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been.

CHAPTER 10
    I DIDN’T NEED rest. What I needed was some off-grid time.
    They say Einstein came up with his theory of relativity while riding a bike. And I say if it’s good enough for the father of modern physics, it’s good enough for me.
    That’s why I keep my Giant Talon locked in the back of my car. The more thinking I need to do, the more I want to get out and hit the trail, which is surprisinglyeasy to do in Boston. It’s only ten miles from downtown to Blue Hills Reservation. I’d been known to squeeze in a ride in one hour—much less than the four hours for which Keats had barred me from the office.
    By eight thirty that morning, I had a venti dark roast in me, half a pack of wintergreen Life Savers saving my breath, and a deserted parking lot at the Blue Hills trailhead. That meant I’dhave the place to myself. I pulled my bike out of the back of the car, jumped on, and headed into the woods.
    By the time I was pumping my way up the first leg of Tucker Hill Path, everything I’d learned in the last twenty-four hours had started clamoring for attention in my mind all over again.It wasn’t easy to shake off what I’d seen up to now, starting with the crime scene I’d witnessed. Theycertainly don’t set you up for that kind of thing at MIT.
    Still, I knew I had a choice. I could wallow in the sadness and the grotesquerie or I could focus on solutions, and when I thought of it that way, it was a complete no-brainer.
    I settled into an easy pedaling cadence and tried to focus.
    Keats said he was looking for an older male, but I didn’t see why this couldn’t have been two people,or even more, operating together. Hackers work in unofficial dark net communities all the time. They’re competitive, too, with one another, but also with themselves. It’s always about doing better than, doing more than, reaching further than they did the last time around.
    They just don’t usually kill people.
    So what was I missing here? Where was that app on Gwen Petty’s phone? And how the helldid these assholes hide it so well? I had no idea, but one thing was for sure. I wasn’t going to roll over on this. It was my first real job and the stakes couldn’t have been higher.
    Besides, like I said, hackers tend to be more than a little competitive, whether they’re wearing black hats or white. There was no way I’d be letting this thing get the best of me.
    I shot straight through the nextjuncture and into an uphill climb. The ground was steadily rising in front of me, and the sweat was building at the small of my back. I could feel the slope in my quads and glutes with the kind of burn I love to hate. There was a lot more hill to go, but it would be worth it when I was flying down the other side.
    As I worked it just a little harder, another question presented itself in my mind,out of nowhere. Was I
meant
to find those .glp files? Anyone capable of engineering something like that could have easily initiated a remote wipe on Gwen’s phone. Butthey hadn’t. They left the files in place. Not only that, but whoever put them there knew that someone like me—someone smart enough to admire their handiwork—was going to find this stuff. Maybe they were just showing off at thatpoint.
    Yeah, well, mission accomplished, douchebag. I’m impressed. And I can’t wait to see you crash and burn.
    I’d done two circuits of the outer loops on either side of Houghton’s Pond by now. So I headed in a new direction, up the Breakneck Ledge path, the closest thing they have to a black diamond out there.
    My glutes were toast and my calves felt like rods, but I barely noticed anymore.And I didn’t slow down, either. I was weirdly pumped, all things considered. Physical exhaustion aside, my mind was lit up like a pinball machine as I flew up and over the crest of that ridge just a little too fast. By the time I even realized my back tire was sliding out from under me, it was too late.
    I turned hard into the slope, trying to