Page 138 of Stalkers Anonymous

Tyler lifts his eyes from the pad. “Cole.”

“Yeah?”

“You stay with Hailey for those forty-eight hours. You do not leave her. Got it?”

I would be more annoyed if it weren’t the exact assignment I would have given myself.

Across the room, Grant taps his graph paper. “Usual spot? How tall are those concrete piers?”

“Twenty feet.” Zach doesn’t turn from his call.

“I want to be on top of one.”

Zach doesn’t miss a beat. “You can’t. Train.”

“What time?”

“Every four hours. Noon, four, eight…”

“Let’s plan for nine.”

“Then you can be on top.” He goes back to mumbling into his phone.

Grant nods to no one in particular, like that settles it, and goes back to sketching. “Camera one wide, camera two long. I want every face in the frame except Hailey’s.”

“Why?” Hailey asks.

“Because if for whatever reason, the footage ends up in front of a jury, it shouldn’t be of you. It should be footage of people they’ll never be able to identify.”

“Oh.” She purses her lips but seems content enough with that answer.

I lean toward Austen, trying to see what he’s doing that requires so much aggressive typing.

“Austen.”

“Mhm?” He doesn’t stop typing to look at me.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“The phone thing.”

“You said you’d send him an SMS exploit.”

“Yeah.”

“And?”

He finally glances up at me over his glasses. “And once it’s back online,” he says, “I’m going to clone it.”

“You’re going to clone it.”

“The whole phone. Photos, texts, browser history, Reddit cache, everything. Full copy on a hard drive in the van by Friday. So when we hand him to the cops, we hand them a man, a confession, and receipts.”

I stare at him. Who the fuck is this guy?

“I don’t see how we all keep our names clean in this,” I admit, looking at all of them. “The police will have questions.”

He finally stops typing. “They aren’t going to ask, Cole. Jessica gets the relevant pieces onto a USB. The USB ends up in Lars’s coat pocket while he’s zip-tied. The cops find it on him. The cops never have to know where the data on it actually came from.”