“It was him, definitely,’’ Tim said. “The guy we knew as Ray Santiago. Trouble is, the police seem to think Ray Santiago may not be his real name.”

  Uhy would Ray lie about his identityf I can think of a number of reasons, of course. But I have a hard time seeing any of them as something that could possibly have anything to do with Ray.

  Perhaps it's some silly mistake. Perhaps Ray made an error when he wrote down the phone number for his family. But even if it’s an unlisted number, the police could get it.

  Perhaps he was estranged from his family, and made up a fake address so no one would contact them.

  Or perhaps he was an orphan, a foster child, and wanted, for some reason, to pretend that he had a family just like anyone else. I don't necessarily understand human psychology as well as I would like, but I think I can see why someone would do that.

  Phis is ridiculous. I can keep thinking of more possibilities, each more improbable than the last. That the police killed Ray and are pretending he's an imposter to cover up their crime. That his identity is fake because he’s in the witness protection program. Ridiculous. What we need right now are answers, not more improbable theories.

  “1 don’t understand how this happened,’' Maude was saying. “You ran a background check on Ray, right?"

  I could see through the camera that Tim looked uncomfortable.

  * u Yeah, but a background check is only going to find so much," he began.

  MS

  “If it doesn't even find that the man’s an imposter, then what good is it?” Maude snapped.

  “Let Tim explain,” I said.

  Tim looked down at his hands for a few moments. Then he looked up again, glanced at Maude, and fixed his eyes on my camera.

  “Turing, I think maybe I blew the background check. Remember, when we hired Ray, I was still taking the PI class. I’d never done a background check before. So I got some help from someone who knew a lot more than I did. ”

  “Who was that?” Maude asked.

  “Ray,” Tim said.

  Maude started to say something, then put her hand over her mouth as if she needed to physically restrain herself.

  “I know it sounds stupid now, but it seemed so logical then,” Tim continued. “When he was here for the final interview, you had me talk to Ray, so I could get the information I needed for the background check. And I was nervous because I’d never done it before, only learned about it in class. And we started talking about that, and he said not to worry, he could show me a few things that would help me—stuff about using the Internet to do most of the checking. We found a phone jack, plugged in his laptop, and he showed me all kinds of stuff. Used himself as an example, and showed me how to do a credit check, a Nexis search — everything. And he e-mailed me bookmarks for all the sites he used, and printed out everything and explained it all, while I took notes. It was great. ”

  “But he was running the show, ” Maude said.

  “Yeah, but I didn’t think it mattered, ” he said. “I mean, I was right there, looking over his shoulder, every minute. I saw where he

  Click Hare for Murder

  4 ^ went, what he typed in, what came back. It was all okay. ”

  “But he was driving,” Maude said. “He chose the sites; he defined the searches. Of course he wouldn't show you anything that would prove him a fraud. Hell, for all we know, he might have rigged it so when it looked like he was going to the credit agencies, he was calling up a faked page from his hard drive. Can you say for sure he didn’t?”

  “Since I didn’t even know that was possible, no; I can’t say for sure,” Tim said. ‘Maybe that’s what he did. All l know is that it looked as if he’d done everything we needed and printed out the results. I made a few phone calls to his references, but they checked out. It seemed silly to redo everything he’d already done. ”

  “I wonder how many other imposters we have working for us, ” Maude said.

  Tim winced.

  “Look, by the time I did backgrounds on everyone else, I’d spent those couple of weeks working for the instructor who taught the class, remember? I learned a lot more about how you were supposed to do background checks. Like not relying so much on online stuff, and how to cross-check it. The background checks on the other employees were a lot more orthodox. Really. Although if you want to have someone else, someone with more experience, do new background checks on all of them, that’s fine with me. I’d feel a lot better if we did that. ”

  “I’ll consider it, ” I said. Tor that matter, I intended to do some heavy digging myself, on all the Alan Grace employees. Better yet,

  I’d see if KingFischer could help. KingFischer was security conscious

  * to the point of paranoia. “For now, we need to find out more about Ray. ”

  “Perhaps the police will uncover Ray’s real identity while they’re investigating his murder, ” Maude said.

  “Unlikely,” Tim said, shaking his head. “For one thing, they’d have run his fingerprints through all the databases; if his prints were on file anywhere, I think they’d have gotten a hit by now. Of course, that’s good news. If his fingerprints aren’t on file, at least it means he’s not a crook. Wasn’t a crook, I mean. ”

  “No, ” Maude said. “It only means he didn’t have a criminal record. He could still be a very successful crook; someone too smart to have gotten caught. ”

  “God,” Tim said. “First the police and now you. ”

  “What do you mean?” Maude asked.

  “Never mind,” Tim said. “It’s just that I don’t think the police will do much of an investigation. They think Ray was a crook, too; or at least involved in drugs. ”

  “I never said Ray was a crook, ” Maude protested.

  “You just did,” Tim said. “You said —"

  I found myself on the verge of snapping at them—asking them, why they were wasting time bickering. But l stopped myself. Bickering was how they showed the tension they were feeling. Being impatient was how I showed mine.

  “Tim, why do they think Ray was involved in drugs?” I asked instead.

  “The way he was killed, I guess,” Tim said. “Well-dressed young man found shot in an alley behind a trendy Adams-Morgan club—what was he doing there if he wasn’t either buying or selling drugs? And the fact that he’s Hispanic doesn’t help; I guess they think he’s the nephew of a rich Colombian drug dealer or something. ”

  “That’s ridiculous, ” Maude said. “We know who Ray was: a brilliant system engineer who just happened to be Cuban-American. ”

  “Really?” Tim said. “How do we know he wasn’t a drug dealer hiding his identity by pretending to be a system engineer?”

  “He’s—he wasn’t pretending,” I said. Strange how we all still fell into the habit of thinking of Ray in the present tense. “Maude’s right; he was a brilliant system engineer, and given the hours he spent on the Alan Grace project, I can’t imagine when he could have found the time to sell drugs. Or use them. ”

  “Not to mention the time he spent on his volunteer work, ” Maude said.

  “The time he said he spent,” Tim muttered.

  “Tim, I went to a Byte Back meeting with Ray a couple of weeks ago,” Maude said. “Those kids at the rec center knew him. Liked him. He tutored them for a couple of months. You can’t fake that. And I’ve worked closely with him; I’d have seen signs of drug use. ” “The signs aren’t that obvious, ” Tim said. “It’s not like all drug users have track marks running up and down their arms. ”

  Maude looked at him over her glasses.

  “I’ve worked in offices for decades, ” she said. “I know the signs that someone’s drinking or using drugs, and I didn’t see any of them on Ray. ”

  Tim squirmed a little.

  “Are you sure you were looking?” he asked.

  “I was looking, ” Maude said. “He was a stranger to us, and he was going to be responsible for Turing’s new home. We’d be trusting Turing’s life to him. I was looking, long and hard. And I didn’t see anything that made me uneasy.,”

  “None of us did,” I said. “Until now.”

  Maude nodded, and her face fell.

  “Obviously I missed something, ” she said.

  “We all missed it,” Tim said. “Look, I believed the guy, too. He seemed like one of the white hats. He tried to get me involved in some of his crusades to protect kids from online danger. Like monitoring chat rooms to watch for signs of stalkers, stuff like that. So if there were signs, I didn’t pick up on them either.”

  “We’re not going to get anywhere sitting around talking about this,” 1 said. “We’ve got to investigate this much more thoroughly. Even if Tim is wrong, and the police are seriously looking into Ray’s murder, there’s a lot they don’t know—about me, for instance. I’m not sure they’d know what to make of me if we told them, and I don’t want to tell them. So we do our own investigation. ”

  Our own investigation- Maude squared her shoulders and looked interested. Tim tried to follow suit, but his stomach lurched.

  What’s wrong with me? he thought. A few weeks ago, he’d have found it thrilling to investigate a homicide.

  But not a homicide where he was—-guilty wasn’t the word. Responsible. If he hadn’t blown away Ray’s request for help, maybe there wouldn’t even be a homicide.

  I have to tell them, he thought. But he couldn’t see an easy way to bring it up.

  “I’ll take care of the online side,” Turing was saying. “Maude’s our liaison with the D.C. police, and she’ll be investigating at the Alan Grace offices and other nearby locales.”

  S3

  “What about me?” Tim asked.

  “You’ll be uncovering Ray’s past,” Turing said. “Maude, help him with the travel arrangements, will you? He’ll need to stop off at the Florida Bureau of Vital Statistics in Saint Petersburg for a copy of Ray’s birth certificate and see if he can find a corresponding death certificate. That’s usually what people do to establish a new identity that will hold up under some scrutiny, take the birth certificate of a dead child. And then he’ll need to go down to Miami.”

  “The visit to the Bureau of Vital Statistics is fairly routine, isn’t it?” Maude asked. “Maybe we could hire a local private investigator to do that part, and send Tim straight to Miami, where he can be of more use.”

  Damn, Tim thought. He’d felt reassured at starting with a visit to a government agency. He knew how to do that.

  “Good thinking,” Turing said. “Tim, you’ll need to take your laptop; I’m getting together as much data as I can on Ray, including photos and videos of him. If it turns out Ray Santiago isn’t his real name, it may be a little harder, but I’m sure sooner or later someone will recognize him if you show his picture around enough.”

  “What if they don’t?” Tim asked.

  “Then you can go on to San Jose; I’m pretty sure his Silicon Valley credentials were valid, but you can check them out all over again, and try to follow his trail back from the other end.”

  It would take forever, Tim thought. And that was strangely comforting. As if by following Ray’s trail into the past, he could atone for failing him in the present.

  * * *

  Maude and Tim have their assignments -

  Time for me to see what I can do.

  Ray’s credit cards first, I think. I can legitimately run a credit check on him, thanks to the forms he signed when we hired him. And once I know what cards he has, I can eventually find a way to access his records. Not so legitimate, of course; hut I think the situation warrants it.

  Much as I hate to see humans using institutions with inadequate security, I rather hope Ray had his credit cards with institutions that really need to clean up their act, rather than the ones that already have. It would make it so much easier. But sooner or later, electronically or by using human contacts, I’ll get access.

  And once I can see his credit card records, I can identify his Internet Service Provider; almost everyone uses a credit card for the monthly ISP charges.

  Then the real unknown—getting access to his ISP. Some of them have security so loose that Tim could probably hack in, and others might defeat even me, at least when you consider that I have to get in and out again without leaving a trail. And odds are Ray was knowledgeable enough to choose one of the tough ones.

  I could ask KingFischer for help, but I hate to bother him, busy as he is. It's as if the UL firewall were under siege. I’d drop everything to help him, but I’m more and more convinced that someone is using the information from Ray’s laptop to attack us. Which means finding Ray’s killer is just as important as defending against the attacks. If we find the killer, maybe we stop the attacks. If we find him in time.

  This isn’t going to be easy.

  * * *

  Tim felt like a fifth wheel- Turing had him sitting at Ray’s computer, inserting a new, blank CD-ROM on command, and occasionally looking at something she’d display on the monitor. Apparently she was sorting through the hies to find photos or video sequences that gave a sharp, recognizable image of Ray, and good, clear audio of his voice. In her office next door, Maude was making his travel arrangements, partly online and partly over the phone.

  As Turing worked, images of Ray flashed across the screen. Was this an integral part of what she was doing, Tim wondered, or something to amuse him while he waited? Ray telling something to Maude, both of them laughing. Ray frowning, chewing out a moon-faced young man that Tim vaguely recognized as Grant, his lieutenant. Ray eating at his desk—he seemed to do that a lot during his video meetings with Turing. Ray hunched tiredly over his computer, the glow from the screen emphasizing the still faint lines in his face and hinting at what he might have looked like if he’d lived another ten years.

  All disconcertingly familiar, and at the same time strange. Or was it just strange to see so many images of Ray when the man himself was dead?

  Snap out of it, Tim told himself. Do something useful. What would his PI class instructors do?

  They’d study Ray’s office for clues, he decided. Not so much clues to the murder, perhaps. But clues about who Ray really was.

  “Of course, my investigation has run into a blank wall

  5b already,” he muttered. Quite literally; for a place where someone spent the better part of his waking life, Ray’s office was singularly bare.

  “What was that?” Turing asked.

  “Sorry, I was talking to myself,” Tim said, focusing with more attention on the pictures Turing was showing onscreen. Most of them were close-ups of Ray. “Do you have any shots that give a really good view of what Ray’s office was like before the police came?”

  “Of course,” Turing said. “But it didn’t look that different from the way it looks now. They were very neat about searching, and didn’t take anything away with them.”

  Yes, Tim could see that from the wider-angle shots Turing was now showing. He looked from the screen to the office and back again. The angle and quality of the light changed from photo to photo. The configuration of the papers on Ray’s desk changed, but only slightly; Ray obviously followed the clean-desk school. The bookshelves contained technical books and magazines, neatly aligned, and apparently void of bookmarks. Even his coffee mug was a blank; solid navy ceramic.

  Was this some kind of strange corporate policy? He left Ray’s office and strolled along the line of glass-fronted offices that would normally have housed the rest of the staff. All of them were filled with personal touches. From the evidence, the office next to Ray usually contained an avid skier with a blond girlfriend and a white huskie. The occupant of the next office liked cats and motivational slogans. Tim thought he wouldn’t mind meeting Maria, owner of the truly incredible action figure collection in the third office; he particularly liked the way Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Mr. Spock had joined forces to fight off the nine Ring-wraiths. And beyond her was Grant, who probably thought his collection of skulls, bats, and gargoyles the height of Goth elegance.

  Okay, Alan Grace had a fairly liberal policy on office decor, he thought as he returned to Ray’s office. The anonymity was Ray’s own choice.

  “What are you up to?” Maude asked, coming up behind Tim.

  “Look at these,’’ Tim said, holding up the contents of Ray’s pencil holder.

  “Have you found something significant?” Turing asked.

  “Ray doesn’t even have a pen or pencil that isn’t standard corporate issue,” Tim said. “What kind of person goes through life without ever picking up a pen or a pencil with an advertising slogan on it?”

  “And this is significant?” Maude said a little sarcastically.

  “I haven’t found anything personal in this whole damned office, and that could be significant,” Tim said. “No souvenirs of vacations, no pictures of friends and family, no desk toys, no posters, no mottos. No books and magazines other than technical ones. He doesn’t even have any cartoons on the walls, because of course you can find out a lot about someone from what he considers funny. There’s no Ray here.”

  “Should we have noticed this before?” Turing asked.

  Tim shrugged.

  “Maybe we should have,” Maude said. “But when Ray

  Sfl was here, he filled the office. It didn’t seem bare at all. Now . .

  She shrugged.

  “Of course, we still have to figure out just what this means,” Tim said.

  “What’s to figure out?” Maude said. “He was hiding who he really was.”

  “I see what Tim means,” Turing said. “Was he trying to hide his life before he came here? Or his life during the hours he wasn’t at work? Or was he already making sure that when he moved on, he wouldn’t leave behind any clues to who he really was.”

  Maude nodded, and patted Tim on the shoulder, as if to apologize for laughing at him earlier.

  “That’s the last CD,” Turing said. “You can take off anytime.”

  “Come on,” Maude said. “I’ve got your ticket and itinerary.”

  “What’s with Turing, anyway?” Tim asked as he followed Maude to her office. “She’s acting ... I don’t know. Weird. A little paranoid.”