“So we shouldn’t worry too much just yet about delays in delivering the system,” Maude said.

  “Precisely,” Turing said. “Even if I were ready for it, right now we need to worry a lot more about security. Has anyone used the information from Ray’s laptop or his PDA to make dangerous changes before we knew Ray was dead? Even worse, could they use any of that information to break into the system in the future, when changes could be even more dangerous . . . when Em in there?”

  Turing signed off soon after that, though Maude suspected she was still watching through the cameras. Watching the door to Ray’s office, among other things. Maude found herself doing that, whenever anyone approached it. She’d locked the door, told the staff she wanted to preserve the contents for the police. Which should keep them out for now. Unless one of them had something to hide. Something that might be connected with the contents of Ray’s office. She’d made sure one camera was aimed so Turing could watch the door of Ray’s office, in case anyone tried to get in after she left. After everyone left.

  A good thing Turing could do it, she thought. Tim had

  3b grown fond of saying what tedious, thankless work surveillance was. Since he’d only done a few brief surveillances so far in his private eye career, she assumed he was quoting from one of the classes he’d taken. Turing, fortunately, could create a background task, a small extension of herself, which would make the task less tedious. But not less nerve-wracking, waiting for one of their staff to make some move that would prove his disloyalty.

  Or even more nerve-wracking, finding out, too late, that the move had already been made, unseen.

  Maude remembered, suddenly, the scary stories she and her friends had told each other in Girl Scouts. Corny stories, yes; but when she remembered how they’d told them— huddled in their sleeping bags in the darkened woods; whispering, because the troop leader had already told them several times to be quiet—she could still remember how those stories terrified her. Especially the ones whose heroine locks the doors and windows to keep the monster out and thinks she’s safe, until she hears a noise behind her—only a small noise, a creaking board, or perhaps a throat cleared. And the heroine turns to find the monster already inside, waiting for her.

  She sometimes remembered those stories when she came home late, alone. Especially once when she walked in to find her apartment in disarray, picked up the phone to call the police, and then thought she heard a noise from the bedroom. Her imagination, it had turned out; but the police had commended her wisdom in not staying to find out whether or not she heard a real burglar.

  But if Turing realized someone—or something—was in her home, where could she flee?

  Stop it, Maude told herself. It’s one thing for children to scare themselves with tales of ghosts and lurking maniacs. It’s different for grown-ups.

  It’s too real.

  Tim eased his car another lane to the left and glanced down at the directions Detective Stowers had given him when he’d finally reached Homicide.

  Correction: when he’d finally reached the Violent Crimes Branch.

  “We don’t have Homicide anymore,” the switchboard operator had said. “You want Violent Crimes.”

  “Not really,” Tim had muttered as he copied down the phone number.

  It would have to be in Southeast. Like many white residents of the Washington area, Tim hadn’t spent much time in Southeast D.C. He hoped the Violent Crimes Branch wasn’t in a particularly scary part of Southeast, but then, they’d put it where the business was, wouldn’t they?

  From 395, take the Pennsylvania Avenue exit. He’d done this before, but only to connect with 295 north on his way to Baltimore. He hoped there weren’t any squeegee people working the stoplight today. He knew it was paranoid, but he couldn’t help wondering what would happen if one of the squeegee people was actually a carjacker waiting to

  * pounce.

  Continue on Pennsylvania to the top of the hill. He continued, looking warily to either side for possible danger.

  After a block or two, the slightly seedy small businesses that clustered near the interstate gave way to a quiet neighborhood. Tree-shaded streets lined with modest apartment buildings and small, brick, single-family homes. He spotted a huge, modern, redbrick Baptist church on his left, and then, a block or two later, another equally large rival Baptist church—this one more traditional, with white columns.

  Cross Branch Avenue, and then turn into the Penn Branch Shopping Center. He expected a blighted, half-abandoned urban strip mall, with half the space boarded up and the rest filled with pawn shops, convenience stores, and minimarts, its owners thrilled to have D.C.’s finest as paying tenants.

  Well, okay, there was a minimart. And a liquor store. Also a First Union Bank, a CVS drugstore, and a Subway sandwich shop. No boarded-up stores. The place looked busy and modestly prosperous. Strangely suburban.

  He drove around to the back, where the police shared the shopping center s lower level with a Division of Motor Vehicles branch office. He had to cruise the parking lot twice to find a spot. Apparently there wasn't any special lot for the police cruisers; they were scattered throughout the lot.

  He cooled his heels for half an hour in a waiting room, with an anxious, middle-aged woman and two uniformed officers. The woman glanced up and edged almost imperceptibly away from him. The officers ignored him, their posture suggesting that they’d waited for a while and expected to wait longer.

  Tim bit a nail as he imagined being grilled by a hard-

  3‘I bitten pair of detectives. Having to justify himself. Give an alibi. Would playing Beyond Paranoia at the time of Ray’s death count as an alibi?

  They’d smile condescendingly at how new and unscuffed his PI registration was. They’d be watching, when they took him over to identify the body, to see if he showed signs of guilt—or worse yet, if he fainted or threw up, the way rookies always did in books and movies.

  “Mr. Pincowski?”

  “Pincoski,” Tim corrected, standing up to shake the detective’s hand. Way up; the guy was tall.

  “Detective Stowers,’’ the officer said. He wasn’t just tall; he was big. An ex—football player who still did something to keep in shape.

  Finding out that Tim was a PI didn’t seem to bother Detective Stowers. Or amuse him, Tim was relieved to see.

  And he didn’t seem confused by Tim’s dual role as both friend of the victim and representative of his employer. Or interested in Tim’s whereabouts at the time of the murder. At first, Tim was relieved. But then he began to wonder. Would it look suspicious if the police later found out that he was supposed to meet Ray?

  And more important, was this something that would help them catch Ray’s killer?

  Maybe. But he couldn’t bring himself to admit his failure. He’d let Ray down. At least he wouldn’t let Turing down, he thought, and brought up the subject of Ray’s laptop. r

  “Laptop?’’ the detective echoed.

  “The company’s concerned about it,” Tim said. “That and the PDA. They could both have confidential corporate information on them.”

  “We didn’t find a laptop or a PDA at the scene,” Stowers said. “If we locate either one, I’ll let you know, but you should probably check other places where he might have left them.”

  Tim shook his head.

  “He wouldn’t have left them anywhere,” he said. “Okay, he might have left his laptop at home if he was going out to a club or something, but there’s no way he would ever go anywhere without his PDA.”

  “I was at the scene,” Stowers said. “I’d have remembered a laptop or a PDA. His wallet was intact, but all he had was some cash, his driver’s license, and a couple of credit cards. Nothing we could use to find a next of kin or place of employment. We got his address from the driver’s license, and went there. If we’d found a laptop or a PDA, I’d have wanted to see them, but we didn’t; just a nonoperational desktop computer. The only way we knew to call your company was that we found a couple of business cards and a file with copies of all his applications and insurance paperwork. And to tell you the truth, I was kind of surprised when anyone called back. I figured maybe the business cards were phony, too.”

  “What do you mean, ‘phony, too’?”

  “The next-of-kin information you have on file for him is phony, you know,” the detective said.

  “Phony?” Tim exclaimed. “Are you sure it’s not just out of date—Maude would have his latest information—Maude Graham. She’s—”

  “Yes, we’ve talked to Ms. Graham, and she faxed over a complete copy of Mr. Santiago’s personnel file for us earlier this morning,” Stowers said. “She has the same Miami address for Mr. Santiago’s parents. Only there aren’t any San-tiagos living there—no one lives there, and according to the Miami PD, no one has for some time.”

  And then things got really strange. The detective began asking questions about drugs. Did he know whether Ray used drugs? Had Ray ever offered to sell him drugs? They brought pictures. Have you ever seen this man? Do you recognize any of these people? And no, he didn’t really recognize any of the pictures. All the subjects, whether ratlike and furtive or hulking and pugnacious, looked vaguely familiar, but only because they were the stuff of any suburban dweller’s nightmare, the kind of urban wildlife you’d cross the street to avoid.

  Well, with one exception.

  “He looks vaguely familiar,” Tim said, pointing to one man with a strangely penetrating stare.

  “Do you remember where you’ve seen him?” the detective asked, sitting forward a little.

  Tim frowned, and then it hit him.

  “I think he tried to squeegee my windshield earlier today,” he said. “At the stoplight on Pennsylvania, just after I exited 395.”

  “Not the same guy,” the detective said, sitting back again. “This was taken in the morgue, two weeks ago.”

  “Ah,” Tim said, nodding. That accounted for the strange stare. “Look, who are these guys—drug dealers or something? Because Ray wasn’t a drug dealer—he didn’t do

  ME drugs at all; he was a very skilled and highly paid system engineer at Alan Grace Corporation.”

  “Odds are most of that pay went right up his nose,” the detective said. “And your people at the corporation may want to check around, see if there’s any money or equipment missing. Looks like he’s pretty much cleaned out his apartment of anything valuable. No TV, no stereo.”

  Tim wanted to protest that Ray had only been on the East Coast for six months, most of that time too busy to shop for anything but necessities. And he didn’t care much about material things anyway. Lived in his head and his computers. But he wasn’t sure Detective Stowers would believe him. And what if the detective asked too many questions about what Ray was so busy with? Turing wanted to keep a low profile.

  “You’re writing this off as some kind of drug-related crime, aren’t you?” Tim said instead.

  “We’re not writing anything off, Mr. Pincoski,” Stowers said, frowning. “But when you’ve got nearly a dozen murders in the same geographic area, with the same M.O., you’ve got to consider a possible connection. And so far, the connection is cocaine. Maybe you’re right; maybe your friend wasn’t involved in drugs, as a dealer or a buyer or even a casual user. Maybe he just wandered into the wrong place at the wrong time. But when you consider the trouble we’ve had finding any trace of Mr. Santiago, apart from his employment at your company—phony address for the next of kin, no trace of him in Miami, no Florida driver’s license in all the years he lived there—you’ve got to wonder what’s going on.”

  M3

  “I just can’t believe it’s Ray we’re talking about,” Tim said, shaking his head.

  Probably the wrong thing to say, since it inspired the detective to ask that Tim meet them over at the medical examiner’s office. To make sure the body they’d found was really the man Tim had known as Ray Santiago. Tim couldn’t think of a way to get out of it.

  ‘‘Maybe it’s not Ray,” he muttered as he stepped back out into the parking lot. He was surprised to find it was still daylight. It was easy to lose track of time inside the windowless police offices, and he’d expected it to be night when he emerged. But it was still midafternoon, and the temperature had climbed into the nineties. Which made it all the more annoying that he had to trudge up and down for five minutes to find his car.

  He removed an orange flyer from his windshield—apparently a local hair salon with a special on braids had papered the parking lot in his absence, decorating police and civilian vehicles alike. He pulled out, careful not to back into the police cruiser that had dogged his heels since he’d stepped into the parking lot and was even now waiting to take his space.

  The police were here for several hours -

  Interviewing the staff.

  What if they want to interview me? If they review Ray's e-mail, see how many messages we exchanged, and say, “Who is this

  Turing Hopper person? Why haven't we seen him? All right, her.

  *

  We want to talk to her. Send her down to the Violent Crimes Branch this afternoon. ”

  MM

  Of course, it doesn’t really look as if they will. They seem strangely uninterested in Ray’s work. I’d like to think it’s because they know his work has nothing to do with his murder. That would reassure me. But since they’re focusing on questions about possible drug use instead, I’m not sure I trust what they’re doing.

  They had a so-called expert examine Ray’s computer, but he didn’t do a full-scale forensic analysis. He just asked if the system administrator could reset Ray’s passwords so he could get into Ray’s e-mail and his files. I did. He spent an hour poking around, and then left.

  “That’s a relief,” Maude said. “I was worried he’d find something about you. ”

  “I knew he wouldn’t,” I said. “I already scanned all Ray’s files, long before the police came. I’m impressed; Ray was very meticulous about security. ”

  “And fortunately, since you control the system, you could have deleted anything if he hadn’t been.”

  “Not safely,” I said. “There’s always a way to retrieve deleted data, if you want to spend enough time and effort. ”

  “Okay, I know a deleted document isn’t really deleted,” Mvaude said. “But you could have created documents the same size and saved them over. ”

  “And then I’d have to fake the file date,” I said. “And change a couple of logs that showed Yd done all this. And even if I did, these days you can examine a disk drive on a molecular level and retrieve every bit of data ever saved on it—not that the police are likely to have the time or money to do something like that. But it’s possible. ”

  “I’m not sure I needed to know that,” Maude said. “I think I shall return to writing personal documents with pen and ink. ”

  MS

  I fretted, wondering if I had overlooked something important in Ray’s files. Something that might give away more information than is safe if the police expert spotted it. Something we were all overlooking that would help the police solve Ray’s murder, if we brought it to their attention.

  I was relieved when the police left. And even more relieved when Rim returned.

  The police had come and gone while Tim was down at the Violent Crimes Branch. That meant they didn’t have just Detective Stowers on the case, he thought. That was a good thing, wasn’t it?

  Maude bustled Tim into her office and shut the door. Unusual at Alan Grace.

  “Won’t the staff wonder what secrets we’re discussing?” he asked, half-joking.

  “I sent the staff home after the police finished interrogating them,” Maude said.

  “That was nice,” Tim said. “They probably needed a break, after the police finished with them.”

  “I confess, I wasn’t thinking about nice,” Maude said. “It wasn’t as if they were going to get any work done, and I didn’t think I could stand having them all around trading rumors and having hysterics.”

  “You’ll get credit for being nice, anyway,” Tim said, with a faint smile.

  “So what happened down at the Violent Crimes Branch?” Turing asked. “Do we know any more about Ray?”

  “No,” Tim said. “In fact, I’d say we know less than we ever did.”

  Mb

  “I wish you’d refrain from being deliberately cryptic,” Maude said, sounding uncharacteristically impatient. “It’s been a trying day.”

  “I don’t really know any more about Ray’s murder than I did before I went down there,” Tim said. “And there seems to be some question about who he really was.”

  “You mean it might not have been Ray who was murdered?” Turing asked.

  “No,” Tim said, controlling a shudder. “They had me ID the body.”

  Against his will, the image filled his mind. He hadn’t looked at the face right off. Couldn’t look; couldn’t get beyond the right hand, not for several minutes.

  When Tim was eight, he’d seen his grandmother in the funeral home, lying in the casket, and couldn’t get over the thought that she was just asleep. His mother and his aunt discussed how natural she looked, and argued gently over whether her glasses should be on her face or placed on her bosom. He’d watched Gram carefully, confident that any second she would open her eyes and offer her opinion. She looked that lifelike. He’d figured having seen Gram, and a few other relatives, he was prepared for what he’d see when he went to ID the body, and the only problem would be accepting that Ray was really dead.

  But down at the morgue, looking at that hand, he’d known. Maybe it was something about the color, or the awkward angle—he still wasn’t sure. But he’d known beyond any doubt that the guy attached to that particular hand was stone-cold dead, and the longer he looked, the less he wanted to move his eyes up to the face and see who the dead guy really was. Because—