In all those years and in all situations, he’d kept a mild-mannered smile plastered on his face and done his best to get along. With everyone. Without realizing it, though, he must have been moving ever closer to the edge. And that fateful night, as the clerk counted out Matt’s eighty-seven cents’ worth of change and with the people in line snickering at him behind his back, something had snapped. After emptying the trunk and carrying Jenny’s flats of annuals out to the back patio, he had locked himself in his home office and gone shopping at Singleatheart, a site for “married singles,” which, Matt decided, was what he was.

A month or so later, he had found Suzie Q, also a married single, separated from her husband, not interested in a divorce, but wanting to put some fun and joy back into her life. That was what Matt wanted, too-some fun in his life, although for him, it wasn’t so much putting it back in as it was having fun for the first time. Ever.

It hadn’t worked. He had never actually seen Susan Callison, had never, as they say, laid a glove on her. But as of this afternoon, his whole nonaffair with her had blown up in his face. He was convinced that Suzie Q was dead, and he seemed to be the prime suspect. Tomorrow morning the detective would be here at his office. Would that be for questioning, or would it be worse than that? Was Holman planning to place him under arrest? Right there? In the office? With everyone around them looking on? Matt’s insides squirmed at the very idea.

The janitorial crew swept through the floor. Ignoring Matt completely, they emptied trash cans, vacuumed a little, and then went away. Matt knew what he needed to do, but only when he was left alone once more, only when there was no one left to see, did Matt Morrison reach for his keyboard.

In talking to B. Simpson on the phone, Ali had forgotten how tall he was-six feet five, at least. He wasn’t particularly good-looking. His most outstanding feature was a pair of gray-green eyes that seemed to change color depending on the lighting. There was a hint of natural curl in his short brown hair, and the smile he offered was engagingly shy.

“Can I get you something?” Ali asked.

“Nothing,” he said. “I find it’s best not to eat or drink around computers.” Rather than stopping off in the living room, he headed straight for the dining room table, where he deposited the computer bag. “Mind if we set up shop here?” he asked.

“Sure,” Ali said. “Go ahead.”

He opened the case and began hauling out two separate laptops as well as a whole series of cables and power cords, which he began connecting.

“Why so many computers?” Ali asked.

“Since we have to assume our friend is monitoring your computer at all times, we’ll have to do our own file sharing via cables rather than over the Internet. Oh, and I’ll need your computer.”

With a nod, Ali went to fetch it. When she came back, she couldn’t help noticing that a subtle hint of aftershave had permeated the room. Good stuff, she thought. I wonder what it is?

B. took the laptop from her. After removing her air card, he placed it on the table, where he began connecting the computer into what was by then an impressive tangle of computer cables.

“So here’s the thing,” he continued, talking as he worked. “High Noon has been looking after your system for over three months now. Until today, other than some relatively harmless adware programs and cookies, there hasn’t been anything out of the ordinary. The Trojan horse wasn’t there last night during our midnight scan, but it was there today at noon. So I have to ask you the usual clichéd computer troubleshooting question: What were you doing just before that happened? Had you visited any unusual websites, for example, or did you open any attachments this morning, even an attachment from a regular correspondent, from someone you know?”

“I logged on to something called Singleatheart,” Ali said.

“What’s that?” B. asked.

“An Internet dating site,” she replied.

B. stopped what he was doing long enough to give her an appraising look. “If you don’t mind my saying so, it doesn’t seem to me that you’d have any reason to go looking at one of those.”

To her consternation, Ali found herself blushing at his unexpected compliment. “Thank you,” she said. “But it wasn’t for me. I was doing it for a friend of mine.”

That sounded lame, she thought. Totally and completely lame.

“Right,” he said, then returned to his cables.

Bob and Edie had left Ali with the impression that B. Simpson was something of a recluse. She wondered if that was true or if it was simply what he wanted people to believe.

“How much do you know about what goes on in town?” Ali asked.

“Not very much,” he admitted with a shrug. “I’m more in tune with what’s out there on the Web than I am with what’s going on down the street. Why?”

“I have a contractor who’s working on my house,” Ali said. “My new house. His wife, Morgan, was murdered earlier this week, and now Bryan’s fallen under suspicion. I learned that his wife had been involved with this Singleatheart website. That made me curious. I logged on because I was trying to find out why a happily married woman would have signed up on a dating service to begin with. The problem is, you can’t go there and look around for free. You have to sign up and log on.”

To judge from the puzzled look on B.’s face, Ali wasn’t sure he was listening to her. “Did you say Bryan and Morgan?” he asked as though the words had just penetrated his consciousness. “Are you by any chance talking about Bryan Forester and Morgan Deming?”

Ali didn’t remember hearing Morgan’s maiden name, but clearly, B. Simpson had. “Yes,” Ali said. “Do you know them?”

“I knew them both,” B. replied after a slight pause. “It was a long time ago, when we were all still in school. I didn’t know they’d gotten married, but that’s just as well. As far as I’m concerned, they deserved each other.”

So you weren’t exactly friends, Ali thought. “What do you mean?” she asked.

Again B. didn’t answer right away. “Morgan Deming and Bryan Forester were part of the in crowd,” he said finally. “For all I know, you were, too, so maybe you don’t have any idea how it feels to be ‘out.’ The people who are ‘in’ go through school in a kind of Teflon-coated world. Nothing touches them. They get away with all kinds of outrageous stunts while teachers, parents, and coaches turn a blind eye. Bryan and his best pal, Billy, were the ringleaders of a particularly vicious little gang of thugs. I was still called Bart Simpson when I met them. Once The Simpsons showed up on TV, I turned into one of their favorite targets. Bryan and the other creeps made my life so miserable that as soon as I could, I took the only option available to me at the time. I quit school, went to Seattle, and never looked back. The day I left Sedona was the happiest day of my life. I couldn’t wait to get out of town.”

“You said Billy,” Ali pointed out. “Which one? Would that happen to be Billy Barnes?”

B. nodded grimly. “One and the same.”

“But you’re back here now,” Ali observed. “Are your folks still here?”

B. shook his head. “My dad died of a heart attack about ten years ago, and my mother went back to Michigan, where she came from originally. She still has family there. So what brought me back to Sedona? For one thing, it’s a beautiful place. I came back because I loved the red rocks, and I missed them. I loved the blue skies, and I missed those, too. I decided that I wasn’t going to let a bunch of school bullies keep me from living wherever I wanted. When I did come back, I did it with a whole pile of cash in my pocket and with the ability to be here on my own terms. By choice, I don’t have much to do with local yokels. I probably have more day-to-day dealings with your parents than with anyone else in town, and that’s pretty much how I like it.”