The Dying Breath: A Forensic Mystery

anger through his fingers. The gun he never wore off duty had been tucked into the back waistband of his jeans. She could see it bulge beneath his green Hudson Valley Community College tee shirt.
    Her grandmother drifted by. “Would you like something, girl?” She patted Cameryn vaguely.
    “No, thanks,” Cameryn replied as her grandmother, sensing an empty coffee cup nearby, floated away.
    They’re not going to catch him.
    She seemed to understand this truth before anyone else in the room. It was as though she were watching a paramedic desperately trying to shock life back into a corpse when it was clear the person was gone. Dead, Cameryn knew, was dead. She could tell by the way Sheriff Jacobs stood that he understood this, too. He leaned against the wall with his arms crossed over his chest, his hard eyes watching the action from behind polished lenses. No, it was Justin and her father who were trying to control the universe, as if by sheer mental force they could bend time and space and catch Kyle O’Neil. Their two heads bent toward the computer, so close to each other they almost touched, the white hair brushing against the dark.
    A thin man from the FBI and a heavyset woman from the Colorado Bureau of Investigation spoke to each other in a code of letters followed by a perplexing string of numbers. “Negative,” the woman said and sighed.
    “What’s negative ? Why can’t you find him?” her father demanded, standing up to his full height. Like Cameryn and her mammaw, he’d changed from his pajamas, but unlike Mammaw, who’d traded her nightgown for her Sunday best, her father had thrown on old Dockers and a sweatshirt. His hair was uncombed and his feet were bare. “It’s been over an hour—that animal threatened my daughter!”
    The FBI agent was named Andrew Thliveris. A man in his forties with silvered hair and dark eyes, he’d arrived in the middle of the night wearing a suit, something no native of Silverton would ever do. But his voice was casual. “Call me Andrew,” he’d told them. “Thliveris is a mouthful.” Now when he spoke his tone was measured, patient. “I understand how upsetting this is, but it’s not that easy.”
    “You say that but you’ve got his e-mail address right there !” Patrick exclaimed, jabbing his finger at the screen.
    “I’m afraid Kyle O’Neil’s been warchalking.”
    “What the heck does that mean?”
    With his left hand Andrew loosened the knot of his tie, a solid red with a single blue stripe. “It means he piggybacked his machine onto a random unprotected connection. It means he’s using someone else’s Internet linkage to communicate with your daughter. We narrowed it down to a class C network originating from Fort Lewis College.”
    “You got it narrowed down to the Fort?” Justin asked. For a second his face came alive around the eyes, but the excitement vanished when Andrew said, “No—wait!” He pressed his palms toward the floor. “I’m sorry, but O’Neil’s gone.” It took a moment for the words to sink in. “We traced the origin point to the college library but we got there too late.”
    “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Mammaw murmured. Her hand rose to her throat as she sagged into an empty folding chair, one of three that had been placed around the perimeter of the room. Justin dropped his head back and stared at the ceiling.
    So it is a fact now—he got away. The words swirled around Cameryn and above her like flakes of snow that chilled her to the bone. For a moment no one spoke, but she could hear her grandmother murmuring prayers, a steady current against the silence.
    “Look, I know this is hard,” Andrew said to everyone in the room, “but don’t get discouraged. O’Neil’s showing himself—that’s the important thing. The more he contacts Cameryn the better our chances of finding him. Don’t you agree?” he asked, directing this comment to the CBI agent.
    “Absolutely,” the woman answered. “A tracer route, which is what we had to do to get the Fort Lewis hit, takes time. If we can keep this guy talking we can tighten the net. We’ll get him.”
    “How?” Patrick asked. A single word, it seemed as loud as a gunshot. Her grandmother stopped praying in order to eye Andrew.
    “Well, a lot of that depends on your girl here.” Andrew smiled, showing teeth.
    “What is it, exactly, you’re wanting?” Mammaw demanded.
    Cameryn had the sense that Andrew had been waiting for this opening all along.