Suzanne said, "Look, you can't let crazy people set your agenda. If you want to visit this Death kid, you should. If you don't, you shouldn't. But don't let Freddy psy-ops you into doing something you don't want to do. Maybe he does have a rat in your building. Maybe he's got a rat at the hospital. Maybe, though, he just scored some stills off a flickr stream, maybe he's watching new photos with some face-recognition stuff." Perry looked up from his screen, still scowling. "People do that?" "Sure -- stalkerware! I use it myself, just to see what photos of me are showing up online. I scour every photo-feed published for anything that appears to be a photo of me. Most of it's from blogjects, CCTV cameras and crap like that. You should see what it's like on days I go to London -- you can get photographed 800 times a day there without trying. So yeah, if I was Freddy and I wanted to screw with you, I'd be watching every image feed for your pic, and mine, and Lester's. We just need to assume that that's going on. But look at what he actually reported on: you went out and played catch and then hugged after your game. It's not like he caught you cornholing gators while smoking spliffs rolled in C-notes." "What does that guy have against us, anyway?" Suzanne sighed. "Well, at first I think it was that *I* liked you, and that you were trying to do something consistent with what he thought everyone should be doing. After all, if anyone were to follow his exhortations, they'd have to be dumb enough to be taking him seriously, and for that they deserve all possible disapprobation. "These days, though, he hates you for two reasons. The first is that you failed, which means that you've got to have some kind of moral deficiency. The second is that we keep pulling his pants down in public, which makes him even angrier, since pulling down people's pants is *his* job. "I know it's armchair psychology, but I think that Freddy just doesn't like himself very much. At the end of the day, people who are secure and happy don't act like this." Perry's scowl deepened. "I'd like to kick him in the fucking balls," he said. "Why can't he just let us be? We've got enough frigging problems." "I just want to go and visit this kid," Lester said, and they were back where they started. "But we know that this Freddy guy has an informant in the hospital, he about says as much in this article. If we go there, he wins," Perry said. Hilda and Lester just looked at him. Finally he smiled and relented. "OK, Freddy isn't going to run my life. If it's the right thing to visit this kid, it's the right thing. Let's do it."