Myron said, "I'm going to call a friend, see if I can get an override Caller ID put in on this line. For when he calls back. I assume Chad has a computer'?"

"Yes," she said.

"Where is it?"

"Up in his room."

"I'm going to download everything on it to my office via his modem. I have an assistant named Esperanza.

She'll comb through it and see what she can find-"

' 'Like what'?"

"Frankly I have no idea. E-mails. Correspondence.

Bulletin boards he participates in. Anything that might give us a clue. It's not a very scientific process. You check out enough stuff and maybe something will click."

Linda thought about it for a moment. ' 'Okay,' ' she said.

' 'How about you, Mrs. Coldren? Do you have any enemies'?"

She sort of smiled. ' 'I'm the number one rated woman golfer in the world," she said. ' 'That gives me a lot of enemies."

' 'Anyone you can imagine doing this'?' '

"No," she said. "No one."

' 'How about your husband? Anybody who hates your husband enough'?' '

' 'Jack'?' ' She forced out a chuckle. "Everyone loves Jack.' '

"What's that supposed to mean?"

She just shook her head and waved him off Myron asked a few more questions, but there was little left for him to excavate. He asked if he could go up to Chad's room and she led him up the stairs.

The first thing Myron saw when he opened Chad's door were the trophies. Lots of them. All golf trophies.

The bronze figure on the top was always a man coiled in postswing position, the golf club over his shoulder, his head held high. Sometimes the little man wore a golf cap.

Other times he had short, wavy hair like Paul Hornning in old football reels. There were two leather golf bags in the right corner, both jammed past capacity with clubs. Photographs of Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Sam Snead, Tom Watson blanketed the walls. Issues of Golf Digest littered the floor.

"Does Chad play golf?" Myron asked.

Linda Coldren just looked at him. Myron met her gaze and nodded sagely.

"My powers of deduction," he said. ' 'They intimidate some people."

She almost smiled. Myron the Alleviator, Master Tension-Easer. "I'll try to still treat you the same," she said.

Myron stepped toward the trophies. "Is he any good?"

"Very good." She turned away suddenly and stood '

with her back to the room. "Do you need anything else?' '

"Not right now."

"I'll be downstairs."

She didn't wait for his blessing.

Myron walked in. He checked the answering machine on Chad's phone. Three messages. Two from a girl named Becky. From the sound of it, she was a pretty good friend.

Just calling to say, like, hi, see if he wanted to, like, do anything this weekend, you know? She and Millie and Suze were going to, like, hang out at the Heritage, okay, and if he wanted to come, well, you know, whatever. Myron smiled. Times they might be a changin', but her words could have come from a girl Myron had gone to high school with or his father or his father's father. Generations cycle in. The music, the movies, the language, the fashion they change. But that's just outside stimuli.