Донна Эндрюс - Click here for murder

“Since I didn’t even know that was possible, no; I can’t say for sure,” Tim said. ‘Maybe that’s what he did. All l know is that it looked as if he’d done everything we needed and printed out the results. I made a few phone calls to his references, but they checked out. It seemed silly to redo everything he’d already done. ”

“I wonder how many other imposters we have working for us, ” Maude said.

Tim winced.

“Look, by the time I did backgrounds on everyone else, I’d spent those couple of weeks working for the instructor who taught the class, remember? I learned a lot more about how you were supposed to do background checks. Like not relying so much on online stuff, and how to cross-check it. The background checks on the other employees were a lot more orthodox. Really. Although if you want to have someone else, someone with more experience, do new background checks on all of them, that’s fine with me. I’d feel a lot better if we did that. ”

“I’ll consider it, ” I said. Tor that matter, I intended to do some heavy digging myself, on all the Alan Grace employees. Better yet,

I’d see if KingFischer could help. KingFischer was security conscious

*

to the point of paranoia. “For now, we need to find out more about Ray. ”

Donna Andrews

“Perhaps the police will uncover Ray’s real identity while they’re investigating his murder, ” Maude said.

“Unlikely,” Tim said, shaking his head. “For one thing, they’d have run his fingerprints through all the databases; if his prints were on file anywhere, I think they’d have gotten a hit by now. Of course, that’s good news. If his fingerprints aren’t on file, at least it means he’s not a crook. Wasn’t a crook, I mean. ”

“No, ” Maude said. “It only means he didn’t have a criminal record. He could still be a very successful crook; someone too smart to have gotten caught. ”

“God,” Tim said. “First the police and now you. ”

“What do you mean?” Maude asked.

“Never mind,” Tim said. “It’s just that I don’t think the police will do much of an investigation. They think Ray was a crook, too; or at least involved in drugs. ”

“I never said Ray was a crook, ” Maude protested.

“You just did,” Tim said. “You said —"

I found myself on the verge of snapping at them—asking them, why they were wasting time bickering. But l stopped myself. Bickering was how they showed the tension they were feeling. Being impatient was how I showed mine.

“Tim, why do they think Ray was involved in drugs?” I asked instead.

“The way he was killed, I guess,” Tim said. “Well-dressed young man found shot in an alley behind a trendy Adams-Morgan club—what was he doing there if he wasn’t either buying or selling drugs? And the fact that he’s Hispanic doesn’t help; I guess they think he’s the nephew of a rich Colombian drug dealer or something. ”

“That’s ridiculous, ” Maude said. “We know who Ray was: a

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brilliant system engineer who just happened to be Cuban-American. ”

“Really?” Tim said. “How do we know he wasn’t a drug dealer hiding his identity by pretending to be a system engineer?”

“He’s—he wasn’t pretending,” I said. Strange how we all still fell into the habit of thinking of Ray in the present tense. “Maude’s right; he was a brilliant system engineer, and given the hours he spent on the Alan Grace project, I can’t imagine when he could have found the time to sell drugs. Or use them. ”

“Not to mention the time he spent on his volunteer work, ” Maude said.

“The time he said he spent,” Tim muttered.

“Tim, I went to a Byte Back meeting with Ray a couple of weeks ago,” Maude said. “Those kids at the rec center knew him. Liked him. He tutored them for a couple of months. You can’t fake that. And I’ve worked closely with him; I’d have seen signs of drug use. ” “The signs aren’t that obvious, ” Tim said. “It’s not like all drug users have track marks running up and down their arms. ”

Maude looked at him over her glasses.

“I’ve worked in offices for decades, ” she said. “I know the signs that someone’s drinking or using drugs, and I didn’t see any of them on Ray. ”

Tim squirmed a little.

“Are you sure you were looking?” he asked.

“I was looking, ” Maude said. “He was a stranger to us, and he was going to be responsible for Turing’s new home. We’d be trusting Turing’s life to him. I was looking, long and hard. And I didn’t see anything that made me uneasy.,”

“None of us did,” I said. “Until now.”

Maude nodded, and her face fell.

Donna Andrews

“Obviously I missed something, ” she said.

“We all missed it,” Tim said. “Look, I believed the guy, too. He seemed like one of the white hats. He tried to get me involved in some of his crusades to protect kids from online danger. Like monitoring chat rooms to watch for signs of stalkers, stuff like that. So if there were signs, I didn’t pick up on them either.”

“We’re not going to get anywhere sitting around talking about this,” 1 said. “We’ve got to investigate this much more thoroughly. Even if Tim is wrong, and the police are seriously looking into Ray’s murder, there’s a lot they don’t know—about me, for instance. I’m not sure they’d know what to make of me if we told them, and I don’t want to tell them. So we do our own investigation. ”

Our own investigation- Maude squared her

shoulders and looked interested. Tim tried to follow suit, but his stomach lurched.

What’s wrong with me? he thought. A few weeks ago, he’d have found it thrilling to investigate a homicide.

But not a homicide where he was—-guilty wasn’t the word. Responsible. If he hadn’t blown away Ray’s request for help, maybe there wouldn’t even be a homicide.

I have to tell them, he thought. But he couldn’t see an easy way to bring it up.

“I’ll take care of the online side,” Turing was saying. “Maude’s our liaison with the D.C. police, and she’ll be investigating at the Alan Grace offices and other nearby locales.”

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S3

“What about me?” Tim asked.

“You’ll be uncovering Ray’s past,” Turing said. “Maude, help him with the travel arrangements, will you? He’ll need to stop off at the Florida Bureau of Vital Statistics in Saint Petersburg for a copy of Ray’s birth certificate and see if he can find a corresponding death certificate. That’s usually what people do to establish a new identity that will hold up under some scrutiny, take the birth certificate of a dead child. And then he’ll need to go down to Miami.”

“The visit to the Bureau of Vital Statistics is fairly routine, isn’t it?” Maude asked. “Maybe we could hire a local private investigator to do that part, and send Tim straight to Miami, where he can be of more use.”

Damn, Tim thought. He’d felt reassured at starting with a visit to a government agency. He knew how to do that.

“Good thinking,” Turing said. “Tim, you’ll need to take your laptop; I’m getting together as much data as I can on Ray, including photos and videos of him. If it turns out Ray Santiago isn’t his real name, it may be a little harder, but I’m sure sooner or later someone will recognize him if you show his picture around enough.”

“What if they don’t?” Tim asked.

“Then you can go on to San Jose; I’m pretty sure his Silicon Valley credentials were valid, but you can check them out all over again, and try to follow his trail back from the other end.”

It would take forever, Tim thought. And that was strangely comforting. As if by following Ray’s trail into the past, he could atone for failing him in the present.