The Key
for once, allowing me to drift quickly to sleep. Which was good, because the last thing I wanted to do was think.

chapter eleven
    I overslept the next morning. Peter had turned off the alarm before it sounded.
    “I made an executive decision,” he told me. “You’ve been working too hard, and then you had to deal with this Gallagher guy dying at your feet. You deserved a decent night’s rest.”
    It was a good thought, and he did bring a nice cold Diet Coke with him when he eventually woke me up at eight, but already running late so early in the day put me off-balance.
    I managed to shower and get dressed without imbibing any of Peter’s toiletries, although I knocked over his deodorant while drying my hair, which set off a domino-like tumbling of all of the products lined up on the counter next to it. It would have been fun to watch if I hadn’t been in such a hurry.
    Peter was on the phone in the living room when I emerged from the bedroom and crossed over into the study. I wanted to check e-mail again, to see if maybe Man of the People had written during the night, and it wouldn’t do to log in from my work PC. I opened up the Web browser and selected “history” to get to the link for my new account. Without really looking, I selected the most recent listing, assuming that it would be the one I needed, since I thought I’d been the last one to use the computer. But instead of the page I expected, I found myself on the Winslow, Brown Web site, looking at Jake Channing’s photo and professional biography.
    That was odd.
    I scanned the index of previous Web pages along the left-hand side of the browser more carefully and selected the second listing. This took me to a Google search on Jake Channing.
    There was only one explanation for it, assuming I hadn’t been Googling Jake in my sleep. And that was that Peter had been Googling Jake while I slept in.
    “Peter?” I called out.
    His head appeared in the doorway, the phone clasped to his ear. “That sounds like it meets the specifications,” he was saying, presumably to whichever one of his company’s engineers was on the other end. He held up an index finger to indicate he’d be done in a minute, and his head disappeared again. “And when do you think it could be ready? I see…” His voice trailed off into the living room.
    I tried to think of reasons why Peter had been Googling Jake, but I wasn’t yet sufficiently caffeinated to come up with anything that made sense. Instead, I found the link to the new e-mail account and checked it. Still nothing. And Peter was still rambling on about specs and timetables.
    Then I checked my regular home e-mail account, just in case. But while I had a whole slew of new e-mails from the Viagra folks, here, too, there was radio silence from Man of the People. And Peter was still on the phone.
    I got out my BlackBerry to check messages at work, pressing Send without thinking. The number for my office voice mail was usually the last one I dialed every night, and when I pressed Send, the device automatically dialed the last number I’d used. So I was surprised when, instead of the familiar voice welcoming me to Audix, I heard Dahlia Crenshaw inviting me to leave a message.
    Peter chose that moment to reappear in the study. “What can I do for you?” he asked. Startled, I hung up on Dahlia’s recording.
    “I was just wondering why you were Googling Jake Channing.” It may have been a trick of the morning light, which was lending a rosy glow to the small room, but I could have sworn he blushed.
    At least he didn’t try to pretend he hadn’t been doing any such thing. “I—I was curious. How did you find out? I thought I’d closed down the browser.”
    “You did. But I was using the history function. Why you were curious?”
    “The history function? Why were you using that?”
    “To get to the new e-mail account you set up for me. But I got to your Google search instead.”
    “Interesting. Did you—actually,

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