"Perhaps she's gotten it out of her system andean be more helpful this time," I said instead.

  "I'm not holding my breath, " Maude said. "Odds are ill only

  MO Donna Andrews

  end up passing her another forty or fifty tissues, and drinking another wretched cup of tea."

  "But Maude," I said. "I thought you liked tea."

  "I do," she said. "As long as it's properly made."

  "Hers isn't?"

  "What that woman does with a teapot ought to be a felony," Maude said. "Vve never seen a more blatant example of sheer unprovoked cruelty than what she inflicts on those poor, innocent tea leaves. Still, it's all for a good cause, I suppose. And I should make allowances for the stress she's under. I've stopped asking her if there's news about Eddie. There hasn't been, and she's starting to cringe every time the phone rings."

  She squared her shoulders and marched up the stairs.

  I considered asking KingFischer if he'd had any more luck cracking Eddie's network, then decided against it. For one thing, it was unnecessary. KingFischer knew how impatient I was to get into Eddie's system and would tell me as soon as he got in. For another, it was only ten minutes since the last time Yd asked him. Normally, ten minutes is a long time for an AIP, but I suspected it would seem very short indeed to KingFischer if he hadn't made any progress in the meantime.

  So I returned to my own tasks. I could have done the hacking, of course — technically I was still in the UL system and only looking out into Eddie's office through the laptop. But KingFischer was better at this kind of hacking anyway, and I wanted to concentrate on something closer to detective work. I was hoping to dazzle KingFischer by using my social engineering skills and deductive reasoning to guess Eddie's password and gain access to the system from within before he succeeded in cracking it from without. So I had Maude hook up my waldo, or robotic arm, to the laptop — the latest waldo Casey had developed could be easily operated from one of the laptop's standard USB ports.

  Using the waldo, I could type on a standard keyboard, and anyone subsequently analyzing the contents of Eddie's computer would have no way of knowing that the commands it received had been typed by something other than human hands. They might no-

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  tice that the little rubber tip on my pincer polished off fingerprints . but so would someone dusting the keyboard.

  A truly sainry computer forensic analyst might see signs that the typist in question was remarkably slow —/ only had the one waldo. and it only had one set of pincers that take the place of the human thumb and forefinger, and I discovered that they weren't designed so I could point them both at the keyboard simultaneously. I was limited to hunt-and-peck typing with a single metal finger, and while I could do this faster and more accurately than a human could perform the same operation, 1 was still considerably slower than even a moderately fast human touch typist. It felt, as Mr. Spock once said on Star Trek, like trying to construct a mnemonic memory circuit using stone knives and bear skins.

  Not that I had a lot to type. The trick for guessing a password is to find out as much information as possible about its creator: a large percentage of people use words or numbers that are significant to them as the basis for their passwords. I'd already tried all the bits of data I'd found in Eddie's DMV record — social security number, license plate number, telephone number, birth date, street address, and so on — alone, and in various combinations. When we had more information — if Maude found anything that looked like a list of passwords, for example — I'd have more data to work with. Meanwhile, I watched the almost nonexistent traffic on Eddies network, typed in a command occasionally, in the hope of learning more information, and scanned the room for anything interesting.

  I was reading the top document on a stack of papers when something suddenly struck the robot arm holding the camera. The picture veered wildly as the camera bounced off the surface of the disk.

  I swiveled the camera around three hundred and sixty Jegrm but saw nothing.

  Perhaps some book or other object had fallen from one of the bookshelves above. I craned the camera up but still saw nothing.

  The picture shook again as something tapped the camtra. num lightly this time.

  This time, when I swiveled the camera, I encountend an t nor-

  mous yellow eye with a vertical black pupil. I zoomed out and identified the eye as belonging to a black cat. A very large cat, although perhaps it only appeared large because it was so close to the lens. It crouched next to my laptop, staring into the camera with an unblinking gaze.

  It raised its paw again.

  "Shoo!" 1 said. "Leave that alone!"

  The cat blinked and shifted its gaze to the section of the laptop that housed the speaker. After a few moments, it looked back at the camera and lifted its paw again, as if about to poke at the lens.

  I searched my data banks for something more effective.

  "GROWRF!"

  I repeated the deep, bass bark several times and accompanied it by snapping the pincers of my waldo at the cat. It flattened its ears and jumped off the desk.

  I returned to studying the system, but I was worried about the damage the cat could do to my peripherals if it returned, so I had to keep scanning the room for it. I was relieved when Maude finally reappeared.

  "Keep it down in here," she said. "I can explain your voice by saying a colleague is teleconferencing in by speaker phone, but the barking's a little over the top. I had to tell her I had a noisy screen saver on my laptop."

  "Thank goodness you're back," I said. "You have to do something about that cat."

  "Cat?" Maude said. She looked around.

  "It was here a minute ago, attacking my waldo."

  "Ah," she said. "Probably hid when I came in. I doubt if it will bother you while Vm here."

  She walked over to the kitchenette and poured the contents of a teacup down the sink.

  "Mrs. Stallman has gone off to run some errands, n she said, setting down the cup. "I could tackle her again when-she gets back, but I think we'11 get faster results hunting through this mess, strange as that seems."

  "You'reprobably right," I said.

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  m Vm going to Office Depot for some moving boxes. Then I'll stop by my house for my jeans. "

  She looked around with her hands on her hips.

  "There must be some information we could use in here somewhere, * she said, frowning. "Mixed in with several tons of junk, of course. But it must be here. VII find it if I have to pick up and file every last scrap of paper in this room. "

  With that, she turned on her heel and strode up the stairs.

  The mountains of paper, sad to say, did not look the slightest bit anxious at her threat.

  I heard a rustling that probably meant the cat was on the move.

  I kept on slowly typing while I could,

  Fridayi 1:35 p.n.

  Urong time of dayi Tim thought- In broad daylight, the block looked ordinary. Pedestrians strolled the sidewalks. Cars prowled up and down, hunting for parking spaces. He saw nothing unusual. Nothing to mark this as the site of Eddie Stallman's fateful (and perhaps ultimately fatal) encounter with an unidentified dark blue sedan.

  For that matter, he wasn't entirely sure he had the precise site. It could be five or ten feet either way, from the information given in the paper.

  He pulled out his camera and began taking pictures.

  "Ghouls."

  He turned to see an elderly man standing in a nearby yard, leaning over the chain-link fence, watching him.

  "Ghouls," the man repeated. "Vultures. Smell the carrion a mile off, can't you?"

  "I beg your pardon?" Tim said.

  "But you're out of luck, aren't you?" the man went on, pulling a ratty cardigan sweater tighter around his chest. "They towed the car away and cleaned up the blood, so there's nothing left to titillate your readers."

  "I'm not with the press," Tim said.

  "Ah, so you're an amateur ghoul," the man said, nodding. "A hobbyist, as it were. An aficionado of the tawdry everyday tragedy."

  The guy was a little weird, Tim thought, but he didn't sound angry or confrontational, despite his words. More like he was lonely and wanted someone to talk to but wasn't good at striking up a conversation.

  And he was a potential witness.

  "I'm a private investigator," Tim said, reaching into his pocket for his notebook and another of the business cards he seemed to run through by the hundreds each week. "Did you see the accident?"

  "Wasn't an accident," the man said. "Confounded car accelerated and drove straight for the poor beggar. Never had a chance."

  "Are you sure?" Tim asked.

  "Police didn't believe me either," the man said, shaking his head.

  "You told them this?"

  "Of course I told them," the man said, this time with a faint hint of anger. "They didn't do anything. They never do. Neighborhood's gone to hell in a hand basket; drunks puking over the fence every weekend. Waste of time even reporting it. They never do anything."

  "They did come, didn't they?" Tim said, as he scribbled furiously in his notebook.

  "Oh, well, they came," the man said, as if making a great concession. "Went through the motions. But that's all they'll do. I've been predicting this. You ignore the littering, the cursing, the late night roughhousing, and the next thing you know, this happens."

  Tim nodded, though he was thinking that it was a big leap from littering to vehicular homicide. He wondered if it was Eddie Stallman's rotten luck that the only witness to his accident—if it was an accident—was a known curmudgeon

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  who'd complained so loudly and so often about minor neighborhood problems that the police discounted anything he said.

  "Still, you did what you could," he said. "You told them what you saw. Could you tell them anything about the driver?"

  "Couldn't see him," the man said. "Too damn dark."

  "So it wasn't here by the streetlight," Tim said, looking up at the nearby pole.

  "Burned out," the man said, scowling again. "Been out a week now. Guess I need to call and report it again."

  Tim nodded, disappointed. The old man wore glasses with remarkably thick lenses—rather like what Tim's grandfather had worn after his cataract surgery. He might not make that good a witness even with a streetlight.

  "But this is the spot, right?" he asked.

  "That's it," the man said, nodding. "Victim's car was right where that blue hatchback is now. He came walking down the other side of the street, coming from Wilson Boulevard, and then crossed over when he got near his car. Careless, crossing in the middle of the block like that, but it's not as if there's much traffic that time of night. Then this car came along and just ran him down."

  "Deliberately?"

  "Turned his headlights off and accelerated. Looked pretty deliberate to me."

  "Were you in your yard?" Tim asked.

  "Sitting in the front window," the old man said. "Keeping an eye out in case of trouble."

  "What happened after the car hit him?" Tim asked.

  "I called the police."

  "I mean what did the driver do? Did he get out to see what he'd done, or drive off immediately, or what?"

  "The phone's in the kitchen," the old man said. "I couldn't keep watching while I called the cops."

  "Did you hear him drive away?"

  Mb Donna Andrews

  The old man thought for a moment.

  "Yes," he said. "But you know, it wasn't right away. I heard tires squealing, but not until after I'd hung up from calling the police."

  "Did you hear a car door close?"

  "You're thinking maybe he got out to see what he'd done? No idea. I don't remember hearing a car door, but I wouldn't necessarily have heard it. The kitchen's in the back' of the house."

  Interesting. It would probably have taken several minutes for the old man to reach the cops and report the incident. Long enough for the driver to get out and . . . and do what? Check to make sure his victim was dead? Take something from the body?

  Of course, even if the driver did get out, that didn't prove or disprove the attempted murder theory. He could see someone who'd accidentally hit a pedestrian getting out to see if his victim was okay and then fleeing when he realized how serious Eddies injuries were. For that matter, if the impact was hard enough, the driver could have been stunned enough to need a minute or two to recover before driving off.

  Still, interesting.

  He was trying to think of any other questions he should ask when his cell phone rang.

  "Hear a lot of them, too, in the middle of the night," the old man said, sounding disgusted.

  "Sorry about that," Tim said. He glanced at the caller ID—Claudia—then turned the phone off. He could call her back in a couple of minutes.

  But as he looked up, he spotted a police car parking a few houses down. If they were coming back to talk to the old man ...

  "Look," he said. "I'm just beginning my investigation— I might think of something else I need to ask you."

  "I'm retired," the old man said, turning toward his house. "I'm here most days. Most nights, too."

  Tim extracted a name and phone number. He thanked Mr. Wilmer Meekins for his assistance and strolled away in a deliberately casual manner. When he got to the end of the block, he glanced back. Mr. Meekins was standing on his porch, holding the screen door, talking to one of the police officers.

  Tim breathed a sigh of relief. Not that he was doing anything illegal, but he really didn't want to have to explain himself to some suspicious homicide detective. Especially since, technically, the crime scene didn't have a whole lot of relevance to Eddie's business. But until Maude and Turing found him some business contacts to interview, he didn't have a lot else to do.

  As he rounded the corner, he pulled out his cell phone and returned Claudia's call.

  "Sorry," he said. "I was at the crime scene, interviewing the witness who saw the hit-and-run."

  "Dynamite. Any new information?"

  Tim shook his head before remembering that Claudia couldn't see him.

  "Not much," he said. "Oddly enough, the witness thinks it's murder, too, but I can see why the cops aren't buying it without more corroboration."

  "Nutcase?"

  "Not really," Tim said. "Not happy with all the twenty-somethings turning his neighborhood into their playground, and I think he must call 911 every time someone sneezes after dark on his street."

  "So they think he's crying wolf now?"

  "Could be," Tim said.

  "Got anything I can do?"

  "Not unless Maude and Turing have uncovered some more leads," he said.

  "They're working on it," Claudia said. "I don't suppose

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  there's any chance Turing will show up in person to inspect the basement."

  "I wouldn't count on it," Tim said, making a mental note to ask Turing again about revealing her secret to Claudia before he accidentally spilled the beans. "I gather you're getting tired of staring into a microfilm reader?"

  "I got tired of that two days ago."

  "Sorry," he said. "Right now, I hardly have anything for me to do. I'm interviewing Casey next, and after that, I may have to go back to the Stallmans' house and help Maude."

  "Stretch it out with Casey," Claudia said. "I just talked to Maude. Turing and KingFischer still haven't had any luck hacking into Eddie's computers, and Maude's threatening to look at every single piece of paper in the basement."

  "Come to think of it, I may need to stay around and nurse poor Casey back to health," Tim said. "Unless you really need a break from the microfilm."

  "No dice," she said. "I've got dibs on the microfilm. Turing sent me video on that basement."

  Tim sighed.

  "Cheer up," Claudia said. "By the time you finish with Casey, Maude or Turing will have found something."

  Friday 8:Q0 p.m.

  "I don't see a cat" Maude said peering behind the bar.

  "It ran under there when you came downstairs," Turing said.

  "It's not here now."

  "Have you checked for burrows?" Turing asked. "Don't they chew holes in the walls and build nests inside them?"

  "You're thinking of rats," Maude said* "Not cats. Cats catch rats. And mice."

  "And my waldo. Every time I start typing, the cat attacks me."

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  "I'll probably have a lot better luck catching it when this place is less of a bloody mess," Maude said. "Or perhaps when Mrs. Stallman comes back she can lure it upstairs. Hang on—I hear the phone ringing again."

  "You're going to answer it?" Turing asked.

  "That might be a good idea," Maude said. "What is it he calls this operation?"

  She had located the phone, beneath a pile of papers, and was looking around for the marketing brochure.

  "Stallman Enterprises," Turing prompted, and Maude noticed, with amusement, that she was pointing her directional microphone at the phone. Maude lifted the receiver.

  "Stallman Enterprises," she said, in her best secretarial manner. "May I help you?"

  "What the hells wrong with my site?" demanded an angry male voice.

  "I beg your pardon, sir?" Maude said, in her iciest tone. "I didn't quite catch what you said."

  "I said what's wrong with my site?" the voice repeated, this time as much defensive as angry. "Where's Eddie? I need to talk with Eddie."

  "Mr. Stallman is unavailable, sir," Maude said. "I'm sorry you're experiencing problems, but if you can tell me your name and the name of your site and what seems to be the matter, we'll resolve the problem as soon as possible."

  "Who are you?" the voice demanded.

  "Maude Graham," she said. "I'm part of a team that Mr. Stallman's family has hired to keep his systems running and meet his clients' needs until Mr. Stallman can leave the hospital and resume doing so himself."

  "Leave the hospital? What happened?"