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He captured my wrist and drew it away. His eyes softened but still held an amused glint. “Then don’t touch it.”
I smiled, unable to help the sweeping warmth running through me from his look of amused concern and his friendly touch. Being with him felt amazingly comforting. I didn’t feel as embarrassed as I did with Raven. Corey reminded me of my more memorable boyfriends back in high school.
Surprisingly similar. Did I like him?
His smile lit up his blue eyes. He squeezed my wrist gently. “What do you want to do now? Want to play a game?”
“I feel lazy,” I said. “I haven’t had a day off in forever.”
“A day off from work or a day off from stealing wallets.”
I grimaced. “Maybe both.”
Corey guided me with a light hand at the small of my back toward the bed. The bed itself was pushed up against the corner, but above it were erased chalk marks against the chalkboard paint and I wondered if he woke up in the middle of the night to make notes. He eased me down until I was sitting on the bed. He relaxed on his side, his head propped in his hand as he looked up at me. The way he did it bulged his bicep. The view sent a warm shimmer through me, reminding me how completely sexy a nerdling he really was.
It felt weird to be sitting, so I wriggled down until I was on my side next to him. Suddenly, my heart was fluttering as I realized he managed to get me lying next to him in his bed. Near him, I felt tiny. His wide shoulders were overpowering. The way the white tank shirt clung to his skin revealed lines in his abs. Part of his skin peeked out between his shorts and his shirt at his hip and I was dying to move it a little to see more. How did he do that to me? One little smile, one sweet move to get me to be more relaxed, and suddenly I was way too comfortable, more than I probably should have been since I only met him yesterday.
“What’s it like?” he asked quietly.
“What’s what like?”
“Stealing wallets. What’s it like to do that every day?”
“It sucks.” I breathed out a huge sigh. “You’re always freaked out that you’re going to get caught. You stress over every police siren like they’re coming for you. You worry you’re stealing someone’s rent money.”
“Is that why you only ever took a little bit? Not all of it?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Which meant I had to take more wallets, which meant more time stalking people. I’d go look for a job for an hour and then need to go haunt different locations to get enough for rent.”
Corey grinned, revealing those white teeth in a lopsided sideways smile. “I guess it probably feels weird not to have to worry about it anymore.”
I squinted at him. “What do you mean not worry about it?”
“We’d said we’d help.”
“Yeah, but I still need a job.”
He shrugged. “Where do you want to work?”
“You guys keep asking me that. Axel was asking. But Marc said I can’t get a job right now because of Coaltar.”
“So take a few days off until we figure it out.”
“Raven said it could take a month.”
“You don’t even know where you want to work Take a month off. Sounds like you could use it..” He reached out with his foot, knocking his ankle into mine.
He was flirting! I couldn’t believe I was so excited about it; my heart was pounding. I wasn’t usually the sort to stand back and let someone else flirt with me, playing the coy girl, but with him, I fell right where he wanted me. It was like having my first crush all over again. I grinned, knocking my ankle back into his, but his foot was bigger so I barely nudged it. "It’s just all kind of crazy. I can't believe you guys caught me."
“You weren’t that difficult to find, actually.”
I sat up. “How did you? And why? Why not let the police handle it?”
Corey shrugged. “When we were told there was a pickpocket leaving wallets behind, we got curious. Most thieves don’t. It was just kind of interesting.”
“So you sent out Kevin with the jacket as a decoy?”
“We didn’t start out with that,” he said. “At first we had to figure out how you operated. We figured you’d look for easy targets in the beginning. We tried an old lady with an open purse but you never went for her.”
My breath caught. Forget the flirting. This guy had been hunting for me for a while and I never knew? “That’s how Dr. Roberts knew?”
He scratched lightly at his temple. “See, most criminals work in a similar pattern. Once they get used to a method of getting what they want, they fall into a routine going after easy targets or at least targets they are used to. Imagine our surprise when we figured out that a thief not only puts wallets back, but only takes wallets from grown guys who could defend themselves if they wanted.” He tilted his head at me. “Probably would have caught you sooner if I’d known you were a girl. I could have worked that into the equation somehow.”
I flipped over and looked at the wall where there were still slivers of lines, ghostly numbers and letters left on the board. More mathematical equations. “You used math to find me?”
“Yeah, but I was missing some data.” He reached over top of me to a basket of chalk tacked to the corner. He picked up a piece and started writing letters and numbers in an equation. He wrote with his arm stretched over me, but focused on what he was doing.
I tried to follow, but his bicep passed so close to my face, the warmth of it radiating toward me. My fingers itched to feel the smoothness of his muscles.
“This,” he said, finishing and then pointing at the formula, “is how they catch people like serial killers.”
I scanned the wall, scratching a fingernail across my eyebrow. “I’m the same equation as a serial killer?”
Corey smiled, shaking his head. “No. Math can do a lot, predict the weather or calculate political movements. But getting math to compute the randomness of humans, that’s usually very hard to piece together. Occasionally it can work. It’s called geographic profiling.” He patted the dust off his fingers, crossed his arms and leaned back against the bed. “You were an anomaly.”
“But you caught me,” I said.
“We may not have if it wasn’t for Marc paying attention. We were looking for a guy, perhaps a kid that was showing off.” His eyes studied me. “We found someone we weren’t looking for. The math was right. The assumptions we drew from the data we had were wrong. I’d have to develop another formula to calculate better.”
“So what’s my formula?” I asked.
“Haven’t figured it out yet.”
I tried to smother my grin, but in truth, I was a little proud of that. “So why can’t you use this on Coaltar?”
“He’s a completely different problem,” he said. “Right now, we don’t know the crimes he’s committing.”
“Or if he’s committed any at all.”
Corey pursed his lips, staring at the wall.
“What?” I asked, sensing there was something more to this, something he didn’t want to tell me. I planted a palm on his chest, trying to capture his attention. “If I’m going to be in hiding for a month, can’t I at least know what’s going on?”
He si
ghed and then refocused his eyes on me. His gaze darkened, and his tone dropped a few octaves. “Humans fall into patterns,” he said. “We all do. It’s natural. When you fall way out of a pattern like he did, something has changed so drastically that it forces you to alter your routine. You had a routine until we interrupted.”
“Coaltar had one?”
“He was a social elite. He was interested in science, so he has a lot of connections with research facilities. He was mostly quiet and while he did travel, he pretty much stayed with his upper crust class and never strayed out. Now he’s taking off in the middle of the night to talk with gang members. He is literally risking his life going out there like that and he still does it. Like he woke up one day and decided he was going to see who he could find that would kill him. I mean, that’s how bad some of these gang members are.”
“How did you know about this?” I asked. “I mean there’s millions of people in this town. Are you monitoring them all to look for inconsistencies?”
“We’ve got a few eyes and ears in different places,” he said. “And it isn’t like that. We’re not snooping on everyone. Someone we’ve got networking in those areas saw him show up one day. One look at him and he knew he was completely out of place. When we traced back Coaltar’s cell phone to see where he’s been the last several weeks, we could see the severe change in his pattern.”
I scoffed. “You can track him with a cell phone?”
“The phone companies do.” He dug out his own cell phone, illuminating the front. “Every device you own that has a GPS unit in it can be traced if someone really wanted to. Cell phone companies keep records of you, your calls, your texts, everything. They keep records for as long as a year or two.”
I’d heard rumors of something like this, but it all sounded like conspiracy theories to me before. Could it be true? “So you’re able to check those records?”
His cheeks tinted and he turned his head to avoid my stare. “I may have access.”
“Coaltar told me he was in Europe for the last few months.”
“He lied,” Corey said, his eyes softening like he didn’t want to tell me this part. “I don’t know why. I think he wanted to impress you. He did go to Italy for a function but it was a weekend trip. That part of his routine is normal, to skip off to Europe for a weekend or as long as a week. He doesn’t really stay for months on end.”
