1st Case - James Patterson Page 0,34

and the way my mind worked. It was the same reason he’d brought me along in the first place.

He didn’t want to change locations, either. If we moved Nigella’s phone away from school property, the app she’d downloaded would track our movements and send that information right back to whoever was on the other end. So we stayed put.

A few minutes later, I was carefully placing the phone into a borrowed backpack to blind the camera. Then I carried it down the hall to the same room where we’d interviewed Nigella. Keats closed the door from the outside and watched through the glass while I silently got to work. We couldn’t afford to be seen, heard, or detected here.

I took the phone and carefully laid it flat on the table in front of me. The only thing the camera would see from that angle was ceiling tiles.

Then I opened the app and typed in my first message, going for Nigella’s “voice” as best I could. I’d read through her texts that morning. It was all the research I had time for.

Heyyyy! You still there?

For several long minutes, nothing happened. I kept looking at Keats, and he stared back encouragingly, keeping to his side of the glass until finally a little swoosh sound told me a new message had come through.

I looked down without leaning into the camera’s range and read what was there.

Hey sexy.

This was it. Whether it was coming from a killer, or someone who hired killers, or even just one cog in a much bigger machine, it was our first direct contact of any kind. Talk about going from zero to sixty in one shot. My adrenaline was uncomfortably high, but I knew what I had to do. I carefully keyboarded in a reply, making sure I stayed out of the camera’s way.

Can’t stand this place!! I said. I’m ditching. you still wanna meet?

He came back at me almost immediately.

For real? Hell yeah.

I gave Keats a thumbs-up to let him know it was progressing.

Awsome … where? I asked.

I’ll come to you, he said. What school?

Boston Latin, I answered.

I was just kidding, he said. I know what school you go to.

you do? I asked.

Sure. I know a lot about you, he said. And then, Like for instance, I know this isn’t you.

Right on top of that, a photo came through. It was a snapshot of the school, taken from across the street. When I pinched it open to enlarge it, I realized what I was seeing. It showed Nigella standing on the sidewalk out front, along with me, Keats, and several other agents, just after we’d found her.

My mouth literally dropped open. I heard a soft tap on the glass and looked up at Keats’s confused expression. Then I heard one more swoosh sound.

When I looked down, I saw that another text had come in.

You people are seriously underestimating me. Fuck off.

CHAPTER 37

THEY FOUND THE corresponding phone in a trash can just up the street from Boston Latin. It was just a cheap burner, the kind of thing anyone can pick up at a convenience store or a Best Buy, use anonymously, and then ditch without any danger of getting tracked down.

Even so, it felt like a taunt as much as anything. My guess was that we were meant to find the phone, as a little reminder of how closely we’d been observed all morning and how little we could do with that information. Keats couldn’t even put out an APB, since we had no idea who we were looking for. The whole team worked for several hours, combing the neighborhood, but it was a lost cause.

When Keats and I headed back to the field office, it was just after six o’clock. Neither of us had eaten a thing since breakfast, so we picked up some sandwiches on the way. We got as far as the parking lot before we broke down and decided to eat them right there in the car. I guess Billy was as starving as I was.

“You really rolled with it today,” he told me. “How are you doing?”

“I’m fine,” I said.

“You know, you say that a lot,” he told me. “And the more you do, the less I tend to believe it. I saw you get pretty emotional back there, during the interview with Nigella. I’m sorry if I put you in a tough position—”

“You didn’t,” I said, mostly because I didn’t want him to think so. However tough my position might have been,