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been working on. He paged through the women’s profiles, paying $20 for each one he wanted to be introduced to. The women would come in to a conference room for fifteen minutes and if he liked them they made other plans. Nina Sharanova didn’t want to come to the office so her profile was marked “phone first.” She was the last woman Hans contacted and they arranged to meet near the Church of the Spilled Blood where Alexander II had been slain in 1880, one link in a chain of events leading to the October Revolution of 1917.
    Hans met more than fifty women through the service but Nina was different. She had a quality he couldn’t fully understand, a sincerity of affection he’d never experienced with the exception of his mother. But she wasn’t his mother and her affection wasn’t only for him. She was magnetic, beautiful, easygoing. When she walked into a room people turned to look at her. It’s easy to see, even in the photographs. The high, fine cheekbones, the easy smile. She never looks like she’s posing for a picture. A woman like Nina had never paid attention to Hans before.
    At their first meeting Hans read Nina a poem and told her he was a famous computer programmer. Maybe she thought he was like Bill Gates. As it happens, in the world of open source computer programmers and techno geeks, Hans Reiser is a minor celebrity. His file system, ReiserFS, was the first journaling file system for Linux. The journal is the computer’s own imperfect story. It’s like the black box in an airplane cockpit, but it’s also the flight plan, a record of what the computer did as well as where it intended to go. Storing data on a disk, like committing an event to memory, is almost never a one-step process. If the computer gets interrupted between steps, the file system becomes inconsistent, the computer crashes, and certain data is lost forever. The journal allows a computer to recover from this catastrophe by resolving inconsistencies, reconciling what can be known with what can’t, providing the narrative bridge between where the computer has been and what the machine has become. If ReiserFS became a standard feature of the open source operating system Linux, distributors would pay Hans’ company for support and Hans would be worth millions. The only stumbling block was Hans’ personality. In a community known for eccentric personalities, he had a reputation for being selfish and aggressive and particularly difficult to work with. 3
    A year after they met, Nina was in America, pregnant with their first child. Hans was frequently away in Russia supervising his team of programmers, and Sean was hanging around keeping Nina company. According to Sean he warned Hans he needed to be more involved in his marriage and sent Hans two books,
The Dummies Guide to Better Communication Between Couples
and
The Dummies Guide to Divorce.
He told Hans he was going to need one of those books. 4
    In 2001 Sean and Nina had their first affair. In California Nina helped Hans with his company, but Hans’ father told him she was embezzling money. She was a doctor and wanted to pass the American medical boards but Hans wanted her to stay home and take care of the kids. He said he didn’t have any use for a smart wife. He told her that in America it was just as respectable to be a good mother as it was to be a doctor. Nina wanted to be both. She filed for divorce in the summer of 2004, leaving Hans for his best friend. The divorce was contentious, with Hans adopting his father’s claims and accusing Sean and Nina of embezzling money.
    If I’m going to write a true crime book I’m going to have to figure out what happened between Hans and Nina and Sean. Like Hans, Sean had a motive for killing Nina; she left him as well. In 2005 Nina met Anthony Zografos, an attractive older man with a husky Mediterranean accent and large, sad eyes. She continued to accept money from Sean but refused to see him. Sean left $1,900 in cash in Nina’s mailbox