Bishop walked to the white-board and gestured to Mott for the marker, who pitched it to him. The detective wrote these details on the board but when he started to write "Fingerprints," he paused.

Phate's fingerprints…

The burning Jaguar…

These facts troubled him for some reason. Why? he wondered, brushing his sideburns with his knuckles.

Do something with that…

He snapped his fingers.

"What?" Linda Sanchez asked. Mott, Miller and Nolan looked at him.

"Phate didn't wear gloves this time."

At Vesta's, when he'd kidnapped Lara Gibson, Phate had carefully wrapped a napkin around his beer bottle to obscure his prints. At St. Francis he hadn't bothered. "That means he knows we have his real identity." Then the detective added, "And the car too. The only reason to destroy it is if he knew that we'd found out he was driving a Jaguar. How'd he do that?"

The press hadn't mentioned his name or the fact that the killer was driving a Jaguar.

"We have ourselves a spy, you think?" Linda Sanchez said.

Bishop's eyes fell again on the white-board and he noticed the reference to Shawn, Phate's mysterious partner. He tapped the name and asked, "What's the whole point of this game of his? It's to find some hidden way of getting access to your victim's life."

Nolan said, "You're thinking Shawn's a trapdoor? An insider?"

Tony Mott shrugged. "Maybe he's a dispatcher at headquarters? Or a trooper?"

"Or somebody from California State Data Management?" Stephen Miller suggested.

"Or maybe," a man's voice growled, "Gillette is Shawn."

Bishop turned and saw Bob Shelton standing in front of a cubicle toward the back of the room.

"What're you talking about?" Patricia Nolan asked.

"Come here," he said, gesturing them toward the cubicle.

Inside, on the desk, a computer monitor glowed with text. Shelton sat down and scrolled through it as the others on the team crammed into the cubicle.

Linda Sanchez looked over the screen. With some concern she said, "You're on ISLEnet. Gillette said we weren't supposed to log on from here."

"Of course he said that," Shelton spat out bitterly. "Know why? Because he was afraid we'd find this-" He scrolled a little further down and gestured toward the screen. "It's an old Department of Justice report I found in the Contra Costa County archives. Phate might've erased the copy in Washington but he missed this one." Shelton tapped the screen. "Gillette was Valleyman. He and Holloway ran that gang – Knights of Access – together. They founded it."

"Shit," Miller muttered.

"No," Bishop whispered. "Can't be."

Mott spat out, "He fucking social engineered us too!"

Bishop closed his eyes, seared by the betrayal.

Shelton muttered, "Gillette and Holloway've known each other for years. 'Shawn' could be one of Gillette's screen names. Remember that the warden said he'd been caught going online. He was probably contacting Phate. Maybe this whole thing was a plan to get Gillette out of prison. What a fucking son of bitch."

Nolan pointed out, "But Gillette programmed his bot to search for Valleyman too."

"Wrong." Shelton pushed a printout toward Bishop. "Here's how he modified his program."

The printout read:

Search: IRC, Undernet, Dalnet, WAIS, gopher, Usenet, BBSs, WWW, FTP, ARCHIVES

Search for: (Phate OR Holloway OR "Jon Patrick Holloway" OR "Jon Holloway") BUT NOT Valleyman OR Gillette

Bishop shook his head. "I don't understand it."

"The way he wrote the request," Nolan said, "his bot would retrieve anything that had a reference to Phate, Holloway or Trapdoor in it unless it also referred to Gillette or Valleyman. Those it would ignore."

Shelton continued, "He's the one who's been warning Phate. That's why he got away from St. Francis in time. And Gillette told him that we knew what kind of car he was driving, so he burned it."

Miller added, "And he was so desperate to stay and help us, remember?"

"Sure he was," Shelton said, nodding. "Otherwise, he'd lose his chance to-"

The detectives looked at each other.

Bishop whispered, "- escape."

They sprinted down the corridor that led to the analysis lab. Bishop noticed that Shelton had drawn his weapon.

The door to the lab was locked. Bishop pounded but there was no response. "Key!" he called to Miller.

But Shelton growled, "Fuck the key-" and kicked the door in, raising his gun.

The room was empty.

Bishop continued to the end of the corridor and pushed into a storeroom in the back of the building.

He saw the fire door, which led outside into the parking lot. It was wide open. The fire alarm in the door-opener bar had been dismantled – just as Jamie Turner had done to escape from St. Francis Academy.

Bishop closed his eyes and leaned against the damp wall. He felt the betrayal deep within his heart, as sharp as Phate's terrible knife.

"The more I know you, the more you don't seem like the typical hacker."

"Who knows? Maybe I'm not."

Then the detective turned and hurried back into the main area of the CCU. He picked up the phone and called the Department of Corrections Detention Coordination Office at the Santa Clara County Building. The detective identified himself and said, "We've got a fugitive on the run wearing an anklet. We need an emergency trace. I'll give you the number of his unit." He consulted his notebook. "It's-"

"Could you call back later, Lieutenant?" came the weary response.

"Call back? Excuse me, sir, you don't understand. We just had an escape. Within the last thirty minutes. We need to trace him."

"Well, we're not doing any tracing. The whole system's down. Crashed like the Hindenberg. Our tech people can't figure out why."

Bishop felt the chill run through his body. "Tell them you've been hacked," he said. "That's why."

The voice on the other end of the line gave a condescending laugh. "You've been watching too many movies, Detective. Nobody can get into our computers. Call back in three or four hours. Our people're saying we should be up and running by then."

He takes things apart.

Wyatt Gillette was jogging through the chill evening rain down a sidewalk in Santa Clara, his chest aching, breathless. It was 9:30 P.M. and he'd put nearly two miles between him and CCU headquarters since he'd escaped.

He knew his way around this neighborhood – he wasn't far from one of the houses where he'd lived as a boy – and he was thinking of the time his mother had told a friend, who'd asked if ten-year-old Wyatt preferred baseball to soccer, "Oh, he doesn't like sports. He takes things apart. That seems to be all he likes to do."

A police car approached and Gillette eased to a quick walk, keeping his head under the umbrella he'd found in the computer analysis lab at CCU.

The car disappeared without slowing. The hacker sped up once again. The anklet tracking system would be down for several hours but he couldn't afford to dawdle.

He takes things apart…

Nature had cursed Wyatt Edward Gillette with a raging curiosity that seemed to grow exponentially with every new year. But that perverse gift had at least been mitigated somewhat by the blessing of hands and a mind skillful enough to, more often than not, satisfy his obsession.

He lived to understand how things worked and there was only one way to do that: take them apart.