“Good luck,” she said as she headed back to the desk.

“Excuse me,” I said, beckoning her back. “Um, I don’t know how to get to the Times stuff on this.”

“There’s an icon on the desktop.”

I turned back around and scanned the desk. There was nothing on it but the computer and the keyboard and the mouse. The librarian started to laugh behind me but then covered her mouth with her hand.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just . . . you don’t know the first thing about how to do this, do you?”

“Or the second or the third. Can you just help get me started?”

“Hold on. Let me just go check the front desk and make sure there is no one waiting for me.”

“Fine. Thank you.”

She was gone thirty seconds and then came back and leaned over me to work the mouse and click through screens until she was inside the Times archives and at what she called the key word search template.

“So now you type in the key word for the story you are looking for.”

I nodded that I understood that much and typed in the name “Alejandro Penjeda.” Mrs. Molloy reached across and hit the ENTER key and the search began. In about five seconds I had the results on the screen. There were five hits. The first two were from 1991 and 1994 and the final three were all from 2000. I dismissed the first two as being unrelated to the Penjeda I was interested in. The next three were all from March 2000. I moved the mouse to the first one—March 1, 2000—and clicked on the READ button. The story filled the top half of the screen. It was a short report on the opening of the trial of Alejandro Penjeda, who was charged with the murder of a Korean jeweler named Kyungwon Park.

The second story was also short and it was the one I wanted. It was the verdict story in the Penjeda case. It was dated March 14 and reported events from the day before. I took the notebook out of my pocket and completed that part of the chronology, putting the new information in the right time slot.

Angella Benton—murdered—May 16, 1999

Movie set heist—May 19, 1999

Gessler/Dorsey—phone call—March 13, 2000

Martha Gessler—missing—March 19, 2000

I looked at what I had. Martha Gessler disappeared and presumably was murdered six days after talking to Jack Dorsey about the currency list anomaly.

“If there isn’t anything else, I’m going to go back up front.”

I had forgotten that Mrs. Molloy was still standing behind me. I stood up and signaled her to the seat.

“Actually, this might be faster if you could do it,” I said. “I need to do a couple more searches.”

“We are not supposed to do the searches. You are supposed to be proficient with the computer if you are going to use it.”

“I understand. I am going to learn but at the moment I’m not that proficient and these searches are very important.”