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housekeeper remarked she thought he seemed especially upbeat, although she concedes he was always in good spirits. Dr. Stratton didn’t notice anything different.”
    “Judging by the voice mail he left for me, I’d say he probably was upbeat. Excited.”
    Morgan nodded. “Right. The message he left you saying he thought he’d made a major breakthrough in discovering the identity of your birth parents. That search, of course, being the whole reason he moved to Fredericton in the first place. But damned if we could find any evidence of what he’d learned.”
    “What about the laptop?” Boyd had explored the computer himself, had opened and read every last file. But his skill level in IT matters topped out at using a password recovery tool to get into Josh’s various accounts and software programs. When he’d found nothing on Josh’s search for their birth parents, he’d turned the laptop over to the police for a deeper look. “Your tech crimes guys weren’t able to find anything? No hidden files or deleted files that might still be recoverable?”
    “I’m afraid that’s exactly what I’m saying. I just got the report yesterday.” Morgan flipped through a few pieces of paper until he found the one he wanted. “Our guy resuscitated everything he could, and still nothing about the investigation. Just the casual mentions in emails to you. That includes a search of your brother’s Internet-based web mail addresses and”—he paused to scan the report—“the automated online backup service he subscribed to, his Dropbox, and a dozen other places he might have stashed a file.” Morgan looked up again. “Apart from the exchanges between you and him, we found a big fat nothing.”
    “What about the physical notebooks?” Boyd had found dozens of them in Josh’s room at Dr. Stratton’s. From his own perusal on his last visit, he was certain they were all work related. However, on the remote chance that Josh had used them as some bizarre way of hiding or disguising the notes from his personal investigation, he’d asked Morgan to see if one of Josh’s coworkers could corroborate that.
    Boyd was a damned good cop, but, in his state of grief and shock, he hadn’t trusted himself to have a critical eye on Josh’s things. Turning the laptop and notebooks over had seemed like the best next step after his initial search yielded nothing.
    “No joy there either,” Morgan said. “Everything in them corresponded to articles which were subsequently published or scheduled to be published. No cryptic messages or hidden codes.”
    “Dammit. I was hoping there’d be something there.”
    Morgan grimaced. “My money was on the laptop. But unless your brother was the kind of guy who was obsessive about secure deletion, it’s pretty safe to say the file never existed on that computer. At least not on the hard drive or the flash drives you gave us.”
    “Secure deletion?”
    “Yeah. A tool that overwrites all the clusters where the data was originally stored with a bunch of random data.”
    Boyd frowned. “Josh was careful with data. He was an investigative journalist; he had to be concerned about the security of his files. But I’m talking more about relying on firewalls, complex, frequently changed passwords, and using only secure Wi-Fi. I doubt that concern extended far enough to prompt him to use deletion tools designed to thwart a forensic computer specialist.”
    “Did he have any other electronic storage devices?”
    “His iPhone. But as you know, that was never found. Unless . . . ?”
    “No, nothing’s turned up.”
    Boyd nodded grimly. Without a warrant from a judge, the phone companies weren’t prepared to try to triangulate it for them. They only did that kind of thing without a warrant if a life was in immediate danger. Since Josh was dead, the urgency—or exigency , as the lawyers liked to call it—required to obtain that cooperation was absent. Personally, Boyd figured it would be a waste of