“Let’s go down and you show me what machine he was at. We might be able to pull prints.”

I shook my head.

“Forget it. He was wearing driving gloves. In fact, even the ceiling cameras down there won’t help you. He was wearing a cowboy hat, sunglasses—his whole getup was a disguise.”

“We’ll pull the video anyway. Maybe there will be something that will help us.”

“I doubt it.”

I shook my head again, more to myself than to Rachel.

“He got right next to me.”

“That trick with the prison secretary’s e-mail shows he has a certain skill set. I think it would be wise to consider your e-mail accounts to be breached at this point.”

“But that doesn’t explain how he knew about me in the first place. In order for him to breach my e-mail, he had to know about me.”

I slapped the bed in annoyance and nodded my head.

“Okay, I don’t know how he knew about me, but I did send e-mails last night. To both my editor and my partner on the story, telling them that the story was changing and that I was following a lead to Vegas. I talked to my editor today and he said he never got it.”

Rachel nodded knowingly.

“Destroying outgoing communications. That would fall under isolation of the target. Did your partner get his?”

“It’s a her and I don’t know if she got it because she’s not answering her phone or her e-mail and she didn’t—”

I stopped in my verbal tracks and looked at Rachel.

“What?”

“She didn’t show up for work today. She didn’t call in and nobody could reach her. They even sent somebody to her apartment but they got no answer.”

Rachel abruptly stood up.

“We’ve got to go back to L.A., Jack. The chopper’s waiting.”

“What about my interview? And you said you were going to pull the video from downstairs.”

“What about your partner? The interview and video can wait till later.”

Embarrassed, I nodded and got off the bed. It was time to go.

I had no idea where Angela Cook lived. I told Rachel what I did know about her, including her odd fixation with the Poet case, and that I’d heard she had a blog but had never read it. Rachel transmitted all the information to an agent in L.A. before we boarded the military chopper and headed south toward Nellis Air Force Base.

On the flight there we wore headsets, which cut down on the engine noise but didn’t allow for conversation that wasn’t in sign language. Rachel took my files and spent the hour with them. I watched her making comparisons between the crime scene and autopsy reports of Denise Babbit and Sharon Oglevy. She worked with a look of complete concentration on her face and took notes on a legal pad she’d pulled out of her own bag. She spent a lot of time looking at the horrible photos of the dead women, taken both at the crime scene and on the autopsy table.