“And you’re equivocal again.” Benton’s not going to tell me why he thinks that.

It’s not his style to lead the witness even if the witness is his wife, and I take another drink of water as I think for a moment. He’s right. I’m uncertain, and then it occurs to me why.

“It’s too uniform, too homogenous,” I explain what I’ve been picking up on but couldn’t identify. “There aren’t the variations I might expect. There’s something stilted and unnatural about it.”

“In other words it sounds artificial or canned. Fake, in other words,” he says, and I wonder if this came from Lucy. “We can’t tell if it’s synthetized.” He answers my unspoken question about my niece. “But Lucy agrees that it’s strangely consistent from one comment to the next. She says that if it’s been enhanced or altered—”

“Wait a minute. If you got the audio file from the police, then how could it have been altered?”

“Lucy introduced the idea of a voice changer similar to what gamers are into. There are a lot of these apps on the market, although not the quality of whatever this person used. The typical voice disguised by software tends to sound obviously fake like a poor animation. It’s within the realm of possibility the caller has proprietary highly sophisticated software that changes your voice as you speak into the phone—”

“And it sounds different from your usual voice but normal to whoever’s on the other end.” I finish his thought because I already know what’s next.

Benton asks if I think it’s possible that my cyber-stalker Tailend Charlie is the one who called 911 and lied about me.

“Indicating this individual is stepping things up,” my husband adds. “Escalating whatever his game is, and we know without question that Tailend Charlie is technically sophisticated.”

“Let’s hope that’s not who placed the nine-one-one call because it would suggest he was in close proximity to me today,” I reply. “And I’ve been hoping whoever the cyber-bully is he’s not in Cambridge. Preferably he’s on the other side of the planet.”

“It strikes me as a little too coincidental that you began getting the e-mailed threats only a week ago, all of them altered audio clips. And now this,” Benton says.

“So tell me, Mr. Profiler.” I press my leg against his, and the fabric of his suit is smooth and cool against my bare skin. “What do you have to say about someone who calls nine-one-one to report your wife for being a C-U-Next-Tuesday?”

CHAPTER 8

MALE. AND NOT OLD. But not young,” Benton says. “I doubt it’s a student unless we’re talking about a mature one.”

“As in a graduate student?”