Dr. Larry Fleinhardt's former college days friend Jonas Hoke, the Senior computer-science researcher, who develops for Robert Oliver's firm Lorman group with gifted college drop-out Scott Reynolds a classified program to evaluate government projects, is murdered in his Hollywood Hills home; data were stolen from his computer, which only contains a coded program for analysis of baseball statistics. Hoke's financial divorce complications seem irrelevant, although his wife had a relationship with their security system installer Lucas Grant. However Charlie finds that Hoke actually used the same kind of advanced statistic analysis and performance prediction on other data, cleverly masked under meaningless baseball numbers: Hoke applied this method cutting-edge to calculate human performance prospects in real life, based on various governmental and other data, potentially far more valuable...