Jerome gives a hard jerk. One hand brushes Dinah’s Zappit and knocks it to the floor. Jerome looks at Holly with an expression of surprise so exaggerated it would be funny under other circumstances.

“What just happened? Did I go to sleep?”

Holly collapses into the chair ordinarily reserved for clients. She takes a deep breath and wipes her cheeks, which are damp with sweat.

“In a way,” Hodges says. “The game hypnotized you. Like it hypnotized your sister.”

“Are you sure?” Jerome asks, then looks at his watch. “I guess you are. I just lost fifteen minutes.”

“Closer to twenty. What do you remember?”

“Tapping the pink fish and turning them into numbers. It’s surprisingly hard to do. You have to watch closely, really concentrate, and the blue flashes don’t help.”

Hodges picks the Zappit up off the floor.

“I wouldn’t turn that on,” Holly says sharply.

“Not going to. But I did last night, and I can tell you there were no blue flashes, and you could tap pink fish until your finger went numb without getting any numbers. Also, the tune is different now. Not much, but a little.”

Holly sings, pitch perfect: “‘By the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful sea, you and me, you and me, oh how happy we’ll be.’ My mother used to sing it to me when I was little.”

Jerome is staring at her with more intensity than she can deal with, and she looks away, flustered. “What? What is it?”

“There were words,” he says, “but not those.”

Hodges heard no words, only the tune, but doesn’t say so. Holly asks Jerome if he can remember them.

His pitch isn’t as good as hers, but it’s close enough for them to be sure that yes, it’s the tune they heard. “‘You can sleep, you can sleep, it’s a beautiful sleep . . . ’” He stops. “That’s all I can remember. If I’m not just making it up, that is.”

Holly says, “Now we know for sure. Someone amped the Fishin’ Hole screen.”

“Shot it full of ’roids,” Jerome adds.

“What does that even mean?” Hodges asks.

Jerome nods to Holly and she says, “Someone loaded a stealth program into the demo, which is mildly hypnotic to begin with. The program was dormant when Dinah had the Zappit, and still dormant when you looked at it last night, Bill—which was lucky for you—but someone turned it on after that.”

“Babineau?”

“Him or someone else, if the police are right and Babineau is dead.”

“It could have been a preset,” Jerome says to Holly. Then, to Hodges: “You know, like an alarm clock.”

“Let me get this straight,” Hodges says. “The program was in there all along, and only became active once Dinah’s Zappit was turned on today?”

“Yes,” Holly says. “There’s probably a repeater at work, don’t you think, Jerome?”

“Yeah. A computer program that pumps out the update constantly, waiting for some schlub—me, in this case—to turn on a Zappit and activate the WiFi.”