As he reached for the doorknob, Cardwell said, “One thing, though. If you find anything that looks interesting, useful, would you bring it to me before showing Tomlinson? I’d like to see it first.”

“You would?”

His face hardening, Cardwell said, “I’d like to know what he’s up to. I’ve got an old score to settle with Arlan Sinclair.”

Jake had never seen Leverett Cardwell look so grim.

*   *   *

That evening, Jake found that there was indeed plenty of information on the Internet about Professor Sinclair. He decided to search the Net from his computer at home, rather than his office desktop. Too easy for other people on campus to poke into his files. Do it at home, he told himself. Less chance of being found snooping.

But there was damned little useful material among the megabytes of data. By midnight Jake was bleary-eyed and more respectful of Sinclair than he had been before. There was plenty of information about Professor Arlan Sinclair available on various search engines. His early work in high-temperature gas physics. His patents on laminar flow regenerative cooling systems for rocket engines. Awards and honors for everything from artificial heart pump designs to research papers on shock waves in interstellar plasmas.

But nothing useful.

According to his standard biography in the university’s files, Sinclair was still married. One child, a son, Arlan III. Tell me something I don’t know, Jake grumbled to himself.

Google. Yahoo. Wikipedia. Jake even looked up the state government’s site on prominent citizens.

Arlan Sinclair II. So he’s not a junior, Jake saw. Married 1983 to Olivia Vernon. One child …

Feeling sleepy and cranky, Jake logged off, got up from his desk chair, and headed for the bathroom. By the time he had finished brushing his teeth, though, he went back to the computer and looked up Olivia Sinclair, née Vernon.

There wasn’t much in the files about her. She was from old money, apparently, and lived upstate, in the town of Vernon. She was listed in the social registry. No e-mail address, but there was a phone number given.

Jake yawned as he shut down his computer for the night. It was nearly one A.M. Maybe I’ll phone her tomorrow, he thought as he went to the bedroom. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Olivia Sinclair, nèe Vernon

OLIVIA SINCLAIR, NÉE VERNON

“It was very good of you to see me,” Jake said as he sat in the front parlor of the Vernon house.

It had obviously been a palatial residence, once, but now it seemed faded, dusty, a relic of bygone years. Mrs. Sinclair was a chubby woman with a round, dimpled face. Her hair was the shade of ash blond that older women achieve when they try to glamorize their gray. She was wearing a long-skirted print dress, two different shades of dull brown, as she sat primly on an armchair facing Jake.