“I’ll take that under advisement,” Duckworth said. “To get back to why I came to see you, do you remember anything else about that night that you haven’t already told us? Even the smallest detail? Something that might not ever have seemed all that important, but looking back, you wonder if maybe it is? Something that might be helpful in our investigation?”

“I can tell you one thing about him,” Craig said.

Duckworth sat forward in his chair.

“What’s that?”

“He can’t spell.”

“Excuse me?”

“He can’t spell,” Craig Pierce said. “Or at least he misspells to be clever.”

“How can you know that?”

He tapped away again on the laptop. “Let’s go back to the commentary he posted with the picture of me. Yeah, here we go. Have a look. And it’s not just that he got my name wrong. Lots of people do that.”

He spun the computer around so Duckworth could read it:

Craig Pearce gets it good. Revenj on the kiddy diddler. You can be sure he wont be mollesting anyone ever again!

Duckworth looked up. “Okay. He got your last name wrong, an extra ‘l’ in molesting, and there’s revenj with a ‘j.’ That’s what you’re talking about.”

“Right. The thing with the ‘j’ is deliberate, I think.”

“Why?’

“Even a moron knows how to spell revenge. The other things, he’s just not a good speller.”

“I don’t immediately see how that’s helpful,” Duckworth said.

“I’m sure you don’t,” Pierce said, shaking his head. “Just what are you people doing on the computer end of things? Going after this website to divulge the IP address that was used to post this, for starters?”

“That’d be our legal department,” Duckworth said weakly. “I think they’re working on that.”

“You think?”

“I’d be happy to look into it for you, update you.”

“Because,” Pierce said, tossing the laptop onto the bed, “right now I feel like I’m doing that kind of work on my own. There’s all kinds of signatures someone leaves when they’re online. You just have to take the time to find them, correlate them, look for patterns. And seeing how I don’t have much else to do . . .”

“If you’ve learned anything that could help us in our invest—”

“And do your work for you?” Craig settled back into his chair. His knees had been together to support the computer, and now he let them separate a good foot. The bathrobe began to part.

“Okay, there is one thing I remember, from the actual incident,” he said, closing his eyes, seemingly concentrating. “Just before the dog bit down, it kind of tickled.” He opened his eyes and grinned.

“It did something to you, didn’t it?” Duckworth said.

“Is that a serious question?”

“I mean, you seem traumatized in a way I wouldn’t have expected.”

“Do you mean my cheerful demeanor?”