Glibspet was smiling. He'd just paid for a box of Bugles with a two-party check drawn on a Venezuelan bank, and he'd held the line up for thirty-five minutes. He'd even gotten change. Now he was sitting at his desk eating the little cornucopias and planning his next move on several cases.
He'd found the runaway kid he'd been looking for and he'd like to close the books on that one, but if he waited a few more days before telling her parents, she would probably have turned her first trick. Wait, he decided. He didn't need the money yet. If it came to that, he could break her in and still make a profit.
The lost dog case? Well, he'd never collect on that one, and he'd carefully worded the contract so that he wouldn't have to. He closed out the file. For a poodle that juicy and tender, it had been worth it.
The Averial case, though, was definitely still open. The past few weeks had been unpleasant, with the Three Stooges popping into his office at odd times and making life miserable for him. So far, though, they'd been careful not to do anything that would blow his cover with Mindenhall—they were catching enough hell in Hell for Averial's continued absence that they weren't doing anything that might make him fail. He'd never seen three Fallen so scared.
Scared was the way he liked them.
He pulled a list of ideas he'd been considering from his drawer and called in Mindenhall. He handed him the list. "These are some directions I've been considering for the Avi Baker case," he said. He'd come up with the name Avi Baker for Averial because he didn't think good Catholic Craig would take much of a fancy to hunting Fallen angels for Fallen clients. "Run these down, will you? I'm going to chase a few maybe-leads of my own."
Craig studied the list for a moment, then nodded. "I'll get right on it."
Mindenhall headed for the door, and Glibspet watched his retreating ass. The longer he didn't have it, the more attractive it got. Still, it wouldn't do to hurry; Mindenhall was a long-term project, and in the meantime, he was doing good footwork on the search for Averial. No leads yet, but every negative result narrowed the possibilities. And he'd gotten information for Glibspet that had broken a few other cases.
Glibspet heard the outer door shut. Good. Now he could eliminate some more possibilities. He opened a desk drawer and took out a small, bright red modem, which he hooked to the serial port on the back of his PC. There was no place on the modem for a phone jack or power cord. That didn't matter. He was calling up Hell Online. It was one edge the Hellraised had over Heaven—Hell had all the best programmers. Heaven had who? Grace Hopper, and that was about it.
Glibspet entered his user ID and password, and cursed as the welcome screen slowly and painfully crawled across his display: The red modem was only three hundred baud. It was, after all, a product of Hell.
Finally the message of the day appeared:
/usr/local/hell filled up again last night. I deleted all home directories and expired all Usenet groups except alt.flame. If you had important data on that partition: tough shit. I've got better things to do than keep backups, and don't bother coming to me with tapes. Restoring your pathetic little files isn't on my list of top ten million things to do—Cron.
Glibspet thought of all his favorite poodle recipe files and sighed. Hell's sysops got to wreak havoc out of all proportion to their rank. At least they had finally replaced the mainframe and thrown out JCL. Satan himself had decreed that some things even Hell couldn't tolerate.
When he got the main menu, he keyed for access to the damnedsouls database.
Hell had always kept good records on its human occupants. It had to. But in the old days, an exhaustive search through the damnedsouls files would have taken weeks, and would have required stroking a half dozen different bureaucrats and archivists just to get into the file room. Now Glibspet could formulate a very restrictive query and have it answered within minutes. Probably the longest part of the process would be downloading the query hits over the three hundred-baud link.
He thought carefully and typed in an SQL (Satan's Query Language) statement to pull all the female damnedsouls who had died in North Carolina within six months in either direction of the Unchaining who were residents but who had lived there for less than ninety days: two hundred and forty-seven hits. He punched download and dug in for a wait. He'd have to spend more time after downloading, too, because he was going to have to go through every single hit. Most could probably be eliminated out of hand. He didn't think it was too likely that Averial would have taken the identity of a damnedsoul. Although the information would have been readily available to her, she would have known that all Hell had access to it, too. On the other hand, she might think that they might think she would never do it, and so do it anyway. So he had to check, and he couldn't just skim. He was going to have to do this right.
Glibspet paced while the slow process continued. His silk boxers rubbed against the tender spot at the base of his spine, which started to itch ferociously. The spot had been driving him crazy for days, ever since he got the last of his tail demanifested. He scratched gingerly and looked at his screen. The download was only forty percent complete—he had a little time. He walked into the bathroom, dropped his trousers and rubbed baby oil on the afflicted patch of skin. It didn't help much, but thinking about the baby-rendering factory cheered him up a bit, and when he got back to his office, his PC was flashing ready.
He set the list to printing and unplugged the red modem. It was hot to his touch, and the insulation on the serial cable was a bit singed. That was to be expected; he had yet to find a cable that was fully Hell-compatible. Glibspet let the cable cool for a minute while he put the modem away. The next step would require only his PC's standard internal modem. That, a bit of bribery, some blackmail and probably some plain old-fashioned hacking should get him logged into the databases at the regional insurance agencies. It wasn't hard, really. There had always been a lot of insurance salesmen pledged to Hell, and the agencies had eagerly hired the Hellborn after the Unchaining. Glibspet always had favors he could call in from both crowds. He popped the top off a can of Vienna sausages and started dialing.
Half an hour and two cans later, he had been in half a dozen systems and had about four hundred possibles. He sucked the gelatin off another Vienna appreciatively (one of the few foods whose ingredient list didn't disappoint) and considered his finds. He'd been digging through the companies' "nest prospecting" files. Many insurance agents kept files on paid-out claims so that they could go back later and hit up friends and relatives to buy insurance from them. "Remember your old pal, Joey Feinmeister? We paid out $200,000 smackeroos to the little missus . . . and I know you've seen her new Cadillac. Just think, you too can cash in big . . ."
Glibspet could hardly think of a tackier practice. He figured insurance sales was where used-car dealers went when they couldn't meet the ethical standards anymore. He loved it. More to the point, sometimes the follow-ups found anomalies, and he had a whole list of them now to investigate.
He couldn't afford to neglect the more straightforward approaches, either. Averial was passing as human. One day she was bound to slip and call on Hell for something. All he needed was a single Hellawatt expended to her account; he could backtrace that and discover, if not her exact location, then at least a place where she had been recently. Odds were, it would be someplace where she was known. Where someone, shown a picture of Averial, would recognize a face. Unlike Linufel, Kellubrae, and Venifar, Glibspet wasn't in a major hurry—due to a little point in the contract that the three Fallen had overlooked, he didn't have any deadline for producing his results.
He smiled at that thought.
The three of them were already nearing their deadline. The Unholy Head of State wasn't dealing directly with him, so he could make things as miserable as he chose for the Three Stooges, knowing that the only repercussions he would face would be from them—and knowing that they didn't dare do much to him, because if they did, he'd screw them worse than he already was.
He ought to tell them he needed more money for expenses, too. That would thrill them no end.
Meanwhile, Averial would wait. She had nowhere else to go.