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crimes have escalated into some pretty major—and pretty ballsy—thefts and cons that are starting to rake in some significant money.”

    “You don’t know who’s perpetrating them?” Lila asked.

    He shook his head again. “Only that it’s someone in the Cincinnati area. Most likely someone at Waverly. But the activity shows signs of having started off with amateurs, becoming more sophisticated just recently.”

    “Like maybe someone or a handful of people who were once only in it for the fun are now also in it for the profit.”

    “Exactly like that.”

    “Like maybe someone suddenly joined up with this person or persons and injected them with a little more ambition and organization.”

    “Yep.”

    “Like maybe Sorcerer has indeed found his band of merry hackers.”

    “Which means he’s now stronger and smarter than he’s ever been before,” Joel concluded.

    He traced his finger on the map in a circular motion around an area near the Ohio River. “Dormitory housing is pretty sparse at Waverly, so a good number of the students live in the city proper. And there’s an area downtown around Vine Street that especially caters to students. Lots of student-type apartments, coffee shops, clubs, student-friendly retail establishments, that kind of thing. I think that’s probably the best place to start looking. There and on Waverly’s campus. If my calculations are correct—and it goes without saying that they are,” he added, since Lila was right about modesty being overrated when it wasn’t warranted, “you’ll find Sorcerer in one place or another. Along with his accomplices. It’s just a matter of being in the right place at the right time.”

    “And being uncharacteristically lucky,” she added.

    He smiled. “So all that good karma you’ve been scoring over the years will come in handy now.”

    She laughed at that, a deep, full-bodied, throaty laugh that made something inside Joel shimmy like mirage heat on a strip of desert highway. Only, instead of being way off in the distance like mirage heat usually was, it surrounded him and closed down hard. Once again he reminded himself that he was in no position to be feeling such things. Even under the best of circumstances, he did not need a sexual attraction to a woman whose emotions—at least the positive ones—ran about as deep as a fingerprint.

    Note to self, Faraday: You’re not into meaningless sex anymore. Remember?

    Well, evidently not…

    “Do you have a list of the people in the area Sorcerer contacted and may or may not have followed up on?” Lila asked.

    Joel shook off his wayward thoughts—again—and focused on the matter at hand. Which happened to be the woman he was trying not to think about. Damn. “We do,” he said. “It will be in a dossier with other information I have for you. But remember, there are almost certainly others we don’t know about.”

    “Do you know if Sorcerer established any contact with any of the people you did identify?”

    “You’ll receive a detailed account, but yes, we intercepted a number of e-mails between him and several students at Waverly. They were mostly exchanges of inconsequential information, though. Getting-to-know-you type stuff, the same thing he initially sent to Avery Nesbitt. Sorcerer assumed several different identities, each tailored to be most attractive to whomever he was in touch with. Most often, he was a young student at another university close enough to arrange for a physical meeting, should it come to that. With women, he invariably went the romantic route. With the men, he posed as another gamer and attempted to strike up a friendship through those avenues. Online gaming is huge at places like Waverly.”

    “And did any such physical meetings take place?” Lila asked.

    “A couple of times either Sorcerer or his mark would extend an invitation to meet up somewhere, but to the best of our knowledge, no such physical meetings ever took