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“Now we take that”-he put the cursor over the address, copied it, then put the cursor in the bottom right browser window-“and feed it to ICANN.”

He clicked.

Another pop-up window appeared. It not only had a street address with city, state, and zip code, but there also was a small street map with an arrow pointing to the exact address.

“Amazing!” Jim Byrth said.

“Anchorage, Alaska?” Payne said. “The guy’s way the hell up there?”

Andy Radcliffe shrugged.

“Let’s check the other one,” he said.

When it came up, Payne said, “Jesus Christ! That one says he’s in the Florida Keys.”

Andy Radcliffe looked in deep thought. He clicked around and double-checked a couple links.

“That’s just not possible,” he then said. “Both of those comments were typed in the same day-yesterday. No way someone could’ve traveled from Alaska to Florida. And there’s no way for two people to have the same screen name; the software that sets up the screen names only allows for unique ones. For obvious reasons.”

Radcliffe thought a bit. “There is one possible explanation. If this guy had some way to mirror another computer, he could create confusing IP addresses. And mirroring computers is easy. It’s just that generating an artificial IP address, in essence an alias, can cause havoc. But it is the electronic equivalent of a shell game. And that’d work.”

Payne sighed.

“Looks like we’re at what’s known as a dead fucking end,” Payne said.

Then he saw Radcliffe staring at him with a look of dejection.

Andy looks like he’s truly sorry this went nowhere.

Like it’s his fault.

“Hey, it happens, Andy,” he said.

Harris offered, “Maybe he will write again, and we can draw him out.”

Payne turned to Byrth. He saw that the Texas lawman not only appeared to be in deep thought but that he had that dry white bean tumbling again across his left fingers.

“What’re you thinking?” Payne said seriously. “You look damned introspective.”

“Thinking about Plan B,” Byrth said. “We let your cat out of the bag.”

Payne nodded.

Harris said, “I can call Lee Bryan at the paper and give him the story he can write and post.”

Payne felt his phone vibrate, and he found himself in what he realized was a Pavlovian moment. He was grinning, and it was because he’d already conditioned himself to associate the phone vibration with a text message from Amanda Law.

But then it vibrated again. And when he picked up the phone, the smile quickly went away.

The cellular telephone instead had been ringing. The color LCD screen flashed: SOUP KING-1 CALL TODAY @ 0902.

Well, I’ve put him off long enough.

Now certainly qualifies as “later.”

“Hey, Chad,” Payne said into the phone after hitting the keypad. “What’s new?”

XI