I called Jack Ransom. Jack was technically the second-in-command at Mutant Wizards, the computer gaming company Rob had founded. In reality, Jack ran the company, since Rob had no managerial, business, or computing skills whatsoever. From the company’s point of view, Rob more than justified his existence by providing a steady stream of oddball ideas that, more often than not, could be turned into successful computer and video games by Jack’s legions of programmers and graphic designers.

But unless the staff needed him to come in to brainstorm for them or impress some important client, Mutant Wizards ran just fine without Rob. In fact, having Rob on site usually proved so disruptive that the staff went to great lengths to keep him away. Most of the time, he was content to live the life of a dilettante, but every so often he’d have a brief attack of guilt and vow to be more industrious. One of my unofficial jobs, as a member of the Mutant Wizards board of directors, was to detect Rob’s guilt trips in their early stages and sidetrack him into something else.

These days I saw a lot more of Jack than Rob did—we’d arranged to give me a bunch of corporate titles that meant I could sign off on documents when Rob was nowhere to be found. Luckily, seeing Jack was a lot less stressful now that he’d gotten used to the idea that Michael and I were not breaking up anytime soon and he would not be getting a dramatic promotion from understudy to leading man in my life—his metaphor, not mine.

And Jack was very plugged into Caerphilly’s relatively small tech community. Jasper was a techie. If Jack didn’t have the lowdown on him he would know someone who did.

“Jasper Walker,” Jack repeated. “Yeah, rings a bell. We interviewed him a couple of times. He had a great resume—too bad he must have stolen it from someone who actually has a functioning brain.”

“So you weren’t impressed?”

“Only by his gall in repeatedly applying for positions for which he was totally unqualified. How did you meet Jasper, anyway?”

“I didn’t; a friend did.”

“Steer her away from him, then; the guy’s bad news.”

“Too late—she married him.”

“Bummer.”

“And I think he’s dragged her into some trouble. I desperately need to find out what. Could you maybe ask around, figure out what he’s up to these days—Is he still working over at the college’s data support center? If not, what happened? Is he in some kind of trouble?—stuff like that.”

“Can do. In fact, why don’t you drop by here this afternoon—anytime after two. We have a programmer who used to work with Jasper. I remember it really shook the kid up when he saw Jasper in the waiting room, and he was visibly relieved we weren’t hiring him. He just said they didn’t get on, and it wasn’t important, since I wasn’t hiring Jasper anyway. But I bet he knows more, and you could probably get it out of him.”