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you spent with Michael could have been the eighteenth, or the twenty-eighth.  Remember, we’re talking six months ago.”
    “It was a Saturday,” she said.  “I do a lot of business on Saturdays.  Mike usually worked Saturdays too.  When he called and asked me to spend the day with him, I had to reschedule several appointments.  There are notations in my date book.  It was most definitely the eighth of February.  Harmony remembers it as the eighth too.”
    “Harmony?”
    “The Artificial Intelligence that runs my apartment.”
    “Is Harmony tapped into DataNet?  If she is, there should be a time signature stamped over any footage shot by your apartment’s security cameras.  Your brother may have an airtight alibi locked up in your AI’s data core.  For one of the murders, at least.”
    “No good,” she said.
    “You’re not on the net?”
    “I’m on the net all right, but my apartment doesn’t have any video cameras.  My clients tend to be rather jealous of their privacy.  All of Harmony’s interior sensors are either infrared or Doppler sonar.  Good enough to chase burglars or keep house by, but not good enough for an ID that would stand up in court.”
    I sucked a lung full of smoke and put out the cigarette.  A crumb of tobacco stuck to the tip of my tongue.  I bit the crumb in half with my front teeth and blotted the pieces off the end of my tongue with a finger.  “Let’s say you’re right.  Let’s say that your brother was at your apartment during Christine Clark’s murder.  He still could have killed one of the others.  Or all of them.”
    “You’re looking at it from the wrong angle, Mr. Stalin.  If my brother confessed, in vivid detail, to one murder that he didn’t commit—maybe he didn’t commit any of them.”
    My stomach rumbled.  It was starting to forgive me for exposing it to Michael Winter’s suicide.  It was starting to think about breakfast.
    I stood up and wandered over to one of my favorite pieces, a tall, asymmetrical piece of twisted black grating that I called Broken Concrete by Moonlight .  “Why is it so important to clear your brother’s name?  Is there an inheritance, or are you just interested in justice with a capitol J ?”
    She answered from the couch.  “I admit that I have an ulterior motive.”
    I waited.  My stomach growled again.
    “Michael was a software engineer,” she said, “a good one.  He specialized in high-speed data compression and retrieval.  Several of the big companies tried to seduce him into a contract, but he wanted to stay independent.  He wasn’t getting rich, but he was living pretty well.
    “About four years ago, he started having these fainting spells.  I finally convinced him to see a doctor.  It turned out to be a brain tumor, and the tests showed that it was malignant.  He needed a major operation and he didn’t have nearly enough money.  I had a few marks stashed away, but nothing like the kind of cash he needed.  A big Eurocorp called Gebhardt-Wulkan Informatik ended up fronting Mike the money.  He had to indenture himself to them for ten years.  He was pretty screwed up physically, and I guess the company execs were afraid that he would die before they got their investment out of him.  I had to co-sign his indenture.  If Michael died or skipped out, I’d have to work off the remainder of his contract.
    That’s the bottom line.  If I can prove that Michael was murdered, his life insurance will pay off his indenture.  If the official cause of death remains suicide, I end up working off the indenture in GWI’s Leisure Department.  Since their girls get paid bottom-scale, it will probably take me about fifteen years.”
    I scratched my jaw and thought about trying to crack my neck.  “So all I have to do is prove that your brother didn’t commit the fourteen murders that he confessed to, find out who did commit the murders, and figure out how someone murdered Michael while making it look