“Hilary,” asked Abigail as we neared the city, “just out of curiosity, what does Petite Fleur look like?”

“Skinny and bald,” Hilary said.

“How old would you say he is?”

“I’m not sure. His face is pretty young-looking, but you don’t see a lot of people under forty with so little hair. And it wasn’t like his head was shaved or anything. He was seriously bald.”

Abigail was clearly thinking about Leo again, but even when he’d been alive there was no way anyone could have described him as skinny and bald, at least not based on the picture I’d seen. If anything, he seemed like the poster child for hirsute. Still, it was easy to understand how a teenaged skateboarding enthusiast would label anyone an “old dude” if he looked the way Hilary had described Petite Fleur.

Once off the highway, we were only a few minutes from the Mission neighborhood, where Chez Bechet occupied a small storefront on Valencia Street. Posters in the window promised live jazz, which under normal circumstances would have been enough to keep me far, far away, but tonight something else in the window made equally sure that nothing would keep me from going inside: a hand-lettered sign advertised a two-for-one drinks special lasting the entire month of June.

Two drinks for the price of one had an unquestionable appeal, but it wasn’t the prospect of a bargain that drew me in, or the fact that the offer was written in big block letters in a hand that was becoming as familiar to me as my own. It was the occasion for the special that caught my attention-namely, Che Guevara’s birthday, some eighty years ago this month.

We filed through the door into the sort of dark interior that would have been smoky if smoking were allowed in public establishments in California. A bar area occupied the front of the club and then opened up into a floor crowded with small tables and chairs, all facing a compact stage at the end. It was early still, and it was also a Monday night, so we weren’t surprised to find the stage empty and only a scattering of patrons taking advantage of the Che birthday special.

“He was sitting in the back the last time I met him,” said Hilary, leading the way past the bar. “I got the sense he’s a regular. Everyone seemed to know him, and he mentioned that sometimes he performs here, too. I think he may even be one of the owners.”

We hadn’t advanced more than ten feet when a dog began barking, and there was something familiar about the bark. A moment later, a Great Dane bounded up from the rear of the club, and there was something familiar about him, too. Dogs the size of small ponies aren’t that common, and his white coat with its black markings was distinctive. I realized I’d seen him before, being walked by a bald man on the sidewalk in front of the Forrests’ house.

More importantly, the dog had evidently seen Abigail before and seemed to know her well. He made a beeline for her, rising up on his hind legs to lick at her face and then circling her excitedly, bumping up against her hips and barking.

Abigail, meanwhile, had gone as pale as a ghost. In fact, she looked as if she’d seen a ghost. As far as she knew, she had.

“Scat?” she said faintly. She was rewarded with another round of licks and barks.

And then she looked up to see the skinny bald man now standing in front of us.

“Leo?” she asked.

It turned out that if you wanted to fake your own death, it helped to be a hacker.

“But what about the dental records?” asked Abigail. “And the bone fragments?”

We’d joined Leo at his usual table in a back corner of the club, and since the first jazz combo wasn’t scheduled to go on for another couple of hours, it seemed like as good a choice of venues as any for the time being. He shrugged in response to Abigail’s question. “The dental records were my dad’s-I hacked into my dentist’s network and replaced the files of my own X-rays with his. When he was sick, he lost some of his teeth. It happens with certain types of cancer. I saved the teeth after he died, and I also had the remains from when both he and Scat’s mother were cremated. That’s what they found after the cabin burned.”

This was gross but apparently effective.

“But why?” asked Abigail. “If you wanted to leave, or change your life, or whatever you were trying to do, why didn’t you just do it? Why go to all the trouble of faking your own death?”

“Because someone wanted me dead. Iggie had been threatening me, and while it was hard to take threats from Iggie seriously, I had a couple of close calls that made me think it would be better to make myself scarce.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Like getting home to my apartment and smelling gas. Somebody had left the burner on and blown out the flame. I don’t cook, and I hadn’t used the stove in months, but if I’d lit a match-man, the entire building would have blown up. And then another night I was up at the cabin and Scat started going nuts, barking like mad. I ran outside just in time to see someone take off, but he was on a bike and I couldn’t catch him, and it was too dark to get a good look at him. The next morning I found a can of gasoline and a bunch of old rags by the side of the driveway.”

“On a bike? Do you mean a bicycle or a motorcycle?” I asked, just to be sure.

“A bicycle. And the cabin was at the end of a long road, at the top of a steep hill. Whoever it was had to have pretty good endurance to pedal up there with a big can of gasoline. He must have had it strapped to the back of his bike somehow, or maybe he carried it in a knapsack.”

“Then it definitely wasn’t Iggie,” said Abigail. “I don’t think he could ride a bike that didn’t have training wheels, much less up a hill in the dark with all of that added weight.”

“But Alex Cutler is in a bike club,” I said. “He probably would have enjoyed the challenge.”

“The venture-capital guy?” asked Leo. “You think it was him?”

It took only a few minutes to tell him about what had happened to Hilary, and to confide our suspicions about Alex.

“It all fits,” I said. “And it explains why he would have freaked out when he heard Hilary was digging up the rumors about your death. He was worried about more than her screwing up the IPO-he couldn’t let her find out he’d tried to kill you.”

“But he didn’t. I burned the cabin down myself. And I’m not dead.”

“He doesn’t know that, and even if none of his attempts were successful, the last thing he’d want is anybody looking into what happened all over again.”

“I never did like that guy,” Leo said. “He was always talking about rates of return and exit strategies. He could care less about what the technology actually did as long as his investment paid off.”

“Why didn’t you just call the police?” Ben asked. “When you thought someone was trying to kill you?”

Leo shrugged again. “The software I created was to keep big brother from looking over people’s shoulders, not to invite him in. I don’t trust the police now and I didn’t then. I didn’t want to be a billionaire, either, but I also didn’t want people trying to kill me. I just wanted to live my life. Do my work and play my music and hang out with my dog. That was all I wanted.”

“So you staged your own death?” said Hilary.

“Better to have people think I was dead than to have them coming after me. It wasn’t such a sacrifice. I was sick of the entire scene. But then it turned out I was sick of more than the scene. I had cancer, too. Hodgkin’s.”

“Is that why you look so-?” Abigail started to ask, but then she stopped herself, worried he would take offense, or perhaps remembering that her appearance had also undergone considerable change.

Leo laughed. “Bald, you mean? Don’t worry, it doesn’t bother me. My hair never grew back after the chemo, and I lost a lot of weight that never came back, either.”