Gibson crawled into bed in his clothes. In a perfect world, he would have slept for eighteen hours. In the real one, he slept for six and tossed and turned for three more as his body tried and failed to sleep through all the caffeine. By nine, he was showered and shaved, gear packed. He stepped out blinking into the morning sunshine.

Hendricks and Jenn had been busy. In the last forty-eight hours, they had fine-tuned Hendricks’s camera array, which now not only covered the library’s entrances but also all the approaches to the library. Jenn had scouted the neighborhood for low-profile spots that provided some privacy and were still in range of the library. Hendricks had cameras trained on those too.

“Bad news is that the library’s core demographic appears to be white men between forty-five and sixty,” Hendricks said.

“Yeah, we’ve got photos of twenty-six men entering the library since Monday morning who fall within our profile’s age range. We sent them back to DC. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

“You think he’s one of them?”

“Hendricks thinks not. I’m on the fence.”

“I just don’t think this guy would hang around the library reading periodicals,” Hendricks said. “Doesn’t fit for me. I think he does his thing, keeps a low profile, and gets out of there.”

“And I think he may be so comfortable on his home turf that that’s exactly what he would do,” said Jenn. “But we’ve got so few data points on this creep that it’s kind of academic. He’s going to blend in unless we have a way to pick him out. Which brings us to . . .” She trailed off.

“My program,” Gibson said.

“Does it work?” she asked.

“I think so. But I won’t know for sure until I get it out in the field.”

“Can’t you test it first?” Hendricks asked.

“I have, to an extent, and it works as a simulation without crashing, but unless you want to wait while I build a dummy of the library’s network, then there’s no way to know for sure without just going ahead.”

“How does it install?” Jenn asked.

“Thumb drive. Just need to get into the librarian’s office for two minutes.”

“Sounds doable. Hendricks and I will go take care of it. You hang back here, and we’ll let you know when it’s installed, and you can fire it up remotely and see if it works.”

“Yeah, that’s probably a bad idea,” Gibson said.

Jenn paused, started to get angry, and stopped herself. “Why? Is it too complicated for us poor Luddites to operate?”

“No, actually it’s just one mouse click.”

“Then what?”

“Well, you said the library is full of guys that match our perp, right?”

“Right . . .”

“Well, what if he’s one of them?”

“That’s kind of the point,” said Hendricks.