“I’ve got some foot traffic into the library and park, but not a lot out. I count five, maybe six, possible matches for our profile that are inside the library. Another seven inside that fall outside our profile’s parameters.”

“I’ve got six in the park. Gibson, are we missing anyone?”

“No, that conforms to what I’m seeing too. Computer traffic has been steady, and I’m not seeing anything sneaky from the perimeter.”

“And all quiet at ACG?” she asked.

Too quiet, unfortunately. The screen that displayed inbound and outbound traffic on ACG’s network showed nothing out of the ordinary. And no matter how hard he glared, it seemed resolutely determined to keep on doing nothing out of the ordinary. It had led him to worry that maybe they’d tipped their hand and didn’t know it.

Were they waiting for someone who would never show and was already a thousand miles away, running hard? Or what if this guy were simply taking the week off? Gibson tried to imagine waiting until next Friday to find out. And the Friday after that, and the Friday after that. Suzanne’s memory weighed heavily on him each day, and it was beginning to wear him out. Hendricks had mentioned that his longest stakeout had been seven weeks. Gibson prayed that they wouldn’t be out here that long.

“Gibson. All quiet at ACG?” Jenn asked again.

“Nothing so far,” he said.

“All right, well, next move is his.”

Although they were focusing on men who fit the FBI’s profile, their cameras captured stills of everyone, man or woman, who came within a hundred yards of the library. Jenn had explained the approach to him during her briefing that morning. The woman did like a good briefing.

“In all likelihood the profile is right. A profile isn’t a hunch. It’s statistics, and the numbers say that whoever took Suzanne was probably a white male now in his forties or fifties.”

“But . . . ,” he said, feeling one coming.

“But there are always outliers. Maybe it was a woman trying to replace a lost child, or someone older or younger than we usually see in cases like this. A person of color hunting outside their ethnic group. A terrorist or some other politically motivated abductor. Truth is, the FBI had no way of eliminating any of those possibilities and neither do we.”

“So play the odds, but cover our bases?”

“Play the odds. Cover our bases.”

He passed the afternoon in his motel room, reviewing the surveillance footage for clear face shots, compiling them as stills and matching them, when relevant, with the compiled personal information from the computers logged in to the Wi-Fi. Every hour, he forwarded all-new photos and personal data to ACG—but not directly.