Page 14 of Midnight Secrets

“Someone knows you’re interested,” Metal said soberly. “Otherwise that message doesn’t make sense. You don’t tell someone to look after their neighbor unless you know there’s some relationship there.”

“And you don’t take high-level precautions to hide your identity,” Felicity added. She touched her magic computer. “This guy, or this woman, employed a lot of difficult tricks to hide his or her identity. It’s not just a question of an anonymizer. The person who sent the message had to take a number of steps to hide their identity, and not easy steps, either. That person had to work, and work hard, to hide from me.”

She said it without false modesty. Felicity was the best of the best and she knew it.

“Someone’s watching you,” Metal said. “No way around it.”

“Or watching Isabel.” Joe didn’t know which thought bothered him more.

“And you’re not catching it.” Metal shook his head. “I don’t buy it. You’ve got good situational awareness. You haven’t noticed anything, anything at all?”

Joe shook his head.

“Security cams,” Felicity said suddenly and both men turned to her.

“What?”

But she was too busy communing with her laptop, fingers flying over the keyboard. She sat back and turned the monitor so he and Metal could see. Joe’s eyes widened.

She had some kind of map of their street with an overlay of security cameras with their field of vision. His street with projected cones over several houses.

“Okay, these are the security cams on your street, including yours and Isabel’s. Someone has probably hacked into some of them.”

“Not mine,” Joe said heatedly.

“No,” Felicity said softly. “I set yours up myself and they are not hackable.”

“And I set up Isabel’s system using your equipment and software.” So nobody had hacked his vidcam system or Isabel’s.

“What about the vidcams in the neighborhood,” he asked. “Are they hackable?”

Felicity had kept up the computer patter, fingers flying. “Oh, yeah,” she said and turned the monitor toward him. He and Metal bent forward.

And shit. Sure enough, there was his front doorstep, front and center of the camera view of his neighbor across the street, Edward Crawford, a retired doctor. Isabel’s doorstep was at the edge, barely visible. But when she walked down the small paved path to her gate, she’d be visible.

Felicity scrolled, from vidcam to vidcam, and he got a choppy view of his side of the street down to the park, where security vidcams took over.

“Are these vidcams hackable by someone who’s not you?” he asked.

“Oh yeah,” Felicity said. “You’d need a little nimbleness and savvy but they are hackable. You don’t have to be me to do it.”

Again, she said that without false pride. She knew how good she was.

Joe swallowed. “Have they been hacked?”

Felicity frowned. “Now, that I can’t say. Because I’m assuming that whoever is doing this is pretty good. Good enough to cover his traces.” She gave a half smile. “Or her traces. I’m assuming it’s a guy, though.”

“Yeah.”

“You still have that same email address? You didn’t change it to Joe.Harris123 did you?”

Felicity had a thing with passwords and email addresses. All of her passwords were created using a randomizer—and she remembered them all—and her email address was impossible to guess.

“Yeah.” Joe rubbed the back of his neck. “You pounded that home to me. To all of us. So not only is this guy following me and following Isabel, he?—”

“Has a stake in this. He cares for some reason,” Metal said.

“That’s the thing that has me worried.” Joe looked at his friend who was looking as grim as he felt. “Someone is watching us who cares. And reaching out and touching me. So, yeah, he’s saying I need to protect Isabel but how do I know he’s a friend?”

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