The Merchant of Menace

night.
    She’d been unable to get to sleep until almost four in the morning and now staggered put of bed, bleary and tired and pointedly avoiding looking out the bedroom or bathroom windows. She could hear voices downstairs. She showered and dressed hurriedly and threw on a bare minimum of makeup. Just enough that the bags under her eyes wouldn’t actually frighten impressionable young children. Not that there were likely to be any around.
    “Mom, Mel called while you were in the shower,“ Mike said when she came downstairs. “Said she was probably going to be okay. He’s stopping by in a couple minutes.”
    Jane nodded and made her way to the coffeemaker. Thank God! Mike had started it for her. She poured a cup, added lots of cream and sugar, and gulped it down as quickly as she could. Ah... caffeine!
    “What’s that noise?“ she asked Mike as she came closer to full consciousness.
    “Bruce Pargeter. In the basement fixing things,“ Mike said.
    Jane looked at Katie, who was excavating her cereal for raisins. “You can buy boxes of raisins, you know,“ Jane said. “All by themselves.“
    “But they aren’t sugary or wet,“ Katie said. “What went on last night?“
    “Somebody tried to bump off that reporter,“ Mike said. “The redheaded woman, Ginger.”
    “Why?“ Katie asked.
    Mike shrugged. Jane said, “We don’t know.”
    “Maybe Mel does,“ Mike said. “Here he comes.”
    Katie, still in her robe and fuzzy slippers, went away to get dressed.
    “You, too, Todd,“ Jane shouted into the living room where her youngest was cruising television channels. “No slobbing around in jammies.”
    Mel looked as exhausted as Jane felt. She wondered if men didn’t sometimes wish they could use makeup to spruce themselves up a bit. “Ginger’s okay?“ she asked, as she slipped some bread into the toaster for him.
    “Not okay. But she’ll make it,“ he said. “She’s suffered frostbite, a concussion, and has a broken wrist. She only regained consciousness about an hour ago.“
    “Did you get to talk to her?“
    “Yes, but she wasn’t making much sense. Had no idea what she was doing in a hospital. The last thing she seems to remember is talking to me in your driveway. The doctor says she’ll probably get more of her memory back, but may not ever remember what happened to her.“
    “So you don’t know who hit her?“
    “Nope. It wasn’t that much of a blow, though. But it must have thrown her against the gas meter at the side of the house and she hit her head on it and apparently snapped her wrist trying to break her fall. At least, that’s what the emergency-room people speculated. They were a lot more concerned with her temperature. She must have laid there in the cold for several hours. If she hadn’t been wearing a hat and gloves and a heavy coat, she’d have probably died of exposure.“
    “Do you think that means whoever it was didn’t mean to kill her?“ Jane asked.
    “Whatever the original intention was, she was left to die. It comes to the same thing as far as I’m concerned. If you hadn’t peered out the window and seen her, she would have.“
    “Is this a tribute to what you call my snooping?”
    He smiled. “I guess it is. It saved Ginger’s life.”
    While he was feeling mellow and benevolent, Jane needed to ask something else. “What about the computer disk I found? Have the people in your office read it yet?“
    “Nope. There are files on it, but they’re password protected. They’re going to have to get help from the F.B.I. probably. They have super-duper computers that can run through thou- sands of combinations of letters and numbers until they hit on the right one.”
    Jane poured another half a cup of coffee and debated with herself for a few seconds. “ ‘Guardian; “ she said.
    “What?“
    “ ‘Guardian’ is the password.“
    “How the hell would you know that?“ Mel asked. He held up his hand. “No, wait. I’ll bet you made a copy of that disk before you gave it to me. Am I right? I should have known! Jane, that was evidence. You had no business messing with it!“
    “It wasn’t evidence while it was just an unidentified disk in my house,“ she said. “It was just an unfamiliar... thing.“
    “You know the law on this? Never mind. How did you figure out the password?“
    “Shelley and I figured it out rationally. It’s our secret.”
    Jane wouldn’t have thought it was possible for human features to express both gratitude and