Richie hung up again; he kept one hand on the phone, but instead of redialing he watched me, waiting. “We don’t have time for that,” I said. “We’ve got less than two days to charge Conor Brennan or release him. Anything on his computer that I should know about?”

“Not so far. No links to the vics—none of the same websites, no e-mails to or from. And I’m not seeing any deletions over the last few days, so it’s not like he wiped the good stuff when he knew we were coming—unless he wiped it so well I can’t even see that, and excuse me if this sounds arrogant but I don’t think so? Basically, he’s barely even touched his machine in the last six months. Occasionally he checked his e-mail, he did some design upkeep on a couple of websites, and he watched a bunch of National Geographic animal documentaries online, but that’s about it. Real thrill seeker, this guy.”

“Right,” I said. “Keep looking through the Spains’ computer. And keep me posted.”

I could hear the shrug in Kieran’s voice. “Sure, Kemosabe. One needle in a haystack coming up. Catch you later.”

For a treacherous second I thought of leaving it. Whatever else Pat had said about his vermin problem, out there in cyberspace, what difference did it make? All it would do was give people yet another excuse to write him off as some nutter. But Richie was watching me, hopeful as a puppy watching his leash, and I had promised. “Stay on that,” I said, nodding at the pest-control list. “I’ve got an idea.”

Even under stress, Pat had been an organized guy, efficient. In his place, I wouldn’t have bothered to re-type my whole saga when I switched discussion boards. Pat might not have been a computer genius, by Kieran’s standards, but I was willing to bet he had known how to copy and paste.

I pulled up his original posts, the Wildwatcher one and the home-and-garden one, and started pasting sentences into Google. It only took four tries before a post by Pat-the-lad came up.

“Richie,” I said. He was already scooting his chair over to my desk.

The website was an American one, a forum for hunters. Pat had shown up there on the last of July, almost two weeks after he flamed out on the home-and-garden site: he had spent a while licking his wounds, or searching for the right place, or it had just taken that long for his need for help to reach a pitch he couldn’t ignore.

Not much had changed. I hear it most days but no real pattern—sometimes could be 4/5 times in a day/night, sometimes nothing for 24 hours. Have had a video baby monitor rigged up in the attic for a while now but no joy—am wondering if maybe the animal’s actually in the space between the attic floor/the ceiling underneath—tried to check w torch but can’t see anything. So I’m planning to leave the attic hatch open and point another video monitor at the opening, see if this thing gets ballsy + decides to go exploring. (I’ll put chicken wire over the hatch so it doesn’t show up on one of my kids pillow, don’t worry, I’m not totally mental … yet anyway!)