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to the other as we walked to the front door. “Would you have eventually found it on your own?”
    “Of course,” I said.
    “Of course youwould have,” she said. “So take the damn credit and move on. There are a lot of ways you have to prioritize the bigger picture in this work, Angela. This is just one of them.”
    I knew she was probably right. I’d just have to wrap my mind around it. What a strange feeling, too. I’d been facing down all kinds of competition at MIT. But somehow, toggling that killer instinct over to the real, professionalworld was less instinctive for me than I would have thought.
    Hello, adulting.
    “You said there were two pieces of advice?” I said.
    “Yeah,” she said. “Now that you’re really in this, you need to remember: don’t ever let the work get personal.”
    That wasn’t what I was expecting to hear. “Which part of the work do you mean?” I asked.
    “All of it,” she said. “The case. The murders. The lives thatwere stolen from people whose memory you’re now in charge of protecting. It’s very easy to feel like you’re letting someone down if an investigation doesn’t go the way it should. But you can’t take that path. Don’t even think about it. You’ll burn out, faster than you can possibly imagine.”
    It was like every time I talked to Eve I got another new way of thinking about all this.
    “Just for therecord,” I said. “What makes you think I’d take any of that personally?”
    “Because I know you. I know how you get when someone you care about is attacked,” she said, making a not so subtle jababout what had happened with A.A. “I also know that Gwen was the same age as your sister,” she added.
    That wasn’t off base, either. Sylvie had crossed my mind about a hundred different ways since the nightI’d stood in that room where Gwen Petty was asphyxiated. It was impossible not to imagine my own personal nightmare coming true after I’d seen it happen to someone else, firsthand. I shuddered at the echo of it all as it passed through my mind again.
    Eve touched me on the shoulder, pulling me out of my thoughts. “This work will drag you down if you let it, Angela,” she said. “Don’t let it.”
    “Okay, but how?” I said. “All you ever hear is ‘Suck it up,’ but nobody ever tells you how to actually do that.”
    “You’ve got to look at your own stuff,” she said. “Not that you’ll hear this from any of the guys, but that’s what makes us better at it. Take stock. Be ready for whatever’s going to get the best of you
before
it takes you by surprise.”
    This wasn’t just idle conversation, I knew. Whathappened to the Pettys and the two families before them could easily happen again. In fact, it probably would if the Bureau didn’t work fast enough, or smart enough.
    And that meant me, too, now.
    “I’m handling it,” I told her. She gave me a skeptical look. I gave back a little kiss on Marlena’s cheek.
“Really,”
I said on my way out the door.
    And I was. Barely.
    But handling it all the same.

CHAPTER 14
    THE NEXT MORNING, I went with Billy Keats to Lincoln-Sudbury High School, where Gwen Petty had been a student. I was a little surprised that he’d invited me, but maybe that meant I was doing a good job.
    It didn’t hurt that I’d taken Eve’s advice. I wasn’t crazy about claiming credit for that app, but I trusted her gut about how to play the game. And either way, it bought me some timealone in the car with Keats’s undivided attention. As usual, I had an overabundance of questions.
    “Can I just pose a theory to you, and you can tell me why it’s wrong?” I asked.
    “Sure,” Keats said. He was nodding his head to an old Breaking Benjamin track on the stereo. You could tell he’d been a metalhead, once upon a time, but he sure cleaned up well.
    “What if this isn’t just one or two people,but some kind of network?” I said.
    He gave it a beat and thought about it for a second, which I took as a