Naomi chuckles, shaking her head. “Clever man,” she says.

“Clever who, and what does it mean?”

“That’s Alice from Alice in Wonderland. The original 1865 edition, illustrated by John Tenniel. Apparently you made an impression on Taylor Gatling, Alice. He’s saying hello.”

“Ridiculous,” I say, folding my arms, preparing to be stubborn. “What makes you think this is him? And what could it possibly mean?”

“I conclude that it is Gatling because he has the ability to do this. It can’t be a coincidence that we’ve been hacked within hours of confronting him.”

“Hey, look at that,” Teddy says. “Her mouth is moving.”

“Click on her lips,” Naomi suggests.

Teddy clicks and the image of the young girl vanishes, replaced by a blinking password entry. “Any ideas?” he says. “It could be anything.”

“Not anything,” Naomi points out. “There’s a blinking cursor and eleven blank spaces.”

“So?”

“Password prompts don’t usually include clues about how many characters are required. And this came from Alice’s mouth.” She turns to me. “Therefore I conclude that the password is something you said.”

“That narrows it down to about a million words a month, if you count all those conversations I have with myself.”

“I’m curious,” Naomi says, evenly. “Why are you so resistant to the idea that Mr. Gatling prefers to communicate with you, rather than with me?”

“Because I loathe the man. It looks like he had a child kidnapped for his own political purposes, which is disgusting enough right there. Plus he’s smug and preening and so…so… I don’t know, macho.”

“You’re repulsed by machismo?”

“His version, yes.”

“Interesting. Maybe Mr. Gatling is attracted to women who revile him. But that’s neither here nor there. The image of Alice speaking is conclusive. Therefore the eleven blank characters represent a word or phrase uttered by you, in his presence.”

I shrug. “I said a lot of things.”

“Yes, but what utterance did he remark on? A few come to mind. ‘Swamp Yankee’ is twelve spaces, so that doesn’t work. And ‘backwoods colonial’ is out,” she says, before pausing to muse for a moment. “Teddy, try this: ‘wicked good.’”

He keys in the letters, hits Return.

The password entry space vanishes and is instantly replaced by a video play-bar on the bottom of the screen, with icons for play, pause, fast-forward and stop, and a digital clock that begins counting as a slightly grainy nighttime image forms out of the darkness.

“Stop right there,” Naomi says, and when Teddy hesitates—apparently fearful that he’ll lose the video enclosure—she reaches out and taps the keyboard herself, freezing the image.

“How did you do it so fast?” I ask, incredulous. “What led you to ‘wicked good’?”

“Logic. Rather obvious, actually. We can discuss the finer aspects of deductive reasoning later. Right now I want Jack Delancey, the quicker the better.”

As it happens Jack is already in the residence, specifically downstairs in Mrs. Beasley’s breakfast nook, fueling himself on her French press coffee while he makes phone calls to various sources. He joins us in the command center in exactly the time that it takes him to bound up the stairs.

“What have we here?” he asks, focused on the big screen. “If I’m not mistaken, that’s the Keener residence. Taken with some sort of night-vision camera. High quality, from the look of it.”

“Play,” Naomi commands.

The scene doesn’t change, even though the clock is ticking off the frames. Professor Keener’s home on Putnam Avenue, as seen from a slight angle that covers the front porch as well as part of the south-facing side of the house. Obviously, from the steadiness of the scene, the video camera had to have been mounted on some sort of tripod or steadying device. The windows are dark, as if the house itself is sleeping. A minute ticks by. Lights flare onto the front porch and I hold my breath, but it’s only headlights from a passing vehicle.

“My guess, this is a remote,” Jack says. “An operator would have instinctively panned toward the light.”

“We know Gatling had Professor Keener under surveillance,” Naomi says. “Remote cameras make sense. Probably automatic feeds.”

“Right there,” Jack says, pointing.

The guy has good eyes, I’ll grant him that. He’s the first to spot an approaching visitor, screen left. A male of average build, seen from the back as he emerges from the dark of the sidewalk to the slightly more illuminated area of the front porch. The pool of lesser darkness is apparently the result of an unseen streetlight. Whatever the source, the night-vision camera is sensitive enough to show that he’s wearing jeans, sneakers, windbreaker and a ball cap.

“Pause,” Naomi instructs, and this time Teddy obeys. The image on the porch freezes. “Ring any bells?”

Jack shrugs. “Not yet. I’d say young rather than old. Slender rather than fat. Male rather than female.”

“Note the time stamp,” Naomi says. “It could be faked, of course, but it corresponds to the day Keener was killed. 05:10. Military time for 5:10 a.m.”

“A further observation,” Jack says. “Whoever that is on the porch, it’s not Randall Shane.”

“Continue,” Naomi says.

We watch the visitor ring a doorbell, wait. A light comes on upstairs.

“Oh man,” Jack says. “Makes me want to shout out ‘don’t answer the door!’”

But he does answer the door. We follow his progress as lights come on, and less than a minute after the bell was pushed, the door opens.

“Freeze,” says Naomi. “Now try zooming in.”

Teddy makes a face, sucking his teeth. “What if I screw up? We could lose the whole thing.”

“Nonsense. This has been sent to us because he wants us to see it. Just try the normal zoom, centering on his face.”

It works. Teddy sighs with relief.

“Do we all confirm that the man at the door is Joseph Keener?”

We do. The video continues. Keener opening the door wider, the visitor stepping into the hall, the door closing behind him.

“I wonder if they had a camera inside,” Jack says.

I’m hoping there was no inside camera. It’s sufficiently horrible as it is—I really don’t need to see an actual snuff film, thank you very much.

“Are we going to sit through this or fast-forward?” Jack wants to know when nothing happens for another sixty seconds.

“Patience,” Naomi says. “We watch every frame. It can’t be long.”

Long depends on what you’re waiting for. In this particular case, five minutes seems to be an eternity. Finally it happens. No sound—there’s no audio track—but a distinct flash of light from the ground floor, no doubt from the kitchen area.

“God rest him,” Naomi says.

Ten seconds later the front door opens. The man—the killer—steps out, one hand shoved into his windbreaker pocket, the other reaching up to tug down his ball cap.

“Freeze and zoom,” Naomi says.

“I’ll be damned,” Jack says. “I’ve seen his mug shot. That’s Micky Lee. Aka Mr. Baked Alaska.”

Chapter Fifty

The Luckiest Guy in the World

Even though I’m a head taller and longer of leg, I still have to run to keep up with Dane Porter. The petite attorney power-walks her way through life, elbows pumping. We’re rocketing through the halls of MGH to bring the good news to Randall Shane, who has just been proven innocent of murder to our satisfaction, if not yet to the D.A.’s. There’s still a uniformed officer outside his door, and Dr. Gallagher, making notes on her chart, wants a word before we enter.

“It’s a good news, bad news kind of deal,” the young doc says, glancing down at her charts. “The good news is, Mr. Shane is recovering faster than we ever expected, considering the physical and mental trauma he sustained. The bad news is, because he’s so much better they’re pushing to have him transferred to the Middlesex Jail.”