Page 32 of Hunt Me, Daddy

Arousal was inconvenient. Shame was useless. Fear was data.

Anger worked.

I wrapped myself in a towel, went back to the living room, and opened the Watcher file again with damp hair dripping onto my shoulders.

Outside, Boston shifted toward dawn. The windows slowly grayed. The city began making waking-up noises below. I heard trucks, car doors, a faraway siren, as well as someone laughing too loudly for the hour. My apartment remained exactly as it had been when I came home, except now I knew the truth.

I didn’t sleep.

I sat on the couch with my back to the wall, my laptop open, the knife within reach, and the crossword on the table like a dare.

By sunrise, I created a new document inside the Watcher file.

I titled it:

How to catch a ghost.

Then I started to plan.

CHAPTER 8

Ivan

The hardware update was necessary.

That was what I kept telling myself on Thursday afternoon while I stood in the hallway outside Kit Calloway’s apartment with a fresh device in my pocket and several different reasons arranged neatly in my mind.

The first reason was signal integrity. The camera near the fire escape had been catching too much environmental noise since the storm came through two nights earlier, and while the false positives were minor, minor problems became interesting problems if ignored long enough.

The second was that I did not trust anyone else to enter her apartment and leave it precisely as it had been.

The third was that I wanted to see if she had changed the crossword.

The fourth was that I wanted to be inside her space again.

I stood still for one second longer than necessary with my gloved hand wrapped around the lockpick set in my pocket, and I let that truth exist because denying it had become tedious. It did not change the work. It did not change the risk. It did not change the fact that Kit was currently twelve blocks away in a conference room with three executives who had ignored her last report and would now pay her to tell them, again, that ignoring security recommendations did not become a strategy just because the invoice cleared.

She would be occupied for at least an hour.

I had time.

Her door opened quietly.

There were a few things that I noticed had changed since I filled in the crossword. The string and tape along the inner edge of the door was still there, but she had replaced it with a thinner strip and shifted the angle by less than a degree. The mat still looked ordinary, but its pressure logging had a different delay now. The camera in the dead smoke detector had been moved slightly, not enough to improve the view, but enough to see if someone returned it to the old angle out of habit.

Clever.

She had added a paper-thin wedge beneath the hall table leg too, a stupid little physical tell so low-tech it was almost elegant. If anyone brushed the table, the wedge would slide. If anyone noticed the wedge, they would assume that was the trap and miss the dust line she had laid along the baseboard two inches behind it.

I smiled despite myself.

“Very good,solnyshko,” I murmured.

I disabled nothing in the obvious way. I shifted nothing unless I could restore it. I stepped where the flooring bore weight most quietly and where her sensors expected movement only from her height and stride. It would have been easier to defeat another man’s system. Men built defenses expecting force. Kit built hers expecting curiosity, arrogance, and the kind of careful intruder who liked to believe he was the only clever person in the room.

Which meant she had built them for me.

I should not have enjoyed that.