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door.”
    “Are you talking about John Smith?” Roadrunner ducked through one of the kitchen doorways in his perpetual uniform of bicyclist Lycra. Even though the entire house was built on a grand scale, at six-foot-seven his head nearly brushed the lintel. “Hi, Grace, Annie. Sounds like you’re getting the four-hundred-years-in-prison lecture.”
    Harley scowled at him. “Very funny, dipshit. And that damn well better not be the same suit you were wearing when you got here, because I just got the chairs reupholstered to match the koi.”
    “I’m not an animal. I put the sweaty one under your bed. And all your koi are dead, anyhow.”
    Annie’s bow lips turned down in a troubled pout as she focused on the disturbing possibility of wearing a prison-orange jumpsuit for any length of time. “They wouldn’t do that, would they, Grace?”
    “Do what?”
    “Throw us in jail for a teeny-weeny bit of computer mischief.”
    “No, of course not. Harley’s just being paranoid. The Feds know all about us working under the table every now and then . . .”
    “Right,” Harley grumbled. “They just haven’t been able to prove it.”
    Grace rolled her eyes. “They asked for our help, and they’re going to cut us some slack. Besides, Smith is the new FBI, not the Hoover archetypes we were dealing with back in Atlanta.”
    “Are you kidding me? Did we meet the same guy? He had the suit, he looked like a Feeb, he talked that stupid Feeb talk, shit. The only thing that wasn’t Hoover about Smith was that he wasn’t wearing a dress.”
    Grace shook her head. “They’re desperate, Harley. They tried tracing this network and they can’t do it. Not legally, anyway. So they bring in us and a bunch of hackers so we can do what the law keeps the Feds from doing themselves. You can’t stick religiously to every letter of the law when lives are at stake, and maybe they’re starting to get that. Sometimes you have to bend some rules. Hack into private phone records and save a life, or respect privacy laws and let somebody die. There’s no choice if you’re a human being.”
    Harley nodded. “Exactly my point. Who ever said the Feds were human beings?”
    Grace shrugged. “We had a choice. An office of our own in D.C., or D.C. came to us.”
    “Yeah, well, I agreed to that before they told us they were sending a full-time spy.”
    “Liaison,” Grace corrected him. “He’s here to help us.”
    Harley snorted. “That’s what they say to the mental patients when the guy comes in to give them electric-shock therapy. Christ, Grace, you’re talking about the same agency that set you up to bait a serial killer, and now all of a sudden you think they’ve got scruples?”
    “Harley.” Grace took in a breath and exhaled noisily; one of those secret signals that told people who knew her they should pay attention. “There are creeps out there filming fake murders to get their fifteen minutes on the Web; but there are other creeps filming real murders for the same kind of celebrity. The FBI wants them all shut down, and the first warrant step is a software program that can tell the difference between something staged and something real. They’re doing the right thing, Harley, trying to nail the real killers fast, and scaring the creep idiots straight. And it’s simple for us. Software 101.”
    Harley snorted. “I’m glad you’re so optimistic. Even if we use one of our existing software platforms, we’re talking a week, minimum, just to get an idea if this is doable. It’s going to be a ton of extra work, and my point is, we’ve got a lot on our plate right now. We’re staring down deadlines on security software for three of the biggest corporations in the world, which, incidentally, is going to make us filthy, stinking rich . . .”
    Annie cocked a brow at him. “We’re already filthy, stinking rich. Half the computers in the world run at least one of our software apps or games.”
    “Besides, the security