WE CALLED IN EVERYONE now. The Metropolitan Med-ical Task Force. The Bureau of Public Safety. The local office of the FBI. We weren't talking murder any longer. This was terrorism.

The trail for the missing au pair had gone cold. Jacobi and Cappy had come back empty after passing her photo around the campus bars across the bay. One thing did pan out, though: the article Cindy put in the Chronicle on X/L. With news crews plastered all over their offices and the threat of a subpoena, I got a message from Chuck Zinn that he wanted to deal. An hour later, he was in my office.

"You can have your access, Lieutenant. In fact, I'll save you the trouble. Mort did receive a series of e-mails in the past few weeks. The entire board did. None of us took them very seriously, but we put our internal security team on it."

Zinn unbuckled his fancy leather case and placed an orange file on the table and pushed it across. "This is all of them, Lieutenant. By date received."

I opened the file and a shock resonated through my system.

To the Board of Directors, X/L Systems:

On February 15, Morton Lightower, your CEO, sold 762,000 shares of his company stock total-ing $3,175,000.

On that same day, some 256,000 of your own shareholders lost money, making their net return -87% in the past year.

35,341 children of the world died from star-vation.

11,174 people in this country died from disease that were deemed "preventable" with proper medical care.

That same Wednesday, 4233768 mothers -brought babies into conditions of poverty and hopelessness across the world. In the past 24 months, you have sold off almost $600,000,000 of your own company stock and purchased homes in Aspen and France, returning nothing to the world. We are demand-ing contributions to hunger and world health organizations equal to any further sell-offs. We are demanding that the board of X/L, and the boards of all companies, see beyond the narrow scope of its expansionist strategies to the world beyond, which is being crushed by eco-nomic apartheid.

This is not a plea. This is a demand.

Enjoy your wealth, Mr. Lightower. Your little Caitlin ............