Killer Commute by Marlys Millhiser

Officer Mason called ahead to be sure someone would let her into the fortress. She’d called Charlie’s house, but Libby never answered the phone before noon on weekends.
    When she arrived, Maggie Stutzman made the officer a latte and crawled back on the couch.
    Mary Maggie looked at each of them several times and grinned, “Saturday nights suck on Sunday morning, right?”
    They were again in their uncouth, uncombed, unbrushed, just-out-of-bed modes, and their senses of humor wouldn’t show up for a couple of hours.
    The scare last night had nearly forced them to go to Betty Beesom’s church this morning. We’re talking a serious fright here, that no loose cop grin could budge.
    â€œHow are the cats?” she tried again.
    â€œRecovered.” Charlie slugged down the last of her latte and waved the empty soup-bowl cup at her hostess, not yet up to please.
    â€œYou won’t stop peeing for a week.”
    â€œI’m on vacation for a week.”
    The officer took too deep a draft of her latte, blinked back tears, pushed her glasses up her nose, and gave Charlie a conspiratorial look. “Any more … interesting ideas on Jeremy Fiedler’s death?”
    â€œNobody disappears their identity that completely in this computer age.”
    â€œComputers make mistakes. People make even more. Not nearly enough of the people responsible for things can keep up with the technology. All you have to do is hire a hacker and disappear.” Maggie Stutzman sang the same refrain.
    â€œShut up and make coffee.”
    â€œYou two sound married. So, what’d you do besides drink last night?”
    The unmistakable voice of a dead man coming out of the upper reaches of a more-than empty house had sent the conspirators scattering and then back, clutching. Charlie thought Doug Esterhazie would crush her head into his breastbone. God, they make kids hard these days.
    â€œOfficer Mason, do you think Maggie’s hypotheses about technology overpowering the official brainpower in this country has any validity whatsoever?”
    â€œWell, let me put it this way.” Officer Mason took another gulp of her latte and fished in a uniform pocket for a tissue. “And I will never admit to saying this in a court of law—”
    â€œWe got the room bugged—but go ahead.” Their hostess poured steamed milk into Charlie’s latte cup.
    â€œWe are reportedly looking into hiring, at minimum wage, a few underaged geeks for a summer recreational workshop to look into the possibility of recovering lost, stolen, deleted, or screwed-up files of interest, because we can’t afford Bill Gates’s programmers or their fresh-out-of-high-school replacements-in-training.”
    â€œThis sounds like really classified information.” Maggie handed Charlie her second serious jolt.
    â€œWell, let’s say that if we need a middle or junior-high group of experts to handle this admittedly serious problem, we won’t be able to afford community-outreach types like me.”
    â€œBut aren’t you worried those kids will go home and hack into stuff you don’t want them to, once you give them the information to retrieve what you want them to? How are you going to keep them from babbling or selling the information they retrieve?”
    â€œThat’s exactly the problem,” Mary Maggie said, looking impressed.
    Why did people assume literary agents were stupid? Charlie was expecting Mary Maggie to say, “So, you broke into the murdered man’s house last night without disturbing the crime-scene foils, huh? Congratulations. What did you find? Hand it over before I take you to jail.”
    Actually the most impressive thing they found last night was the difficulty of getting back out the way they got in. If that media-center cabinet didn’t want to push in for them over the new carpet, it turned really rebellious when Doug tried to pull it back in place.