And Bailey accepted it.

“Sounds like Luke should be more of a priority to you than you realize,” she says.

“No.” Cole turns to face her but stays rooted near the door. “In fact, his brother’s condition for working with us is that we don’t involve Luke at all.”

“I doubt he’s concerned for Luke’s safety. He just doesn’t want to take orders from him.”

“He won’t have to. And neither will you.”

“I’m not taking orders from Luke.”

“That’s correct. You’re taking them from me.”

She’s not quite sure what to say to this, or if she should say anything at all. It feels like he’s baiting her into a fight to distract from these revelations about Luke’s brother.

“Meanwhile,” Cole says, “I don’t actually take orders from Bailey, so I’m going to ignore his demand that you not discuss his new position with his brother. However, I’d like to strongly suggest some wording you can use when you do.”

“OK.”

“Put it like this. Would Luke rather his brother be safe, in an undisclosed location, answering to me? Or would he prefer him to have stayed on a Russian troll farm working alongside people who may or may not have swayed a United States presidential election?”

Jesus Christ, she thinks.

“You still haven’t told me how Bailey found Davies.”

“He doesn’t discuss procedure.”

“I’ve heard. But still . . .”

“Still what?”

“Given how well you probably pay him, I figure he probably runs the broad strokes by you, at least.”

“I am ordering you not to discuss this part with Luke.”

“Agreed.”

“I’m serious, Charley.”

“So am I.”

Cole clears his throat and approaches the bed again. “Bailey is a genius. Where the rest of us see endless strings of code, he sees a world without walls, and he’s willing to look into just about any corner of it provided he’s searching for someone he deems morally suspect enough.”

“That’s a pretty good description of what he did for us with Pemberton.”

“But what he lacked then was raw computing power. I’ve given it to him. In spades. And he’s used it to put the full force of his highly sophisticated mind to use. For us. For you.”

“This is going to be one of those conversations that uses the word algorithm and I’m going to have to pretend I know what it means.”

Cole ignores her. “Within the first seventy-two hours, Bailey identified sixty-five people who were purchasing significant amounts of materials that could be used to dispose of human bodies but who had no legitimate reason to be purchasing those materials.”

“Materials?” she asks.

“The materials you need to melt down flesh and bone.”

Charley swallows. In her mind’s eye, she sees a glittering digital net stretched across a map of the night-dark country. Sees it laced with red threads where it catches the cybertrails of anonymous psychopaths who believe they’re working in secrecy. That’s probably not how it works, in a visual sense anyway. Still, the idea of it fills her with something that’s either excitement or stark terror. Probably both.

“You put sixty-five people under surveillance just to find Davies?” she asks.

“No. We still have them all under surveillance. Davies popped first.”

“What does that mean? Popped first?”

“It means he started acting suspicious right away. And he ticked all the boxes of a typical serial killer profile. An angry white male loner with a traumatic past. And then, of course, there was the fact that he’d invested heavily in a personal leather-tanning operation but for some reason had never made any effort to sell or present the fruits of the labor to the world. So once Bailey gave me the signal, I devoted resources to tracking Davies on the ground. And the rest is history.”

“What about the other people under surveillance? How did you eliminate them?”

“We haven’t eliminated them, Charley. We’re still watching them. For all we know one of them might be the next Richard Davies or Frederick Pemberton.”

He falls silent, maybe giving her time to process the enormity of this. Or maybe he’s bragging. Either way, she’s impressed.

“You realize what the purpose of this is, right?” he finally asks. “I mean, aside from giving you targets.”

“Untold billions for Graydon Pharmaceuticals?” she asks.

“We’re not waiting for the horror movie idiots to get our attention by writing letters to the local paper. We’re not targeting the ones who are so desperate for media attention they’ll escalate to incompetence by their fifth kill. We’re targeting the quiet ones. The effective ones. The ones who are content to work slowly and steadily year after year, who might be responsible for an untold number of missing persons cases to which no one’s connected them yet. We’re targeting killers like the Bannings, Charley, who killed for almost a decade because they knew better than to leave a single body by the side of the road, including yours.

“Even better—and I do say this with some amount of pride, so forgive me if my chest is puffing up a little bit—we’re devoting a level of resources and attention to serial predators that no aboveboard, legitimate corner of law enforcement will ever give them. And do you want to know why? Because most of them don’t kill enough people fast enough. That’s why you’ve got some boutique wing of the FBI devoted to hunting them that only springs into action every now and then.