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“Connor!” she called.
“You got something?” he asked.
“Yes! Have the lawyers sent anything through?”
“Rowan’s lawyers?”
“Yes.”
“Yes. That list just hit my computer.”
“I think there’s a very strong chance one of the people on that list had something to do with this.”
“Why do you say that?” he asked curiously.
“Because I’ve found something. Something overwritten in the email reply. It sends the response on to a forwarding address. And this could only have been put in place by someone coding.”
“So, someone working on the game?”
“Yes. It must have been done very carefully, added into the code so that nobody noticed. Then the person left, but the code stayed, hidden away. Forwarding the generated responses. It’s been very, very cleverly done. And without a doubt, this person is an IT expert.”
“And where does it forward them to?” Connor asked.
“I don’t know,” Cami said.
“So, all we have is the list of names?”
“Yes, that’s all we have.”
Connor nodded thoughtfully. “That’s brilliant of you to figure it out. Who would have thought that Rowan himself would have provided the information we need? So, let’s go over what we do know about this man, because we’re going to have to identify him from the list.”
“He definitely lives in Boston, and that might not be common,” Cami said. “The IT specialists could come from all over. But I feel he’s local. He’s been looking for local people so far.”
“Yes. I think that has to be correct. He’s started hunting in his home territory.”
Connor was busy calling up the list on his computer. Cami waited impatiently. That list would be all-important.
“We’re looking for someone who is most likely angry, determined, and arrogant. But all the same, a very good and talented programmer.”
“Yes. It’s a good theory,” Connor agreed.
“And we have to work fast,” Cami said. “We don’t know if he’s online at the moment. I think he probably is.”
She glanced again at the game.
She’d noticed a few characters that she suspected might be this killer. She guessed he would be unobtrusive. He would choose an identity that would allow him to blend into the background. That was what she had decided was most likely.
But there might be a trace of him, based on that strange email instruction he’d given, that must be embedded into the game’s software, and perhaps there was a way of linking it to his character.
Cami’s fingers flew as she adjusted her program and widened its net.
It wasn’t going to be a hundred percent reliable. Not with the quick fix she’d used. But if it gave her ninety percent, that was a start, wasn’t it?
She tapped her fingers on the desk as the program ran, scanning the characters in her visual field. One by one, they were cleared.
Apart from one.
As it reached this character, the program paused and seemed to hang. Cami knew it must be following the path of logic she’d set for it and going deeper. And that surely pointed to anomalies in the code. She leaned forward, excited, as she waited for the result.
But as she did, an error message began flashing up.
The character had gone. He’d abruptly vanished from the screen while her program was analyzing him.
But she remembered who she was. She knew his avatar, she had it in her mind. Styx was his name. And Styx was gone.
That could only mean one thing. That Styx had identified a victim in the game and was now on the hunt for her in real life.
