“That’s him,” I said. “The guy who broke in.” I squinted. “I think. It’s close, but … ” The image was similar, but with additional details that Sheldon’s interpolation hadn’t been able to provide. For one, the male-pattern baldness that left the typical fringe around the sides and back of his head. Or the fact that he’d let his remaining hair grow way too long. Even without the evidence of the website, I’d have tagged him as a nutbar.

“I’m pretty sure this is right,” Nat said. “Sheldon’s picture was a composite, remember. But it’s a pretty good hit. This is Phil Ross, the nuttiest saucer nut ever spawned. Came out of nowhere about three years ago. Real tinfoil hat stuff. And he has our scent.” She scrolled down farther, then clicked a link. Up popped images of my workbench, the ceiling of the barn, and the dirt floor behind the bales of hay, where an unplugged extension cord lay and an impression of a chest freezer could clearly be seen. A caption under the picture said, “Is this where the alien corpse was stored?”

I let my jaw drop. “Oh, freakin’ hell. How?”

“I have a theory,” Nat said. She alt-tabbed and one of Patrick’s videos came up. “Patrick, you yutz, you have geolocation turned on. Your videos of Alaric all have the GPS coordinates of this barn embedded in them. And when your brother posted the video clip, he didn’t strip the metadata. I bet this Ross character downloaded it before Tim took it down, and found the coordinates. From there it’s just Google Maps.”

“Shit. Fuck. Hell. Jesus Christ. Also, shit.” Patrick unlocked his phone and began poking at it. “Okay, it’s turned off now. Too late, of course.”

“And on that happy note,” I said, “what delightful news did you have for us, Patrick?”

“Oh yeah. Tim wants in. He’s not sure what in means, specifically, but he’s seen enough of my videos to realize that something’s up. He’s threatening to blow the whistle. Of course, at this point, I would consider disappearing him to be a reasonable response.”

“Let’s deal with discussions of fratricide later,” I said. “Right now, we need to be concerned about security.” I took my communicator out and put it on the table. “Sheldon, we’ll need you to be an active participant in this discussion. We need to guard against human interlopers, Lorann snoopers, and curious relatives. We can start with things like bars on all the windows, locks on the doors, and go from there.”

“I will manufacture bars and locks, and also additional cloaking detectors. You can place enough of them around the perimeter so that no one can sneak in. They will report to me via subwave.”

“Subwave?”

“Subspace radio. Technically inaccurate but metaphorically descriptive.”

“Uh, do you have to open a wormhole?”