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it,” Jessup said. “He’ll end up giving us what we want, every dollar that he stole, to avoid extradition and the possibility of ending up in a Russian gulag. So don’t beat yourself up over this.”
    “I should have gone with the French braid,” she said. “The ponytail isn’t my power look.”

Kate spent the next couple days back in Los Angeles, gathering all of her notes and files on Nick Fox and handing them over to the federal prosecutor who was leading the trial team. She offered to stick around, to do whatever additional investigation might be necessary, but the prosecutor thought it was best for the case if she stayed out of it until she was called to testify. So she was finally free of the investigation that had occupied most of her time and attention for years.
    She enjoyed that freedom in the privacy of her cubicle for five whole minutes before marching into Jessup’s office. It had a commanding view of the Santa Monica Mountains and the hilltop Getty Center museum, which she knew Nick Fox had twice tricked into buying fake paintings, not that she’d been able to prove it.
    Jessup looked up from his desk. “Did you give the Justice Department everything?”
    “I cleaned out my files,” she said. “I even gave them my paperclips and the half-eaten turkey sandwich that’s been in my desk drawer since January. What have you got for me?”
    He handed her a thin file. “Pirates.”
    “You’re sending me to Somalia?”
    “There’s a ring in Southern California that’s been duping DVDs of movies and TV shows and posting the digital files on the Internet for people to download for free,” Jessup said.
    “We go after that stuff?”
    “Haven’t you seen the FBI warning at the beginning of every DVD?”
    “Yeah, but I thought it was a joke.”
    “It’s not,” Jessup said.
    “It is to me,” Kate said. “I brought in Nick Fox. I should be going after the next Nick Fox.”
    “This is big-time crime, Kate. The ring has cost the studios millions of dollars,” Jessup said. “One of the movies that they uploaded to a file-sharing site was downloaded twenty-seven thousand times in ninety days. And they’ve uploaded hundreds.”
    “I’m not feeling it,” she said.
    “The maximum penalty for conspiracy to commit copyright infringement is five years in prison, a two-hundred-fifty-thousand-dollar fine, and damages, which are computed by taking the sales price of the DVD and multiplying it by the number of times the digital file has been downloaded. On a twenty-five-dollar DVD downloaded twenty-seven thousand times, that’s six hundred seventy-five thousand dollars. Now multiply that by hundreds of movies, and you get the picture. This is a huge case.”
    Kate shook her head and put the file down. “I should be going after someone in the same league as Nick Fox. What about Derek Griffin? That big-time investment guy who ran off with fivehundred million dollars that he stole from his clients? I should find him.”
    “We’ve already got somebody on it,” Jessup said. “An entire task force, in fact.”
    “There must be someone else on the Ten Most Wanted list I can have.”
    “They are all taken.”
    “All of them?”
    “Believe it or not, while you were chasing Nick Fox, the rest of the Bureau was busy, too.”
    “Fine. I’ll take number eleven on the list.”
    “You’ll take this.” Jessup tapped the file. “Oh, and you’ll be working with an MPAA investigator on this one.”
    “MPAA?”
    “Motion Picture Association of America,” Jessup said.
    “They have cops?”
    “Yes,” Jessup said. “They do.”
    “You’re telling me to work with a make-believe cop.”
    “She’s not make-believe,” Jessup said. “She’s real. It’s what she’s hired to protect that’s not.”
    Kate looked Jessup in the eye. “Are you punishing me?”
    “Not every case can be Nick Fox,” Jessup said. “Get used to it.”
    “You have to take down your Facebook page,” Kate told her