James Patterson - Private

This was a bombshell, actually.

Sci turned to Kit-Kat, his open mouth curling into a smile.

“Two males put their hands on Wendy Borman’s clothes. You believe it, Kat? We’ve got evidence. Beautiful, solid evidence.”

Kat was saying, “I must be bringing you the luck.”

“Baby, baby, what a lucky charm you are.”

“So, you are welcome, and I will be going now.”

“Stick around while I run the profiles through the system.”

“You are looking for a spindle in a haystack,” said Kat. “And there are haystacks out to the horizon. As far as the eye can see.”

“We can pass the time together, anyway,” said Sci. “I like it when you’re here with me.”

Kat smiled. “Okay. Let’s dance, good-looking.”

Everybody at private was involved with Schoolgirl, and they all cared about the case. Mo-bot was in her pod in the lab down the hall from Sci. She’d personalized her windowless space with a recliner, scarves draped over her lamps, a slide show of her kids on the monitor to her left, an aquarium of utsuri to her right, and incense burning at all times.

Jason Pilser’s laptop was open in front of her.

Mo used a unique program she’d developed. She called it her “master key.” She had already begun to pick Pilser’s passwords, frisk his hard drive, rifle through the remains of his electronic brain.

“I’m into his e-mail,” she called out to Sci. “I’m the best. Right, Sci?”

“Motherboard of all geeks, Mo,” he called back to her.

“You got that right. Watch me now.”

Jason Pilser had been a pack rat when it came to electronic communication. He deleted nothing, and he utilized several screen names. Mo easily cracked open his office account, skimmed the memos to and from his bosses and colleagues. They revealed nothing, meant nothing, led to nothing, so she moved on.

Pilser’s Commandos of Doom mailbox was listed under the screen name Atticus. Mo-bot attacked the password and it fell. Then she ransacked the suspect’s files. Pilser used “Atticus” to enter gamer message boards and send private messages while he pillaged kingdoms and slaughtered foes in the virtual netherworld of Quaraziz, circa 2409. What a fricking dork this guy must have been.

Mo made note of his friends and enemies in Quaraziz, then accessed Pilser’s MyBook page with her electronic passkey.

Pilser had posted photos of himself on his page, blogged movie reviews, hailed and poked his MyBook “friends.” But there was nothing on his web page more sinister than political vitriol. No screen names crossed over from Commandos of Doom to MyBook, and Mo found no indication that Jason Pilser had been depressed. Though it sure was depressing to probe into his life.

Closing his mail folders, Mo-bot clicked through the icons on Pilser’s toolbar. One intrigued her-a graphic of lightning shooting from a pointed finger. It was captioned “Scylla.”

Mo-bot clicked on the link and was taken to a new web page. Pilser had titled the page “Scylla Lives.” It was a trapdoor to Pilser’s personal journal-and it almost stopped Mo’s heart.

She read quickly, clicked through links, then found a bridge between the real and virtual worlds.

She pushed away from her desk, and her chair rolled back. A moment later, she was standing in the doorway to Sci’s office.

Sci stared as if he were looking through her.

What was wrong with him? Didn’t he get it? She’d unlocked the whole damned murder plan. She was the female modern-day Sherlock Holmes.

“Less than a week from now,” she said, “there’s going to be a Freek Night. You hear me, Sci? That’s what they call their killing game. Jason Pilser would’ve been part of it-if he’d lived.”

“I’m sorry. I’m distracted. I’m running the DNA-”

Mo said, “Listen to the words coming out of my mouth. There are two of them. They call themselves Street Freeks. Their screen names are Morbid and Steemcleena, and they’ve already picked their target. She lives in Silver Lake, calls herself Lady D.

“Sci. Are you getting this? In five days, they’re going to kill this girl.”

Jack had called ahead to Private’s new East Coast office. A senior operative, Diana DiCarlo, was waiting at the gate when Emilio Cruz disembarked at Miami International Airport.

CIA trained, DiCarlo was very efficient. She handed Cruz a briefcase with everything he would need: gun, surveillance equipment, car keys, and phone numbers of Private sources throughout South Florida. And she told Cruz where his subjects were staying.

Cruz checked in to the Biltmore, the room directly above the men he was tailing. He set up his microphones and listened.

Later, he followed his subjects from the hotel to clubs and restaurants, even watched them place their bets at the dog track in Hialeah.

Now, three days into the job, he was in South Beach, the flashiest, sexiest part of old Miami.

Emilio Cruz was sitting on a coral-rock wall, the beach rolling out before him to the ocean’s edge. He was dressed to blend in, wearing a wife beater under an open shirt, black wraparound shades, hair banded at his nape.

He appeared to be engrossed in the daily racing form, but it was a prop. He had a camera eye embedded in the frames of his sunglasses that was not just taping; the images were bouncing off a satellite a couple of miles overhead, sending pictures and sound back to the office in LA.

Directly ahead and maybe thirty feet away, three men sat on a bench facing away from him and toward Ocean Drive.

They were talking together, but their eyes were on the inked, half-naked girls skating by on the hot plum-colored sidewalk.

The two men Cruz had been following were Kenny Owen and Lance Richter. Both were NFL referees. Owen was bald and freckled. Richter was twenty years younger, with a lot of bushy brown hair, a fresh sunburn, and a gaudy Rolex watch that must have weighed a pound.

Five minutes ago, the refs had been joined by Victor Spano, a lieutenant in the Chicago-based Marzullo family.

Cruz had almost said it out loud.

Holy shit.

Spano looked freshly showered and wore a shoulder holster under his ice blue jacket. He was telling the refs about the good time he’d had last night at the Nautilus Hotel across the street. There was no sexier town in America than Miami, not even Vegas.

“The mother was a little hotter than her kid. But the kid was more enthusiastic.”

Richter shrugged and said, “Mr. Spano, wasn’t that, like, incest?”

“Nah,” Spano said. “It was her stepmother. What do you think? I’m a pervert?”

Everyone laughed. The kid with the hair said, “But seriously, Mr. Spano. Back to the assignment we have this week. Tennessee by seventeen points at Oakland? Seventeen points is no walk in the park, and we could be under a lot of pressure here.”

Spano said, “I follow your point, Lance, but you know what they say. Pressure is self-inflicted. You guys are pros. I don’t see a problem.”

A homeless teen with meth mouth and wearing a Speedo and a dirty green shirt came over to Cruz and asked for some spare change for his college fund.

Cruz said, “You’re standing in my sun.”

The kid-already a bum-said, “It’s why they call it spare change, dude. You won’t miss it.”

By the time the fresh kid had pushed off, Spano and the refs had finished their meeting and split up, Spano returning to the art deco hotel across the street, the refs inside a cab heading downtown.

It didn’t matter. Cruz had the whole story. The Titans were favored to mow the Raiders down. The refs had to prevent a massacre and protect that seventeen-point spread. If they did, someone was going to make a whole lot of millions.