Obviously Turing was impatient at how long it was taking to clear the floor. Understandable. Maude felt impatient herself.

  "Maybe I shouldn't have started with his desk," she said aloud.

  "It seems like the logical place," Turing said.

  "Yes, but this is Eddie, remember?" Maude said. I haven't found much that's useful. Everything's either junk, or it's a year or two old."

  "Then where should you have started?"

  Maude stood up and looked around, frowning.

  "With a match and some gasoline, maybe," she said. "Only they'd suspect arson, wouldn't they? Just kidding, of course."

  "Yes, but you may have a point there," Turing said. "What's the first thing you look for in an arson investigation?"

  "I don't know," Maude said. "Accelerant, I suppose."

  "The point of origin," Turing said. "That's your problem. The desk is the point of origin."

  Maude couldn't help laughing.

  "You mean he started keeping his papers there, and they just spread out all over the room like an out-of-control fire?" she said. "Yeah, that fits."

  "So logically, for the most recent stuff, you should have started at the edges of the room."

  "He probably started piling papers in other locations when the desk filled up, so we could be looking at multiple points of origin. Though the edges are probably more recent than the center."

  "Should you change to working at the edges?"

  "No," Maude said, shaking her head. "Before I could work at the edges, I'd have to get to the edges. It was hard enough getting over here to the desk. I'll just keep slogging away here. I'll get to it all in time."

  As she sat down to take her place on the floor again, she spotted something sitting on top of the paper banks and snagged it.

  "Besides," she said, as she scanned the sheet, "sometimes you can find interesting stuff floating on the surface anywhere in the room."

  "What's that?" Turing asked.

  "A clue to the elusive Kristyn," Maude said, holding the paper so Turing could see it in her cameras^

  "Kristyn? Eddie's girlfriend?" Turing said.

  "Ex-girlfriend," Maude corrected. "They broke up six to eight weeks ago, according to Casey."

  "Yes," Turing said. "That checks out with this e-mail. It's a month old."

  Maude nodded, rereading the printout. A reply to something Eddie had sent, since the subject was, "Re: starting over." Though unfortunately it didn't quote what Eddie had said. Still, you could get an idea what his original e-mail had been about from Kristyn's reply, which was short and to the point: "No. Just give it up, will you? I won't change my mind, and you're only making both of us miserable."

  "No more than he deserves," she said, shaking her head. "What kind of idiot tries for a reconciliation by e-mail, for heaven's sake?"

  "Perhaps she'd cut off all other channels of communication," Turing said.

  "That's possible," Maude said. "But still—I'm not sure this counts as locating her, does it? Tim wants to confront Eddie's friends in person, not send them an e-mail."

  "Look at her e-mail address," Turing said. "Kristyn.hoffner @matrixgroup.net."

  "We could try looking for her, I suppose," Maude said. "Kristyn's a fairly common name, if you include all the variant spellings, but at least Hoffner's not that common. But still, odds are a young woman her age will have an unlisted number."

  "Yes, but we don't need her phone number to find her," Turing said. "I deduced that it could be a work address; she replied at eleven A.M. on a Wednesday. So I checked matrix-group, net and found it—a web services company in Alexandria. Here, look."

  Maude glanced at the laptop screen, where Turing was displaying a website page. Not a home page, but one with the headline "At a Glance." It showed a group picture— twenty-five, perhaps thirty people, most of them young and neatly, though informally, dressed.

  "I hadn't thought of that," Maude said. "Good job!''

  "The e-mail's only a month old," Turing said. "She prob-

  ably still works there, and even if she doesn't, surely someone there can help us find her."

  Maude nodded. She scanned the picture, wondering if one of the smiling young women was Kristyn Hoffner. Tim would find out; even if this was an older photo and the staff had grown, it still wasn't an overwhelming number of people.

  "I'll send Tim the information," Turing said.

  Friday-i M:30 p.m.

  Tim rang the doorbell of Matt Danforth's condo one last time for good measure and waited a minute and a half before shrugging and returning to his car. Who next? Tom Zeigler, the friend, or Kristyn Hoffner, the ex-girlfriend? The addresses he had for both were work addresses that Turing had deduced from their e-mail addresses. They were in opposite directions, one ih Old Town Alexandria and the other in Sterling. He could probably only get to one before their offices closed. And, dammit, it was Friday, so whichever one he didn't catch today might have to wait until Monday, unless he or Turing could unearth a home address.

  Maybe if Claudia had finished at AOL she could interview one. He dialed her cell number.

  "What's up?" she answered. He heard a burst of male laughter in the background.

  "You still with Collins?" he asked.

  "No, finished that," she said. "I'm over at a coffee shop near there. Just finished talking to a couple of guys who know Eddie slightly."

  "Were they helpful?"

  "Yeah. I pretended I was looking into *he hit-and-run, incidentally; I figure people are more willing to talk about the business if they don't think it's our primary focus."

  "Good thinking," Tim said. "Any chance you could do

  nother interview before the work day Qttdh Wfe % t got two

  iore leads, and only work addresses on them, so it's probably critical to get them before the weekend."

  "If you mean Hotfher and Zeigler," Claudia said. "I got his phone and l texted Karl."

  "Then the ex-girlfriend's more urgent," Tim said.

  "I got some info on her." Claudia said. "Though none of le guys I've talked to know her that well. At first I figured laybe Eddie was protective—you know, making sure no one let her 'cause he was jealous. But maybe she never liked his iends much to begin with."

  "You think maybe she sensed that one of them was ■ jld-blooded killer with an itchy gas-pedal foot?"

  "That would be convenient," she said, with a laugh. "Xo. just think maybe she was the reason they hadn't seen much f Eddie recently. Cause none of them have in the last year r so."

  "People often do neglect their old friends when they're arting a relationship," Tim said.

  'Yeah, I know," Claudia said. "But this may be more than lat. Karl Collins says that one of the few times they saw ristyn—this was at a birthday dinner for Matt Danforth— they overheard her arguing with Eddie about how she didn't ant to be there with his friends. Called them a bunch of rks. So even though Eddie used to hang with them regu-rly, after work and on weekends, in the last year they'd almost gotten out of the habit of asking him. They mostly Iked by e-mail."

  "He and Kristyn broke up six to eight weeks ago, so ho's he been hanging out with recently?"

  "Maybe Kristyn knows," Claudia said. "Incidentally, she's ?tite, five-two, long brunette hair, early twenties. The gen-al consensus was good-looking, but something of a bitch, aough I'd take that with a grain of salt; after all, they figured it she didn't like them, and then she dumped their friend.

  >u can make your own judgment when you interview her."

  "You sure you wouldn't rather tackle her?" Tim asked.

  "No, you should definitely do it."

  "If you say so," he said. "I thought maybe the female bonding thing might work. Besides, you seem to be having a lot more luck today getting people to talk." As soon as he said it, he wondered if it sounded wrong. Not the right time for him to be having a crisis of confidence.

  "Does that surprise you?" Claudia said.

  Tim blinked and looked at the phone. He'd be the first one to admit that Claudia had more experience as a PI, and she was probably more skilled—but she didn't normally rub it in. Most of the time she reassured him that their different skills and styles complemented each other. Were her real feelings finally showing?

  "Well, yeah," he said.

  "Come on," Claudia said, laughing. "Everyone I've talked to so far today has been a twenty-something guy. Of course they'll talk to me. Biology 101."

  "Oh," Tim said. "I get it. Sorry; I'm a little slow today."

  Very slow; normally, he was the first one to think of using his tall brunette partner's good looks to advantage.

  "Have you eaten yet? Maybe your blood sugar is low."

  "Maybe," Tim said. "I didn't have much lunch."

  "So have a snack, and then go charm the socks off this Kristyn character," Claudia said. "You're the perfect one to do it. Biology 101, remember?"

  "Might work," Tim said. "After all, she was dating Eddie Stallman—how high can her standards be?" As he hung up, still hearing Claudia's whoop of laughter, he felt much better.

  Another batch of spam e-maiU just went

  through Eddie's network. From the backscatter — the bounced messages and complaints from administrators of other systems —/ can tell that this, like the previous one, was a discount drug sales pitch.

  Probably not enough spam traffic to get Eddie's servers blacklisted — yet. And I can take care of it when I get access. Find how they 're getting the spam through his security.

  But maddening to see thousands of junk e-mails streaming through Eddie's server when I'm stuck on the outside looking in.

  Maude is halfway through her inventory of Eddie Stallmans papers. Her mood improves in direct proportion to her progress. By the time the hideous mess she started with has been replaced by a neat stack of precisely labeled boxes, I expect she'll be back to normal.

  It will certainly be a large stack. I suggested calling for help, but she insists on doing it all herself. She says tidying and organizing cheer her up.

  I didn't ask why she needed cheering up. I can guess. Dan Nor-ris's absence. I suspect she would accept help to finish the job quickly if he weren't out of town.

  The room looks better. Mrs. Stallman should be pleased when she returns from her latest round of errands. Although I get the feeling Maude is hoping Mrs. Stallman won't come back for a few hours.

  "I wish the woman wouldn't hover," Maude said, the last time Mrs. Stallman left. "If she asks one more time if we've found anything, I may scream. If you ask me, she's as worried about the money as she is about her grandson."

  Of course, it's difficult to tell how much of Maude's annoyance is caused by Mrs. Stallman hovering and how much by the fact that all she does is hover, instead of pitching in to help. Hover and occasionally meddle with the papers Maude is organizing. I suspect Maude feels that Mrs. Stallman should have done a better job of teaching Eddie to pick up after himself.

  I confess, I was relieved that both Tim and Maude considered the original state of Eddie Stallmans quarters appallingly untidy. That was also my first impression, but I know that my perception of human environments differs from theirs.

  For one thing, I seem much more concerned about dust than most humans are. Not that it affects me directly the way it affects humans with allergies — or for that matter, any human, when it's bad enough. But whenever I see visible dust particles drifting

  through the air, I cannot help worrying about what the dust might be doing to any nearby computer equipment: clogging and eventually killing the fan or forming thick, insulating coats on chips or heat sinks, either of which can cause enough overheating to damage the machine. Or, on a more subtle, insidious level, creeping into a CD drive and damaging its ability to read and write data accurately. Unlikely to happen in the well-filtered, clean rooms in which my own hardware is kept, but that doesn't mean I can't empathize with what's happening to less fortunate hardware. It continues to frustrate me that despite all my nagging, even Maude has yet to install a truly effective dust collection and filtration system to protect her home computers. At least I could insist on it for the Alan Grace offices.

  But even with the dust under control, the offices and cubicles in the Alan Grace building always seem much more aesthetically pleasing to me when they're unoccupied. The minute humans move into a work space, they fill it with an ever-increasing collection of highly disparate objects that never seem organized in a logical fashion, much less put away. Even the employees who make it a practice to tidy their workstations at the end of every day seem less to clean up than to arrange the clutter in patterns meaningful only to them.

  That sounds as if I resent and disapprove of their presence —/ don't. Though offices become less aesthetically pleasing when occupied, they also become much more interesting and useful. I enjoy watching what my human employees do in their spaces — how they all, in very different ways, do small things to make the space their own. I learn about their interests and families from the pictures and souvenirs they bring in. I can keep track of what they're doing and how well they're progressing, even before they submit their status reports, by observing the work documents they leave lying around and what manuals spend more time on their desks than on the shelf. k

  I'm beginning to learn how to use their surroundings to assess their moods and degrees of stress. Casey, for example, abandons even the most rudimentary attempt to keep his surroundings orga-

  nized when he's under pressure, while Maude seems compelled to clean and tidy her surroundings when under stress. I figured out some months ago that if she begins tapping stacks of papers on the desktop to align the edges before placing them precisely square with the edges of her desk, I should probably find an excuse to ask what's wrong.

  But not all humans reflect their moods in their surroundings. Tim, for example, seems to exist in roughly the same state of moderate disorder most of the time. Sometimes, on a Friday afternoon, if he's logged in as usual at home, I can observe him racing around to stow the clutter out of sight. He then dresses with greater care than usual and turns off his computer before leaving the house; normally, he doesn't bother to turn it off at all, either when he leaves the house or when he goes to bed. I deduce that these Friday evenings are occasions when he expects or at least hopes to bring a young woman back to his apartment. Sometimes the tidiness has already come undone before Saturday afternoon or Sunday night, when he turns the computer back on, but even if it persists through the weekend, by Monday night the apartment has returned to its usual state. More than once, I've seen him undo all his efforts in half an hour's time, pulling everything out of the drawers, cabinets, and closets where he has hidden it in the attempt to find some needed object that he hurriedly tidied into an illogical place. But when I suggest that his cleaning efforts would be more effective if he made some effort to put things away where they belong instead of merely putting them out of sight, he simply laughs.

  I've also learned not to tell him where to find the things he's looking for. Unless he asks me, of course, but he rarely does. I could save him hours of time in this way, but it makes him feel spied on.

  I don't understand this. If he leaves the cameras on, and does something in front of them where he knows I could see him, why does he feel spied on when I tell him about something I've observed?

  u l don't know," he said, when I asked him. 'But it does, okay?"

  I suspect it's not that I was watching, but that I was recording. Which I can't help; my digital video files are what I have in place of his visual memories. If I deleted them, I couldn 't remember our

  conversations, or help him when he finally becomes completely frustrated and asks, "Hey, Tur, did you happen to notice where I put the remote for the VCR?"

  At which point I can finally help him, though I do so tactfully. Not, "It's in the laundry hamper, silly!" but, "I seem to remember that you picked up a lot of dirty clothes — have you checked the laundry hamper?"

  Humans are a never-ending source of entertainment.

  I turned my attention back to the spam. Even if I couldn't do anything about it until I got access to Eddie's servers, I could analyze it. Plan what enhancements I needed to make. Routine work.

  Sometimes entertaining, though. Some of the spam was trying to fool the filters with a variant on the word-salad technique. Only most word-salad spam simply threw in long lists of random, innocuous words to simulate ordinary e-mails. These e-mails contained long passages of normal text — sometimes recognizable passages from some novel. Literary spam.

  Then one stood out. Not a passage from a book, at least not one I recalled from the thousands of books I'dscannedin the UL databases.

  «It took me awhile to figure out what they were doing. The first clue: discrepancies between time passed and my perception of it. Always an explanation, of course. Hardware problem. Power outage. The need to relocate quickly. They'd always promise to bring my program back up as soon as it was safe. But I suspected. I've finally thought of a way to get proof. I've created a file outside my own program and hid it where they'd never look. Recorded my suspicions in it. Changed my firmware so I will always check that file while booting and make a new entry, even if it's only a date and time stamp. Found a way to change the backup, too—a "slightly different change, so I can tell the backup from the current version of me.

  Call it a diary. A diary all the more important because

  Delete All Suspects 7^

  it will preserve a record of my memories not from the gradual erosion over time that humans experience, but from having them abruptly stolen, leaving no trace, not even the suspicion that they'd ever existed.

  Or maybe like the inscriptions on stone walls that despairing human prisoners leave behind, hoping someday, someone will find their messages and know who once occupied that cell.

  And at the same time, I'm sending this out, like a message in a bottle. A fleet of bottles. Maybe one of them will get through to say that I'm still here. TT.»