Meanwhile, I headed back for the basement stair landing. I hadn’t stopped long enough to see what had tripped me, but what I’d seen out of the corner of my eye intrigued me.
“Talk about literally stumbling over evidence,” I said as I stared down at my discovery.
It was a trapdoor. It had fallen back in place, but fit so tightly that it hadn’t quite closed, and I was able to pry it open with a kitchen knife.
“Eureka!” I exclaimed as the trapdoor popped open to reveal a space about two feet square and filled to the brim with stuff.
I sat down beside the trapdoor and began removing the top items from Ted’s secret stash.
On the top were a trio of romance novels, which surprised me a lot more than Ted’s small collection of mildly dirty magazines. I’d never have pegged Ted for a romance reader.
But someone had read these books. They were not only heavily thumbed, but marked throughout with a yellow highlighter, as well. All three were by the same author - someone named Anna Floyd who, according to her author biography, lived in the country with her adoring husband and her three darling cats. Two were set in the present day and one in Regency England. I flipped through one of the modern ones and read highlighted quotes. Enlightenment was not forthcoming. If there was a clue here, I’d probably have to read the damned books to figure it out. Later. Much later. Maybe never, if I could first figure out who really killed Ted.
Next was a blue file folder with THE HACKER scribbled on the tab. In it, I found printouts from the Boston Globe Web site - articles about the “Robin Hood Hacker” case, which I vaguely remembered hearing about a year ago. I browsed a couple of the articles, but they didn’t say anything I didn’t remember reading before. Young programmer caught hacking into the system of a major New York bank and erasing about five thousand dollars in charges from his girlfriend’s account. Major embarrassment for the bank when it turned out that the girlfriend had been trying to dispute the charges for two years - they’d come from Panama, a country she could prove she’d never visited - and she had finally attempted suicide, due to stress resulting from her ruined credit history and the bank’s repeated collection calls.
“Maybe I should sic the assertiveness therapist on her,” I muttered. And hacking the bank was the best Robin Hood could come up with to solve Maid Marian’s problem? Didn’t these people know why God invented lawyers?
Never mind. All’s well that ends well. Robin Hood got off with a warning, and the girlfriend got her good credit rating restored.
So what was so interesting about the case that Ted created a file about it and had to hide the file in his secret compartment?
Maybe Ted was the Robin Hood Hacker? No, the photo of the police escorting the hacker out of his apartment building was pretty blurred, but it couldn’t possibly be Ted, who was taller than I and had blondish hair. The hacker had dark hair, and the arresting officers towered over him. Perhaps Ted kept it as a reminder to himself to keep to the straight and narrow? Or was it part of the research for a scheme to hack some other bank? I’d have to work on that.
And I was equally puzzled by the next object - a set of rules from Lawyers from Hell. Not the computer version, but the original role-playing game. I couldn’t figure out why Ted would need to hide that. But it looked like an actual original - I could see some annotations in Rob’s handwriting. Which meant the thing might have considerable value if Ted planned to sell it on the black market to rabid fans. So maybe he was hiding it because it was valuable. And he didn’t trust banks. Or maybe he’d swiped it from someone.
Under the rules, I found a three-year-old copy of PC Gaming magazine. Surprise, surprise. He had a few more of them scattered around the basement, and we had dozens down at the office. What was so special about this copy that he had to hide it? I spotted a paper clip marking a page and turned to that article. Representatives from half a dozen gaming companies talked about the future of the industry. I chuckled. Since Rob was still inventing the paper version of Lawyers from Hell three years ago, anything they’d said about the future was probably a little off base by now.
Ted’s secret stash wasn’t turning out to be as exciting as I expected, I thought, suppressing a yawn.
Next I found a sheet of paper containing a number of strings of numbers with dots in die middle. A month ago, I’d have been puzzled; now, thanks to my time at Mutant Wizards, I knew that a Web site address, like www.mutantwizards.com was the pretty name humans used, while our computers looked for long strings of numbers. When I got back to the Cave, I could log on to the Internet and type in the numbers to see where they led. Not that I expected one of them to turn out to be www.whokilledtedandwhy.com or anything really useful like that.