Xo (Kathryn Dance 3)

Via Skype, Michael O'Neil's calm eyes looked back at them from 150 miles away. He was the person she'd tapped to look into the Salinas partner of Frederick Blanton, the murdered file sharer. She might have sent the request to TJ Scanlon in her own office. But on a whim she'd decided to contact O'Neil instead.

Madigan was briefing the Monterey deputy. "Edwin never went home last night. Kayleigh said that about ten-thirty she heard a car start somewhere in the park out in front of her house. Her bodyguard said he thought he heard it too."

The invisible snake ...

"Kathryn and I want to interview him but he's not answering his phone. We don't even know where he is. This morning a deputy spotted his car on Forty-one, a pretty major road here. He tried to follow but Edwin must've seen him and wove around in traffic and got away."

O'Neil said, "Tough to follow with just one car."

"And I haven't got a lot of people to spare, what with protecting witnesses and Kayleigh," Madigan muttered. "We cover more than six thousand square miles. Grand total of about four hundred and sixty patrol deputies."

O'Neil winced. Monterey wasn't small but that county didn't embrace nearly as much territory with such little manpower. He asked, "Kathryn told me he'd picked up Kayleigh's sister and niece at the airport. Any charges possible there?"

"Kathryn's going to interview them some more," Madigan said, "but doesn't look like it. Edwin was the boy-next-door, didn't do a thing wrong. The little girl loved him and the sister thought he was--get this--the nicest of Kayleigh's boyfriends in recent years."

Dance regarded the man on the screen--strong and solid but not heavy. O'Neil was wearing his typical outfit. Light blue shirt, no tie and a dark sport coat. Most detectives in the Monterey County Sheriff's Office, like here, wore uniforms but O'Neil didn't. He thought casual clothing got you further in investigations than khaki and pointed metal stars.

Dance briefed them about the interview with Sally Docking, Edwin's former girlfriend. "I have to tell you that his behavior with her doesn't fall into a stalker's profile." She explained that it had actually been Edwin who broke up with the woman.

"Still don't trust him," Madigan said.

"No. It's just odd."

O'Neil continued, "I paid a visit to Josh Eberhardt."

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.