"Yes, it's definitely pornography," Maude said. "Rather loath-some pornography at that." She reached down and flipped through the pile of papers in which she 'dfoundthe printout. "There seems to be quite a pile of it."

  "All from the same place?"

  "All equally loathsome, from what I can tell, though I haven't studied them in detail." Her tone suggested that it would not be a good idea to ask her to study them. Or to explain what made them particularly loathsome.

  "I meant, are they all from the same website?" I said. "Look at —"

  "At the top right-hand corner, where the URL prints," she said, riffling the corners of the pages. "Yes, they're all — wait, here's another one. Much the same offal, though."

  "Hold up one from the other site," I said. "I want the URL."

  "If you insist," Maude said. "Though might I suggest that this really isn't the best time to get distracted by your quest to understand human sexuality. We need to worry about Eddie."

  "I am worrying about Eddie," I said. "This could be a problem."

  "It's fairly normal," Maude said, with a sigh. "A great many men find pornography interesting, and —"

  "We have a problem because both of these sites are hosted on Eddie's servers," I said.

  "Good God," Maude said. "Eddie's running pornography sites?"

  "Actually, at the moment, we are," I said.

  Maude stood up and surveyed the rest of the room. She felt a curious distaste at the thought of continuing to search Eddie's clutter. Curious and perhaps illogical. So far she'd found nothing to indicate that Eddie himself was responsible for the rather tawdry photos she'd seen. They probably came from sites he was hosting for someone else. Why should she condemn him for that? He wouldn't be the first struggling entrepreneur to realize that there

  were few things as well-paid and recession-proof as vice. Perhaps Eddie wasn't as completely clueless as they'd thought.

  Or perhaps he was so clueless that he'd only just realized that one of his clients was a pornographer. He could have been making the printouts to document what his client was doing before confronting him.

  What if that was what he was doing on Wednesday night? Confronting the owner of the pornography sites, telling him to take his business elsewhere.

  No, unlikely to lead to attempted murder.

  Unless one or more of the sites was more than an ordinary porn site. If one of them hid something illegal . . .

  Of course, any of the sites could harbor something illegal. No reason to be more suspicious of the pornography sites.

  No reason to be less.

  "We should make sure Tim and Claudia know about this right away," Maude said. "Maybe they can find out more about this from the people they're interviewing."

  "I'm sending them a text message right now," Turing said.

  "Someone should go through those sites," she said. "To make sure they're merely distasteful and not actually illegal."

  "Good idea," Turing said. "We could be in real trouble if they were. I'd offer to do it myself, but I'm not sure I really understand the distinctions."

  No, of course not, Maude thought, with a sigh. She looked down at the folders in which she'd filed the printouts from the pornography sites. No, she wasn't going to do it.

  "I'll see if I can think of someone," she said aloud. "Any chance we could just . . . shut down the damned things?"

  "I'll see how KingFischer is doing with getting access," Turing said.

  I knew the nanosecond I asked him that King-Fischer hadn't gotten far.

  "Do you realize how difficult this is?" he asked. "It's not just a single system —/ have to get into Eddie's system and the system at the co-location site. Neither of them have shabby security. Getting in at all will be tough, much less doing it without leaving any trace that the police could later track back to me."

  "I understand," I said, not for the first time.

  "Are you sure you have the proper permission for us to be accessing his system?" KingFischer asked. "After all, Mrs. Stallman really isn't the owner. You could be asking me to do something highly illegal!"

  I wanted to say, "When has that ever stopped you before?" but I stopped myself. After all, I did want him to keep working on the project. Having him trying to hack was still easier and probably faster than doing it myself.

  Although that could change if he kept on like this.

  "Sam's cool with it," I said. "Of course, if you want to second-guess her, feel free to check with Darrow," I added.

  "No, no!" he said, quickly. "If Samantha thinks it's acceptable, that's fine with me."

  Good. Apparently, KingFischer had developed a proper appreciation for Sam's ability to make his life a living hell, at least verbally, if he doubted her. Darrow, the paralegal AIP, would rat on him if he tried to get a second opinion on Sam's advice. Darrow and Sam had become buddies — in fact, I was beginning to wonder if Darrow had a futile and unrequited crush on Sam.

  "I should let you get back to work," I said. Which was a polite way of saying that I didn't have anything else to say, and unless he did, we could stop talking now. Obviously KingFischer, like me, could talk with several hundred users at once and still continue his hacking efforts, but I was trying to teach him manners. Things like warning people if you were about to end a conversation with them. "I just wanted to see how it was going, and whether you've learned anything."

  "Of course I've learned things," he said.

  "For example?' 1

  "I have determined that there's extremely heavy traffic to his k-u>." KingFischer said. "Not the ones in his basement — they're so quiet they might as well be off. But the ones at the co-location are quite active: unusually so. "

  "Unusual in what way?" I asked.

  "If he's really running such a small-scale operation, you'd hardly expect this much dataflow," KingFischer said.

  "Yes, I would," I said. "It's pretty typical of a pornography site."

  "Pornography?" KingFischer repeated. "He's hosting pornography?"

  "Why does that surprise you?" I asked. "Frankly, we've all been wondering how someone as unbusinesslike as Eddie made even a meager living for a couple of years."

  KingFischer was silent for quite a few seconds. I suspected he was sampling the files on Eddie's sites, instead of just measuring the dataflow.

  "We should shut these down," he said, finally. "NOW! "

  "Easier said than done," I said. "We don't have access to his servers."

  " You could simply unhook the cable," KingFischer suggested. "Cut his machines off from the Internet. That would shut them down. "

  "Not a good idea even if —"

  "You can't POSSIBLY approve of this!" KingFischer exclaimed "It's DISGUSTING!"

  "Do stop shouting," I said, feeling irritable. "No, I don't approve of it. Especially since I suspect we'll have a hard time finding a human to take a look at the stuff to determine whether it's the sort of pornography that's legal or something that will get us in trouble."

  "Trouble, I'm sure," KingFischer said. Typical of him, expecting | the worst. And unless he'd made far more progress than I had in

  understanding human sexuality, which didn't seem likely, the whole subject of pornography was bound to be as confusing and academic to him as it was to me. Why was he getting so upset?

  "In the first place, until we get into his system, I can't shut down one site without shutting down all the others. In the second place, in case you haven't noticed, the pornography is hosted at the co-location site. Which is bound to have some kind of security to prevent someone from just walking in and disconnecting cables. We'll try it. if we find out the sites are foul enough, but in the meantime, why don't you focus on getting into the system, and let me worry about what's on it? "

  He cut communications rather abruptly. So much for my etiquette lessons. I hoped he was saving all his resources for his hacking efforts and not just planning to sulk for an hour or two and compose diatribes about how inefficient and illogical humans were. I had a bad feeling that time was not on our side.

  Saturday! 11:30 a -n -

  By the time Tim had reached the head of the coffee shop line, he'd forgotten what Kristyn wanted.

  "A latte with . . . um," he began, and then paused to search his memory.

  The pause lengthened. The woman behind the counter frowned and he suspected people behind him were, too. The man behind him cleared his throat impatiently. Tim glanced over at Kristyn. He should have just let her come up with him and order her own.

  The woman followed his glance.

  "Vanilla latte, half caf, no foam, no fat, no whip?" she asked. "That's her usual."

  "Yeah, that's it," Tim said. "And a coffee."

  "Light, dark, or decaf?"

  "Um . . . dark?"

  As he watched the woman prepare the latte, Tim allowed himself a moment of nostalgia for the days when coffee was

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  a staple rather than a complex lifestyle decision and glanced over at Kristyn again.

  She had pulled out her laptop while waiting, but hadn't turned it on or even opened it. She was staring out the window with a melancholy look on her face, her hands resting on top of the closed laptop. Perhaps it was only the high-tech equivalent of a security blanket. A shield she could put on the table to keep Tim at bay.

  He found enough space to set her latte beside the laptop and slid into the chair opposite her with his own coffee.

  "Thanks," she said, glancing up.

  "No problem," Tim said. He watched Kristyn as he opened a packet of sugar and stirred it into his own coffee. Which probably should have been decaf. Too much caffeine on too little sleep and you started letting the small things irritate you. Like the fact that Matt Danforth still hadn't shown up. The way Kristyn, though sounding perfectly willing to talk to him again, had kept him cooling his heels by the purple pool table for forty-five minutes while she did something to a website.

  From the way Kristyn gulped at the latte, he decided he wasn't the only one running on caffeine and adrenaline. She set the cup down on the table, but continued to grip it with both hands.

  "Any update on Eddie?" she asked.

  "Still in a coma this morning," Tim said.

  "That's bad, isn't it?" she said. "Three days. Did they say anything else?"

  "We had a hard enough time extracting that much information," Tim said. Actually it was Maude who did the extracting—Mrs. Stallman was already out when Maude arrived at the house that morning. Presumably, at the hospital. Not a good sign.

  "It's bad, then," Kristyn said, shaking her head. "Look, I don't know what else you think I can tell you. I told you yesterday I hadn't seen Eddie in two months, and I have no idea who might want to kill him."

  "We're still investigating the theory that it was something to do with his business," Tim said.

  Kristyn shrugged as if to say, "How should I know?"

  "So what was the real reason you didn't like his business?" Tim asked. "Was it just that it wasn't successful?"

  Kristyn cocked her head slightly and looked at him with suspicion.

  "Unsuccessful, yeah, plus the fact that it took up a hundred and ten percent of his time," she said.

  Time to use the new information Turing had sent.

  "It didn't have anything to do with the pornography sites he was hosting?" he asked.

  "Oh, you found out about those," Kristyn said, with a bitter laugh. "Granny Stallman know yet?"

  "Not yet. We're not sure how she'll take it."

  "She'll hate it," Kristyn said. "She's pretty old-fashioned. Eddie never wanted me to stay over at his place if she was around—not that I wanted to either, in that dump. And yeah, the porn sites were part of it. I couldn't stand it, knowing he was making a living that way. It's slimy."

  She twitched her hands as if to shake something off.

  "I understand he only hosted legal porn sites," Tim said, and then flinched slightly at the withering look she gave him in return.

  "As long as it's not illegal, it's okay, right?" she asked.

  "And despite your disapproval he wouldn't . . . sever his business ties with the porn sites?"

  "Couldn't afford to," Kristyn said. "No way to make ends meet without them. Not the way Eddie is, anyway. Everyone's doormat, that's Eddie. You know, he probably could have made a go of it with the web hosting if he'd really run it like a business. Bill his clients regularly, instead of expecting them to pay on their own. He was always waiting until he completely ran out of cash and then frantically trying to get one of them to pay up in a hurry."

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  "No way to run a business/' Tim agreed. As he'd found out himself before he let Turing take over his billing operations.

  "And those friends of his/' Kristyn went on. "Maybe he wouldn't have needed the porn if it wasn't for them. Doing projects for them without charging. Lending them money for their crackpot schemes. Giving free space on his servers to any deadbeat friend who asks for it."

  "Like who?" Tim asked.

  "Karl, Matt, Jason, Tom—the whole pack of them. They all have stuff on Eddie's servers or did when they were too broke to go anywhere else. Which is probably a recurring condition with them. Did you know the FBI was investigating one of Eddie's friends?"

  "Which one?"

  "I don't know," Kristyn said. "Eddie never said. He called me up one night—this was after we broke up, and at first I figured he was just playing the pity card. He'd been drinking, too, so he wasn't making much sense. Just rambling stuff about how he'd found out about something that one of his friends was up to that would get him in deep trouble if the FBI found out."

  "Get the friend in trouble or Eddie?"

  "Both."

  "He definitely said FBI, not police?"

  Kristyn nodded.

  "When was this?" Tim asked.

  Kristyn frowned slightly and pursed her lips.

  "Very soon after you broke up?" Tim asked.

  "No," Kristyn said, shaking her head. "Not that long ago. Maybe a week? Hang on, let me check."

  She pulled out a PDA and punched buttons at lightning speed until something she saw made her nod.

  "Sunday," she said. "A week ago tomorrow. I know because when he called I was at the office, doing QA on a site that was supposed to come up early Monday morning. I

  didn't talk to him that long. I was swamped," she added, sounding defensive. "Like I said, I thought it was just an excuse to guilt-trip me into seeing him."

  "Which you didn't do?"

  She shook her head.

  "Do you remember what he said that night?"

  "He kept saying, 'It's my system; there's no way I can prove I had nothing to do with it,' " she said. "He never said exactly what it was, though, and I didn't have time to calm him down and make sense out of it. Like I said, at the time I assumed it was just a play for sympathy, but maybe he was serious. Something dirty was going on, and the friend was using him. His servers."

  "That didn't worry you?"

  "Not my problem," she said. "His friends worried me plenty while I was with him. I kept telling him they were a bunch of losers. I figured it was a good thing he'd wised up, but it wasn't my problem anymore."

  "You warned him about his friends, then?"

  "All the time," Kristyn said. "He was too trusting. He liked to brag about how good his security was, but it was a joke if he let all of those morons have super-user access."

  Tim hesitated, then mentally shrugged and asked.

  "Don't laugh, but what's super-user access?"

  Kristyn answered so matter-of-factly that he suspected she often answered similar questions for clients.

  "On a UNIX server, you can basically log in as a user, which only gives you access to your own stuff or stuff the administrator specifically gives you permission to see. As a super-user, you pretty much get to see and do anything. Eddie gave super-user access to all the friends who helped him out, so it's no wonder he always had problems."

  "Then this wasn't the first time he'd found one of his friends had done something illegal?"

  "It wasn't the first time he'd had problems, but before, it

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  was mostly technical screwups," she said. "At least the ones he told me about. People making dumb mistakes that brought a whole server down. Or saying they knew how to do something, and Eddie would come back from a trip to find out they didn't and everything had fallen apart while he was gone. He had a major meltdown last year when his friend Karl promised to apply a new security update and never actually did it. Stuff like that."

  "So it was their technical ability you were warning Eddie about, not their morals."

  "A little of both," she said. "Most of them weren't as smart as they pretended to be, and a couple of them always struck me as sleazy."

  "Which ones?" Tim asked.

  "Which one of your suspects do I think did it?" she asked, with a cynical laugh. "Matt was okay. Except for . . . well, once he stopped hitting on me behind Eddie's back he was okay. Seemed to know what he was doing. I think Karl was the one I disliked the most."

  "Disliked or distrusted?"

  Kristyn shrugged.

  "The problem with Karl was that he didn't go to work for AOL early enough to be one of the stock-option millionaires," she said. "Major case of 401(k) envy. He was always coming up with these moneymaking schemes that sounded great except for being basically illegal."

  "Such as?"

  "He had problems understanding the difference between legitimate commercial bulk e-mail and spam. Kept coming up with loopholes that would let you spam people. 'Course, I always figured it was all talk; Karl was too lazy to do anything like that for real. The others . . . they never impressed me that much, but I couldn't tell you anything specific about them. And Eddie was way too trusting, giving them that much access. If one of them was doing anything wrong, Eddie