had to do it consciously. I was living in a virtual fishbowl now, but if these guys were as smart as they seemed, this was exactly what they’d expect me to do.
I worked from memory, going back to every technology board, every chat space, and every seamy little dark net hangout I could think of where I’d seen signs of Hermes before.
The last time I’d tracked him, he’d all but advertised himself as a key player in this case. There had been signs of him everywhere I looked.
Now it was just the opposite. I spent a tedious three hours going page to page without finding a single indication that Hermes had ever existed. It was like someone had gone around scrubbing out every footprint and eating every bread crumb that had been all over the trail before.
Which meant one of two things to me: either our killers had pulled up stakes and moved their operations yet again, or the supposed connection between these sext murders, Hermes, and the Free Net Collective was just an elaborate bit of fiction.
My money was on the latter. Hackers do it all the time, laying down false leads as a smoke screen while they go about their real business elsewhere.
And Hermes hadn’t just been some garden-variety smoke screen, either, I realized. He’d been a trap. One that I’d fallen for, just like the half-baked wannabe they’d probably pegged me for.
I hated myself for the position we were in. Eve never would have fallen into this if it hadn’t been for me. Her words came filtering back into my mind now. If it’s this easy, it means they wanted you to find them, she’d told me. And she’d been right. Devastatingly so.
With any luck, Keats’s team was way ahead of me on all of this. Maybe by dawn, they’d have Eve home again and the killers would be in custody—or dead, for all I cared.
But until I knew any better, this little covert operation of mine was full steam ahead.
CHAPTER 71
I DIDN’T MEAN to fall asleep.
When I jerked awake, it took me a second to recompute where I was, and why. Everything flooded back in a nasty rush. The phone, set to vibrate, had woken me up. A new message had just come in.
Hey Angela. Wanna talk?
They’d been watching me sleep, hadn’t they? It was a disgusting feeling. But I also knew that any contact was better than none.
I’m here, I wrote back.
Any luck finding Hermes? he asked.
No, I answered. But you already knew that, didn’t you?
You were pretty obvious.
I wasn’t trying to hide. I was trying to get you to talk to me.
Well here I am. Did you get much sleep?
Where is Eve? I wrote.
I asked you a question first.
According to the Android, it was just before 9:00 a.m. The last I remembered, it had been coming up on seven. I could feel the last forty-eight hours dragging on me like a literal weight.
I slept a little, ok? Where is Eve?
She’s right here with me. Safe and sound.
WHO ARE YOU? I pounded out. If we’d been talking on the phone, I would have been screaming at him by now.
I’m nobody! he wrote. Who are you? Are you nobody, too?
A chill razored up my back. Even I recognized that line. It was from an Emily Dickinson poem.
This wasn’t the cold, authoritarian voice of whoever had sent me running around the city the night before. This was the poetry lover. The chameleon who had seduced Gwen Petty, and Nigella Wilbur, and Reese Sapporo by becoming whoever they needed him to be online.
We’d known for a while that there was more than one of these guys. Now the picture was becoming clearer. This was the chatty one. And the other guy was … what? The engineer? The executioner?
What do you want? I asked.
Send me a pic, he said. I’ll make it worth your while.
This app is programmed to take a picture every 10 seconds, I wrote. Why do you need me to send another one?
Don’t play dumb, he said. That’s not the kind of pic I mean. You know what I like.
It was getting seedier by the second. He was right. I did know what he liked. I’d seen more than enough of it in the leering, predatory sexts he’d traded with his young victims.
At the same time, I thought, if that’s what got this guy off, it meant there was something he wanted that I could control. That meant leverage, and even a tiny bit was more