One Grave Less

could tell the coroner was bothered by it too.

Chapter 23
    Diane found Gregory down in the dungeon where David had left him. He was writing furiously in his notebook but looked up when Diane came into the room. He reached over and pulled up a chair for her.
    “Diane, I heard about the tragedy. I’m sorry. Was the person a friend?”
    “Yes,” said Diane, but it felt like she was lying. The weight of all the recent events were on her shoulders as she plopped heavily onto the seat. “She was a member of the board here and a good friend to several of the other members.”
    Gregory eyed her. “But not a good friend to you?”
    Diane slumped and confessed her guilt. “I’m trying to remember the last kind thing I said to her . . . and can’t.”
    “It’s very difficult when someone whose bad behavior we’ve called out dies on us and we are left wishing we had ignored their irresponsibility.”
    Diane gave him a weak smile. “I could have been kinder,” she said.
    “Knowing you, you were,” he said.
    “Your sentiment is appreciated,” she said. “How do you like your accommodations?”
    “It’s rather terrific down here.” He put his hands on the arms of the office chair as if to point to its astonishing comfort. “It’s good to see that David has been able to turn his paranoia into such remarkable creativity.”
    “I think a big part of David’s paranoia is an excuse to play with databases and gadgets,” she said. “It wouldn’t surprise me if he were digging out a new room here in the basement to house a secret supercomputer.”
    “He said supercomputers are above his price range,” said Gregory.
    “So he’s talked with you about a supercomputer,” said Diane. “I guess I’d better worry.”
    “He was going on about a friend in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, with a Cray Jaguar. I thought it was a car,” said Gregory. “I thought perhaps 2.33 petaflops was you Yanks’ word for horsepower.”
    Diane smiled and shook her head. “Perhaps I’d better check the subbasement.”
    “He said if he needed a large amount of computing power he could use slaves,” said Gregory.
    Diane sat up in her chair and looked at Gregory. “What? He’s using hacked botnets?”
    “He said he never used computers in the United States—or Great Britain. But he might have said that for my benefit. My guess would be China.”
    Diane put her head in her hands. “You are joking, aren’t you?” she said.
    “Actually, no,” said Gregory. He paused as Diane groaned. “But David may have been. It’s hard to tell sometimes, you know.”
    Diane looked up and smiled. Gregory grinned back. She looked down at his notebook.
    “It looks like you’ve been hard at work,” she said.
    Gregory liked to work in a notebook with pen and ink. At a glance, it looked as though he was a serious doodler, but his doodles always meant something. Instead of color-coding concepts, he doodle-coded them. He had started with a list of all the people on the team in South America. He had drawn a line through the deceased members, but that didn’t delete them from his analysis. He had fancy frames around others.
    He was doing a network analysis—looking at how each member was connected to the others, correlating each with their World Accord job description, with their current job, with their special talents, personality traits, background, with whom they stayed in contact after the massacre. David would have gladly written an algorithm for him, but Gregory liked to use his own brain for the analysis, continually adding little things to his people map, as he called it, following strings of a web with an unknown pattern until he found the strand that led him to the spider.
    The notebook was spread out so that two facing pages were showing. Diane noticed his computer screen was filled with open windows containing various reports from their work in South America. She glanced at what he had so far. His first entries were of the three of them—Diane, David, and Gregory himself—listing the rumors with the annotation “vague” beside them.
    “Vague?” said Diane.
    “None of the rumors about us have any detail attached to them. God knows, the journalists in London tried to find something.”
    “That’s the way lies are,” she said. “You don’t need much substance to make them stick, so long as there are people out there who are convinced that where there is smoke there is fire.”
    “People love to believe the worst,” he