Flirting With Disaster (Camelot 3)

Once they’d located the coffee place, Katie offered to stand in line while he scrounged up some food. He bought them egg-and-croissant sandwiches—the best he could do—and stopped at the newsstand to get a paper. On the spur of the moment, he picked up a box of chocolates wrapped in red cellophane and a cheesy card with a teddy bear on it. It was Valentine’s Day, and he figured he should at least take advantage of the one opportunity he’d ever have to spend money on Katie in the name of Hallmark-sanctioned sentimentality.

For my dream girl, he wrote above the pre-printed “Happy Valentine’s Day.” He hesitated over how to sign it, then gave up and wrote Love, Sean.

Then he stood staring at the card for half a minute before he sighed, crumpled it up, and threw it away.

When he found her again at the gate, she had his tablet out and was sorting through the data they’d come up with on possible Judah-stalkers as she sipped her coffee.

He stuck the chocolate box between her lap and the armrest and sat down next to her.

“What did you get me?” she asked without looking up.

“C-candy. Sorry, they didn’t have flowers.”

She raised her head, brow furrowed in confusion. “I meant for breakfast. I can’t have candy for—Oh.” When she saw the chocolates, her face became a study in unguarded expressions. Surprise and delight, followed by concern. Dismay. Disapproval. And then her struggle with knowing he’d seen all of it written there when she wished he hadn’t.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “There’s no ring. It’s only chocolates.”

“Yeah.” Her teeth worried at her bottom lip. “Sean?”

“You don’t wuh-want me to buy you sstuff.”

“I don’t want you to act like you’re not leaving.”

Good move, tossing the card. “It’s just c-candy, sweetheart. It c-cost less than your b-breakfast.”

She inspected the box of chocolates, picking at the overlapping cellophane on one edge with a sour expression. Then she sat up straighter, shoulders squared, and offered him a poor approximation of her usual smile. “I like cordial cherries. I think I’ll have one for an appetizer. You game?”

“Nah. Ssssweet stuff makes me sssick.”

“What a wonderful manly blanket statement.” Leaning over, she kissed his jaw. “Thanks. I’m not very good at getting presents. I’ll say in my defense, though, that this is the only Valentine’s present anyone’s ever given me, and I wasn’t expecting it.”

“Rider never b-bought you anything for Valentine’s Day?”

“He considered Valentine’s Day to be a form of consumer rape by greedy, soulless corporations.”

“Everybody thinks that. Most of us d-don’t use it as an excuse not to d-drop a few bucks on the women we’re sssleeping with.”

“Lovely,” she said, and this time the smile came closer to the real thing. “I sure can pick ’em, can’t I?” She got the lid off her chocolates and popped one into her mouth. It was the final punctuation mark on the conversation.

Sean ate his sandwich, drank his coffee, and watched the passengers go by. Ohio people didn’t look like California people. They were whiter, bigger, and softer. A bunch of doughnut holes clutching Starbucks cups and trailing suitcases on wheels. He felt vaguely ill and attributed it to the view.

“So, Mr. Owens,” Katie said after he came back from throwing away the breakfast garbage, “I’ve been trying to make heads or tails of this pile of gibberish you gave me, and I think I might be getting somewhere. Look at this.” She rotated the screen to where he could see it. “I invented some group profiles from what we’ve got, like what sorts of people are interacting with Judah and how. And I think some of them we can definitely exclude.”

Sean started reading the document she’d pulled up.

The Tween. Eleven to fourteen, the Tween has a crush on Judah and tends to check his Twitter stream, blog, and Facebook pages multiple times a day, most frequently in the hours before and after school. She usually participates using her phone, with a desktop computer as a backup. Her spelling sux, and almost everything she writes is an IM abbreviation. The Tween is no threat. Can we try to filter her out?

“Sure,” he said, tapping the screen. “By age, p-probably. I’ll have to ffiddle with it, but I ought to be able to m-make that work.”

The Musician. Twenty to thirty-five, male, the Musician reaches out to Judah as an equal, usually by direct email or through blog comments. The Musician writes from one IP, presumably a home computer, often in the evening. None of the threats so far has mentioned any aspect of Judah’s music. Can we drop the Musician from the results? Maybe by searching for musical terms or references to old shows … Help!

“They’re wordier, aren’t they? I can p-probably do something with the length of the interactions c-combined with the presence of musical terms like ‘lyrics,’ ‘key,’ that kind of thing.”

There were more profiles, at least half a dozen, but he didn’t get a chance to read them before Katie asked, “Will this help? I mean, is this a waste of time?”

“No, this is good. We have too much d-data as it is. I’ve been working on the threats, trying to follow them back to figure out as much as possible about who sent them, where they c-came from, where they were routed. If I c-can make a profile from that direction and you c-can help me narrow down the results until we’ve got a more reasonable pool, we might be able to make this work.”

He clamped his hand over her shoulder. “You’re g-good at this. How’d you get from that database I gave you to this sstuff?”