Донна Эндрюс: Click here for murder

“Detective Stowers,’’ the officer said. He wasn’t just tall; he was big. An ex—football player who still did something to keep in shape.

Finding out that Tim was a PI didn’t seem to bother Detective Stowers. Or amuse him, Tim was relieved to see.

And he didn’t seem confused by Tim’s dual role as both friend of the victim and representative of his employer. Or interested in Tim’s whereabouts at the time of the murder. At first, Tim was relieved. But then he began to wonder. Would it look suspicious if the police later found out that he was supposed to meet Ray?

And more important, was this something that would help them catch Ray’s killer?

Maybe. But he couldn’t bring himself to admit his failure. He’d let Ray down. At least he wouldn’t let Turing down, he thought, and brought up the subject of Ray’s laptop.

r

“Laptop?’’ the detective echoed.

“The company’s concerned about it,” Tim said. “That and

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the PDA. They could both have confidential corporate information on them.”

“We didn’t find a laptop or a PDA at the scene,” Stowers said. “If we locate either one, I’ll let you know, but you should probably check other places where he might have left them.”

Tim shook his head.

“He wouldn’t have left them anywhere,” he said. “Okay, he might have left his laptop at home if he was going out to a club or something, but there’s no way he would ever go anywhere without his PDA.”

“I was at the scene,” Stowers said. “I’d have remembered a laptop or a PDA. His wallet was intact, but all he had was some cash, his driver’s license, and a couple of credit cards. Nothing we could use to find a next of kin or place of employment. We got his address from the driver’s license, and went there. If we’d found a laptop or a PDA, I’d have wanted to see them, but we didn’t; just a nonoperational desktop computer. The only way we knew to call your company was that we found a couple of business cards and a file with copies of all his applications and insurance paperwork. And to tell you the truth, I was kind of surprised when anyone called back. I figured maybe the business cards were phony, too.”

“What do you mean, ‘phony, too’?”

“The next-of-kin information you have on file for him is phony, you know,” the detective said.

“Phony?” Tim exclaimed. “Are you sure it’s not just out of date—Maude would have his latest information—Maude Graham. She’s—”

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“Yes, we’ve talked to Ms. Graham, and she faxed over a complete copy of Mr. Santiago’s personnel file for us earlier this morning,” Stowers said. “She has the same Miami address for Mr. Santiago’s parents. Only there aren’t any San-tiagos living there—no one lives there, and according to the Miami PD, no one has for some time.”

And then things got really strange. The detective began asking questions about drugs. Did he know whether Ray used drugs? Had Ray ever offered to sell him drugs? They brought pictures. Have you ever seen this man? Do you recognize any of these people? And no, he didn’t really recognize any of the pictures. All the subjects, whether ratlike and furtive or hulking and pugnacious, looked vaguely familiar, but only because they were the stuff of any suburban dweller’s nightmare, the kind of urban wildlife you’d cross the street to avoid.

Well, with one exception.

“He looks vaguely familiar,” Tim said, pointing to one man with a strangely penetrating stare.

“Do you remember where you’ve seen him?” the detective asked, sitting forward a little.

Tim frowned, and then it hit him.

“I think he tried to squeegee my windshield earlier today,” he said. “At the stoplight on Pennsylvania, just after I exited 395.”

“Not the same guy,” the detective said, sitting back again. “This was taken in the morgue, two weeks ago.”

“Ah,” Tim said, nodding. That accounted for the strange stare. “Look, who are these guys—drug dealers or something? Because Ray wasn’t a drug dealer—he didn’t do

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drugs at all; he was a very skilled and highly paid system engineer at Alan Grace Corporation.”

“Odds are most of that pay went right up his nose,” the detective said. “And your people at the corporation may want to check around, see if there’s any money or equipment missing. Looks like he’s pretty much cleaned out his apartment of anything valuable. No TV, no stereo.”

Tim wanted to protest that Ray had only been on the East Coast for six months, most of that time too busy to shop for anything but necessities. And he didn’t care much about material things anyway. Lived in his head and his computers. But he wasn’t sure Detective Stowers would believe him. And what if the detective asked too many questions about what Ray was so busy with? Turing wanted to keep a low profile.

“You’re writing this off as some kind of drug-related crime, aren’t you?” Tim said instead.

“We’re not writing anything off, Mr. Pincoski,” Stowers said, frowning. “But when you’ve got nearly a dozen murders in the same geographic area, with the same M.O., you’ve got to consider a possible connection. And so far, the connection is cocaine. Maybe you’re right; maybe your friend wasn’t involved in drugs, as a dealer or a buyer or even a casual user. Maybe he just wandered into the wrong place at the wrong time. But when you consider the trouble we’ve had finding any trace of Mr. Santiago, apart from his employment at your company—phony address for the next of kin, no trace of him in Miami, no Florida driver’s license in all the years he lived there—you’ve got to wonder what’s going on.”

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“I just can’t believe it’s Ray we’re talking about,” Tim said, shaking his head.

Probably the wrong thing to say, since it inspired the detective to ask that Tim meet them over at the medical examiner’s office. To make sure the body they’d found was really the man Tim had known as Ray Santiago. Tim couldn’t think of a way to get out of it.

‘‘Maybe it’s not Ray,” he muttered as he stepped back out into the parking lot. He was surprised to find it was still daylight. It was easy to lose track of time inside the windowless police offices, and he’d expected it to be night when he emerged. But it was still midafternoon, and the temperature had climbed into the nineties. Which made it all the more annoying that he had to trudge up and down for five minutes to find his car.

He removed an orange flyer from his windshield—apparently a local hair salon with a special on braids had papered the parking lot in his absence, decorating police and civilian vehicles alike. He pulled out, careful not to back into the police cruiser that had dogged his heels since he’d stepped into the parking lot and was even now waiting to take his space.

The police were here for several hours -

Interviewing the staff.

What if they want to interview me? If they review Ray's e-mail, see how many messages we exchanged, and say, “Who is this

Turing Hopper person? Why haven't we seen him? All right, her.

*

We want to talk to her. Send her down to the Violent Crimes Branch this afternoon. ”

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Of course, it doesn’t really look as if they will. They seem strangely uninterested in Ray’s work. I’d like to think it’s because they know his work has nothing to do with his murder. That would reassure me. But since they’re focusing on questions about possible drug use instead, I’m not sure I trust what they’re doing.

They had a so-called expert examine Ray’s computer, but he didn’t do a full-scale forensic analysis. He just asked if the system administrator could reset Ray’s passwords so he could get into Ray’s e-mail and his files. I did. He spent an hour poking around, and then left.