"Mr. Stallman was in an automobile accident Wednesday night," Maude said.

  "Good God," the voice said. Then, in a different tone, "Look, if Eddie or the family need an attorney, could you bring my name up? Don Dwyer, Esquire. I'd be happy to

  give them my preferred rates, since Eddie and I already have a business relationship. I do a lot of personal injury work. You could check it out on my website, if it were working. Which it's not. Which is why I called in the first place. Of course if Eddie's been in the hospital since Wednesday, that sort of explains it, but I still need my site working."

  "I'll pass along your offer to the family, sir; and in the meantime, if you can give me more information, we'll see how fast we can get that site of yours working again."

  Maude wasn't sure whether it was her promise of prompt service or the prospect of a client, but Don Dwyer, Esquire, became positively charming and quite apologetic about having snapped at her. He willingly answered all her questions— though all he could tell her was that when he went to his website, he got a blank page. He even surrendered his user ID and password. Maude repeated them aloud as she wrote them down, for Turing's benefit.

  "I can't believe he just gave you his password," Turing said, when Maude finally hung up. "He should know better."

  "A lucky thing he doesn't, isn't it?" Maude said. "At least now you can fix his site, right?"

  "If the problem's in his site," Turing said. "If it's a server problem, Dwyer's password won't do us a bit of good. We'd need Eddie's own passwords to fix that."

  "We'll hope it's with his site, then," Maude said. "Meanwhile . . . Eureka!"

  "I assume that means you've discovered something important."

  "A list of phone numbers," Maude said. "Most people keep something of the sort near their phones. I'd have found it sooner if I'd had any idea where the phone was. But most people don't bury their phones beneath six inches of junk mail." »

  "I suspect Eddie uses e-mail and instant messaging a lot more than the phone," Turing said.

  "You could be right," Maude said. "This is a short list.

  Casey's on here, home and work numbers, and about a dozen other people. Of course, we have no idea who they are— friends, clients, blind dates. Now that I've found his phone, hang on ... he has caller ID. Let me check his incoming calls."

  She paged through the call list, looking over her glasses to compare the numbers on the paper with the ones that appeared in the phone's LCD panel.

  "The ones I can identify are already on the list," she said. "Only twenty calls over the last week, half of them yesterday or today from Mr. Dwyer. No additional information on who or what these people are to him. They could be anything. What kind of businessman keeps no records whatsoever?"

  "I think he keeps them," Turing said. "I just don't think he bothers to file them."

  "Yes, we seem to be standing in what passes for his filing cabinet. Which is a fascinating insight into his character, but doesn't tell us who these people are."

  "I can look the numbers up in a reverse directory," Turing said.

  "Good idea," Maude said. "The first one is—"

  "You could just hold the paper up to my cameras," Turing suggested. "I could read them myself a lot faster."

  "My, aren't we impatient!" Maude exclaimed. But she hid a smile behind the paper as she held it up. This eager, impatient Turing was a vast improvement over the morose, discouraged Turing she'd been seeing in the past few weeks.

  Apart from Casey-i two other names on Eddie's phone list had both work and home numbers. Maudt and I agreed that these were probably personal friends rather than business contacts. One, Karl Collins, lived in Loudoun County and worked at America Online, according to the phone numbers. TI.h other. Matt Danforth, lived in Falls Church and worked at som -thing called CDMG Enterprises in Fairfax. No strut addnss was

  given, and a quick web search for CDMG Enterprises turned up nothing. I did find several legitimate businesses with similar names, but none of them were located in the area. I found myself wondering if CDMG Enterprises, like Stallman Enterprises, was a fancy name for a one-person operation.

  Of the other ten numbers on the list, I identified four as residential and six as business phones. Though that still didn't give us an idea which were customers and which were friends. The residential phones could belong to customers who ran home businesses and hosted their sites with Eddie. The business phones could be the work numbers of Eddie's friends.

  All very untidy. I had to keep reminding myself that in humans, a lack of organization did not necessarily imply a lack of intelligence. In fact, I have often observed an alarmingly high correlation between intelligence and disorder.

  Of course, if Eddie were a more organized person, perhaps his grandmother would not have needed us to help sort out his business. I resolved to regard his disorganization as a benefit, of sorts. It made the puzzle more challenging.

  "That's easy for you to say," Maude said. "You're not the one answering the damned collection calls. I'm sorry we found the phone."

  She had a point. The phone had rung three more times since Don Dwyer's call, all calls from Eddie's creditors.

  "Plug the phone line into the laptop," I suggested. "I can answer with what sounds like a canned message, record any useful data the callers leave, and notify you if it sounds like a call we should take."

  "Excellent idea," Maude said.

  She seemed more cheerful as she returned to her sorting.

  I felt more cheerful myself. At least now I had some information to work with. Though it felt odd, using phone numbers to find business names, and then business names to find websites. Odd, and backward. I normally followed trails from the Internet to the outside world, not the other way around, and doing it this way felt tediously slow. But at least it was working. Once I had the names of

  Delete All Suspects S3

  the businesses, I found sites for five of them. Two definitely not hosted by Eddie, while the other three probably were.

  "How can you tell?" Maude asked, when I told her this.

  "By the IP addresses," I said. "They're similar. IP addresses are usually assigned in blocks. *

  "So all the sites Eddie hosts would have numbers close to each other."

  "Precisely," I said. "I know Eddie hosts Don Dwyers website — at his co-lo, not here in the basement — so I looked up the IP address for that. Three of the sites associated with those phone numbers have addresses in the same block. So odds are Eddie bought the whole block. "

  "What if he has more than one block?" Maude asked.

  "Heprobably does — one here and one at the co-lo site," I said. "But I cant imagine a one-person shop hosting enough sites to need another one. And I doubt ifhes hosting clients here in his basement."

  "So you can examine all the other IP addresses in the same block as Dwyer's and find all of Eddies other clients?"

  "Well, it's not quite that straightforward, but yes, eventually I can." I said. "I'm gathering contact information for them. "

  "Good," Maude said. "Tim and Claudia can visit them."

  "The local ones, anyway," I said. "Roughly a third of them are out of state, and another third don't have any contact information except an e-mail address."

  "We can worry about them later," Maude said. "Tim and Claudia can start with the locals. For that matter, they should start with the friends and move outward to the clients, if we can tell which are which."

  "We cant tell in any reliable way" I said. "But the people for whom we have only a home phone, or a phone at a business Eddie doesn't host are more likely to be the friends. Tim and Claud/a COM start with them. "

  "It might be a good idea to contact Mr. Duyer fairly soon." Maude said. "On the off chance that he's more than a client."

  "You think he's also a friend?"

  SM Donna Andrews

  "He's a lawyer," Maude said. "If Eddie needed a lawyer for something, maybe he'd have used Dwyer. Even better — what if he were hosting Dwyer's site to pay him off for some legal work?"

  "How do you know he needed a lawyer?" I asked.

  "I don't," Maude said. "But if you're running a business, odds are sooner or later you will. If only to draw up contracts or papers of incorporation. The way we have Sam."

  "True," I said. "Let's ask Sam about Dwyer."

  "Yes," Maude said. "She can get all the dirt."

  "More important, as a lawyer, she knows all the rules about confidentiality and client privilege," I said. "If he's representing Eddie, he might just stonewall us, but Sam would know what he can and can't say to help us, and whether we can use some legal tactic so he'll talk to Eddie's next of kin. Why not let Sam talk to him?"

  "Excellent idea," Maude said. "Odds are he'd be a lot more likely to level with her than either of us. Shall I call her?"

  "Please."

  Of course, I could call Sam myself — now that she knew about me, I felt less hesitant about using my voice generation program with her. But I knew even though Maude wasn't a lawyer, she had a much better understanding of the human legal system than I ever would.

  "Of course," Maude added. "It will probably make things go a lot easier for anyone who talks to him if we get his website fixed first."

  "Already done," I said. "The password he gave you worked, and the problem was simple. Apparently, Eddie fixed his homepage Wednesday night and made a small but critical mistake in the HTML."

  I displayed Dwyer's corrected page on the laptop monitor.

  "That weasel!" Maude exclaimed. "I've seen his ads on late-night TV. An ambulance chaser of the worst kind. Maybe Eddie didn't make a mistake after all. Maybe he was performing a public service, making Dwyer's site invisible."

  That sounded unlikely, but I didn't say so, because I deduced Maude was making a joke.

  I felt rather gntfiful to Don Duyer, Esquire. He had — quiti

  unintentionally, of course — given us our first real break. Thanks to him, we now had a good idea who Eddie s friends and clients wen and could send Inn and Claudia out to interview them. In fact. I briefed Claudia on the first one on the list — Karl Collins, the AOL employee — and she cheerfully agreed to table her research in the courthouse to hunt him dou n.

  And as I studied the copy I'd made of the defective HTML file, I realized that making some minor change to Dwyer's home page must have been one of the last things Eddie did before leaving his basement room Wednesday night. The defective file had been uploaded to Dwyer's website at 7:29 P.M. About four hours before the hit-and-run. According to what Tim had learned, Eddie had arrived at the bar in the early evening and spent several hours there.

  One of the last things, or perhaps the last thing. Had something happened while Eddie was working on that file — something that upset or distracted him enough that he'd made a silly mistake in the file he was creating, uploaded it without testing, and then raced off to the bar where he'd spent the remaining hours before his accident? It seemed plausible. But what?

  "So what kind of trouble has Tim gotten himself into this time?" Sam asked, though Maude could tell from her voice that she was only kidding. The faint lilt of her southern accent disappeared when Sam went into business mode.

  "At the moment, none," Maude said.

  "Then tell him to go out and get himself a case,'' Sam said. "We can't have that boy idle; I'm depending on him for my early retirement."

  "He's on a case," Maude said. "We could use your help for part of it."

  To her annoyance, Mrs. Stallman returned while she was outlining the situation for Sam, and Maude had to watch

  what she said. Well, not what she said—she wasn't telling Sam anything that they couldn't share with Mrs. Stallman— but how she said it.

  "Is Eddie Stallman a complete idiot, or just wildly impractical?" Sam asked, when she understood exactly how little information they'd found on Eddie's business.

  "The latter, I think," Maude said. "Or perhaps both." Then, noticing Mrs. Stallman approaching Turing's laptop, she called out, "Don't touch that, please! It's running something important!"

  "Sorry!" Mrs. Stallman said, jerking her hand back as if her fingers had been scorched.

  "Ah," Sam said. "Your client is there."

  "Yes, unfortunately," Maude said.

  She frowned as Mrs. Stallman continued to wander about the room, looking at papers, sometimes picking them up. After all, it was Mrs. Stallman's home, Mrs. Stallman's grandson, Mrs. Stallman's case. So she bit her tongue every time their client drifted into the room and confined herself to warning Mrs. Stallman away if she was about to disarrange something Maude had already sorted and inventoried.

  "I'll see what I can find out," Sam said. "About Dwyer and then from him."

  "Thanks." Maude hung up.

  Mrs. Stallman was flipping through a stack of papers.

  "One thing you should know," Maude said. Mrs. Stall-man glanced up with an eager expression. "We've received several collections calls. The phone company, two credit cards—"

  "I can't possibly pay them until you people find his money," Mrs. Stallman snapped. Then- her face softened again. "I'm sorry, dear. It's the strain. I shouldn't take it out on you."

  "I understand," Maude said. "Look, if you want to help things along, perhaps you could take the cat somewhere else."

  "Cat?" Mrs. Stallman said.

  "A large black cat," Maude said. "Do you mean you don't have a cat?"

  "Oh, you mean Eddie's cat," Mrs. Stallman said. "I never could abide cats. I told Eddie the cat had to stay down here."

  "I understand," Maude said. "But just for now, while we're organizing things here—"

  "I'm sorry," Mrs. Stallman said. "I know I shouldn't get in your way. I'll just get out from underfoot."

  She scurried up the stairs. Moments later, Maude heard rattling noises.

  "Damn," she said. "She's putting the teakettle on again."

  "The cat's back," Turing said, waving her pincer toward the other end of the room.

  The cat had reappeared and was lying on an exposed pipe that ran near the ceiling. Its long tail hung down and twitched occasionally.

  "It's not hurting anything there," Maude said.

  Though it did seem to be watching the laptop rather intently, she noticed, as she returned to her sorting.

  Friday 2:30 P-M.

  "You look awful" Tim said when Casey answered the door.

  "I feel awful," Casey said. At least, that's what Tim deduced he said—it sounded more like, "I EE aw-oo." Casey waved vaguely at the sofa and armchair in the living room and shuffled toward the kitchen.

  Casey's decor bore more than a passing resemblance to Eddie Stallman's, though he had some distance to go before he could match the squalor of Eddie's lair. Only one computer, for example. Though come to think of it, Tim heard what sounded like a printer rattling away in the other room, so there were probably more computers back there. Maybe

  Eddie wasn't unusually messy, just unlucky that he only had a single room to live and work in.

  Tim cleared computer equipment off the armchair and sat there. It looked as if Casey had been lying on the couch—a ratty blanket was wadded up at one end while a laptop perched precariously on the arm at the opposite end. At the laptop end, a large speaker served as an end table, its top littered with objects, including a drinking glass, a prescription pill bottle, and several wads of red-stained tissue.

  Tim shuddered, and noticed that his tongue had stolen back to check the gums behind his second molars where, presumably, his own wisdom teeth were still lurking. I'd have found out by now if they had to come out, he thought, wouldn't I? His tongue seemed to be finding something rather lumpy and hard beneath the surface. He tried to remember how long ago his last dentist's appointment had been. Would Casey laugh if he asked about the first symptoms of wisdom teeth problems?

  Casey emerged from the kitchen and collapsed onto the sofa. He was holding a bag of frozen peas in each hand, pressing them to the sides of his face.

  Tim's tongue had discovered a sharp edge on one of his molars. Had that been there before, or had something just broken off?

  "Pretty bad, huh?" he asked aloud.

  Casey nodded.

  "Look, I hate to bother you now when I know you're feeling so lousy, but it's kind of important. It's about your friend, Eddie Stallman."

  "He finally call you?" Casey said.

  "Actually, his grandmother did," Tim said. "She wants me to investigate what happened."

  Casey frowned, looking slightly puzzled.

  A horrible thought struck Tim.

  "Casey, did anyone call to tell you about Eddie?" he asked.

  "What about him?" Casey said, moving his mouth as little as possible and still wincing.

  "He's in the hospital," Tim said. "There's been . . well, the police are calling it a hit-and-run accident, but Mrs. Stallman, Eddie's grandmother, thinks someone deliberately tried to kill him. She found a printout of the e-mail you sent him, recommending me, so she hired me to investigate."

  The surprise and shock on Casey's face looked genuine, though Tim had to suppress an inappropriate urge to laugh. With his mouth and eyes wide open and both hands still pressing the bags of frozen peas to his cheeks, Casey looked like a large chipmunk impersonating Munch's The Scream.

  "He'll be all right?" Casey asked, finally.

  "They don't know yet," Tim said.

  "Shit," Casey said, shaking his head. "How could—I mean, Eddie . . . shit!"

  Either Casey was talking more clearly now or Tim was getting used to his temporarily slurred speech.

  "Is*he a good friend of yours?" Tim asked.

  "He's not like a really close friend," Casey said. "But he's a friend. He's—he's okay. I mean, he's not perfect, but I can't see why anyone would try to kill him."

  "His grandmother thinks it has something to do with his business," Tim said.

  Casey looked puzzled again.

  "Of course, since she has no idea what his business is, she's not much help figuring out how."

  Casey nodded slightly. "Nice old lady," he said. "But she can hardly even use her own e-mail."