Page 2 of Just Right

This was trouble. It was bad trouble. And suddenly, apart from this man, now half-running toward her, she realized how alone she was here.

Patti turned and ran up the staircase, her feet clattering on the metal treads. She was going as fast as she could, but he was gaining on her, his footsteps pounding behind her.

"Gail," he said, his voice hoarse and rough. "Come back! You know you don't have to run away. Is it you, Gail? Is it really you?"

Something about the way he said it made her feel a rising sense of horror. She shouldn't be here. She shouldn't have sneaked in. And now she was trapped in these deserted premises, with a strange man who sounded as though he was out of breath, but who was also running scarily fast up the stairs behind her.

She reached the top of the stairs, but there was nowhere to go. Nowhere! She was on a small viewing deck overlooking the pool. It felt like a trap. Her breath was heaving in her chest.

He advanced on her, looming.

"No, don't do this, you'll regret it, you mustn't, you can't! Not now, not me! Please!" The words spilled out of her in a terrified babble.

"Oh, Gail," he hissed. “Oh, no!”

She felt something hit her head hard, so hard her vision exploded, and she blacked out instantly.

She never felt herself topple over the edge of the rail, her unconscious form freefalling down, to land with a splash in the dark waters of the pool below.

From above, the killer watched her sink.

Breathing hard, he waited, watching the waves turn to ripples, and then to the merest shimmer of dark reflected light, like negative space around the object in the pool, now unmoving and lifeless.

It was done.

But he knew, deep inside, that it wasn't over.

CHAPTER ONE

Was she going to do it?

Cami Lark had been agonizing over her decision for most of the night. She'd been sitting in her student digs at MIT, holed up in the tiny bedroom, messaging her friend on the dark web as she tried to build up the resolve, the courage, and the sheer bloody mindedness to do what she longed to do.

That was to sneak back into the FBI archives and try again to pull the information on her sister Jenna's missing persons file.

Last time she'd tried, the file had corrupted thanks to malware embedded in the record archive. Worse still, there had been a tracking program tacked onto the file which she hadn’t seen in time, and Cami knew that someone might know who she was. Someone in the FBI might already be aware that she was trying to open this mysteriously corrupted file to find out exactly what had happened to her older sister Jenna, who had disappeared when Cami was just fifteen years old.

The FBI had investigated, but nothing had ever come of it. Cami had always wondered why. Recently, she’d been co-opted into the FBI to help with cases that required IT expertise, and she’d thought it was her chance to find out. But she knew she was on dangerous ground, especially since the reason she’d been co-opted in the first place was as an alternative to going to prison after the FBI had caught her hacking their main website homepage.

So, she knew that there was a strong chance this foray could end in disaster. But still, she had to try.

This time, Cami's friend had shown her some open source coding that she thought might help her get around the problem. Cami had tweaked the coding, and she thought it was a workable solution. All she needed now was the courage.

"Done it yet?"It was her friend, Amo-1, messaging again.

"Not yet."Cami drained what must have been her sixth cup of black coffee that night. She turned to the energy drink on the desk, cracked it open, and downed that as well. The faintest chirps of birdsong were filtering in through the still dark windows. The time was four-thirty a.m. Her eyes felt reddened, her body felt tired, but her mind felt sharp, like a knife.

"What you waiting for?"

"I don't know."

Almost of their own volition, Cami watched her fingers move over the keyboard. She'd painted her fingernails black to match the color of her dyed hair, with its daring, partly shaven style, and the color of the dark tattoos on her arms.

"Won't wait forever. Do it or don't do it. Whatever it is???"

She hadn't told Amo-1, her anonymous but trusted friend, exactly what her covert mission involved. Cami knew that if anyone found out—anyone other than whoever had inserted the tracking program earlier—she'd be in huge trouble. It could destroy the uneasy relationship she currently had with the FBI. After all, the fact that they’d said they would drop the charges against her if she was willing to help with IT-related cases, didn’t mean they couldn’t reinstate them again. Cami didn’t fully trust the FBI. Even though she now admitted to herself that there were good people working there, there were also people like the one who’d embedded this malware into the case archive.

Now, biting her lip, she agonized once more over her decision.

---