Crouching Buzzard, Leaping Loon

Of course, I thought, if this were one of those women-in-jeopardy movies, the basement would be where the escaped lunatic was hiding, or where the secret treasure was buried, and the soundtrack would swell with ominous music when I reached for the door handle.

And, I confess, I did start when I looked down the steps and saw a figure in the gloom. Santa Claus, to be precise. He was propped up in the corner where the stairs made a ninety-degree turn, his head slumped on his chest and his hat askew. I deduced from the improbable way his left leg was twisted that he was a life-size Christmas decoration, but I still checked him for a pulse before turning my back on him. The moth-eaten, life-size reindeer – irritatingly, only seven of them – were hanging by their antlers from hooks in the ceiling beams.

I noticed, with a sigh of relief, that the basement seemed ten degrees cooler than the rest of the house. And there I found more proof of Ted's brief occupation. A space at the foot of the stairs had been cleared of clutter, and here Ted had set up housekeeping. A futon. A makeshift desk, still bearing the outline, in dust, of a CPU.

The clothes Ted hadn't hung from the overhead beams were jumbled into a copier-paper box. In fact, the copier-paper box seemed to be the cornerstone of his decorating and storage scheme. Beside his futon, one box served as a bedside table, holding a digital alarm clock and half a dozen empty Coors cans. His desk was a board held up at each end by a stack of three boxes. The desk boxes contained computer manuals or small pieces of electronic equipment. A stack of about two dozen boxes formed a low wall between his niche and the rest of the basement – they contained a vast collection of science-fiction and mystery paperbacks and a small collection of relatively unkinky girlie magazines. In the tiny basement bathroom, Ted's towels, ragged and brightly colored, had been thrown unfolded into a copier-paper box, since the linen closet was overflowing with Mrs. Sprocket's vintage toiletries and faded, lace-trimmed towels.

I wasn't seeing much paper, anywhere. Which was unusual. No matter how much so-called computer visionaries touted the paperless future, in my experience, heavy computer users tended to have more paper around, rather than less. And I found no disks, Zip drives, tapes, or CD-ROMs. Unheard of. One thing I'd noticed about my coworkers at Mutant Wizards – they adored their hardware and software with a passion I couldn't even begin to understand, much less share. But at the same time, they trusted their cybernetic idols even less than I would have. I'd seen only one programmer whose work space wasn't littered with printouts and backups, and I'd heard Frankie and Jack arguing about whether the best metaphor for that guy was “bungee jumping without a cord“ or “playing Russian roulette with an Uzi.“

And it hadn't been Ted. His cube at work had been as bad a rat's nest of paper and disks as anyone's, until the police hit it. Evidently the police had stripped his home office, too, and the only things I'd find were objects the police had left behind – probably for good reason.

I stood, looking around, and feeling sorry for myself gave way to feeling sorry for Ted. I wondered if he'd actually rented the house, or if he'd only worked out some kind of deal to live in the basement as caretaker until it was sold. No matter how tight housing was, I wasn't sure I'd want to live here, surrounded by the warren of metal shelves Mrs. Sprocket had used to store such treasures as her back issues of the Saturday Evening Post, her empty mason jars, and several dozen rusty metal cemetery flower baskets.

I was working on a good case of melancholia when the doorbell rang again. As I was racing up the stairs to answer it, I tripped over something and fell sprawling on the landing where the L-shaped stairs turned, halfway up. I didn't stop to see what had tripped me – I wanted to take care of the new visitor first.

This time it was Rico. A dressed-up Rico; he'd thrown a plaid sport coat over his design school T-shirt. He was leaning casually against one of the porch pillars. I was tempted to tell him that he didn't have the height to pull off a really classy lean, but I settled for some more practical advice.

“I wouldn't put any weight on that if I were you,“ I said. “One good push could bring the whole porch roof down.“

“Oh, hi, Meg,“ he said. “What are you doing here?“

“Locking up, at the moment,“ I said. “The police have taken all of Ted's computer stuff, so it's no good looking here for the missing Lawyers files.“

“I figured as much,“ he said.

“Then why are you here?“

“To tell you the truth, I was hoping to run into Ted's landlord. He hasn't returned my calls.“

“And why are you looking for Ted's former landlord?“

“Same reason you are, I guess,“ Rico said. “Sooner or later he'll want to rent the place out again. I was hoping to be first in line.“

“The landlord's not here,“ I said. “I guess you'll have to keep trying. See you, Rico.“

“Okay. Any chance you could let me in to –?“

“Good-bye, Rico.“

I stood, pondering for a moment. Ratty as Ted's living quarters were, he had a place to live. And I couldn't remember anyone describing his basement den – all I'd heard were envious comments on how lucky he was to have actually snagged a place outside town. I suspected he'd never had anyone over. And Frankie and Rico both lived back at the Whispering Pines Cabins, four or more to a room. Could Caerphilly's tight housing market actually be a motive for murder? It had certainly caused not a few heated discussions between Michael and me during our yearlong search for living space. And we were sane, rational human beings, for the most part. My coworkers at Mutant Wizards? Yeah, maybe one of them would kill for a place to live. I'd keep it in mind.

Meanwhile, I headed back for the basement stair landing. I hadn't stopped long enough to see what had tripped me, but what I'd seen out of the corner of my eye intrigued me.

“Talk about literally stumbling over evidence,“ I said as I stared down at my discovery.

It was a trapdoor. It had fallen back in place, but fit so tightly that it hadn't quite closed, and I was able to pry it open with a kitchen knife.

“Eureka!“ I exclaimed as the trapdoor popped open to reveal a space about two feet square and filled to the brim with stuff.

I sat down beside the trapdoor and began removing the top items from Ted's secret stash.

On the top were a trio of romance novels, which surprised me a lot more than Ted's small collection of mildly dirty magazines. I'd never have pegged Ted for a romance reader.

But someone had read these books. They were not only heavily thumbed, but marked throughout with a yellow highlighter, as well. All three were by the same author – someone named Anna Floyd who, according to her author biography, lived in the country with her adoring husband and her three darling cats. Two were set in the present day and one in Regency England. I flipped through one of the modern ones and read highlighted quotes. Enlightenment was not forthcoming. If there was a clue here, I'd probably have to read the damned books to figure it out. Later. Much later. Maybe never, if I could first figure out who really killed Ted.

Next was a blue file folder with THE HACKER scribbled on the tab. In it, I found printouts from the Boston Globe Web site – articles about the “Robin Hood Hacker“ case, which I vaguely remembered hearing about a year ago. I browsed a couple of the articles, but they didn't say anything I didn't remember reading before. Young programmer caught hacking into the system of a major New York bank and erasing about five thousand dollars in charges from his girlfriend's account. Major embarrassment for the bank when it turned out that the girlfriend had been trying to dispute the charges for two years – they'd come from Panama, a country she could prove she'd never visited – and she had finally attempted suicide, due to stress resulting from her ruined credit history and the bank's repeated collection calls.

“Maybe I should sic the assertiveness therapist on her,“ I muttered. And hacking the bank was the best Robin Hood could come up with to solve Maid Marian's problem? Didn't these people know why God invented lawyers?

Never mind. All's well that ends well. Robin Hood got off with a warning, and the girlfriend got her good credit rating restored.

So what was so interesting about the case that Ted created a file about it and had to hide the file in his secret compartment?

Maybe Ted was the Robin Hood Hacker? No, the photo of the police escorting the hacker out of his apartment building was pretty blurred, but it couldn't possibly be Ted, who was taller than I and had blondish hair. The hacker had dark hair, and the arresting officers towered over him. Perhaps Ted kept it as a reminder to himself to keep to the straight and narrow? Or was it part of the research for a scheme to hack some other bank? I'd have to work on that.

And I was equally puzzled by the next object – a set of rules from Lawyers from Hell. Not the computer version, but the original role-playing game. I couldn't figure out why Ted would need to hide that. But it looked like an actual original – I could see some annotations in Rob's handwriting. Which meant the thing might have considerable value if Ted planned to sell it on the black market to rabid fans. So maybe he was hiding it because it was valuable. And he didn't trust banks. Or maybe he'd swiped it from someone.

Under the rules, I found a three-year-old copy of PC Gaming magazine. Surprise, surprise. He had a few more of them scattered around the basement, and we had dozens down at the office. What was so special about this copy that he had to hide it? I spotted a paper clip marking a page and turned to that article. Representatives from half a dozen gaming companies talked about the future of the industry. I chuckled. Since Rob was still inventing the paper version of Lawyers from Hell three years ago, anything they'd said about the future was probably a little off base by now.

Ted's secret stash wasn't turning out to be as exciting as I expected, I thought, suppressing a yawn.

Next I found a sheet of paper containing a number of strings of numbers with dots in die middle. A month ago, I'd have been puzzled; now, thanks to my time at Mutant Wizards, I knew that a Web site address, like www.mutantwizards.com was the pretty name humans used, while our computers looked for long strings of numbers. When I got back to the Cave, I could log on to the Internet and type in the numbers to see where they led. Not that I expected one of them to turn out to be www.whokilledtedandwhy.com or anything really useful like that.

Beneath the IP addresses, I found several long, abstruse legal documents. I got through a few paragraphs before deciding I'd better keep them for bedtime reading.

And at the bottom of the compartment, I found what looked like a small flashlight. I checked it out – aha! It was actually a small portable black light. Which did solve my problem of how to get my hands on one so I could check the mail cart path. But I couldn't think of any good reason for Ted to have hidden it here. Everyone knew he was fascinated with the mail cart and had been fooling around with changing its path. Why bother to hide the evidence of his pranks?

“For this, you need a secret compartment?“ I said aloud. Then again, maybe he hadn't built me secret compartment; maybe he'd found it and decided to use it. But even I could have found a better collection of things to hide in a secret compartment. “Jeez, Ted. Is that the best you could do? Is that it?“

I peered down into the compartment. Yes, that was it. Well, almost it. I saw a small, triangular white shape – the corner of a piece of paper that was trying to disappear through the crack between the side of the compartment and the bottom.

I grabbed the kitchen knife I'd used to open the trapdoor, and carefully teased the rest of the paper out, before it could disappear into whatever spider-infested crawl space was behind the stairs.

It appeared to be a printout of a computer spreadsheet, like the ones I used to calculate my budget. Down the left half of the paper was a series of words or phrases, like “the Voyeur,“

“the Ninja,“

“Mata Hari,“ and “the Iron Maiden.“ Eleven entries in all, and beside each one were a dozen columns of notes in tiny, barely readable type. Some of the words I could decipher – things like “struck out“ or “no dice.“ But most of it…

“I need more time and better light to deal with this,“ I muttered. Although I figured it would be worth dealing with. From the date on the upper right-hand corner, it had been printed on Saturday – only two days before the murder. And one of the labels on the left was THE hacker. So maybe the printout would help me figure out the meaning of the strange collection of objects I'd found beneath the trapdoor.

I found an empty grocery bag in Mrs. Sprocket's pantry – actually, I found several hundred, but I needed only one – loaded the contents of the secret compartment into it, and stashed it in my trunk.

But after I locked the house back up, I decided to explore the yard a little. The driveway continued behind the house, although I deduced from the three- and four-foot dogwood seedlings in the middle of it that no one had driven that way for several years. I followed the driveway and discovered an enormous weathered barn.

My cell phone rang. Michael.

“So what are you up to?“ he asked.

“I'm not sure,“ I said. “Do you have to be breaking into someone's actual house for it to be burgling? Or would someone's barn count, too?“

“I know I'm going to regret this, but whose barn are you burgling?“

“Ted's. Or his landlord's.“

I wedged the phone between shoulder and ear and explained, briefly, what I'd been doing, while rummaging through my purse for something that would serve as a makeshift screwdriver. The door was secured with a relatively new padlock, but since the screws holding the hasp onto the door were already half-loose, it took only a few minutes to remove the hasp entirely.

“There, I've got it,“ I reported to Michael. “And I bet the police didn't search in here. They couldn't have, unless there's another way in – the padlock was swathed in spiderwebs.“

“You don't think maybe the spiderwebs are a sign that there's nothing worth finding in the barn?“

“Not necessarily,“ I said. “I mean obviously there's no evidence of the murder in here, given the spiderwebs; but there could be something that gives me a clue to why he was killed.“

“Meg, be careful,“ Michael said.

“I will,“ I said. “Stand by, and I'll give you a blow-by-blow description of what I see.“

I began pulling open the barn door. I was wondering if I should fetch the flashlight I kept in my car, when something struck me on the head and I lost consciousness.