1st Case Read Online Free PDF

regain control of the bike. My front tire hit a thickroot that I hadn’t seen coming, and it stopped me cold. The bike flipped straight forward. I went over the handlebars as it did and came down hard on both palms while my ride rolled right over me. My body kept going and I slid a few more yards on my stomach before I finally came to a clumsy stop against an ash tree on the hillside. It hurt, but probably looked worse than it was.
    Still, that seemedas good a time as any to head back. I had a bloody shin from where my pedal had sheared off a layer of skin, and a fine sheen of dirt and sweat was covering me pretty much everywhere else. If I wanted to show up at work looking like a human being, I was going to need more than a bathroom sink now.
    The good news was, I still had plenty of time to kill. Morethan I’d need for getting cleaned up.If I played it right, I could grab a shower, make some progress on the questions flying around my mind, all in one stop, and still be back at my desk the minute my four-hour banishment was over.
    What can I say? I’m nothing if not efficient.

CHAPTER 11
    I PARKED OUTSIDE Eve’s place on East Broadway and let myself in with the keypad. Eve’s place was only a few miles from the office, while my own apartment was way out in Somerville, which was as much as I could afford after MIT. Mom and Dad had barely gone through the motions of inviting me to move back home. They knew I’d never go for it.
    Eve was in the nursery when I came in, rockingMarlena to sleep in the hand-painted chair my parents had given her as a baby gift.
    “How’s it going?” I whispered.
    “Still waiting for the hard part,” Eve whispered back. She’d been deliriously happy about the whole motherhood thing since the day she’d come home from Guatemala. I’d already begun to wonder if she was ever coming back to work. But I couldn’t imagine Eve
not
working, and I don’tknow if she could, either. It’s like she has code running through her veins instead of blood.
    Marlena was adorable, of course, but as for me and babies?Not so much. I was looking forward to bonding with her as soon as she was ready to talk about space camp, or gaming platforms, or the infinite pleasures of solid food. In the meantime, I made myself generally scarce when it was time for holdingher for a while, or feeding her, or God forbid changing her.
    So I grabbed a quick shower in the guest bath. Borrowing a fresh shirt, I threw on my previous day’s suit and found Eve at her big glass desk with the baby monitor next to her.
    “I got a peek at your .glp files,” she said, waggling a phone I didn’t recognize. “Come take a look at this.”
    Who else but Eve kept a supply of iPhone andAndroid burners at home, much less with access to FBI case files? She’d already loaded a copy of Gwen Petty’s operating system onto an actual handset.
    “What am I looking at?” I said while she swiped from one screen to the next, back and forth, back and forth.
    “Look at the lower right corner,” Eve said, and swiped again, left, right, left, right. “You see that tiny refraction when I change thescreen?”
    “No,” I said.
    “Here.” She gave me the phone, and I tried it myself. That’s when I finally saw it, just a slight ripple, like that corner of the phone’s wallpaper went watery as I swiped in and out.
    “Wait, what?” I said. “No way.”
    “I think so,” she said.
    It was an invisible button, or at least it seemed to be. I put my finger on that spot and held it there, waiting to see if anythingwould happen. And then sure enough, after about five seconds, the screen opened up into an app I’d never seen before.
    The interface itself wasn’t fancy, or even particularly well designed. It looked like a simple chat program, as far as I could tell. There were icons to access the camera; the keyboard,which was rudimentary compared to most current standards; and a Send button. That was it. Theamazing part was how well it had