“There’s around twenty Jack Morettis I can find currently alive, mostly American, thirteen of them between forty and sixty years old. None are psychologists. But there was a Jack Moretti born September 30, 1971. He graduated from Stanford in 1990 with a doctorate in clinical psychology, died July 29, 2008, Los Angeles. What caught my eye is how he died.”

“How did he die?”

“He hanged himself. Seemingly out of the blue.”

Taylor felt butterflies. She moved to see the papers more clearly: printouts of a newspaper and a magazine article.

“Go on,” she said.

“The death’s odd. Moretti’s a respected psychologist, happily married, with one son. He’d reported no issues, according to his family. He’d just been promoted at work. Next thing they know he’s committed suicide.”

Taylor brought the notes closer. The article was an obituary from the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry. Moretti had been based at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, home of the Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute. It spoke about his service to medicine, pioneering work in neurology and psychology, his popularity as a lecturer, sense of humor as a colleague. It mentioned he left behind a wife and son, didn’t mention the cause of death.

The report, from the Los Angeles Daily News, gave a bit more but not much: Mystery Over Senior Doctor Who Took His Life.

Dr. Moretti’s family insist his death was entirely out of character and have demanded an investigation into the events leading up to it.

“Did Rory’s sister say anything else?” Kudus asked. “Other requests?”

Taylor decided to keep the gift requests to herself for now.

“Nothing like this. Would you see if you can get any more? Someone will have chased the story.”

“I’ll try. There’s been something else on Kane as well. It may be nothing. Look at this.”

He showed her another sheet, this one a log of website visitors. Just before three a.m., someone had checked Edward Pearce’s university profile. The academic webpage they’d created for his cover was set to automatically record and analyze the IP address of anyone probing, but whoever had done this had disguised their device and whereabouts.

“Could be anyone,” Kudus said. “Someone curious, maybe someone he met on the way. Or a fellow academic.”

“On a hidden device?”

She studied the log again.

“His cover looks solid to me,” Kudus said. “It’s not so unusual to use a private server. Some people have them set up as standard.”

“Send it through to technical analysis, see if they can extract any more data. I’d really like to know who’s interested in him.”

Bring him back, Taylor thought. Cancel it. Do as she’d been instructed to do. But she sensed it was already too late. She wasn’t going to drop everything just because Gabriel Skinner felt left out.