Page 128 of What We Burn

Me:

Running the Brock text trace again. Different angle.

FENRIR:

You’ve run it four times.

Me:

Fifth time’s the charm.

I pull up the spoofed text logs. Sage is hiding them. Keeps deleting them like it’s going to keep them from me. But I’ve been in her phone this entire time, watching them all come in and logging each one.

Have I alerted the others?

I’ve had the chance every day this week and I haven’t taken it. Tell Holden and she’s back in the house until somebody’s dead. Tell nobody and I’m a man reading her phone in his mother’s basement.

I pick the basement. Nobody made me.

Just like I’ll keep the fact she tried to ditch Eli with her buddy Jamie today.

That’s right, folks. I’m fucking everywhere.

The routing chain for these spoofed texts is eleven VPN layers deep. I’ve cracked eight. Each one routes through a different country. Two of the servers don’t exist anymore—a hosting provider in Montenegro that shut down in 2021 and a proxy service in Estonia that got seized by Europol. Whoever set this up built their chain through infrastructure that was about to die. The trail goes cold at the corpse.

This is craftsmanship. Patient, specific, deliberate.

Which means he’s smart. I hate when they’re smart. The dumb ones are so much more satisfying. You pull one thread and the whole thing unravels and they’re standing there with their browser history open going, “How did you find me?”

Because you’re an idiot, Charles. Now fuck off back to your incel group.

This guy won’t be that easy.

There’s a knock at the door.

“Come in,” I call out.

Gene enters with the mug of peppermint tea on a small tray. There’s a napkin folded into a triangle and a small shortbread cookie beside it. He sets the tray on the one clear corner of my desk and leaves without a word.

I take a sip. It’s good. Gene makes excellent tea. It’s possible he makes it under duress, but the quality isn’t affected.

FENRIR:

I’ve been running a parallel analysis on the text metadata. The timing’s changed.

Me:

Changed how?

FENRIR:

The early messages clustered late at night/early morning—consistent with someone sending when they assumed she’d be home and alone. But the pattern shifted about two weeks ago. They’ve moved to daytime. Clusters in the late morning and early afternoon, with a tighter window than before.

Two weeks ago. I check the timeline twice and get the same answer both times.

Me:

That’s when she went back to the diner.