Death on the WEB
The first reader to guess the murderer's identity and explain how this conclusion was reached wins a $25 gift certificate from Borders Books and Music.
By JON KATZ
I'd like to say I'm hip and grok all the new technology, but nobody who knows me would buy that for a second. I'm no techno-nerd. I'm not a programming whiz or a scientist. I'd rather be alone with my dog, reading a book, than almost anything in the world. I do my information-gathering the old-fashioned way -- lots of legwork, tracking people down. But the computer revolution is my world now. Somehow, without having planned it, I've become the first private eye on the Internet. I'm Marshall Paine, leading PI of cyberspace. I work the dark side of the Net, and there are some pretty scary black holes out there.
My girlfriend, Julie, is a computer whiz who got me a busted Power Mac cheap, then fixed it for me. She and I put up a home page on the Web announcing Paine Investigations, and I was in business. I do background security checks, search for cyberthieves and frauds and stolen chips, delve into digital espionage. There's more money here than you can imagine. In a country where people get shot for five bucks, they can surely get killed for software worth billions.
Next page: A corpse and a computer
