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huge—will be on the family’s nickel. In the meantime, someone else is getting away with assault, at least, and maybe with attempted murder.”
    “Wait a minute,” Ali said. “This whole thing happened on the inside. Every juvenile detention facility I ever heard of has security cameras everywhere. Doesn’t this one?”
    “It does,” B. agreed, “but it turns out the cameras in one whole section of the building, including the room where Lance was putting up Christmas decorations, went on the fritz the night before the incident took place. A work order was issued that morning, prior to the fire, requesting the facility’s security contractor to send technicians to either fix the malfunctioning system or replace it. The repair appointment wasscheduled to take place the following day—the day after Lance was burned.”
    “So what part of the system was offline?” Ali asked.
    “The part that included the classrooms, the rec room, and the cafeteria. The rest of the system seems to be functioning properly.”
    “That seems suspicious right there, doesn’t it?” Ali asked.
    “It does as far as I’m concerned,” B. agreed. “That’s why I’m thinking there may be a lot more to this than meets the eye.”
    Ali didn’t bother asking how B. knew about the malfunctioning security system or the request for service, all of which were things he could have gained access to only with help from Stuart Ramey, the guy manning a High Noon keyboard back home in Sedona. Since B. shouldn’t have known, in terms of plausible deniability, it was probably better that she not know too much about them, either.
    “Let’s say the kid’s injuries weren’t self-inflicted,” Ali said. “What does that mean?”
    “It means that someone inside the facility—someone with access to the security camera system—is involved in what happened.”
    “A guard?” Ali asked.
    “Or maybe a guard and an inmate, two people working in conjunction. One to take out the security system and the other one to set the fire.”
    “So the real question is, why would Lance be targeted? Is it due to something that was going on inside the facility, or does it have something to do with why he got sent there in the first place?”
    “What got him sent there,” B. replied, “is something that could have been treated as a kid’s prank and wasn’t. I keep thinking about the stunts that I pulled when I was his age. The thing is, I got away with them. Lance didn’t.”
    That was when Ali finally tumbled. B. was taking this personally because he was seeing his own history reflected in what was going on with Lance Tucker. As a child, B. had been teased unmercifully by the other kids for his name—Bart Simpson. When other kids were outplaying Little League and Pop Warner football, an outcast B., who had already shed his given name, had taken refuge in technology. Hidden away in the family garage, he had cut his computer science teeth by taking old computers apart and putting them back together. By the time he was in junior high, he had taught himself how to write code.
    A high school dropout without a trace of a college degree, B. had moved to Seattle in his late teens and made both a name for himself and a fortune in the computer game industry. Because he was a natural at computer hacking, he was also a natural at designing computer security measures. And that was the business B. was in now. His company, High Noon Enterprises, based in Sedona, counted among its clients a collection of Fortune 500 companies from all over the world. Even so, Ali knew that the guy she loved was still a rogue hacker at heart.
    “When did all this happen?” Ali asked. “And how did you hear about it in the first place?”
    “The incident occurred over a week ago. Since computer security breaches are my bread and butter, I subscribe to Internet Security News. ISN is a news aggregator that’s been following the story from the beginning. Once the burn victim’s name was