1st Case - James Patterson Page 0,11

shower in the guest bath. Borrowing a fresh shirt, I threw on my previous day’s suit and found Eve at her big glass desk with the baby monitor next to her.

“I got a peek at your .glp files,” she said, waggling a phone I didn’t recognize. “Come take a look at this.”

Who else but Eve kept a supply of iPhone and Android burners at home, much less with access to FBI case files? She’d already loaded a copy of Gwen Petty’s operating system onto an actual handset.

“What am I looking at?” I said while she swiped from one screen to the next, back and forth, back and forth.

“Look at the lower right corner,” Eve said, and swiped again, left, right, left, right. “You see that tiny refraction when I change the screen?”

“No,” I said.

“Here.” She gave me the phone, and I tried it myself. That’s when I finally saw it, just a slight ripple, like that corner of the phone’s wallpaper went watery as I swiped in and out.

“Wait, what?” I said. “No way.”

“I think so,” she said.

It was an invisible button, or at least it seemed to be. I put my finger on that spot and held it there, waiting to see if anything would happen. And then sure enough, after about five seconds, the screen opened up into an app I’d never seen before.

The interface itself wasn’t fancy, or even particularly well designed. It looked like a simple chat program, as far as I could tell. There were icons to access the camera; the keyboard, which was rudimentary compared to most current standards; and a Send button. That was it. The amazing part was how well it had hidden itself, not just on the phone’s screen but in the operating system.

“I don’t get it,” I said. “Where are they keeping the files for this?”

“We’ll find out,” Eve said. “But sometimes, Angela, you’ve got to look up from the files. It’s not always about the code.”

A little wave of anger passed over me. Frankly, I wasn’t used to being outsmarted.

“Should I even be on here?” I asked. It was a little late for that question, but Eve shook her head.

“It’s fine. That handset’s cloaked. You can’t even go online,” she said. “And I’ll wipe it as soon as we’re done.”

That was easy enough for her to say. She was Eve Abajian, as in the Eve Abajian, FBI superhero. I was still just Angela Hoot, lowly intern. My security clearance couldn’t even touch Eve’s.

Not that I was going to say no to any of this. If Eve was comfortable sharing it with me, that’s all I needed to know.

I looked down at the phone screen again. There was no chat history, or even a way to access one that I could tell.

“What about the .glp files?” I asked.

“Try refreshing,” she said, and hit two keys on her keyboard. “Now.”

I closed and reopened the app. When I did, it was suddenly populated with thirty-one new messages.

“Just like that?” I asked.

“Yeah, but if it’s this easy, it means they wanted you to find them,” Eve said, echoing my own thought. “Don’t ever forget that. It’s a completely different premise. They could have squirreled these away much more deeply if they’d wanted to.”

“They’re putting on some kind of show,” I said.

“Exactly,” she said.

The problem was, everything had been scrubbed clean. There were no date stamps, no metadata to trace back the files, and certainly no forensic watermarking. All we had to go on was what we could see.

The files turned out to be a combination of images and text. The images were clear enough. There were no faces, but a lot of body parts. Some of them were coy—an open blouse, an unbuttoned pair of jeans—but it got more explicit from there.

The rest were text fragments, from what seemed to be an ongoing conversation. Or a seduction, I guess. It was horrifying to read through, knowing what was waiting for Gwen Petty at the end of it all.

The texts were also arranged in what seemed like a random order and chopped up into pieces. There was no way to know what wasn’t there, or how much of the conversation we were missing. Any number of other files could have been overwritten since they were deleted, in which case we’d never get them back.

Or maybe they’d been deliberately left off by the killer, excising anything that might reveal more than he wanted us to know. I had no idea yet how much control the