His partner, Stokes, offered Sam a curt nod of hello. “Our boy did some driving last night. His posts came from three different servers. We’ve isolated them, so we know one was from a hotel offering free wifi, one from a small-time auto repair shop without a firewall.” Not quite meeting Sam’s eye, as if she realized how it would affect her, she admitted, “Which was on Reisterstown Road, near Druid Hill Park.”

Close. Very close to where she lived. God, she had never thought about how close her hometown was to Delaware -where the boys had been killed. Or that the monster they were chasing could actually operate right in this area.

Alec obviously thought the same thing. She saw his sudden tension and the scowl on his handsome face.

Sam closed her eyes for a moment, forcing herself to take a deep, calming breath. She lived in a large metropolitan area with an untold number of servers. Of course someone wanting to disguise his location from the FBI would be drawn to a big city. He’d headed south, that was all, and Baltimore was the first big city south of Wilmington.

Besides, almost nobody knew her real address, including many of her old friends. Her Web site was registered through a hosting service, she used a PO box for almost all her correspondence, and she had an unlisted, unpublished number.

Coincidence.

Still, knowing the killer had ended up so physically close when he had responded to her blog-on top of the fact that he visited her site at all-didn’t exactly make her day.

“And the other location?” Blackstone asked.

“A residential neighborhood near BWI, probably some Joe Blow with an unsecured Linksys router.”

BWI Airport. South of the city. Even farther from Wilmington. So he circled the entire beltway and then drove back to Delaware, damn it.

Sounding hopeful, Alec asked, “Was it the first one? Did he post from home, then think better of it and go out to find a more secure location?”

Sam was less hopeful. Because she did not want to think this bastard might live so close.

Agent Stokes shook her head. “Uh-uh. The third. A brand new ISP was assigned within minutes of his post.”

Sam, who had been listening quietly, talking only in her head, couldn’t help muttering, “You guys are good, taking it all the way to street level so soon.”

Jackie Stokes shrugged. “We’ve got access most people don’t. Amazing how quickly a federal warrant goes through when bodies start to fall.”

“No doubt.”

“All right, give me some good news,” said Blackstone.

“Well, the good news is, if we ever do have a suspect, we’ll be able to prove all this through his laptop’s history. Without one, we’re shooting in the dark.”

Wyatt’s eyes narrowed. “Tell me one of those connections was in the vicinity of a surveillance camera.”

The other woman, a pretty blonde who had been busily typing on her keyboard, lifted her head. “Already on it, sir. The residential area, no go, but it’s possible he was seen by a late-night dog walker or nosy neighbor.”

Blackstone nodded. “Note the area, please.”

“Already sent the information to your BlackBerry, sir.”

He sighed, saying, “We really don’t need the sirs in this office, Lily.”

The woman stammered an apology, which her boss waved off. “Continue,” he said.

“The hotel is part of a budget chain. They might offer free wifi, but they don’t put any money into security. It is across the street from a bank ATM, though. Depending on where he parked, it could have caught something.” The blonde, Lily, didn’t sound hopeful. “And the Baltimore auto repair shop he used to send the middle post is located near an intersection with a red-light cam. I’ve already contacted the locals to get the ID of the specific camera, and can pull it up for examination.”

“Excellent.” Blackstone turned his attention back to Alec and Sam. “But obviously it’s not enough. So we’re going to have to proceed with the backup plan. Are you certain you’re willing to do this?”

Sam nodded. “But we need to get going.”

“Alec, this is your show. I assume you know the best way to deal with the psyche of this unsub, so why don’t you write out the initial response.”

“All right.” Alec turned to face her. “If you had gotten up this morning and read these messages, how would you have dealt with them? Would you address the first comments first, or skip right to the ones that…”

“Made my blood boil?”

“Exactly.”

She thought about it. “I always give a nod to my regulars before diving into any debates.”

He sat beside her and pulled a pen from the inside pocket of his suit jacket. “Okay, you go ahead and respond to those and I’ll write down what to say to the Professor.”

She lifted a brow. “He’s a professor?”

“It’s not important. For all intents and purposes, you know him as Darwin.”

“Got it.”

Seeing the way her own fingers shook as she touched them to the unfamiliar keys, Sam closed her eyes for one moment, trying to hear her own normal, daily voice, wondering if her fear sounded as loud when she spoke as it did inside her head.

Doesn’t matter as long as it doesn’t come through in the writing.

Swallowing down the nervousness, she began to type. She addressed the first few messages in one bunch, since they were all agreements with her column. A couple of other visitors had related their own horror stories, which she tackled next. She didn’t have to feign the sadness she felt for the man whose teenage daughter had run away with an abusive rapist she’d met on MySpace, or the man whose wife had been robbed and beaten when she’d met with someone she thought was selling a dining room set.

She gave a shout-out to those who begged her not to feed the troll- Darwin. Then she was finished. There was nothing to do but find something to say to the man who thought people should be allowed to be slaughtered without anyone else’s interference. “Okay,” she whispered.

“Alec?” Blackstone said. He had been watching from the end of the conference table, sitting quietly, one leg crossed over the other, his hands, fingers entwined, resting casually on his lap. She sensed the man saw quite a lot with that dark, intense stare, but neither his pose nor his expression revealed his thoughts.

“Got it,” Alec said. He cleared his throat, glancing at Sam as if to ask her one more time if she really wanted to do this. When she nodded slightly, he lifted his notebook and read aloud the words he’d written.

She listened, thought about them, then said, “Okay, if I had decided not to blast him off the Internet, that sounds like something I might say. Might need to tweak a word or two.”

He pushed the paper over. “Fine.”

She took it, but didn’t write, waiting for a final go-ahead from the guy in charge. When Blackstone nodded once, she jotted her changes on the page, her small, neat print nearly lost in Alec’s bold, spiky handwriting.

There was a metaphor in there somewhere. She knew it. Something about her small, neat life being sucked into his big, bold one.

God, she hoped she wasn’t making a mistake.

“Go ahead, Sam.”

She began to type.

Dear Darwin…