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caught them at it, and they killed him. But then, if it was just a burglary, they would have taken other stuff. There was all kinds of stuff that thieves would take, just sitting around.”
    “Yeah. But they only took the laptop. That means that they came for it. And were willing to kill for it,” I said.
    “Shit.”
    “If we’re lucky, he encrypted the sensitive stuff. Every time he wanted to send me something serious, I’d get the key, and then after I acknowledged it, the file would come in. If he whipped some encryption on it, we’re okay.”
    “But if we’re not lucky and he didn’t encrypt…”
    “Then we could be in trouble,” I said.

Chapter Four
    WE WERE AN ODD COUPLE, wandering around in the middle of the night, in a monsoon. If we’d been noticed at Bobby’s house by an insomniac neighbor, and if the cops later said something in the newspaper about looking for a white guy and a black guy seen together in the rain, I didn’t want the desk clerk at the La Quinta to have that memory.
    Instead of going back to the motel to talk, we drove a loop through Jackson, windshield wipers whacking away, windows steaming up, talking about what to do. We had two problems: getting some kind of justice for Bobby, and finding the laptop. The lives of a lot of us could be on that thing. Events, dates, times, places. Bobby knew way too much-it was as if the legendary J. Edgar Hoover files were out wandering around the country on their own.
    “It’s gonna be tricky,” I said. We drove past an open space with orange security lights inside, and a chain-link fence around the perimeter. We couldn’t see much of the buildings, which were huddled low and gray, as if depressed by the rain. “If we call the Jackson police, we’re gonna get a homicide guy with a notebook or maybe a desk computer, but most of what he figures out he’ll keep in his head. Calling up people on the phones and so on. There won’t be any way to track the investigation. If the killer-guy is a sophisticated outsider, which he probably is… they’re not going to come up with anything.”
    “How do you know that?”
    “Because I’ve gone into enough places to know the signs. The guy didn’t leave much. Besides, I was dating a cop, remember? And I’ve done some, mmm, preliminary research into the Minneapolis cops’ computer system.”
    “That’s cold, Kidd.” He was a romantic, and offended.
    “Hey, I wasn’t dating her to get at the system,” I said defensively. I fumbled around for the defroster and turned it on, blowing hot air on the windshield. All the heavy cogitation was steaming things up. “I was dating her because I liked her. It just happens that the system was sitting there.”
    “All right.” He wasn’t sure he believed me. “So what do we do?”
    “If we call in the FBI and tell them that the dead guy is the Bobby that everybody’s been looking for, they’ll be all over the case. Then, we might be able to track the investigation-half the people in the ring are inside the FBI system. But what if they find the laptop? The worst thing that could happen to us is to have the laptop land at a computer forensics place, and have it turn out that the files aren’t encrypted.”
    “Even if they are encrypted, the FBI’s got those big fuckin’ computers. They’ll crack it like a walnut.”
    John’s not a computer guy. I said, “No, not really. If Bobby encrypted the files, and kept the keys in his head, they’re safe.”
    “Really?” A little skeptical. “What about the CIA and the NSA and the FBI and those other three-letter agencies?”
    “Some of the software that Bobby used-that everybody uses, now-can encrypt stuff so deeply that if the entire universe was made of computers, and they did nothing but try to crack the message, there wouldn’t be enough time in the life of the universe to do it.”
    He thought about that, then laughed. “You’re bullshitting me.”
    “Nope.”
    “Why would anybody encrypt