change the subject.

  "So is there anything urgent that needs doing in the garden?" she asked.

  Dan could think of a great many things, though they both knew how unlikely it was that she'd do any of them in his absence. But it got them off the dangerous ground of the work neither of them could tell the other about. She poured another cup of tea and settled back for a long conversation that would have to take the place of their original plans.

  Fridays fl:3Q p-n-

  So fari I haven't learned any more about the strange message I found in the spam e-mail. If it is a message and not just my paranoia. Of course, the fact that I haven't yet found the passage in any book contained in the UL library seems significant, though not conclusive. Also the fact that the passage was contained only in a few hundred spam e-mails sent through Eddie's server. Similar e-mails sent through other servers contained passages from Madame Bovary or The Great Gatsby.

  Of course, since whoever sent it covered their trail too well even for me to follow it very far, Vm not sure what good the message does.

  Maybe it wasn't intended to accomplish any good. Maybe it was only intended to upset me.

  Surely, it wasn't just a coincidence that the message came through Eddie's servers soon after I started watching them. Was Eddie somehow connected with T2P With Nestor Garcia?

  I'd talk this over with my human friends, but they're not online, and I don't want to bother them by phone.

  Or maybe I don't want to upset them until I have a better idea what it all means.

  Maude turned off the laptop half an hour ago. Presumably, she has packed it up by now and is on her way home. I hope she remembered to leave food and water out for the cat.

  I feel curiously left out now that I am ... I was about to say

  back in the UL system, but of course I never really left it. I'm no more cut off than usual. Even though Tim, Claudia, and Maude are away from their computers, we can still reach each other by cell phone if something interesting happens. I have better access than they do to all the documents Maude fed into the scanner, and I'm analyzing them, to see if I can identify anything whose importance we overlooked. I'm cut off from Eddies systems, except as a spectator, surfing the websites he hosts, but it's the same when Vm logged into the laptop in Mrs. Stall man's basement. The sudden pang of loneliness I feel is utterly irrational.

  Still, strange how accustomed I became, in a single afternoon, to having my cameras there in the basement. It's not as if there was a lot to see or hear there. Maude sorting papers. Mrs. Stallman hovering, whining about her precarious finances. The cat reappearing whenever the humans left the room, to examine the latest changes to its environment. It's not a normal part of Tim's cases, moving into a client's home for such an extended period. If not for Eddie's poor filing habits, we'd be operating as usual, with my human friends contacting me through their office or home computers, or by cell phone when they are away from their computers and they learn something they want to report, or need information that I can provide.

  I suppose this must be similar to how humans feel when technology such as television allows them the illusion of being present at news events and momentous public occasions. The feeling of seeing history made.

  I made the mistake of sharing these musings with KingFischer.

  "Sounds more like morbid curiosity to me," he said. "Like the way they all watch notorious trials on Court TV. Or those shows where they take a group of people and subject them to public humiliation and torture for the enjoyment of the audience. Morbid curiosity. Maybe even voyeurism. Television seems to feed all their worst instincts."

  "You've been watching television?"

  "I've been making a study of it," he said. "It's entirely useless and illogical."

  "A h," I said. Not a good sign, when KingFischer began studying something other than chess. It usually signaled the start of a period of more than usually intense misanthropy. I understood how illogical most human behavior seemed to him, compared with the or-der and symmetry of his beloved chess. But if he didn't like something humans did, why did he insist on wallowing in it when he could just ignore it?

  Of course, I could always hope that he would develop an irrational but passionate interest in some aspect of television. Find redeeming values in on-line computer courses. Develop an interest in high-end computer-generated graphics. Become an avid fan of Dr. Who or vintage episodes of The Beverly Hillbillies. Get addicted to a soap opera. Anything but this blanket condemnation of a whole area of human endeavor as useless and illogical.

  Not a very reasonable hope. I decided to change the subject.

  "So I gather Eddie's pretty good at security," I said. "I must say Vm surprised, given how disorganized he is, but I suppose everyone's good at something."

  "His security's adequate," KingFischer said. Considering how reluctant he was, during these misanthropic phases, to give humans credit for anything, this probably counted as high praise. "Though I could probably have broken in by now if you hadn't made it sound so important to avoid detection. His co-lo site has rather decent security as well. Though I assume the home system's the most important."

  "Probably," I said. Interesting as it would be to have access to Eddie's clients' sites — and useful, if anything went wrong with one of them —/ suspected the real meat would be in his home system. Financial records, e-mails, perhaps even passwords and access information about the co-lo site.

  "If you attach a machine to the network you might learn a great deal," KingFischer said. "For example —"

  "Yes, I know," I said. "I've already done that, but I haven't learned much. With Eddie away, there's not a lot happening in his home network."

  "Not much happening anywhere," KingFischer grumbled. "We

  Delete All Suspects 105

  may have to wait until those humans of yours find us some useful data."

  I thought of teasing him about having to rely on useless, illogical humans for anything, but found I wasn't in the mood for it. And while I wanted to discuss the latest possible message from T2, to do that I'd have to tell him how I'd received it, and even though I agreed with him, I wasn't in the mood to hear KingFischer rant about the stupidity of spam.

  "We 11 have to wait till morning, then," I said. "My humans will probably go to bed soon, so 1 doubt if anything will happen before morning. n

  Friday-. T:M5 P• n-

  Tim leaned back and surveyed the crowd-Probably a typical Friday night at Whitlow's. A huge, noisy crowd of people approximately his age. Some of them obviously couples or groups of friends out to celebrate the end of the work week, while others, equally obviously, wanted to meet new people.

  Tim watched one such flirtation play out at the next table, between a pretty girl and a surprisingly average-looking guy. Not just a pretty girl, he decided, about one step from gorgeous. Not someone he'd ever have the nerve to approach.

  Some other time, that thought might depress him, but tonight he found he could sit on the sidelines observing the action without feeling like a complete outsider.

  Probably because observing the action was exactly what he was here to do. He was working.

  Maybe he should look for more cases that required hanging around in bars. Interview potential witnesses in bars. Fill out his case forms in bars. Find some way to hang out in a bar with some purpose other than meeting women, so he didn't feel so self-conscious. He might have better luck

  meeting women if he wasn't trying. Or was it just his imagination that a couple of women had given him, well, inviting glances would be an overstatement. Encouraging looks was more like it. Still, more than he usually managed.

  Probably more than Eddie usually managed, too, he thought, remembering the photo Mrs. Stallman had shown him.

  Of course, they didn't yet know if Eddie came here as part of the meat market crowd on weekends. Maybe he only came here on weeknights, when it was quieter. Considering how close it was to his house, maybe he considered it his neighborhood bar.

  Or maybe Wednesday night was the first time he'd been here. Maybe he'd come here to meet someone. His attacker. Someone his attacker didn't like him meeting.

  Or maybe—

  Or maybe he should wait until Claudia finished questioning the two bartenders, Tim thought, smiling and shaking his head. Until then, he was theorizing with no data. Turing would disapprove and would quote Sherlock Holmes at him. "It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgment."

  Of course, that quote showed that Conan Doyle hadn't ever worked as a detective. No such thing as all the evidence, and even if there was, how would you know when you had everything? But still, some reasonable amount of evidence would be nice.

  He glanced up to see Claudia approaching, carrying two new beers.

  "Any luck?" he asked, lifting his coat from the chair so she could sit down.

  "Yes and no," she said, shoving one of the beers in his direction as she sat. "One of the bartenders says he looks familiar. But he isn't sure. Not surprising; it's not the kind of place where you could possibly get to know all the customers, especially not on a weekend."

  "And Eddie doesn't have the world's most memorable face/' Tim said.

  "Yeah, he'd have to do something pretty memorable to stick in their minds."

  "Almost getting killed on the way home from here isn't memorable enough?"

  "Maybe it would be," Claudia said, laughing. "Then again, it didn't happen in here, and anyway, neither of them was on duty that night. I got the name of the guy who was. He doesn't come on again until Monday night, though."

  "Did they have an address or a phone?"

  "If they did, they weren't telling me."

  "The name might be enough for Turing to track him down, though," Tim suggested.

  Claudia nodded, pulled out her cell phone, and began punching keys. Too many keys for a phone number, so Tim deduced that she was sending Turing a text message with the bartender's name.

  "Good idea," she said, as she typed. "I asked the guys who are on tonight if one of them could call the weeknight bartender, ask him to get in touch with me, but I have no idea if they'll do it."

  They probably would, for Claudia. Maybe it wasn't the fact that he was working that made him more appealing to the women here tonight. Maybe it was Claudia. They probably figured he must have something going for him, if she was with him.

  "Even if we do find him over the weekend, I think we should come back here on a weeknight," he said aloud. "I think the atmosphere's probably a lot different on week-nights. Maybe there's something we can learn."

  "You don't want to show Eddie's picture around tonight?" Claudia asked.

  Tim looked around, considering. It was tempting, but for the wrong reason. He found he was thinking less of what he could learn about the case than whether the blond

  woman in the red leather skirt would be impressed if she knew he was a PI.

  "Too soon," he said. "I'd rather know more about the cast of characters in Eddie's life. Right now, we could be sitting next to Eddie's best friend or his worst enemy, and we wouldn't have a clue."

  "Afraid we'll tip off the killer and scare him out of town?"

  Tim shrugged. Stranger things had happened.

  "Later, then," Claudia said. "Finish off your beer, and you can show me the scene of the crime."

  "You're on," Tim said, tipping his glass.

  When they came back on a weeknight, the sidewalks probably wouldn't be filled with couples and groups of people. Though even tonight the crowd thinned out as they left Wilson Boulevard behind for the street where Eddie had parked, and their footsteps on the sidewalk grew gradually louder than the distant traffic noise. It was a little eerie, moving so quickly from the noisy chaos of the Friday night crowd to the relative quiet of a residential neighborhood, where the houses were visibly occupied but the sidewalks deserted.

  More than a little eerie when they got to the block in which the hit-and-run had taken place, with a pool of deep shadow midway, where Mr. Meekins hadn't yet convinced the county to replace the streetlight bulb.

  "Great place for a mugging," Claudia said.

  Tim nodded. He'd only thrown his jacket on when they left the bar, but he found himself reaching to pull it closed and zip it when they started walking into the shadow. Ridiculous; it wasn't as if streetlights or moonlight gave off heat.

  "Here's where it happened," he said, stopping at the place Mr. Meekins had indicated, just below the burnt-out streetlight.

  Claudia nodded. She reached into her suitcase-sized purse, rummaged until she unearthed a flashlight, and be-

  gan a slow prowl through the area, studying the ground in the flashlight beam. Studying it a lot more carefully than Tim had done some ten hours earlier.

  "It rained that night, you know," he said.

  "Yeah, and last night, too," Claudia said, glancing up. "I know I'm probably wasting my time. We got anything better to do?"

  Tim shook his head, and she returned to her search.

  Nothing better to do now and not much left to do in the morning, Tim thought. If there was anything fishy going on with Eddie's business, Turing and Maude would probably find it. Maybe they'd turn up something about the hit-and-run while they were at it, but so far, the case for attempted murder didn't look promising. Unless Mr. Meekins could provide a few more details.

  He glanced at the old man's house. A couple of lights were still on.

  "Looks like Mr. Meekins is still up," he said. "The eyewitness. I'll knock on his door, see if he'll talk to us."

  "Good idea," Claudia said. "By the way, what color was Eddie's car?"

  "Silver," Tim said. "Why?"

  "I don't know," Claudia said. "Makes a deliberate hit more plausible, I guess. Harder for the driver to claim he didn't see Eddie if he was standing in front of a light-colored car."

  "But doesn't rule out an accident," Tim said.

  He opened the gate and made his way carefully up Mr. Meekins's front walk. The concrete was old and cracked— not the best of footing at any time, and especially treacherous in the dim light from the streetlights at each end of the block.