How to Succeed in Murder Read Online Free PDF

underlying psychological issues that might explain why I hadn’t bought a sofa yet. Which was my own fault—I thought we should wait until we were at Eileen’s office to talk about Clara Chen’s death.
    “Finally!” Eileen jumped to her feet as her assistant ushered us into her office. “What took you so long?”
    “Don’t ask.” The last thing I needed was for them to tag team me on my supposed ambivalence toward putting down roots. We needed to focus on serious matters. “How much time have we got?”
    Eileen checked her slim wristwatch. “My calendar is clear until three. Come on, I’ve set things up at the conference table.”
    Eileen’s office was huge, with sleek minimal furniture and acres of uncluttered space. The conference table was positioned in front of a floor-to-ceiling window offering a calculated-to-impress-clients view of the Transamerica pyramid and a bit of the Bay Bridge beyond it. I knew Eileen was important at her firm, but the view spoke volumes about how important.
    It was all very nice, but something about the crisp efficiency of everyone we’d passed on the way from the elevators, and the tidy stacks of manila folders on every flat surface, and the general buzz of purposeful dialogue made me feel as though I might break out in some sort of rash. Places of business usually affect me that way.
    There were four neat stacks of color-coded folders on the conference table, aligned in perfect symmetry. Brenda plonked her overflowing satchel down in the middle of them. “Okay.” She looked at us.
    “Okay,” Eileen said.
    “Okay,” I agreed. “Now, what have we been able to find out about Zakdan?”

Chapter Five
    Eileen is a financial genius. She has one of those brilliant heads for business that land people on the covers of magazines that are too tedious to even think of reading. So I had every expectation that she’d be able to come up with a detailed analysis of the financial position of Morgan Stokes’ company with one hand tied behind her back.
    But I never thought Brenda would turn out to be an investigative mastermind. I’d suggested that she log some internet time over the weekend, reading up on Zakdan, the Chief Technology guy Lalit Kumar, and Jim Stoddard, the other executive that Jack had mentioned—as well as Morgan Stokes himself and anyone else whose name came up along the way. I hadn’t expected her to compile an encyclopedia.
    She pulled a three-inch stack of papers, bound with a giant black clip, out of her bottomless satchel. “Do you guys know why it’s called Zakdan?”
    I shook my head.
    She grinned, stuffing everything but the stack of papers back into her bag and slinging that onto one of the buttery leather chairs that lined both sides of the table. “In the late eighties, two guys from the Computer Science department at Brown started fooling around with an idea for a programming toolkit to help engineers build graphical applications for the PC more easily.” She saw my blank look and waved her hand. “It doesn’t matter what they did. The point is, their names were Zak Bridges and Dan Maceri.”
    “Zak and Dan?” Eileen’s eyebrows went up.
    Brenda’s grin got wider. “You got it.”
    I pulled her pile of papers toward me. “This is all about Zakdan? And you got it all in one weekend? Do you keep a team of hackers working for you in a basement somewhere?”
    Her eyes flashed. “This isn’t even half of what I found. Everything is online these days. And—while from a civil-liberties point of view I’m shocked and appalled by the amount of personal information that you can find on just about everyone—a good search engine sure makes investigating someone easy.”
    Wow. Duly noting her moral compunction, Eileen and I stared at her. “Do we have to read all this,” I asked, “or are you going to give us the good stuff?”
    First she gave us the dull stuff. Apparently Zak and Dan had been awfully successful with their initial set of