Coyle thought of narrowing the search to males. Could he assume the figure in the video was male? Or was someone with a height of five four more likely to be a female? Was it possible to imagine a woman involved in this kind of murder? Last year they had worked a case where a soft-spoken, thirty-two-year-old woman, dressed in a silk blouse, pleated skirt, and cardigan, walked into the police department lobby and confessed to beating her husband to death with a roofing hammer.

The alarm went off again.

Coyle looked at the two computer screens. A recent source of pride was his theory of programming signatures. In the past year he’d noticed his programming had its own style—a kind of signature—based on the software he used and the choices he made. He liked to think his signature was edgy. Only he had no one to tell. Adrienne said, “If it’s all just coding, how can yours be different?”

With that thought, Coyle decided to do some coding. He’d promised Eddie he would create an open-case file to track progress. He reached for his phone and scrolled until he found the Kings of Leon. In a new file on the right-hand laptop, he typed in everything they knew so far about Jane Doe. He worked quickly, listing facts and probable future lines of inquiry. When he finished, he posted the file to an FTP site and programmed a firewall around it. He set up an IPtable for Linux systems, which restricted access to a single port and defined the type of traffic to accept. Then he established public and private encryption certificates. All he needed to do was to set the private key password. The Kings of Leon started on “Use Somebody.” He thought of Adrienne. He set the password.

By the time Coyle finished, another thirty minutes had gone by. He stood up and walked out of the team room. The hallway was quiet. A light was on in Eddie’s office, but no one was there. At the end of the hallway, Coyle turned into the common room, where the team members had storage lockers. He felt nauseated from the trail mix and lack of sleep. The first twenty-four hours of the investigation were nearly over, and Eddie would take it out on them if they didn’t have something soon.