something that wasn’t there.
“So, it’s just a coincidence with Gwen Petty’s initials?” I asked.
“No. More like the opposite,” Keats said. “I think whoever’s doing this is getting better at it. That’s not good news, but it’s good to know, anyway.”
In other words, those .glp files really were a custom job—an upgrade to whatever digital trap this killer might have set for his previous victims. Which also raised the even more troubling question: where was all of this headed next?
I was awake now, for sure. Wide awake.
“I just need a minute,” I said. “I’ll hit the bathroom sink and be right back.”
“Good-bye, Angela,” Keats said. He started walking backward toward his own office and pointed me to the exit. “Believe it or not, the FBI will still be up and running when you get back. I’ll see you in eight hours.”
“Four,” I said. “I already had half a night’s sleep right here.”
“Fine.” He threw up his hands in surrender. “But don’t come back dragging.”
“I won’t,” I said. “Some of us just don’t need as much sleep as you old guys.”
“Shut up and go home,” he said, but he smiled, too.
Keats never let anyone forget that he was one of only two agents in the Northeast to make ASAC before they were thirty. So it was fun to take him down a notch or two about his age.
I didn’t mean to flirt, exactly. Or at least there was no endgame in mind. It was more like office-banter-as-smoke-screen, to help me avoid being completely intimidated. It’s not like I was gearing up to ask him out or anything like that. I didn’t even know if that was allowed.
But I will say this much. If Billy “Not the Poet” Keats had looked at me with those pale-blue Paul Newman eyes of his that morning and asked if I had dinner plans for Friday night, I knew exactly what my answer would have been.
CHAPTER 10
I DIDN’T NEED rest. What I needed was some off-grid time.
They say Einstein came up with his theory of relativity while riding a bike. And I say if it’s good enough for the father of modern physics, it’s good enough for me.
That’s why I keep my Giant Talon locked in the back of my car. The more thinking I need to do, the more I want to get out and hit the trail, which is surprisingly easy to do in Boston. It’s only ten miles from downtown to Blue Hills Reservation. I’d been known to squeeze in a ride in one hour—much less than the four hours for which Keats had barred me from the office.
By eight thirty that morning, I had a venti dark roast in me, half a pack of wintergreen Life Savers saving my breath, and a deserted parking lot at the Blue Hills trailhead. That meant I’d have the place to myself. I pulled my bike out of the back of the car, jumped on, and headed into the woods.
By the time I was pumping my way up the first leg of Tucker Hill Path, everything I’d learned in the last twenty-four hours had started clamoring for attention in my mind all over again. It wasn’t easy to shake off what I’d seen up to now, starting with the crime scene I’d witnessed. They certainly don’t set you up for that kind of thing at MIT.
Still, I knew I had a choice. I could wallow in the sadness and the grotesquerie or I could focus on solutions, and when I thought of it that way, it was a complete no-brainer.
I settled into an easy pedaling cadence and tried to focus.
Keats said he was looking for an older male, but I didn’t see why this couldn’t have been two people, or even more, operating together. Hackers work in unofficial dark net communities all the time. They’re competitive, too, with one another, but also with themselves. It’s always about doing better than, doing more than, reaching further than they did the last time around.
They just don’t usually kill people.
So what was I missing here? Where was that app on Gwen Petty’s phone? And how the hell did these assholes hide it so well? I had no idea, but one thing was for sure. I wasn’t going to roll over on this. It was my first real job and the stakes couldn’t have been higher.
Besides, like I said, hackers tend to be more than a little competitive, whether they’re wearing black hats or white. There was no way I’d be