They’d been working on Tate for four days now. It had been slow going, and they weren’t in complete agreement about how much progress they were making. Hendricks thought it was going well. Jenn was a little surprised at how long it was taking. She’d expected Tate to cave before now. The pathetic child molester had more backbone than she’d expected. What was certain was that Tate had accepted the fact that his situation was hopeless. He had come to see Jenn and Hendricks as the gods of his life. At this point, his game was admitting to just enough to make them happy without incriminating himself—a standard intermediary step. He talked in circles, but the circle was getting smaller every day.

For the first two days, he had clung to the fairy tale that he’d never even heard of Suzanne Lombard or her abduction. It was a stupid lie, and Hendricks had leaned on Tate hard enough to get him to give it up on Tuesday. They’d made Tate tell them the whole story. Tate was, if anything, an aficionado of the Suzanne Lombard case and knew it backward and forward. But so far Tate hadn’t told them anything that wasn’t in the public record and swore up and down that he didn’t know anything about hacking ACG.

“How much more do you want to push him today?” Hendricks asked. “He needs to eat. Sleep. Boy’s borderline incoherent at this point.”

Jenn nodded. Hendricks was right. They were in danger of breaking Tate, but not in a productive way. She would need to update George. He wasn’t going to like it. Calista was on his back to produce results, and every day they were here increased their chances of detection. That would not be good, to put it mildly. It didn’t matter one bit what Tate had done. If she and Hendricks got caught with Tate, they were all going away for a long, long time.

Hendricks’s phone buzzed in his hand. He looked at it, puzzled at first, but then confused and worried.

“What is it?” she asked.

“It’s Vaughn’s virus.”

“What about it?”

“It just went off.”

Gibson lay flat on his stomach and watched Jenn and Hendricks peel off matching jumpsuits. He was on the roof of a storage unit at the far end of Grafton Storage that offered an unobstructed view of Jenn and Hendricks’s little operation. He didn’t know precisely what was happening to Tate, but he had a pretty good idea. The fact that it required ski masks made him a little sick. Tate was vile. No question. But that didn’t justify whatever was happening down in that storage locker.