Page 54 of The Wolves Come at Night

“We’re ready to head up the mountain.”

“Oh, good,” she said, almost surprised at the strength in her normally cracked voice. “Pick me up in five.”

She was putting the glasses in the dishwasher when it hit her. What had been bothering her for three days.

She leaned against the counter and called Marcus back.

“Almost there. Come on down.”

“You go on ahead, I’ll drive myself and meet you and Donna in the parking lot. I need to talk to the kid who wrote the GPS game again.”

“Simeon Chase? Why?”

“How many people are allowed the same coordinates at the same time?”

“They’re not. It’s meant to be a singular experience, completely random.”

“But what if it wasn’t random? What if Georgia Wray and her boyfriend were playing the game, too? What if both Carson Conway and Georgia Wray had the same coordinates? What if what Georgia’s parents think is true—that the fight Carson heard Georgia having with Justin was just that, a fight. And someone else shot her?”

“What are you saying, Taylor?”

“I’m making a leap, and this is assuming Jason Osborne didn’t kill Georgia, but… They look a lot alike, don’t you think? Georgia and Carson?”

A pause. “They have similarities, yes.”

“What if the killer wasn’t after Georgia at all? What if he was after Carson all along? What if he got the wrong girl?”

Twenty-Six

Simeon Chase answered Taylor’s call on the second ring, sounding out of breath.

“Captain? Hey. Did you find her?”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Chase. No. I’m calling for a different reason. I have another question about the app you run. You said that the coordinates Carson and Izz followed were randomly generated. Would it be possible to have more than one player sent to the same set of coordinates?”

“That’s not supposed to happen, no. I suppose a glitch could occur. The probabilities are incredibly slim, though every program is limited by its data points. Mine has over 50 million possible combinations per geographic space, so the odds of that happening are astronomical.”

“So if two players asked for the same thing on the same day—enlightenment, say—the app wouldn’t send those people to the same coordinates?”

“No. Definitely not. The algorithm is programmed to sense anomalies like that and generate different coordinates. Technically, thirty people could be standing in a group and all ask the same thing at the same time and be sent to thirty different places. It’s meant to be completely random.”

“But even random patterns can exist. Is there any way to look and see if the app has ever generated duplicate coordinates?”

She heard him typing in the background, waited patiently. A low whistle came through the phone, then a heartfelt and clipped “Bloody hell.” Her heart sped up.

“Find something?”

“Unfortunately, I have. It never occurred to me that I could be the source of the malware on Carson’s phone, but apparently, I was. My app has been hacked, Captain. There’s code in here that I didn’t write. It’s going to take me some time to sort it out.”

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” Taylor said. “How could your app be hacked? What sort of tools would someone need?”

“Only a decent keyboard, apparently,” he grumbled. “Can I ask what exactly you need me to look for? I can spout hypotheticals all day long, but if I have an idea of what I’m looking for, that would certainly help.”

“First, can you shut it down so whoever hacked it can’t see what you’re doing? I assume they’ll figure out that you know now?”

“I’m not sure. I don’t know how deep this goes. Without some serious diagnostics, I can’t tell if whoever hacked me is still in the system, or if they’ve left a back door they can enter any time they want. I suppose I can take the app off the App Store, stop other people from downloading it in the meantime. Bugger. That’s a project. This is not how I wanted my first app launch to go. I have an angel on the hook, too.”

“An angel?”