Ronnie’s mind juggled the images on the screen and the faces of those two dead girls.

He rubbed his eyes which stung from being up all night. The two computers he had in front of him hadn’t gotten a break either.

Positioning his chair in front of the laptop, he reran the data model. Turning to the inkBLOT server to run another report, he thrummed his fingers against the wooden desk. Nervous excitement gave him a buzz as he waited for the results to pop up on his twenty-two inch monitor.

The screen flickered as the results displayed across the screen.

Ronnie’s jaw dropped.

Please don’t let this be a dream.

He closed his eyes and opened them again.

“It is a match!” He slapped the desk. “A solid match.” He grabbed his mouse, copied some information from one file into another, and adjusted the numbers in the algorithm from the data on inkBLOT.

A warm rush of excitement swirled in Ronnie’s stomach. The model worked. This wasn’t a fluke. It might not be a statistically significant sample yet, but today marked a turning point. He scribbled numbers on a piece of paper, double-checking them against the results on the computer screen.

A swell of pride tickled his ego. All those hours of studying inkblots and the psychology behind them hadn’t been a waste of time after all. He tucked his pencil behind his ear and went to another screen.

Running a hand nervously through his hair, he reached for his can of Mountain Dew. Empty. He popped it with his knuckle, sending the can off the side of his desk to the floor.

The black lab snoring under the desk scrambled to his feet, retrieved it, and dropped it into the trash can.

“Score,” Ronnie said without even looking up. That was the first trick Rorschach had learned as a pup and he never missed. “Thanks, Rorschach.”

The dog yawned, then belly-crawled back under the desk.

“Sorry, buddy. The all-nighter taking a toll on you?” He couldn’t remember if he’d fed him, so he took a dog biscuit from the cookie jar he kept on his desk and tossed it to him just in case.

Rorschach snapped up the biscuit, let out a sigh, and went back to the business of sleeping.

A feminine voice seemed to come out of thin air. “What’s going on here?”

Ronnie jumped and Rorschach shot out from under the desk with a woof.

“Dang, girl. You scared me to death.” Ronnie hadn’t heard Tiffany come in, but there she was, propped in his doorway. “What? Are you in stealth mode?”

Tiffany laughed. “Hardly.” She gave Rorschach a rub on the ears before she plopped her purse down in the chair at the other desk.

“How long were you standing there?” he asked the tiny blonde.

“Long enough to see you looking right smug about something.”

He smiled. “I’m feeling pretty good.”

“Well you don’t look so good. You’ve got circles around your eyes as dark as your hair, and man, this whole place smells of garlic from the half eaten pizza still sitting on the table. Yuck. That’s not the pizza from Saturday night, is it?”

“‘fraid so.”

“That’s not like you. What the heck’s been going on?” The color drained from Tiffany’s face. “Please don’t tell me the iPad app crashed again.”

Ronnie could almost feel her nervous energy from where he sat. “No. No way.”

He propped a foot against the edge of his desk. “The changes you made to the app are fine. inkBLOT is up and running without a hitch. In fact, last month’s numbers are higher than ever.”

“Well, then why do you look like you’ve been up all weekend?”

“Because I have been.” Suddenly he caught a whiff and realized the pizza wasn’t the only thing that stank. He folded his arms across his chest to hide the funk. “You won’t believe what I’ve been working on.”

“Do I really want to know?”

“Remember the string of missing girls up in Pennsylvania?

“Yeah. They caught that nut. It was all over television. He had all those victims tied up in display cases around his house like a life-sized doll collection.” Tiffany shivered. “What a weirdo.”

“The last update I heard was that they found the other two girls that were missing buried in the guy’s backyard.”

Tiffany rubbed her arms to chase the chill. “That’s scary. The families knew the guy, too. But wait a minute, what’s that got to do with your place smelling like a trash dumpster? Oh, and by the way, you kind of look like you’ve been sleeping in a dumpster, too.”

“Thanks a lot.” Ronnie took a comb out of his back pocket and whisked it through his hair. “Better?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Good. So, you want to know what that freak has to do with us?”

Tiffany straightened and shook her head. “With me? Not me.”

He motioned between the two of them. “With inkBLOT. Which means you and me.”

She looked skeptical.

Ronnie raised a challenging brow. “The big deal is that inkBLOT matched him.”

“Whoa.” Tiffany rushed to Ronnie’s side, and looked at the screens in front of him. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying? This isn’t embezzling or some white collar crime. This is really dangerous stuff.”

“I know.” Ronnie rocked in his chair as he nodded. “It’s big.”

“You’ve got to tell someone about this.”

He shook his head. “Not yet. When I have a scientifically sound sample, and enough credit for people to take me seriously, then I’ll get it in front of the right people.”

“But Ronnie, you’re saying that the data we’ve captured is chugging out lists of people who aren’t just up to no good, but potentially dangerous. Deadly!”

“That's true,” Ronnie said. “And it’s getting more and more accurate.”

“Yeah, and when the names were attached to less horrifying crimes, I was fine with waiting, but these last couple, they're big. We could save lives.”

“Some day,” Ronnie said.

Tiffany folded her arms across her chest.

Ronnie sat forward. “They’ll shut us down if we tell now. We can’t put everyone on a list who MIGHT be dangerous. It would be like putting a percentage of the population under arrest just in case they did something. We can’t do that.”

“We have to do something.”

Tiffany looked frustrated. Ronnie got that. It bugged him to keep all this great work hush-hush too, but who would believe a theory that a couple of teens put together? No one. He knew that. Like everything else in his life, he’d have to wait until the timing was right.

Ronnie softened his voice to soothe her concerns. “Soon. I hope it will be soon, too. That’s the plan. For now though, I’m still working on the piece of the model that will tell us what level of crime could occur before it happens. I’m tweaking that.”

“Was that guy on the lists I’ve been checking?”

Ronnie opened a blue folder. “Yep. Right here. Number 51793. He surveyed with us several times. I cross-checked his results against the data you usually run. Can you imagine if we could get everyone to take the inkBLOT quiz? But, and this is rockin’, the marker questions we added, they’re really helping weed out suspect answers. Now, when people make stuff up, we’ll know it.”

“This is great. You amaze me. Over and over again.” Tiffany’s look of excitement turned to concern. “Have you slept at all since Saturday night?”

“No. I’ve been too amped up to sleep. Once I got it all sorted out, I updated the model and reran the reports to see how the ones we already validated played out. Time flew by. Tiff, all of the data is on the money. This list is getting tighter with each tweak.”

Tiffany slapped Ronnie’s hand in a high five, and then headed over to her desk. “At least the list of folks on my report that I have to keep tabs on will be smaller. That’s a relief.”

“We’re making progress, Tiff. Real progress.”

“I sure feel lame. I sat in my room reading all weekend. You should’ve called. I’d have been here in a hot second.”

He knew it was true, but when everything started coming together he hadn’t been able to slow down for anything.

“Well, I’m pretty much done with it for now.”

Tiffany powered up the computer on her desk, then turned back to Ronnie. “You probably need to get some rest.”

“It’s eight in the morning. I can’t go to sleep now. I’ll be fine once I jump in the shower,” Ronnie said. “In fact, that’s where I’m heading now.”

“Good. Take that trash out while you’re at it.” Tiffany turned and started working through the files on her computer.

“Hey, this is my apartment.”

“Yeah, well I work here, and for a real bargain I might remind you.”

She had him there. He’d been in a bad place when his mom left for Florida and never came back. inkBLOT and Tiffany became the most important things in his life. Once they turned the inkblots into a game and set up the portal, Tiffany took of the detailed analysis and advertising which was profitable for them both. They’d become best friends in the process.

She looked pretty today. He stopped in the doorway and turned to say something about it, but feeling corny he swallowed the words.

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