“So,” I said, as I hung up. “One of the sisters is a liar: Fiona or Jenny, take your pick. Well spotted. And starting this summer, Jenny was being odd about Jack’s little friends. That’ll need explaining.”
Richie was looking healthier, now that he had something to concentrate on. “Maybe your woman did something that pissed Jenny off. Simple as.”
“Or maybe Jenny was just embarrassed to admit they’d had to pull Jack out of preschool. But there could have been something else bothering her. Maybe this woman’s husband was a little too friendly, or maybe one of the employees at the preschool had done something that scared Jack, and Jenny wasn’t sure what to do about it … We need to find out, either way. Remember Rule Number Two, or whatever it was: odd behavior is a present, just for us.”
I was dialing my message minder when the mobile rang. It was the computer whiz, Kieran or whatever, and he was talking before I got my name out. “So I’ve been trying to recover the browser history, see what was such a big deal that someone wanted it gone. So far, I’ve gotta be honest with you, it’s been kind of disappointing.”
“Hold on,” I said. No one was within earshot; I put the phone on speaker. “Go.”
“I’ve got a handful of URLs or partial URLs, but we’re talking eBay, we’re talking some mommies-and-kiddies board, we’re talking a couple of sports boards and a home-and-garden forum and some site that sells women’s underwear. Which was fun for me, but not a lot of help to you. I was expecting, I don’t know, like a smuggling operation or a dogfighting ring or something. I can’t see any reason why your dude would want to wipe the vic’s bra size.”
He sounded intrigued, more than disappointed. I said, “Her bra size, maybe not. The forums are a different story. Any sign of the Spains having problems out in cyberspace? Anyone they pissed off, anyone who was giving them hassle?”
“How would I know? Even when I’ve got a hit on a site, it’s not like I can check what they did on there. Each forum’s got like a few thousand members, minimum. Even if we assume your vics were members, not just lurkers, I don’t know who I’m supposed to be looking at.”
Richie said, “They had a file of all their passwords, yeah? Can you not use that?”
Kieran was starting to lose patience with the idiot laypeople. The kid had a low boredom threshold. “Use it how? Throw the passwords at every ID on every website in the world till I wind up logging in to something? They didn’t put their forum IDs in the password file; half the time they didn’t even put down the name of the website, just initials or something. So, like, I’ve got a line here that says ‘WW—EmmaJack’ but I don’t have a bog whether WW is Weight Watchers or World of Warcraft, or what ID they used on whatever site we’re talking about. I got her eBay ID because I turned up a couple of hits on the feedback page for ‘sparklyjenny,’ so I tried logging in and boom, away we went. Kids’ clothes and eye shadow, in case you’re interested. No leads like that on any other site, though, or not so far.”