He thought about it for a second, then put it in his pocket. He was closing the closet door when the teakettle began to hum. He hurried back to the kitchen, let the raw steam play down the back of the envelope, pried up the seal, took out the bill, shot a quick photo of the long-distance calls, and resealed the envelope before the adhesive could dry. He put the kettle back and sniffed: the smell of the adhesive hung in the air, only faintly, but it was there, he thought. He hoped Carmel would take her time.

In the office, the computer was sitting quietly; he paged quickly through a few other folders, dragged a couple of them to the Zip icon, waited a few seconds until the files had been dumped, then shut the computer down.

All right. What else? He was ready to leave; before he went, he took a last look around.

The apartment was fabulous. But aside from the stuff in the filing cabinets, and stuck away in drawers, it hardly seemed to have been lived in: obsessively neat, everything in its place, like a stage set.

The phone in his pocket rang: Sloan.

'They're leaving,' he said. 'I just got my shrimp cocktail. I hope I'm not supposed to follow them.'

'Nah, let them go. But what do you think?'

'They're tight, all right. It was kissy-smoochy all night. But I think the guy was expecting somebody else to show. He kept cruising the place, looking around.'

'Huh. Wonder what that's about?' Lucas asked, feeling just slightly guilty.

Then: 'How come you're eating a shrimp cocktail and they're already leaving? You having it for dessert?'

'Well… yeah,' Sloan said. His voice went a little hoarse: 'I love these things.'

When Carmel got home, a little after eleven – she had to work the next day – she stopped at the threshold of the apartment and wrinkled her nose. Something, she thought, was not quite right. She couldn't put her finger on it: the air was wrong, or something. The apartment's chemicals had been disturbed. She walked through, leaving the hallway door open, so she'd have a place to run if she needed it, but found nothing at all.

'Huh,' she said, as she closed the hallway door.

By the next morning, she'd forgotten it.

When Lucas got home, he took the CompactFlash card out of his pocket, dropped another one out of the Nikon, and read them into his home computer. After transferring the files to Photoshop, he sharpened the photos as much as he could and dumped them to his photo printer. That done, he called Davenport Simulations and let the phone ring until a man answered, his voice grumpy at the interruption.

'Steve? Lucas Davenport.'

'Hey, Lucas! Where've you been, man?' Steve smoked a little weed, from time to time; dropped a little acid on weekends, and let his beard grow. When the acid was on him, he could program in three dimensions. '"You don't come around any more.'

'I'd be like the ghost of bad news, the former owner hanging around,' Lucas said. 'But I needed somebody who could help me out with a computer problem. I thought about you… from your phreaking days.'

'I don't do that shit anymore, hardly ever,' Steve said. 'Uh, what do you need?'

'Is there anyone on the Net who could track down anonymous telephone numbers?'

Lucas asked. 'If there is, do you know how you could get in touch with him?'

Steve dropped his voice, though he probably was alone: 'Depends on what the numbers are and how much trouble you want to go to. And whether you want to pay for it.'

'How much would it cost?'

'If you want all the numbers and don't ask any questions… I know a guy who does that kind of work. He could e-mail them to you for a couple of bucks a name. How many do you have?'

'Maybe fifty,' Lucas said.

'Oh, Jesus, I thought you were talking about hundreds. Or thousands. I don't know if he'd be interested in a little job like that.'

'I'd pay him more,' Lucas said.

'I can ask,' Steve said. 'Say five hundred bucks?'

'That's good,' Lucas said.

'I'm putting my name behind this, man. I'll be stuck for the five hundred if you don't come through.'

'Steve…'

'All right, all right.'

'I could use any other information they can find on the people who belong to the phone numbers – I mean, if they can do that.'

'That'd cost you more.'

'Go up to a thousand.'

'You got it: send me an e-mail with the numbers. I'll pass it on. You'll get it back by e-mail.' jricy

Lucas copied odd, unusual or unidentified numbers from the photos and asked for names and addresses. He dumped the e-mail to Steve, then checked his own e-mail account, and found two letters, one advertising pornographic photographs of pre teens, which he deleted, and another from his daughter.

Sarah was in the first grade, starting to read and write: but her mother, a TV news producer, had shown her how to use a voice-writing software program. Using the voice-writer, Sarah now wrote Lucas a couple of times a week.

Lucas took fifteen minutes to interpret the voice-written text, and he wrote back, struggling to use words that Sarah could sound out, while at the same time trying to avoid the Dick-and-Jane syndrome. He was just finishing when a perky little female voice from the computer said, 'You have mail.'

He sent the e-mail note to Sarah, then clicked on his in-box. The sole piece of mail was a list of names and addresses attached to the phone numbers he'd sent out. All but two of the names had personal information attached. Lucas scanned it: the information appeared to come from credit bureaus, although some might have come from state motor-vehicle departments. At the end of it all was a price tag: 'Send $1000.'

'Quick,' he muttered. He looked at his watch. Just under half an hour.

He printed the numbers out, and turned to the documents he'd pulled from

Carmel's computer.

Though he spent less than five seconds with most of them – virtually all were work-related – it was after three in the morning before he wiped the disk, shut down the computer and went to bed.

The next day, he chopped the disk to pieces with a butcher knife, and dropped the pieces in two separate trash cans in the Skyway: he had an almost superstitious dread of computer files turning up when they weren't supposed to.

Then, while he was still in the Skyway, between the Pillsbury building and the government center, he noticed a woman in a shapeless black dress, wearing a white scarf on her head, babushka-style. He turned to watch her walking away; some religious or ethnic group, he thought, but he didn't know which. He went on to police headquarters, whistling, where he called Sherrill.

'Can either you or Black come by for a minute?'

'Which would you prefer? Me or Tom?'

'Stop,' he said. 'I just want to hear about the Allen case. And mention a couple of things to you.'

Sherrill came down a few minutes later and dropped into his visitor's chair.

'We're running out of stuff to look at,' she said.

'Let me tell you what Hale Allen told me yesterday,' Lucas said. He laid it out quickly, then told her about the ethnic woman in the Skyway. 'She looked like the aliens the kid described, when she was putting together that composite photo. So we need to get a low-angle photograph of somebody in a dark dress, wearing a scarf over her head; then we need to plug in a bunch of faces, including Carmel's.'

'Carmel Loan,' Sherrill said. 'That could get rough, if we went public and didn't have the goods.'

'Which is why I don't want her to know that we're looking at her. Not unless we get something solid.'

'All right,' Sherrill said. She pushed herself up. 'I can probably get a picture of Carmel from your lady at the Star-Tribune library, if she still works there.'