Her foot tapped nervously against the footrest. She doubted he’d even remember her. He’d lost one of his colleagues that day and she knew that didn’t happen to these guys very often. They trained too hard to mess up.

One of the group raised his beer bottle in a toast she couldn’t quite hear over the noise of the jukebox. The others joined him in the salute. She recalled suddenly that Alex had gone to the funeral yesterday of the man who’d died.

They were toasting their lost colleague, Dave “Scotty” Monteith.

Yael rubbed her hand over the base of her sternum as the few things she’d eaten and drunk tonight swirled uncomfortably in her stomach. How disrespectful would it look that she was here having a drink and some food as if nothing had happened?

Did they all know how badly she’d messed up? If she’d been faster or simply better at her job, she might have figured out Evi1Geni-us wasn’t where he was pretending to be. Sure, a laptop had been streaming the video feed of the torture while Anya Baker’s blood-streaked corpse had slowly cooled and stiffened in real time—and Yael had tracked that VPN-cloaked computer faster than almost anyone else on the planet could have done. But the UNSUB himself had already left the building after uploading the sound-stripped version of the video with the prepared fake polls. The bastard had also set up cameras to film the HRT explosion from two angles—one inside the room, one outside—presumably recording the footage before cutting the connection and, once again, disappearing into the ether. Apparently, he liked to have video evidence of his crimes which would be great if they ever caught him. It was unlikely he’d trust that sort of information to the cloud. More likely he had multiple copies squirreled away somewhere.

She wanted to help track him down along with that evidence.

Then she wanted him incarcerated somewhere he could never hurt anyone else ever again. Or dead.

As much as she was generally opposed to violence, she’d make an exception in this case. She was fine with this man ceasing to exist as long as it stopped the killings.

He’d made over a million dollars last week alone and people had even sent him bonuses when he’d played the footage of the explosion, mocking the FBI and their efforts to catch him. She’d expected her face and online alias to also be streamed at the end of the video. What twisted serial killer/black-hat hacker wouldn’t be bragging about turning the tables on the people hunting him?

But he’d held that piece of information back for now.