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and shovels down enough beer and sandwiches to sustain a third-world country for a week.
    Why do I do it? I find it reassuring to watch other people screw up their lives. Participating in my own is a bummer. One day I might decide what I want to be when I grow up. For now, I work for Bobby and live in North Carolina. And that’s better than being where I was.
    Me and Thomas Wolfe—we can’t go home again.
    In fact, I won’t even admit where home was. The closest I’ll come to confessing to where I’m from is to say that, back home, we’re too busy running from alligators to stop and make pocketbooks out of them.
    It doesn’t matter anyway. I have a new life. I even have a new name. It’s not technically Casey Jones since the divorce, but it’s the name on my MasterCard, so why argue? Besides, call me sentimental, but a new last name was the one thing my ex gave me that can’t be cured with penicillin. So I kept it.
    Anyway, I don’t deserve to use my own name. My ex took care of that when he convinced me to take the fall for the smuggling charge. I was young, I was in love, I was a sucker for a pretty face. Never again. I did the crime so I did the time. But I never thought of how it might affect Grandpa. He’d raised me on his own ever since my parents had been found lying dead in a field of soybeans, shot from behind by assailants unknown. I don’t even remember what my mother or father looked like anymore, it happened so long ago. But I do remember the shame on my grandfather’s face when he came to visit me the first—and last—time in prison.
    One day, I will go back and prove to him that all those years he spent feeding and caring for me weren’t in vain. And when I do, I know of at least one ex-husband who’s going to pay. And one murder investigation that will be reopened. In the meantime, I’m learning what I can and I call Grandpa every other week from pay phones. I never talk long.
    But enough about me. Let’s talk about what Bill Butler thought about me. I examined his card carefully. The fact that he was carrying one at all meant he was a little different from the rest of the jackbooted crowd a few blocks west of McDowell Street. What was a nice Long Island boy doing here in the wilds of North Carolina?
    More importantly, how could I weasel information out of him while still retaining a chance to get his skinny bones in bed when I was done?
    I wasn’t sure it was possible. I sighed and put the matter on the back burner. It was time to get to work.
    Five minutes later I was pulling up archived photos and articles from the local newspaper—the News & Observer, or N&O, as we locals call it—on my trusty Macintosh. Bobby never moves from his chair; I never start a case without my Mac. We all have our rituals. I learned everything you would ever want to know about computers in the office of that Florida prison. A nice lady from vocational rehab taught me how to turn one on. A not-so- nice lady, formerly of a bank in Miami, taught me how to really make it purr. She was serving a fifteen-year sentence for bank fraud and, like most of the inmates, she’d only been caught because some guy she was dating screwed up and got greedy.
    NandoNet had started as the News & Observer’s computer network before they sold it off for a tidy profit. It lets you surf the Internet cheaply and review reprints from their current and past issues by pressing a few convenient buttons here and there. I was interested in deeper access and knew how to get it, courtesy of a young lady who’d been caught with her hand in the ad space money jar. She sold the code out to Bobby about a week before the feds came to haul her away. They ought to call it pink-collar crime. Believe me, it’s the wave of the future.
    I started by reviewing the society pages. I wanted to get a better look at Thornton Mitchell, the victim.
    The South was changing, no doubt about it. The society page was nothing like it used to be. No smiling