"But you won't go to prison."

"But I want to win. That's the whole point of the exercise," Taryn said.

They sat in silence for a minute, then Dannon said, "What do you want me to do?"

"Think about it," she said. "You're smart. And I'll think about it overnight. We'll talk tomorrow morning. It's all a balancing of the various risks, and the various goals. It's like a calculus problem: and there is an answer."

THE HOUSE HAD WI-FI throughout, and when Dannon was gone, Taryn fired up her laptop, went online, and looked up Lucas Davenport. Google turned up thousands of entries, most from newspapers and television stations statewide, covering criminal cases on which he'd worked over the past twenty-five years.

There were also what appeared to be several hundred business-oriented entries from his involvement with Davenport Simulations.

Those caught her attention, and she dug deeper. Davenport, it seemed, had been a role-playing game designer as a young man, and then, with the rise of the machines, had created a number of simulations for 911 systems. The simulations were in use nationwide, and after the World Trade Center attack, Davenport Simulations had moved more extensively into training software for security professionals. By that time, she found, Davenport was out of the business, having sold it to his management group.

The local business magazines estimated that he'd gotten out with around forty million dollars.

So he was smart and rich.

And the first batch of clips demonstrated that he was, without a doubt, a killer.

Somebody, she thought, that she might like.

SHE HAD A RESTLESS NIGHT, working through it all, and in the morning beeped Dannon on the walkie-talkie function and said, "I'm going to get an orange juice. Meet me by the pool in three minutes."

Three minutes later, she was asking, "This Quintana guy, the Minneapolis cop. If we asked him to check around, he wouldn't have any idea where the question was coming from, right?"

"Well, he'd have an idea," Dannon said. "It's possible that he and Tubbs speculated on it, but there's no way he could know for sure."

"Then I think we ask him to look up this woman, Tubbs's girl, and ask the question. He should be able to come up with some kind of legal reason for doing it-that he heard about the attorney general's review and thought he ought to look into the Minneapolis department's exposure, something like that. Some reason that wouldn't implicate him. Just doing his job."

"I thought about that last night-I couldn't decide. I'm about fifty-fifty on it," Dannon said.

"So I've decided," Taryn said. "Do it, but be clever about it. Don't give yourself away. Call from a cold phone."

"I can be careful," Dannon said, "but it's still a little more chum in the water. We could be stirring up the sharks."

"It's a small risk, and we need to take it," she said. "Make the call. Let's see what happens."

CHAPTER 11

A few years earlier, Kidd had become entrapped in his computer sideline when the National Security Agency, working with the FBI, tried to tear up a hacking network to which he supposedly belonged. Kidd's team had managed to fend off the attention, and after several years of quiet, he'd begun to feel safe again.

Part of it, he thought, might be that he and Lauren had finally had to deal with the fact that they loved each other. Then the baby showed up, though not unexpectedly ...

He wanted to be safe. He wanted all that old hacker stuff to be over. If you want something badly enough, he thought, sometimes you began to assume that you had it. He and his network had some serious assets, and hadn't been able to detect any sign that the feds were still looking for them.

Still, he was sure that if the government people thought they could set up an invisible spiderweb, so they'd get the vibration if Kidd touched the web ... then they'd do that. They'd give it a shot.

So Kidd had had to stay with the computers, watching for trouble, although now, painting six and seven hours a day, he was working so hard that he hadn't time to do anything creative with the machines; and he was making so much money that he didn't have to.

He and the other members of his network understood that even monitoring the feds could be dangerous. Computer systems were totally malleable, changing all the time. Updating access code could lead to serious trouble if it was detected. In addition to that problem, the number of major computer systems was increasing all the time, and security was constantly getting better. So care was needed, and time was on the government's side.

The most powerful aspect of any bureaucracy, in Kidd's eyes, was the same thing that gave cancer its power: it was immortal. If you didn't seek it out and kill it, cell by cell, it'd just keep growing. Bureaucracies could chase you forever. You could defeat them over and over and over again, and the bureaucracy didn't much care, though some individual bureaucrats might.

The bureaucracy, as a whole, just kept coming, as long as the funding lasted.

AS PART OF his monitoring efforts, Kidd had long been resident in the Minneapolis Police Department's computer systems, which had useful access to several federal systems. The federal systems had safeguards, of course, but since the basic design of the system had been done to encourage access by law enforcement, the safeguards were relatively weak. Once you had unrestricted access to a few big federal systems, you could get to some pretty amazing places.

None of which concerned him when he went out on the network from a Grand Avenue coffee shop eight hours after he'd testified for the attorney general. In his testimony, he'd represented himself as a former computer consultant who was mostly out of the business, and was now concentrating on art. That was true.

Which didn't mean he'd misplaced his brain.

So he got a grande no-foam latte and sat at a round plastic table at the back of the shop and slipped into the Minneapolis Police Department's computer system. Instead of going out to the federal networks, he began probing individual computers on the network. He was looking for a group of numbers-the number of bytes represented by the photo collection.

The collection was a big one, and though there'd be thousands of files in the department's computers, the actual number of bytes would vary wildly from file to file. If he found a matching number, it'd almost certainly be the porn file.

He'd thought he had a good chance to find the file; and he was right.

"THE PROBLEM," he told Lauren later that night, "is that I found four copies of it. I know which computers have accessed the files, but I don't know who runs those computers."

"Sounds like something Lucas should find out for himself," she said.

"Yeah. But how's he going to explain that he knows about the files? Without explaining about me?"

"Maybe that's something you should talk to him about," she said.

Kidd looked at his watch: "You think it's too late to call?"

"He said he stays up late."

Lucas answered on the third ring. "Hey, what's up?"

"I have a certain amount of access to the Minneapolis police computer system," Kidd began.

"I'm shocked," Lucas said. "So ... what'd you find?"