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“You might want to write that down, Sergeant Payne,” Byrth said with a big grin.

“It’s one robust browser,” Radcliffe said, concentrating on his work.

They watched the cursor move to the window with the newspaper articles. And then they saw that when he floated the cursor over a headline, one of the tree’s hyperlinks in the browser window on the upper right became a brighter blue.

“The upper right browser shows the meat of the newspaper, all the files and such, stripped of the coding that makes the GUI so pretty.”

“ ‘Gooey’?” Byrth said.

“GUI, for graphical user interface. It basically means what makes a computer page look nice.”

“So how’s it going to be possible to do the trace?” Payne said.

“Yeah,” Ratcliffe said. “ICANN.”

“You can what?” Payne said.

“No, ICANN. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. ICANN.”

“You’re making this up,” Payne said.

Byrth put in, “I think you may be right, Marshal.”

“I’m not making it up. Hey, can I call you ‘Marshal,’ too?”

Payne didn’t respond.

Radcliffe explained, “ICANN is a private nonprofit corporation out in Marina Del Rey, California. It was started in 1998, and tasked to assign and track every website, et cetera.”

Radcliffe moved the cursor into the new browser window. He typed in a website address and hit ENTER.

A pleasant blue page filled the browser. It had the ICANN logotype-it looked like a stylized pound symbol inside a circle meant to resemble a globe-and line after line of hyperlinks. Radcliff clicked on SITE MAP at the top of the page. And a new page appeared with an eye-crossing number of additional hyperlinks. He went immediately to the one he wanted and clicked.

“Okay. A unique numerical identification, what’s called its logical address, is assigned to every device-every computer-so it can join the network and communicate with another computer. If IP addresses were not unique, there’d be all sorts of conflicts. It’d be chaos. Once we have the IP address, we go to ICANN and find out where the address is registered.”

He moved the cursor to the left browser window.

“Okay, now we go back to the newspaper and find those comments you’re hunting.”

He flipped to the printout with the first comment. Then he clicked around in the left browser, working his way through the newspaper until he found the article. The others noticed that the blue hyperlinks in the upper right browser brightened and dimmed as he went through the various pages.

“The two pages are connected,” Payne said aloud. “Interesting.”

One blue hyperlink then stayed brightened.

He moved the cursor over to it and clicked.

Up popped a window. In it was:

From Death.Before.Dishonor (9:52 a.m.):

F**k you pendejos! Dudes sell drugs because people (are you paying attention?) because people want to buy them! Look at the ads on this page-booze, gambling (and where there?s gambling there?s hookers)… Something for everyone. What?s the difference with drugs? And you know what? Sometimes we even clean up the rats from the gutters-like those in this motel!

Recommend [0] Click Here to Report Abuse “Well, I’ll be d

ammed!” Payne said. “There it is! The missing jewel.”

At the top of the pop-up window was: IP ADDRESS X.173.57.92.234.