Free Tell No One by Harlan Coben Page B

good night and then he was gone. I stared at the phone and wondered what the hell that was all about.
    Sleep was out of the question. I spent most of the night on the Web, surfing through various city street cams, hoping to stumble across the right one. Talk about the high-tech needle in the worldwide haystack.
    At some point, I stopped and slipped under the covers. Part of being a doctor is patience. I constantly give children tests that have life-altering—if not life-ending—implications and tell them and their parents to wait for the results. They have no choice. Perhaps the same could be said for this situation. There were too many variables right now. Tomorrow, when I logged in at Bigfoot under the Bat Street user name and Teenage password, I might learn more.
    I stared up at the ceiling for a while. Then I looked to my right—where Elizabeth had slept. I always fell asleep first. I used to lie like this and watch her with a book, her face in profile, totally focused on whatever she was reading. That was the last thing I saw before my eyes closed and I drifted off to sleep.
    I rolled over and faced the other way.
    At four in the morning, Larry Gandle looked over the bleached-blond locks of Eric Wu. Wu was incredibly disciplined. If he wasn’t working on his physical prowess, he was in front of a computer screen. His complexion had turned a sickly blue-white several thousand Web surfs ago, but that physique remained serious cement.
    “Well?” Gandle said.
    Wu popped the headphones off. Then he folded his marble-column arms across his chest. “I’m confused.”
    “Tell me.”
    “Dr. Beck has barely saved any of his emails. Just a few involving patients. Nothing personal. But then he gets two bizarre ones in the last two days.” Still not turning from the screen, Eric Wu handed two pieces of paper over his bowling ball of a shoulder. Larry Gandle looked at the emails and frowned.
    “What do they mean?”
    “I don’t know.”
    Gandle skimmed the message that talked about clicking something at “kiss time.” He didn’t understand computers—nor did he want to understand them. His eyes traveled back up to the top of the sheet and he read the subject.
    E.P. + D.B. and a bunch of lines.
    Gandle thought about it. D.B. David Beck maybe? And E.P.…
    The meaning landed on him like a dropped piano. He slowly handed the paper back to Wu.
    “Who sent this?” Gandle asked.
    “I don’t know.”
    “Find out.”
    “Impossible,” Wu said.
    “Why?”
    “The sender used an anonymous remailer.” Wu spoke with a patient, almost unearthly monotone. He used that same tone while discussing a weather report or ripping off a man’s cheek. “I won’t go into the computer jargon, but there is no way to trace it back.”
    Gandle turned his attention to the other email, the one with the Bat Street and Teenage. He couldn’t make head or tail out of it.
    “How about this one? Can you trace it back?”
    Wu shook his head. “Also an anonymous remailer.”
    “Did the same person send both?”
    “Your guess would be as good as mine.”
    “How about the content? Do you understand what either one is talking about?”
    Wu hit a few keys and the first email popped up on the monitor. He pointed a thick, veiny finger at the screen. “See that blue lettering there? It’s a hyperlink. All Dr. Beck had to do was click it and it would take him someplace, probably a Web site.”
    “What Web site?”
    “It’s a broken link. Again, you can’t trace it back.”
    “And Beck was supposed to do this at ‘kiss time’?”
    “That’s what it says.”
    “Is kiss time some sort of computer term?”
    Wu almost grinned. “No.”
    “So you don’t know what time the email refers to?”
    “That’s correct.”
    “Or even if we’ve passed kiss time or not?”
    “It’s passed,” Wu said.
    “How do you know?”
    “His Web browser is set up to show you the last twenty sites he visited. He clicked the link. Several times, in