They watched Bradley for ten tense minutes, urging him silently to do something. Periodically, the Wax Man would pause typing and look over the top of his laptop toward the kids on the grass and lick his lips wetly.

“What’s he doing?” Hendricks asked.

“Besides making my skin crawl? Not a lot,” Jenn said.

“I’ll second that.”

“Yeah, well, him being creepy is all academic if he doesn’t actually access ACG,” Hendricks said.

“I wish I had good news, but no joy there,” said Gibson.

Abruptly, the Wax Man shut his laptop, shoved it into his backpack, and walked briskly toward the street.

“Where the hell is he going?” Jenn asked.

“Did we spook him?”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “Hendricks, he’s rounding the corner toward you in three, two, one . . .”

Hendricks grunted an affirmative. “Got him. Oh, yeah, I see what you mean. That is not a well guy. He’s getting into a late-model Ford. Started it. Annnnnnnd, he’s out of here.”

“Damn it,” Jenn said.

“Well, I got model and plates,” Hendricks said. “But if that was our guy, then yeah, I’d say we just got made.”

“And if he isn’t?” Gibson asked.

“Then I guess he had somewhere to be.”

“Do we go after him?”

“No,” Jenn cut in. “Nothing we can do about it now. We maintain the stakeout and assume he wasn’t our guy. We have enough data that we can follow up later if we need to.”

With that, the three of them settled into a state of advanced, professional waiting otherwise known in the trade as excruciating boredom. By four o’clock, the park was still busy but fairly static. No one new using a Wi-Fi-enabled device had come or gone in thirty minutes. Gibson was tracking fourteen users logged in to the library’s Wi-Fi. Nine outside and five inside. Outside, he had four on tablets or e-readers—two white women, a white man in his twenties, and a silver-haired African American man who had to be at least eighty. That left five outside on laptops, also a mix of genders and ethnicities, with three of particular interest.

The first was a squat, powerfully built white male in his late thirties. His computer’s registry identified him as Kirby Tate. His nondescript face was completely out of proportion with his enormous shoulders and chest, and he looked like someone had Photoshopped a kid’s face onto a man’s body. The result wasn’t pretty, but the man seemed to like the effect, since he was wearing tight khaki shorts and a tank top several sizes too small. Gibson knew the type—had served with the type—guys who would wear a tank top in a blizzard.