“But something would still have to be installed on my laptop, right?”

“Again, child’s play. If your computer touches the Internet, all notions of security and privacy go right out the window.”

“Comforting. I wouldn’t bother you if it wasn’t urgent, Sam. This is a killer on one of my cases. I need you to look at my computer and see if there’s anything here that could possibly help me find this sicko. Could you do that?”

“Sure. You want to meet tomorrow?”

“Tonight. I’m driving down right now. This time of night, I can be in L.A. in less than two hours.”

“Whoa. I plan to be totally hammered by then.”

“I’ll take Sam Zackoff hammered over anybody else stone-cold sober any day of the week.”

“Now that’s how you get a guy to help you.”

“Where do we meet?”

He thought for a moment. “There’s an all-night diner just a couple blocks from the convention center. It’s called Riff’s. It’s on Figueroa Street. I’ll be there chugging coffee like a madman.”

“Thanks, Sam.”

“No worries. We go way back. If the only way I can touch base with you these days is to do an occasional favor, I’m here for you. I can never tell when your gratitude might overwhelm you. See you soon.”

*   *   *

ON THE HOUR-AND-FORTY-FIVE-MINUTE drive down the I-5 freeway, Kendra glanced several times at her laptop on the passenger-side floor. She almost felt it was Colby himself down there, watching her, taunting her, and plotting his next move.

As she fumbled with the car stereo’s volume knob, she realized that her hands had never fully stopped shaking since her dialogue with Colby.

Enough.

She had beaten him once, and she would do it again. As much as he liked to boast that he knew her, she knew him, too. She would use his confidence, his arrogance, against him.

You’re going down, Colby.

*   *   *

KENDRA PARKED HER CAR AND entered the narrow diner. It was a freestanding building, but was clearly designed to emulate the railroad car diners of the Northeast, with a long counter and a wedged-in row of booths. There were only two people visible at first glance—a medical worker in pink scrubs eating chili at the counter and a homeless man facedown in the last booth.

Wait. Not a homeless man, she realized as she glanced at his tousled brown hair and brown bomber jacket. That leather jacket was lambskin and very expensive.

“Wake up, Sam.”

“I’m already awake.” He didn’t lift his head or make any other move to look at her. “I’m just trying to summon the will. I wish you had called about two hours earlier.”

“Never mind. I shouldn’t have imposed. The FBI has experts who can deal with this sort of thing.”

He snorted and finally sat up with a lopsided grin. “You’re playing me, woman. If you really believed that, you wouldn’t have driven all the way down here in the middle of the freaking night.”

“You’re the best, Sam. And I’m not playing you when I say that.”

“I know you’re not. You’re the one person who has always held all my abilities in appropriate regard.”

He smiled again with that wonderfully cockeyed grin. Sam was thirty, thin, and his thick mane was everywhere no matter how long or short it was at any given time, complementing his brilliance with a distinct mad-scientist vibe.

She and Sam had a brief, stupid fling during her wild days, but they both quickly realized that romance wasn’t in the cards for them. But through all the years, he had always been there for her in a way that no lover ever had. She wouldn’t trade that kind of friend for the world.

Sam picked up the pot of coffee on the table and emptied it into his cup. He waved the empty pot at the waitress who had just emerged from the kitchen. “Keep ’em coming please. Be assured that my friend here tips insanely well.”

Kendra turned back toward the waitress. “I do. Make sure he gets anything and everything he wants.”

She sat across from Sam and put the laptop on the table between them. “Here it is. I’m not sure what you can do, but I’m hoping you can find out something that can give me some kind of trail back to him. Maybe through a software vendor or maybe an IP address … I’m not sure.”

The mere sight of her computer seemed to give him a jolt, making him more alert than the coffee had been able to do. “You never know. Even the most accomplished hackers are often terrible at covering their tracks. Let’s see what we have here.” He lifted her computer, then froze. “I thought you said you turned this off.”

“No, I said I didn’t turn it back on. It turned off by itself at the end of my and Colby’s rap session.”

He raised his eyebrows at her. “No, it didn’t.”

“What are you talking about? I saw it happen.”

“No, you saw the screen and indicator lights switch off, and you heard the fan shut down.” He ran his fingers across the laptop’s underside. “It’s still warm. It shouldn’t still feel this way, not after two hours. You were meant to think it was off, but it’s not. For all we know, your laptop’s microphone has been transmitting our entire conversation back to him.”

“Shit. What do we do?”

He quickly popped the laptop’s battery off and placed it on the table. “There. That should take care of it.”

She stared at her computer, once again feeling that eerie sensation she’d had in the car. “Why would he do that?”

“Don’t know, but maybe we can find out.” Sam reached into the worn leather satchel on the seat beside him and produced a screwdriver. He used it to remove the laptop’s back cover, then the hard drive. He pulled his own laptop from his satchel and connected Kendra’s hard drive to it via an interface cable.

As he flipped up his laptop’s lid, Kendra saw an elaborately etched cartoon version of Sam on it, with the motto BORN TO BE BAD in a fiery font.

“You’re kidding, right?”

He shrugged. “A gift from a grateful client. He’s actually very talented. If I detached the top cover and put it on eBay, I could get thousands for it.” He switched on his computer. “Let’s see what malware your nasty friend put on your computer.”

“Aren’t you afraid of infecting your own system?”

He smiled and shook his head. “Please. This thing is bulletproof. I’ve had foreign governments try to penetrate my systems and totally fall on their asses.”

Kendra had once dismissed Sam’s pronouncements as mere braggadocio, but she now knew better. As proud as Sam was of his accomplishments, she was aware of the fact that there was far more he didn’t talk about, especially where his security-sensitive clients were involved.

Sam glanced at his screen as it booted up. “The thing about firewalls I build for myself, I don’t sell or license them to anyone. That way no one knows how to crack them. Trust me, my computer has nothing to worry about.”

“So what’s happening now?”

“I’m taking an inventory of the applications on your hard drive. I hope you don’t have anything on there you don’t want me to see.”

“Like nude pictures of myself?”

“Pfft. Seen that. Old news.” He shrugged. “Maybe compromising pictures of the new man in your life.”

“There’s no new man in my life.”

“I heard you were living with someone. But if you don’t want to talk about it…”

“There’s nothing to talk about. I was staying there for my own safety. Nothing more.”

“Uh-huh. And there was nowhere else you could stay?”

“Not like that. I’m telling you, it’s like a fortress.”

“You’ve butted heads with a lot of sickos in your time. You’ve never squirreled yourself away before, even when it would have been the prudent thing to do. There must have been something about this guy that made you feel safe. Protected.”

“Yes. His house. I’ve already told you. What are you seeing on my hard drive?”

“Still scanning.” Sam regarded her for a moment. “It’s not a sign of weakness to lean on someone occasionally, Kendra. I’m actually proud of you. I wish you’d do it more often. I think you’re so determined to show that you can now stand on your own two feet that you sometimes ignore the lifelines that people throw your way.”