Practical Demonkeeping

them check out.”
    “Why don’t you just drive up to Pine Cove and meet her?”
    The Spider’s color deepened. “I couldn’t do that.”
    “Why not? What’s the deal with this woman, anyway? Does it have to do with a case?”
    “No, it’s…it’s a personal thing. We’re in love.”
    “But you’ve never met her?”
    “Well, yes, sort of—we talk by modem every night. Last night she didn’t log on. I’m worried about her.”
    “ Nailsworth , are you telling me that you are having a love affair with a woman by computer?”
    “It’s more than an affair.”
    “What do you want me to do?”
    “Well, if you could just check on her. See if she’s all right. But she can’t know I sent you. You mustn’t tell her I sent you.”
    “ Nailsworth , I’m an undercover cop. Being sneaky is what I do for a living.”
    “Then you’ll do it?”
    “If you can find something in these names that will bail me out, I’ll do it.”
    “Thanks, Rivera.”
    “Let’s finish this.” Rivera picked up a matchbook and read the name and address. The Spider typed the information, but as Rivera began to read the next name, he heard the Spider pause on the keyboard.
    “Is something wrong?” Rivera asked.
    “Just one more thing,” Nailsworth said.
    “What?”
    “Could you find out if she’s modeming someone else?”
    “Santa Maria, Nailsworth ! You are a real person.”
     
    Three hours later Rivera was sitting at his desk waiting for a call from the Spider. While he was in the computer room, someone had left a dog-eared paperback on his desk. Its title was You Can Have a Career in Private Investigation . Rivera suspected Perez. He had thrown the book in the wastebasket.
    Now, with his only suspect back out on the street and nothing forthcoming from the Spider, Rivera considered fishing the book out of the trash.
    The phone rang, and Rivera ripped it from its cradle.
    “Rivera,” he said.
    “Rivera, it’s the Nailgun .”
    “Did you find something?” Rivera fumbled for a cigarette from the pack on his desk. He found it impossible to talk on the phone without smoking.
    “I think I have a connection, but it doesn’t work out.”
    “Don’t be cryptic, Nailsworth . I need something.”
    “Well, first I ran the names through the Social Security computer. Most of them are deceased. Then I noticed that they were all vets.”
    “Vietnam?”
    “World War One.”
    “You’re kidding.”
    “No. They were all World War One vets, and all of them had a first or middle initial E. I should have caught that before I even input it. I tried to run a correlation program on that and came up with nothing. Then I ran the addresses to see if there was a geographical connection.”
    “Anything there?”
    “No. For a minute I thought you’d found someone’s research project on World War One, but just to be sure, I ran the file through the new data bank set up by the Justice Department in
Washington
. They use it to find criminal patterns where there aren’t any. In effect it makes the random logical. They use it to track serial killers and psychopaths.”
    “And you found nothing?”
    “Not exactly. The files at the Justice Department only go back thirty years, so that eliminated about half of the names on your list. But the other ones rang the bell.”
    “ Nailsworth , please try to get to the point.”
    “In each of the cities listed in your file there was at least one unexplained disappearance around the date listed—not the vets; other people. You can eliminate the large cities as coincidence, but hundreds of these disappearances were in small towns.”
    “People disappear in small towns too. They run away to the city. They drown. You can’t call that a connection.”
    “I thought you’d say that, so I ran a probability program to get the odds on all of this being coincidence.”
    “So?” Rivera was getting tired of Nailsworth’s dramatics.
    “So the odds of someone having a file of the dates and locations of unexplained disappearances over the last thirty years and it being a coincidence is ten to the power of fifty against.”
    “Which means what?”
    “ Which means, about the same odds as you’d have of dragging the wreck of the Titanic out of a trout stream with a fly rod. Which means, Rivera, you have a serious problem.”
    “Are you telling me that this suitcase belongs to a serial killer?”
    “A very old serial killer. Most serial killers don’t even start until their thirties. If we