Fear No Evil by Allison Brennan Page B

mask his signal. I’m also working on the delay—there’s a full minute-thirty-second delay, I think. But again, it’s almost impossible to tell. The delay could be caused by one of the servers he’s moving data through. He’s sending the transmissions through a variety of hubs and nodes—virtually everything is a dead end.”
    “Wow,” Patrick muttered. “Where’d you get this trace program? I’ve never seen anything like it.”
    “I wrote it.”
    “You?” Patrick was impressed.
    “More or less. I improved it, I should say. The less you know the better. Quinn already told you I’m wanted by the government. Since they already want me for high crimes, a little hacking isn’t going to increase my jail time.”
    Her words were light, almost self-deprecating, but there was a wistful quality that Dillon caught.
    Connor spoke up. “But you think you might have found Lucy. Why are we standing here doing nothing? Let’s get off this damn mountain and find her.”
    “Because I think it’s a trap,” she said.
    “Why?”
    Kate didn’t answer.
    “You have coordinates, but you don’t want to do anything about it?”
    “Do anything? What do you think I’ve been doing for the last five years? Trask killed my partner. He’s been killing women for sport for years. He’s a genius and he’s not going to let me find him until he wants me to, unless I can somehow outmaneuver him. He wants me to walk into a trap so he can kill me. He’s gone underground because we have his prints—because of me. We have a physical description, and I think he’s too vain to change his appearance. He’s vindictive and powerful. He’s not going to simply let me find Lucy, or any of his prey.”
    Patrick said, “But here you have your program—unbiased—tracing the feed through dead ends and nodes and landing at a live spot. The trace looks exactly the way it should look.”
    “I know the program seems to have found the live feed, but Trask plays a game of cat and mouse. The coordinates are the cheese.”
    “We have to do something!” Connor stared at the screen, watched Lucy helpless and fearful.
    Dillon spoke. “Kate, she’s our little sister. We have to follow every lead.”
    “By the time you get to that island, it’ll be too late to get back here and retrace the steps. If it’s a trap, or a phony lead, we’ve lost all the time we have. You can do what you want. I’m not going anywhere.”
    “You don’t have to. She’s not your sister. But we’re going.” Connor looked from Dillon to Patrick. “Right?”
    Dillon was torn. He wanted to go to the island the coordinates pointed to. Lucy had said she was on an island.
    But Kate was the one with experience tracking this killer. She’d seen his face, been inside his head. Could Dillon trust Lucy’s life to Kate’s instincts?
    Kate spoke up. “I sent the information to Quinn. He’s looking into the data now.”
    “We can’t wait for the FBI to act,” Connor said. “Not when we’re this close. What if he rushes it? What if this Trask knocks time off Lucy’s clock, doesn’t give us the full forty-eight hours to find her?”
    Dillon glanced at the countdown.
     
33:50:02. 33:50:01. 33:50:00. 33:49:59.
     
    His heart raced twice as fast as the countdown. He didn’t want to wait, but he trusted Kate’s instincts—on this, on understanding this killer.
    “He won’t jump the clock,” Dillon said. “The countdown is part of the thrill.”
    “And you’d bet Lucy’s life on your psychoanalysis? You haven’t even met him!” Connor shouted.
    Dillon took the jab, understanding his brother’s frustration. “It’s the anticipation. He’s working himself up toward the final act.” He turned to Kate. “Has he ever changed the countdown?”
    “Only Paige,” she said quietly. “She had twenty-four hours, not forty-eight. But that was a completely different situation. He…he had another girl, killed her when he captured Paige. We were close and he knew