The file-sharing partner in Salinas.

“How polite a visit?” Dance asked.

“I talked Amy into going with me.”

Amy Grabe, the FBI’s special agent in charge in San Francisco.

“They decided there’d been enough federal copyright violations to justify a raid. Joint task force.”

Which meant it wasn’t very polite. “Feet apart, spread ’em” had probably been involved. Dance and O’Neil shared a smile. It was hard to say, given the optical mechanics of Skype, but it seemed to Dance that he winked at her.

Of course, he hadn’t.

Then she admonished herself again: Concentrate.

“Good job, sir,” Madigan said and enjoyed a bite of what Dance believed to be pistachio ice cream. She’d missed breakfast and was thinking of asking for a cup of her own.

The Monterey detective continued, “They did find some file sharing going on out of his house but Eberhardt was more of a researcher. He keeps track of hundreds of above- and underground fan sites for musicians. Looks like he’d comb through them and get potential customers for illegal downloads. It really wasn’t all file sharing—it was file stealing and selling too. They charged a fee for the songs. They’d ripped off albums of about a thousand artists.

“There’s this really … dark underground of websites out there. They have to do with cultural things, mostly: books, movies, TV shows, music. A lot of them are about stealing the artists’ work—bootlegs, for instance. But most of them are about the celebrities themselves: Stephen King, Lindsey Lohan, George Clooney, Carrie Underwood, Justin Bieber … and Kayleigh Towne.

“And it’s all off the radar. The people posting use proxies and portals … and anonymous accounts. None of this shows up on Google. They’ve worked around that.” O’Neil gave them the list of websites whose addresses were only numbers or letters: 299ek333.com was typical. Once inside them, there were various pages that seemed nonsensical—“The Seventh Level,” for instance. Or “Lessons Learned.”

But navigating through the links, he explained, you got to the true substance of the sites: the world of celebrities. TJ Scanlon had found none of these.

O’Neil said, “It looks like that’s where Edwin’s getting a lot of his information. In fact, he posted plenty about the file sharer who got killed—the vic in Fresno.”

Madigan asked, “Anything that’d implicate Edwin in the killing?”

“No. He just urged people not to use file sharing.”

Of course, he wouldn’t slip up. Not clever Mr. Edwin Sharp.

O’Neil turned away for a moment and typed. Dance received an email containing several URLs. Harutyun took her phone when she offered it to him and he set to work typing them into a computer nearby.

O’Neil asked the room, “You’re monitoring all her calls?”

“That’s right but we’re trying to buy some time, make it harder for him to contact her with another verse,” Harutyun said. “We’ve given her and her family new phones, all unlisted. He’ll probably find the numbers eventually but by then we hope we’ll nail him on the evidence or witnesses.”