1st Case - James Patterson Page 0,18

whatever the hell was going on.

I stood up now and aimed the burner’s camera out of the office window toward the water. After a few seconds, sure enough, another thumbnail showed up. This time, it was a shot of Boston Harbor through the streaky glass of our work space.

“Holy shit,” I let out.

Jonas, the other intern, popped up from the next bench. “What is it?” he asked. In the CART, expressions like “Holy shit” usually mean one of two things: something bad has happened, or something very cool has happened.

Or in this case, both.

“Go get Zack,” I said. “Right now.”

Zack Ciomek was the lead investigator in the CART, and this was something he was going to need to see.

While I waited, I put the phone facedown to keep the camera lens dark for the moment. Then I swiveled to search the app’s code on another one of my screens, where it didn’t take me long to confirm what I suspected. They’d put a command string right there in the main source code, programming the app to take a photo on a default of every ten seconds.

My heart was going considerably faster than that by now. I knew a hell of a lot more than I had ten minutes earlier, but still nothing about where this was taking us, exactly.

Suddenly, there were voices everywhere. The room had started to fill up. Word had obviously spread fast. I stood up to make room for Zack as he slid into my chair.

“What do we have?” he asked.

“It’s taking photos and sending them back without logging them on the phone itself,” I said. “Which means the user never knows it’s happening.”

“What else?” he asked, and pointed at my screen. “What are these thumbnails?”

“I’m not a hundred percent sure,” I said, “but maybe …”

I picked up the phone again and held it out in front of me. Then I did a quick lap around the room. By the time I came full circle, we had a dozen new thumbnails on the screen. That was a hell of a lot more than one every ten seconds.

“I think it’s mapping the space,” I said. I was 99 percent sure, anyway. “Some kind of geolocation function is telling it when the camera’s on the move. If it can track in three dimensions, it knows which parts of the room it’s seen and which need filling in.”

“And when to start taking pics faster because there’s more to see,” Jonas said behind me.

“Exactly,” I said.

“Holy … shit.”

It wasn’t over, either. Another window had just opened on the same screen, with no prompting from us. So far it just looked like one large, blurred image, but it also seemed to be resolving itself into focus. A thin, striped “thinking” bar cycled along the bottom edge as the pixels arranged and rearranged themselves.

“Is that compiling in 3-D?” Zack asked, his voice rising. It wasn’t really a question. That’s exactly what it was doing, and we all knew it now.

“This isn’t good,” one of the other investigators said.

“Someone call Billy Keats!” Zack yelled over his shoulder.

Already, a recognizable image of the CART was on the screen, with a small navigation tool in the corner. Zack used my mouse to pan back and forth, showing a 360 representation of the office around us, except for a few grayed-out blocks of space the camera had missed.

The implication hit me like bile in my stomach. This meant that someone, somewhere, had done the same thing to Gwen Petty’s bedroom, if not her whole house.

And the thing was, we’d only begun to crack this open. So what else was this app capable of? Or for that matter, how far was our mystery hacker going to get before we reached the bottom of the rabbit hole?

CHAPTER 19

IMMEDIATELY, THE SPECIAL agent in charge of the Boston field office, Audrey Gruss, called a full meeting in the big bull pen just outside the CART.

They had two rows of monitors set up at long tables, with screens on three walls showing crime scene photos, regional maps, screen caps from the app, and CNN on mute.

Keats and his other case agents were there. Also analysts from every department, including my team, physical forensics, and medical. Eve even conferenced in by video. She didn’t waste any time throwing me a bone, either.

“Angela, what else can this thing do?” Eve asked from her screen.

We’d already gotten a briefing from Zack, and now a few dozen pairs of eyes turned to look at me in