Ordinarily, he avoided using forged letters; there were too many ways to get tripped up, but he’d been assured that no one would question this one.

Satisfied with the scene, he went back to the bedroom and took Doctor Furst’s shoes off and placed them beside the bed—side by side with the toes pointing away from her. He didn’t know why he felt the urge to do that, but it allowed him to leave a scene. The shoes felt final, somehow.

Tinsley let himself out quietly. It was beginning to rain; the drops were heavy and landed like little wet bodies hitting the sidewalk. Tinsley hardly registered it other than to appreciate that the street where the good doctor had lived was deserted as a result. He took off his latex gloves and slipped away into the shadows.

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY

Early Friday morning, Jenn woke Gibson unceremoniously by flipping on the lights and clapping her hands like a drill instructor. He was pretty sure he’d locked the door.

“It’s five twenty-eight,” Jenn said.

That was all she’d come to say, apparently. She left the motel room door open behind her and went, he assumed, in search of baby ducks to berate. Hendricks appeared a minute later and put a large coffee on his end table.

“Morning, sunshine. Equipment check in sixty, and then she wants to review the game plan.”

Twenty minutes later, Gibson’s motel room looked like a low-rent command center. He’d flipped his mattress up against the wall and placed an array of laptops, monitors, and keyboards in a semicircle on the box spring. Black-and-gray cables laced it all together, and yellow stickies affixed to the monitors and keyboards helped him keep each one straight. On one set of screens, Hendricks’s cameras, updating every three seconds, relayed stop-motion images of the streets surrounding the library. On another, the program Margaret Miller had so kindly installed displayed a wealth of information about the computers logged in to the library Wi-Fi.

Gibson’s program wasn’t overly complex, but it was brutally effective, relying on the library Wi-Fi to do most of the work for him.

There were myriad ports into a computer. All of those ports relied on a firewall to tell them whom to trust when users came knocking. A firewall was simply a big, burly bouncer who turned away anyone not on the VIP list. That was all well and good until the owner of the club, the human user, called down to the bouncer and, in effect, gave a user VIP clearance. The user was telling the bouncer to hold open the velvet rope and let them into the club, no questions asked. That was what happened whenever the user opened a web page, clicked on a link in an e-mail, or ran a program. Or joined a Wi-Fi network.