When I show the note to Emma, she exclaims: "So she isalive!"

I'm not so optimistic. Janet never spoke of having a boyfriend. She mentioned her ex-husband and her pervo Web-crawlers but no particular guy in her life.

"Maybe she's all right," I tell Emma, "or maybe these phone calls are being made by someone pretending to be her."

"Like who?"

"The widow Stomarti springs to mind. Young Evan's going to do some sniffing around."

Emma emits a worried peep. "Evan? OurEvan?"

20

The kid's name is Dominic Dominguez but he goes by Dommie. His mother leads us to the inner sanctum.

"G'bye," Dommie calls out, having heard us coming down the hall.

His mother knocks lightly. "It's Juan Rodriguez, honey. He had an appointment, remember?"

"What's he got on?" Dommie inquires from behind the door.

Juan has forewarned me that the kid is quirky and short-fused, so I should lay off the wisecracks.

"A Ralph Lauren shirt," Dommie's mother reports, "a nice pale blue. And no neckwear, sweetheart."

The kid has a healthy phobia about grownups in neckties. My Jack Webb model is at the cleaner's. Juan removed his in the car.

"Come on in," Dommie says.

Before slipping away, his mother touches Juan's sleeve. "Would you mind asking if he's ready for din-din?"

Inside Dommie's room it feels about ninety-seven degrees because of all the electronics. There's a low-grade static hum that sounds like one of those coin-operated bed vibrators. I know next to nothing about computers but clearly Dommie is loaded for bear. Walled in by hardware, he toils intently at one of several PCs, his bony back to die door.

Juan says, "Hey, buddy."

The kid doesn't turn around. "Gimme a minute," he mumbles. "Who's that with you?"

"My friend Jack. The one I told you about on the phone."

"Yojack."

"Hi, Dommie."

The kid's speed-shifting a joystick for a video game: dueling skateboarders, set to the vocal stylings of Anthrax. Juan glances my way and shrugs. There's no place to sit. The bed is littered with open boxes: Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Apple. I'm sweating like a stevedore.

Juan says, "Your mom wanted to know if you'd like some dinner."

"Not now!" The skateboarders on the kid's monitor are battling each other on a half-pipe, twirling and seesawing in midair. "Kill him!" Dommie rasps at the animated characters. "Kill that little bastard, Tony!"

I nudge Juan, whose face registers concern.

"Get outta here! Seriously, dudes!" Dommie screeches, apparently at us.

We retreat into the hallway. "You neglected to mention he was a psychopath," I whisper to Juan.

"He's just a little high-strung."

From inside the kid's bedroom we hear a feral yelp, then a sharp crack that sounds like a gun. I lunge for the doorknob but Juan snags my arm. Moments later Dommie's standing there, cool as ice. Now I can see he's wearing Oakley cutaways, baggy surf shorts and an oversized Ken Griffey Jr. jersey. His black hair is buzzed in wedding-cake layers, and a gold stud glints in one pale nostril. He weighs all of eighty-five pounds. He motions us back into his bedroom, where I notice a chemical tinge in the air. Dommie has shot out the tube of his PC with a Daisy pellet rifle. For now he seems at peace.

He glides his chair over to a working monitor, a raspberry-colored Mac. "Dudes," he says, "it's your lucky day."

Juan smiles hopefully. "You cracked the hard drive?"

"Like an egg. But everything was passworded, yo, so it took a while."

"And what was the secret word?"

" 'Detox'!" Dommie chirps. "Now pay attention"—the kid's fingers are flying over the keyboard—"here's a directory of all the files. I'll open one so you can see what it looks like."

The screen brightens with several rows of oscillating waves.

"They're all like that?" I ask.

"What else," says the kid.

"Can't you convert it to text?"

The kid looks at Juan as if to ask: How'd you hook up with this imbecile?

Juan says, "Jack can barely work a car radio. You've got to make things real simple for him, Dommie."

The kid is holding both hands in the air, like a doctor scrubbed for surgery. His fingers haven't quit moving, though, flitting across invisible keys.

"Okay," he says, "in the beginning was Pro Tools. That's software, dudes. High-end software. Lucky I had it, otherwise I couldn't read what's on this drive."

I say, "Dommie, please. Tell me what we're looking at."

The kid reaches for the mouse and guides the arrow to one of the wavy horizontal bands. Then he double-clicks and leans back, pointing to a speaker. "Listen tight," he says.

Thump. Thump-thump. Thump-thump.Pause. Thump. Thump-thump. Thump-thump.

"What is it?"

"The file name is DRoysteroi," the kid says.

"Yeah, but what isit?"

"Dudes, come on. It's music."

Dommie shuts it down and spins around to face us. "This hard drive you brought me, it's all sessions. What they call a master. That gorky-gork I just played for you is the bass drum part for a cut called 'Cindy's Oyster,' somethin' like that. If you want I can pull up the guitar track, harmonica, vocals—it's all there."

"Only one song?" I ask.

The kid chortles. "Try, like, thirty. Some are already mixed down, some are still in pieces. I didn't sit through all of it because it's not my thing. Plus it would take, like, days."

Juan says, "Dommie's into rap—"

"Nuh-ugh, hip-hop," the kid protests.

"He mixes original stuff for some of the club DJs."

"Yeah, that's how come I can afford Pro Tools," Dommie says. "It's radical bad. Sixty-four tracks. No hiss, no wow, no flutter. Plus I've got AutoTune so it's always on key, even if some stone-deaf mother is singing. State of the art, dudes. Everybody's got it."

"Not us," I say.

"State of the art. Wave of the future. Reel-to-reel be dead and gone," the kid zooms on. "This program can run off a Power Book—know what that means? You can mix a whole record on a laptop, yo, and it's cleaner'n twenty-four tracks of tape. Serious, man."

Juan says, "Jack wants to hear everything on that hard drive. Every single cut."

"Ha, I pity your white ass," says Rapmeister Dommie, twelve going on twenty-nine. It's good that he's wearing sunglasses; I believe I'd rather not see the size of his pupils. He returns to the Mac, closes down Pro Tools and starts diddling with the plug-in board. When he spins around again, the hard drive box is in his hands. He thrusts it at Juan's chest and says, "Hey, they're only eight games out of first."

"Anything's possible, Dommie."

"I really like that rookie shortstop. What a gun, huh?"

"Yeah, and he can actually hit a slider once in a while." From his pocket Juan digs out a couple of tickets to see the Marlins play the Mets. "Hey, buddy, where could Jack listen to all this stuff you found for us?"

"In his car. Duh."

Laughing, the kid stacks a tall pile of CDs on my lap. "I burned these myself, no charge. I'll print out a file directory so you'll sorta know what you're hearing."

"Thank you, Dommie," I say.

"Did my mom say what was for dinner? Better be macaroni and cheese or I'm not leavin' outta this room. It's Tuesday, right?"

"Monday," Juan says.

Something beeps. The kid pulls a pager out of his surfer shorts, glances at the message and snorts. "Douche bag."

"Dommie," I say.

"Kraft macaroni and cheese. Serious, man. Go tell her."

"The music on this hard drive, what kind of—if you had to describe it ... "

The kid jeers. "Folk rock. Country rock. Folk country7—I dunno whatcha call it. My folks'd probably like it but not me. See, I'm strictly into a street sound."

"Ah, the street."

"Strictly."