After the events of last Friday, Alex had requested she bring forward her relocation to the satellite office that Cramer, Parker & Gray had recently established at Quantico so she could more easily continue on this Joint Task Force that was working to capture this sadistic killer.

She’d been looking for a place to buy down here and Alex suddenly had a friend from the BAU who was selling and had already moved into a bigger property. It had happened so fast Yael couldn’t believe she was finally a homeowner. The house was fantastic and had great security, too. Alex had been fastidious about her personal safety ever since her face had been seen by one of the country’s most dangerous serial killers. She knew he was worried about what had happened last week. She’d be lying if she said she was cool with it. More than anything, she was angry. At herself, at Evi1Geni-us. At anyone who thought it was okay to hurt other people for pleasure or because they’d had a bad day.

Her thoughts flinched away from the direction they’d taken.

Evi1Geni-us hadn’t broadcast her identity to the world, or doxxed her. Yet.

It was another reason why moving and buying a house through a private sale and via the shell company Alex had set up to thwart anyone trying to track her down had seemed like an excellent idea. It didn’t stop someone figuring out where she lived by simply following her home. She needed to be vigilant. Alex had offered to give her some lessons in surveillance detection this weekend which she planned to take him up on.

They’d already gone over her online security and had taken some precautions. The vulnerability in her system had been inserted as an executable script when she’d begun tracking the computer streaming the video. They’d assumed Evi1Geni-us was busy torturing Anya Baker when in fact he’d been doing to her what she’d been doing to him.

Hunting.

And he’d had the advantage. He’d somehow known they were operating out of the FBI’s Houston Field Office. He’d set a trap and, despite knowing better, she’d fallen straight into it.

She’d since rewritten her programs to detect anything like it in the future and three independent experts, including a certain pissy Special Agent Chen, had gone over every pixel, every byte, every line of code, and every physical component of her machine—and every other machine in that FBI operations room last week to confirm they were clean. Evi1Geni-us hadn’t done any real damage to them. Just shaken their confidence and made them look like fools.