“Scissors,” Alex told Chen who was sitting at her console with her mouse hovering over the vote buttons.

The way Alex said it made Yael’s stomach churn. He’d been chasing this guy for a long time and she didn’t want to imagine what happened to Anya if the watchers voted “knife.”

The feed from the crime scene was being shown on a large screen on the wall. Yael kept her eyes away from the images and concentrated instead on the software, which was coded in Python.

One of the Hostage Rescue Team operators sat heavily in the empty chair beside her. “What sort of psycho spends their New Year’s Day terrorizing women?” He sported a sling and plaster cast on his left arm and a lethal-looking gun in a thigh holster on his right.

Yael frowned and sent him a quick glance. He met her gaze with the greenest eyes she’d ever seen. He looked pissed.

“Maybe it’s not their New Year.” She fixed her attention back to the screen, determined to ignore the presence of this very large, armed male sitting so close by.

“Good point.” Ashley Chen gifted her a nod. “We need to send that observation to the profilers and see if it fits any other patterns of behavior.”

The man on screen—dressed completely in black except for the scary Scream mask—moved out of sight and a second camera came online, this one with a bird’s eye view of Anya Baker’s face. Evi1Geni-us walked over to a table and picked up a pair of tailor’s shears. He dramatically snipped them in front of the camera before very carefully starting to cut up the woman’s jeans leg from the bottom to the top.

Anya’s expression suggested she was screaming but there was no sound. There was never any sound on these videos, which lent the whole thing a surreal quality that was also stomach churning.

Yael tried to breathe slowly in and out, the way she’d been taught when dealing with stressful situations. Don’t look at the screen.

According to Alex, Evi1Geni-us had started selling the actual sound recordings as exclusive non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the dark web. Yael didn’t know which was worse—Evi1Geni-us for doing the crime, or the customers buying this shit. Only so many of the attendees could be law enforcement and she knew Alex had spent a lot of time and effort creating several shady personas to be in a position to receive multiple invitations.

“Getting some information off the blockchains. It’s a lot easier doing this in real time than trying to figure it out after the fact,” said Laura.

After the auctions, Evi1Geni-us transferred the money to hardware wallets that were then disconnected from the internet and put in “cold” storage, which basically made them untraceable until he decided to spend that money. Unfortunately, he could probably cash out in a crypto exchange before they even caught up with the fact he was online.

Identifying the people who were paying to watch however…much simpler.