Bern's note reported that "El Ranchito is either a tortilla manufacturer in Zillah, Washington, or the name of Bette Davis's dog in the movie 'Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte.'" His second e-mail said, "Turns out the El Ranchito plant has a restaurant next door. Likely place to share a real-life taco, wouldn't you say?"

I clocked into the day job then for a six hour stretch, and didn't think of El Ranchito until I read it again on the subject line of another vid-mail from Bernley.

"I found four Publicams on the I-net that could prove useful," he began excitedly. "One in the laundromat, one in the restaurant - those are both for security. One on the nearby Interstate is a State Patrol speed trap. And one aimed down mainstreet is run by the local C.O.C., and it has an auto zoom. Frame rates and archive keeps vary, but we can go back at least two months on all of them."

So Bernley was still in pursuit of the Princess of Pixels, and hoped to catch a snapshot of her on one of these public videocams in the vicinity. Seemed pretty unlikely to me.




When I told Porky about the MS Bob connection, she was VERY interested.
I'd get back to Bernley, but first I wanted to learn more about the source of that original cryptogram. I called up Aporkalypse. She retrieved our previous day's transmit, and said she'd see what she could find out. And when I told her about the MS Bob connection, she became REALLY interested.

"There's a saying," she said, "that 'A friend of Bob is a friend of Bill.' Rumor is it's about money."