The rented office space smelled of industrial carpet cleaner and stale anxiety. It was a windowless box on the second floor of a strip mall off Highway 12, sandwiched between a tax preparer and a defunct travel agency. There were no hydrangeas here. No white fences. Just beige drywall and the low, maddening hum of a fluorescent light fixture that flickered every forty-five seconds.
Maya paced the length of the room, her footsteps muffled by the thin grey carpet. It had been twelve hours since they fled the cul-de-sac. Twelve hours of silence from the Podcaster.
“Stop pacing,” Chloe murmured. She didn’t look up from her laptop. “You’re vibrating the floor.”
Chloe sat at a folding table pushed against the back wall, surrounded by a fortress of technology she had salvaged from her home studio before the evacuation. Three monitors, a server tower, and a tangle of cables that looked like a robotic nervous system. She wasn’t wearing makeup. Her hair was pulled back in a severe bun, held in place by a pencil. The influencer was gone; the hacker was in the chair.
“I can’t help it,” Maya said, stopping to stare at the blank whiteboard where they had taped up the floor plan of the empty house next door. “He’s quiet. I don’t like it when he’s quiet. It means he’s writing.”
“He’s not writing,” Chloe said, her fingers flying across a mechanical keyboard. “He’s waiting. He’s waiting for us to break. But we’re going to break him first.”
She hit a key with a decisive clack.
“It’s rendered.”
Maya moved to the table, leaning over Chloe’s shoulder. On the center monitor, a jagged blue waveform sat frozen.
“Play it,” Maya said.
Chloe put on her noise-canceling headphones, then unplugged the jack so the sound would play through the external speakers.
“I added a 60-cycle hum to match the electrical grounding issues of 1994 recording equipment,” Chloe explained, her voice clinical. “I layered in a noise floor profile I took from an old cassette tape. And I synthesized the voice using the snippets from the podcast and that old home video Sarah found in her attic.”
She pressed the spacebar.
Static filled the room. A hiss of magnetic tape. Then, a woman’s voice.
“I don’t know what to do,” the voice whispered. It was Juniper. It was terrifyingly accurate—the slight lilt, the breathless quality of her fear. “He’s outside again. The man in the blue suit. He thinks I don’t see him by the tree line. But I see him. I have the ledger. I know where the money went.”
The audio cut out with a sharp pop of static.
Maya felt a chill ripple down her arms, despite the stifling heat of the room. “It’s perfect. It sounds real.”
“It sounds like bait,” Chloe corrected. “It hits every trigger. ‘Blue Suit.’ ‘Ledger.’ ‘Money.’ It attacks his narrative. He thinks he knows everything about 1994. If he hears this—a recording he doesn’t possess—he’ll panic. He’ll have to know where it came from.”
“He’s arrogant,” Maya said. “He thinks he’s the director. Directors hate plot holes.”
“Exactly.” Chloe opened a new window. It was a browser, but not Chrome or Safari. It was Tor. The interface was dark, minimalist. She navigated to a forum called The Cold Case Collective.
“This is where he lurks,” Chloe said. “I traced the referral traffic from his podcast host. 40% of his initial listeners came from this specific thread.”
The thread title was: The Gables Ghost: Fact or Fiction?
“He monitors this,” Maya said. “He probably posts here under a sock puppet account to hype himself up.”
“We’re going to give him something to click,” Chloe said.
She opened a file uploader.
“I’m embedding the audio file in a canary token,” she explained. “It’s a trap link. It looks like a standard Dropbox URL, but the moment someone clicks it, the server logs their IP address, their device type, their browser fingerprint, and—if I configured the script correctly—their GPS coordinates.”
“What if he uses a VPN?” Maya asked. “He used one at the library.”
“This isn’t an IP trace,” Chloe said, a grim smile touching her lips. “This is a browser exploit. It asks the device for its geolocation API. If he’s on a phone—and he’s always on his phone—it will ping off the nearest cell tower before the VPN tunnel can mask it. It’s dirty. It’s illegal. And it’s going to work.”
Chloe typed a caption for the post.
User: TruthSeeker94 Subject: FOUND TAPE Text: My aunt cleaned out her attic in The Gables today. Found a box marked ‘J.B.’ There was a cassette inside. I think this changes the timeline. The police missed this.
She pasted the link.
“Ready?” Chloe asked.
Maya looked at the screen. This was the point of no return. Once they posted this, they were engaging the enemy directly. They were stepping onto his stage.
“Do it,” Maya said.
Chloe hit Post.
The message appeared at the top of the thread.
Now, the waiting game began.
Maya pulled up a chair and sat next to Chloe. The room felt smaller suddenly. The silence was heavy.
“How long?” Maya asked.
“Depends on how obsessive he is,” Chloe said. “If he has alerts set up for the thread… minutes.”
One minute passed. Two.
The fluorescent light flickered. Buzz.
Maya stared at the map tracking dashboard Chloe had opened on the second monitor. The world map was dark. No pings.
“What if he knows it’s a trap?” Maya asked. “He knows we have tech skills now. He saw you at the library.”
“He thinks I’m a hack,” Chloe said, her eyes narrowing. “He called me a fraud in Episode Four. He thinks I bought my followers. He thinks I’m just a pretty face with a ring light. He underestimates me. That’s his fatal flaw.”
“He underestimates all of us,” Maya agreed.
Five minutes.
A comment appeared under their post.
User: GablesWatcher: Fake. The police cleared the attic in ‘94.
“Is that him?” Maya asked.
“Maybe,” Chloe said. “Or just a troll.”
Another comment.
User: TruthSeeker94 (Chloe): Listen to the audio. The hum is 60-cycle. You can’t fake that decay.
Chloe typed the response fast. She was baiting the hook.
Ten minutes.
Maya stood up and walked to the door, checking the lock. The paranoia was a physical itch under her skin. She felt like the walls were closing in. She missed the open view of the wetlands, even if the wetlands were full of eyes.
“Movement,” Chloe said sharply.
Maya rushed back to the screen.
“Someone clicked,” Chloe said. “IP from Seattle. VPN.”
“Is it him?”
“No GPS data. Just a desktop computer. Probably a random user.”
Another click. Frankfurt, Germany.
Another. Dallas, Texas.
“The post is getting traction,” Chloe said. “People are listening. They’re debating it in the comments.”
User: RedDress: *Holy sht. That sounds like her. I went to high school with Juniper. That’s her voice.
“Good,” Maya whispered. “Validate it. Make him curious.”
Twenty minutes.
The thread was blowing up. Speculation was wild. People were tagging the podcast’s official account.
Then, the screen froze.
“Hello,” Chloe whispered.
A single, red dot appeared on the map. It wasn’t in Seattle. It wasn’t in Germany.
It was in The Gables.
“He clicked,” Chloe said, her voice trembling with adrenaline. “Mobile device. iOS 17. High-end hardware.”
“Where is he?” Maya demanded, leaning in so close her nose almost touched the screen.
Chloe zoomed in. The map layers peeled back. State. County. Town. Neighborhood.
The dot hovered over Bittersweet Court.
“He’s in the cul-de-sac,” Chloe said. “He’s checking the forum from the scene of the crime.”
“Which house?” Maya asked. “Pinpoint it.”
Chloe typed a command to refine the GPS triangulation. The dot wobbled, then stabilized.
It wasn’t over Sarah’s house. It wasn’t over Elena’s.
It was hovering directly over the gap between Number 4 and Number 5.
“He’s between the houses,” Chloe said.
“The easement,” Maya realized. “The path to the wetlands.”
“No,” Chloe corrected, zooming in further. The satellite view showed the property lines. “He’s not on the path. He’s… he’s inside Number 5.”
Maya went cold. “The empty house.”
“The GPS accuracy is within three meters,” Chloe said. “He’s in the structure. He’s in the Thorne house.”
“Elias’s old house,” Maya said. “The Cursed House.”
“He’s lurking,” Chloe said. “He’s on the Wi-Fi. Wait… I’m seeing a signal bridge. He’s piggybacking off your Wi-Fi, Maya. That’s why the signal is so strong. He’s using a repeater.”
Maya stared at the red dot. It was pulsing gently, like a heartbeat.
“He’s there right now,” Maya said. “He’s sitting in the empty house, listening to the fake tape, thinking he missed something.”
“He’s trapped,” Chloe said. “He doesn’t know we can see him.”
Maya grabbed her coat from the back of the chair. The fear was gone, incinerated by the white-hot clarity of the hunt.
“He’s not trapped yet,” Maya said. “But he’s about to be.”
“What are you doing?” Chloe asked, though she was already reaching for her own keys.
“We’re going back,” Maya said. “We’re going to catch a ghost.”
“We need weapons,” Chloe said, opening her purse and pulling out a pink taser. “And we need the others.”
“Text them,” Maya ordered. “Tell Sarah and Elena to meet us at the end of the cul-de-sac. Tell them to bring flashlights. And tell them to be quiet.”
She looked at the screen one last time. The red dot was still there, unmoving. Arrogant.
“He thinks he’s the audience,” Maya said, opening the office door. “Let’s show him he’s the finale.”
They ran down the hallway, the sound of their footsteps echoing like war drums. The trap had worked. Now they just had to spring it before the predator realized he was the prey.