Cold Case

me a favor, huh? Be careful! And tell your friends to watch their backs. I’ll see what I can do from my end.”

They cut their connection, and Matt gave a new series of commands to his computer. Soon he was composing a virtmail message to go out to the other sim participants — proposing a meeting, same place as last time, for tomorrow at six P.M.

He’d just finished when his father’s voice came floating back. “Dinner is served!”

I’m betting that my former rivals have Net agents out ready to pounce on any news mentions of our names, he thought, shutting the system down. But maybe by then I’ll be able to tell them a little more than the official story. Free flow of information, after all.

Bradford Academy’s cafeteria was crowded, so Matt decided to do a good deed. He carried David Gray’s lunch tray as well as his own. David grimly stumped along on his cane through the mob scene.

“That leg has to he getting better soon,” Matt tried to console him.

“The magnetic therapy helps the bones knit faster,” David admitted with a grimace. “But it also leaves an itch where I can’t scratch.”

They reached the table that Andy Moore was holding for them. Matt looked at the two trays, both of which held a sandwich and a soda. “Do you remember which one is yours?”

David sighed. “Does it matter?”

He had a point. They might go to a better-than-average school, but the cafeteria menu was, to put it mildly, lame. Matt gave David his choice and began munching unenthusiastically on a mustard sandwich (at least that was all he tasted) when Megan O’Malley plumped down in the seat beside him. A cup of soup slopped on the tray she carried — proof of her intrepid nature, Matt thought. Soup from that kitchen…he didn’t want to think what was in it.

“How’s it going?” Megan asked.

“Not well.” Matt took a sip from his gel-pack of soda. “Another name on the List of Ed Saunders has a red mark beside it.”

Andy leaned across the table. “Sounds like a good title for one of your dad’s books, Megan,” he suggested through a mouthful of potato salad.

“The line’s been used,” David Gray said, taking a taste of his sandwich and making a face. “Just without the name Ed Saunders.”

“Forget that,” Megan said. “What happened?”

“The guy who played my boss in the sim — his house burned down last night.”

Megan shook her head. “I hate to say it, Hunter, but the people from your sim seem awfully…accident- prone.”

“Not Mister Matt over there,” Andy put in. “He’s just rolling in good luck. Did I tell you about the mystery girl in the hot car who came by looking for him?”

“You told me,” David said in a long-suffering voice. “Or was it the hot girl in the mystery car you mentioned?”

“Is that for real?” Megan asked Matt.

Feeling the color rise in his face, he shrugged. “Yeah. Not only that, but the girl was a friend of yours — Nikki Callivant.”

Megan choked and nearly sprayed Andy with a mouthful of soup. “What? How?”

“I can only give you the why,” Matt said. “You mentioned this school and my name when you got together at that charity do. So she came to check me out.”

“Sure she wasn’t stalking you?” Andy ostentatiously used his napkin to wipe soup droplets off the table.

“Shut up, Moore,” Megan and David growled almost in unison.

“I think I’d leave any stalking jobs to her father,” Matt said. “He’s some kind of muckety-muck in national security.”

“That does it!” Andy exclaimed. “For this election, my money will be on Walter G. Callivant.”

“You clown,” David groused. “Walter G. is a national joke.”

“He’s really not—” Megan began.

But Andy blithely went right on. “Callivant Lite is the candidate for me. If there are going to be any dirty tricks in this campaign, his side will have access to the best government technology.”

He laughed, but quickly shut up when he saw nobody else thought it was funny.

Matt shook his head. Maybe Andy finally realized what he had to say wasn’t exactly in the best of taste.

“Andy,” he said, “for my sake, you’d better hope that you are wrong. Because, otherwise, the list of people in that sim who might be victims is getting awfully short. I could be next.”

Any illusions Andy may have created about luck were quickly dispelled when Matt got home. He opened the door to find a cream-colored envelope lying on the rug — honest to gosh snail-mail! It was so unexpected, he nearly stepped on it.

Then Matt picked the thing up and recognized the return address. He’d seen it on the letterhead of the law firm that had been making Ed Saunders’s life miserable.

The other shoe drops, Matt thought gloomily, slitting the envelope open. It’s funny how legal people have stuck to paper. Is it just tradition?

As he read the couple of paragraphs on expensive stationery, he came up with a new theory. If he’d gotten an electronic letter like this, he’d have simply yelled for his computer to vaporize it.

The letter was addressed both to Matt and his parents, and it demanded that Matt cease and desist all activities which might be construed as harassing the firm’s clients (never named), including (but not limited to) attempts at fraternization, telecommunication, and unauthorized abstraction of personal or legal information, to name a few.

And what exactly would authorize abstraction of information look like? Matt silently wondered as he read on.

Failure to knock off the above activities, or ones like them, would result in civil action in the courts, and possible criminal complaints, specifically for the continuing offense of felonious use of computer equipment for the purposes of illegally obtaining sealed records pertaining to the firm’s clients.

Carefully refolding the heavy document, Matt took it into the kitchen to post on the refrigerator door. Initially he’d intended to raid the fridge as well, but all of a sudden that cafeteria sandwich wasn’t sitting too well in his stomach.

The sudden chime of the call announcer sent the paper flying one way and the refrigerator magnet flying another. “Nerves,” Matt muttered as he scooped them both up, plunked the magnet in place, and then went to the living room computer console.

Captain Winters’s face appeared when Matt ordered the computer to make the connection.

“Did you have someone watching for me?” Matt asked. “I just got in.”

The captain shook his head. “Guess my sense of timing is on today. I managed to get a look at a draft of the report on last night’s fire as it came into the Fairfax County Department of Public Safety.”

“And?” Matt said.

“It wasn’t easy for the investigators to sift through all that debris,” Winters went on. “Did you know how much paper was in that wood-frame house? I didn’t think people did that anymore. Must have been a regular firetrap.”

An image popped up in Matt’s mind — all those lovingly shelved books. Oswald Derbent must have skimped his whole life to have collected so many.

Matt forced himself back to the present. “What did the investigators have to say about the cause of the fire?”

“As far as they can determine, the blaze started in one of the lamps in the front parlor — or reading room, or library, whatever you want to call it,” Captain Winters said. “The socket on that style of lamp is safety rated for one hundred watts, but there was a two hundred-watt bulb in there. It burned too hot, drew too much power through the wiring, and burst into flames.”

Matt put his hands behind his back — he didn’t want Winters to know how his fingers were knotting together. “I was in that room just days ago,” he said, “and Derbent kept it as dim as a church. He had two lamps, and they were burning forty-watt bulbs. I think he considered bright light an extravagance, and