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continued, “What am I asking here?” He scratched his chin. “Tell me one thing that would allow a drug gang to use this business for their own purposes. I’m not asking if they did, just make something up. One possibility.”
    She peered at him for a moment, confused, and then sat up, looked at a wall calendar as if it might explain something to her, then looked back and said, “There isn’t any. Not that I can think of. We don’t buy or sell any physical product, so you can’t use us to smuggle anything. There aren’t any trucks, nobody crosses any border. We don’t make that much in profit … and all of our income is recorded because it’s all done with credit cards. So, I don’t know.”
    “Is there any way they could use your computer systems for communications of some kind?” Lucas asked. “Or anything like that?”
    “Why would they?” she asked.
    “I don’t know. I’m just trying to think of anything that might help,” Lucas said.
    Phillips said, “Listen, if they want to communicate, they can buy an encryption package, for a few dollars, that the CIA couldn’t break, and just send e-mails. Why would they go through us?”
    Lucas turned his palms up. “Don’t know. Maybe they didn’t. But somewhere, there’s a reason they were killed. Possibly in this company. Did Mr. Brooks speak Spanish?”
    “Oh, yes. He was fluent. So was his wife,” Phillips said. “They lived in Argentina for five years, and that’s where Pat got the idea for the company. Everybody’s got computers down there, but it’shard to get good software in Spanish. His idea was, get some of these really good, inexpensive, second-level software packages—business software, games, whatever—and translate them into Spanish. That’s what we did. We’d buy the rights, get a contractor to recode in Spanish, and put it online.”
    “Then the customers would download it and that’d be the end of it,” Lucas said.
    “That’s it,” she said.
    “But couldn’t a drug gang be somehow using the…” He faltered, then said, “But why do it that way, when they could do it with an encrypted e-mail?”
    “I can’t think of why,” she said.
    “Who does the books?”
    “Merit-Champlain, they’re an accounting company over in North St. Paul.”
    “I know them,” Lucas said. He’d used the same outfit when he was running his computer company in the mid-nineties. As far as he knew, they were straight. “Did Brooks finance the company himself?” he asked.
    “As far as I know, yes. He used to work for 3M, he made very good money,” Phillips said. “He had savings, and he borrowed money from his 401K. I think his brother chipped in. When we started, there were only three of us, full-time, Pat and me and Bob Farmer, who was the computer expert. Candy would come in after the kids were at school, and she’d stay until it was time to pick them up. Everything else, we’d farm out. Contract work.”
    “Pretty much a success right from the start?”
    “Not hardly,” Phillips said, shaking her head. “It was two yearsbefore Pat took his first paycheck. After that it came on pretty good, and we’re still growing. Well, we were still growing … I don’t know what’ll happen now.”
    “Are Brooks’s parents still alive?” Lucas asked.
    “Yes. Nice folks. They live out in Stillwater. Agent Chang—”
    “Dick,” Lucas said.
    “Yes, Dick said they were being contacted.”
    “They’d probably inherit,” Lucas said.
    “Unless it’s his brother,” Phillips said. “I really don’t know. Nobody thought … this could happen. That they’d all be gone. Never in a million years.”
    L UCAS WORKED her a bit more, got the name and address of Brooks’s brother, but had the feeling he was pushing on a string. He thanked her and left her in the office. Chang was standing in the hallway with a water-machine paper cup in his hand, and Lucas nodded and asked, “Anything?”
    Chang shook his head. “Lot of Mexicans