Cold Case

Matt touched the glass to his lips. The bubbles really did come up to tickle his nose. And it tasted rank to him. Leif claimed that the bottle was programmed to taste like the very best stuff. Matt didn’t care. The champagne was only the delivery vector. Everybody whose identity they didn’t know had been marked.

Marten had to know his suggestion was doomed from the start, Matt thought. Krantz called it. Not one of the folks behind these proxies wants irresponsible people, maybe even litigious or murderous people, knowing who they really are.

Raising his glass in a mock toast, he gave the other sleuths a Monty Newman grin. Too bad that’s just what’s going to happen.

8

“Glad to see you got over your cold,” Megan told Leif as she held open the door to her house. He came in balancing a stack of books, topped by her brother’s boots.

“I used the sick time to get what I needed out of these.” He carefully deposited the pile on a kitchen chair. “If your parents are in, I’d like to thank them for letting me borrow all this stuff.”

“Sure,” Megan said. “After we check the books.”

“Check?” Leif echoed. “For what?”

“That you haven’t cut out any of Nikki Callivant’s pictures,” Megan informed him sweetly. “That’s how I understand this obsession with public — or semipublic figures — begins. Clipped pictures pasted up on walls. Little shrines built in the corner of a room. And the next thing we know, Nikki Callivant is bringing in the police to arrest another stalker.” She shook her head. “I don’t want to see you going that route, Anderson. For one thing, I am not going on HoloNews to say, ‘He was a quiet boy. I can’t believe he’d do anything like that.’”

“But I’d never—”

She gave him a 200-watt glare. “I wouldn’t put anything past you — the dumber, the better.”

Leif rolled his eyes. “Thanks for your concern, but I don’t have any personal interest in Nikki Callivant. This is just research to help out Matt.”

“If he’s in trouble with the Callivants, he’s going to need more than just research to save him,” Megan said.

“I’ve already been working on that — which is more than you can say.”

Megan shrugged. “He hasn’t asked me.”

She grinned as Leif struggled not to snap back at her. Instead, he changed the subject. “I suppose you’ve heard how Matt found the guy who was running the sim.”

“Yeah.” Megan shuddered. “Pretty gross.”

“You may not have heard about the threats this Saunders guy made before he died or about the letter he was carrying.” He went on to explain about the list of sim participants, and how they’d found Father Flannery.

“Somebody — probably the hacker who started all the problems — called a meeting of the wannabe detectives. I managed to get my hands on a tracking program, and Matt used it to trace the people’s proxies back through the Net.”

“Just happened to get your hands on that, did you?” Megan mocked.

Leif’s ears reddened. “It was only a little trouble, and it helped out a friend. Matt called me just as I was leaving to make this delivery. He and the priest are going to spend the afternoon paying a few real-world visits to the participants in the sim.”

Megan whistled. “That should be interesting.”

“Especially since one of them all but accused somebody in the group of murdering Saunders,” Leif went on.

He paused when Megan shot him a look. “You don’t think that happened, do you?” she said.

“Considering the blizzard, I’m guessing it was the ice on the streets.”

She nodded. “Even if he’s just looking for the hacker in the group, Matt’s going to need more than a list of suspects. He’s too—”

“Honest?” Leif suggested when she hesitated.

She shrugged. “Close enough. I was actually thinking along the lines of straightforward and naive.”

“I was wondering if you wanted to come in for a subtle bit of help,” Leif said.

“How?” Megan asked bluntly.

“Maybe we can come at this from the Callivant side. P.J. Farris has these tickets for a Junior League formal. Nikki Callivant’s supposed to be there, with several other members of her family—”

“You are obsessing on her!” Megan accused.

“No, I’m not,” Leif replied, “ ’cause I’m not going to be there. My folks have grounded me, remember? But I still think Nikki is our closest connection to the family. She’s our age, and while she doesn’t hang in any of our circles, I expect she’ll talk with P.J.”

“A Callivant and a senator’s son. Yeah, that might work.” P.J. tended to kid about the fact that his dad was in the Senate—“the honorable member from the great state of Texas!” But between his stunning good looks and his political connections, P.J.’d have no trouble catching Nikki Callivant’s attention. Megan looked suspiciously at Leif. “And where do I come in?”

“Well, P.J. could use a date—” He hurriedly put up his hand before Megan could explode. “And I don’t think it would be a bad idea to double-team Nikki. At worst, you could play good cop/bad cop with her.”

“With P.J. playing the good cop,” Megan growled. “Well, I don’t have to worry about pushing any buttons with Nikki-baby’s temper. I’ll just mention your name.”

“Glad to be of service,” Leif said with an ironic smile. “Both for the button — and for finding you a way to get some use out of that gown you bought for the winter formal.”

Matt had just enough time after getting home from school to have a glass of milk. Then Father Flannery was at his door. “I had to rearrange my schedule for this,” Flannery said. “I certainly hope we’ll be able to catch all these people in one afternoon.”

“Let me finish this note to my folks, and then we’ll be off,” Matt promised.

The priest hadn’t been surprised when Matt called him this morning. Matt suspected that Flannery knew what he had done at the meeting of the suspicious sleuths. Why else had he made sure that Milo Krantz had been marked by the virtual champagne?

While he scribbled on a piece of paper, Matt reached into his knapsack and handed over a printout. The list was simple — proxy, real name, and address.

“I put them in order of nearest to farthest,” Matt said.

Father Flannery grunted as he read. “There’s certainly enough ground to cover.”

“First on the list is Harry Knox, aka Milo Krantz,” Matt said. “He’s close by.”

“Then the pair pretending to be the Slimms — on the edge of Georgetown, and the fellow proxied up as Lucullus Marten in Virginia.” The priest watched as Matt attached his note to the refrigerator with a magnet. “No time like the present, I suppose.”

Although their first stop wasn’t all that far away, getting there meant crossing an invisible line — the border of the beltway. Named for the ring of parkways around Washington, these suburban towns had once been prime real estate. But that had been years ago. As conditions had improved in Washington, “urban problems” moved to the outer towns, who soon didn’t have the police, social services — or the tax base — to handle them.

The town where Harry Knox lived didn’t even have the funds to take care of its streets. Huge patches of ice still hadn’t been cleared away. They looked like frozen lakes surrounded by a treacherous terrain of cracks and potholes in the pavement. Father Flannery had to drive carefully to keep from skidding his way to their destination.

Once it had been a “town house development,” homes for the young professionals — would-be “beltway bandits.” The place had been put up quickly, and now its shoddy construction showed. Tiles on the roofs were cracked or gone. Patches of brick were discolored, as if the walls had caught some skin disease. Some windows even had plywood in them instead of glass. The original homeowners had obviously been replaced by renters. A forlorn air of decay hung over the place. On what had once been lawns, children’s footprints had scuffed away the