Shadow Unit 9
Author: Emma Bull; Elizabeth Bear; Will Shetterly; Amanda Downum; Leah Bobet; Kyle Cassidy
Date: 2011-08-04 07:00:00+00:00
Keywords: behavioral analysis unit; Paranormal; Thriller; Crime; Mystery; Horror; Science Fiction; Fantasy; bau; fbi
Description: The FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit hunts humanity's worst nightmares. But there are nightmares humanity doesn't dream are real. The BAU sends those cases down the hall. Welcome to Shadow Unit. The Shadow Unit series was created by award-winning authors Emma Bull and Elizabeth Bear. Contains * Always Crashing In The Same Car * by Will Shetterly * Spell 81A * by Amanda Downum and Elizabeth Bear * Closet Monster * by Leah Bobet
Publisher: CatYelling

Book 9

Emma Bull

Elizabeth Bear

Will Shetterly

Amanda Downum

Leah Bobet

Contents

Publishing Information

“Fidelity”

“Things Ben Falkner Does When His Wife Isn’t Around”

“Bridge Day”

“Always Crashing In The Same Car” by Will Shetterly

“Casserole”

“Confessions”

“A Good-looking Badge Instills Confidence”

“Silence”

“Posterity”

“Spell 81A” by Amanda Downum and Elizabeth Bear

“Texas”

Chaz Villette’ journal, 2009-09-04 11:57:00

“Standard of Care”

Chaz Villette’s journal, 2009-10-12 18:22:00

“Summer of Sam”

“Orientation Day”

“Closet Monster” by Leah Bobet

“Shatterproof”

“Grievous Bodily Harm”

“Eight Second Rule”

“Three-day Weekend”

“Meet the Family”

Credits

Publishing Information

© 2007-2011 Emma Bull, Elizabeth Bear, Sarah Monette, Will Shetterly, Stephen Shipman, Amanda Downum, Leah Bobet, & Holly Black. Cover design and photo @ Kyle Cassidy.

First edition. Published by CatYelling.

Smashwords Edition.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

All seasons of Shadow Unit are available online at www.shadowunit.org.

“Fidelity”

Ashton, VA, February 2010

SSA Stephen Reyes, Ph.D., takes off his wristwatch. He removes his cufflinks, tie-tack, necktie. He leaves each one neatly in the nonmetallic tray provided. It’s black lacquer with gold and crimson dragons, not institutional plastic, and so he knows Lau brought it. The view out of the containment room is dismal enough; all of Hafidha’s loved ones have been trying to brighten it.

Hafidha watches behind her insulated enclosure as Reyes divests himself of pens, keys, cellphone, PDA, wallet, Idlewood visitor badge with the RFID chip in it. Velasquez watches as the trainee, Partridge—a young woman with red hair, freckles, and the brittle businesslike hypercompetence of an ACOA—wands Reyes for any forgotten bits of metal. He’s wearing his father’s ring with the spinel masquerading as a ruby in it, the one pawned and redeemed a half-dozen times that Reyes knows of. The ultra-sensitive detector chirps and that, too, goes in the tray.

With every item he sheds, Hafidha gets a little taller, stretches her neck a little more. He thinks of a small dog behind a gate and hates himself. Hates himself more: Reyes’ trips to Idlewood are not generally conducive to a sense of calm serenity.

He pauses at the airlock. “May I come in?”

She steps back from the plastic, leaving palm-prints behind. “Do I have a choice?”

He smiles. “Sure. You can say no, and I’ll turn around, put all this crap back in my pockets, and go home until next week. Or you can say yes, and we can sit down for a while and drink tea out of lousy paper cups and talk face to face like old friends.”

He sees the struggle in her face. She wants him there, she doesn’t want anyone to see her here. The thing in her head wants them both to suffer, but maybe if he stays, it can hurt them both more—

Don’t personify it, Stephen.

Institutionalization is bad for people. The more their autonomy is curtailed, the more they become manipulative and secretive. Like grad students, Reyes thinks, and keeps the amusement out of his face. Hafidha would think it was for her, and it isn’t.

Institutionalization is bad for people, and so Hafidha—and the other Idlewood inmates—get all the self-determination they can handle.

She steps away from the wall. “Tea?” she says brightly. “I don’t suppose that comes with a scone?”

Reyes smiles and turns to Partridge. But Velasquez is already standing in the doorway to the observation room, the bakery bag in his hand, a paper tray with four large cups balanced on the other. Reyes left them in the hall until Hafidha engaged him. Velasquez, an Idlewood staff lifer, had picked up the cue without being asked.

At the moment, Reyes likes the pockfaced, stocky deputy head of security a lot.

“Three kinds,” he answers. He accepts the food, balances the tray on the same side to keep his left hand free, and enters the airlock.

The door behind him locks. The door in front swings open, and Reyes moves into Hafidha’s containment room.

When the Faraday cage seals him in, he feels nothing. He tries to imagine what it’s like for Hafidha—as if blinded or deafened, senses muffled, missing half the world. Limbs severed, eyes put out.

Before he can stop himself, he dry-swallows.

You’re in a room with a gamma, his endocrine system says. A highly combat-trained gamma, younger than he is, with longer reach. There is very little in Hafidha’s room that could be used as a weapon, but she will always have her feet and teeth and fists. His heart squeezes hard in his chest, informing him that this is a terrible idea.

Carefully, he sets the tea and the bag of pastry on the small table which doubles as a desk. She only has one straight-backed chair, but she’s already dragging her rocking chair around to the opposite side, eagerness in every motion.

He won’t relax. But this is Hafidha today, and he will treat her as he always would have—as a quirky, resilient genius who was never the least little bit impressed with his shit.

They sit beside the window. There are plants on the ledge between the casement and the containment room, smug and lush in what amounts to a tiny greenhouse. Someone must care for them from outside, but the smell of chlorophyll filters in through the ventilation holes. As Hafidha sits in her plastic rocking chair—she’s padded and obscured it with tablet-woven cushions, and he imagines she spun the yarn herself—she’s framed against the wall behind her. She’s prevailed upon somebody to push a five-foot-square Ikea bookcase up to the outside of the Faraday cage. Inside the cubes, Reyes can see a riot of yarn and fibers, all the brilliant colors she’s ever loved, and the tools of her art.

She can’t have the fiber, the crochet hooks, the spindles and bobbins, inside her cage except for when she’s supervised and working on them. You could braid a rope with yarn and hang yourself; you could put the sharp end of a spindle into your eye.

“Do you like my burrow?” she asks brightly, over the crinkle of paper as she investigates the contents of the bag.

Reyes pushes a cup of tea towards her. It’s more warm than piping now, but tea takes chilling better than coffee does and this isn’t hot enough to hurt anyone. “I liked your old one better.”

She pulls out a chocolate chip scone and a cinnamon sticky bun and squares them on the paper napkins before her. “Stephen Reyes, honesty?”

He shrugs. He uncovers and sips his tea.

She mirrors him—or seems about to, and stops with the cup at her lips. Just as full as ever, but naked-looking without lipstick. As naked-looking as her long, articulate hands without their gaud of rings and polish. “You should have let me die.”

“And Chaz too? You know it wasn’t an either-or choice, Hafidha.”

The rocking chair moves under her weight as she looks down. Reyes puts a hand on the pastry bag and spins it. The smell of sugar and cheese Danish fills the room as he makes his selection. “Besides,” he says, “I don’t believe in monsters. I believe that you are ill. I also believe that you beat cancer, and you can beat this.”

She’s about to snort dismissal until that last line. Instead, she stuffs an overlarge bite of sticky bun into her mouth.

Reyes keeps talking, and he doesn’t show the chill he feels as the shadow of poor dead Hope Mitchell, his torturer, falls across him. “I don’t believe in monsters. I believe the anomaly is knowable, containable, and treatable. I believe you can get better.”

She swallows what’s in her mouth with a grimace and washes it down with a gulp of tea. “That’s your mythology, Stephen.”

What he wouldn’t give to hear her call him El Generalissimo now.

“It is,” he says, and takes another bite of Danish.

She smiles.

He smiles back. He gestures to the wall of color behind her. “So what are you making now?”

“Socks,” she answers, extending her narrow foot to demonstrate. Inside the embroidered phoenix slipper, her ankle is encased in a lacy confection of brilliant greens. “Turns out you can crochet them. There’s a special stitch to make them stretchy. You want a pair?”

“Only if I can have them in purple.”

“Baby,” she says. “You’re on.”

I’d lay down my body I’d lay down my arms

I never once in my sweet short life meant anybody harm.

—Garbage, “Happy Home”

“Things Ben Falkner Does When His Wife Isn’t Around”

Silver Spring, MD

“How d’you handle that, man?” his brother said, the third or fourth or tenth trip out to a classified location with no knowing when she was coming home.

Ben Falkner shifted the receiver from his right hand to his left. He was in the kitchen, stirring canned soup in a saucepan for a Saturday lunch. In the living room, the girls were playing: tentative, still. Rebekah’s voice rose and fell, and every so often plastic bricks clattered against the side of a Rubbermaid tub. The social worker said Deborah was integrating well into the family, but it was better if both parents were home. It was better for refugee children if they could keep track of their new families every day.

Ben Falkner wiped his brow, pinched the phone firmly between ear and shoulder, took a deep breath and said, “It’s no big deal.”

Ben and his brother Avi are close, but there is no explaining his marriage to Avi. Avi’s wife Miriam is a tax accountant who works strict nine-to-five hours. She wears soft skirts and pins her hair up with green butterfly clips and has round, uncallused hands. She does not know how to aim or fire a gun. She is the primary caregiver for Ben Falkner’s niece and two nephews, and Avi does not know how to separate laundry, or bake muffins for a seven-year old’s birthday party, or wait.

•

Eight years later, Ben is good at waiting by the phone.

His wife calls every night by nine, come hell or high water, when she is on the road. Up to her ears in police or profiles or corpses, overtired or overworked, she has never missed a goodnight call to her husband and daughters.

Ben Falkner spends the hour and a half after dinner and before the evening phone call in a variety of ways. He reads carpentry magazines or balances the books. He watches movies with the girls. He runs laundry, white on white on white, and watches it tumble in the sleek and fancy dryer they bought with Esther’s year-end bonus last winter.

For a while, during a bad patch mid-2005 when Deborah was tantruming and inconsolable and Rebekah sullen and Ben and Esther fighting all the time, he spent the hours before the nine p.m. call drifting surreptitiously through dating sites; just to look, not to touch, he told himself.

A thirty-something bank teller in Idaho wrote him a few e-mails. He wrote a few back. He sent the last one just as the phone rang.

Cooking, cleaning, and cheating. All the things bored housewives do, he thought, and the disgust was so sharp and abrupt that he blocked the site and refused to touch the computer for a week.

He told her when she came home. He looked her right in the eye and told her. I’m having trouble, he said. I don’t know if I can do this.

Her face closed off like a desk drawer shutting. The next day, she found them a therapist.

•

The phone rings at eight-fifty-five. Ben Falkner is reading the last few pages of a Raymond Chandler novel. I’m tired, the girl says to Marlowe. You’ll have to carry me this time.

He picks up the phone. The line is crackly, faraway. Beyond it, the sound of highway traffic. “Es?”

“Ben?” she says. There’s a burst of static. “I can’t talk long.” She sounds worn out, weary. Beaten.

He closes his eyes. Puts a smile into his voice. “That’s okay,” he says.

•

“The problem,” Dr. Mashriki says - a solo session this time; Esther has been called away to Omaha and it was too late for Ben to cancel - “isn’t the marriage per se. It’s about how you’re defining masculinity.”

Ben’s hands are on his knees. He sits very still; this is how he was taught to sit in school, and this is still how he sits when the spotlight of an authority figure is fixed firm upon him.

“What is it men do?” Dr. Mashriki says, when it comes clear that Ben isn’t going to answer. “Provide for the family. Bring home the bacon.”

“Protect their wives,” he blurts.

The doctor leans forward, elbows on his knees, notepad between his hands. “And you can’t,” he says, soft and blunt. “How does that make you feel?”

Helpless. Reduced. Unmanned.

Ben Falkner shrugs.

“Do you love her?” the doctor asks. Not looking at the wall or the notepad or his glasses this time. Looking Ben in the eye. Man to man.

Ben swallows. A pulse beats in his palm; he’s clenched his fists tight. “Yeah,” he says, quiet.

Mashriki sits back. The fight, the challenge is out of his face. “All right,” he says. “So let’s talk about it.”

•

Still safe, Ben thinks when he picks up the phone between the second and third ring. It’s eight-forty-nine in the evening. Still alive.

“Hello?” he says, even though he knows who it’ll be. The Falkners’ friends and family, their daughters’ friends, know not to call the house until after nine o’clock.

“Ben,” she says, miles away, in the Midwest or Florida or the icy north, and it’s a sigh unwinding. “Girls still up?”

This too is part of the ritual. She talks to the girls first: asks about their days and homework, gives them a flattened, telephonic kiss goodnight. And then the grownups talk. “I’ll get them,” he says, and takes the phone into Deborah’s room.

He gives them their privacy. Deborah chatters into the phone to her mother - the only way she has ever known a mother, as something that sometimes goes away - and Ben returns to his sketching. He is drafting a desk chair for his wife; something with a curve just so in the back, so she can lean her strained and beaten spine against it without pain. He doesn’t work on it during shop hours. Only in the evenings, when he’s waiting for her to call.

Rebekah brings the phone in to him when she’s finished. She hands it off silently, hair already braided for bed. “Thank you,” he says, solemn, and she nods a little and wanders back to her room.

“Hey,” he says, when his eldest is gone. “How’s it going?”

“Hey,” Es says back. “Not good. You?”

He puts the smile into his voice. He wraps it around that tiredness, those four words bruised and aching. “Finally tracked down that power bill,” he says. “They didn’t mail it after all.” And then: “Don’t worry. I took care of it.”

Her breath gusts and crackles across the line. “Thank you. I don’t know what I’d do.”

He puts down his pencil. It rolls across the drafting pad. “No problem,” he says, solid and dependable and strong. When she first started with the job, he’d ask: When do you think you’re coming home? He knows better than to ask it now; now he just waits.

The brief silence tells him everything.

“Well,” he says. Everloving. Forgiving. Steady like a rock. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow night, then.”

“I love you,” she says. She means it, he knows. She’s always meant it.

“Goodnight,” Ben Falkner replies, perched on the side of his cold and solitary bed. Outside the window, the moon lights up the swingset he built for his daughters with his own two hands, the fences he’s carefully mended, the branches of their tall oak tree. The faint, scratched lines on his drafting pad. “Goodnight. I love you too.”

“Bridge Day”

New River Gorge Bridge, Fayetteville, WV, the third Saturday in October, 2009

The bridge is open to pedestrians for one day, once a year. For six hours, from 9:00 am to 3:00 pm, it’s also open to BASE jumpers and rappellers. Legally, with news crews and shuttle buses and thousands of observers. It’s an event, a destination. The biggest BASE party in the world.

It’s five hours from your front steps, the way Daphne drives. Closer to three and a half if you’re alone in the car.

Sunrise on October seventeenth is at 7:20, give or take. You’re there by six, having hiked in the .8 of a mile from Fayetteville to stand cold and dark in the registration line, waiting to hand the green-eyed girl behind the folding table strung with Vertical Visions banners your 2x2 headshot and your passport. She checks them under a miner’s light, smiling, her orange-streaked hair slicked back into a scraggly ponytail, and then she does smelly things with a badgemaker. What she hands you back is the passport and a photo ID badge, $89.99 worth of red and yellow plastic.

One of the weirdest things you’ve ever held.

To get it, you had to submit everything from the name of your next of kin (Daphne Worth) to your blood type (O negative).

The next of kin thing isn’t too unusual, though it’s not normally this formal. Others leave letters, just-in-case, for family, lovers, friends. But you’ve never had someone to worry about you before.

Everybody who might have cared what happened to you was always right there beside you. Breaking chains. Jimmying locks. Tiptoeing across dark-night construction sites. Furtive in blacks, carrying pry bars.

“You have nice eyes, Charles,” the girl says. “Have a good ride.”

You clip the badge onto your jacket. “Uh. Thanks.”

The smile turns into a grin when you stammer, which makes you stammer harder. Wiktory.

You grin back, awarding her the point, and get out of the way so the two girls behind you can get their ID settled. You? Shoulder your rig, stretch your neck side to side, and walk on. Past the vendors, setting up now, with their gear and memorabilia and vats of hot oil. You stomach rumbles at the smell, and you promise it funnel cakes before too much longer. Past the early arrivals of a crowd that will eventually edge close to a quarter million. Four hundred or so participants to two hundred thousand members of the audience.

Well, isn’t that pretty much like life?

You also pass one or two other jumpers, who catch sight your red and yellow badge and smile. No sign of anybody you know, not yet. No old friends. But there probably will be.

You walk on, starting across the three thousand and thirty foot span of the second-highest steel-arch bridge on earth. Past floodlights and past the packing tarps, already in use. There’s no early morning silence here, no breaking and entering, no slipping through the back country and deciding who’s going to stay to talk to the park rangers if somebody gets killed.

Just a waiting ambulance, dewed with condensation. Just a bright red truck emblazoned with the Vertical Visions logo, its cherrypicker ready to suspend over the bridge railing. Beside it, three guys muscle a sixteen foot aluminum diving board up to the exit. Height, five feet above the bridge, making it eight hundred eighty-one feet to the water.

Eight seconds with no airfoil.

If you pull at a hundred feet, you can free fall for seven of those. But you want to hit the landing zone solid: tanking it into the river is for suckers, and those rocks waiting if you miss the beach will hurt if you faceplant into them.

It’s been a while. So five seconds would be better.

Somebody’s got a radio playing. One. Nothing wrong with me. Two. Nothing wrong with me.

Nice choice, you think, and snort. If that were true, you’d be home with your feet up.

Clear of the exit zone, you mosey up to the railing and lean over. One or two others are lined along the edge, bellies pressed to painted metal, straining their eyes into the darkness below. Dimly, you can make out the yellow chevrons of the landing zone, bright against the sand. It’s too much night down there in the gorge to see much more of anything, except maybe the lights of an early motorboat.

“Good wind,” says the guy on your right.

It moves the coils of hair on your neck, streaks a couple across your face. The bandanna’s in your pocket; when the time comes, you’ll tie it on under the helmet to keep the mess out of the way.

“Nice and even,” you agree, wrapping your arms around yourself when it makes you want to shiver.

He’s got a helmet bumping from its strap over his shoulder too, knee pads, gloves. Older guy, white, brown on brown. Pushing fifty. Nothing to prove.

You wonder how many exits he’s got behind him.

You don’t feel like talking yet, so you turn away. You pull a Clif bar from your pocket and eat it walking. It tastes like gritty sugar and chewy cardboard; you have to check the label to see it’s supposed to be carrot cake. What the hell; it won’t be too much longer until those funnel cakes start sizzling.

Funnel cakes. And a festival atmosphere.

A little cluster of guys stand around near the packing tarps, arranging plans for a six-way exit and discussing the finer points of mesh sliders and thirty-nine versus forty-two inch pilot chutes. One says, “What’s the worst that could happen?” and the other five laugh.

•

The penultimate jumpers before you go off standing one on another’s shoulders. They play aerobatics on the way down. The guy right ahead can’t track—his arms and legs kick like a dangled puppy’s, and it’s no surprise when his turn ends twenty feet short of the beach and he plunges hip deep into the river, his black and yellow bumblebee seven-cell blowing out like an oil slick on the water.

He doesn’t use the diving board. It’s reserved for advanced jumpers. You suspect he doesn’t have enough exits, and he looks like the type who would balk at wearing a helmet.

You?

Sixteen feet of diving board is just four normal steps and one short one. When the crew tells you there’s a rescue boat ready and you can start your exit, you walk to the end, feeling it spring under every footfall. Just like in the swimming pools back home, except with no splash at the end, and plenty of time to work on that gainer.

You look down all that scrotum-crisping distance, craning your neck to watch the abseilers rapp off under the bridge like a cloud of baby spiders. The wind’s a little diagonal and crosswise, like it should be, and when it gusts around the bridge supports you swear it brings you the whirr of their racks. You’re a little surprised you can hear it over the wind, your breath, the thunder of your chickenshit cardiac equipment.

The lime green pilot chute is tucked into your left hand like a synthetic fungus that wants the whole world to know it’s poison. Behind you are voices, crowd noise, footsteps. People just... watching. Everybody’s looking at you. The skin over your shoulders crawls. Below, the wakes of the rescue boats curve through the river.

There’s only been one fatality in the past nineteen years, you told Daphne. Really, our day job is more dangerous.

You turn your back on the gorge. You face the crowd.

You bounce twice and lean back into the arms of the wind.

A gainer’s easy, once you learn to commit. Commitment is always the hard part. Kick high, arms back to get the rotation moving. Tuck tight to speed up and let the spin carry you around. Give it a twist so you come out facing forward, not back the way you started. One, two. Start to flatten out with your head still down. It’s just physics now.

Haste makes paste, but hesitation will kill you just the same.

Now your heart squeezes out slow, useful gulps of blood and oxygen. Now your breath evens. You spread your arms and legs, stabilize, catch the cold bright wind. It rips fluttering sounds from your nylon jumpsuit, stings your face around the goggles. Good, you’re tracking properly, owning your fall, head a little below vertical and your body slanting up to your pelvis. The autumn foliage is all gold and red and brown down at the gorge bottom, a few trees still hanging on in ragged, dusty green. Pilot chute right where it should be, tucked up tight in your fist.

You fall until it’s time to fly.

Throw.

The pilot chute flies out to the end of its nine feet of bridle, pops wide, snaps behind you. Slap and yank as the canopy deploys, the drag of the slider up the lines, sway of your body as you pendulum down under the foil. Seven cells blossom over you, gaudy in stripes of magenta, emerald, turquoise. Perfect heading, and when your face hurts from grinning you go for the toggles. You come around into the wind, back towards the bridge, rescue boat tracking to your left.

You’re not going to need him. You swing your feet forward like feelers as you pass over the first yellow chevron. Rutted sand socks the soles of your boots and you take a running step before you let momentum pull you forward, over your own shoulder, somersaulting perfectly once, twice, as if unwinding the gainer. It brings you to your feet, shaking sand out of your helmet, a deep familiar quiet filling the empty spaces in your body.

You take your first calm breath in what feels like a decade, but it’s really just a year and a half.

“Nice dismount,” says one of the shoulder-stand guys.

“Nice piggyback,” you answer, dragging your canopy off to the side in case the girl behind you makes the beach after all.

“Gonna go again?”

You look up at the bridge, at the trio of canopies—red, orange, aqua—just blossoming below it. Three. Nothing wrong with me.

“What the hell,” you say. “We paid for the day pass, didn’t we?”

Thanks again to Tom Dancs for making us sound like we know what we’re doing here. Lyrics from Drowning Pool, “Bodies.”

“Always Crashing In The Same Car” by Will Shetterly

Edgar Hoover Building, Washington D.C., July 28, 2009

Dear Mr. Reyes,

You clearly have us mistaken for some other Tom and Betty Johnson. My husband and I are ordinary, honest Americans. We live modestly on the rent from our Minneapolis fourplex. Most of the year, we’re not even in Minnesota, so if you’re looking for someone who did something there, it can’t be us. We’re usually in California, at what Tom calls our little love nest in the Morongo Valley. But I’m sure your people know about that by now.

If you’ve seen our desert hideaway, you know we live too simply to be doing anything dishonest. You surely saw our basement apartment in Minneapolis. Our California home is like that, small and pretty but not at all fancy. There’s our trailer house and the pergola that Tom built when he was into carpentry one year, and his workshop from our first years there, and not much else except the stars and desert and all of God’s amazing creatures. When you have love, you don’t need much. Tom and I like to go for drives and see the countryside and watch our shows and listen to the radio to keep informed. We hardly ever go into town. People will look at you funny sometimes, and Tom always adores my cooking.

We only come back to Minneapolis for the month of July. We love our home in the desert, but it gets pretty warm in summer! The Twin Cities is a special place for us for so many reasons—the Aquatennial Parade, all the wonderful events around the lakes, everyone smiling and dressed in their summer clothes, so bright and gay. Not “gay” in the way people mean now (which is certainly fine by me because I always loved Liberace and Tiny Tim and Elton John), but cheerful, the way everyone should be. Tom and I would come to Minneapolis in the summer even if it wasn’t convenient to do the books for our rental property then.

That’s all there is to us. You must think we’re awfully dull, and I suppose we are. But Tom and I are happy, and that’s what counts. I wish you would visit me. I could easily convince you this is all a mistake.

Sincerely,

Mrs. Tom Johnson

Dear Mr. FBI,

Of course I’ll answer your questions, but if you think we’re Muslim terrorists or Russian sleeper agents or Cuban spies, you’ve got another think coming. I can’t believe you don’t have real threats to America to investigate. However, I know you’re trying to protect us. Since Tom and I have nothing to hide, I’ll answer your questions as fully as I can.

My father was Fred Lund. His grandfather came over from the old country, Sweden. My mother was Mary Meyer. Her people were farmers who left Germany before the Revolutionary War. If I was at all hoity toity, I could be in the Daughters of the American Revolution.

Daddy owned Lund Feed and Grain in New Gothenburg. He worked hard to give us everything we needed. He and Momma had a traditional marriage: he ran the business, and she ran the home. Some people said Daddy put in long hours so he wouldn’t have to go home and face Momma and the girls, but as Momma said, Daddy understood the value of hard work. A woman simply has to remind a man of what’s expected of him sometimes. My sisters and I had a lovely childhood. We always knew we were very blessed, right up to the night of the fire.

Tom doesn’t talk about his family. I think that’s why Momma never understood him. Tom’s father was very strict, a spare the rod and spoil the child man, and Tom surely loved a good time then. If you could’ve heard him laugh when I first met him, you would know why our love is forever. Some years since then, he laughs a little like he used to, and some years he doesn’t, but I’ll never forget the sound of his happiness, even if he never laughs quite like that again.

I read somewhere that the measure of a man is his ability to laugh in the face of adversity. It was sure true of Tom. His father died in a haying accident when he was fifteen, and three years later, his mother and little brother drowned on a fishing trip when their boat capsized. Tom didn’t let that set him back a bit. He tried to keep the family farm going. When it failed, he did odd jobs. You would think Momma would’ve respected his work ethic, but she simply never liked him.

Tom says he loved me as soon as he laid eyes on me. I still can’t believe how lucky I am to have him. My sister Nan was the pretty one, and Leigh was the clever one. I was just Boring Betty, but Tom called me Cinderella when he was feeling romantic and the Ugly Duckling when he was being funny. He said I would shine someday, and he was lucky enough to see that first.

We met when I was working at the Feed and Grain. I was seventeen, and you know how shy girls are. I thought I would be an old maid for sure. But Tom watched me at the cash register, and then he said, “You’re doing such a fine job, I bet you’ll be running this place soon.” Tom wasn’t much for talking. When he complimented you, you knew he meant it.

Tom and I were an item after that. On Saturday nights when he wasn’t off hunting or fishing, I knew what I’d be doing: California burgers at the Starlite Drive-in, followed by a double-feature at the Rex, and home by eleven. Tom was the perfect gentleman. But he didn’t look like the boys who took out Nan and Leigh. He liked jeans and T-shirts, and he drove a blue Mustang. When he proposed, Momma said I was too young, though I had turned eighteen, and too young for him, though he wasn’t but five years older than me.

You might’ve heard there was crazy talk about us being cut out of the will if we married. We knew that wasn’t going to happen. Parents just get protective of their children. If not for the fire, my family would’ve come to love Tom as much as I do.

Afterward, it was too painful to stay in New Gothenburg. We married, because life must go on, and sold the Feed and Grain to buy the fourplex in Minneapolis. It was fun being in the Twin Cities, but we weren’t city people even then. Tom started to get cabin fever in our basement apartment. Even his occasional hunting trip wasn’t enough to cheer him up. He came back from one and suggested we take Route 66 to California to escape the snow.

I loved that trip. If you ever get the chance, it’s still wonderful to drive. People who talk about flyover county don’t know what they’re missing.

When we reached the West Coast, we loved being in a land where some people don’t know what a snow shovel looks like. California was already expensive, but we found 100 acres in the Morongo Valley that was perfect. Tom could go off hunting or fishing whenever he liked. If he was gone for a few nights, I was never afraid. Our neighbors were cottonwoods and willows, quail and roadrunners, mule deer and coyotes.

After twenty-two wonderful years of marriage, I finally became pregnant. Tom was the kindest father-to-be you could imagine.

I was in my sixth month when we returned to Minneapolis. Everything was perfect, with Tom and I driving to the A&W for root beer floats on those hot July evenings, walking the sidewalks under the elms (what a shame about the Dutch elm disease—so many of them are gone now!).

Then I made a mistake because I loved Tom so. It was obvious he needed some time by himself. I went to visit my cousin in the Iron Range for a week so he could batch it while I was gone.

As soon as I started north, I knew I had made a mistake. Call it intuition. I could just tell something would go wrong. I was afraid for our baby, and I hated the idea that if anything happened, Tom wouldn’t be there. I stopped at a gas station and called, and when he didn’t answer, I decided to go home. If he was away hunting, I would be waiting for him when he returned.

But he was with someone when I got back.

No man is without weakness. I knew that, but I believed Tom and I had a perfect understanding. I’d been so trusting, so sure that our love was enough. I was so upset I threw up. Then I felt the most awful pain, and I knew I was losing the baby.

Tom took me straight to the hospital and left me there. The doctors could do nothing. First they said our girl was with God. Then they said I would never have another child because I had V.D.

Only Tom could have given it to me. I never wanted to see him again. I thought, after what had happened, he would stay away.

But he came to visit. He said he couldn’t bear to lose me. I was the only person who understood him. The others never meant anything. He said he had cleaned up the apartment, and we could go home, and it would never happen again, and I didn’t have to tell anyone, because it would be as if it had never happened.

But all I could think about was my dead darling daughter and that girl Tom had been with. All I could wonder was how many others there were. Had there been a girl on every one of his hunting trips?

I told him to just go away and kill himself. Without a word, he left.

As angry as he made me, I’m still ashamed of losing my temper with him. The next three weeks were the hardest of my life, so I suppose that ought to teach me a lesson.

But after what Tom did, how could I not forgive him? Isn’t that the Christian thing to do? There’s good in every religion, because they all teach us to forgive. On our anniversary, we renewed our vows. He’s never gone hunting again. You couldn’t imagine a better husband. Every year since then, he pays for what he did. What good would punishing him now do?

I beg you, please let Tom and me have our happiness again.

Sincerely,

Betty Johnson

Dear Stephen,

I would never sue the police or you for false arrest, though I must say I have a better idea how the prisoners at Guantanamo feel. All I want is what every American enjoys, the pursuit of happiness.

As for our involvement with the police, there were two earlier times when officers came by. I didn’t keep a diary. One was around our twenty-eighth anniversary. The other was maybe ten years ago. Neither was important. I just remember that the nice young men were sympathetic to my loss.

I expected Detective Zingermann to be just like them, silly me.

Since you asked for as much detail as I can remember, here goes. (Tom will tell you that’s a mistake! I can go on sometimes! LOL!)

It was early this month. You might think that’s a pleasant time for me, but you would be as wrong about that as you are about everything else. I sometimes find myself crying without knowing if it’s from sadness for my loss or joy for what’s to come. If you’ve loved and lost, you know emotions don’t edge each other out. They pile on like dogs that don’t know if they’re clean or filthy.

When I heard the doorbell, I patted my eyes with a Kleenex and went to the front door. During those weeks, I always half-expect to see a neighbor with a hamburger hot dish or a plate of Rice Krispie bars, like it was the first time. People bring food when they learn of someone’s hard times. Since I don’t tell anyone about my troubles, I know that’s a silly expectation, but I still have it every year.

I thought my visitor was a salesman until he showed his ID and said, “Mrs. Johnson? I’m Saul Zingermann with the Minneapolis Police Department.”

That didn’t surprise me. He looked like a detective, a dark-haired man in a suit, a bit funny-looking in a handsome way, a little like Columbo and a little like Monk. I liked him most because of his smile. It was kind but still cocky, like Tom’s when we met.

Putting his badge away, he said, “I’m looking into the death of Tom Johnson.”

That surprised me. I said, “Oh, I think you must have the wrong Johnsons.”

“I’m sorry.” I could tell right away that he was a sensitive man, and that he knew I was sorrowing. Police are like doctors, morticians, and me. So long as you can love, being familiar with loss doesn’t hurt your ability to feel someone else’s pain. It may make it greater. “I’m investigating the death of a Tom Johnson who previously lived in Fargo.” He held out a picture of that Tom. “I wanted to ask a few questions about the accident.”

Was there a pause before he said “accident”? I didn’t want to leap to conclusions. “Oh, my,” I said. “What happened?”

“He was forty-one and divorced when he bought a ‘65 Mustang on eBay almost exactly a year ago. None of his family knew where he was until yesterday, when he crashed into a tree off Highway 55 doing eighty miles an hour.” Detective Zingermann watched me as if he thought what he’d said would make me say or do something. How hard it must be to have to give people such terrible news day after day.

I said, “Please come in,” and led him down to the apartment. “Would you like a drink? Coffee? Tea? A beer? A man likes a beer, so there’s some in the fridge. My husband does.”

His face got even kinder. I knew I was right to like him. “Nothing for me, thank you, ma’am.” He glanced at my shelves of china dogs and Barbies. I wanted to give him my best advice about dusting: Leave a can of Pledge on the counter. When company comes, say you were just about to clean. The hard part is remembering to dust the Pledge.

His eyes narrowed. I said, “What’re you thinking?”

“You’ve given the place a homey touch.” He frowned as if he might be starting on a headache. I meant to offer him some Excedrin, but I believe I forgot.

“Now, Detective. It’s all right, you can tell me.”

“I was thinking this doesn’t look like a place where a man would live.” Then he squeezed his brown eyes shut, as if they were tired and blurry.

I looked around my little living room and saw he was right. Tom doesn’t like frills, and never did. If he had his way, I would never have been able to buy the Victorian living room set. Tom would’ve wanted black leather and chrome and automobile pictures.

I said. “Everything’s just the way it should be.”

He nodded, then glanced at me with a smidge of confusion I could see him trying to hide. He said, “Did you know this Tom Johnson?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Because under the passenger seat of the car, there was a Lunds grocery discount card. This is the address on the account.”

“Anything else?”

“There weren’t any skid marks.”

When he squinted again, I said quickly, “It’s all right. Go on.”

“Stuff like that makes a guy wonder.”

“Is that all?”

He nodded. “The autopsy came up clean. The car wasn’t tinkered with. There wasn’t an insurance policy on him.”

“I must’ve left my card at Lunds and he picked it up by mistake.” As his frown returned, I said, “Stranger things have happened, you know.”

He nodded. “Yes, ma’am. I guess so.”

“This Tom Johnson must’ve lost control. Such a terrible thing for his family, to have him die in an accident.”

Detective Zingermann squinted several times, like men do when they’re struggling to understand something they need to know, then nodded. “Yes, ma’am. It looked funny. But the world’s full of funny-looking stuff.”

He wanted to go, but it was nice having a man in the apartment again, even if he wasn’t Tom. I insisted he have tea, and we talked about the Minnesota Twins and the Dodgers and the weather. Detective Zingermann was excellent company. When he left, I was sorry I wouldn’t see him again, but it’s best to keep life simple.

The next day, I went looking for Tom. Besides Minnesota, I’ve found him in the Dakotas, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Illinois. I even found him up near Winnipeg once, but I don’t like to drive far these days. The internet has been an enormous help. This year, I was sure he was up near Bemidji.

I will always love the sight of pine and spruce and birch and poplar against the blue summer sky. I saw fishing boats on the lakes and joggers and families picnicking by the roadsides until I couldn’t help but sing about summertime and easy living. Summer really doesn’t last long enough. A perfect day was made more perfect by the anticipation of finding Tom. I stopped for blueberry pancakes and coffee at a couple of Denny’s and enjoyed picturing how I would come back to them the next day and get tables for two. The nicest thing about a long drive is you can stop to eat often and no one wonders about your appetite.

I arrived in Bemidji around 5:30. I can never be sure when the best time to catch Tom will be, but that window between work and supper is usually good. I was imagining we might go somewhere for a walleye dinner, then drive through the night singing together—I never cared what his voice was like.

I found the apartment without any trouble at all, thank you, Google! You can’t imagine what hunting for Tom was like in the beginning. I rang the bell, and a blond man in a plaid work shirt and jeans answered. I liked his eyes in his Facebook photo, and I thought it was almost certainly him, but I always ask. “Are you Tom Johnson?”

He worked his jaw a little, then said, “Yes.”

“Do you have any diseases?”

“Excuse me?”

“Tom,” I said a little louder, because sometimes you have to make sure men know what you need, “Do you have any diseases of any kind?”

“No. Why—”

“Just answer, Tom. Is anyone else here?”

“Yes.”

“Who?”

“Toni. My girlfriend.”

“Isn’t your Facebook status single?” You hear about men who do that on the internet, pretend to be single to flirt with women, maybe take advantage of them.

I heard someone coming toward the door. A Native American girl appeared behind him, smiling and showing the ring on her finger. “He’ll be updating that.” She looked at Tom, but he was quiet. Toni said, “Tom? Who—”

I said quickly, “I was looking for a Tom Johnson I used to know, but clearly I’ve got the wrong one. Tom? Treat her well.”

I hurried away. I wasn’t as disappointed as you might think. I don’t always find Tom on the first try. A Tom Johnson near Mankato seemed likely. There is never a shortage of possibilities for my Tom.

At least Bemidji has a Chinese buffet and a supper club where they know how to fry a walleye. I spent the night at the Holiday Inn, then started back the next day.

After a lovely breakfast of buttermilk pancakes at Perkins, I was on my way south when my cell phone rang. I pulled over to answer. (I never, never talk on the phone while driving.) A woman said, “Mrs. Johnson? I’m Supervisory Special Agent Esther Falkner with the FBI. I believe Detective Zingermann visited you the other day.”

“The FBI? Oh, my. There was some misunderstanding that the detective cleared up. Is he all right?”

“Yes, ma’am. Will you be returning to your Minneapolis apartment soon? You may be able to help us with a case.”

Life was more pleasant when all phones had wires. Then a drive was a drive, and you could be alone in a car with a friend or your thoughts. I said, “I’ll be glad to do anything I can to help. I’m on a little vacation trip right now, though. Shall I call you when I get home?”

“I’m afraid this is urgent, Mrs. Johnson. If you tell me where you are, I can send agents to meet you.”

I respect the law and the police, but I don’t think they have the right to tell people what to do for no good reason. “Miss Falkner, I’m not going to ruin my trip. I’ll be home tomorrow. You can call me then.” To prove I meant it, I turned my phone off. I only have it for emergencies, anyway.

But my drive had been spoiled. Instead of admiring the forest, I kept wondering why Detective Zingermann hadn’t understood that Tom and I weren’t the people he was looking for. Something seemed wrong.

My worry was confirmed after my second breakfast in Little Falls. Shortly after Clear Lake, a police car raced up behind me with its lights flashing. I can be so stupid sometimes. I thought I hadn’t seen a speed limit sign or a tail light was out. I put my hands on the steering wheel like Tom taught me and watched in the mirror as two policemen got out.

Then a dark sedan that I hadn’t noticed pulled over in front of me. The passenger was a big, blond, handsome man. The driver would be very pretty if she lost twenty pounds and put a little more effort into her make-up, and her suit really did not flatter her. You should tell her to wear greens and blues. Brown is not her color.

They looked like business executives until they drew their guns. I checked the mirror. The two policemen had theirs out, too.

I’m so stupid. I thought someone must be hiding in my back seat. My heart began to race, and I thought, “Thank God the police are here!”

The driver held up a wallet with a badge. “FBI. Mrs. Johnson, I’m Special Agent Daphne Worth and this is Special Agent Daniel Brady. Please step out of the car and make no sudden moves.”

I wanted to laugh. I said, “Dear, I’m sixty-two years old. There’s nothing to be afraid of. I got a call from a Miss Falkner, who said there’s some sort of mix-up.”

Miss Worth nodded. “That’s why we’re here. Get out of the car immediately, and we’ll straighten everything out.”

Mr. Brady said, “Do you need any help, ma’am?” His accent made him sound as charming as he looked.

“Yes,” I told him. “I’d like you to start counting. You and these other officers, please shoot Miss Worth if she doesn’t drop her gun by the time you reach thirty.”

Mr. Brady and the two officers swung their guns toward Miss Worth, and Mr. Brady began counting. You should be very proud of that girl. Her gun stayed on me the whole time while she said, “Brady! Danny! She’s a gamma. This is what she does—she gets in your head. Pushes you around. Come on, Danny, push back. You’re a stubborn sonofabitch, you don’t let people do this to you. Fight her!”

I said, “Dear, they’ll shoot. Drop your gun.”

Mr. Brady reached twenty-five, his forehead shiny with sweat. I said, “Miss Worth, please!”

As Mr. Brady said, “Twenty-eight,” she dropped her pistol.

I got out of my car and told the men, “Now, don’t you let her move one step.”

Miss Worth said, “Mrs. Johnson, we can help you.”

“You want to stop me from finding Tom again. What kind of help is that?” As she frowned, I told the men, “Don’t let her say anything. Even if you have to shoot her. Mr. Brady, are other FBI agents on their way?”

He said, “If we don’t call to say we’re bringing you in.”

“Oh. Can you convince them you’re doing that? That everything is going perfectly?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Then please go ahead.”

Miss Worth was staring at him as he took out his phone. I told her, “If you say anything, they’ll have to shoot. What good would that do?”

Mr. Brady said into his phone, “Ma’am? She’s co-operating. We’re bringing her in.”

As he hung up, I said, “Mr. Brady, please help me get away.”

He had to think about it a little—Momma always said a man needs to believe what you want him to do is his own idea. Once I asked him again, he pointed at Miss Worth. “If I kill her, my boss will call in everything he’s got, including the National Guard and maybe some nukes. If I don’t, she’ll say what car we’re in and which way we headed.”

“Then you should make sure she doesn’t know,” I said. Really, I didn’t want anyone to hurt Miss Worth if it wasn’t absolutely necessary.

Mr. Brady took his time, but at last he said, “The cops could put her in the cruiser and drive the back roads until they run out of gas. That’d buy a few hours.”

I told the officers, “Do that. And don’t answer your phone or radio. And don’t shoot Miss Worth, but don’t let her escape, either.” I looked at Mr. Brady. “Will that do?”

When he nodded, I felt like Modesty Blaise with Willie Garvin. Tom had never been as handsome as Daniel Brady.

As soon as the officers drove off with Miss Worth in the back seat, Mr. Brady used his badge to flag down the first man who drove by. In the car, I asked the driver, a Mr. Norder, if he knew of a man living alone where no one would find us. A farm near Sobieski belonged to a widower named Ericsson. Everything Mr. Norder said about Mr. Ericsson’s place sounded perfect to Mr. Brady.

As we traveled, I told Mr. Brady, “You and your partner would make a lovely couple. Dan and Daphne.”

He frowned. “She’s married.”

I suppose I hadn’t seen her ring because her gun was in the way. “Is there anyone in your life?”

He pinched his lips together. I almost asked him again, but he said softly, “Not now.”

“Everyone should grow old with someone they love.”

“I’ve been thinking about that.”

“What does the FBI want? I haven’t done anything.”

“Zingermann...”

He was struggling, so I patted his thigh. I hope I don’t shock you by saying it’s a very nice thigh. “It’s fine, Dan. You can tell me.”

“Zingermann said he knew you had nothing to do with the death, but when he was typing his report, he couldn’t think of a reason why. Wanting some details for the report, he Googled ‘Tom Johnson Ford Mustang July 8’ to see if anyone mentioned seeing it online. And....”

“Go on.”

“He found four Tom Johnsons who died in Ford Mustang crashes on July 8th of four different years. Which set him going through police records. A Tom Johnson died in a Ford Mustang within four hundred miles of the Twin Cities on July 8 every year for the last twenty-two years. Different states or counties, but it’s always a Mustang and always a Tom Johnson.”

I could feel the tears building. I bit my lower lip to distract me, because I don’t believe in self-pity. I know I’m very fortunate.

Dan said, with kindness that I appreciated, “The first was your husband. Who was a person of interest in the disappearances of several young women during the years preceding his death.”

I said, “But why me? You don’t think I had anything to do with those girls?”

He shook his head.

“Tell me.”

“Theory is, your husband killed them, you learned of it, and you killed him.”

“I couldn’t! How could I kill him?” I said, but I remembered telling him in the hospital, “Just go away and die!”

“Maybe you tampered with his car. Maybe you tampered with him.”

“That doesn’t make sense.” When he didn’t answer, I added, “What do you mean?”

“Some folks are... They’re unusual.”

“That’s silly,” I said. “I’m as ordinary as they come. As common as dirt.”

“You make people do what you want.”

“I just know how to talk to men.” The idea that I might have had something to do with Tom’s accident made me sick. I said, “I don’t want to talk about it,” and we didn’t.

Dan had been in theatre, and Mr. Norder is in his church’s choir, so we sang hymns as we took country roads to the farm where Mr. Ericsson lived. Isn’t it strange how people can know the same hymn, but with different words? I had to teach them the right ones. Then I asked Mr. Norder to forget he had ever seen us and go home.

I can’t say much about that night. The house was small, but there was a fan in the garage, so Mr. Ericsson made a bed out there and didn’t bother us at all. Dan fixed dinner, and while I was eating the best steak I’ve ever tasted, I knew I was looking for Tom in all the wrong places. I told Dan, “You’re Tom Johnson, and you love me with all your heart.” It seems funny that we hadn’t both known it all along.

My Tom came back to me in perfect innocence. I’m not talking about sex. I’m talking about two people holding each other. He listened while I told him everything I knew about him, and how hard it is to have him die every year, but how wonderful it is to know he’ll always be there for me.

I don’t want to write the rest. Give me my Tom and let me go.

Betty

Dear Mr. Demanding,

You know the rest. The next morning, as we drove toward the church to begin our new life, you people were planning how to ruin it. I will never forgive myself for thinking that keeping Mrs. Worth from speaking would silence her. I know young people text. You should give her a raise.

The church in New Gothenburg looks much as it did when Tom and I were first married there, but there are changes each year—good changes at first, like the new wing for the Sunday School. And then there were sad ones as the congregation grew smaller, the chairs and carpet wore out and weren’t replaced, and Pastor Bob grew old. Pastor Jack took his place, and began aging in turn. Pastor Bob renewed our vows for the first four years, but I never really liked him because I could tell when Tom and I first married, Pastor Bob thought it was too soon after my family’s death. I never felt bad when Pastor Bob forgot about the service afterward.

But I liked Pastor Jack. The slow death of the church was not his fault. Last year, Pastor Jack looked so very tired. I went in with Tom hoping to see Pastor Jack with a big smile on his face.

The church was empty, which was no surprise on a weekday. In the office, a Chinese woman was typing on an old computer. I didn’t like her looks—a church office is no place to fuss over being stylish. I wondered if she was married to one of Bill Lo’s boys, and I made a mental note to dine at the Golden Dragon Cafe after the wedding. When she looked over the top of her computer at us, her face seemed guarded, but sometimes that’s just how people see Tom and me. Envy is everywhere. I said, “Hello. We’re looking for Pastor Jack.”

As the Chinese woman stood, a middle-aged dark-haired woman in a suit stepped out of the pastor’s office. She wore small gold earrings and a gold wedding band. She put her hand out to me and said, “I’m sorry. Pastor Jack died last year. May I help you?”

As I shook her hand, I read the name plate on the office door. Sure enough, it said, “Rev. Alice Creagan.”

I’m afraid I panicked. Tom and I should have just turned around and walked out. Heaven knows there are plenty of other churches in that part of Minnesota, and plenty of ministers. But that was Tom’s and my church. If you’ve never been deeply in love, you can’t know how much these things mean. Everything was perfect, until now. Now it would all be ruined.

You see how it was, don’t you? You say you know how people think. So you’ll understand why I felt so angry and helpless, and why I did what I did.

“Tom,” I said, “shoot them.”

And my Tom drew his pistol.

He did it for love. Once I’d reminded him of our years together, how could he not fight when our happiness was threatened? A man protects and treasures what he loves. But I felt dizzy, and everything seemed slow all of a sudden, and I thought, instead of Modesty Blaise and Willy Garvin, we’d become Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, and I didn’t like that so much.

Everything moved slowly except the dark-haired woman. She was almost a blur. She had Tom’s wrist in both hands, and shoved his arm down to point the gun at the floor, and Tom made a noise, a little grunt, as if she’d hurt him.

Someone came through the door behind him, and I just had time to recognize Mrs. Worth as she used a Taser on my Tom.

He went stiff in a horrible way, as if his muscles were pulled tight and might break his bones. He couldn’t even put out his hands to break his fall. I heard his forehead hit the wooden floor, and I screamed.

Mrs. Worth didn’t turn that terrible thing off until she was right beside him. Then she and the dark-haired woman got Tom’s arms behind him, and Mrs. Worth put handcuffs on him. He struggled and groaned, but the dark-haired woman said, “It’s over. For Mrs. Johnson’s sake, don’t fight us.”

The Chinese woman had a gun pointed at me. “I will kill you if you move, Mrs. Johnson. I don’t know how many cold-hearted bitches you’ve met in your life, but this one has a gun with a full magazine and is very pissed about what you did to her best friend. Do you understand me?”

I’m not a young woman, and I’ve got brittle bones, even though I always drank plenty of milk. I couldn’t run from them. That’s when I began to cry.

Now I know the dark-haired woman was Mrs. Falkner. She said, “It’s all right, Mrs. Johnson. We’re going to take you someplace where you’ll be very well cared for. You’ll have your own room, and garden privileges if you cooperate. And the meals are better than where I work. It’s not a punishment. It’s a place to heal.”

She handed me a tissue. It wasn’t as soft as Kleenex. After a moment, I said, “What about Tom?”

He still lay face-down on the floor, working his lips as if struggling to speak. You can’t imagine what that did to my heart.

Mrs. Worth was examining him. She looked up at me, and her expression made me a little scared. “Does it wear off?”

“What do you mean?”

She said, “What you did to him.”

“Oh!” I said to Mrs. Falkner, “This place you’re taking me. Will my Tom be with me?”

She and Mrs. Worth exchanged looks, the kind Tom and I have seen all our married lives, when people think we don’t notice. “I can’t promise that.”

“Please. I need to see him every day.”

“Why?”

“So he’ll always know we love each other forever.”

There’s no point writing about the rest of it. I suspect you had a tape recorder in there, and I’m sure Mrs. Falkner gave you a full report.

Tell Mr. Brady that if he cares to visit, I promise I won’t ask to have Tom back.

Sincerely,

Betty

P.S. When we came out of the church, three men stood across the street wearing big earphones like people at airports have. You couldn’t have been the tall Mexican boy whose clothes looked too big for him. Were you the small white man with the receding hair and the rifle? Or the beautifully-dressed black man next to him? Either way, I thought you looked very nice. You could be my Tom.

•

Black widow, Brady thought. Killer cougar. Neither phrase got the taste of bile out of his mouth. He shoved the pages of Betty Johnson’s letters back in order, jabbed them into their folder, and slapped it closed.

That was about as useful as any symbolic gesture: in other words, like tits on a bull.

Inside, she was still a fragile eighteen-year-old, a wounded woman of forty. Her version of her life story was all shell and hollow inside like a chocolate Easter rabbit. Perfect, shiny, sweet. Anything else would have been too much like real life, where the ugly duckling never changed, and Prince Charming was the wolf.

Brady hadn’t become Tom Johnson. He hadn’t had Tom Johnson’s memories—any Tom Johnson; those had fallen out of the shattered skulls of twenty-two men dead behind the wheels of wrecked Mustangs. Any competent director would have given him more to work with. The character he’d played was as hollow as the play itself. And how sad was that: Betty Johnson’s delusion orbiting tightly around an empty man-shaped space? Nothing she’d done to Brady was as bad as what life had done to her. Love the sinner, hate the sin.

He’d been the dream boyfriend in a teen romance. He’d been a Ken doll. When he’d returned to himself, what he wanted more than anything was to crush Betty Johnson’s throat between his two hands.

Someone had stopped beside his desk, so he looked up. Falkner, of course, because who the hell else had that radar?

He sighed. “I know, I know. Walk away.”

She nodded, and hitched one charcoal-trousered hip onto the edge of his desk. “Or let Reyes have his debriefing. Though I understand why you wouldn’t want to talk about how it worked, and for the record, so does he. He’s just hoping you’ll overcome your...” She turned up one corner of her mouth, which told Brady she really did understand. “...natural reticence.”

Brady snorted. And Falkner didn’t move away, which meant either she or he still had something to say. He was surprised to realize after a moment of silence that it was him.

“There was no sex,” he said.

Falkner tucked her chin a bit, acknowledgment more than agreement.

“You see women writing in to advice columns, saying they just want to be held. Cuddled.”

He couldn’t get the next sentence out, but Falkner stepped in, thank God. “She associated sexual intimacy with her husband, and transferred the association to what she witnessed when she walked in on him raping and killing Valerie Pierce. Once she converted, it became part of her mythology: perfect, sexless affection. The opposite of what she saw her husband do.”

Brady rocked back in his desk chair, folding his arms over his chest. “Kay Baylor’s going to have a goddamn field day with me.”

Falkner gave a slow blink, like a cat pretending not to watch a bird. “Do you think so?”

“No. Not really. Shit, okay, not at all. But excuse me if I’m not looking forward to explaining how it felt to be a brain-fucked hand puppet.”

Falkner just nodded, as if that hadn’t been the crudest, angriest thing he’d ever said to her.

He took a moment to steady his voice and his hands. Then he tapped the file folder. “The Tom Johnson she found in Bemidji. She could have made him walk out on his girlfriend. She’d kill a man over and over, but she wouldn’t bust up a relationship.”

“As much as she thought she was entitled to happiness, she wouldn’t take it at the expense of someone else’s.” It almost sounded reasonable, in Falkner’s warm, resonant tones.

“Even monsters deserve love,” Brady said, a little ashamed of the sneer he gave it.

“No,” said Falkner. It surprised him into turning his eyes up to hers. She added, “But they want it. And wanting it isn’t what makes them monsters.” She gathered the folder off his desk. “I’ll file this with the rest of the case docs.”

Brady watched her walk, firm on her low-heeled loafers, into the copy room. Between his ears her words unfolded, took on a startling new shape, and bit him.

And that’s why Mom is all four goddamn Horsemen interviewing a suspect. Because she knows the thing to say that splits your brain open and lets the truth pour in.

He waited until he was in the truck with the AC running before he pulled out his phone. He’d deleted the number from the directory (and felt so fucking virtuous about doing it, too), but he could still find it, by sight, in the list of past numbers called. It seemed as if it rang for a long time, but Brady knew better than to judge by his own perceptions right now.

“Hello?” Gray’s voice, careful, withholding judgment. Of course he was.

“It’s Danny Brady,” he said, though Gray already knew that. “Thanks for taking my call.”

The pause that followed was long enough that Brady felt panic climbing his throat.

“Danny, I’m a grownup. I answer the phone.”

He was right, and Brady was an idiot for assuming they were going to behave like high-school girls (Teen romance, he thought, and squirmed). But then, his noble fucking breakup scene might have been lifted straight out of one of those idiot books Lau sometimes made him do dramatic readings from, when they got together for beer and pizza. His part of the scene, anyway. Gray hadn’t got the director’s memo, and had been playing an adult.

Brady took a long breath, let it out, and said, “Well, that’s why I’m a little stupid. When it comes to people I care about, sometimes I’m sixteen years old.”

Pause, pause, and Brady could hear his heartbeat in the thump of blood in his inner ear.

“I don’t want to date a sixteen-year-old,” Gray said, slow and a little soft, but firm as Falkner’s tread.

“Hell, neither do I. And I don’t want to be one anymore, either. I want to get it through my head that the world doesn’t end if I fuck up, and that I’m not allowed to make anybody else’s choices, and I want to deserve—” What you want, and what you deserve, and the space between the two. “—another chance. With you.” At that, Brady’s throat closed up tight; he couldn’t have said another word if he’d had a gun to his head.

“That’s a lot to want,” Gray replied.

Brady thought he heard skepticism, and hoped he was wrong. “The difference between a real sixteen-year-old and me is, I know I can’t have everything.” He swallowed down his hoarseness and said, “Can we have coffee sometime? Just coffee. Just to talk.” Jesus at the circus, right now I don’t think I could even hold hands. He shivered like a dog kicking in its dreams.

“Not even a damned muffin?” Gray said.

Brady unstuck his tongue from the roof of his mouth, got a little air in his lungs. “And a muffin.”

“I’m busy this week,” Gray said, and Brady felt his heart sinking in a body cavity full of sludge. “But I can try to keep next Thursday early evening free.”

Apparently sludge was good for buoyancy, after all. “Works for me.” Brady swallowed, and added, “Thank you.”

“Oh, believe me, I’m aware I’m doing a public service. Good night, Danny.”

Brady thumbed the red button and let his spine sag for the first time in weeks. It may not be far or fast, but the puppet can goddamn move by himself. That would have to be enough for now.

“Casserole”

Woodbridge, VA, July 2009

Danny Brady expected all sorts of things when he opened his front door on the hazy early evening sun, but Chaz Villette with a casserole dish was not any of them. He stepped back in surprise; Chaz either took it as invitation or opportunity and shouldered past him. Brady shut the screen door—after the horse is in?—and turned around to face the uninvited denizen of his living room.

He folded his arms (defensive body language, five yard penalty) and swallowed. “This is new.”

Chaz held up the casserole like Wilt Chamberlain palming a basketball. “I know you like lasagna. I’ll just stick this in the fridge.”

Brady was being bulls-rushed, and he wasn’t sure how he felt about it. But he followed Chaz into the kitchen anyway, studying the other man’s body language. Superficial confidence, but it was bravado. The stiff shoulders and puppet-string jerkiness gave him away. When he crouched to slide the casserole into Brady’s barren fridge, Brady said, “Maybe you should offer me a beer.”

Chaz stood, a Coors in one hand and a Dogfish Head in the other, and let the fridge swing closed. A half-smirk acknowledged Brady’s irony. “When did you start drinking real beer?”

I should have thrown that shit away. “It’s for friends.” He extended the opener, accepted the Coors that Chaz held out to him, and twisted off the top.

Chaz’s beer let out a fine trail of vapor when he popped it. The cuffs of his long-sleeved shirt were buttoned close despite the sweat that dappled his hairline. He threw his head back and drank, throat working. When he lowered the bottle, the beer was a third gone. “Mind if I sit?”

Wordlessly, Brady gestured to the stools at the breakfast bar. He hitched his own seatbone up onto one and turned the open Coors in its condensation ring. Chaz sat down one chair away, right arm draping the bar.

Brady said, “I can do for myself, you know.”

Chaz raised an eyebrow at him.

“I wasn’t hurt.” Not like you were—

“Is that so?”

Brady stared at his beer as if he were going to have to monologue the label. He could do it, actually, in a Shakespearean style. Or film noir. Or phone sex.

It had been one of his better party tricks in college.

He studied Chaz’s face, the receptivity, the drawn skin over sharp-edged bones. There was a lot of peace and quiet in Chaz’s expression. Kid learned that trick from Duke. But it didn’t matter: the kid wasn’t a kid anymore. No thanks to Brady. He’d done it on his own.

He tried again. “I don’t deserve this.” He’d meant to say need. There was honesty in shock.

“Kindness?”

Brady’s mouth hurt from not twisting. “Something like that. Chaz—”

“Danny. Look. You know I know, okay? You don’t have to talk about it.”

Another quarter-turn for the beer bottle. Brady sketched a hangman’s noose on the countertop with wet fingertips. “I don’t?”

Chaz shook his head. Drank another third of a beer. Nerving himself. “No, of course not. So what are you going to tell me? That she got her sticky fingers inside your head and made you see the world through her lens? That sometimes you still don’t know which thoughts are hers and which are your own? That you feel filthy all over the inside of your skin, and shamed, and like you should have fought harder, done more? That saying you weren’t raped is a technicality?”

Chaz’s voice shook. He stammered, and for a second the kid was back, uncertain, hesitant, exhausting himself with watching for cues and clues on where to go and what to do.

“You don’t have to tell me.” Chaz finished his beer.

Brady’s head ached around the bruise. The healing Taser burns on his back itched. They’d scar. No biggie. Nobody would ever notice unless they were close enough to kiss.

“You fought back,” he said, because it was lying there in between them. And he had to make Chaz understand, somehow, that Brady hadn’t measured up to Chaz’s example or his own expectations.

Chaz looked at him. Stared, really, and then swallowed and looked down. His brown hands paled as they clenched on the empty beer bottle.

“Before I decided to die,” Chaz said, conversationally, “I crawled to him and put my head in his lap. Because I wanted to. Because I needed him.”

Somehow—too many years in the interrogation room?—Brady managed not to say oh. Instead, he said, “You didn’t have to be rescued.”

“Really? Because if you hadn’t been there, my plan—inasmuch as I had one—was to die on the lawn. I just wanted to get away from the blood. And the mirrors.” Brady could tell Chaz was peeling his fingers off the beer bottle by force of will as he set it down. “There was too much blood in that room.”

Brady thought of Andre. Of Daphne, of Chaz, each on the business end of his gun. He thought about pulling the trigger, and about not pulling it. He thought about his first visit to Kay Baylor, and if he should be going back. You’re here for me. And I wasn’t there for you.

Think of what an asshole would do, Danny, and do something different.

He thought about Gray.

He snorted. He shook his head. He put it down on the cool countertop between his hands, next to the untouched beer. “I used to drive a Mustang.”

“Fits the profile,” Chaz said, standing. “You mind if I get another beer?”

“Help yourself.” Brady picked his head up. He reached for the Coors. “Make it a round.”

•

J. Edgar Hoover Federal Building, Washington D.C., July 2009

Chaz’s voice had echoed out of the fridge. “Hey, Brady?” Back to a last name basis. Good.

Brady had set down his first, now empty, beer. “Yo.”

“Talk to Daphne, would you?”

Brady had felt his face crunch up around the wince. He should have handled that already.

So here it was Tuesday morning, and Brady made himself look up at Daphne as soon as she set her drink on her desktop. He said, “Hi.”

Her mouth did something funny. “Hi.”

If it were done when ‘tis done, then ‘twere well it were done quickly. “Worth, look. I’m—”

She turned, hands twisting, and said in a rush, “I should have had your back. Brady, I am so sorry I did not get you out of there.”

His own apology choked him. He spluttered for a moment, then managed to stammer, “I pointed a gun at you.”

She blinked. Once, twice. “You saved my life,” she said. “You got me out of there, to where I could get a text to Falkner. And I left you—” She choked. Looked down. Finished. “I left you with her.”

He couldn’t look at her. Christ in a go-cart, it’s all of us. Staring at his desk, he said, “You did everything possible. You did well. You saved my life, Daphne.”

“But—”

This time he looked up. He met her eyes, saw her squint. “It’s the job. Next time it might break the other way. I’m home and dry, right?”

“Right,” she said. “The job.”

She still didn’t sit. He waited.

“That Zingermann, he’s a bulldog, huh? Can we get more cops like him?”

“Very quiet bulldog,” he agreed. “Who says ‘stuff’ a lot.”

She pulled her chair out, hesitated. “Want coffee?”

“Love some,” he said, and waited until her footsteps faded before he let himself turn away.

“Confessions”

Ashton, VA, July 2009

Chaz ran into Dyson Cieslewicz at the foot of Idlewood’s main staircase. He’d just come down the stairs, and Cieslewicz was coming from the direction of the elevators. It hadn’t been a good day in Hafidha’s world, and when Cieslewicz said “Hi, Agent Villette,” shyly, as if he expected Chaz to blow him off, Chaz said, surprising himself nearly as much as Cieslewicz, “Hey, you wanna come get some coffee or something? The cafeteria here isn’t bad.”

“Sure,” Cieslewicz said and smiled at him. It was cliché to talk about unattractive people being transformed by their smiles, and it wasn’t accurate anyway. But Cieslewicz’s smile made you see something beside the acne scars and the ugly glasses.

Chaz chose the table in the back corner of Idlewood’s basement cafeteria, where he could have walls on two sides, and Cieslewicz didn’t argue. Coffee for both of them, and Chaz got the lasagna. They knew him here; the woman working the counter gave him a smile and damn near half the pan. Cieslewicz bought a muffin, which he then proceeded to pick apart into crumbs while Chaz ate.

They didn’t say anything for a long time.

Finally, Cieslewicz said, apparently to the remains of his muffin, “Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I wonder why it wasn’t me, y’know? I mean, I’m the one Dad almost killed, I’m the one he was ragging on twenty-four-seven about how evil being left-handed was. So how come it was Eddie who went crazy and got superpowers?” He glanced up. “And I thought maybe you might be wondering the same thing.”

Chaz raised his eyebrows, doing his best to look puzzled and incredulous, but Cieslewicz pushed ahead, “Because of your friend. Because”—with a pointed look at Chaz’s empty and practically shining plate—”you eat the way Eddie does, and, well, people have said some things. Nothing bad. Just...things.” The glasses were still almost distractingly ugly, but the eyes behind them were calm and sad and lonely.

“I...” Isn’t that why you’re here, cowboy? Because you’re lonely? He stopped, took a deep breath, and said, “Yes. Yes, I do wonder.” And, God, it was like a boulder had rolled off his chest and let all the words out: “There aren’t any answers, you know. Not real ones. We’ve got theories and speculations and correlations, but D—a friend of mine says ‘correlation is not causation,’ and that’s where we get hung up. We can correlate until the end of time, but we still don’t know what the cause is. We don’t know why it hit Eddie and not you. We don’t know why it hit Hafidha”—he forced himself to say her name without stumbling, but it was hard—”and not me. We don’t know why Hafidha and I have a...have gone a different...”

“Why you’re a superhero instead of a supervillain.”

“Um,” said Chaz.

“Sorry, that’s a lousy way to put it. But I mean, you got a thing like Eddie’s hand, but you aren’t running around killing people with it.”

“Not yet,” Chaz said. “That’s what happened to my friend who’s here. It’s not likely it will get you, you know. Like being struck by lightning. I mean, trauma is a risk factor. There may be a genetic link. But still. Even though it doesn’t feel like it when you’re here”—and he waved his hand to indicate Idlewood in all its ridiculous Kirkbridian splendor around them—”this is a really, really rare thing to have happen. One in...millions. But me... It’s already got me. I wonder sometimes what it’s waiting for.”

“I don’t know very much,” Cieslewicz said, “but I have figured out that this thing is greedy. It doesn’t wait. So, y’know, you must be doing something right.”

“I eat my spinach,” Chaz said. “I do a good deed every day.”

“Hey, man. Whatever works.”

Cieslewicz reached for his coffee—left-handed, Chaz noticed, and the hand looked better.

“Yeah,” Cieslewicz said, and Chaz twitched a little, realizing he’d been caught. “I got whatchamacallem, benefits, because of Eddie. So I figured I’d better use ‘em.”

“That’s good,” Chaz said and winced.

“Well, I was never any good at the violin anyway,” Cieslewicz said comfortably, and Chaz said, “You know, I really need some of that disgusting fruit jello. You want some?”

“A Good-looking Badge Instills Confidence”

Bloomington, IN, October 2009

“Justice isn’t centered.”

Brady squeezed his burning eyes to clear them. “What?”

Nikki Lau sprawled on the hotel suite couch, her feet up on the arm. She frowned, intent, at her badge. “Justice. The figure. It’s off center.”

He blinked again and gave his head a little shake. That always worked for cartoon characters, when nothing made sense. “Did she move? Is this one of those face of the Virgin on a tortilla things?”

Lau ignored him. Or maybe she’d been struck deaf by a miraculous FBI badge. “And the word spacing sucks. Both the ‘of’s dangle off the ends of their lines like, I don’t know—like balloons on strings.” She rolled sideways and waved her badge folder to him and the room at large, outrage in every visible fiber. “This is a crappy piece of design work.”

Brady slumped back in the upholstered chair that was barely less hard than the straight-backed one at the desk. “It’s a gold shield with a big-ass eagle on top. You show it to people and they stop doing whatever it is you don’t want them to do. Nobody reads it.”

“Good design costs the same as bad up front, and has a longer use life. Also, a good-looking badge instills confidence in the wearer.”

“I take it you didn’t get any sleep last night, either.”

She glared at him. “...No.”

“Yeah. Well, come take your frustrations out on these transcripts. If we get through ‘em by midnight, I’ll buy you ice cream for a bedtime snack.”

Lau gazed down at her badge. “I’ll try to continue to wear it with pride,” she sighed, and flapped the wallet closed. “Transcripts. Ice cream. I’m there for you, man.”

“Silence”

Ashton, VA, August 2009

Katharine Allison had met Silence before.

Silence looks down a lot of the time: at clasped hands, at a glass of water, at restraint cuffs. Sometimes Silence would look out a window, at a neutral artwork meant only to break the line of a beige wall, or at the stop-start tick of a clock, trudging out the hour.

This Silence looked her in the eye, cool and regal. Hafidha Gates had said Good Morning as she sat down, and then had not uttered a word since, content to sit and stare.

Silence could mean so many things.

“I have a lot of information about you,” Katharine said, though she hadn’t brought in any files, not even paper ones. “There’s the medical records, of course, and the files from the cases that you’ve worked on. I’ve met your team members, your friends, your parents, and they’ve shared stories with me, their hopes and anxieties for you.”

Silence.

“They hope that you’ll be able to walk out of here one day,” Katherine continues. “They think that if anyone can, you can.”

One corner of her mouth pins, half a smirk. But it’s gone, and Hafidha Gates doesn’t speak.

“And you don’t want to talk to me,” Katharine says, soft voiced. “You don’t want to say anything, not even to tell me that you won’t say anything. You have the right to remain Silent. And—well. Here in Idlewood, it can feel like the only right you have left. And anything you say can be used against you. You know. It doesn’t matter what an interview subject talks about, as long as you keep them talking. Because everything they say gives an interviewer another way in. You know it. You’ve done it.”

Cool eyes. Lifted chin.

“And that’s significant, isn’t it?” Dr. Allison goes on. “You’ve done it. You were the one who worked to catch the people who live in Idlewood. You caught the bad guys. And now you live here, with the people you’ve brought here. I think about how that might feel. I’d feel exposed. I’d sit in the room designed to keep another sense from me, and remember when I could walk down the hall, do my business, and just go home. I’d feel judged by everyone who saw me. I’d feel like I’d let them all down.”

Nostrils flare and pinch. Blink and you would miss it.

“And you didn’t ask to talk to me. This is mandatory talk therapy. Nobody asked you. You don’t have a choice. I’m coming here to talk to you for an hour. It’s on the schedule. I’m supposed to ask the questions, and you’re supposed to cooperate and answer my questions. You don’t have a choice about me coming here for this hour, but you don’t have to say a word. And you’re right. You don’t have to say anything. You can resist what’s happening to you.”

Nothing, not even a twitch.

“And I want you to. I want you to resist. I want you to hold your trust until I’ve proven that you can trust me. I want you to remain silent until you choose to speak. Heaven knows you don’t have a lot of choices. You don’t have anything but rules, restrictions, control imposed on you, nothing that you control but your voice. So control it. Be silent. I’ll come here for our hour, and I will meet with you. And you don’t have to say a single word you don’t want to say. Ever. Not even if you do decide to say something. You will always have the right to be silent with me. I promise.”

Stillness. Intent stare, mouth set and straight, one brow knits, smoothes.

A nod.

“Posterity”

Ashton, VA, September 2009

All the way out to Idlewood, Todd was trying to think of an in.

Because—he and Reyes had agreed—there was absolutely no reason for Clemson McCain to say yes. McCain had been a prisoner of the federal government for forty-five years, a prisoner in a Plexiglas box for fourteen of them, and while he was a model prisoner, save for that one lapse in 1995, neither of them deluded themselves that that meant a damn thing, save that Clemson McCain was too smart to waste his energy fighting a battle he could never win.

But this battle he could win. All he had to do was say no.

The appeal to altruism, or to McCain’s hypothetical “better nature,” Todd discarded before he’d even agreed to be the one to ask. McCain was a predator; unlike some of the other gammas at Idlewood, he had not the slightest interest in helping to protect his prey. Bribery seemed like it might provide better leverage, but there were two problems with that. One was that McCain already had just about all the privileges he was ever going to get; if he asked for things he was allowed to have, he got them. Things he wasn’t allowed to have were forbidden for extremely good and cogent reasons, and Todd wasn’t about to go compromising security. Getting McCain to say yes wasn’t worth another dead orderly or five.

Or a dead Solomon Todd, and let’s not fool ourselves about which one McCain would prefer, Sol old boy.

The other reason Todd decided against bribery was that McCain would be likely to take it as an insult, and most of the good relationship Todd had with McCain—insofar as either the word “good” or the word “relationship” had any relevance whatsofuckingever—was based on a weird sort of mutual respect. He didn’t want to jeopardize that now, not when McCain was running out of time.

McCain’s body was shutting down. No cancer, no disease, just the accumulated stress of running a gamma metabolism for fifty years. He might live to see 2010, but nobody was being very promising about it. So essentially, Todd had one chance, whether he took it today, or tomorrow, or on December 31st—if McCain was still alive by then. Because once McCain said no, that, too, would have to be respected.

He still hadn’t come up with anything solid by the time he reached the ponderous Kirkbride glory of Idlewood. “Winging it is a valid lifestyle choice,” he muttered to his reflection in the window as he locked the car.

He didn’t let the matter cross his mind again until the orderly on duty said, “He’s having a good day today, Mr. Todd.”

“Thanks,” Todd said and decided, as he walked into McCain’s Plexiglas world, to just say it straight out, to do McCain the courtesy of being honest about it.

“We’d like a sample of your DNA.”

Clemson McCain considered. He was getting skinnier and yellower and starting to curl in on himself like a dying plant, but he wasn’t letting death hurry him anymore than he’d ever let anything else make him move one fraction of a second faster than he meant to.

“You think it’s genetic,” he said.

“It’s a possibility,” Todd said.

“Why should I?” said Clemson McCain, and he sounded genuinely curious.

Todd opened his mouth with no idea of what was going to come out and said, “Posterity.”

McCain’s habitual pause was a little longer that time. “Posterity?”

“You’re the first,” Todd said. “Someday, people will write books about you. And the more information you give us now, the better those books are going to be.”

McCain eyed him. He read omnivorously, though always returning to the Bible (like a dog to its vomit, Todd thought and squashed it down hard), and Todd knew he’d read a lot of history. He knew what Todd meant, even if he wasn’t quite buying it. “And why should I care? I’ll be dead, Solomon.”

“You won’t care then,” Todd agreed, “unless the afterlife is a lot different than I’ve always thought. But that doesn’t mean you can’t care now.”

Bingo, he thought, although he was careful not to let his satisfaction show. Because McCain did care. He was as vain as any monster, and Todd had often thought that one reason he was so accepting of his terribly restricted life was that he was a control freak. He’d admitted it himself once, although not in so many words. I am a tidy-minded man, Solomon. It pains me to see waste and chaos. In his Plexiglas box, McCain really could control just about everything. There was neither waste nor chaos. But he couldn’t control what would happen after he died, anymore than he could control the runaway metabolism that was killing him.

Todd thought about how much he must hate the irony—it was, essentially, waste and chaos that was killing him—and said, “The doctors might be able to keep what’s happening to you from happening to the others.”

It was a gamble, and for a moment he thought he’d blown it. McCain muttered, “The others,” with profound scorn, but he didn’t hang up the phone, and he didn’t change the subject. Instead, after a pause, he said, “I’ve been reading about the Human Genome Project.”

“Yes?” Todd said.

“Will they—someday—be able to pinpoint it, do you think? The thing that...the thing that I have called a gift from God?”

The temptation to lie was nearly overwhelming, but Todd wrestled that angel and got it in a headlock. “I don’t know, Clemson. I don’t know that it is genetic. But I know that they won’t be able to if they don’t have the data to work from.”

McCain nodded. He said nothing for a long time, but he did not hang up the phone, so Todd didn’t either. He could wait. He had time. He had more time than Clemson McCain did, that was for sure.

And finally, McCain heaved a sigh—Todd could see his ribcage move with it, and that more than anything showed him how frail McCain was getting. “All right. They take enough samples from me, I won’t notice one more. And Solomon?”

“Yes?”

McCain looked at him squarely, sharp gray eyes glinting in the fluorescent light. “Thank you for asking.”

“Spell 81A” by Amanda Downum and Elizabeth Bear

The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.

—Samuel Beckett

University of Memphis, TN, August 2009

Someone had left flowers again.

Cassie Martin slowed, her neck prickling under a layer of sweat. She glanced down the corridor, in case her secret admirer was still around. Late for office hours, especially on a Friday—the hall was quiet, all the other doors closed.

Bethany nearly walked into her, boots squeaking on the tile. “What is it?” Paper rustled as she shifted the stack of folders and bag of Chinese take-out in her arms. The smell of lo mein and garlic chicken wafted past the familiar scent of her perfume. She glanced around Cassie and saw the bouquet. “Aww! Wait, it’s not your birthday, is it? It’s not on my calendar this month—”

“No.” Cassie frowned. “This is the third time in the past two months.” When she was fifteen she would have thought it romantic. At Bethany’s age she would have found it engagingly mysterious. Now the mystery was quickly moving through engaging into annoying. How hard was it to ask a woman out, anyway?

“Somebody has a crush.” Bethany winked. “It’s Dr. Kirkland, isn’t it? He totally stammers around you.”

“Stacy stammers around everyone, poor guy. I don’t think it’s him.” It had been wildflowers at first, and then a dozen roses, both so perfectly dried they crumbled if she breathed on them too hard. She knelt to investigate the newest offering.

“What are those?” Bethany asked, leaning over her. “They’re pretty.”

Sky blue petals had faded milky blue-grey, the yellow center dried to the color of parchment. The leaves scraped softly as Cassie lifted the vase.

“They’re lilies,” she said. “Egyptian blue lilies. People usually call them lotuses.” Where had her admirer found them? All right, maybe it was still a little engaging.

“Fancy. There’s a note.”

That was new—the other two bouquets hadn’t had one. Cassie eased the thick creamy paper from between the stems. Neat printed handwriting covered one side. A whiff of incense teased her as she lifted the card, quickly lost under the smell of grease and spices, of Bethany’s expensive perfume oil and Cassie’s own sweat.

“I am this pure lotus which went forth into the sunshine,” she read aloud, “which is at the nose of Re; I have descended that I may seek it for Horus, for I am the pure one who issued from the fen.”

Bethany blinked. “That’s pretty too, but what is it?” She wore a silver ankh and Eye of Horus amid the necklaces tangled around her throat, but her interest in Egypt was aesthetic rather than academic.

“The Book of Going Forth by Day, spell 81A. For being transformed into a lotus.”

“Wow. Somebody has an educated crush. Orrin can’t quote anything older than the Romantics—I clearly need to raise my standards. That’s really sweet.”

Cassie cradled the vase in the crook of her arm and reached for her keys, casting a last glance down the hall. “That’s one word for it.”

•

Your hands shake as you leave Mitchell Hall, clenched and sweaty in your pockets. The sun drowns in the west, throwing your shadow across the grass and pebbled walk. You fight the urge to look back, to check Dr. Martin’s window. It’s all so stupid: feeling this way about a professor, leaving her presents—leaving her anonymous presents like some creepy stalker—not even having the balls to stay and watch her, to see her smile....You hope she smiles, the way she smiles in class when someone says something smart, the way she smiles at her friends. The way she smiled at you when she saw your paintings.

If you could tell her how you feel, tell her how much she means to you—tell her about Emmie, ask for her help. Dr. Martin could help with everything, if you weren’t such a coward—

Someone shouts on the Student Plaza, a man’s voice raised in anger. Shoulders tighten, head turning against the memory of a blow, and you turn to find another path when a woman’s voice answers, quavering, defiant even at the brink of tears.

You stop.

Walk away. Run. It’s none of your business, none of your concern. Your right arm aches, echoes of long-healed fractures.

In your head, Emmie’s voice, soft and brutal: How many people said that about Mom? How many people said that about us?

You want to go home, make dinner and lie down beside Emmie where it’s safe. But if you walk away now, just like everyone else, how can you ever deserve safe?

Your neck twists tight as you keep walking, shoulders hunching till you feel like a cartoon vulture. Carrion bird, going to feed on someone else’s pain.

Going to stop it, Emmie corrects. Going to help.

A man and a woman stand in the short grass of the plaza. His arms swing wide as he yells. Not hitting, not yet, but you see the force in the motion. The woman turns away, arms folded tight across her chest, holding her bag against her like a shield. On the far side of the lawn people keep their heads resolutely down, lengthening their stride to avoid the scene. How many times did you see your mother stand like that? How many times Emmie? You couldn’t save either of them, but this time, this one....

Instead you stand still as stone, still a coward. The man spits out one last parting curse and storms away. As he disappears around the corner of the University Center the woman drops her bag. Tears shine on her cheeks. You bite your lip, taste your own salt. Vulture.

“Are you all right?” you ask, drawing near.

She flinches at your voice and you shrink back, keeping small. Small like Mom and Emmie, fine-boned and fragile—you hated it as a child, but it makes some things easier. The woman is your height and heavier. Round cheeks crease as she tries to smile.

“Yeah,” she says, wiping her nose surreptitiously. “I’m okay. Sorry.”

The apology twists something inside you, burns like coals under your sternum. “It’s not your fault. Did he—”

The question is too stupid to finish: of course he hurt her. But she reads the end anyway and her eyes widen with automatic denial. “No, no. Of course not. Nothing like that. It was just a stupid fight. Stress, you know.”

Beneath the swollen lids and waterproof eyeliner her eyes are blue, or maybe grey. Hard to tell in the gloaming light. They narrow as she studies your face.

“I know you, don’t I? Dr. Martin’s class? You had paintings on display in the Artlab.”

Your cheeks burn. “Yeah. That’s me.”

“They were really nice. I especially liked the one of Isis—she was so beautiful.”

Because you gave her Emmie’s face. Emmie keeping all your scattered pieces together. The blush creeps into your ears, and you nearly let yourself get distracted. “Thank you. But if you need— If you want someone to talk to, or coffee, or something—”

She might be the one blushing now, but it’s getting too dark to see. The tall sodium lights lining the sidewalks buzz to life, glazing her hair and damp cheeks with shades of cobalt yellow and golden poppy. “Thanks. But that wasn’t.... Dan and I are still together. We’ve had stupid fights like that before.”

Of course they had. “I wasn’t trying to hit on you,” you say in a rush, before she can defend him any more. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Sorry. Then yeah, coffee would be great sometime. After class, maybe.”

“Sure.” You crouch and grab her fallen bag, keeping an arm’s length between you as you hand it back.

“Thanks.” She smiles again, still brave, but more honest now. “I should go. I’ll see you in class.”

You watch her walk away, melting into the twilight, and Emmie whispers again. I like her.

Memphis, TN, August 2009

You make it home an hour before dawn, shaking with hunger and nerves, the smell of salt and incense and death clinging to your skin and clothes. The blue house waits for you, cool and welcoming in the sticky night. Blue is the color of magic, according to one of Emmie’s books. Dr. Martin hasn’t said anything about that, but the color reassures you all the same. You knew as soon as you saw the brilliant azure siding that this house was yours. You turn all the locks behind you, leaning your forehead on the cool wooden door while the air conditioning dries the sweat on your neck. The memory of the night’s work films you worse than salt and moisture, nothing you can wipe away. You want to sink to the floor and cry, but Emmie is waiting for you.

You finish all the leftovers in the fridge, eat standing in the kitchen—you never take food upstairs unless it’s for Emmie. It all tastes like salt and resin to you, but your hands stop shaking by the last carton of dry fried rice. The growling in your stomach stills, and you head to the bathroom to scrub away the grime and stink of murder. You won’t take that upstairs, either.

It’s all right the soft voice that sounds like Emmie croons as you lean against the molded plastic of the shower. It was a good thing.

Tears rinse away under the shower spray, cooler than that water. Death should be peaceful, reverent. What you did tonight was ugly and vengeful. Violent.

Just like Dad. You want to vomit, but your stomach is too greedy for that, too practical to be swayed by tears and weakness.

No, no. You stopped him. He’ll never hurt anyone again now. Lisa will be safe.

Clean and dry, you climb the attic stairs. Quiet fills you as you unlock the door at the top of the stairs and the familiar mix of frankincense and linseed oil wafts over you. Silent but for the soft whir of the dehumidifiers. The rest of the house may be yours, but it’s just a house. This is yours and Emmie’s, a safe place. A sacred place.

Every inch of the low vaulted ceiling is painted. Coat after coat of zinc white and linseed oil to saturate the plaster, each layer smoothed and sanded. Next came the scenes from The Book of Going Forth By Day, painstakingly copied till your eyes crossed and your hands cramped on the brush. Scenes from the papyri of Hunefer and Ani, Anubis weighing hearts while Ammit waits, hungry. The eater of hearts—you feel her inside you, growling and pacing, eternal hunger and restlessness.

The sarcophagi are evenly spaced; draped with silk they look like long, low tables. Rectangular instead of anthropoid—it was the best you could do. You had the money for a normal coffin when they gave Emmie back to you, the last of the money you got when Dad died, but you weren’t going to bury Emmie in anything that came from him. Then you learned what had happened to her, and realized you weren’t meant to bury her at all.

The coffin is mahogany, stained and sealed and lined with velvet, the panels covered in scenes of things she loved. The top is glass, caulked in place—you can’t open it, though sometimes you want to. The man in Belfast had the right idea, but he was clumsy and didn’t understand what he was doing. You wrapped Emmie and anointed her and wove all the charms she loved into the bandages, but you can’t stand to look at what he did to her face. Instead her funeral mask stares back at you when you lift the silk covering, pale and smooth, as perfect as she is in your head.

You don’t bother to check the other two boxes. Emmie’s companions—sweet, smart girls who deserved something better than the world out there. You knew the right way to do it by then, knew the oils and incenses and charms. They’re in much better shape than Emmie. But neither of them speak, even after you painted tiles with the spell to give the dead a mouth, and slipped them into their wrappings. Neither one was enough to keep Emmie from getting lonely again.

It’s all right, she whispers, as you lie down on the cool boards beside her coffin. Here you can rest, warded from bad dreams. You did a good thing tonight. Now tell me about Lisa.

The sun rises beyond the paint-blinded window, safe from the snake for another day. In the shadows of the attic that smells like paint and prayers, you tell your big sister about the girl you met at school.

J. Edgar Hoover Building, Washington DC, September 2009

They never had cleaned out her office.

Over the sunflower couch in Hafidha Gates’s sanctum sanctorum hung a framed poster of Edward Gorey’s Gashlycrumb Tinies. Even after she left them for the hallowed halls of Idlewood, Solomon Todd liked to go in and look at it, sometimes.

X is for Xerxes devoured by mice.

Todd would kick off his loafers and prop his feet on the arm of the sofa and stare up at it and wonder what he could have done better, how he could have gotten involved sooner. What he could have said to her to make it right.

He’d bring a stack of casefiles with him and prop a jacket open on his lap, so if anybody wandered in it would look like he was working. Honestly, he usually was working. It’s just that between working, he’d stare at the poster some, too.

Eventually, that poster was going to have to come down. Just like the trio on the wall opposite the door: Stephen Hawking, The Truth Is Out There, Robert Smith. The couch would have to be moved out, and something done with it. Eventually, this office was going to either be ceded to Todd, or to a technical analyst, if Reyes found one who met his standards and who was willing to accept the career dead-end that only the ACTF could provide.

C is for Clara who wasted away.

Todd happened to know that, sans Hafidha’s salary, Reyes had the budget for another field agent—two, actually—but then Stephen Reyes was picky about who he worked with and the sixth WTF cube had been empty for as long as there had been an ACTF. And honestly, it wasn’t like anybody they brought in was going to be able to fill Hafidha Gates’s size eight-and-half leopard-spot pumps anyway.

They’d get by with Chaz and Falkner—and Todd himself—indefinitely.

Todd was just contemplating poor Neville (about to die of ennui, as his tiny dark eyes peering out of a window embrasure clearly indicated) when he was drawn from his reverie by the sound of Daniel Brady—at his desk out in the bullpen—carpet-bombing with the F-word.

Todd rocked upright, case jackets slipping off his abdomen and thighs to splash on the floor, and lunged for the door and the hallway. He rounded the corner in sock-feet just in time to see the entire team gravitating to Brady’s desk. Brady himself was half out of his chair and leaning forward, massive shoulders blocking the monitor that Chaz, Lau, and Worth were all craning to see.

Todd paused in the doorway, aware of Falkner and Reyes doing exactly the same thing on the side wall of the room. Reyes strode between half-height cubes, heels clicking. “What it is?”

Wordlessly, Brady spun his monitor. Whatever so troubled him must have been in the headline, because Reyes scanned it quickly and took a step back, arms folded in an unconscious defensive gesture as frown lines drew themselves between his eyebrows.

It was Lau who took pity on Todd and Falkner, and read aloud: “Police Baffled By Memphis Mummy.”

“We got him,” Worth said, as betrayed as any nine-year old who’s just caught her mom playing Tooth Fairy. “We got the son of a bitch.”

“It’s two hundred miles from Belfast to Memphis,” Falkner said.

“Two hundred thirty-one,” Chaz corrected.

Falkner gave him an amused look. “How sure are we that this is a new killing?”

“Pretty sure,” Brady said. “The victim was registered for and attending classes over the summer term. So, last month.”

“Fuck,” Worth said, sounding—for a moment—more like Brady than like herself. “Did we kill the wrong guy?”

•

Esther Falkner came into Reyes’ office, shut the door, and folded her arms over her chest. “You need to hire a technical analyst,” she said. “We need somebody on the news media full time. We could have missed this one.”

Reyes watched her steadily across the desk for a moment. She was a blade of a woman, unimpeachable and invincible. He could have used a gross.

He leaned forward, stabbed the speaker button and an extension code on his phone with his forefinger, and waited two rings. Out in the bullpen, Todd picked up. Reyes didn’t wait for the formalities. “Come in here.”

“Your will,” Todd said, and stood even as he was hanging up the phone. Reyes watched through the blinds as he crossed the bullpen and Villette, Worth, Brady, and Lau pretended not to notice. The door opened, and Falkner stepped aside to allow Todd into the room.

Never one to miss a social cue, Todd shut the door behind him. His eyebrows went up. Reyes didn’t bother to exposit: he had a lot of faith in Todd’s ability to pick up a story in media res.

“I know I do,” Reyes said. “We’re running short-staffed, and when Sol retires next year, we’re going to be even shorter. But there’s a problem.”

He held the budget memo towards Falkner. She scanned it, eyebrows rising, and handed it to Todd without a word.

Todd read fast. “Twenty-five percent?” he said. “They can do that?”

Falkner’s outrage was a thing of beauty. “After what we did in North Dakota—”

“That’s all that’s saving us.” Reyes lowered his voice, fingertips drumming on his blotter. “That, and the fact that Pauley lied for us. Celentano or his bosses want Villette off the street. I’m not going to let that happen. But when your budget doesn’t officially exist—”

“He’s trying to starve us out because of Chaz?”

“I try to think the worst of people.” Reyes felt his shoulders rise in what could have been a shrug, if they had not been too stiff to fall again. “I’m also getting a lot of reminders about how expensive Idlewood is. And how many consultants we employ.”

“What about the plane?” Falkner asked.

“We share it with the critical incident, anti-terrorism, and hostage response teams,” Reyes said. “Technically, we’re saving money by keeping an asset in use.”

Todd cleared his throat. “I can take my retirement any time—”

Reyes said dryly, “The fact that the budget is being cut suggests it would be difficult for me to hire three people to do the work in your place. Since they’ll probably just eliminate your position when you go, I intend to hold on to you to the bloody end.”

“All right then.” Todd’s chin tucked, the reaction Reyes wanted. Todd’s inner fox might also have some badger blood. “Hand me the entrenching tool. We will fight them on the beaches, etcetera.”

Reyes nodded, and let him have the smile for four seconds before he turned it on Falkner. “Esther, Memphis is yours. Lau and Villette are working on finding us a way in—invite or jurisdictional. Something will come up. Pick your away team and be ready to go.”

He saw her moment of contemplation, and then the frown. Reyes assigned who went and who stayed.

It wasn’t that Falkner needed the leadership practice, but Todd’s impending retirement and the Hope Mitchell incident combined to remind Reyes that his days in the FBI were numbered. One way, or the other. He leaned back in his creaky leather chair, steepled his fingers, and put on his best John Forsythe. “Someday, my child. All this will be yours.”

•

Tick.

Tock.

Sometimes, it was all Daphne Worth could do to remember that the ACTF had only been a part of her life for two and a half years. It was like being married. Still new, still fresh. Except from the inside of her skin, so much a part of her that she couldn’t imagine herself without it.

There were other things she could not imagine herself without, and—other than Tricia—it seemed like every single one of them came with the job. Chaz Villette: her partner, her best friend. Nikki Lau: ally, essential element, vulnerable as a lily under her Kevlar skin. Esther Falkner: mother-warrior. Hafidha Gates—

Hafidha.

May, June, July. August. September. Four months and a lifetime since Hafidha got sick, and it hadn’t changed. They were adapting, finding ways to maneuver around the hole she’d left in the structure of the team. But the hole wasn’t healed—it wasn’t even scabbed over—and Daphne was starting to wonder if it ever could be.

Some blows you recovered from.

Some never healed. You just learned to accommodate.

She had a file open on her computer, and her hand occasionally made scrolling gestures with the mouse, but she wasn’t reading. Her eyes scanned over the words and figures without passing them along to her brain. Her brain spun a hamster-wheel of distress.

It was Todd who’d actually pulled the trigger on the Belfast gamma. Daphne had been just a year on the job then, just wearing into her new role. She hadn’t yet really internalized that Todd was more than a wacky, soft-spoken paper pusher when he’d looked at Reyes, and Reyes had looked back, and Todd had left the rest of the team behind to clamber with a rifle into the loft of the barn where Thomas Payne had gone to ground with the pair of high school girls he was holding hostage. She could still hear—she couldn’t help but hear—his voice over her headset, soft and assured: “I have the solution,” before Reyes gave the order to fire.

That word was FBI euphemism. The solution was a lethal one; it meant he had the gamma in his rifle sights. It hadn’t saved the last two victims’ lives, and nothing Daphne could do had prevented their rapid dehydration and death. By the time she got an IV in either of them, the organ damage was irreversible. And Payne had been right there.

How could they have killed the wrong guy?

It was Todd who had pulled the trigger. But it had been Brady and Lau who had followed the evidence to Payne’s house, obtained the search warrant, and found the forty-one girls and young women dissected, preserved, and entombed in his basement. All the evidence indicated that Payne had been getting away with it for years, not hunting close to home until recently, when the pressure of increasing infirmity constricted his range.

Did we kill the wrong guy? Todd might not be wondering—or he might, because who knew what went on behind that Zen-master facade? But Lau and Brady sure were, and the rest of the team was right there behind them.

Now Falkner emerged from her office, swept her gaze over Lau (on the phone), Brady, Worth, Chaz, and Duke, and jerked her chin at the briefing closet. “Five minutes,” she said, and made a U-turn to pass the Cowboy’s desk and vanish into Reyes’s office. The door shut behind her, and Daphne turned over the back of her chair to catch Chaz’s eye. He Spocked her back and stuffed a Peppermint Pattie into his mouth.

She grinned and opened the top drawer, groping for her BlackBerry. Three minutes later, and she was in the back-to-the-wall chair in the briefing closet, settling in, Chaz on her right hand and Nikki on the left.

By the time Falkner came in, everybody was in their places. There were enough seats to go around now, and it hurt Daphne’s heart not to be crowded into a corner by the press of too many bodies and not enough chairs. Not to have to remember to save the last seat and the last corner of table for Hafidha and her global extensible brain.

Things fall apart, Daphne quoted to herself. The centre cannot hold.

“Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,” Brady answered. Daphne’s head jerked back as she realized she had spoken aloud.

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity,” Reyes finished, jumping ahead in the poem. “I always thought that bit was better taken out of context.” He turned his attention to Falkner, standing by the door—a little less painfully than she would have, two and a half years before, a little more ease in the arc of her spine. “Esther?”

Sometimes, Daphne thought, things do get better.

“Lau and Todd have done the groundwork,” Falkner said, moving away from the doorframe she had been unobtrusively leaning against, “and Nikki’s gotten us an invite from the University of Memphis PD. Lau?”

“It turns out that there’s an interstate element to the case. Which gives us jurisdiction. I contacted the U of M chief of police and explained the situation to him, then offered our cooperation with his department. And it turns out the U of M has a real police department,” Lau said, shuffling papers. “Thirty-odd sworn officers, with a reciprocal arrangement with the Memphis municipal police department. We’re not dealing with rentacops here, but they’re a small enough department to jump at the offer of FBI assistance with a creepy-ass case. Especially when—well.”

“Wait,” Chaz said. “Interstate element?”

Lau looked over to where Todd was ripping the sealing plastic off a bottle of water with his incisors. “Duke?”

He spat it into his hand and took a quick gulp of water. “Remember, children. Your teeth are not for use as tools.”

Todd must have arranged to sit on the outside of the table, because he stood up with barely a whisk of wheels on nylon carpet and lifted the remote from the shelf by the outmoded laptop. He had apparently been working on his PowerPoint skills, as one thumbclick of the remote summoned an image of a white man in his mid to late twenties, unshaven and Bohemian-chic, to the whiteboard that also served as a projection screen. The second click added the image of a dessicated corpse, hands crossed neatly over its chest. Bogman, Daphne thought, remembering where she’d seen that leathery brown complexion before.

“The victim,” Todd said. “Daniel Goodrich. Located in his apartment when his girlfriend insisted the super unlock the door. All indications are that this was the primary crime scene.”

He clicked. The two photos were replaced by a left-justified, smiling image of a green-eyed suicide blonde in her mid-twenties, her roots showing dark. “Minerva Carter.”

Another click, another face joined the first, centered on the projection. Also white, this one brown-haired and plump. “Lisa Quattrochi.”

Daphne perceived a sinking feeling. By now, she had learned to embrace it.

One more click. One more girl, so they were three abreast. This one also a brunette, pale-faced against startling dark hair. “Cerise Gale,” Todd said. He set the remote aside, crossed to the whiteboard—breaking the projection so the faces of three young women flickered across his shoulders and the balding back of his head. He lifted a blue pen and wrote each girl’s name under her image. “Now, you might ask, what do these three young women have in common?”

“White,” Brady volunteered. “Twenties. Look like student-Bohemian types. And let me guess from context: they all live in Memphis?”

“One gown, two town,” Todd said. “Quattrochi is an anthropology grad student at U of M, same institution as the male victim, Goodrich. Gale and Carter are locals, but Gale works in food service and Carter has a job at the library. And Carter lives in West Memphis. Or rather, she lives in West Memphis. Arkansas. Our case.”

“Are,” Daphne said. Todd was careful about his verb tenses. “Lives.”

“All three,” Todd said, “have gone missing in the last two months. Two before the mummification and one after. Quattrochi was last seen two nights ago.” He paused, an air of satisfaction surrounding him.

“But wait.” Brady was spindling a piece of notebook paper between his hands until it came apart in shreds. “There’s more?”

Todd nodded. “Quattrochi was dating Goodrich. He was seen by a neighbor only two days before the body was discovered—”

“Which gives us a timeline on the mummification,” Lau interjected. “It can’t take more than forty-eight hours.”

Todd continued, “The local cops questioned her extensively in the case, but despite being the chief suspect she was well-alibied. Her disappearance is currently presumed to be flight to avoid prosecution, and I was initially operating under the possibility that she might be our gamma, and she might be in the wind. But a little investigation was enough to turn up two similar missing persons. We need to consider the possibility that she might be alive and a victim.”

Reyes’s intake of breath was enough to send the hairs on Daphne’s spine prickling. Reyes’s hunches weren’t hunches: they were the distilled result of experience, judgment, and years of study—not to mention the innate knowledge that could pass for mindreading, if you let yourself get superstitious about it.

It made Daphne feel a little better about her sense that something was up.

Todd capped the marker and laid it down in the tray. “Now, I don’t know that these three disappearances are related to Goodrich’s rather lurid death—”

“I bet a lot of girls go missing in Memphis in any given year,” Lau said, but it wasn’t an argument. Daphne glanced over at her, and saw the specter of those forty-three dead Tennessee youths in the creases on her brow.

Brady nodded. “Consistent victimology.”

“We can’t rule it out,” Falkner said. “Right. Away team is Reyes, Brady, Worth, Lau. Be ready to roll out in twenty-five. Todd, Chaz, you’re the anchor team. I’m sorry, but this one looks to involve a little too much data for just one.”

“It’s good,” Chaz said. He settled back in his chair, and Daphne marveled at the difference between this and the young man she’d once met who had been ready to do anything for a trip into the field. But his place was assured now: he didn’t have to fight to keep it. He’d go where he was needed.

Reyes, though, folded his arms. “Me?”

“You told me it was my field team,” Falkner said. “Which one of us has a better feel for university politics? Are you going to argue my judgment now?”

•

Hope Mitchell’s updated case file was centered on Chaz’s blotter when he came back from the bathroom, a yellow post-it ordering review this and see me before I leave. But Reyes’s door was shut. So after Chaz spent fifteen precious minutes of his prep time memorizing the data it contained and then stored it in his locking file, he wasn’t surprised when Reyes appeared from Down the Hall and without breaking stride, said, “Villette. My office.”

Chaz’s head tracked as Reyes swept past his desk without offering a clue as to the nature of the conference. Chaz glanced over his shoulder at Todd; Todd shrugged with his eyebrows. All right, then. Chaz grabbed notebook and pen—in case he needed to draw something—and lurched upright, heart already accelerating in his chest as he searched his conscience.

Nothing jumped out at him as a current and immediate sin, but he spared a moment’s amusement that Reyes could still do that to him.

“Shut the door.”

Chaz did, softly, feeling the click of the latch against his fingers before he released the handle. Reyes had a manilla jacket in his hands. He stood in front of his desk, facing Chaz, shoulders square.

“I’m really not going to like what you’re about to tell me.”

Reyes shook his head, and did Chaz the honor of not insisting he be seated. Granting Chaz the advantage of his height, which meant Reyes thought he was going to want it. Silently, he extended the jacket.

Chaz accepted it and began scanning the printouts inside, a pattern already building its three-dimensional structure in his mind as he flipped pages and memorized images, correlating, contrasting. “These are DNA sequences.”

Reyes said, “Everyone in Idlewood, except Susannah Greenwood. Every dead gamma Frost has retained samples from.” He hesitated. “Hafidha Gates. You.”

Chaz had known it was coming, and so he managed to keep the shock of rage and fear from registering on his face or snapping the mirror up around him. The cards were only identified by code numbers, but he’d just spotted a closely repeating pattern to two of them. One was familiar, part of an autopsy report he’d once studied exhaustively. And that part of the code number must indicate the age of the subject, which meant the lower sequence was...

“This one,” he said, and handed Reyes his card.

Reyes glanced at the code string and nodded. “How did you know?”

Chaz handed him the second one, the similar one. He made his voice crisp and professional. “Because that one’s William Villette. Which one’s Hope Mitchell?”

Silently, Reyes indicated the card. “You’re seeing it.”

Chaz nodded, patterns dancing in his brain. “I’m seeing its absence, anyway. Which one is Hafidha?”

Reyes leaned over his forearm, riffled cards, handed him the proper one.

“She gave consent for this?”

Reyes made a face. “Eventually. The Bug—didn’t want her to.”

Cardstock crumpled in Chaz’s hand before he realized he was clenching it. Carefully, he uncurled. “Sorry.”

“They’re duplicates,” Reyes said, wryly, which made Chaz cough slightly with suppressed laughter. Not funny-laughter, but surprise and irritation. Of course Reyes had seen him coming. “What are you not seeing?”

Chaz flipped a few more cards. “I’m not seeing the anomaly. I’ll have to look at a few thousand controls to be really sure, but—there’s nothing here. Nothing that indicates a genetic link to the anomaly, or a link to resistance of it. Except—me and Mitchell. There’s an...” His lip curled ironically “...anomaly in both of ours that looks similar. And this thing in Hafs’ might be... part of the same thing. An adaptation? He looked up at Reyes. “Can Eileen Cho offer consent?”

“Not meaningfully.”

“So you’re conducting medical experimentation on human beings without their knowledge or permission?”

“Treatment,” Reyes said. “Testing for treatment. On a ward of the state.” He shook his head, scowl lines drawing long beside his nose. “Essentially the same thing. Do you have a better option?”

“Where’d you get mine?” Because Chaz sure as hell hadn’t signed any forms.

“Evidence,” Reyes said. “At a crime scene. I’d say I was sorry, but—”

“Don’t,” Chaz said. “I like you better honest.”

Reyes’ chin came back. He returned Chaz’s stare, but it looked softer around the eyes than Chaz’s felt. “Touche.”

Chaz slapped the jacket closed, quieting the buzz of patterns in his brain. “May I keep these?” Reyes’ nod was only a formality. They were already stored in his head.

“So you agree with Frost’s assessment?”

“Yes,” Chaz said. “The majority of these people have nothing, genetically speaking, in common. Other than being human. But the betas do, and it looks like genetic damage. We have anecdotal evidence that some things can predispose—left-handedness—and it’s early to make any blanket statements—”

“The anomaly’s acquired,” Reyes said.

Chaz nodded, feeling a coldness settle into his spine as if from within. “The anomaly’s acquired. And some people have a freak resistance to it.”

University of Memphis, TN, September 2009

“Shit, Cassie. Have you seen this?”

Cassie looked up to find Bethany leaning through her office door, alternately waving a newspaper like a flag and fanning herself with it. Her pale face was splotchy, and sweat glistened across her forehead and sternum and darkened the top of her black camisole. They’d had more than one discussion about sartorial color choices in Tennessee summers, but with a name like Bethany Strange, she was probably doomed to a life of black lace and heat exhaustion. Orrin Sykes lingered behind her, keeping body heat distance between them. Tall and gaunt with deep-set eyes, he didn’t need to wear black to coordinate with Bethany—he already looked like a cartoon undertaker.

“Seen what?” Cassie leaned down and tilted the oscillating fan toward the door. Filmy black fabric billowed and stuck to Bethany’s sweaty thighs. Cassie recrossed her legs in sympathy.

Bethany slid the wrinkled, ink-smeared copy of The Daily News across Cassie’s desk, eclipsing a pile of to-be-graded quizzes. Cassie’s eyebrows climbed as she scanned the headline. “’Police Baffled by Memphis Mummy’? Really?”

“I would have said ‘mystified’,” Bethany said, collapsing into the wooden chair on the other side of the desk. Her paisley skull-and-crossbones bag landed beside her with a whump. “How often do you get to write a lede like that?”

“That name sounds familiar.” She tapped the grainy photograph of a dark-haired young man. She didn’t recognize him, but no one looked quite right in the blurry pointilism of newsprint. “The...mummy.”

“Dan Goodrich? He was an anthro major. He took your Ancient History of Asia class last semester. He was kind of a douchebag.” She winced, glossed lips twisting. Cassie cocked an eyebrow, and from the doorway Orrin made a disapproving noise. “Well,” Bethany said defensively, “it’s true.”

Somewhere over Tennessee, September, 2009

Evening light mellowed the landscape as the Gulfstream dipped towards the General DeWitt Spain airport in Memphis, Tennessee. Nikki Lau leaned against the window, trying to ignore the worry churning away in her gut. Did we kill the wrong guy? Did we? She wanted to steal another glance at Brady, but he was going to catch her at it if she kept it up, so she settled for watching the arched shadow of a bridge inchworm across the green-amber mottled celadon surface of the broadest river she’d ever seen. Mud flats scattered with trees made swampy margins between the river and streets lined with houses and businesses. As the plane descended, Lau could make out toy cars and the unraveled cotton-swab tops of trees. A flash like sunlight bouncing off an angled mirror drew her attention; when she turned her head, she caught sight of a massive pyramid of dark glass, glittering in the slanted light.

“Crap,” she said. “I guess they take the Memphis thing seriously.”

Across the table, Brady raised his eyes from a pile of case jackets—everything they knew about the missing girls. “Hmm?”

“Honking big pyramid,” she said. “I wonder if it’s bigger than the Luxor.” She’d been to Vegas often enough when she lived in LA, and the glistening black sides of Sin City’s resident Egyptian-themed casino were a familiar sight to anyone driving in from the southwest.

“Chaz would know,” Brady said. “It’s a sports arena. Or was. The Memphis Grizzlies used to play there, but I think it’s closed now.”

“You’d think Tennessee would be more black bear country,” Lau deadpanned, just to get a flicker of a smile out of him. It almost worked: the smile muscles tensed, at least. But he was carrying the same load she was right now, and probably a little bit more.

She knew something was up with him and Gray. You’d have to be blind to miss it. What it was, exactly, was a guess—but Lau knew what had happened with his last serious relationship, and if she couldn’t get herself over a perfectly amicable divorce from a guy with absolutely nothing wrong with him except that she didn’t love him, what was it like to move past something like... Andre Kent?

He should get a medal for even trying. And Gray, who she really still hoped she’d get to meet someday, should get a medal for putting up with him during the process.

Reyes dropped into the chair beside Brady and slid a netbook onto the table between them. The motion was enough to attract the attention of Falkner and Worth, who arrived in tandem from the front of the plane. Worth stood aside to let Falkner claim the seat beside Lau, but Falkner shook her head and gestured Daphne into it.

Reyes swiped a fingertip across the skidpad on the tiny computer, revealing the foxy face of Solomon Todd. “Everybody’s here,” Reyes said. “What do you have?”

“Geographic profile,” Todd said. “Chaz has gone over the police reports on all four victims, treating them as linked. It looks like Memphis PD did a good job with the missing person investigations—even pulled cell records. Three lived in the Normal Station neighborhood, which is the U district, more or less. Other than U of M itself, there’s not a lot of other links—and even within the university it doesn’t look like their paths would have overlapped much. We’re still working on it.”

“There are places in any University where everyone’s paths overlap,” Reyes said. “Student Union. Library. Out in the quad on sunny days.”

“Local bar or pizza joint,” Lau said. “Victims are town and gown, remember.”

Reyes nodded. “Observer bias,” he admitted, dismissing himself with an airy wave. He looked up at Falkner for direction, making Lau’s lips curve a little. Was it killing him to let Falkner run the show? Sure, it sounded like it had been his idea, but how hard was it to pull your own command if you were Stephen Reyes? And what was really up? It wasn’t that he doubted Falkner’s ability to lead. And she sure as hell didn’t need seasoning. It couldn’t be that he had some reason to distrust himself on this one, could it? Other than the reason they all had, this time out.

Lau shook off the distraction. Trying to second-guess Stephen Reyes was like playing chess against Bobby Fisher. Sometimes you didn’t even figure out the other guy’s strategy until the game had been over for a month and a half.

Falkner seemed ready for him. She drew herself erect from the core and uncrossed her arms. “Footwork. And lots of it. Once we get settled, we’ll start drawing up interview lists—”

“I’ve sent some preliminary suggestions to your email,” Todd said. “I had to do something while Villette was playing supercomputer. I guessed it might save you some time on the ground. I suggest you concentrate on the University to start, as if you needed me to mention that.”

Reyes smiled grimly at Todd’s Skyped-in image. “That joke only works if you have a chalkboard, Solomon.”

It must have been context, because Todd stared, taken aback, and burst out laughing. He was still shaking his head as he cut the connection. Lau was pretty sure she heard him mutter Asshole in cheerful tones as he went.

Reyes snorted and snapped the netbook closed. He stood, Falkner moving aside to let him have the aisle, and returned to his usual seat up front without another word. Falkner followed.

Worth glanced at Lau. “Non sequitur much?”

Brady leaned over the table. “What was that about?”

Lau lifted the folder she had been flipping through and hid her mouth behind it. “Marital shorthand.”

Brady’s paroxysm of laughter drew Reyes’ attention back to them, but by then, Lau was absorbed in the case jacket, and butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.

University of Memphis, TN, September 2009

The U of M campus comprised exactly the mix of traditional and modern Brady would have wanted if he’d been location scouting for a major public university campus. Students filed along tree-shaded path through an atmosphere that remained sultry even in September. The white-columned brick administration building stood across an elliptical plaza from a smaller hall with an elaborate yellow and red art deco facade. The long shadow of a stark, modern white clock tower lay on the ground as if cast by the gnomon of a giant sundial.

Brady watched his team precede him across the brick, all but one of them doing a fairly convincing imitation of casual, academic haste. Falkner couldn’t mosey if her life depended on it, but if Brady hadn’t known already how uncomfortable Reyes was, he never would have guessed from watching him.

Reyes hurried two steps to get the door for the rest of the team while Falkner consulted a card. By falling in a half-step in front of Brady as Brady passed through the door, he managed to let Brady keep his preferred position at the end of the line. Brady was grateful. He thought he was keeping the gnawing worm of regret from showing, but just in case it was better to be behind everybody.

Inside the building, the air-conditioned cool drifting beneath shadowy high ceilings came as a relief. Falkner was already ten steps down the corridor, Lau and Worth caught up in her wake, and Reyes and Brady hustled to make up the distance.

A minute or two later, they gathered before a reception desk, behind which resided a slightly doe-eyed woman who rose from her chair to greet them. “You must be the team from the FBI,” she said. “Chief Merchant is waiting for you in Dean Rand’s office.”

The Dean of Students was a broad-hipped woman who seemed firmly anchored in her office, with its sweeps of neutral carpeting and cliffs of pale Danish Modern bookcases. Her pale skin was almost translucent, her gray hair was hot-curlered into an updated bouffant, and for a moment Brady imagined his Grandma Gilmer patting her own ample hip and whispering “The bigger the bottom, the bigger the hair.” He liked Dean Rand before she even opened her mouth.

“Special Agent Nicolette Lau,” Nikki said, stepping to the forefront. “We spoke on the phone.”

She offered her hand to Rand as the man who must be Chief Merchant, thin and brown and tough-looking as a mahogany plank—Brady thought of Morgan Freeman, twenty years ago—rose from an oatmeal-colored chair and extended his hand to Falkner. Introductions all around, Brady at first prey to an unnameable anxiety until he realized it was his internal timer telling him to get some calories into the betas. Not this trip, he told himself, and felt the anxiety convert to sadness.

He shook hands and mumbled pleasantries, and let himself be pushed to the back of the group and out of the circle of negotiations.

“We’ve arranged to put you up in some VIP housing on campus,” Rand said. “Interview space might be a little more challenging—”

“The house is quite small,” Merchant said, meaning the police station. “SA Lau said you would conduct most interviews in the field?”

“Until we identify a suspect,” Falkner said.

Merchant dipped his chin. “We have reciprocity with the Memphis PD. I’ll handle the liaison with their homicide investigation for now. When would you like to start interviews?”

“Tonight,” Falkner said. “Right after we get settled and grab something to eat, if it’s not too late. Otherwise, first thing in the morning. We’d like to hit the ground running. Has the victim’s body been forwarded to our facility in Baltimore?”

Merchant nodded. “If you’re correct about the link between the Goodrich murder and the missing girls, I agree about the need for haste. A young woman’s life may be at stake. We provided SA Lau with transcripts of interviews of Goodrich’s family and known associates. Including Quattrochi. That might save you some time.”

“Our analysts are reviewing them,” Falkner said. “We’ll still wish to re-interview. Sometimes we ask kind of funny questions.”

“Just like on TV?” Dean Rand asked.

“Sometimes,” Falkner said. “But only sometimes.”

•

Rand and Merchant showed them their rooms and the phones and left them to their own devices, though Merchant made sure every one of them had his cell number. “Damn,” Daphne said, as she followed Falkner into the small conference room set aside for their use. “That’s a lot of paper. These are the transcripts of the completed interviews?”

She hadn’t really intended dry understatement, but apparently she’d achieved it anyway, because Lau snorted and shook her head. “And just think, we left Todd and Chaz at home. They’ve got e-copies, though, so we don’t have to review all of this.”

Brady shut the door behind himself, closing all five of them inside the gray-carpeted hush of the little room. Nobody said it, but Daphne could see the thought travel from him to Reyes, from Lau to Falkner. Each face stilled for a moment, then resumed animation with an effort. Lau looked down guiltily, her mouth twisting, and Daphne brushed her arm with the back of her hand.

You couldn’t help but evoke the ghost of Hafidha. Even avoiding mentioning her showed the shape of her absence. She was too much a part of who they were and how the team functioned.

Into the awkward silence, Daphne’s BlackBerry buzzed. A moment later, the other palmtop devices around the room answered.

“Interview lists,” Reyes said. He opened his mouth to say something else, then looked at Falkner.

That look she gave him might have been amusement. “Let’s split them up and get to work.”

•

They did it by zone, a geographic split. Tonight they’d start with the campus, residences first. Reyes and Lau departed to visit Goodrich’s apartment—where his body had been discovered—and canvass his neighbors, and the other three stayed behind. Tomorrow, when people would be in their offices and workplaces, the whole team would interview the faculty and graduate students that might have known Goodrich or Quattrochi, librarians and aides who might have known Carter, fellow cafeteria ladies who would have worked with Gale.

Since Falkner, Brady, and Daphne were working in such a geographically restricted area, they’d first check Quattrochi’s apartment—on the Park Avenue subcampus a few city blocks from the main campus—and then split up. Help, if it was needed, would never be more than a few minutes away. The following evening, when somebody would have to drive out to West Memphis, they’d work with partners.

Something about Quattrochi’s one-bedroom grad student apartment left a funny taste in Daphne’s mouth from the moment she slit the seal and paused inside the doorway to let Falkner and Brady enter first. Brady gave her a funny look, but acquiesced when she waved him through. He should have the first look at the scene, and anyway, Daphne preferred to keep her unanticipated emotional reaction out of his attention and Falkner’s.

The apartment was cramped, cluttered with secondhand furniture, and piled with books. It was smaller than Chaz’s apartment, which was saying something—or maybe it wasn’t actually smaller, but Chaz’s place had good light, and the darkness in this one made it seem close. Blackout curtains dimmed the bedroom, where it seemed Quattrochi had slept on an opened-out sofabed. Dusty ceramic kittens dotted the bookshelves and the battered nightstand that served to hold a TV up. Heaps of clothes, clean or dirty, lay kicked this way and that. The floor was carpeted, but there was no evidence of a vacuum cleaner, and nobody had bothered to wash the dirty dishes in the sink.

“Not houseproud, was she?” Brady said. Daphne winced on the missing girl’s behalf, but she too was trying to breathe shallowly. Wasn’t it everybody’s worst nightmare, strangers in your home when you were unprepared?

She’d identified that uncomfortable sensation. It was the sense of the road not taken. This could have been her as a med student, living on mac and cheeselike substance and sleeping where she fell.

If she hadn’t preferred adventure, this was where she could have ended up—or begun, rather. This wasn’t an end-point. It wasn’t supposed to be an end-point. It was supposed to be the road that took you there.

“I wonder if she had a porn buddy,” Daphne answered. “You know, this looks like a grad student apartment to me.”

Falkner was in the bathroom, rattling through the medicine cabinet. Daphne edged up on the kitchen sink and ducked down, holding her breath as she opened the cabinet under it. The trash had been recently emptied, at least. The only things in the bag were a couple of Starbucks cups and a fistful of withered roses, their colors faded like parchment, like something out of a Joni Mitchell song.

“So why do you throw out the bouquet you had enough sentimental attachment to to dry?” Daphne asked.

Brady snorted. “You broke up with him?”

“What if he turned up horribly dead and you were the chief suspect? Would you hang on to those flowers?”

Brady shook his head, curls breaking with sweat around the tops of his ears. He needed a haircut. Out of character. “If I killed him, probably not. I’d probably crush them up before I threw them away, if I were harboring that kind of rage.” He paused. “And if he was dead and I loved him? I’d wrap them up and put them out of sight.”

“So these didn’t come from the boyfriend.”

That tight smile creasing Brady’s face looked like victory seen through pain. He turned away and raised his voice. “Falkner? You should see this.”

•

When they finished inside, they moved on to the neighbors. Daphne knew the questions by heart now, and knew how to let one answer lead naturally and organically to the next. She knew the little reassuring noises and the hesitations that would invite an interview subject to fill the silence. She knew her job, and if she wasn’t Todd or Reyes or even Lau across an interview table, she was still good at it.

And this? It was relentlessly routine. They divided up the grad student housing by apartment number and worked it door by door, leapfrogging each other as necessary.

Some were one-bedroom efficiencies for single students; others were housing for married students or students with children. There were one hundred and fifty apartments in total, which worked out to fifty doors knocked apiece. By fifteen, Brady quoted Ghostbusters to her when they passed in the courtyard—”When we get to twenty, I’m going to puke.”

Daphne laughed wearily and punched his arm, and then wondered when that had happened. When, exactly, had the Cowboy stopped being the intimidating hardass she desperately wanted to impress, and started being some guy she could slap on the shoulder? Somebody who she could tell needed moral support, and who would offer it in return?

About the time, maybe, that the WTF turned into home.

Today, they were just two people who desperately wanted not to have made a terrible mistake. She imagined his gut was churning with as much awfulness as her own, but the job had to get done. And if they had done it wrong before, more reason to get it right this time.

She turned her attention back to the interviews. Harried-looking grad students in pajamas or boxer bottoms, bathrobes, jeans, shelf tanks. Barefoot, in slippers, wearing flipflops. Ripped cargo pants and unwashed hair. Gauzy hippie skirts. Some with irritated looking spouses rattling cooling supper dishes significantly as she asked questions, those same spouses surprised when Daphne asked the same questions of them. Of any available children, if the children were old enough and the parents were amenable.

It was amazing how many doors opened to a crooked gold badge and the words, “I’m Special Agent Daphne Worth of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. We’re looking into the disappearance of your neighbor Lisa Quattrochi, and I was wondering if you had a few minutes to spare to answer a few quick questions?”

They looked... young. Even the ones who were her own age. And when she mentioned Quattrochi—Lisa, as Daphne started thinking of her by the sixth or seventh door, since that was how her neighbors knew her—they looked worried, or frightened, or irritated. A few got angry—referred aggression, taking it out on Daphne because they could not get at the thing that really hurt them—and she rode it, kept them from shutting the door when she could, asked the same questions. Weight loss, behavior change, anything you’ve seen that struck you as out of the ordinary, no matter how small. Anybody else in the community exhibiting these symptoms? No? Was Lisa upset about anything? Did she ever confide in you? Do you know who might have been sending her flowers? What were her interests outside school? Did she ever mention anything about Daniel? Were the police harassing her about his case?

It was endless and relentless and a good thing students stayed up late, because the sun was gone and the night cool enough to sting before they finished. The next time Daphne’s path crossed Brady’s, she rolled her eyes like a silent movie star and said “I hope Reyes and Lau are doing better,” and Brady answered, “This is slower than crap dripping down a cow’s tail.”

Falkner paused as she passed in the opposite direction. “How’s it going?”

“Forty-five,” Daphne said. “I’m starting to get a sense, though. Let’s just finish this and order some Chinese food. The delivery guys keep walking by, and the smell is killing me.”

“I’ll call Reyes,” Falkner said.

Brady heaved a sigh and scratched his head, blond locks falling back into place as if blow-dried. “Race you.”

•

There were two addresses left on Brady’s list when his palmtop buzzed. None of the team’s rings.

He knew he shouldn’t have answered, but it was reflex. “Hi mom,” he said. “I’m at work.”

“This late? Oh, honey, you work too hard.”

“It’s the job.”

Looking back, he would never be able to retrace the series of noncommittal grunts that got him into trouble. One minute, his mom was fretting about how long it would be before frost got her tomatoes, and the next she was saying, “You know, Danny, you’re not getting any younger. When are you going to think about a family?”

“Mom—”

“You’re so good looking,” she said. “Just like your father. What about that Chinese girl you’re always talking about?”

He’d mentioned Lau three or four times, in the context of work or casual friendship. It was enough to put her into his mother’s head as the leading contender for grandchildren. Sure. When she decides she wants kids, we can do A.I. Iron control kept the words in his head; his mom probably didn’t even notice the strangled silence. She was on a roll.

“You father would have a fit, of course.”

About her being Chinese. Brady could picture it; all he had to do was downgrade the fit the old man would have about Gray by ninety percent. And put an expiration date on it.

“But he’d get over it for grandbabies.”

“Nikki’s a co-worker, mom.”

She sighed. “I know, sweetie. I’m sorry.”

“It’s nothing,” Brady said, “Look, I’m on the clock, I really have to go. I’ll call Sunday if I can.”

She hung up after a few more pleasantries; he found himself staring at the phone when Daphne dragged up, her stone focus on polished and professional flagging badly. “Everything okay?”

“Fine,” he said, and folded the phone closed. It went into its belt holster as if he’d never pulled it out. “Come on, Kemo Sabe. Close your eyes and think of tangerine beef. We’re nearly there.”

She almost smiled. “You got any interviews left?”

“Two,” he admitted.

She held out her hand for the palmtop he’d just put away. “Give me one.”

Memphis, TN, September 2009

Standing on the grotty brown carpet of the apartment building hallway, watching Reyes’s shoulders, Lau jammed her hands into her pockets. “Brady’s better at scene analysis.”

Reyes slit the police seal on the apartment door left-handed and clicked his lockblade knife closed. He put it away, producing a key from the same pocket, and with lavender-gloved hands opened the door.

It opened on a dark room that smelled faintly of old leaves and mothballs and something sweet.

“Think of it as cross-training.”

Forensics had already been through the scene, so Reyes reached out and flipped the lightswitch by the door, illuminating a typical depressing student pad. Broken-backed chairs and couches were shoved against the walls of a small living room with dingy white walls. Threadbare brown carpeting covered an uneven floor. When Lau stepped on it, she could feel the lumps where the pad beneath had worn into crumbles.

The room also boasted a TV and several bookcases. Piles of books and mail on the coffee table were all shoved to one end, creating space for a laptop computer that was nowhere in evidence. Crime lab, Lau thought.

There were no signs of a struggle, except the stains on the third-hand couch. Everything about the room said this was the den of a hard-working doctoral candidate.

It was hot and still, breathless. That itchy odor rasped her sinuses with every breath. “I hope somebody cleaned out the fridge.”

Reyes grunted. “He was found on the sofa.” He crossed the living room with rapid steps that almost hid his limp. For a moment, Lau thought he was going to throw himself down on the sofa and compose himself as if in the scene photos, but instead he crouched, wincing, and dropped one knee. Gingerly, he slid one hand under the drab tweed skirt of a pleated dust-ruffle.

Lau should have better things to do that watch her boss grope around under furniture. The smell of camphor followed her, fading slightly as she walked into the kitchen. It had an underlying note, something bitter and resinous and not unpleasant. Both were infinitely preferable to the crime-scene smells she had expected, cadaverine and putrescine, voided bowels and spilled bladder. And better, too, than the formaldehyde and rotten meat stench of Payne’s basement dissection and mummification shop.

The kitchen was as threadbare and Spartan as the rest of the public space, and as cluttered. The table had obviously never been used for eating; it groaned under the weight of library books arranged in piles that no doubt made all the sense in the world to the former occupant, scraps of yellow Post-It marking pages. The refrigerator hadn’t been cleaned, but it hardly mattered: there was nothing in it but a broken sixpack of Diet Coke, a crusty squeeze bottle of yellow mustard, and a bottle of insulin.

“He was a diabetic,” Lau called around the corner. “And he was doing his dissertation—” she leaned over the books on the table “—on something to do with Middle Eastern languages, although your guess is as good as mine exactly what.”

“Hello,” Reyes said, behind her. When she turned around, he was holding up another textbook at eye level, open to the title page. Reading Egyptian Art: A Hieroglyphic Guide to Ancient Egyptian Painting and Sculpture. There was a scrawled pencil signature in the upper right hand corner. Lisa Quattrochi.

Quattrochi’s victimology was still in progress, being compiled by the rest of the team. But Lau remembered the spare details they knew already. It wasn’t unusual that she would leave a book under her boyfriend’s couch, certainly. But—

“Didn’t Todd say she was an anthropology grad student?”

“Archaeology is a branch of anthropology,” Reyes said. “And Egyptology falls somewhere between archaeology and art history, from what I recall. So if you think of Egypt, what do you think of?”

“Mummies,” Lau said promptly. “Think she goes back on the list as a suspect?”

“I don’t see how we can avoid it.” Reyes folded the book closed again, handling it by the corners, and only barely managed to whip it aside as he was interrupted by a virulent sneeze, which he stifled in the immaculately-tailored crook of his elbow. “Excuse me.”

Lau grinned. Sometimes, it was nice to be reminded of his mortality. “What is that smell, anyway?”

“Mothballs?”

She shook her head. “There’s something else. Something... bitter. Black-smelling. And something sweet. Resiny.”

He cocked his head to one side and sniffed. “Myrrh. And frankincense,” he said with certainty. “It’s strongest by the couch.”

“You’re sure?”

“Raised Catholic,” he said. “The stuff seeps in through your pores. And it’s an odd kind of incense for a grad student with no signs of spiritual interest to be burning.”

The basement, the bodies, the jars. “The Belfast mummies didn’t smell of myrrh.”

“No,” Reyes said. “They didn’t.”

Lau left him there and went back to the kitchen. No garbage pail beside the stove, though the spatters on the cheap latex paint told her where it should be. Maybe the crime team had taken it. She started pulling cabinets open—over the stove, over the counter, under the sink—and after the third one she stopped and stepped back, examining the cleaned-off shelves with a frown. Mismatched plates, yard-sale wine-glasses, just as you would expect. And—

“Reyes,” she called.

He appeared at the narrow entryway, frowning. When he followed her gesture, the frown deepened. “No food at all in the house?”

“Not even a can of Beefaroni or a package of ramen,” she said. “Now what kind of a grad student lives like that?”

Memphis, TN, September 2009

There’s so much you can’t do.

No seventy days of preparation, no priests and dancers and hired mourners. You haven’t figured out how to remove the organs; you’re not willing to risk the remains to try. All you have are oils and unguents and your two careful hands, the charms you sculpt from wood and clay. Incense burns in lazy coils as you wrap Lisa in linen, layer after layer. She was pink and soft and curved only days ago. Now her skin is brown, leathery, the arches of cheek and temple proud through sunken flesh. Still beautiful, in a way, but so unlike her face in life.

It will be all right, you tell yourself. The organs are safely preserved, no need to seal them in honey. You wouldn’t want to rip the brain out, anyway—the thought makes your sinuses prickle. But you’ve done the best you could. You’ve done well, never mind the nagging doubts.

So why don’t they speak? You feel Emmie with you always, a soft flutter like the brush of a bird’s wing, but Minerva and Cerise are silent. You brought their favorite things: books, jewelry, even the bicycle propped in the corner. Dried flowers and jars of honey and spices line the shelves, carefully dusted. But no trace of any part of their souls.

Dr. Martin would know what you did wrong. If you could just find the courage to talk to her.

When Lisa’s bandages are snugged into place, you wipe your hands on a rag. Last into the sarcophagus goes the teddy bear you found in her house. A ragged, threadbare little thing, one eye missing, but it has the feel of something loved. The glass lid slides into place, and the pungent smell of caulk cuts through the cloying layers of incense.

You stumble downstairs when it’s done, shaking and wrung-out. Hungry. Always hungry. Your phone rings as you fix a sandwich, a shrill rattle against the table that makes you jump. A container of take-out barbecue sauce ricochets from counter to floor, spraying red across the linoleum. Your hands shake as you drop the knife.

The number isn’t one you recognize, but you’re laughing at your own nerves and the silence in the house hasn’t broken in days.

“Hello?” The word sticks; you clear your throat and try again.

A pause, then a woman’s cautious voice. “Henry?”

“Yes.” Something familiar there, but you can’t place it—

“Hah.” A triumphant bark of a laugh. “It’s Meg. Meg Brooker.”

“Wow. I— Wow.” You sit, the chair knocking the backs of your knees. “It’s been a long time.”

Meg Brooker. Emmie’s tomboy friend from high school. A fierce, dark-haired girl who ran everyone into the ground on the hard red clay and dead grass of the soccer field. She made Emmie laugh, and smuggled wine coolers to share in the stuffy darkness of her family’s tool shed. You were only Emmie’s shy little brother to her, but she broke a bully’s nose once when he threatened you.

You shake your head against the sudden rush of memory as Meg laughs and says “Six years.”

“What happened to you?” Your stomach snarls, and barbecue sauce dries like clotted blood on the kitchen floor, but that can wait. “You disappeared after graduation.”

Another laugh. “I joined the army. I know—crazy, right? I got back last month.” Her voice dulls, the sun vanishing behind clouds. “I heard about Emily. I’m— I’m so sorry.”

You ought to be used to it by now, but the knife still twists sometimes. “Yeah. Thanks.”

“Look, I called because I’m in Memphis for a college interview. Do you want to get together? I’ll buy you a drink.”

You swallow, mouth drying even through the hunger-spit. “I’d like that.”

Emmie would like that.

University of Memphis, TN, September 2009

Dinner was Americanized Chinese takeout in Falkner’s room, and if it was a far cry from her mother’s cumin beef, the watery, flavorless Buddha’s delight was at least food, and lots of it. It wasn’t the meat Lau missed, when she missed things she’d used to eat before it had really sunk in that she was eating things with nerves and attachments and emotions. It was the comfort food, and cumin tofu just wasn’t the same.

Neither Brady’s tangerine beef nor Falkner’s garlic chicken—both swimming in glossy cornstarched sauces—looked at all tempting, thankfully. Lau sighed, and ate another limp baby corn spear before putting her takeout box down. “Is there any of the vegetable fried rice left?”

Daphne had taken the precaution of packing a small bottle of real soy sauce, so they weren’t at the mercy of the plastic packets, and a teaspoon of that rendered the fried rice acceptable. Lau traded her chopsticks for a fork, opened a Fresca from the vending machine in the lobby, and settled in.

Falkner gave them ten minutes to lay down a foundation of calories before she glanced at Reyes—patently oblivious and profoundly absorbed in his fried dumplings—and cleared her throat. “So what do we have?”

Brady looked from side to side, and when nobody else looked ready to jump into the breach, he stepped up. “Quattrochi fought with her boyfriend—a public quarrel—about a week before he died.”

Lau slugged back Fresca, wrinkling her nose at the somehow-pleasant artificial acridity. “Domestic violence?”

“Just a shouting match,” Brady said. “But a very public one. It seems to have been about Quattrochi’s teaching load, and him feeling neglected. He was still around after, though—they didn’t break up.” A muscle in his jaw worked, and he suddenly got very interested in picking the chili peppers out of his dinner and laying them on a napkin.

Reyes asked, “Did you get into Quattrochi’s apartment?”

Falkner nodded, chewing a green bean. “It was what you would expect. A complete pigsty. Textbooks, a pretty nice student sound system that was probably hooked up to her laptop, closets full of ironic hipster clothing. One thing we did learn was that she was an avid bicyclist, but her bicycle and helmet were not in her apartment or chained up outside.”

“Suggests she may have gone out for a ride,” Lau said. “Is that in the police reports?”

“There’s no indication that anybody knew where she was going,” Worth said. She, too, pushed her dinner aside half-eaten, making a face. She reached for a fortune cookie. “She didn’t leave a note, and it’s possible that the local police—well. Might have missed the bicycle thing. Especially since there are bike racks all over the place.”

“So how do you know hers is gone?”

“We don’t know it’s gone,” Brady said. “We know it’s not at her apartment or any of the racks in the complex. God help us, we looked. At every fucking two-wheeler in the complex. Compared a photo from her apartment. Not there.” He forked a piece of beef into his mouth and chewed, swallowed. “I’ve got the campus cops looking for it. Kind of an All Points Bike.”

“Oof,” Worth said, with a catlike flinch and headshake. “What did you get?”

Reyes swirled tea in a paper cup. “There’s nothing in Goodrich’s apartment to indicate he was involved in anything shadier than stealing television off the internet. We did find some of Quattrochi’s things scattered about, including a book on reading hieroglyphics, though. Also, Todd called in. He’s got a list of people who have moved from the Belfast area to Memphis since the gamma incident there. Chaz is following up on them electronically, since we are a little bit swamped on this end, but he says it’s slow going and Todd is still tracking some down.”

“We did find out that Quattrochi had a secret admirer,” Worth said. “Somebody left her flowers a couple of times.”

Reyes perked up. “Not the boyfriend? Not a stalker?”

“It was after his death.” Worth rolled her cup between her hands. “And it appears she didn’t think there was anything creepy about it. No note, no threats. She threw the flowers away, though—they were still in the trash in her kitchen. All dried out.”

“Right,” Falkner said. “Go to bed. Make it good. Wake up call’s at five. Somewhere out there, there may still be victims alive.”

Lau swallowed the last bite of fried rice and folded the container closed around the plastic fork. As the team stood, she and Daphne swept the detritus of dinner into paper sacks to discard in the hall. It was nice of Falkner to let them use her quarters as home base, but nobody really wanted to sleep in a hotel room that smelled like cold Chinese food.

•

It starts with a touch.

You don’t mean to. Don’t want to. Not now. Not yet. Sitting with Meg in this dim, loud bar you feel more human than you have in years. Alive, after so long in a tomb. You talk about high school, finding the few bright moments amid the terror of your childhood and holding them to the light. You tell her about classes. She talks about her army friends. She’s as fierce as ever, the corners of her dark eyes sun-creased now. But under the fall of curls against her cheek you see scars, and she limps. The world is hungry, and takes its share of everyone.

You want to keep talking, to listen to her laugh and pretend like you’re the kind of person who lives like this every day. Ignore the fifth empty box waiting in the attic. Ignore Emmie’s lonely yearning. Selfish, but you can’t help it.

Finally, though, the spark of laughter dims in Meg’s eyes. Her cheeks are flushed. Empty bottles crowd the little table—you’re nursing your second. She leans across the table and takes your hand in her callused one, holds tight enough that your automatic flinch doesn’t pull you free.

“I’m so sorry, Henry. I know how close you were. I should have been there—” Her voice cracks.

“It’s all right. It wasn’t your fault.” You should have been the one to protect Emmie, but you never could. Grief and loneliness unfold in your chest, razor-edged. And with them comes the whisper of Emmie’s voice. Your hand tightens against Meg’s, and before you can stop it the magic pushes free of your skin.

Ten minutes later she starts to sweat.

Fifteen minutes later she pushes a half-drunk bottle of beer away and frowns at it. “I don’t feel so good.”

You want to cry, but that never helped anything. “Come back to my place,” you say. “I’ll make coffee.”

“Yeah. Sure.” She works her tongue against her teeth and grimaces. Alcohol makes the dehydration worse. “I need some water.”

“I can make that too.”

She laughs and follows you out. Her limp is worse.

She’s soaked in sweat by the time you reach the safety of the blue house. You help her up the stairs, holding her elbow while you open the door.

“Christ,” she mutters, shaking her head. Curls stick to her damp cheeks. “When did I turn into such a lightweight?”

“It’s all right. Sit down. It’ll be okay soon.”

She nods, shuffling toward a kitchen chair. Her walk is all wrong, nothing like the carefree strength it ought to have. What happened to her out in the hungry, hurtful world that she hasn’t told you?

As she reaches the chair she freezes. Her shoulders tense. A warning of what’s coming, but you don’t know what to do. She turns, and the spark in her dulling eyes isn’t humor. “Henry. What did you do?”

J. Edgar Hoover Building, Washington, DC, September 2009

At four o’clock in the morning, the burr of Chaz’s AOP startled him awake. He jerked upright, blinking, disoriented, his hand on his throat as if he could still feel the sting of a tightening wire. The Addams Family snapped their way through most of a verse before he managed to get a hand into his pocket and answer.

“Doctor Frost,” he said, as the creak of the brown leather couch in Reyes’ office reminded him of where he had dozed off. “You’ve concluded your autopsy?”

Even to himself, he sounded like he was wading his way up from the depths of sleep, voice creaking and breaking, offering at least one sharp pop.

“Doctor Villette,” she answered. “I’m sorry to wake you.”

She wasn’t, of course. But she made the attempt to simulate human behavior. Like the Terminator. Fuck you, asshole. “It’s okay. I’m at work. I was just catching a cat nap. Go ahead with the results, please.”

“First,” she said, “you must understand that it’s difficult to autopsy a mummy. Normal tactics of dissection will not work. But as radiation exposure is not a concern in this case, I subjected the decedent to a full course of computer aided tomography—a CAT scan. I am in the process of conducting a DNA extraction. There’s also a carbon chelation technique developed by Frederick Zugibe, a former New York forensic pathologist, that allows fingerprinting to take place. A basic process of mummification is the formation of long-chain carbon molecules in the flesh, which is what causes stiffening of the cadaver. Merely moisturizing or rehydrating the body will not result in a pliable, fingerprintable skin.”

“I think I understand,” said Chaz.

Frost sniffed into the phone. “Zugibe’s tactic replaces the calcium ions in a mummified victim’s skin with soluble sodium, which can then be washed out, breaking up the carbon bridges and allowing the skin to become at least moderately elastic again.”

“Do you have reason to believe that the recovered victim is not who the police believe him to be?”

“What? No. But I also have no reason to believe that their identification is accurate, either, as it’s based circumstantial evidence—to wit, the location of the corpse in the home of a missing man. I do not have the fingerprints yet. The chelation process will take at least three days. Once I’ve obtained DNA, however, I will be submitting it to the FBI lab for matching. Which is, as you understand, sometimes a lengthy process.”

Longer without Hafidha. Chaz made a noncommittal noise.

Frost clucked her tongue. “But while a positive identification will take a while—if Goodrich’s DNA or prints are even on file—I have discovered some other interesting... anomalies, for lack of a better word.”

“I’m listening.” And he was, now, sitting up on the couch with his elbows on his knees, leaning forward in the dark room and listening intently.

“I do not believe that this death was caused by the same process as the ones in Belfast, which suggests as well that this is not the same gamma.”

Chaz breathed out a long sigh of relief, stifling it so he wouldn’t miss a word Frost said. His throat hurt as if he’d been breathing smoke. He could picture Frost on the other end of the phone line, impatiently forward on her toes.

She forged on, not pausing to make room for his reaction as most people would. “There are a number of discrepancies. There was a good deal of damage to the cellular structure of the Belfast mummies, and no carbon bridging. The unfortunate individual on my table currently displays much more classical mummification. He’s not merely dehydrated. He has cured.”

“I see,” Chaz said. He found his shoes and fumbled them back on over slick navy dress socks. Hafidha would have scowled at him for wearing navy, and told him it made him look like the underside of a cucumber.

“In addition,” Frost said, “the present victim appears to have suffered several post-mortem mutilations. His eyes, genitals, and extremities all show damage, and his nose was hacked off with something very like a kitchen knife.”

“Trophies?”

“Uncertain,” she said. “There are other differences as well. The Belfast mummies smelled of... mummy. Putrefaction, faintly, and a certain mustiness. Like moldy beef jerky, as I have heard it described.”

“And the alleged Mr. Goodrich does not?”

“The alleged Mr. Goodrich,” she said, “has an odour of sanctity about him. Concealed under a stronger aroma of camphor. The—I hesitate to use the word, but it is the best I have—alchemical processes at work in this cadaver have infused the flesh with preservative substances. Acid resins. Beta-boswellic acid.”

“Frankincense,” Chaz said.

“And myrrh. Copal. Natron. I believe that some of the body’s water and carbon were converted into these substances. And a majority of the rest was...expressed.”

“Wait.” Chaz resisted the urge to scrub out his ears. He was awake now, adrenaline the most effective wake-up drug he knew, and the sense of being unable to draw a full breath was receding. “The gamma is transmuting something in the flesh of his victims? Or something like that.”

“Or something like that,” Frost admitted. She hesitated, and corrected gently, “Victim, Dr. Villette. So far, only one. Have a good morning.”

“Good morning, Dr. Frost.” He let her disconnect and slid the AOP back into his pocket. Victims. Why had he said victims?

Because he had dreamed it. While he was dreaming also of choking on wire.

University of Memphis, TN, September 2009

Predictably, Daphne awoke, showered, drank coffee in her room, brushed her teeth, checked her plum-colored suit in the mirror—ignoring a brief pang when she stepped into the stylish-but-sensible cordovan shoes Hafidha had forced her (not quite at gunpoint) to buy—and twisted her hair into a ponytail. She texted her “Good morning, Sweetie!” to Tricia, checked the load on her firearm, and squared her shoulders. “Way to greet the day.”

Situational awareness be damned, there weren’t enough hours to get everything done mindfully. She checked email on her palmtop while waiting for the elevator. There was one from Frost and one from Chaz, both timestamped for oh dark thirty. Falkner walked up beside her as the elevator door chimed, and Daphne held the BlackBerry up so she could read Chaz’s email, as it was the shorter and less technical of the two.

“Thank God,” Falkner said, fervently, stretching her shoulders back. Daphne heard the crackle as Falkner’s spine straightened.

The weight lifting off her could have come from Daphne’s own shoulders. “We didn’t make a mistake.”

“It doesn’t seem like it,” Falkner said. They stepped into the elevator, Falkner passing a hand back through to hold the door as Lau jogged down the corridor, three running steps putting her inside. “Unless the manifestation has evolved.”

“Chaz’s email?” Lau asked. She seemed brighter, too. They all swayed slightly as the lift began to descend.

Daphne nodded. “Someday we’re going to make that mistake.”

“That’s why we do everything we can to bring them in in one piece,” Falkner said. “We’re not judge and jury.”

Except when we have to be. Daphne licked her lips. “So what are the odds of two similar weird manifestations appearing less than three hundred miles apart?”

Lau shrugged, her houndstooth suit jacket rising and falling smoothly with her shoulders. “We get a lot of invisibility,” she said. “All different kinds. But that’s an obvious one. Who hasn’t felt invisible, or wished she could melt into a wall?”

“Or through the floor?” Daphne said as the doors opened.

Lau grimaced sympathetically. “At least twice a press conference. Come on, let’s grab some of that yummy continental breakfast before the guys get down.”

•

The morning was made of interviews. This time, the team dispersed more widely. Reyes and Brady headed out to West Memphis to investigate Carter’s housemates and living arrangements, and the rest of the team repeated the previous day’s interview process on campus, this time concentrating on Carter, Gale, Goodrich, and Quattrochi’s co-workers and—in the case of the latter two—department members.

September wasn’t really Autumn yet as far as Memphis was concerned, and by midmorning Daphne’s feet squished and sweltered in her nice shoes.

When the team reconvened for an early lunch in their cramped, cluttered conference room, it was takeout again. Barbecue this time, and infinitely superior—and Reyes had somehow managed to score Caesar salads and slices of veggie pizza that looked halfway edible for Lau and Falkner.

“Whole Foods,” he said, when Daphne pointed her plastic fork inquiringly.

Daphne kept her sunglasses on inside, feeling like a rockstar. It was her best defense against the combination of underslept headache and glare through the window.

Todd and Chaz joined them by webcam, feeds sharing space on a pair of netbooks. The information dump was fast and dirty and accomplished between hurried bites. “Carter was a bicyclist too,” Brady said, piling pulled pork onto an onion bun. “A good one. She biked to work on a regular basis, and it’s something like fifteen miles.”

“So she was fit,” Lau said. “That makes her a higher-risk target for the UNSUB. But it also means she spent a lot of time alone, right?”

“Higher-risk for her,” Daphne agreed. She drained coleslaw between the plastic spoon and the styrofoam edge of the cup, then added a miserly quantity to the tower of pulled pork on her bun. “Let me guess, she was taken off a bike too?”

“She never came home from work,” Reyes said. “Her roommates reported her missing after thirty-six hours. And yes, her bike is missing. We have a description.”

Falkner said, “Did the bike ever turn up?”

Brady shook his head.

So that was two missing.

Daphne groaned. “Is there a campus cycling club?”

Falkner shook her head, but Daphne thought she probably meant yes. “I’ll add it to the interview list. Anything else?”

“I followed up with the local crime scene team. No trash can was logged into evidence from Goodrich’s apartment.” Chaz said it evenly, but they all knew what the evidence suggested. The gamma had spent time with Goodrich, and been jamming hard enough to eat up all the food in the place. And he’d cleaned up after himself when he went.

Todd cleared his throat. He was eating, too, as was Chaz, but Chaz’s lunch wasn’t something-unidentifiable-with-noodles in a square tupperware. “So if we buy the Mummy Gamma 2.0 hypothesis, based on Frost’s analysis this one is a lot more familiar with actual historical mummification techniques than the first.”

“Crap,” Brady said. “Do you suppose the University of fucking Memphis has much of an Egyptology department? Why wasn’t that the first place we looked?”

Across the table, Reyes rubbed his eyes. It wasn’t the first place they’d looked because the sheer mass of people to interview meant that something had to come second. And third, and fourth, and fifth.

Chaz asked, “Was Gale a bicyclist?”

“She wasn’t,” Lau said. “According to her friends and coworkers, she liked romantic movies, Oasis, dark beer, and books by Jennifer Crusie and Charlaine Harris. She dated casually but had no steady boyfriend. She lived alone.” She smiled. “Guess what, thought? Gale also got flowers. And they were still in her room. Dried out, but we sent them to the lab anyway.”

“Dried out,” Todd said. “Like Daniel Goodrich.”

After he was done pinching his nose, Reyes said, “Even if the gamma isn’t affiliated, there’s got to be somebody there who can contribute to the profile. Who can use Frost’s autopsy to give us an idea of the gamma’s knowledge base.” He looked around at the team, and Daphne had known him long enough to imagine what he saw: Falkner stiff and upright; Daphne with her arms crossed across her chest, as if that were all that was holding her together; Brady slumped in his seat like a too-tall teenage boy in math class. Lau alone seemed collected. “I know. Everybody, I know. It seems like an impossible task. The volume of information is staggering, and I know also that it feels like every head we cut off the hydra just results in two more growing. I know it feels like a hole has been blown in our ability to process that data. And I know we’re racing the clock for Lisa Quattrochi. But I also know that we’re coming closer to a profile, and possibly to the lead that will bring us to a suspect, and I know that you’re the best in the business.”

He laid his hands flat on the table and met their gazes one by one, whether directly or mediated by an Internet connection. Daphne felt herself rocked back in her chair. The inspirational halftime speech was not a genre she’d ever imagined Reyes finding himself comfortable with, but apparently she’d underestimated him.

“We’ll get to the bottom of this,” he said.

Todd made a rude noise through the speaker. “All things are possible under heaven.”

Daphne looked at the monitor over the top of her sunglasses, ignoring the dazzle for a moment. “So, Todd. you ever try to push a gurney through a revolving door?”

•

The problem with dried flowers was that they never wilted, never drooped. They just sat in a vase, slowly fading over years, collecting dust and becoming more and more brittle. Set about Cassie’s book-cluttered office in three different places now, the bouquets were starting to feel like so many eyes staring over over her shoulders.

Moreover, they smelled odd. Not just dry, or dusty, but like... mothballs. Like natron.

Honestly, they were starting to give her the creeps.

She pushed her chair back from her desk, shamelessly abandoning the grading, and had just scooped the oldest bouquet out of the reproduction jackal-headed canopic jar representing Duamutef (a son of Horus the Elder, whose image is meant to contain the stomach) when Bethany’s familiar knock rattled her door.

“Come in,” Cassie said, dropping the crisp-petaled flowers sere and rustling into the nonrecyclable garbage.

Bethany stuck her head in, her face again dewed with sweat. Something in her expression arrested Cassie before she could dispense with the second bouquet.

“Problem?” Cassie asked.

Bethany swallowed. “Somebody from the FBI wants to see you.”

•

“Somebody” turned out to be a compact, well-spoken man about ten years her senior. His suit fit him like he’d had it tailored, and he knew how to tie a Windsor knot. Everything about him would have said calm, cool, intellectual professional—if it wasn’t for the tiny platinum baseball tacking his velvet-gray tie down, and the welts of faded scars around his mouth.

“Doctor Martin,” he said, extending a hand. “I’m Stephen Reyes. I’m investigating the murder of Daniel Goodrich.”

She came around the desk to take his hand, amused to note that she had a couple of inches on him. His handshake was good—firm and dry—but as he stepped back the swing of his jacket revealed the diamond-textured rubber handle—you didn’t call it a hilt on a pistol, surely—of his gun. He noticed her wince, and smoothly swung the jacket closed over it. “I have a badge too,” he said. “I have to pass a gun safety course to keep it. I promise it won’t go off unless I want it to.”

She laughed. “I guess that was pretty transparent. Please, have a seat. I’m going to take a wild guess—you’re here to ask questions about mummification, aren’t you?”

Though she gestured him into the comfortable chair, he demurred. “That was originally part of the plan,” he said. “But first I have to ask, Dr. Martin—who sent you those flowers?”

He gestured to the two bunches still in their improvised vases, the third in the trash basket.

“I don’t know,” she said, a chill tickling her spine. “They were delivered anonymously.”

He nodded, as if she had confirmed a suspicion. “I am going to describe a person to you. And I need you to think, very carefully, if there are any of your students who might fit that description.” His hand went to his hip. She tensed, but all he came back with was a phone. “And then I’m afraid I would strongly suggest that you enter protective custody.”

“...I beg your pardon?” She heard the words, but they sounded like something from a TV show. Not anything anyone would be saying to Cassie Martin.

“Three young women are missing, Dr. Martin,” he said. “It’s our strong belief that their disappearances are linked to this case. And at least two of them received gifts of dried flowers before they vanished.”

•

Something there is that does not love a wall, Reyes thought, watching Dr. Martin pace slowly around the cramped room in a hastily borrowed Memphis FBI safehouse, picking up objects, examining them with a critical eye, and setting them down.

Reyes, his sidearm digging in under his ribs, sat beside the door. He could be out with the team, interviewing Martin’s list of twenty-two persons of interest. He could have turned Martin over to a representative of the Memphis police. They had safehouses of their own, no doubt, and officers to staff them. If Martin was the gamma’s next target—and the flowers tended to indicate that she was—there was nothing in the profile to indicate that he was a career criminal, or connected, or would have any way of finding her once she was safely sequestered.

Reyes was pretty sure it was a he. It was the detail of the flowers, the male victim mutilated and dumped, the women kept. Captive, he told himself hopefully, unbelieving.

But he wanted to get Martin to relax, to come down off the tension of the interview. He had a few things he wanted to ask her, once she had processed enough to be thinking with what he judged was normally quite ferocious clarity. And Falkner had requested him to take care of the protection detail.

“We can have somebody fetch your work,” he said. “A book? Laptop with Tetris on it?”

At the first, she looked up. At the last, she smiled.

Reyes kept his gaze on her eyes—an agaty, stippled hazel—so it would not trail down the long brown-satin curve of her neck. Down, boy. She probably smelled like wonderful old books under the cloud of her hair.

“I noticed you had a book in your pocket,” she admitted. “Improving literature?”

Sheepishly, he pulled it out. “Barbara Neely,” he said, displaying the color-splashed cover. “I like mysteries.”

“And the Doors.” A sharp crease etched itself between her eyes when he jerked back against the chair. “Sorry.” She spread her hands. “You were humming. Spooky insights are your department, right?”

The chill made his hand numb when he slid the paperback into his pocket again. “It’s actually not all that spooky. It’s a matter of playing odds and noticing patterns. Statistics.”

“You make it sound so dry.” He’d engaged her. She sat down on the edge of the loveseat opposite, elbows on her knees, and leaned into him. “So teach me how you do it.”

“Crash course?” He flexed his fingers to shake the cold out of them.

“The crashiest.”

“All right. You heard me say that the UNSUB is probably male, late teens or early twenties. If he’s older, he’s quite socially retarded, and trauma may have arrested his emotional development at the younger age. He’s most likely white. We believe these things to be true because of the environment he chooses to do his hunting in—a university campus—and the nature of his victims. He is most likely male because of the way he treated Goodrich—mutilated and discarded, treated with contempt—and because there is probably a sexual aspect in the relationship he imagines he has with the female victims he chooses. We know he imagines this relationship because of the flowers. It is suggestive that his female victims are white, young, and pretty, and their bodies have not been recovered. This makes me believe that they themselves are a form of trophy for him. It could even mean that he’s keeping them alive. He may believe he’s keeping them safe. He’s probably extremely chivalrous to women. He probably appears quiet, reserved, and unassuming—”

“Jesus.” She rubbed her hands together and bit her lip, then drawled the word out again. “Jeeeesus.”

Hands on his knees, Stephen Reyes waited.

She got there. “White, young, and pretty. None of those things describe me.”

Only one of them. But pretty didn’t begin to cover it.

“There’s the rub,” Reyes said. “So we need to figure out what it is about you that attracts him. You’re the break in the pattern. And as such, you might be the key to it.”

“Like pulling a raveled thread.”

He nodded, about to elaborate, but the mellow strains of “Amarillo by Morning,” tinny and digitized, interrupted him. He held one finger up to hold his place in the conversation and held the BlackBerry up to his ear. “Reyes.”

Brady’s voice was staticky under the noise of traffic. “We’ve got another body,” he said. “Female this time, I think, although it’s a little hard to tell.”

“No ID?”

“And the clothes don’t match any of the descriptions,” he said. “I called home first. Frost is already on the Gulfstream. There’s a piece of luck, though—the vic’s got a prosthesis.”

“Where did this turn up?” Reyes asked. From the sound of traffic, he had a pretty good idea.

“The Deacon of St. Mary’s Cathedral found her when he unlocked the doors this morning. She was wrapped up in a shroud on the step, all heaped up with more of those fucking dried flowers,” Brady said. “Posed remorsefully. Inasmuch as you can pose pork jerky.”

“Christ,” Reyes said. “Don’t the churches in this town have security?”

J. Edgar Hoover Building, Washington, DC, September 2009

By the time Chaz’s phone started snapping at him again, he’d more or less lost track of what day it was. His life was an endless procession of scanning documents on his computer screen until his eyes burned and his gummy tongue stuck to the coffee-rank roof of his mouth. Every so often somebody—Todd—put food in front of him. Every so often the used coffee needed draining to make room for the next batch. Twice he fell briefly asleep in his chair, once for a few hours longer on Reyes’s sofa. Somewhere out there were three women more or less his own age who might still be alive.

If they were, Chaz was determined that he was not going to be the weak link in the chain that might lead to their deaths.

“Good morning, Dr. Frost,” he told his phone. “This is Special Agent Villette.”

If being beaten at her own phone etiquette threw her, Frost gave no sign. “I’ve commenced work on the second body. The chelation process will not be complete for several days. But I’ve found another way to confirm the second victim’s identity.”

“I’m putting you on speaker.” Chaz caught Todd’s eye—it wasn’t hard, as Todd was athletically eavesdropping—and held the phone up between them. “Go ahead, Dr. Frost.”

“The victim is Corporal Margaret Brooker,” Frost said. “Age 23. A disabled Iraq war veteran. I was able to identify her by the serial numbers on her prosthesis.”

“That’s good work, Dr. Frost,” Todd said. “G.I. bill, I assume?”

“That’s the fascinating part,” Frost said. “Corporal Brooker was not a student at the University of Memphis, or in any way attached, although she had applied for admission.”

“Seriously?” Chaz regretted the outburst immediately. He could imagine how Frost’s icy stare would coast over the tops of her spectacles like Scott Summers’ eyebeams, if Cyclops’ power were to make you feel like a puling idiot.

After the pause, Frost said, “I took the liberty of following up on her medical records, as I am aware that you and Agent Todd are somewhat overburdened at present. Her residence of record is with her parents, in Lewisburg, Tennessee. She attended Marshall County High School, graduating in the class of 2003.”

Chaz’s memory was better than almost any baseline’s. But it wasn’t perfect. Sometimes, like anyone, he needed a little push in order to remember an obscure detail. “Wait,” he said, the thrill of the chase rocketing up his spine with a tingle like a kiss. “Marshall County. Class of 2003. That was the alma mater of two of the Belfast victims. Slater. Karynne Slater. And Emily Jane Damaes. And Damaes’ next of kin was a half-brother—”

“Cauthren,” Todd said. “Henry Lee Cauthren. He’s on Dr. Martin’s list. Doctor Frost, I think you just caught our gamma. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome, gentlemen.” The click as she cut the connection rang through the space between Chaz and Todd. For seconds, neither one of them breathed.

Then, slowly, carefully, as if it might be radioactive, Chaz put the AOP down on his desk. “Holy shit. He caught it. He caught the manifestation from the gamma who killed his sister. It is a fucking contagion after all.”

“Correlation is not causation.” Todd swallowed audibly. “But then, there’s that thing we don’t believe in again.”

“I’ll call Reyes,” Chaz said. “You start pulling everything you can get on Henry Lee.”

•

The thing that haunted Chaz—as he worked, as he sorted and collated and pieced together the data that Todd gleaned from newspaper morgues and insistent phonecalls, as if the backtrail were a symphony and Todd was the conductor—was not Henry Lee Cauthren. It was not Henry Lee Cauthren and his older half-sister Emily Jane Damaes. It was not Henry Lee Cauthren, Emily Jane Damaes, and the spotty county records that hinted at the crimes of their abusive, alcoholic (step)father. It was not even Emily and her terrible, senseless death at the hands of Thomas Payne, the Belfast gamma. Those horrors were alienated in Chaz’s consciousness for the time being, part of an immense jigsaw puzzle. He would not mourn for them now. Perhaps later, he’d have time and energy for mourning.

The thing that haunted Chaz—as he built a profile in his head, created a model of a man he’d never met, and got to know him as intimately as a brother, a best friend—was the memory of Danny Brady’s grim, graven dignity across the breakfast bar countertop.

The first thing they pulled were the tax records, and the location of Cauthren’s cheery blue bungalow that he’d bought with life insurance money from his father, his sister. But that wasn’t enough, and as much as Chaz wanted to rush, he knew the team needed more. They needed everything that might give them an edge in dealing with Henry.

They needed to know that it looked likely that Henry James Cauthren had physically and sexually abused his son and stepdaughter. That he’d died of an alcohol and diazepam overdose that anybody could have seen coming. That said son and stepdaughter had, in response to the abuse, developed the kind of relationship you expected of soldiers under fire. That Emily’s death would have shattered the younger Henry. That Henry had relocated a couple of hundred miles away after Emily’s body was released to him. That there was no record of Emily’s interment. That in Memphis, Henry had enrolled as a full-time Art student, but had taken classes in Egyptology—

“Flowers in the Attic much?” said Todd, dropping off two jelly doughnuts and a cup of coffee almost white with cream on Chaz’s desk.

“No shit,” Chaz said, and kept working. He knew why he couldn’t stop thinking about Brady. Because the profile kept telling him one thing, over and over. There was no way Lisa Quattrochi or the other girls were alive. They were somewhere, kept safe, and they’d died just like Margaret. And the reason the team had gotten Margaret Brooker back was because the leg she’d lost in Iraq made her imperfect, so Cauthren hadn’t kept her.

Memphis, TN, September 2009

The line of FBI and police vehicles was five strong, and it was only one of three such, closing now on the Cauthren residence. Ahead of them, officers were cordoning streets, shooing residents indoors,

In the rear seat of an SUV driven by Falkner, with Brady on shotgun, Daphne strapped her helmet on and tightened the side closures of her ballistic vest. She took a deep breath, to make sure she could, and felt the weight of the trauma plates against her ribs and breasts. The vests actors wore on TV looked more comfortable than hers, but they were asking for a fatal bullet through the armpit. Real-world projectiles did not respect tidy dramatic conventions about where one might get shot.

Lau sat beside Daphne; Reyes had stayed behind with the threatened history professor. His voice still came to them over radio. “Good luck.”

“We’re in position on the North side,” Falkner said into her mike, bringing the SUV to a stop sideways, blocking the street.

The Cauthren house was... adorable. It sat mid-block, a tree-framed bungalow in bright, Mediterranean blue, with friendly porches and a dozy aspect. If houses had faces, as Daphne’s brother had always insisted they did, this one wore a sleepy smile.

Lau looked at it in patent disbelief. “What’s he building in there?” she muttered to Daphne.

But before Daphne could answer, Falkner said, “Three,” and reflex took Daphne out of the car, her sidearm heavy in her hand.

By prior arrangement, she and Lau immediately broke to the left, leading a group of SWAT agents through a side yard where songbirds twittered in the slack warmth. The lawn was cut, the foundation plantings lovingly maintained. There was no fence or gate, and they moved quickly, hunched over, all too aware of the potentially deadly sightlines from the windows above.

The swimming pool was Daphne’s first sign that something inside this house did not suit the superficial air of suburban normalcy. It had been an elegant, kidney-shaped affair, not large but attractive and functional. Now it was clogged with green leaves—water lilies?—and a mess of floating stems. Among them drifted saucer-shaped blue flowers, each lance-head petal curving up and out as if reaching for something.

“Lotus,” Lau said. “I think we’ve come to the right place.”

Brady’s voice in Daphne’s headset crackled. “In position.”

“In position,” Daphne answered, as they moved up to the back door. There was a porch here, too, screened on both sides by shading lattices. It was vacant, but the SWAT agents checked it carefully nonetheless. The one with the Halligan tool (”Hooligan tool,” Daphne heard Todd say in her head) stepped forward and shoved the wedge head into the doorjamb while his team and the two ACTF agents covered him. With a sharp, splintery crack! the door swung open.

“We’re in,” Lau said, and Daphne heard the thump! from the front of the house as Brady kicked the door in.

“So are we,” Falkner said, unnecessarily, and Daphne and Lau led their strike team into the kitchen.

It was a house. A nice house, well-kept, airy, brightly lit, and filled with the incongruous creak of weapons belts, the nylon shushing of body armor, the panting of adrenalinized men and women as they moved from room to room, weapons ready and hearts thundering painfully. The sharpness of those breaths never left Daphne: she still heard them, sometimes, in her sleep. They were the best air she’d ever tasted.

Over her headset, voices followed her. “Living room, clear. Dining room, clear.”

“Kitchen, clear,” she said herself, as Lau checked the pantry and split off with half their team to check the cellar. Daphne, who had seen too many movies, waited.

“Basement clear,” Lau called up, and Daphne heard the tromp of her boots ascending. “Second floor?”

“Already up here,” Brady said. “Nothing but two bedrooms and a sunporch converted to an artist’s studio. But... there’s an attic.”

At the foot of the attic stairs, Lau in her six, Daphne came shoulder-to-shoulder with Brady. He bumped her lightly, like a big friendly cat, and she leaned back, startled by the gesture but glad of the reassurance.

Sidling back to back, they climbed into warmth and sunlight.

Daphne did not think they would find the attic empty. A sense of presence filled the house. But empty it was, or empty—at least—of the living.

The room smelled of camphor, resin, linseed oil, and sweet spice. It was a beautiful place, a temple—the panels between the beams of the vaulted ceiling plastered and painted by a skilled hand in Egyptian-looking frescoes. Jars of some golden fluid—honey?—sat on the tops of mismatched tables, obviously salvaged from yard sales, stripped, and lovingly oil-finished so the scarred wood glowed in the light. There was a woman’s bicycle propped in one corner of the room, a set of tennis rackets, women’s clothing, preserved food in ranks of jars set among the four white-draped oblongs that could be nothing but coffins.

Four white-draped oblongs, and one that stood open and empty, neat rolls of off-white cloth stacked inside it, a glass lid as if for an aquarium leaned alongside.

Everywhere, everywhere, dried flowers. And silence, except for the sound of Lau hyperventilating as she lifted, with gloved hands, the corner of the nearest pall. “Dear God,” Lau said, the cloth shaking with the trembling of her hand.

Daphne crossed to her quickly, but Lau was already pulling her armor together, sealing herself up inside it until her surface was as smooth and strong as glass. “What is it?” Daphne asked.

Silently, with a gesture, Lau showed her the dead woman wrapped in linen in her Sleeping Beauty coffin. Silently, with a gesture, Lau drew her attention to the ragged teddy bear tucked in by her side.

•

“He’s not here,” Falkner said, her tone so weary that Reyes could picture her fumbling her weapon into its holster and struggling with the snap. “But the victims are. And Emily Damaes.”

“Dead?” He knows the answer from her tone, but he makes himself ask, anyway.

“He took... very good care of them,” she said. “He’s got another coffin ready. It might have been for Brooker, Stephen—”

Reyes kept himself from turning to check across the room for Cassandra Martin’s presence only by an act of will. “But he missed Brooker,” he said, lowering his voice. “And he needs something else to fill that coffin with.”

•

You don’t go home after dropping off Meg. You can’t face Emmie, or the house, or the row of silent boxes.

You couldn’t finish Meg. Between the leg—awful clumsy plastic, nothing like real skin and muscle—and the plain silver cross that hung at the hollow of her throat, you knew she wasn’t for you. Wasn’t for Emmie. And anyway, Lisa hasn’t spoken, just like Minerva and Cerise. You’ve fucked it all up somehow, and no excuses can convince you Meg would be any different. So you wrapped her in a silk shroud and left her on the step of St. Mary’s. It’s silent on the edge of dawn, a heavy, sepulchral quiet, but it’s peaceful too. Maybe Meg will be safe here. Maybe she’ll be at peace.

After that you walk, aimless, for hours. The sun rises in shades of salmon and vermilion and gold, spills rich and warm over the rooftops. You’re already sweating by the time you reach the shade of Overton Park. You hide from the sun, try to hide from your own thoughts and the flutter of Emmie’s voice and the silent faces of all the girls waiting for you every time you close your eyes.

When the sun begins its slide into afternoon you know it’s no use. You have to go back and face Emmie. You have to figure out a way to fix it. Find the courage to talk to Dr. Martin. You could talk to Bethany—that would be easier. She’s funny and smart and she smiles and teases sometimes when you see her to hand in papers or around campus. But you realize from her conversations with Dr. Martin that Bethany knows enough about Egypt to grade quizzes and not much more. Whatever secrets she keeps wrapped in skulls and black lace, they aren’t the ones Emmie needs.

You’ll talk to Dr. Martin soon, you tell yourself on the long walk home. And you won’t bring home any more girls until you do, no matter how Emmie pleads. It must be the Opening of the Mouth. You’ve read and studied the pictures, but you’re doing it wrong. Dr. Martin will know.

Distracted by the spiral of your thoughts, you don’t realize anything’s wrong until you turn the corner that leads to home.

The noise hits you first: voices, the hum of engines, the crackle of a radio. All out of place on your quiet street. Then you see the cars. The strangers on your lawn, on your porch. The open front door.

Nothing is safe. You should know that by now.

Your pulse sickens you as it races. Your cheeks burn as your hands go cold and numb. You want to run to Emmie, to hold her and keep her safe and kill anyone who comes close, but you’d have better luck running into a burning building than through that swarm of cops. So you turn, always a coward, and walk away, careful and slow. Twelve strides back to the corner. Another twelve till a neighbor’s fence and shrubs block the view of your desecrated house.

Now you run, hard and fast, faster than you’ve ever run from anything.

Not soon. You’ll talk to Dr. Martin now.

•

Cassie was getting used to the intermittent music emanating from Special Agent Reyes’s phone, and the careful way he crossed the room and turned away to answer it. But this time, after a sentence or two his voice dropped even further, and he glanced at her, frowned, and stepped out into the hall.

Reyes, she noticed, was left-handed.

It took every ounce of willpower she had not to tiptoe across the room, long linen skirt swishing against her ankles, and flatten herself against the wall like a cartoon character to eavesdrop. Instead, she kept her hands on the book in her lap, the highlighter tucked away between the last three fingers of her right hand.

She didn’t have long to wait. He came back in, extending the device so she could read the screen. It was an image, with the slightly unfocused look of something shot with a smartphone or PDA camera. Hieroglyphs. Hand-drawn, and rather well, though not entirely grammatical. She ran the translation in her head. “I don’t understand—”

“Cauthren,” he said, “seems to have stopped by your office today. When he found you and Bethany Strange gone, he slipped a note under your door and tracked down Ms. Strange.”

“Is she—”

“Missing,” he said, very gently. She closed her eyes. Missing could become that other thing without so much as a transition.

“Oh.” She pressed her hand to her mouth as Reyes, eyes wide, turned to her. “Somebody’s going to have to tell Orrin.”

“The envelope the message was found in had your name on it.”

That thump was the book sliding out of her lap. She hadn’t even noticed. But her hands clung together over her chest, and what she could feel of them was cold as ice. “He’s asking for help. Help speaking with somebody—” she squinted at the symbols again. “—he wants an interlocutor.”

“Your help.” His eyes were dark. Intent, the irises a transparent chocolate brown. When he paused by the window, they lit up from the side, full of textures that were otherwise invisible. “So if he wants you to be able to find him, and he wants your help in particular—”

“My help making somebody talk. My help as an interpreter?”

“Your help with his rituals, to make them come out right? Where would he go? Where would he take Bethany?”

The direct question settled her, or maybe it was the focus of Agent Reyes’s gaze.

“The Pyramid,” she said. “It’s perfect for him.”

•

On the patio, outside under the cool leaves, by the still water floated with beautiful cerulean lilies, Lau and Worth came up to Falkner with eyes that said they wanted—needed—something. The timing was good. The water and flowers had worked their miracle. After the close, still, immaculately kept blue house. Falkner could turn away from her conversation with Brady, turn to them and be the pillar they needed.

Lau looked her in the eye and said, “I think we can bring him in alive.”

Falkner looked at Worth.

Worth nodded. “Teddy bear,” she said. “Lau found a teddy bear with one of the dead girls. He’s trying to take care of them.”

“God help him,” Lau said. “He’s trying to do the right thing.”

Falkner looked at Brady—for an opinion, not approval.

Brady bit his lip so hard it whitened. And then he nodded. “No promises,” he said.

•

Bethany stops fighting eventually, and you thank all the gods you’re not sure you believe in. You’re strong enough to hold her, but every time your hands tighten on her arms, every time soft flesh presses to bone, your stomach rolls over. It might be easier to tie her up, but that disgusts you even more. Now she sits, flushed and disheveled, glaring at you. She doesn’t cry, but rubs her eyes every so often like she wants to. Smoky mascara and eyeliner smear her cheeks.

You wait by the chained rear entrance of the pyramid, away from careless eyes, away from the stony gaze of Ramses. To the west lies Wolf River Harbor, lined with trees on either side, Mud Island, and beyond that the wide lazy stretch of the Mississippi. The sun slides swollen toward the horizon, and the glass walls of the pyramid shine with all the colors of sunset. You’re glad the doors are locked; inside is cement and stadium seating, the air thick with the ghosts of popcorn and hot dogs and sweat. Out here in the bleeding daylight it’s something beautiful, something holy.

Bethany moves and you tense, but she only twists her tangled hair into a knot above her nape. Her jaw is sharp with tension. Hazel eyes narrow as she tracks your every pacing step.

“How did you do it?”

No accusation or recrimination. You’ve received plenty of those since you arrived on her doorstep—you only knew her street, but the bat mobile in the window and the ghosts on the welcome mat made it easy to find the house. Accusations and demands and more violence than you’d thought her capable of. A boot-sized bruise rises on one shin, and your shoulder throbs where she bit you. The scratches on your cheek have dried. You don’t mind the pain, but every time she struggled you felt the power rising under your skin, trying to chew its way free.

“How?” she asks again, honest curiosity. You wish you had a better answer, but all you can do is shrug.

“Magic.”

Her face twists, lips parting for a scathing retort. Then she stills again. “Really?”

“I don’t know what else to call it.”

She snorts and wipes her cheek with the hem of her skirt. It only smears the sweat and makeup. You get a better look at the boots that kicked you, and now you’re amazed she didn’t break your leg. Oxblood leather, heavy soled and laced to her knees.

“Aren’t you dying in those things?” You flinch as you hear the words. Bethany grimaces.

“You sound like Cassie.” It’s her turn to wince. You stare at each other through awkward silence and lengthening shadows as the sun slips down.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” you say in a rush. “Or Dr. Martin. I just need her help.” You tried to explain earlier, but she was too angry. Now she leans forward, elbows on her knees, and her frown is confusion instead of anger.

“Help with what?”

“The Opening of the Mouth. I’m doing it wrong, and none of the books are helping. Dr. Martin will know how to do it, how to bring their souls back. She has to.” Your sinuses prickle, all the pain and frustration of the last few weeks finally breaking free. You pinch the bridge of your nose, hard enough to carve a deep crescent with your thumbnail. Crying doesn’t help.

“Can I help?” Her face softens in pity and you turn away; you’d rather see her angry. “I know I’m not as good at this as Cassie,” she continues, “but I’ll try.”

Your knees weaken. You need Dr. Martin, but the sun has nearly set and she isn’t here and strangers have Emmie and you have to do something—

Noise from the parking lot and you startle: tires and doors. Voices. They’ve found you. Trying to think of a plan, you turn back to Bethany, but she’s already on her feet, chest swelling.

She screams, high and fierce, the lines of her neck springing taut with the strength of the cry. Then she spins and bolts for the trees, and the water.

•

The pavement slapped Lau’s feet as she ran, each footfall jiggling loose droplets of sweat that dribbled down her forehead and neck. Her shirt under the ballistic vest was soaked, her hand slick on the butt of her gun. She knew the rest of her team was behind her, Daphne running hard to keep up, Brady a few steps behind and gaining. Even this late in the day, the glass pyramid behind her still reflected hot gleams at the sky; the asphalt underfoot just soaked up the sun and gave it back as swelter.

The chase rang in her, so strong she barely heard Reyes’ voice. “Brady, stay back. Send up the women. We don’t know what kind of range he has, and we know he has more respect for females. The signs of remorse surrounding Brooker’s body—”

“Sure,” Brady said, between panting breaths. “He wraps them up nice after he’s done with them.” But Lau heard him dropping back—not far back, just level with Falkner. Daphne caught up to Lau as Lau hurdled the curb at the edge of the parking lot and sprinted down a grassy slope to the edge of the brown water. A band of trees loomed; Lau didn’t quite crash through, as she could see the muddy water’s edge beyond. She staggered, instead, to a halt against a larger tree’s uphill side. Daphne crouched behind a bush ten feet off.

As she heaved breaths in and out, Daphne caught her eye and nodded. A jerk of the head. That way. Daphne must have caught sight of the quarry before she ducked.

Behind them, Brady and Falkner advanced more cautiously now, mincing down the turf that Lau had chipped with her running steps.

Lau took one last deep breath and jerked around the tree, gun extended.

Henry Lee Cauthren stood mid-calf deep in the coiling brown river, one arm around a young white woman’s throat, the other twisting her right arm up and behind her. The woman—Bethany Strange—was off-balance, pulled back against him, the water pushing at her splayed legs, adhering her full black skirt to her thighs. She was taller than Cauthren, and in other circumstances Lau would have thought stronger, but Cauthren was a gamma, with everything that implied.

Lau wished, badly, that Todd were at the top of the bank with a rifle. She still had every intention of bringing Cauthren in alive if she could. But it was nice to have insurance.

She lowered her gun and stepped through the screen of trees. Daphne had her back. And Falkner and Brady were right behind her. That was enough firepower. “Henry?”

The gun went into the holster, but the snap stayed up. Lau spread her hands as she came down to the water’s edge. Cauthren stared at her past Strange’s shoulder, eyes wild, dark hair wet and plastered to his cheeks and forehead. He was smaller than she’d expected, wiry-looking, underfed, his eyes sunken over staring cheekbones.

“Henry,” she said. “I’m Nikki Lau. I want to help you.”

“You have to help Emmie,” he said.

“We want to help Emily,” she said. “We’re the people who caught Thomas Payne after he hurt her. We want to help Emily, and we want to help you.”

She took a step forward, ignoring how her shoe sank into the muddy river bottom, how the water swelled up around her ankle and made her foot slip on leather. “Come on out of the river, and let Bethany go, and we’ll help you and we’ll help Emily.”

“I need Dr. Martin.”

“Dr Martin is with us.” One more splashy step forward, watching Cauthren, watching Bethany, wondering if he’d just eased off Bethany’s arm a little. Yes, she was standing straighter. Yes. “Emily is with us too, and we want to help her. Doctor Martin can help your sister.”

“He did it badly,” Cauthren said. “Payne. It was ugly and awful, but Emmie stayed anyway. And I’ve studied and studied, and I’m better than he was, but none of them stay. None of them talk. Emmie is so lonely, and Lisa and and Meg—” His voice cracked. “I need help.”

Emily’s not the only one who’s lonely, Lau thought, with a twinge of pity. And a twinge of nausea, too, as she remembered Payne’s damp and crumbling basement in Belfast, the racks of Mason jars repurposed to hold organs, the bodies arrayed with sepulchral attentiveness.

“Emily—Emmie’s fine,” she said. “Emmie’s safe. Let Bethany go and come with me and I’ll show you.”

Far above, Lau could see the police chopper circling, hear the distance-attenuated thunder of its rotors. Somebody—Falkner—must be ordering them to maintain their distance, and Lau blessed her for it.

Cauthren stepped back, but Strange stayed where she was. His hand slid back, now just cupping her throat. Lau caught her eyes. Hold on, she willed. Just hold on. We’ll get you out of this.

Strange moved. Suddenly, purposefully, she dropped to her knees in the river, sliding eel-like out of Cauthren’s grasp. She plunged forward, scrabbling, lunging toward Lau. Past Lau, if she could get there, up the riverbank and away—

She didn’t make it. Cauthren threw himself after her, both clutching hands grabbing an ankle clad in a heavy oxblood boot. She kicked, hard, kicked again, but the water and her skirt and her lack of leverage impeded her. She caught him between the eyes; he barely flinched.

Gamma, Lau thought, and reached for her gun.

The crack of gunfire sounded right beside her. Daphne, walking down the hill like John Wayne if Wayne knew how to shoot straight, her service weapon before her in both hands speaking twice.

The first one splashed the water beside Cauthren; the second caught him in the chest. His hands slipped from Bethany’s boot. She kick-crawled another few feet away. He half-rose, hand to knee, looking as if he would lunge after her.

Daphne’s gun spat twice more.

Cauthren rose to his full height, turning away. Not dead, still moving with volition. “Henry!” Lau yelled after him. “Henry, stop, please, let us help you—”

He surged away, crimson coiling through the water around him. Can’t let him go. Can’t risk touching him—

•

You can’t control it any longer.

The power crackles under your skin as you grab for Bethany, hungry and thirsty and pushing free. You’re glad, so glad, when your fingers close on the armor of her boot instead of skin. She kicks hard; your nose crunches. You want to let go, but Emmie beats frantic wings inside your head.

Don’t let her go! We need her! I need her!

Another kick, this one sharp and hot in your chest. You can’t breathe. Can’t hear over the roar of your heart, the roar of Ammit. Bethany tugs free, scrambling through the mud, and Emmie drives you after.

We need her.

You need Dr. Martin, but she didn’t come, only these cops, and Bethany won’t help you now even if she meant it before.

Another blow. Another. Not Bethany—she’s too far away. You’re bleeding.

You turn away from the pain, away from the people shouting on the shore. The river is cool, soothing, muddy browns painted blood and gold and scarlet as the sun sinks away. It’s not far to Mud Island, Emmie urges. Her voice changes, demanding instead of soft. You can make it. You’re stronger than you think.

It doesn’t matter. Even if you escape, they’ve taken Emmie. Taken Meg and Lisa and the others, and no one will help them now. You’ll be alone and afraid.

You’re crying, all the warmth leaking out of you into the hungry river. It coils like a snake around your legs.

Don’t leave me! Emmie cries.

No, you think as gritty water fills your mouth. You won’t.

The sun vanishes into bloody water. Swallowed by the serpent. You follow it down.

•

Lau swallowed hard and drew a bead on the back of Cauthren’s skull. She fired, missed as he dove, tracked the motion and would have fired again but he plunged into the river, swimming strongly, then feebly, and the angle made her bullets glance into the water where they could do no harm at all.

It didn’t matter. She could see how he righted himself in the water, how he struggled to stay upright. How quiet he suddenly became as his mouth slipped under the red-bloomed Mississippi. The current dragged him away. There was no splashing, no shouting. Just the arms stiff out, the head bobbing down twice, a third time. Drowning reflex, Lau thought, even as she plunged through the water to get to Bethany, caught her arm, ducked the girl’s panicked roundhouse swing and bundled her into her arms—dripping, shaking, alive.

Daphne was already moving, down the bank, Brady and Falkner covering her as she kicked off her shoes and made a flat dive that carried her far into the river. She stroked strongly into the current, effortless and competent.

She did not reach Cauthren before he went down and did not come back up again.

J. Edgar Hoover Building, Washington DC, September, 2009

When Daphne walked into the briefing cabinet, she found the team already assembled—and Reyes, uncharacteristically, pacing the three or four steps the cramped room afforded, while Falkner occupied his habitual chair. He caught her eye as she settled herself in the worst spot at the table—back to the projection screen, in between Lau and Chaz. Brady winked at her from across the table before she spun around.

Daphne recognized the thin, lank-haired girl who frowned sullenly from the display, though it took a moment to mentally age her into a thirtyish woman so Daphne could put a name to her. Hope Mitchell. The gamma who’d kidnapped Reyes, held him for three days, and more or less knocked his face in. The pale meaty scars were still faintly visible, disapearing into his hair and creasing his full lips.

“Not a new case?” Daphne asked, just to be sure.

Reyes shook his head, but Nikki answered out loud. “Just a briefing.”

“Agent Todd’s been looking into Ms. Mitchell’s backstory,” Reyes’s voice stayed pleasant and level, but he sipped his cooling tea like a man who needed to steady himself. “His discoveries combine interestingly with some things she let slip while I was her prisoner, and combined with our existing body of information may prove revealing about the essential nature of the anomaly. Todd?”

Todd didn’t stand—he was behind the table, next to Brady, and he would have had to climb over either Falkner or the Cowboy to get out. So he tapped the pile of papers before him into a tidier rectangle instead and cleared his throat. “I’ve recovered Mitchell’s pediatric medical records,” he said. “She was treated as a failure to thrive case from age eleven months, when her growth curve dropped from the seventieth percentile to the fifteenth.”

Todd paused, while Daphne waited for the sharp intake of Chaz’s breath to match her own. It didn’t come, though, and when she glanced over at him his face was carefully blank. He waited, hands in his lap, blinking intently at Todd. Reyes warned him, she realized, feeling a moment’s warmth for the old bastard. After that moment passed, Daphne looked away from Chaz.

“HIPAA violation,” Brady said. “Drink.”

Todd started speaking again. “She responded well to nutritional supplementation, however, and by the age of three was back on the curve. At five, at about the date of the marriage license for her mother, Kitty Samson, and her stepfather, Clement Mitchell, she falls off the curve again. This is also when the ER visits start, though the records were a bit dicey to track down. They start off in Wisconsin and wind up in New Mexico, and wander all over the flyover zone in the interim.” Todd pushed his stack of paperwork to the center of the table. “There might be a few missing.”

Chaz spaghettied out an arm to grab them, glancing around the table to see if anybody wanted a prior claim. Daphne waved him in. He’d just hand her each sheet as he finished, and he read faster.

“She was committed in Albuquerque in 1982—diagnosed violent and autistic, and her family said she was a danger to herself and others and could not be controlled. As far as we know, she first killed a man in 1984,” Todd said. “Between her release in 1995 at age 21 and her death in 2009, she stayed busy, averaging 14 victims a year. More than one a month for fourteen years. We know because she kept meticulous numbered records. Although—” Todd looked down “—we have not recovered all of them.”

“You’re describing a beta to gamma progression,” Brady said, as mildly as if he were merely clarifying. “A juvenile beta triggered by intolerable physical abuse over a period of years to convert into a delusional gamma.”

Reyes cleared his throat. “Actually, she might not have been.”

Every head at the table swiveled—except Chaz’s and Todd’s. “Explain, please?” Falkner asked.

Reyes licked his lips. “I’m not sure Hope Mitchell was a gamma. I would be inclined to diagnose her as a second-stage beta, comorbid with paranoid schizophrenia. And there’s more.”

Daphne considered screaming when he paused, but he was just taking a breath. And you couldn’t blame a man who had been through... that... for steeling himself before choosing to talk about it.

“She told me she had known what she was since she was born,” Reyes said. “She had some linguistic markers of precocious speech. And... She told me her mother was impregnated by a stranger who came out of a white light. A superhuman stranger.”

You could have heard a feather drop.

Without raising his eyes from the medical reports, Chaz said, “Her father was a gamma.”

“There are some indications that that may be so.” But Reyes—cautious, uncommitted Reyes—nodded. He believed it.

Daphne bit her cheek. Before she could get her emotions under control enough to speak, Chaz looked up. “Are we going to reconsider a genetic link now?”

“No,” Reyes said. “I think the DNA evidence was indicative.” He looked at Chaz so expectantly that Daphne could imagine the coaxing.

“It’s not just trauma,” Chaz said. “It’s exposure. There’s got to be an inoculation in addition to the primary trauma and the secondary trauma. What do you know about orchids?”

Brady’s chair creaked. “Nothing?”

Chaz leaned forward on his elbows, then winced and dropped the left hand into his lap. “Orchids bloom when they’re stressed. They bloom when they’re expecting to die. Reproduction is a massive expenditure of energy. So I think what happens with the anomaly is that there’s a primary stressor—the first crack—and it gives the anomaly a foothold. And maybe it gives you some advantages. Makes you a little tougher, gives you some tiny edges. Some little paranormal gifts. Not even first-stage stuff.”

“It’s a parasite,” Lau said.

“A symbiote,” Daphne corrected, feeling her heart in her chest like a sackful of Mexican jumping beans. Across the table, Todd was a frowning Buddha. “It’s a symbiote that helps us survive the monsters we breed ourselves.”

“Well, there’s your evolutionary edge,” Falkner said. She closed her eyes as if her head hurt.

Chaz nodded. “Pre-first-stage stuff, which some people might not even notice as anomalous. And then when there’s a big crisis, a serious threat—it spawns.”

Reyes leaned against the wall beside the static image of Hope and steepled compact hands. “That implies that the natural habitat of the anomaly—symbiote, or parasite—is the damaged human brain.”

“Right,” Chaz said. “So if it wants to spawn—”

Brady said “It has to make damage. Like our friend in Memphis, who—”

“Caught it when his sister died at the hands of the Belfast gamma.”

It was like watching a tennis match. Daphne wished she’d brought a cup of coffee in, suddenly, because she badly needed something to do with her hands. “So how does that explain betas? And second-stage betas?”

Chaz shrugged. “Resistance? Maybe Hafs and I had something like antibodies, from being exposed so young. We were immunized. Early trauma can cause permanent changes to the DNA, and only, only... Mitchell and me—there’s a genetic marker in common. Since my... parent does not exhibit that same genetic marker, it strongly suggests that Duke was right. On top of everything else, the Bug is a teratogen.”

Nikki said, “But Hafs wasn’t—”

“We don’t know,” Reyes said, “what Hafidha did or didn’t experience. If Chaz is right, her primary trauma and her innoculation could have happened before she was adopted by the Gateses. When she was a tiny child.”

“And maybe I’m even more resistant because I got it—” Chaz swallowed “—antenatally. Like Mitchell. Who also converted as an infant. But if that’s true, it implies something else.”

Reyes didn’t look down. “We know how to breed betas.”

It fell into a long, echoing silence. Daphne caught herself straining her ears, as if she might be able to hear the ripples of that splash bounding and rebounding off the walls of the room. Across the table, Danny Brady wasn’t breathing.

Chaz’s lips thinned. “You going to tell the CIA about it?”

Reyes’s face had never been so still. Daphne bit back her sigh of relief when he finally spoke, like a man taking holy orders. “I’m not even going to tell my mother.”

•

Later, when Chaz was in the kitchenette, Reyes maneuvered around him to the coffee pot. Hot water came from a red-handled spigot on top. Chaz waited while the Old Man filled his mug and turned back. The mirror said no one was close, and whatever Reyes wanted to say he’d say it now.

“If you’re right,” Reyes said, head tipped back to stare straight up at Chaz, “there’s another implication. Something Todd began to suspect some time ago, but I decided at the time that we should keep it to ourselves as speculation.”

Something I didn’t want to say in front of Brady, Chaz read between the lines.

“I know,” Chaz said. “You’re all potential gammas.”

“Me more so than most,” Reyes answered. “Keep an eye on that, would you?”

You, Chaz thought. And Brady. That was why Reyes had shuffled the team like a deck of cards. He was making sure that they could take down Stephen Reyes. He was planning in advance against his own worst nightmare.

“Reyes—I think... have you considered that we’re all too close to this to do the job anymore?”

Reyes stopped moving. The stare didn’t waver. “Are you questioning me, Villette?”

Mutely, squinting as his eyes dilated, Chaz nodded.

“Good,” Reyes said. And left Chaz blinking as he brushed past him into the bullpen.

•

Reyes went to his office. He shut the door. He sat down behind his desk and typed his password. But as the monitor flickered to life he spurned the keyboard with his fingertips.

He pulled his palmtop out of his pocket and frowned at it. Then he scrolled through a contact list, found the name he wanted, and called—quickly, as if any hesitation could cost him.

“Dr. Martin? It’s Special Agent Reyes. I mean, Stephen Reyes. This isn’t an official call. I was just wondering if you were doing all right...which now that I say it, is kind of a stupid question.”

“Oh,” she said, her throaty voice pleasant, pleased, surprised. “No, it’s not a stupid question. Please, call me Cassie.”

•

Daniel Brady sat at his desk and prayed.

It had been an ongoing argument with Hafidha, who was the sort of self-righteous spiritual Atheist only a kid raised by hippies could become (and didn’t he feel guilty, thinking that now. But guilt did not remove truth.).

But he believed. He believed in a God better than the people who worshipped Him. He prayed to a God who loved all His creation equally.

He prayed to a God of Love.

He prayed for guidance. And he prayed for strength.

It was not unlike the sort of prayers you might expect at an AA meeting. Only without the crazy-ass gamma element, he hoped.

He prayed because he had identified the problem.

He’d thought he could manage on casual sex and careful friendships. He had the gang at work. He had Lau, sister and best friend and avenging angel. She’d been ready to kill for him. Eager, even.

He had all the family he needed right here.

Which was good, because lately, he’d been lying to his mother again. Every Sunday, like clockwork. Because every Sunday, like clockwork, he called his mother. And there weren’t any truths about his life that he could tell her.

She’d heard Gray’s name. He’d been my friend in the State Department. She had never heard Andre’s, and that was an omission Danny failed to forgive himself every time he picked up the phone. And now, years later, and in no small part due to Gray (In that case, the lie became true: he was Danny’s friend at State. If he was even entitled to call Gray a friend anymore.) Danny understood the lie he’d been telling all along.

There was a tension in Danny’s life between being with the guy he wanted to have a life with, and in hiding that life from his family. And whatever noble lies he told himself, that was why he’d left Gray.

Because he couldn’t lie about this. He couldn’t lie about Gray.

And he couldn’t tell the truth, either.

Danny was alone in the office. It was after seven on a Friday, and even Reyes had gone home.

He picked up the phone on his desk. Not his cell, that would do it in the push of a button, remember the numbers, keep a record.

He dialed.

When Jim Brady answered, he held his breath for two seconds. Then, at the second gruff hello, he dropped the handset softly in the cradle without speaking, and laid his forehead against his hands.

Marshall County, TN, October, 2009

Standing in her underwear and stockings, Esther Falkner laid her old dress blues out on the rough synthetic motel-room comforter piece by piece. Army blue looked stark against the muddy greens and browns of the cheap fabric. She inspected the press, ran the lint roller over it, and pulled it onto her freshly-showered body piece by piece: skirt, blouse, jacket. The neck tab was still the bane of her existence, but she wrestled it down. She found herself fingering the hershey bars on the left sleeve and forced her hand to drop. She pulled her white gloves on.

She slipped on her freshly-polished shoes, and picked up her beret.

A glance in the mirror showed a tall, stern woman with excellent posture, her long hair turned up severely in a French twist. The uniform still fit.

She nodded to herself, found her umbrella, and stepped out of the motel room, checking the door behind herself to be sure it latched.

The corridor was long and featureless except for the intermittent punctuation of other doors. Despite herself, Falkner thought of all the things that could be going on in the reassuring anonymity of those rooms. Nothing of it showed on her face: she could feel the impassive mask pressing down on her features as if it were a clear plastic shell she kept in a drawer and brought forth as necessary.

In the lobby, the desk clerk nodded to her. She nodded back, and opened the umbrella as she stepped out under the awning. Outside, rain dripped watery light across Tennessee hills as green as wine bottles.

Falkner got into her rental car, stowed the umbrella on the passenger side, and pulled out onto state route 129. Behind her, the Econolodge greyed away into the rain.

It was a half-hour drive to the cemetery. Belfast itself, when she passed through it, had not changed—a cluster of a half-dozen one- and two-story buildings huddled at a crossroads, nestled amidst rolling wooded hills like the backs of drowsy dinosaurs. There was no parking lot at the graveyard: she just pulled to the side of the road at the end of a row of cars.

She got out of the car umbrella-first, careful of her shoes on the muddy verge. When she stood, back twinging, falling water speckled her shoulders. She locked the car behind her—aware as she did it that it might be the only locked car on this side of Lewisburg—and picked her way across soaked grass to the gap in the cemetery wall where a gate had once stood. She joined a cluster of umbrellas under the branches of a crooked black walnut tree.

She stayed at the back, not wanting to interfere in the family’s grief. Falkner’s umbrella was black, as were those of the four other uniformed service members present—a male Lieutenant and a rifle-armed honor guard of three, two men and a woman who came up to the shoulder of her tallest compatriot. Those of the other mourners were a riot of colors, pulled out of hall closets in frantic improvisation that morning, and they contrasted strangely with the black clothes.

The service was brief, to the point. The grave yawned open. The coffin above it lay under a flag striped in bold red, white, and blue. Under the direction of the Lieutenant, three rifle volleys were fired. The flag was folded and presented “on behalf of a grateful nation “ to Corporal Meg Brooker’s mother, because Meg had never had the chance to marry.

It was nothing new. It was over quickly.

There was no gravestone yet. In the slow, milling dispersal that followed, Falkner walked up to a woman her own age, clutching a triangle-folded flag to her chest. “Ms. Brooker,” she said, extending a white-gloved hand. “I’m Esther Falkner. I am so very sorry for your loss.”

Because she had the resources of the FBI behind her, Falkner knew that Melissa Brooker had been a single mother. That Meg was her only daughter. Looking at Brooker, at her chill, pinched face, Falkner did not need to imagine her pain. She felt it, felt what it would be to lose Bekk this way. To get her back from war, injured but alive, and then have this happen—

Brooker lifted her chin. “Did you serve with my daughter, uh, Captain?”

Falkner shook her head. “I wore the uniform out of respect for her service. I’m retired. I am in the FBI now, and I was on the team that investigated your daughter’s murder.”

“Oh,” Brooker said. She squeezed Falkner’s hand hard, and then dropped it. “Oh. Did you—”

She looked away.

“No,” Falkner said. “But I was there when it happened.” She could have said more, but she didn’t know, yet, what Brooker needed to hear.

“Henry—” She stopped. “Henry was a good kid. I knew him. I went to—I remember him graduating. I remember his sister’s funeral. How does something like this happen?”

Falkner shook her head. “Sometimes it just does.”

“I wish—” Brooker laughed painfully. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t say that. But we have to forgive, don’t we?”

“Say whatever you need to,” Falkner said, aware that other people were milling about them, coming close, offering tacit support of Melissa Brooker as they noticed that this intimidating stranger had buttonholed her.

“I wish you hadn’t killed him.”

Falkner sniffled. She let it happen; let the tears sting. Now that she knew she could. “So do I.”

The conversation after that consisted of a few pleasantries. Falkner gave Brooker her business card. She didn’t expect Brooker to call. She walked away as the funeral party started to break up, and slid back into her rental car. Could anyone else tell what of the water on her face was tears, and what was rain? She could: the tears were hot. They burned.

Other cars filled and drifted away. Falkner waited. At last, when Melissa Brooker had been helped into a sedan by a man who was probably her uncle or father, Falkner got back out of the car.

This time, she did not bother with the umbrella. She didn’t expect anyone but the vault guys and the gravedigger to see her now, and they were concerned with wending their green mud-spotted backhoe harmlessly between the neat white interchangeable headstones of the Armed Forces section of the graveyard. There were no mourners to guide her, but with the help of scribbled directions, she found what she was looking for anyway. Two graves, side by side, under freshly turned and returfed earth. On the far side of the graveyard, where the rows were not as neat and white as teeth.

These ones also had no headstones. Falkner wondered if they ever would.

She reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out a baggie of petal fragments, whispery and frail, more the memory of blue than the color itself. Carefully, rain falling down her neck, she spread them across the graves of Henry Lee Cauthren and Emily Jane Damaes.

•

Back in the car once more, she pulled her cellphone out.

It rang only twice before the cheery, overwhelming rush of questions that was Dinah Liebowitz filled the line. “Esther! How long has it been since you called? How’re Ben and the girls?”

“Hi, Mom,” Falkner said. “I’m sorry. Work has been hell.”

“Texas”

Date: Mon, 29 Mar 2010 06:58:57 -0700

From: Solomon Todd <cindersilver@gmail.com>
To: SSA Stephen Reyes <reyese@fbi.gov>
Subject: How I Spent My Summer Vacation

Steve—

Greetings from scenic Los Martires, TX. It’s like Fred, only dustier, not so urban, and fewer trees.

Just as many gammas, though. What is it about this damned state? Is the mothership parked under Denton? Didn’t I say I was never coming back here?

Retirement is treating me well, thank you. I think I’ve been through every ancient library and dusty newspaper morgue in the Lone Star State. If these people were any worse at throwing things away, they’d be Vermonters. Which suits our purpose pretty well, but if they recycled, I could have been home with my feet up by now, planning a trip to Cancun.

Anyway, you wanted to know what I got. What I got is a whole lot of inconclusive. I did get my hands on the papers of one Jared Martenson, a town doctor in Arlan, which had been willed to the local “historical archive” (whatever you’re picturing can’t possibly do it justice; mostly, they seem to be archiving packrats) and it turns out he had taken an interest in Howard McCain’s traveling road show one of the times it came through. Based on his investigations, one woman with liver cancer experienced a three-year remission after the elder McCain laid his hands on her, but eventually died of the disease. Another, a kidney stone sufferer, was pronounced cured, and at least never sought medical attention for the complaint again. Another, an asthma sufferer, showed no improvement.

I did score some old newpaper photos of the elder McCain. They’re just as grainy and pixellated as you’d expect, but they do not show a man who you would call particularly gaunt—or heavyset. Meanwhile, in the younger generation, you have Edgar, who was roly-poly, and Clemson, who was raw-boned but too large-framed to be called skinny.

But we can no longer use extreme gauntness as diagnostic, in the wake of Susannah Greenwood and Simon Talliwell, with their apparent ability to use others for sustenance. (Can a vampire gamma be far behind? Yeah, I know, pretend I didn’t think it.) Suggestive, sure. But not diagnostic. Edgar could have been sucking the life out of his victims ^h^h^h^h^h^h^h patients in exchange for healing, right? Or just eaten enough of that fried chicken and potato salad that if he hadn’t been a gamma (or a beta) he would have been a six-hundred-pounder. It’s not like it’s impossible: it would just have required _dedication_.

So, as I see it, these are our potential scenarios:

Howard and Edgar are con men (Edgar possibly even duped into believing his own press); Clemson is a supervillain.

Howard and Edgar are both betas, Clemson is a gamma.

Howard is a beta, Edgar and Clemson are gammas.

Edgar is a beta, Howard and Clemson are gammas.

Howard and Edgar are both gammas, Clemson is a gamma. Gammas all around!

Howard is a con man, both his sons have superpowers.

Howard has superpowers, Edgar is a con man, Clemson is a gamma.

...Yeah, my brain already hurts.

So given what we know about betas (Chaz, Hafidha, Mitchell) we know or suspect that two of the three had a gamma parent. (In Chaz’s case, pre-breakthrough, but obviously if he was not capable of passing it on already, he and Chaz somehow acquired it in the same place at the same time.)

Hafidha’s background is a subject for further investigation (Don’t people think of posterity?), but she’s a unique instance, as status beta in her case seems to have been transitional. And unlike Mitchell and Chaz (and potentially Edgar, if we can trust Clemson’s hearsay evidence that Edgar was identified by their father from birth as being special), she did not convert as an infant.

So I can’t conclude that Howard or Edgar were jammers, but I can’t rule them out, either, And if Howard was a jammer, and his kids were—well, that’s an interesting corrolary to what you and Chaz learned about the DNA.

Or, short form, yadda yadda correlation =/= causation, but this does support the teratogen theory, at least for betas. A teratogen that could be passed from parent to child. Which is, after all, how teratogens work. But if Edgar was a beta because his dad was a jammer (or potential jammer) then where does that leave us with McCain? Was he just another beta who happened to be a serial killer? If so, why did he show no evidence of genetic damage?

I think we have to say he was likely just a run of the mill gamma, and Edgar was a fraud.

Yeah, I know you know all this. Think of it as a student paper. I’m laying out my material so I can see it all in one place.

I think you’re right. We still don’t know how the hell you get from alpha to gamma, except repeated intense stress and exposure, but we know how to breed betas. And breeding is exactly it. First, take one anomaloid, juice, and—

Well, anyway. Tomorrow, I’m off to Portugal (Texas) and after that Plano. What I really need is something unambiguous, such as somebody who personally regrew a severed limb like a lizard’s tail after being manhandled by Edgar or Howard.

yrs, in appreciation, etc,

Sol

Date: Mon, 29 Mar 2010 08:09:45 -0600
From: SSA Stephen Reyes <reyese@fbi.gov>
To: Solomon Todd <cindersilver@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: How I Spent My Summer Vacation

Sol—

Another potential answer is that Patient 01 was not Howard McCain’s biological child. Would explain his animousity towards his mother, and how he managed to not be a beta if his brother was, and we’re right about how you get betas.

Which would be suggestive on the contagion theory, as well.

Have we considered the possibility that William Villette was resistant, like Hafidha? If he went through a status beta phase, maybe he was already an active jammer when he fathered SA Villette, but he hadn’t gone full-bore gamma yet?

However, the plural of anecdote is still not— well, you know.

yours,

Stephen

Chaz Villette’ journal, 2009-09-04 11:57:00

Current mood: awful

Current music: The Cowboy's Batphone

[locked/private] One forward, two back

I baked cupcakes and took them to her last night. Sort of doughnut consolation, maybe. I made the Chocolate Featherbeds recipe, the one that's from some '50s cookbook and probably based on a thirty-year-old recipe even then, and I frosted them with the chocolate fudge frosting. She loves those. She once said they were Hostess Cupcake bodhisattvas.

While I watched, she picked up the first one and broke it in half, then broke those pieces in half, and kept on until she'd crumbled the whole cupcake. Crumbs everywhere, chocolate frosting under her fingernails (short now) and embedded in her cuticles.

"What are you doing?" I asked her, and I was proud of myself, because it just sounded curious. It didn't sound the way I felt.

She kept her face tilted down and her head a turned a little to the side, but she looked up at me, slantwise. Back in the day I would have thought she was going to tease me.

"Looking for the teeny tiny file," she said.

After a pause just long enough for that to sink in, she added, "Oh, that's right. You're the good twin."

But I stayed while she crumbled all twelve cupcakes. She smiled the whole time.

They're just cupcakes. I can bake more. And maybe the next time I bring them, it'll be her I get to give them to.

“Standard of Care”

Ashton, VA, September 2009

Kay Baylor was the last to arrive. Traffic had been heavy inside the beltway—a Friday night, a holiday weekend, a few hundred thousand people trying to get their families out to the country to enjoy the last flickers of summer—or just an excuse to escape DC’s cloying embrace for a day or two.

The long drive out through Virginia had calmed her nerves, though, and by the time she parked her car in the evening twilight, under one of Idlewood’s majestic copper beeches, she was—not looking forward to the evening’s work, but at least resigned.

She knew she was going to be last because she’d recognized Ramachandran’s aged Mercedes in the parking lot, parked beside a dark green Buick sedan with a four-body trunk and an eight-cylinder engine that could not have said off-duty cop more clearly if it were airbrushed on the doors. She didn’t know what Allison drove, but since she worked here, Kay was confident in her estimation that she had also beaten Kay.

The old asylum’s grounds had been beautiful once, maintained perennial gardens with long sweeps of sparkling white crushed stone path. Now, the lawns got mowed and a few day lilies shoved gallantly through the thickets, but the roses had conquered all. This late in summer, they were still heavy with bloom and heavier with a rich, sweet scent no florist rose could approach. Idlewood’s roses were old, from before the rise of the Hybrid Tea, and they filled the air with a texture and a tapestry of smell.

Kay let her footsteps carry her up the hill toward Idlewood’s broad lawns, its sweeping prospect. She found herself leaning forward, huffing a little. Too much time behind a desk, old woman.

She passed through the massive double doors at the top of Idlewood’s marble steps—marred in this age of litigation by rough black traction strips—and thought, as she thought each time, This place needs a sally-port. She endured the Idlewood Dance, sacrificing her electronics, her concealed-carry purse, and the blued-steel 9 millimeter that her ex-husband had bought for her after the Hope Mitchell incident. He’d made sure she learned to use it, too, though he’d known better than to try to teach her himself.

(”Stephen, because you feel physically threatened and unsafe, you’re giving me a gun. You know what we call that behavior, don’t you?”

“Do you object because you don’t want to carry a weapon, or because there’s a name for it?”)

They gave her everything back except the gun. On the other side of the first line of security, she turned left, away from the secured wing the patients inhabited. The conference rooms were on the third floor, and in the spirit of self-flagellation, she forced her out-of-breath self up the stairs instead of waiting for the lift.

When she walked in, breathing through her nose to control her panting, Rupert Beale, Casey Ramachandran, and Katharine Allison were waiting for her around an oval conference table. None of them had assumed the head. Instead Beale and Ramachandran sat behind it with an empty chair between them, like a study in contrasts. Beale was the bigger man, his barrel body softening only slightly with age, the flesh under his cheekbones starting to draw in. Ramachandran was neat, trim, and still moved with a runner’s spring in his step. The hair that fringed his bald pate was steel-colored.

Allison had her back to the door; she craned around slightly as Kay walked in, enough to flash her a smile while the men half-rose. Allison was a big, broad-shouldered woman with a mane of wavy dark hair only slightly tamed by a headband and the frames of her oversized glasses. She’d kicked off her open-toed shoes under the table, and Kay could plainly see the red marks they’d left on the pale skin of her feet.

Who did a walking job in heels, unless she was a cocktail waitress? As far as Kay was concerned, Allison was the woman of steel, and her shoes proved it.

Kay shut the door behind herself and went to sit beside Allison, the same one-chair gap placing her across from Beale. He smiled quickly, a welcoming twist of his lips, and then reseated himself and returned his attention to Ramachandran.

Ramachandran waited until Kay had settled herself before picking up a remote control that was the only thing on the table other than a pyramidal speakerphone/intercom and a tray with water and glasses. “As you can probably guess,” he said, “this has a limited distribution. Doctors Villette and Reyes have produced some interesting speculation on the nature of the Anomaly, and I believe everybody involved needs to be brought up to date before a subsequent discussion of how this affects our standard of care.”

He glanced around the table as if to be sure he had everyone’s attention. As if there were any chance of wandering eyes now—Kay knew she was not the only one sitting rapt. Seeming satisfied, Ramachandran brought them through his presentation quickly, outlining the ACTF’s findings with regard to genetic markers—and the lack thereof—in known gammas and betas. By the end of it, Kay was leaning forward hard enough to numb her elbows on the tabletop. And Beale, across from her, was leaning back, his hands resting in his lap, his brow furrowed.

“The juvenile-onset betas, then,” he said. “We’ve identified only two, and they both show this genetic modification.”

“They do,” Ramachandran said. “Two is not a statistically significant sample.”

“It’s what we have,” said Beale.

They were all M.D.s in the room except Beale. But Baylor’s residency was long behind her, and it was Allison who steepled her fingers and widened her eyes. “CCR5,” she said. “It’s like the HIV-resistance genes. There’s a gene that shuts the Anomaly down.”

Ramachandran’s lips compressed. He’s withholding. But he nodded. “There’s a gene for resistance that only seems to exist in juvenile-onset betas. Melinda Grossman did not show it, and neither does Hafidha Gates—though there’s something in her that could be an incomplete form.”

A juvenile-onset gamma, and an adult-onset beta. Or at least, a gamma who had proved far more resistant than most to the Anomaly-induced delusions and paranoia. If gamma and beta even meant anything anymore.

“Teratogen,” Allison breathed. “It’s acquired? Prenatal exposure causes—Doctor Villette?”

“Or Hope Mitchell,” Kay cautioned. “What about Hafidha? What about Greenwood?”

“Greenwood’s parents were not on board with the DNA sampling. We have to consider the illness as a continuum,” Ramachandran said. “At one extreme, almost normal mental functioning. At the other, delusion, lability, urges towards violence.”

Kay opened her mouth to speak and closed it again. Client privilege. She’d earned Villette’s trust the hard way, and she’d be damned if she would betray it. Even for what seemed like a very good return on investment.

“We have no evidence,” Kay said carefully, “that betas are entirely free of those issues.”

“Doctor Baylor,” Beale said, shaking his mastiff head, “I am not free of those issues.”

“Well, of course not,” Allison said. “Neither am I. But this opens up a whole new series of questions. Especially when we’ve having some success with cognitive treatment and antipsychotics...”

“Shouldn’t Doctor Reyes be here?” Kay asked, pleased with herself that she was able to say the words unselfconsciously. As if Stephen were just another colleague.

Ramachandran said, “It was felt best we hold this discussion in his absence. I will discuss our findings with him in detail.”

“Best by whom?”

“One moment,” Ramanchandran said. “And all will be made clear.” Pressing a button on the intercom, he leaned down to it and said, “Chris, please send in Doctor Frost.”

A moment passed, during which Kay swallowed a prescient chill and poured herself a glass of water. When the door opened and Frost entered with the efficient shushing of brisk footsteps on worn carpet, she did not turn to look. The men half-rose again, and there was a moment while Ramachandran introduced Frost around the table. She was a little rounded woman who should have looked soft, grandmotherly. But the light of intelligence behind her clear blue irises was bright as a cutting torch, and Kay was just as glad that Frost did not offer to shake hands.

Instead, she accepted the flat black box of the remote from Ramachandran. Without preamble, she said, “I have dissected more anomalous brains than any other pathologist of whom I am aware, and I have made some intriguing, if preliminary, findings. Combined with Doctor Allison’s electrical scans, which she has so generously shared with the research team, and with the interviews conducted by Doctor Ramachandran, Doctor Beale, Doctor Baylor, and the members of the ACTF field team, they might even be called suggestive.”

A click, and color images appeared on the screen. “This is a functional MRI of a normal brain,” Frost said. She paused. “For suitably broad values of normal.”

Beale chuckled, but Kay was profoundly certain that Frost had not intended it as a joke. She paid him no heed, merely clicking through to the next image. “While we are still experiencing a marked lack of success in isolating or even identifying a pathogen, we are becoming more confident in identifying the Anomaly’s direct effects and sequelae. This is an anomalous brain, under the influence of what the ACTF refers to as jamming. It is, in fact, the brain of Hafidha Gates before she completed the progress of her disease. And this—” another click, a third image lined up beside the other two “—is what it looks like when she uses her abilities now. As you can see, and as we were previously aware, there is a significant difference.”

“The amygdala is engaging,” Allison said. “But the prefrontal cortex is suppressed.”

“Very good, Doctor Allison,” Frost said, like the kindergarten teacher she resembled. “The amygdala, as some of you may not know, is believed to perform a basic function in the formation of emotional memories. Specifically, in fear conditioning and the sort of disruptions found in post-traumatic stress. The prefrontal cortex is responsible for what we term executive function—rational decision making and impulse control. To put it more simply, Ms. Gates’s disease has progressed, her ability to control her emotions has eroded, and her brain has become far more reliant on memories and behavior patterns based in operant conditioning and the fear response in order to determine a course of action. She also shows patterns of electrical activity consistent with some forms of obsessive compulsive disorder, and what you as psychologists might term magical thinking.”

“She’s terrified,” Ramachandran translated. “She’s constantly reliving patterns of fear associated with trauma. She’s trapped in an OCD feedback loop and her brain is telling her that if she does not carry out certain specific actions terrible things will happen.”

Frost smiled, sort of. “And, if we accept the evidence of the brain scans, and take as a given that she’s consistent with other members of the gamma population, she’s likely suffering from delusions not inconsistent with schizophrenic ideation. As well as harassing auditory hallucinations.”

“Jesus,” Beale said, after a three-second silence so stark Kay had been able to hear herself swallow. Beale paused and shook his head, but apparently it still seemed like the best word. “Jesus. I mean, you know this sort of thing has to be behind it. But it’s different to see it all up there in, well, in red and yellow. And Villette doesn’t show evidence of the same progressive breakdown?”

“Villette,” said Villette from the door as heads whipped around, “seems to have gotten very, very lucky. No, it’s okay, sit. This meeting was my idea.”

He closed the door behind him, the sound of the latch making Kay realize she hadn’t heard it click open. He crossed the conference room to take the sole seat at the foot of the table, closest to the door, between Kay and Beale. “Please, Doctor Frost,” he said.

She extended the remote. “Since you are here, I would prefer to be excused.”

But Beale stood and limped around the table and pulled out the chair between Kay and Allison. All the women on the same side. “Please,” Beale said. “Sit. Your expertise is needed.”

Kay didn’t think Frost was mollified. Kay didn’t think Frost had ever been offended in the first place. She just honestly had no desire to be in the room unless her presence was immediately and critically necessary.

But she also didn’t seem inclined to push Beale out of the way to get to the door, so she was pretty much trapped into sitting as he requested.

He returned to his side of the table, and Frost clicked the remote once more. “These are functional MRIs of a selection of past and present Idlewood residents. They are not jamming in any of these images. Doctor Allison” —she glanced at Allison, and Allison nodded pray continue— “merely asked them to review a series of positive and negative memories. This is Susannah Greenwood. Clemson McCain. Henry Clark. Roger Weathers. Jason Saito. Sofia Akadiou. Betty Johnson. As you can see, there is a direct link in some—Gates and Greenwood, and to a lesser extent Saito and McCain—between activity in the amygdala and prefrontal cortex, and the subgenual area, here.”

Frost glanced around the table as if checking to make sure a class of slow learners was following her. Kay heard Villette breathing on her right hand side. She did not glance at him. She did not touch Frost’s arm for attention. “I’ve seen images like that before.”

“Doctor Baylor,” Frost said, granting her the podium with a crisp birdlike headbob.

“Deep Brain Stimulation,” Kay said. “It’s used to treat Parkinson’s, obsessive compulsive disorder, bipolar disorder, major depression. Among other serious illnesses. Devices implanted in the brain produce a constant series of pulses of weak, high-frequency current. In some patients, they’ve proved spectacularly effective.”

“And in others,” Allison said, “they might as well have stayed home and ordered pizza. And it all depends on the strength of the connections between those three brain regions. The better the connection, the better the success rate.”

The sound Villette made wasn’t a sigh, exactly. It was a noise of sorrow and tiredness, but it wasn’t a sigh. “Some people are better equipped by nature or nurture to withstand the ravages of a brain malfunction. Genetics, history, environment—none of these are simple, guaranteed predictors of behavior. I expect the anomaly is unpredictable in the same way: that it interacts with brain chemistry and the host’s personal history, and that affects who is influenced by it and to what extent. And for the same reason, some of the people who are influenced by it may be better equipped to respond to DBS.”

He paused. “Patients showing the stronger connection are also more likely to be able to externalize and alienate their experience of the anomaly, which means cognitive tactics work better for them. They are also more likely to report experiencing its action as a sensed-presence effect, as if an invisible second person were with them. That’s a phenomenon also found in mountain climbers and other extreme athletes, by the way. Some people theorize that it’s related to the left hemisphere actually noticing the action of the right.”

“A treatment,” Beale said, jerking so hard in his chair that the table rattled. “You’re talking about a fucking treatment.”

Villette held up his hand. “A treatment that will not be effective for the majority of gammas. But which may be effective on those like Greenwood and Gates, who still have some functioning cortical control over their instinctual brain functions, and who are not sociopaths, psychopaths, or sadists apart from the functioning of the anomaly. Unfortunately, severe personality disorders are commonly found comorbid with status gamma in the... anomaloid... population, possibly because both states are influenced by trauma and brain damage. But yes. We may be able to help Hafidha.”

“There are issues,” Ramachandran prompted.

Villette nodded. “Hafidha is refusing surgery, and her parents back her up. Greenwood’s parents may eventually be more amenable, but at this point—” he shrugged. “They’re happy to have their daughter eating and alive. And frankly, Greenwood may be the best candidate for a less invasive resolution. And she’s awfully young.”

Beale poured himself a glass of water, slowly, keeping the ice from rattling into the glass. “Our two best candidates aren’t interested.”

As if Beale had not spoken, Villette went on. “Saito is a psychopathic sexual sadist. Hakes is... Hakes. Cho, Miner, and John Doe aka Henry Clark have all suffered significant brain damage, which renders them ineligible. Akadiou is insane to a legal definition, incapable of judging the right or wrong of her actions. Roger Weathers is elderly, suffers from apparent dissociative identity disorder, and is deeply engaged in therapy with Doctor Allison. Johnson doesn’t believe there’s anything wrong with her. Jessica Kelly is a paranoid schizophrenic...”

“Cieslewicz,” Kay said. “Sense of right and wrong, has maintained his core personality, made attempts—some successful—to control the damage caused by his manifestation.”

Villette sat back in his chair and nodded. “Eddie’s offered his consent to the procedure. His brother, Dyson, is on board.”

There was silence for almost ninety seconds, as Villette and Ramachandran—who had, oh so obviously, orchestrated this entire meeting between them—allowed the others to contemplate the intricacies of the situation.

“We need a surgeon,” Kay said.

Allison glanced at Frost. Frost, seeming aware of the attention, said, “I do not operate on living persons.”

“We can find someone,” Ramachandran said. “And an anesthesiologist, and core staff for an OR. The question is, do we want to pursue this line of research, in the understanding that while the procedure is as routine as brain surgery can be, this application of it is not?”

Silence ruled again, but this time more briefly. Beale looked up from a study of his thumbs and said, “Doctor Villette. If you arranged this, I suppose it’s you I should be asking this of. In the understanding that I am not opposed to a plan that could give relief to some of Idlewood’s patients—nevertheless. Why did you request that Dr. Reyes be excluded from this meeting?”

Villette leaned forward. Kay remembered him frail, with staring eyes and brittle hair. Now muscle stretched his suit jacket across his narrow shoulders and professional conviction buoyed his voice. “Because I believe it is unfair to ask him to retain his clinical detachment where Hafidha is concerned.”

“But it’s not unfair to ask this of you?”

He let his lips part over his teeth. If his body was fit and his mind was sharp, there was a whole world of cornered animal in that smile. Not for the first time, Kay wondered if she had done the right thing by him.

“I’m confident of my own ruthlessness,” he said.

Chaz Villette’s journal, 2009-10-12 18:22:00

Current mood: None. Or other.

Current music: Maddy Prior - When I Was On Horseback

[locked/private] I didn't go see her on her birthday

XM has this great radio station, The Village which I persist in imaging in terms of The Prisoner. Really it's American, English, and Irish folk music, though their definition of folk is exceptionally broad.

On September 30th, I didn't go out to Virginia. It was her birthday, and you just don't give the It that kind of traction. On her. On me.

So instead I went out yesterday and stayed overnight in one of the staff crash rooms, intending to see her again this morning. I brought brownies. They were bittersweet-chocolate/chipotle brownies, and yes, oh internets, the slash is intentional. These things were that much sex.

The thing was, I was so upset and distracted and full of fret that when I started baking the brownies I didn't realize I was sort-of-out of a lot of things that go into brownies. (My favorite brownie recipe this week is Nick Malgieri's "Supernatural Brownies," and that was what I meant to use for a base.

But somebody on my flist was talking about making ancho-vanilla extract to use in brownies, and I got inspired....)

Except the oven is hot, and the bowls are set out, and the pan is greased, and I realize that I only have three eggs and 4.5 ounces of bitter chocolate, no bittersweet or semisweet at all.

Reader, I improvised.

4.5 ounces bitter chocolate (I used Ghirardelli this time, because I had gotten a ton of it on sale)

2 sticks unsalted butter

3 tbsp vegetable oil

3/4 cup of cocoa powder (I used SaCo Premium)

3/4 tsp kosher salt

3 eggs

1/3 cup plain whole-milk yogurt

1 cup flour

1 cup vanilla sugar

1 cup brown sugar, packed lightly

1 tbsp vanilla extract (I've started making my own, actually, because it dawned on me that the way I go through the stuff the easiest thing to do was to invest in a bottle of white rum and a fistful of vanilla beans)

1 tsp chipotle powder

1/4 tsp cinnamon

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Grease (Oh, come on. With this much fat already in the brownies? Coals to Scranton.) a 9x13x2" pan and line it with parchment.

About now, XM started singing in Arlo Guthrie's voice about oranges rotting in the creosote dumps.

Put the butter, chocolate, cocoa, and oil in one microwave-safe bowl. Put that in the microwave and nuke until it until it's mostly melted, checking it every minute. If you burn the last chocolate in the house you will be sad.

When it is mostly runny mix it together and let it stand to finish melting from its own heat.

Juan and Rosarita are riding that big airplane, which is a story that never ends well.

While it is nuking, whisk the eggs, salt, vanilla, spices, and yogurt together. Add the sugars and the flour and whisk it together into something that looks like it would make pretty awesome blondies, if it came right down to it.

Pour the melted chocolate into the eggs and flour mixture slowly, mixing as you go. When you have a runny, greasy thing, pour it into the baking pan and spread it out, then put it in the oven.

"Both sides of the river, we died just the same." I fail to understand why anybody would make box brownies, when the real deal takes about the length of one folk song to mix together, and there's nothing complicated to do.

Bake for between 35-45 minutes, or until it is done. Does anybody actually do that thing with the cooling on a rack, turning out, trimming off the edges and so forth? Because the edges are the best part, and warm brownies are warm cookies, aren't they? And you have to test them.

Failure modes:

Brownies are crispy and black: your oven is too hot or you left them in too long (mine were done at 35 minutes on the dot.)

Brownies are dry: You panicked at the sight of all that fat, didn't you? ...Yeah, you did. They're brownies, they're not healthy.

Brownies are gooey: you couldn't wait an extra five minutes until the skewer came out clean?

...I just realized, I wrote this like anybody was ever going to read it.

Is this the healing process?

Wasn't I pretty when I entered Cork City

And met with my downfall on the fourteenth of May.

Anyway, I got the brownies out to Arkham mostly unconsumed (go me) and gave them to William, which is the drill. I surrendered my electronics while William checked the brownies for tiny files and brought them around to her room, and I went in to the booth so we could talk face to face.

She was spinning. With a wooden spindle and a long hank of what must have been dyed brushed sheep's wool, which was wound through a sort of bracelet thing on her right wrist. Spinning yarn, like Sleeping Beauty.

She must have been thinking the same thing, because she looked up and said "Are you my Prince Charming?"

But it was her talking, and not the It. The It—it doesn't smile that way, a little hopeful, like wondering if you're going to accept the overture. She was playing.

"Maybe," I said. "At least, you would not believe the rosebush out front—"

And just like that, we were off. Old times, and she told me that if she continued to make improvements, Casey was going to let her have a crochet hook. She showed me what she called her yarn stash and sent some of it around with William for me to pet and admire. She said she'd make me a sweater once she figured out how. "It's slow learning from books."

I should have let it go there. I know, I know. I know to stop on a positive. I should have left that night and forgotten about the next morning. But I'd already made the arrangements, you see.

When I got up the next morning, Dr. Casey was waiting for me. He told me that when she'd gotten up that morning, she'd asked William for her spindle. And then she'd broken it and tried to jab the shattered end into her throat.

"I think it's best you don't see her," he said. "I don't want to reward the behavior."

I left her other birthday present with him, though. For when he thinks she should have it. It's a pair of slippers Nikki helped me pick out. They're silk, and they're embroidered with the most amazing phoenixes.

“Summer of Sam”

Ashton, VA, October 2009

Chaz Villette walks through the door to Hafidha’s burrow’s antechamber, and she can tell in five seconds that she’s not going to enjoy this conversation. She reads her predestination to unhappiness by the angle of his shoulders. It’s in the lack of advance warning too, and only confirmed by the detail that his arms are full of file jackets rather than cupcakes.

He speaks to her valet—it’s LaShawn today—turning his head aside for privacy. She’s getting damned good at reading lips. Trust her baby brother to have noticed.

Whatever it is, it’s bad. She knows, because the valet nods and withdraws to the other side of the soundproofed door. And Chaz crosses the antechamber, sits down at the card table beside her burrow’s shimmering, semi-transparent wall, and lays his burden out before him, squaring each jacket with the table’s edge like somebody with borderline OCD.

He doesn’t ask permission to sit.

That’s a bad sign too.

“What,” she says. “Is it Thanksgiving already?”

He answers, but she can’t hear him. The conversation holes in the transparent sheathing are too small to jam even a fingertip into—she could break it with a crochet hook, but they’d just gas her—and the mesh muffles sound the same way it blurs light. Hafidha will spend the rest of her life looking at everyone she loves, and the little sliver of October world she can glimpse through the windows, through a haze of copper spun fine as silk.

She rises from her bed and sets the sweater she’s knitting aside. It’s supposed to be for Daphne, and she wonders if the Bug will ever let her finish it. She concentrates on how much it twists inside her to walk across the scatter rugs on the tile floor, and the Bug doesn’t do a thing to stop her from going to Chaz. Maybe it knows what’s coming, too. Maybe it can read Chaz’s face, the tired lines drawing the corners of his mouth down, as well as she can.

Maybe it just knows that it hurts, so she can keep doing it.

She sits down across from her baby brother and folds her arms. “It’s a bad time.”

He nods, face impassive. Then he opens the file jacket in the middle and extracts an eight by ten black and white photo of a toddler, a pretty plump-cheeked girl with a cheeksplitting smile and a head full of two-strand twists secured with bright cartoon elastics. Tweety Bird. Sylvester.

He says, once more, “Your birth name is Jacquelynne Destiny Carroll.”

He might as well have stabbed her in the chest with one of the bamboo skewers he uses for checking the done-ness of cake. She shakes her head; her mouth is full of words she cannot say.

“I know you know.” Chaz lays the photo down on the open file folder. Face up, curse him. “I know you know, because every electronic record pertaining to your birth, your parents’ death, and your adoption has been scrubbed out of existence. Utterly wiped. I only know two people who could manage that, and one of them is fictional. It took Todd and me four months to put the narrative back together, Hafs. There are still a few hardcopy newspaper morgues around, but—you did a really good job.”

He smiles, a little flash of crooked teeth under a Roman nose that belongs on some other face.

“That girl is dead,” Hafidha says, grating it out one breath at a time. The skewer’s still in her, probing around, looking for a vulnerable spot. But all the spots are vulnerable.

Chaz nods, staring down at his big awkward hands. He speaks as if relating a case history, any case history at all. Something of only academic interest. “She died on July 14th, 1977, at approximately 2 am, aged 21 months, 14 days. She was killed in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, in New York. With her died her mother Letisha, her father, Monroe, and her brother, Martin, five years old.”

She wants to open her mouth, to say Chaz. Don’t. Please. And she does—she gets her lips apart, but her voice coils up in her throat like a snake and chokes her. She could make herself vomit easier than making herself talk. Maybe she will—vomit. Maybe she will topple her chair over, bang her head against the cork-padded floor. Anything, anything.

She can feel the Bug in her, drinking up the hurt, and she knows she’ll sit right here until it’s done.

Chaz continues, inexorable, soft. Telling her a story. “It was one of the hottest days of the year, and New York City was burning. Two lightning strikes and a malfunctioning breaker had crippled a power substation on the Hudson River. The lights went out in Gotham.”

“The Summer of Sam,” Hafidha chokes out, shaping her lips around the words and forcing air through her voicebox to make the words hiss out. All those esses. “Nineteen seventy-seven.”

Chaz smiles a shy little flicker and nods. Pleased with her. Proud. “But it wasn’t David Berkowitz that killed the Carroll family. And it wasn’t the rioting and fires that rattled their neighborhood that killed them either.”

“No,” Hafidha says, and now the Bug lets her talk. She’s cooperating, going the way it wants. Feeding it the hurt that wells up from the scabs Chaz is picking off. Picking, picking.

She doesn’t remember any of this. She doesn’t remember the people in the photos she knows Chaz has concealed in the other folders: the strong brown man with the porn ‘stache and the big dark eyes like pools, the full-hipped woman with her red-black hair worn natural and her swingy bellbottoms worn a little too tight, the snub-nosed boy in coveralls. She hopes he hasn’t brought the autopsy photos. She’s seen those too, and she never needs to be in a room with them again.

“The adoption records were sealed.”

“Duke,” Chaz says, as if that explains everything.

Which of course it does.

He clears his throat. “They weren’t bad people,” he says. Encouraging her to continue, to finish his story.

“I never knew them,” she says. “But no. They weren’t bad people. They were getting-by people. Letisha worked. Monroe worked, but got laid off. It was the Seventies. Everybody was getting laid off. So Monroe started making deliveries for a friend—weed mostly, and cash, and larger quantities of both than the corner boys handled, because Monroe was hardworking and responsible and had a good reputation in the neighborhood. He didn’t do much more than a beer or a toke on the weekends, and neither did Letisha. So he wasn’t skimming. He was doing what he could.”

“I know.” The bone-pain sympathy in Chaz’s voice sends a thrill of delight through the Bug.

She takes a breath. “Monroe didn’t keep dope or cash at home, ever, but the three soldiers who wanted to go into business for themselves didn’t know that. That night was the perfect opportunity: the streets were in riot, two blocks of Broadway in Brooklyn were aflame, the emergency rooms were flooded and what passed for police were very, very busy. The soldiers broke in while the family was asleep—they were all sleeping in the living room, because the power was off and it was the only room with cross-ventilation—and held them at gunpoint, demanding to know where the drugs and money were hidden. The dark and the heat and the lick of flames against the sky probably contributed to raising the adrenaline levels in the room. So did the screams of the toddler in her crib.”

“It wasn’t her fault what happened,” Chaz says. The Bug doesn’t want to hear that; it digs its hooks in and makes her keep talking.

“This is speculation,” Hafidha says, “but the police believe that the three men began to pistol-whip Monroe. Letisha attacked one of them with a lamp, defending her husband. The youngest soldier, nervous, fired a shotgun blast into her abdomen.

“It was a bad neighborhood, but it wasn’t the kind of neighborhood where people ignore the sound of a shotgun. The assailants knew the police would be called. So they put the barrel of a .45 in Monroe’s mouth and pulled the trigger. Letisha was still alive. The intruders dragged Martin in from where he was hiding and shot him in front of his mother to force her to talk. But time was running out, and Letisha was no longer conscious. After a cursory but destructive search of the apartment, the invaders fled.

“Martin was pronounced on the scene. The parents both hung on long enough to be loaded into an ambulance, but only Letisha lived to reach the hospital. The emergency rooms were crowded; the streets were insane. By the time she got there, it was too late. She died in surgery. The attackers were apprehended on other charges; the youngest agreed to testify against his companions in the triple murder case for a reduced sentence. He contracted hepatitis in jail and died of apparent institutional malnutrition in 1985.” Hafidha drops her chin onto her knuckles. “Did you know that New York has not executed a death row prisoner since 1976?”

“Yes,” Chaz says. He folds the file jacket closed and shuffles it off to the side, in a stack by itself.

“That little girl,” Hafidha says. “Jacquelynne Destiny. Would it have been better for her if she lived?”

“I don’t know.” He looks up, looks her in the eye for as long as either of them can stand, and looks down again. “I’d have missed you.”

It’s so patently ridiculous it makes her snort, even if the Bug wants to tell her what an idiot he is for saying so. She manages not to sound sharky, but she can’t keep the words in. “I’m afraid the bus for Witch Mountain just left.”

“The Anomaly,” he says, “is acquired. Prenatal exposure seems to predispose the mature jammer to resistance. There’s limited evidence that it reinforces certain pathways in the brain that later provide... resilience... to the Bug. Remember when you agreed to let Reyes take your DNA? Hope Mitchell and I—” He pauses, swallows, trying not to give the Bug a crumb. “—Hope Mitchell and I both exhibit signs of genetic damage. Which is probably anomalous in origin.”

Hafidha folds her hands to hide that they are shaking. “What’s that got to do with me?”

“You do not exhibit that damage. Not...all of it.”

“I see.” “Damage”—a mutation—that means he is out there, in the real October sun, and she has to get hers filtered and third-hand. “Where’s Professor X, Hank?”

Stray strands of hair stick through his fingers every which way as he makes a fist at his nape. “There’s also some less limited evidence that the Bug spreads most consistently with the traumatic death of the original host.”

“Like a mushroom shooting out spores.”

“Like a spider feeding its young on its corpse,” Chaz counters. But he refuses to be derailed. All on one breath he says, “And when she was five years old Letisha James was molested by an uncle who later committed suicide after killing his own wife and three children.”

“Letisha wasn’t a jammer.”

“No,” Chaz says. “Letisha had the first crack. And the inoculation.” His ridiculous Adam’s apple bobs in that ugly stork throat. “Like William Villette when he raped his sister Addy. But like him then—like Addy, after he raped her—she wasn’t a jammer. Yet. If she’d survived that night in 1977, though. She might have been. Instead, she died, and passed the... infection on to her daughter, and to the young man who killed her.”

She wants to keen, to crumple to the floor. She wants to wrap her arms around Chaz sitting there so still and sore and rock them both until they can cling to each other and scream like the lost children they are. Her baby brother.

Fathered by the same monster. She never knew how prophetic she was.

She sits dry-eyed, hands folded. She bites her cheek until she tastes seaweed and copper. She drives her nails into her palms until red crescents mark her flesh. The words still come out through her teeth, bright and cheerful as tea party conversation. “So I hear you’re going to drill a hole in Eddie’s head. Maybe you can borrow one of my crochet hooks and try to fish out the Bug with that. What do you say, Platypus?”

Chaz stands. He leaves the folders on the table. The photos are for her, but he won’t put them inside her cell, when the Bug can destroy them. He presses a hand to her cage and says, “I love you, Hafidha.”

His fingers trail across the plastic as he turns and steps away.

“Orientation Day”

J. Edgar Hoover Building, Washington D.C., November 2009

“And that,” SSA Stanley Murchison said, “is Down the Hall.”

Arthur Tan blinked. Of course it was. Here was the hall, and there was the end of it, and here at this end were his own bad self and Murchison, in charge this very morning of giving him his orientation to the Behavioral Analysis Unit. Murchison, whose sense of humor had been reviewed by critics in counterterrorism as “suspect”, “juvenile”, and, in one thrilling rave at Tan’s going-away party, “nonexistent”. Tan kept his face blank. Waited, but Murchison didn’t so much as crack a smile.

“He means the Anomalous Crimes Task Force,” said someone at the cluster of desks behind them: tall, thinning light brown hair, suit clean and sharp but not as new as all that. He turned in his desk chair and waved one big, careful hand, “Hi. Pete Pauley.” He gestured to the stocky black woman talking seriously into the phone at the desk behind him. “You’ve met Lisa.”

“I have,” Tan flashed her a smile; Dr. Lisa Marshall had sat in on his interview. She smiled back and nestled the receiver deeper between her ear and shoulder. He broke out of Murchison’s orbit, shook Pauley’s hand. “Arthur Tan.”

“Right, you’re the new Cam.”

“Damn, I hope so,” he said, and Pauley chuckled. Cam Siddiqi had pretty much hit the FBI version of the Powerball: right off maternity leave to field agent, senior, in Honolulu, Hawaii.

“Yeah, she said she’d send us postcards.”

“They’ll all be crime scenes,” Marshall said, hand over the receiver.

It was the kind of seniority that ten years in the BAU could give you. He’d told Padma that when the job posting came up: Think about it as a really, really slow ticket to Hawaii. She’d squinched her eyebrows up in that way that said Arthur, I am not happy, but in the end, all she’d asked for was to have that promise notarized.

Pauley pulled a face. “So, you were anti-terrorism?”

“Yeah, Bomb School. Home of the engineering geeks.” Tan bit back a wince immediately. Back at the home of the engineering geeks, things could be pretty laid back. Other units of the FBI did not have senses of humor of which they were aware.

And yeah, here came Murchison, shuffling behind him. “We still have to get your IT clearances set up.” He nodded: hearing it loud and clear. Playtime over. Didn’t want the new hire to get overstimulated before snacktime.

Pauley spun his chair a little and smiled. “Well, you can go down there if you like. The ACTF’s still a BAU unit.”

Something passed between the two for a minute, and then Murchison sighed. “C’mon,” he said, and led the way down the narrow, businesslike hall. Tan could have sworn Pauley was grinning.

The Anomalous Crimes Task Force began between the twin pillars of a pair of institutional washrooms, his and hers, and curled past an office, around a short corner to a cramped bullpen. Arthur Tan poked his head through the door in the Bureau-approved tactical manner—presenting minimal target while achieving wide view of the room—and inspected the layout: standard Fibbie grey with a clutch of desks huddling together at the center for warmth. Two private offices lined the right wall, both darkened and with shut doors. Whatever the Anomalous Crimes Task Force was, it wasn’t home to callers.

One of the doors to the left opened, and a balding white man squinted out from a room rich with photocopier glow. “Murchison. Did you bring me a picnic?”

Murchison lifted an eyebrow, cleared his throat. “SSA Solomon Todd, this is SA Arthur Tan. He’s starting today with the BAU. I’m giving him the tour.”

Todd’s handshake was firm and dry and encumbered by about fifteen file folders. And either he was naturally raccoon-eyed, or he hadn’t had much sleep this week. “Well. Welcome to the unit.”

“Thanks,” Tan said, and scoped the empty desks again. Nothing to suggest what this spinoff unit might contain, although there were a few things hinting at who populated it: a brightly-colored plastic logic puzzle here, a blurry photo of someone clinging to a rock wall there. “What kind of cases do you do here?”

And that, bar none, was a face so straight it’d been cut with a laser alignment tool. “Anomalous crimes. Does what it says on the tin,” Todd said. “I’m sure your introductory briefing will cover it, and I wouldn’t want to step on anyone’s toes.”

Entirely suspect, that. And from the way Murchison shifted his weight, Tan was pretty sure that Solomon Todd liked nothing better than stepping on people’s toes, and that Murchison was feeling the psychic weight of his shoe depressing as they spoke. He liked to think he was reasonably adept at the whole office politics thing. And this was definitely office politics.

“So,” Murchison said, “we’re expected down at IT.”

“Nice to meet you,” Todd said, and drifted back into the copy room.

One thing at a time, compadre, Arthur Tan told himself as SSA Murchison led him out of that cramped cubbyhole of a workspace, back into the buzz and light and activity of the BAU bullpen. Learn the job. Hell, learn to keep a lid on that mouth of yours.

“Any questions?” Murchison asked as they gained his new desk, his scrubbed-down, blank, fresh desk. And that had to be Murchison’s sense of humor coming out.

“No sir,” Tan said, and straightened his tie.

“Closet Monster” by Leah Bobet

Act I

J. Edgar Hoover Building, Washington, DC, November 2009

Danny Brady was not in the habit of coming into the office to hide.

Chaz did, and Todd occasionally. Some mornings Brady came in to the debris of several pots of coffee and the tucked-away leavings of six a.m. breakfasts, shoved under shredded paper in one’s wastebasket like a bad evidence dump. Lau did it sometimes too, though with Lau a bout of drowning her demons in report-writing was statistically indistinguishable from plain old All-American work ethic. But Danny Brady didn’t crawl into the WTF bullpen like a kid under the bed at midnight; he preferred diners, or bars just before last call. Quiet, comradely, anonymous.

Or had. Relationships...changed things.

So this morning he was in the office at a heroic five-thirty ayem, and now six of America’s top profilers were going to know that something was wrong.

By eight the paperwork on Memphis was finished and there was no more avoiding it. Danny Brady tidied his desk twice, straightened his tie by feel. Picked up the phone.

It was seven in Texas; not too early to call. Rosemary Gilmer Brady had been out of bed at six every morning for years to be at the Baylor University Hospital pharmacy by eight sharp, with breakfast on the table for her ingrate son to boot. She picked up on the second ring.

“Mom,” he said, to that compressed long-distance Hello?

“Danny!” she said, and he couldn’t pick between a grin and a wince at the way her voice brightened. “How are you?”

“Happy birthday, Mom,” he said, and went through the ritual thank-yous, the filtered sounds of coffee cups and songbirds and a still-familiar kitchen drifting in over the line. Almost enough to mask the noise of shoes on industrial-grade office carpet: Worth appeared at the desk opposite him and dropped her bag beside the chair; waved hello absently before shuffling into the kitchen. “You doing anything nice?” he asked, and leaned into his phone.

“Oh, your father and I are going out for dinner. It’s just another day, really. Nothing fancy,” she said, which meant that Dad was taking her out somewhere fancy indeed and her blue-collar, Pentecostal, just-this-side-of-backcountry upbringing needed a few hours to handle it.

“Well, you have a good time now,” he said, and let out a breath. So far, so good. He might just make it out alive.

The hope was short-lived.

“How about you?” she asked. “You meet anybody nice?”

He let it dangle for just a minute. She asked, statistically speaking, about one Sunday in four; she knew better than to ask that every time. But often enough. Oftener lately. Mothers, like tracking dogs, had an exquisite nose for the thing you wanted them into least.

“No,” he lied. “Things are busy at work lately.”

She knew. He knew she knew, at least on some level, and they’d happily gone through years of Sunday calls on a sort of refined Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. The questions had started up again about six months past, right about when he and Gray had—

Well. Either the profiler gene was hereditary or it was the other thing rearing its head. Danny Brady was an only child, and his mother wasn’t getting any younger.

“Well,” she said, hiding the way her voice flattened into a habitual disappointment. It only lasted a moment, though, and for that Danny Brady was grateful and loved his mother. “You’re a good-looking boy. That can’t last.”

No, it couldn’t. Didn’t. Hadn’t.

Oh, Jesus on a piece of county fair pie.

“Oh Danny Boy,” Worth said, materializing at her desk. Hafidha’s words, not hers, and for that reason they rang extra hollow. He covered the mouthpiece on his receiver and raised both eyebrows, inquiring. The office was awful quiet all of a sudden—quiet before he’d noticed that there’d been anything to quiet down—and it sure wasn’t to ride the seesaws in the bathroom.

“Case,” she mouthed, and strode to the half-full briefing room.

Case. The terrible, mundane knotting in his gut mixed with a brief Hallelujah.

“Mom?” he said, breaking into the stream of a story about her retired women’s group and some seminar they were doing at the Nasher Sculpture Center. “I’m sorry. I’ve got to go.”

He set the phone down carefully and shoved out of his chair, scrubbed sleep out of his eyes. Through the screen in that cubby of a briefing room, someone was assuredly dying in the worst possible way; ways that could put him and his at extreme physical risk.

Brady pushed into the briefing room and shut the door behind him.

Safe for another week.

•

It was bad.

“Jacob Ellroy, aged nine.” Nikki Lau said. The picture flicked up on the screen: small body, dumped face-down in a muddy Mississippi culvert after a fresh rain. The mud blackened what the bruises didn’t. “Contusions to the torso, three broken ribs. Strangulation by ligature, which was the actual cause of death.” She paused. “Also, signs of sexual assault. As in, they’ve recovered semen.”

“Great,” Daphne Worth muttered. Great, Chaz Villette’s hands said in the way they held the case file tighter. Brady shifted his weight, crunched up against the briefing room wall behind Worth’s chair. Eight-thirty in the morning and his legs already ached. He was going to need another coffee.

“Adams County sheriff’s deputies found him yesterday outside Natchez, Mississippi. He went missing from his home in town Sunday night: the parents came in Monday morning to get him up for school and he wasn’t there. No family trouble as far as local PD has it. They issued an Amber Alert right away, but nothing came up on the tip lines. The dump site’s about twenty miles from Natchez. He’s the third in four months.” Lau’s voice was crisp and expressionless. “The other two are Jason Sanchez, age ten, and Angelo Birks, nine, both also of Natchez. Jason disappeared four months ago and was missing for three days; Angelo two months ago, and missing for a week. Similar dump sites, and one difference in the MO: our first vic was beaten to death.”

Lau added their pictures to the screen: one Hispanic kid in Sunday best on the steps of a church, looking like he’d give anything to trade them in for a tee-shirt; one black kid grinning with a baseball bat held out in classic bunt position.

Nobody winced, but the urge was strong.

“What’s our angle?” Brady asked. One kidnapping made it a federal case. Three kids were enough to trigger the BAU’s procedural tripwires. It took a little more to get the ACTF involved.

Lau tipped him a nod, slight. “They can’t figure out how he’s getting into the houses.”

Across the table, Villette’s eyebrow rose.

“Jacob Ellroy disappeared from his bedroom four days before he was found, after a few nights’ worth of nightmares. Standard stuff: monsters in the closet and in his room, but he’d never had a problem with them before. No forced doors, no open windows, no prints on the doorknob. The alarm system was still engaged.”

“Motion detectors?” Esther Falkner asked.

“Motion detectors.” Lau glanced at her file. “Property crime was a hobby in Natchez even before the recession. Anyone who’s still got money down there seems to want to keep it. Violent crime in Natchez, however—” she flipped another page “—not traditionally all that high.”

“Until four months ago,” Worth kicked in, and sighed.

Lau nodded. “Local PD are pretty sure they have a serial. And Down the Hall is pretty sure there’s no way to circumvent that many locks and security systems. Which is why we’re here.”

Brady mentally ran the list of possibles: invisibility, teleportation, walking through walls. God knew what else. No way of knowing until they got on the ground. God, he was tired.

Stephen Reyes seemed to catch that thought out of the air. “Lau, Brady, Falkner, Worth, Villette: wheels up in an hour,” Reyes said. “We’ll continue this on the plane. Todd, you’re holding down the fort.”

He rose. Todd nodded from his own chair and followed: to double-check when the kids should be in bed and the plants watered, no doubt. Brady stood back and let the rest of the team get their hustle on. He was a little too tired to hustle this morning, and it’s not like they were going to leave without him.

“Hey,” Lau said, files gathered in a shedding stack against her chest. She bumped his elbow a little on the way out the door. “Gotta watch all that gettin’ laid. You look like a raccoon.”

Danny Brady briefly thanked God for women who grew up with brothers. “I couldn’t find my concealer this morning.”

Nothing on her face changed, but something in the catch of her next few steps told him to cut that shit out. “Oh,” she said, covering it well. “I don’t think mine’ll match.” Super-secret code for Spit it the hell out.

He couldn’t fault her. It hadn’t been too long ago that none of them had pushed enough, and look how that turned out.

“My mom’s birthday,” he said, shortly. Shut the briefing room door behind them and started for the desks. “She’s been after me about, ah. Settling down.”

“Ah,” Lau said, in the way that Vietnam vets said Ah to jumping at gunshots. “What’re you gonna do?”

Danny Brady still remembered the rhythm of Andre’s breath on the rare mornings he’d slept in; the way it slowly quickened and surfaced to the smell of coffee and the hiss of good bacon. The way he never gave his parents a key to his apartment, even though they’d lived not half an hour away, because then he might have to explain the extra toothbrush. The way he’d sat all the way down the table from his lover at parties, or going out for drinks. Andre had been—and Danny was, back then—so deep in the closet you couldn’t see them for the plaid bell-bottoms.

Blissful married life.

He raised one eyebrow. “I don’t know. Go into hiding. Change our names to Adam and Steve and start a new life as interior decorators.”

“Fibbie blue and gunmetal gray a specialty,” she said, and dropped the files onto her desk, then leaned under it to retrieve her go bag. It muffled her next words: “You should talk to Worth.”

That’s what he needed. Intra-team profiling. He reached under his own desk for his brown leather overnight bag, checked the zippers, and said nothing.

“She’s done this before,” Lau said.

The main pocket zipper pull was fraying. He’d have to get that fixed when they got back. “Don’t you know that it’s different for girls?” he deadpanned.

“I didn’t think you knew who Joe Jackson was.”

“Hey,” he said, and now he could look up again without his face all disarranged. “Radio technology reached Texas over the frontier railroads just in time for me to make it to junior high.” He shouldered the bag, and managed a grin. “I built my first one out of cow teeth, but we’re a rugged lot.”

The completely indelicate snort Lau let out told him he was safely away from the actual topic. And then they were in the hallway, crowding onto an elevator with Worth and Chaz and Falkner, and however tired he was, whatever might be waiting when he got back home, SSA Daniel Brady was on the clock.

•

They landed at Natchez-Adams midafternoon and drove convoy down Highway 61, tree-lined and shady, into the downtown. Daniel Brady rolled down his window and leaned his elbow on the sill, soaking up glorious fall heat; D.C. in late November still felt like running an ice machine directly into your collar, no matter how many years he went through it. Lau tucked her window down a touch to get a crossbreeze going, and in the back seat, Chaz Villette shifted and squirmed.

“I told you to go on the plane,” Brady said mildly. Perhaps not mildly enough; the look on Villette’s face when he glanced in the rearview was at least half surprise.

“I’m counting houses,” he said. Turned his head again to peer out the other window. “One in ten’ve been foreclosed.”

“Hang a right,” Lau cut in, flicking the map another inch on her PDA screen, and they turned onto a broad major street, busy with trees; drove into thickening subdivisions.

The Ellroy house was pretty: white siding, green trim, tall inquiring windows. The family was out, and they’d left in a hurry: two pairs of shoes were kicked and scattered across the front hall, and a cup of coffee had been left to cool on the dining room table. An officer with close-cropped military curls let them in and moved the shoes aside, delicately, with his foot. “The boy’s bedroom’s at the back,” he said, and led them down a dark-stained, wood-floored hallway, past doors half-closed and listing, to the scene.

“Did they preserve the scene?” Brady asked, easing one hand into a stretched blue nitrile glove.

The officer—Jackson, his name tag said—shook his head. “No, sir. We couldn’t keep the parents out.” The man’s lips were thin with embarrassment.

Brady nodded, once. That wasn’t a couldn’t that involved riot barriers or heroic college football tackles. He let the glove sag and opened the door.

Danny Brady had no metric for normal in children’s bedrooms anymore; he’d not been around many on a regular basis for a stretch of years, with the obviously exceptional exception of crime scenes. But by that shaky logic, this bedroom was aggressively normal: light blue wallpaper sporting fighter planes, a rickety plastic basketball hoop mounted over a child-sized desk, a scattering of little green army men embedded into the rug. Aggressively normal, but not defensively so; there was an unnaturalness to rooms posed this way by parents or guardians or the discriminating trophy-keeping UNSUB. That nylon basketball net would have never been left unhooked just so. The sheets would have been taut, not creased by sleeping bodies. Jacob Ellroy had, it seemed, just had an honest-to-Jesus love for all the things that made a seven-to-eleven-year-old demographic

The three of them fanned out, leaving Jackson head up and at-ease outside the door. Brady poked a plastic machine gunner with a toe. “Didn’t think kids had these anymore,” he said.

Lau stooped, picked one up between two fingers. “My niece and nephew go through them like water.” She turned it around, set it upright on a white particle-board dresser. “I think they just like to destroy them.”

Villette nodded, absently cataloguing toys: a dusty tee-ball bat, wrinkled miniature jeans. “It’s the only toy nobody gets mad at you for breaking. You’re supposed to melt them on the sidewalk.”

Brady let his eyes wander. The ways into a room were doorways, tunneling, windows—there. “Alarm sensor on the window,” he pointed out.

Lau nodded crisply from where she stood, bent over a desk scattered with three-ring paper. “Local PD will have the monitoring records.”

The bed was low to the floor, the walls solid. He stomped on the floor in a few likely places; no trapdoors, no tunnels, no entrances or exits. The closet was double-doored, and Brady swung it wide. “Nice deep closet,” he noted. “I don’t blame the kid for having nightmares. You could get a hell of a monster into this.” It was big enough that it had probably been a Murphy bed once. The little corner alcoves ducked behind the walls and were lined with immovable shelves of clothes: kid-sized football jerseys and elastic-waist jeans. He tapped the back wall: solid.

“My mom put those closet organizers in all the closets,” Lau said, coming up on Brady’s right. “You know, the wire racks with two levels and shelves and baskets and built-in shoe thingies? So the monster just moved under the bed.”

Brady snorted and crouched down on his haunches, inspecting the floorboards. “Mine didn’t give a fuck about the closet. It waited in the hall. You wanna know what that does to your bladder, you’re seven years old and there’s a monster between you and the bathroom?”

Villette’s fingers were gloved and quivering an inch from a tacked-up crayon drawing, his head turned just so to the wall. Lau grinned. “Brady was a bed wetter!” Her elbow connected light with his side. He obligingly oofed. “Hey, Danny, did you start a lot of fires?”

“Killed every goldfish they ever gave me, too,” he said, and pulled himself up with the side of the closet door. No good to touch the inside handle; they’d have to check it for prints. Maybe they were lucky, and nobody’d run fifteen herds of football players over the thing yet. “How ‘bout you, Villette?”

Villette ran one nitrile-gloved finger over the drawing, tracing the lines of something that looked like a big red robot. “I didn’t have one,” he said, surprisingly offhand, reasonable.

Lau quirked one dark eyebrow. “No closet monster? Really?” He dropped his hand, nodded. “Where did you keep your insecurities, then?” Villette didn’t move. When he turned, though, his eyes were here, and not back far away. “Everywhere else, I guess?” He came unfrozen after three long seconds: shrugged, one-shouldered and stilted, and roamed across the floor to peer inside the closet. “I slept in the closet myself when I could get away with it. With a pillow and blanket. On the floor.”

“Well,” Brady said, getting a whiff of something like the bad old days, “you could have had a summer and a winter house in this one. Makes me wonder if someone else got the same idea.”

Thank all the stars and little fishes, the tension of the bad old days went out of the air. To be replaced with the tension already in progress. Brady resisted the urge to rub the bridge of his nose, like Gray did; nobody’d mentioned those little changes in his body language, but that just meant they were being polite.

“It’s big enough for two,” Lau said, stepping back out into the room. “How would he hide, though?”

Villette’s lips tightened as he swung one of the doors shut. “However he wants,” he said, surprisingly wry. “That’s the problem.”

Act II

Daphne Worth, Esther Falkner, and Stephen Reyes arrived at a Natchez police station that had coffee fresh-brewed, a whiteboard set up in the conference room, and photocopied pathologist reports in stiff orange folders at every empty seat. Either Lau had made additions to their backstage rider or someone in Natchez was possessed of a great and uncommon kindness.

The nearest candidate was waiting just inside that conference room with tightly-cornrowed hair, a wilted navy pantsuit, and enough bags under her eyes for a dyke’s second date. She stuck out a hand immediately, not quite caring where it ended up. “Mahalia Davis. I’m half of Natchez Homicide. Thank you for coming in.”

Reyes took it firmly, shifting Worth and Falkner into taking his flanks. Worth fell back obligingly and scanned the station. There were a lot of shut doors in here, and it was very, very quiet. “SSA Stephen Reyes. This is SSA Falkner and SA Worth.” He indicated them with two brisk nods. “Let’s get right down to it, shall we?”

The other half of Natchez Homicide didn’t look much better for wear. Detective Rick Croft came in as Davis dealt out a poker hand of last month’s dump site photos, and he was pale and heavy in those ways that civilians were discouraged from noticing. He took a long pull of coffee from a lukewarm mug before sitting down next to his partner. “Thanks for coming,” he said, with a nod across the table. “I’ve got the Ellroys in room three and four if you need to speak to them directly.”

Falkner nodded quietly and slid out of her chair. Worth cast a questioning eye up at her, but Falkner shook her head and slipped out the door. Stuck with the bodies again.

Which was maybe better than being stuck with the parents.

“We’ve got your timeline,” Reyes said, tapping the folder with one crisp finger. “Where’s the prevention sitting?”

Croft straightened. “We’ve got alerts out to all the schools about any strangers approaching, and it’s been on the news. The Neighborhood Watch people have formed up and are walking the kids to and from school. And there’s a town meeting scheduled for this week.”

Reyes nodded at each; his finger was still tapping the cardboard idly. Processing, processing, Worth thought. “That’ll help if he’s picking targets out in public. Agent Lau will give you some statements about preventing break-ins to disseminate. I assume the whole community’s already aware of the serial nature of the crimes.”

Detective Davis whuffed air out her nostrils. “That’s the problem.”

Croft winced. Reyes raised an eyebrow minutely, and blood came up under Detective Croft’s skin. “Ah,” he said. “There have been some incidents.”

“They’re working up to go lynching,” Davis said, mild and flat. Croft turned even redder and kept his eyes on the scarred brown wood of the table.

“Who’re they lynching?” Reyes asked.

Davis’s lips were pressed into a steady, thin line. “There aren’t a lot of gay men in this town, but there are sure as hell enough rumors.”

Worth swallowed past a familiar, dry throat. “Actually,” she said, keeping it good and casual, “most child sexual abusers don’t choose their victims based on their own sexual preference. Men who molest boys frequently have relationships with adult women. They’re rarely gay men.”

Her poker face, her bland profiler’s face must have been good. Croft looked at her with nothing but a professional’s eye and said, “That so?”

Worth’s shoulders unwound just a touch. “There’s a large body of literature on child sexual abuse.”

“The original study was 1978,” Reyes cut in smoothly: calm FBI man, not a hint of emotion, butter wouldn’t melt inside five miles. “But if your people don’t know that, that doesn’t change the problem. How much trouble do you think there could be?”

The silence stretched for two moments too long. Then: “People are angry,” Croft said quietly. “And they’re scared.”

“Well,” Reyes said, as if it didn’t turn a hair on his head, “your officers will need to actively keep a lid on that. Confusion and accusations will just give this man cover to work under. The community needs to keep calm and keep to its normal routines to maintain the integrity of the investigation.”

Worth nodded, catching the thread and holding onto it with both hands. “Every police officer out there breaking up a fight is an officer not finding this killer.” There. Now sell that to them.

Both members of Natchez Homicide took it like a lifeboat. “Right,” Croft said, and squared his shoulders. “We’ll disseminate that.”

A door flicked open across the station house and spat out Esther Falkner, back straight and head high in a way that meant she was trying very hard to keep them there. She held the door for a plainclothes officer, who stepped inside as gingerly as a babysitter going into the nursery. She wasn’t across the room before Lau, Brady, and Chaz came through the door like a funerary parade, quick and sharp and serious. Brady looked just as tired as Natchez Homicide. Worth took in the fine smudged shadows under his eyes, the straightened tie. He’d been at his desk early this morning. Which could be nothing. She looked away before he’d have to admit noticing her watching.

“The house is mostly clear,” he said after the necessary introductions. His voice was brisk but courteous; nothing that’d tell her anything. “We’ve got the crime scene tech going over one more thing, and we’re hoping to see the alarm system logs.”

“I can get those for you,” Croft said, and shoved his rolling chair back.

Falkner claimed it almost immediately and planted her elbows on the table, framing the orange folder. “Geographical profile, please,” she murmured to Chaz, and started listing off addresses and names.

Worth flipped through the folder in front of her: birthdates, deathdates, scenes of crime. “It doesn’t say if the other houses had alarms.”

“Sanchez family wouldn’t,” Davis said, frowning slightly. She missed it, Worth realized. And isn’t happy. “I’ll get someone on the rest.”

“Thank you,” she said, to try to take the edge off, and kept the smile in place until Davis was out of the room.

“What’re we looking at?” Reyes asked quietly.

“Something’s definitely hinky,” Brady said.

Lau nodded. “No standard way of getting in or out of there undetected. Not without some serious monkey business.”

“I’m sure the people paying for that plane will be glad to hear,” Falkner said drily, and called off another address for Chaz to mark on the map.

When the door opened again, it was hard enough to bang into the conference room wall. Six heads shot up and stared at Detective Croft’s red face, big eyes, the folder in his hand.

“Those the alarm logs?” Brady asked.

“No,” Croft said, breath heavy with running. “We’ve got another missing persons report.”

•

The house was in a different end of Natchez, as much as there were ends and neighborhoods and districts to a city you could drive across in fifteen minutes flat. Brady pulled up in the driveway with hands tight on the wheel as Lau dispatched instructions from the passenger seat: close the roads, lock down the university, send out an Amber Alert. It wasn’t a big town. There weren’t that many places to go.

The local PD—Davis and Croft—were ahead of them in an unmarked squad car. They parked and hit the pavement striding, two-step perfect as a pair of ballroom dancers. Those two had been partners for a long time; you could tell. It was like how people and their dogs grew alike.

“Check out the roof,” Lau murmured as Brady put the car into park and drew the keys from the ignition. He craned his neck and scanned the faded brown roof tiles, noted the cracks in them, the small windows, the way the stains on the fat white siding blotched darker in the evening light. No, the Ellroys hadn’t exactly been serving caviar for dinner, but this was a whole other side of the tracks, and their guy apparently didn’t mind crossing them. He dropped Lau a nod—it was a good catch—and scratched the class struggle off his list of possible anomalous triggers.

Which could actually be helpful, for the first time all day. The funny thing about living in a city that was poor was how it sharpened up that difference between poor and dirt poor.

“So, you bet they didn’t have an alarm system installed?” he said.

“Uh-huh,” Lau replied, and opened the car door.

The house was small inside: tiny and thick-tiled in a way that said it’d be a heritage property in a rich town and in a poor town was just old. Croft and Falkner were in the plaster-walled kitchen with a couple who could have been anywhere from their early thirties to fifty-two with faces that twisted and tired; Lau paused at his side, then peeled off wordlessly to join them. Detective Davis waved him past, quickly, and he followed her down a hall thick with family photographs in dollar-store tin frames, into the child’s room.

This time there was police tape. Brady slipped on a pair of nitrile gloves—extra large, thanks—and ducked underneath it.

Jacob Ellroy’s bedroom had been big enough to rate a walk-in closet, but this one was a shoebox. The single bed was pressed up in the far corner of the room, and the bedclothes were plain brown, rumpled; no headboard or desk in sight. Toys were stacked haphazard in a wicker hamper that might have been for linens once, and there were handfuls of them, bright and plasticky. More than there were clothes, or furniture, or books.

“They moved here from uptown a year back,” Davis said, catching the way he lingered over that mountain of toys. “Steve Butler lost his job in the last big layoff at the paper mill.”

“Ah,” he said. Yeah. He wouldn’t take away a kid’s toys either. Not that it mattered, the way they were stuffed under the wicker lid, the bed, into the corners. Emmet Butler knew the score.

Worth and Villette were casing the room like a pair of professional jewel thieves. “Where’s the boss?” Brady asked, and Worth looked up from where she knelt on a worn rag-knotted rug, peering under the bedframe.

“Outside checking the perimeter,” she said, and brushed bangs out of her face. Of course: for footprints and the like. Brady wondered if he should join him. There was barely enough room for them all in here even with Davis hanging back in the doorway.

“Looks like we have a time frame,” Davis said from her perch. “Steve Butler brought Emmet home from school at four-thirty; left him in his room doing his homework at five, and then went outside to mow the yard. They noticed he was gone when Althea came home from work and called him for dinner at six-thirty. Call to the station came within ten minutes.”

“Two hours,” Worth said. “That’s not a lot of time.”

“How old is he?” Brady asked.

“Seven,” Chaz replied, like he was memorizing the word. He was crouched in the closet doorway, balanced on his toes in a way that made him look more like a kangaroo than an agent of the Bureau. He looked up, shifted back without even wobbling. “I think something’s been in here.”

He shifted over—not one hand laid on that precious potential source of fingerprints, the closet door—and Brady crouched beside him, balancing one hand on the floor. It did look like someone had been leaving footprints in the piles of clothes spread across the closet floor; someone much bigger than a kid. He traced the air above one with a gloved finger. “What would you call that? Upwards of a size nine shoe?”

Villette squinted. “Eleven and a half,” he said. “Give or take a half.”

“Not a small guy, then,” Brady remarked, and glanced up. The ceiling of the closet was low; the dangling wire hangers left it even lower. “Hey. All those hangers are empty.”

“Someone doesn’t like hanging up laundry,” Worth suggested.

“The room’s messy. But it ain’t dirty,” he replied, and eased himself back onto his feet. “Hey, Detective Davis? How’d you rate this on the messiness scale for a seven-year-old kid?”

In profile from the hallway, her mouth quirked. “Actually,” she said, “it’s not bad.”

Worth had come up behind them and was peering over Villette’s shoulder. “What’re you thinking?”

“I think a guy tall enough to have a size eleven shoe—”

“Eleven and a half.”

“—give or take a half,” Brady continued smoothly, “Would probably knock down all kinds of stuff if he was trying to fit in that little shoebox. How’s your nose?”

Worth made a face, then duly leaned in close to the fallen clothes; gave them a solid sniff. “Still detergent fresh.”

Villette nodded, once, and teetered to his feet. “We have to check the other crime scenes.”

“Do you need the addresses?” Davis asked, flattening herself against the wall in his wake.

Chaz Villette smiled a bit bashfully, tapped his forehead, and strode down the hall at speed. Brady trailed after him. They could touch base with the rest of the team out front, and Davis’s crime scene techs probably wanted at that bedroom the day before yesterday.

A voice rose and lowered as he came down the hall: female, unfamiliar. “—he was napping. He’s still little, he does that a lot after school—”

Almost pleading. Then Falkner, smooth and calm. “It’s all right. Go on.”

“I knocked twice, and he didn’t answer. He’s a light sleeper, Emmet. It took him a whole month to get used to the new house; the street noise kept waking him up. And then I got worried, and opened the door, and—”

Daniel Brady opened the front door, stepped outside, and let his ears fill with evening wind.

Villette was already out of sight: likely around the corner, looking for Reyes and official permission to dig his fingers into two more children’s closets. The door shut behind him, halfway out of his hearing. He didn’t turn.

“Getting desperate,” Worth said behind him, and he couldn’t have said right away why his heart skipped an anxious beat.

“Me, you, or Villette?”

Worth whuffed a laugh that wasn’t. “This isn’t his usual MO. This kid’s too young. And none of the others were grabbed during the day or with a parent awake.”

“Devolving,” Brady agreed, and the word still gave him a little shiver of adrenaline after all, but it was a familiar one. Comfortable. “It still doesn’t answer the question of how he’s getting in.”

“No,” she agreed. “But we have the start of his mythology.”

Daniel Brady stopped cold on the front walk, bathed in darkness and a quavering porch light. “He’s the monster in the closet,” he said, horrified to the bone in that distant place where he could still be horrified even when he was on the job.

“We need to find out if the other kids were having nightmares,” Worth said. “And what those nightmares were about.”

Brady turned to face her. “Are you seriously proposing a Nightmare on Elm Street setup?”

Worth shrugged, one-shouldered. “I don’t know yet. There are lots of other ways for someone to find out if that’s connected.”

“Child psychiatrist,” Brady mused. “School nurse. Trusted friend. Shit.”

“It’s something for us to get on,” she said, and then Falkner and Lau emerged grim-faced from the house. Reyes and Villette rounded the corner a few moments later, trailed by a pair of uniformed officers who looked like they’d just been busted down to understudy and kicked out of their dressing rooms. “Not much by way of footprints,” Chaz Villette said. “But the neighbors keep enough hedges to provide all the cover he’d need.”

“Not much by way of an entry point either,” Stephen Reyes added, and lifted a half eyebrow at Brady and Worth. They shook their heads practically in unison.

“He kept the last one two days,” Lau put in. “Or that’s the estimated time of death.”

“He’s devolving,” Falkner replied quietly. The rest went unsaid: All bets are off.

“Right,” Stephen Reyes said, and smoothed the creases in his pantlegs with two careful palms. “We have twenty-one hours. Go.”

Act III

Daphne Worth had set her hotel alarm clock for four in the morning, but Chaz Villette’s soft knock on her door beat it by ten whole minutes. She opened up blurrily—no peephole on the door; very, very dangerous—and he held up a paper bag positively reeking of fresh pastry without a word.

There was a coffee in his other hand when she opened the door wider, and she accepted it and took three long gulps before she could manage a “G’morning.”

“I am your breakfast and briefing,” he replied wryly, and shut the door behind him. “Eat and be enlightened.”

That was right: when Stephen Reyes said that they were to be sleeping in shifts, back on shift happened the second you were conscious. “Urgh,” she mumbled, and took another drag of coffee. She settled into the hard hotel desk chair; the bed was way too comfortable to even look at right now. “Go for it,” she said, and opened the paper bag with clumsy fingers.

“Lights,” Chaz said, and let her squinch her eyes shut before flicking on the assemblage of pastel hotel lamps and bathroom mirror bulbs. “We’ve run down the nightmares,” he said when they were open again, and waved away her silent offer of what smelled like warm croissants. “Good call. Both Jason Sanchez and Angelo Birks had monster nightmares the night before they were abducted.”

Daphne bit into a purely serviceable pile of stiff pastry and butter, and waved her hand impatiently. Bring it on.

“It was all too recent for the schools to notice sleep dep or to get a psychiatrist involved. At this point we’re thinking manifestation, not a vector for contact. Kid has nightmares about the monster in the closet and the next night, monster comes out of closet.” He paused. “You eat like a beta.”

“I run with a bad crowd,” she said around her fourth mouthful, swallowed, and went for the coffee cup. There were crumbs on her pajamas. Oh well. “That doesn’t fit with Emmet Butler, though.”

This time the pause was longer. “No,” Chaz said, half-distant, and rubbed one eye with a long finger. “It doesn’t.”

Worth thought fuzzily about hot showers and opening the curtains wide, about real sunlight. Won’t help, she reminded herself. Still dark out. “You don’t like it,” she said.

He looked up at her almost gratefully. “No. We’ve never seen a mythology devolve before. By all rights this guy should only hunt at night, period, no exceptions. There’s no such thing as closet monsters when it’s light out.”

“Not since Jason Saito, anyway,” Worth said, and smacked the back of her own hand lightly. “Sorry. Bad joke. Not-a-joke.”

“Not a joke,” Chaz agreed, and now he looked uncomfortable, and this time she wasn’t quite sure what she’d said.

“Oh, well. Tag,” Worth said. “You’re it. Want me to make the bed for you?”

Chaz shook his head. “I’m not it. I...the beat cops just brought in one of the dozen gay men in Natchez who’s actually out of the closet. And the six guys who hit him across the head with a broken beer bottle.”

Daphne’s skin abruptly went goose-pimple cold. Not a joke. Oh.

“Sorry,” he said, quieter. “But we’re all up and on duty.”

The clock radio alarm went off, blaring a blast of bluegrass music distorted into static by the volume and bad signal. Daphne Worth slapped it quiet with one quick hand and grabbed for a scratchy towel.

“Ten minutes,” she said, and looking slightly sallow under the fluorescent lamplight, Chaz nodded.

•

“Kids,” Daniel Brady muttered, and ran a hand through carefully-combed hair. “Why’s it always kids?”

Lau glanced up from the file; the thin cardboard was up high enough to cover her mouth. He couldn’t see if she was smiling or frowning. The lack of sleep blurred such fine distinctions anyway. “It’s not always kids.”

“Cape Cod was kids,” he pointed out. “And Omaha, and Sullivan College.”

Lau put the file down. All right, so it definitely wasn’t a smile. “College students. They wouldn’t even call themselves kids.”

“San Diego was kids,” Brady continued. “La Befana.”

“Mr. Friendly was kids,” Chaz Villette put in from the doorway. He looked a little less rumpled; he’d somehow grabbed a change of clothes while Worth was putting herself together. She stood behind him, looking a hell of a lot more bright-eyed than everyone except Falkner, who’d stolen an hour on the Natchez police break room couch after making the team swear to wake her up if anything came together.

“You,” Lau said, mock-serious, mock-joking, mock-something, “are not helping.”

Nobody mentioned Yardston, or North Dakota. Nobody had to. Yardston crouched on the wall like a stain.

“D’you think that’s a pattern? Kids?” Chaz said, much too calm and mild to just be talking about this case, this town, this all-nighter. He ambled into the room and straddled the chair he’d left just an hour ago, leaning both arms on the eye-wateringly orange top of its back.

“That’s not about gammas.” Worth put in. She ran a hovering hand over the file of paperwork, looking like a pelican trying to decide where to dive. “People get funny about kids.”

“Funny?” Brady asked. It was good to prompt. Prompting made you the interviewer, and it meant people would neglect to point those nasty questions at you.

Worth shuffled one file off another. They’d gone to the piling system sometime in the last two hours. Her brow scrunched into thoughtful lines. “In general,” she said. “Why’s pedophilia a bigger deal than rape? Society makes all kinds of excuses for rapists, but call someone a pedophile and we get the torches.” She jerked her chin in the general direction of the holding cells, where Davis and Croft had stuffed their half-dozen drunken good ol’ boys. Shit. Guess Villette didn’t wake her up gently.

“Nobody blames us for that. That’s,” and she paused as her mouth twisted into a private distaste, “the kind of lynching no one has a problem with.”

“That’s hardwired human instinct,” Falkner said quietly. Turned a page. Smoothed it. “Children are vulnerable. You have to protect them.”

“Have to?” Worth pressed. There was a glint in her eye Danny Brady didn’t like. Villette had definitely not woken her up gently.

Falkner took it, unruffled. “Parenthood changes your brain chemistry. Literally. It’s the hormones.”

“Not just parenthood,” Lau said. Brady raised an eyebrow, and she shrugged. “The niece and nephew.”

“It’s what that baby smell is for,” Villette said, and his voice was a little odd. Brady looked up. He was quite carefully watching an unoccupied corner of the conference room. “Kin identification.”

Brady felt a sudden need to deflate the tension out of the room, and he didn’t even know where it had come from. “So the take-home lesson today is to be careful which babies you sniff.”

“Not a problem I generally have,” Worth muttered. Falkner glanced at her, a look full of yet more meaning he couldn’t grab out of the air.

“Maybe it is more than that,” Villette said too fast, and yeah, he’d picked it up too. “Maybe gammas do select for kids.”

“Well, it’s predator tactics,” Lau said, much too slowly. “You find the place in the herd where you’ll do the most damage with the least effort. This is definitely doing the most damage.”

They’d all been warned about personalizing. Brady warned himself about personalizing the anomaly daily. They all let it pass. “So,” he said. “Kids.”

“This kid,” Lau picked up.

“Kids are fragile. Kids are protected. Kids—” Brady rubbed the bridge of his nose with two imprecise fingers. “Kids get to keep all their toys even when daddy’s lost his job and they can’t afford a new roof.”

“And the only thing kids can’t be protected from, in their worlds—in their mythologies,” Worth added, “is monsters.”

Chaz’s lips were pressed together slightly. “Ideally,” he said.

“Ideally,” Falkner agreed. “But kids also have to be taught to be afraid of violence, or hunger. Or, hell, other kids. It’s just games unless it happens to them. And our UNSUB’s not targeting the kids who are afraid of things.”

“Army men,” Lau said softly. Brady glanced at her, and she shook her head. “He’s targeting the kinds of kids who still melt army men on the driveway.”

“So what’ve they got that he doesn’t?” Falkner asked. It was a teacher’s question. They all knew the answer.

Serial killers, gammas, UNSUBs, people who fixated on the repeated destruction of innocence had had their innocence destroyed. People who imitated monsters to hurt someone else felt like monsters, felt they had been treated monstrously. We never do anything to anyone else that isn’t actually just picking our own scabs. Psychology 101. Profiling kindergarten.

“That’s prosaic,” Brady said, and the dry bite of his own voice surprised hell out of him.

“Well,” Worth said. “We never said that every gamma has to be imaginative.”

He snorted, and covered it up with his hand as the conference room door opened and spat Stephen Reyes and Detective Davis into their unique little paperwork paradise. Not fast enough: Reyes’s glance lingered on him, and one black eyebrow went up just so. Hell, who knew he hadn’t been listening at the door. Not even high school principals had that much of a superpower for a timely entrance.

“The gentlemen,” Reyes said, with a glance over his shoulder, “have been charged with assault.”

Falkner sat up straighter in her chair, nodded crisply. “And we’ve got something. “

They outlined it. Reyes hesitated, and then sat. Shuffled paper one hand to the other. The lines in his face drew down; not tension. Recognition. Fatigue.

He was silent for a moment when they finished, and then looked at his watch. Brady snuck a glance at his own: twelve hours. Maybe.

“All right,” Reyes said. He planted his hands on the conference room table and stood. “Let’s give the profile.”

•

“The suspect we are looking for,” Stephen Reyes told the entire police department of Natchez, Mississippi, “is a male in his late thirties or early forties. He’s at least five foot eight inches and wears a size eleven shoe. He has access to a private building, a house or business, where he can keep a child undetected, but can operate effectively in a working-class neighborhood and in both black and white communities. He will be solitary, unobtrusive, organized to the point of being meticulous. He’ll have no children of his own; he has trouble forming intimate relationships and he’s not sexually assertive with women.”

An eyebrow quirked in the back of the room. “Yes, with women,” Stephen Reyes said, mild and unhurried.

“This is not about sex,” Falkner said firmly, somehow more firmly than Reyes might have managed. “It’s about power and fear.”

“He’s not picking victims for sexual attraction,” Villette added from the opposite corner. Brady blinked. He’d almost faded into the woodwork there. “He’s picking them because they remind him of himself.”

The owner of the eyebrow ducked her head.

Reyes picked up the cue; spread out an arm to include both sides of the room. He was much too experienced at this to pace. “Our UNSUB experienced a trauma as a young child: around seven to ten, about the age of the children he takes. Abuse, or sexual assault, or violence. Something that made him feel as if he would never be safe again. His innocence was destroyed, and that’s his driving force. He’s reenacting that trauma with his victims.”

“He feels he’s showing them,” Falkner said, “that the world is not safe.”

Brady leaned back against the wall, arms crossed, off safely to the side, and watched a handful of foreheads crinkle; a handful of pencils still on their notepads. A handful of people run their fingers through the weave of their social circles, casual acquaintances, nearest and dearest, and try to come up with a killer.

It came up empty, of course. There were things people never asked each other, unless it was across a bed. Even when it was across a bed. There are so many things—he shifted his weight, lightly—we don’t actually want to know.

A uniform cop in the second row stuck up her hand. “So how’s he getting into the houses?”

“We’re still gathering data on that,” Reyes said. His eyes didn’t even flicker; nice dodge, but not nice enough. Seven-point-five from the Russian judge. “The important thing is this: We know what the man we’re looking for has in his past, what he’ll look like, and how he’ll behave. Find the person who fits this profile, and blocking his entry points will be immaterial.”

It was about as much of an answer as Taco Bell was an authentic Mexican dining experience, but the Natchez PD seemed to catch that it was the one they were gonna get. Detective Croft stood and clicked his notebook shut, and then all of them were up, hurrying in every direction not blocked by a stained white plaster wall.

Reyes straightened imperceptibly, adjusted his silk tie. “Villette? Give Todd a call. Get him hunting down any record of child abuse cases going twenty-five, thirty years back that fit our parameters, child protective services files or criminal charges.”

Falkner stood, fist knuckled into her lower back. “I’ll hit up the older officers for gossip.”

Reyes nodded. Falkner’s low heels clicked steady across the station floor, a slowly accelerating heartbeat. Chaz palmed his cellphone and retreated, soft-shoe, into their conference room office.

“You want this out to the local media?” Lau asked, and Reyes shook his head.

“I have something else for you and Worth. And Detectives Davis and Croft, if you’re available.”

Detective Davis came around her desk cautiously. “What’s that?”

Reyes threw another glance at Holding Three; one definitely meant for public consumption. “I think it’d be better if we moved up that town meeting, please,” he said to Davis. She blinked with understanding and went to a cluttered, busy desk. Picked up the phone.

“Press conference?” Brady asked.

Stephen Reyes shook his head. “Firebreaks.”

•

The people of Natchez, Mississippi crowded into the gymnasium at Alcorn State with a restless enthusiasm that made Daphne Worth think of pep rallies. Or a hospital on the afternoon you heard budget cuts were coming down. Or maybe that bit from Birth of a Nation, but with a generous sprinkling of tired-looking mothers holding their curious toddlers with an undistracted deathgrip, and the way the teenagers in the corner huddled together, and the slight smell of unwashed hair—

Okay, Harpy. That wasn’t fair. Let’s try to fling a little less poo, now.

Worth ran a hand through her hair and sighed. It needed washing too. It was much, much too humid today.

Lau came up beside her, half-visible against the sunlight streaming in from the high plastic windows. Wrong angle; she shifted, and Lau’s carefully impassive working face came into view. “Ready?” she said.

Worth nodded. Ready as she was ever going to be. No sense in starting up a conversation about otherwise at this stage of the game.

“Right,” Lau said, and sat down beside her. The college had provided a gross of folding chairs, lined up in crooked rows along the sweeps of colored lines painted for basketball, tennis, sprints. The speakers behind the podium—Lau, Worth, Davis, and an older man from the communications end of Natchez’s suddenly very overworked PD—had another row of the same. The front row spectators in the audience were watching them with a wary curiosity, but nobody had come up to attempt an ID. Yet.

The communications man tapped the microphone lightly, and Worth came to attention.

“Thank you for coming,” he said gently, and the room quieted down in a way worthy of an educational institution. “I’m Phil Moreland, from the Natchez police department. We’re here today to answer some questions about the recent abductions, and we’re here to talk about your safety.

“This is Detective Mahalia Davis,” he said, over the inevitable, restless stir, “and we have Agents Nicolette Lau and Daphne Worth from the FBI here today. The microphone’s in the front aisle, and once we make sure everyone has the background, we’ll start taking questions there.”

Davis took the podium and started outlining the case in a dry, nervous tone: three dead boys, one missing, black and Hispanic and white, poor or richer. Six men locked up in the municipal holding cells.

Worth bit the inside of her cheek and scanned the crowd for a male, between thirty and forty years of age, solitary, apart. Leaned slightly forward to take it all in.

The dig of a small elbow in her ribs broke her concentration. She looked over, and Lau was watching her out of the corner of her eye; slow, steady expression. “They’re on your side,” she said, and Worth blinked.

“Hm?”

“We’re on their side,” she repeated. “And they’re on ours.”

“The important thing,” Davis was saying, “is to remember that your neighbors are still your neighbors and your families are still your families.” Moreland stood just off to the side, behind Davis, arms crossed. He nodded.

The woman across from her in the front row fidgeted in her seat, baby in lap. Her arms tightened around the sleeping kid.

Worth let out a breath, and then nodded. “Thanks.”

Lau nodded and stood, hands smoothing her pencil skirt, with a calm, professional smile.

“Agent Lau,” Moreland said by way of introduction, and Nicolette Lau tucked the microphone down to reach her chin.

“I’ll take questions now,” she said, and the floor exploded with upraised hands.

Act IV

Daniel Brady was on his fifth coffee of the day when Stephen Reyes opened the conference room door. Detective Croft was on his heels, and they were both of them loaded down with fresh stacks of white paper. “The Ellroys’ alarm logs,” Croft said, looking pouchy and hassled, and handed out the fresh kill. “Finally.”

“Alarm logs!” Sol Todd crowed through the phone in the center of the table.

“How are you not tired?” Brady said.

“Son, I was pulling all-nighters before you were born,” came back through the echoing phone line.

Falkner, perched on a filing cabinet, turned toward the phone where Solomon Todd was connected full-time now, and damn the long-distance charges. “Did they explain the delay?”

Croft’s heavy mouth turned sardonic. “Property crime’s been up the past six months. A lot of families in town looking into alarm systems, too much paperwork and money to dig through, woe is them. Nice to know something in this town is making money.”

Villette dipped a hand into the mass of white paper. “The fences are probably doing okay too.”

Croft snorted. It didn’t sound too amused.

Brady riffled through the stack of paper—it was that thin kind where you had to separate each page and peel the hole-punched edges off like opening up a banana—and squinted at times, dates, columns of numbers going back and back. “It took them a whole day to get us this? How far up are the B and Es around here?”

“Up,” Croft said. “The paper mill’s been bleeding jobs since the economy went bad, and there weren’t all that many to start with. People are getting desperate. Anyone who’s not looking at their neighbor’s stuff is looking into protecting their own stuff.”

Brady closed his eyes; flashed on a small mountain of toys, stacked haphazard and incongruous on a brown-carpeted floor. “Including the Butlers?”

Reyes looked up, and if he hadn’t looked grim before he sure did now. “Todd? Check on whether Steve or Althea Butler put in a call to a home security company sometime in the last few months?”

“I’ll call them,” Croft said. “It’ll be faster.”

“How about our other victims?” Reyes asked, and Croft nodded on the way out.

The door shut, and Reyes turned back to the phone. “And Todd, pull the alarm company’s staff records.”

Brady poked through the printed sheets until he found the week before the Ellroys’ son disappeared. The alarm system was armed, disarmed with clockwork regularity: the morning paper, the school bus time, their arrival home in the evening all clearly delineated.

“You can get their whole routine here,” he said, and waved the paper. “And Swiss trains probably run on it.”

“No reason to vary it,” Falkner said. “They felt safe.”

Croft opened the door, poked his head in. “The Butlers got a quote. Thomson Home Security.” He pulled a champion face. “It was too much, so they held off.”

Falkner looked up, studied his face. “Blaming themselves?”

Croft nodded. “Unfortunately. Going to try the Birkses now.”

Villette was already on his feet. “That’s a different company. The Ellroys are”—he waved his hand for the printout, and Lau handed it back—”Pitbull Alarm Systems.”

“There goes that,” Brady said.

“No, it still makes sense. It’s the easiest way to get inside,” Villette said. Brady looked up, and he shrugged, half-shoulder. “Already be on the inside.”

Worth leaned forward. “On the inside of which company?”

“Um,” Villette said. “Sol? Can you find any employees who have worked for both Pitbull Alarm Systems and Thomson Home Security in the last six months? Someone who got fired, or changed jobs, or contractors, anything. Anyone they both refer business to.”

Paper rustled. Brady stared down the barrel of his coffee mug. It was cold.

“Here we go,” Todd said. “One Clayton Alexander Maxwell, thirty-eight years of age, white, never married. Resident of Natchez as of January 2002, hailing originally from Baltimore, Maryland. And he’s a contract installer for both Pitbull and Thomson on all kinds of interesting things, the most interesting of which are—tada—alarm systems.”

Brady put down the coffee cup.

The sound of clicking keys came over the line. “If he’s going to install things for these people he’ll have had to provide a driver’s license before they let him drive a company truck. Drug test, too. And—hold on. It appears our boy Maxwell has a history. Check this out.”

Six phones blipped in unison, overlapping like church bells. Brady dug his out and thumbed open the message. It was a child services file, scanned with bonus rumples and tears included, and if that wasn’t a coffee stain he went out Sundays in a tutu. The picture appended was a young boy, white, looking maybe seven years old at the outside even though the file said ten. He was turned away from the camera. Or was maybe just avoiding whoever was behind the camera.

“Youch,” Worth muttered, and Brady had to agree. The kid’s stepfather had put him on a ventilator for a week. And then—”They sent him home?”

“They sent him home,” Todd said.

“What about the rape?” Brady said. “He wouldn’t just add that in himself. There’s nothing about that in here.”

“It was inside a family,” Lau said, and he was not imagining that edge in her voice, the way she held it low. “It’s still hard enough to get a rape kit ordered for little girls half the time, never mind the boys. And this was almost thirty years ago.”

“So it could have gone on,” Villette said evenly, “after he went back.”

“Well, that’s more than enough initial trauma,” Worth said, and scrubbed her eyes with the back of one hand. “What’s the second hit? And what’s the manifestation?”

“Getting in and out,” Lau said. “That’s what Down the Hall couldn’t explain.”

“Getting an extra key made for a door is something anyone can do,” Villette said.

Worth looked up. “It is.”

“So is circumventing an alarm system and hiding in a closet.”

“What’re you saying?” Brady put in.

Villette spread his hands. “We don’t have an awful lot to say this is actually anomalous.”

“That’s all theoretical until we know if Emmet Butler’s still alive,” Stephen Reyes said, and stood. “Todd, home address?”

Todd rattled it off like a mug scraping across cell bars.

“All right,” Reyes said. “Let’s suit up and pay a visit.”

Brady caught up with Reyes in the parking lot, jacket halfway on, to find Chaz had beaten him to the punch. “So there’s no reason for this to be anomalous,” Chaz was saying. The lines of Reyes’s face drew down into a sour mask. Maybe not the best time to push it.

“We work the case as if it is. There’s no sense in taking chances.”

The silence that followed was awkward. No sense in taking chances with your people unless you decide there is, right?

It was an old beef. Almost gone stale. Brady whuffed out a breath, and they both turned around. “How long do we work it that way?”

“Pardon?” Reyes asked.

“Well,” he said, keeping it cool, keeping it offhand. “An awful lot of our cases end a certain way.”

Reyes pursed his lips. Villette turned away studiously to inspect something on the wall, and even under all that melanin, Brady saw the flush.

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” Reyes said. “Just stay careful.” He paused, again. “Use your judgment.”

It was just as good an answer as It doesn’t matter how he’s getting in.

Use your judgment. Right.

Daniel Brady shrugged on his jacket, rested his hand on his sidearm, and patted the safety like a good-luck charm.

•

There was mail piled up in the mailbox on Clay Maxwell’s front stoop. Brady flicked through it with one gloved finger: a full week’s worth of junk flyers and bank statements and bills. No catalogs: no such luck as that. Catalog subscriptions were always great for prying into someone’s mental underwear drawer.

No catalogs, and no lights on inside.

“Looks empty,” he said.

“Looks it,” Lau agreed, and her hand went to her sidearm.

He pulled his own out, hefted the weight. Beckoned Reyes and Villette forward with a jerk of the chin. Falkner crooked a finger at a uniformed officer off to the side, and they moved, careful feet crushing browned-out grass, around the side of the house. Brady knocked on the door, three strong raps. “Clayton Maxwell? FBI.”

A bird whistled down the street. Tires sounded, swishing and calm, on asphalt. Brady looked at Lau, raised an eyebrow, and she nodded.

He reared back and kicked the door open.

The house sharpened into a blur of darkened hallways, cracked floor tiles, walls painted a standard buyer’s beige. Lau hustled in before him, gun trained and ready, and after them poured in a ration of local PD, Reyes and Villette in the rear. “Clear,” Lau called, and kicked another door open for him to hurry through, firearm ready. Living room, cramped downstairs bathroom, a kitchen at the back of the house with a thick sheen of dust on the counters and dirty stove. A fly buzzed, frightened, into a greasy windowpane and dropped.

“Clear,” Villette called down the stairs, and Lau let out a breath. Falkner and Worth came in through the back door, holstering their weapons.

“No one here,” Brady said, and let his outstretched arms sag. “Not for a while.”

“He’s in the wind,” Worth said.

Reyes and Villette joined them, rustling bits of broken floor tile. Reyes tossed something on the kitchen table: the mail in hand. “This goes back before the Ellroy murder. It’s not us that spooked him.”

“So he can’t be too far,” Falkner said. There were shadows under her eyes. Fatigue, or the dim light, or whatever; they made her look old. “Put an APB on his vehicle. I don’t care what you threaten, you can’t transport an abducted kid in public on foot. Not in a city this size.”

Worth slipped out into the hallway to find a uniformed officer. A radio crackled, far away.

“All right,” Reyes said. “While we’re here, let’s take a look.”

Brady roamed back through the living room—resolved it from a blur of emptiness, a threat rating, to dingy couch, carefully manicured newspaper rack, clumped, stiffened carpet—and walked up the narrow, creaking stairs to the upstairs hall. It was small for a house that’d bothered with a second story: two rooms and a bathroom, the thin beige doors of each huddled together like prey. The curl of dirty laundry identified the bedroom easy enough. He snapped on a pair of gloves and pushed open the lolling door.

There was nothing there.

Okay, not nothing; there were heaps of laundry, maybe once dirty and clean but mostly just dirty now. There was a mattress flung out across the floor like an afterthought, unsheeted, askew. A scarred desk hulked in one corner of the room, dying under drifts of paper, every drawer pulled and left lolling open. Brady frowned. This didn’t look right: someone this sloppy would’ve already been dragged to the station house, or at least have made himself obvious enough to acquire a brand-new crown of beer bottle glass.

Someone this sloppy didn’t find three separate yet equally out of the way dump sites for his bodies.

Villette came out of the other room and stopped in the doorway. Brady heard him hesitate; turned full. There was, held out like an offering, a little green army man in one gloved palm.

“There are hundreds of them in there,” he said. “Thousands.”

Brady took it, turned it over. The plastic was dark green, unfaded and unfazed by sun or water or time. “New.”

Villette nodded. He stepped back to let Brady through, into the hallway, into the other room.

There were thousands. They were arranged row on row, in concentric circles, faced out bravely around an empty scrap of carpet. No: around a wall, and a double-doored closet.

Brady picked a path over green plastic, careful. Opened the closet door with two careful fingers.

Clayton Maxwell’s blankets were light blue. They were edged with something satiny that might once have been shiny, like a baby blanket would be, and was now just ripped and scuffed. The pillows were uncased, stained with sweat. The habitual imprint of a head, a neck, pressed into them ghostly.

He’s hiding, Brady thought, fleeting, and closed the door like it had been an intrusion. “There’s got to be another place. A business, another house. Somewhere he feels protected.”

“Ten percent of the houses in this city have been foreclosed on,” Villette said softly.

Brady’s throat was dry. “He could be anywhere.”

•

The search for Clay Maxwell’s electrical van went door to door, block by block, in squad cars cruising silent with their lights taken down. It was a small city. It was still slow fucking work.

Worth turned up the radio calling another block clear while Chaz drummed his fingers on the conference room table, putting fat markered Xes over block after block on a map of the greater Natchez, MS area. “This is ridiculous,” he said. Tap tap tap. He probably didn’t even know he was doing it. “He’s got to be watching for cop cars. And we can’t just run through every empty house inside five blocks of wherever we find the van; he’ll spook.”

“They need to do something,” Worth said. She knew the feeling. She needed to do something.

“Mom and Reyes should have told them no. We’re not working the profile. We’re just reacting.”

Daphne Worth did not disagree. “Kids,” she said instead.

After a second, Chaz nodded. “Kids. Okay. So it’s normal. But it’s still not going to work.”

“So what d’you want to do?”

She saw him scrub his face with long fingers out of the corner of her eye. “Where would you go to hide out with your new toy if you wanted to keep him three whole days and couldn’t afford to put money down? Where would you feel safe?”

Worth chewed her lip. Tasted coffee and that ridiculous strawberry lip gloss of Tricia’s she’d found in a drawer the week before and promptly kidnapped. “Somewhere as far away from cops or his family or other threats as possible. Somewhere I’d be able to scout in advance and lay in supplies. Somewhere I knew.”

Chaz nodded. “I bet he didn’t have time to work up soundproofing or anything. He moves fast, and that house was too sloppy. I can’t see him, well. Holding off long enough to renovate.”

“No prep, then,” Worth said, feeling a relief at it that wasn’t so obscure. No dungeons. No elaborate setups. Nothing inventive, terrible, anomalous to find later.

The conference room door opened and spat in Esther Falkner like something out of the last war. “No other properties,” she said, and sank into a chair in a way that looked decidedly off-kilter. “He rented the house, and that was it. How’s the van?”

“They’re looking,” Worth said. The radio sounded. Chaz pursed his lips and crossed another X onto the map. “We’re trying to narrow it down for them.”

Falkner eyed the coffeepot with a kind of caution usually reserved for tropical snakes. “What’re you thinking?”

“That it’s worth looking up houses Maxwell was familiar with,” Chaz said, and snagged the beige conference room phone off its cradle.

“Houses he worked on,” Falkner said, and nodded sharply. “Forget the alarm companies; call Todd.”

Solomon Todd sounded only slightly more subdued than he had that morning. “The silver lining on all this?”

“Mm?” Chaz replied.

“Alarm companies have terrible database security. All right, here it comes.”

Worth’s phone pinged. She thumbed a few buttons and a scroll of names, dates, addresses, filled the screen. Falkner reached for her own; Chaz Villette’s was already in his hand.

Worth scrolled down five entries and blinked. “Hey, hold on. That’s the Ellroys’ place.”

Falkner whistled through her teeth, softly. “So he’d been in the house before. That makes sense. He leaves himself loopholes.”

Chaz was already paging through the list. His cheeks flushed a little, but he didn’t look up. “There’s our first victim. Not the second—Todd, did Maxwell do an install at that address?”

Keys clicked. The line crackled. The radio sounded, and another Natchez city block came in clean. “No, he didn’t,” Todd said. “But he did one down the street the same week. That’d be the Wallaces at 5708.”

Falkner nodded, brusque but not sharp. “So maybe he sees Angelo Birks on the street, passing by. Or the kid goes over to play.”

Chaz stood, phone balanced in one hand; lifted the other one over their map with a bright red marker. “So what’s far away?” He paused. “Todd, what on that list is vacant?”

“Hrm,” Sol Todd said, and rattled off a list of addresses. Seven, maybe eight. Much fewer to check than the whole of the downtown Natchez area.

Worth’s heart sped, anticipatory. She closed the e-mail and went for her speed dial.

“Brady.” The air behind his voice was all wind, and tires, and silence.

“Hey. We have something for you. Eight addresses he worked on, vacant houses. Places he’s familiar with.”

She could have sworn Danny Brady almost purred. “I’ll call off the canvas, then. Give ‘em over.”

She listed addresses. The litany on the radio broke off, replaced with Unit to 255 Main; unit to 1701 Martin Luther King Avenue. Remember, just look, don’t touch. “Thanks,” she told Brady, and snapped the phone shut. The silence that followed oppressed.

Chaz had marked neat little red Xes on the map; he was tracing them, their trajectories, eyes flicking back and forth and over. Falkner had picked up the land line’s receiver and was talking to Todd in a low voice. Worth laced her fingers together and mentally sat on them. Wait. Just sit tight and wait.

Natchez was a small city. It wasn’t ten minutes before the radio crackled, and “Control,” a tight voice said. “Vehicle sighted.”

Worth leapt out of her chair and grabbed the two-way. “This is Control,” she said. “Location?”

The address was meaningless. Some house on some street in some city in America, functionally like all the other ones. She put down the radio, snugged her weapon in its holster. The vests were in the car. They could put them on on the way.

Chaz stabbed the map with one thin finger. The paper shook. “There.”

•

Abandoned houses, Daniel Brady realized, weren’t really all that abandoned. People left things: rugs, stacks of crusted dishes. Photographs, hanging on the wall, or the spaces where photographs should be. No matter what you did, there was always a trail. You never really wiped anything clean.

He reset his grip on the Glock and stepped quiet down the hall. Dust rose from the carpet with every footstep. He reached up, pinched his nose until the sneeze was past. The reassembled team, FBI and locals both, paused behind him. He breathed out. Glanced right, left. Moved on.

“Clear,” Reyes murmured through the earpiece. Nobody upstairs.

Brady snapped around the corner into the family room, wordless, weapon trained. The marks where a couch had sat for years, maybe decades, were stamped into the faded brown carpet. Sunlight slanted through dirty windows. Nothing.

“Clear,” he echoed, and glanced over his shoulder at Chaz. Tilted his head to a door they hadn’t opened. Basement. Down.

Chaz nodded, backed up behind the door, reached out for the dingy fake brass handle. If the door creaked they’d be sunk. If the stairs creaked, they’d be sunk. Best to just charge the thing. “We’re going downstairs,” he muttered into the tiny microphone, and “Copy,” came over the earpiece.

He held up his hand, gave a three-count.

Chaz yanked open the door and they stormed down the basement stairs.

It was dim upstairs, but here it was dark; he’d known it would be. That still didn’t give his eyes enough time to adjust before he had to swing his weapon in a wide, covering arc; shout, “FBI, freeze!” into the gloom. The basement was musty. It smelled like abandoned things, half-rotted foundations, sweat.

That hard-to-pinpoint reek, sour and pheromonal, that meant fear.

Right place, Brady registered, clinically, before Chaz slipped past him to a dangling chain-pull fixture and flooded the room with light.

His eyes focused on ancient rebar shelves; an abandoned orange toolbox; a stack of discarded bathroom towels. He couldn’t pick out Maxwell for a full ten seconds; not until the man moved.

Clay Maxwell was skinny; medium-tall in a faded blue denim shirt and clean-pressed khaki pants that were slowly losing their crease. He was balding in a totally nondescript way, a touch at the front and sides; the topography of every receding hairline that ever lived. His hand was up, shading his eyes on pure instinct, and the tanned, thick knuckles were bruised. Red.

He knelt on the edge of a blue plastic-covered mat, the kind they used in elementary school gym classes so you didn’t break your neck. There was a little lump of fabric beside him: hunter green on the top, denim on the bottom, splotched dark with Maxwell’s shadow. It wasn’t moving.

His eyes were very big. Very white.

“Stand up,” Danny Brady told him, lining up the sights automatically. “Step away from the boy.”

Maxwell’s mouth opened and shut like any of this was rightfully a surprise.

“C’mon,” Brady said, and kept the gun trained on Maxwell’s center of mass. The walls down here were concrete. Not the best place to be firing a shot anyway, but Maxwell didn’t know that. He stood.

Brady registered a shuffle behind him; Villette, taking aim. Maxwell looked up sharply, and Brady sucked in a breath and steadied his elbow. “He’s dead, isn’t he, Clay?” Villette said, soft, warning.

“Yeah,” Maxwell said, hoarse whisper, and scuffed a foot on the poured-concrete floor of the basement.

“Nothing more to say about that?” A beat. “No reasons? No excuses?”

Brady felt his neck muscles tense to keep him from turning his head away from the man next to the dead kid. Oh, Chaz. Don’t go off the reservation, today of all days.

Maxwell just blinked: no speak Cop. Off-script. Not how this was supposed to go. Sure’s hell it wasn’t. Villette moved forward to join him, out of his blind spot. Brady risked a glance. He didn’t look like he was necessarily going to blow. Just tired. Really, really tired.

“Right,” Chaz said, with a thin intensity that made Brady fight not to step back a foot. “What did we forget about monsters?”

“What’s that?” he asked carefully.

“That they’re banal. They’re everyday,” his voice was professional, disinterested. Cutting. “That they’re really nothing special after all.”

Maxwell flinched. He had thin wrists; so thin. Like an unfed kid’s. Like a gamma’s, Brady realized, but the fight still hadn’t come. No malice, no energy; none of the glint deep down in the back of the eyes. Nothing there but pathetic, knee-jerk fear.

Brady released the safety, shoved the gun roughly into the holster. Reached for his cuffs.

Maxwell’s hunched skinny body ducked, broke, and ran.

“Hey!” Brady shouted, and took off.

“Get down!” someone upstairs hollered as Brady thundered up the stairs after him. “Down on the ground!” His sidearm teetered, not quite homed, and tipped out onto the stairs. No time to stop for it; Chaz could scoop it up, and Chaz was behind him, clattering upstairs on a two-second delay. He ducked his head and kept running.

Brady gained the main floor, looked left, looked right, through to the kitchen and the open back door.

It was autumn-bright in the yard, overgrown; knee-high weeds stung through his pantlegs as he strode through them after Maxwell, Maxwell who ran glancing behind him, who couldn’t run fast enough to shake Daniel Brady as he jogged four steps, turned it up for two more, and tackled.

They hit the ground hard. It wasn’t even close to a fair fight. Daniel Brady had several inches and probably sixty pounds on the guy, and the good Lord had allocated each and every one of them to one of those muscles you used for pinning a man down, pressing his cheek into dusty gravel, bringing his arms up to snap into a pair of cuffs.

Maxwell made a sound like a wail when the first cuff snagged tight around his wrist. Oh, hell. Brady got the hell off him and did the rest standing. Sirens blared, skidding their way homewards, forming circles upon circles upon regiments around the house where Emmett Butler’s body was curled up. Too late, Brady thought, and hauled Maxwell’s body out of the fetal crouch it was desperately trying for. Too late.

Five long seconds and Esther Falkner was beside him, kitted out, hair tied back, a spark in her eyes. “The kid?”

Danny Brady backed up, let the local PD behind her take Maxwell by each arm, march him through the backyard and into the kitchen, where they could search him for weapons, fall into process and routine and procedure while the prisoner transport van came around back. He shook his head.

Falkner let out a breath, shoulders sagging.

“Yeah,” he said. “Too late.”

•

There was already a crowd outside the abandoned house.

Someone must have got word out; local PD or a neighbor, watching the entire Natchez police department close in on the little shotgun house through barely drawn curtains. Way too many people were lined up in clumps across the street, watching the activity. Watching the door.

“This isn’t good,” Worth said, watching them right back through the dirt-streaked front window.

Brady picked a piece of gravel out of the gap between his vest and his sweat-wilted shirt. The local cops were moving their cars to form up a barricade; police tape wasn’t going to do it this time. The crime scene unit lurked down a side street, waiting. Out on the porch, Nicolette Lau and Stephen Reyes’s voices were barely audible, rise and fall. There were going to be cameras here soon; out-of-town ones. More hours before they could turn around and go home.

“Davis found something,” Worth said, not turning around. “Burglary report out at Maxwell’s place, about three months back. Someone got in and tossed the place.”

Brady blinked. “So that wasn’t mixed signals. The disorganization.”

“No,” Worth said. Paused. “He just never had it in him to clean it up.”

Ah. “Trigger,” Brady supplied.

“Yeah.”

“Why didn’t he have an alarm system in?”

Worth shrugged uncomfortably. “Those installers only get paid about ten dollars an hour. Probably couldn’t afford it.”

The first news van pulled up, doors falling open almost delicately as the brake lights came on. Lau appeared on the walk, out of her vest and helmet, hair pasted to her head with drying sweat. She caught sight of them through the window, raised an eyebrow. It was as impenetrable as Upper Sumerian for a second, and then—yeah. Asked her yet?

Brady resisted the urge to raise a middle finger.

Footsteps shuffled in behind them, deliberately long and scuffed; Charles Villette’s way of not making any sudden moves. Worth looked up, flashed him a brief smile.

“We’re going to take him out the back,” Chaz said. “Once the press conference has started. Mom’s getting the van around.”

Backdoor fade. Brady decided not to put money on whether that’d been Reyes’s idea or Lau’s. “Double escort?” he asked.

Chaz shrugged, suddenly stick-thin and uncomfortable, chin canted downwards. “He’s not gonna give us any more trouble. He threw the bodies in the ditch.”

He threw the bodies in the—oh. “He was projecting onto the kids,” Brady said. Profiling kindergarten. Psychology 101.

Chaz nodded. “He doesn’t like himself very much,” he said, quiet and clipped, and handed Brady’s sidearm back, grip first.

He took it, checked it. Snugged it into the usual place, snapped the holster shut. “Thanks.”

Chaz nodded again and excused himself without another word.

The news crews were setting up—three of them now. The local police cleared a space: room enough for Lau and Reyes, for Detectives Davis and Croft. Someone switched on a floodlight. It blended with the autumn sun.

“Ask you something?” Brady said. It came out just casual enough that he knew it took Worth point-five seconds to figure out something was up.

“Mm?”

“How’d you tell your father?”

He didn’t have to specify what. She knew.

Worth wrinkled her forehead briefly; scratched at a smear on the glass. “I didn’t.”

Brady turned, surprised. She gave him an awkward, slightly shamefaced smile. “I cheated. I told him I liked girls and boys five minutes before I told him I wasn’t going to medical school. I don’t think he even heard the first bit for a week.”

He snorted and ran a hand through his hair. It was limp, a little sweaty. “Don’t think that’s going to work.”

Worth gave him an appraising look. “I heard the John Wayne method gets good results.”

He quirked an eyebrow. “Ride into town and blow away anything that looks at you funny?”

She whuffed out a little breath that was the closest he was going to get to a laugh in this house. “Never apologize, never explain.”

He nodded slowly. “Thanks,” he said, and outside the window, Lau began telling the nation about the capture of the Natchez serial killer.

Falkner came in a minute later, still in her vest. “The barriers are up. It’s time to take him out of here.”

Brady stood, tested his right arm, then left. Sore. Still good. “I got it.”

He could feel just how curious that glance was on the back of his head. Falkner would never ask You sure? but she could sure as hell think it at you.

“It’s all right,” he said, and clumped his way to the dusty, broken-down kitchen. “I got it.”

Clay Maxwell was slumped over the kitchen table in handcuffs, under the eye of two very blank-faced uniformed cops. Brady nodded to them as he rounded the corner, and that expressionlessness didn’t quiver. Well. Everybody had ways of dealing with a thing, or not dealing. Or decompensating into a puddle on someone else’s table.

“Come on,” he said, breathing-close to Maxwell’s pressed-together knees. “Time to go.”

He wouldn’t stand. In the end, Brady had to take him by one arm while the officer on duty lifted him by the other, and between them they paraded him through the back door, down the flattened, browned, knee-high grass, to the swinging-open chain-link gate where the squad car was waiting. The sun hit him direct in the eyes. He squinted through it, spotted the hangover of the crowd, curled round the corner, pointing their way over the humped roofs of police vehicles.

“All right. Let’s make this quick now,” he said, and the officer quickened his pace.

The squad car door was already open. Clayton Maxwell’s knees had no resistance left in them. The driver sat ready to go.

“Queer—” someone shouted, back behind the makeshift, rickety cordon, and Danny Brady laid a big hand on the back of Clayton Maxwell’s head and tucked him into the squad car.

Act V

Brady’s office phone rang an hour after they landed, his go bag full of dirty and unpressed clothes and heavy with the requisite paperwork to send Clayton Maxwell, banal everyday serial murderer, into the American correctional system. The bullpen was quiet; all the chat had been spent on the airplane. The ringer went off into that silence like the Running of the High-Pitched Bulls.

Brady grabbed the receiver before it could strike again. “Hello?” he said. Nobody would be calling him for anything work-related tonight; anyway, all his autopilot professionalism was probably still in the air over the Appalachians.

“Danny,” the familiar voice said, mild, careful. Gray. On a landline; Gray at home. “You sound like hell.”

“How did you know I was back?” he asked, absently rubbing itchy eyes. Too much recirculated air. Too much anger. Not enough sleep.

“Ways and means,” he said, light and cheerful and teasing. “You’ll be free sometime soon?”

Which wasn’t so light, or cheerful. Gray Putnam still didn’t trust him. Not entirely.

He deserved that, he did.

Brady sighed a little, leaned his head into the receiver as if it were a warm shoulder. Let him play G-man if he really wanted to; God knew Brady didn’t complain about it in a whole host of other settings. “Soon,” he promised. The paperwork needed doing. His paperwork needed doing. He looked down at the death reports for four children, the photocopied alarm logs, the glitches in them, circled spiral in blue ink by Chaz Villette, that showed Maxwell’s times of entry: four nights here, three nights there. Hiding in the closet. Watching them sleep and dream the sound of monsters in their rooms, breathing.

Brady swallowed. There were always sleepless mornings for that. There was always tomorrow. “What’s up?”

“Nothing,” Gray said, and there, the edge was in. “I just thought you might like some dinner.”

“I would. I do,” he said hastily, and stared down at this hands, the papers on his desk. “I just need to wrap one thing up here.”

He didn’t say something happened. But here and now, after everything—after Minneapolis—he didn’t need to. The bottom fell out of Gray Putnam’s voice. “Everything all right?” he asked.

Brady tried to keep his own voice light. “On the relative scale.”

“You all right?”

Brady knew what he meant: ten fingers, ten toes, and a healthy squall when you smacked it. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m all right.”

Gray didn’t believe him. The silence on the other end of the line said that quite clearly. But, “All right,” he said. “Bring beer if you want it; I’m all out.” I got rid of that stuff you drink and haven’t yet replaced it.

“All right,” he said, and set down the phone, and stared at the sweat from his fingers evaporating on the handset for a good five minutes.

He picked up the phone once more before leaving the office. It was late, but it was Sunday, and Daniel Brady had called his mother every Sunday since he’d moved into the dorms at eighteen. The habits of a lifetime weren’t all that easy to break.

He dialed eleven digits, and listened to it ring.

“Hello?” his mother said, and the strain was already in her voice. It was late. She’d been worrying.

“Hi, Mom,” he said. “Hope I didn’t wake you up.” They both knew he hadn’t.

“No, no,” she said, already sounding easier. “We were just watching the news. Everything all right?”

“Yeah,” he said; the question everyone asked and the answer everyone wanted to hear. The answer everyone expected of you, day in and day out. Status quo. “I’m fine. Just tired.”

“Good,” she said, maybe more easily dissuaded after a lifetime of leaving those silences the hell alone. “How’s work?”

“All right,” he said, and told her how they’d just got back from a case, and how they’d caught the guy who did it, and didn’t tell her about the dead lump of somebody else’s child displaying its final terror on a secondhand gym mat. He told her about the neighbor across the way. He asked after his cousins. The knot drew tighter and tighter in the center of his chest, just below the place where his heart would be.

“You meet anyone nice?” she asked finally, offhand. A little too casual for something to not be up.

Daniel Brady tightened his hand around the phone. Hopped the receiver to his other hand; his right hand was sweaty. Wiped it on the side of his jeans.

“Danny?”

He closed his eyes and saw that pile of trampled laundry, the dead little body in the corner. Heard Chaz Villette’s voice strip the anomalous, the wicked and strange off Clayton Maxwell in layers until all that was left was a pathetic, hunched little man.

“Get Dad on the phone, please,” he said through the rock in his throat.

“Danny?” his mother asked again, confused now that they were off-script, apprehensive in the same way Emmet Butler’s mother had sounded when she’d described for the officers once again how she’d opened the door and her kid was gone, gone, gone.

“Get Dad to pick up in the other room. I...want to talk to you both.”

“All right,” Rosemary Gilmer Brady said heavily. Like she’d known this was coming for years.

His father jiggled the old rotary phone when he picked it up. Brady didn’t hold the receiver away from his ear like usual, just waited for the noise to stop, the throat to clear, Jim Brady’s rusty voice to say, “Hello?”

“Dad,” he said, and abruptly had no idea how to go on.

“Daniel,” his father said, deep and cautious. Jim Brady had never been familiar with anyone in his life. “Is everything all right?”

Yes. No. Yes. It was all right for the first time in a very long time, but really it wasn’t; really it had never been all right, and things weren’t going to be all right very, very soon. You’re tying yourself in knots, cowboy.

They’re gonna have to drag you to the car.

Daniel Brady blinked, wiped a hand across his eyes.

Get up, he told himself, and walk.

“I met someone nice,” he said, and the words crackled and echoed through 1,300 miles of phone line, across switchboards and switchbacks, far enough to push through time; to push right through who a person was now into who they were before. “I wanted to tell you both. I’ve met someone.”

“Danny, that’s good,” his mother said, sounding strange and strained and cautious. “What’s—”

“His name’s Grayson. He works for the State Department.”

“Wait,” his father said, as terrible as he always knew it would be, as terrible and hoarse as disappointment or death by drowning. “You say his name?”

The monster in the closet was real. And it wasn’t. And it was. Come on, Big Damn Hero.

Danny Brady took a breath. “Yes.”

“Daniel, how long has this—” his father managed.

“Always,” he said, and held his breath, and shut his eyes against the blow he knew was coming.

•

He showed up at Grayson Putnam’s doorstep without a case of beer, without having combed his hair; without an offering.

“Danny,” Gray said when he opened the door. Eyes wary. Wondering, he knew, whether everything was all right after all.

Daniel Brady held up a hand, still shaking. Shaking from holding a phone very, very tight, and then setting it down quietly against the shouting. “I told them,” he said.

Gray still hung onto the door, his eyes light and wary, his trim body blocking the way inside. There was an indent on that shoulder where Brady could pillow his head. There was a mole on the arm below it, shaped like a comma, that he could brush idle with a fingertip. “You told who what?”

Brady took a deep breath. “I told my parents,” he said, “that I have met someone nice.”

Gray stood in the doorway for ten long breaths before he opened it wide, mouth crimped tight because real men didn’t cry, and let Danny Brady into his arms.

So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. — Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1933

“Shatterproof”

Adams Morgan Neighborhood, Washington, D.C., November 2009

This is how it works. You drive yourself home alone, with the bag of dirty clothes on the passenger seat. You park alone in the driveway before the narrow, charming brownstone row house with the tall window and the stained-glass panels on either side of the door. You check the shadows before you get out, alone, and go up the walk in the light autumn rain, alone, and unlock the door—alone, and aware of your situation, of the potential threats, of the night.

You are not a victim. You know how to fight. You carry a gun. You keep one hand free as you step inside and shut the door and key the security code.

You lean back against the dark, solid door—so heavy, so unlike anything Californian—and breathe in the November air. My house. Mine.

All yours, and yours alone. Bought with your money, furnished to your taste. Your den.

You kick your shoes off in the entry and pad through the kitchen to the washer, the usual ritual. When the machine hums on, you stand there, leaning your forehead against the door of the dryer stacked on top of it, letting it shake itself to life in your hands.

You wish you had a dog. Something, anything that would be glad to see you. There were dogs when you were a kid, a series of rescued mutts with the sorts of names that boys give dogs: Rex and Boots and Fluffy. The unspoken understanding was always that they were your brothers’ dogs, but Boots and Fluffy both climbed into your bed illegally after lights-out, more often than not.

You swear you can still smell Clay Maxwell’s unwashed skin on your hands, though you’ve scrubbed them over and over again. Just your ordinary everyday kind of monster.

A monster who’s off the street for now, and in part due to your work.

You walk back through the kitchen naked, not so much stopping as swerving to grab a grocery-store apple and a piece of cheese from the fridge. You eat them as you climb the stairs to the bathroom, waving hello to the Scottie dogs that decorate your magazine rack.

The smoked Gouda goes down in four bites; you’re still crunching chips off the apple and chewing them noisily when you step under the showerhead. You wash everything twice, making a ritual of it, scouring the soles of your feet with the tickling loofa and your cheeks with the apricot-pit facial scrub. There’s an unguent or emollient for every inch of your skin. Girl stuff, stuff you usually don’t fuss with, but it’s an excuse to stay in the warmth for a few minutes longer. Steam, heat, and falling water on a heavy massage setting start to take some of the stiffness out of your neck and shoulders. A couple of Aleve and a Flexeril from the medicine cabinet will handle the rest, and ensure a dreamless sleep.

You’re still tucking the tail of your fluffy polka-dot Company Store towel between your breasts to turn it into a tube dress when the house phone rings.

Shit—

You charge out of the bathroom, tearing away that comforting veil of heat and steam far too soon and too violently. But you reach the hall extension in time—hall because you have to take your cell phone to bed with you, but the house phone can live in another room—and cup it to your ear, shaking wet hair off your face. The team would have called your cell, and nobody else would be calling at midnight with anything like pleasant news.

“Lau residence,” you say, in that cool professional voice that always, somehow, hides the turmoil and the fear.

“Nikki?”

It’s Bob, your oldest brother, and for a moment you think it’s okay, it’s only 9 P.M. on the left coast, maybe he forgot—but you can hear how his fear and tension manifest as cool military professionalism, and your profiler brain won’t let you believe your own lie. “Hey,” you say. “What’s wrong? Are Gretchen and the kids—”

“Fine,” he says. He hesitates to gulp air, but that’s the only clue that any normal person’s voice would be breaking.

You come by it honestly.

You reach out and lean your right hand on the wall. Your towel’s coming undone, and you prop the phone on your shoulder to fix it.

“Tim?” you ask. He’s touring with some dive-bar band, bicycling around the Southwest as a publicity stunt. Anything could have happened—

“It’s Dad,” Bob says finally, softly. “Nikki, he’s had a heart attack.”

“But—” Excuses pile up behind your tongue and die in the crush. But he’s only fifty-five. But he runs every day. But Mom watches his diet like a hawk. “Which hospital?” You’re already making plans, cardiologist on speed dial, heaven and earth to be moved—

“He’s... He’s dead, Nikki. I am so sorry. There was nothing they could do for him. It was massive. It happened... we just got back from the hospital. Mom tried to call you earlier, but couldn’t remember your cell number and didn’t want to leave a message on the machine.”

There’s a silence.

Somebody says, “Oh.” It’s you. It must be. There’s no one else in the house to speak. “Is Mom—”

He laughs, because it isn’t funny. “She’s Mom. She’s already ordering everybody around and refusing to be fussed over. She’s coming apart at the seams.”

“Don’t leave her alone, okay? I’m on my way.” What’s in the closet; what’s ready to be thrown into a bag; what can you buy at the airport if you need it that badly? Your knees wobble, but the wall is solid, and there’s no time, now, to be fragile. Bullets and bracelets, Wonder Woman. Just keep moving.

Bob swallows audibly, but recovers his Air Force crispness with an effort. “Can you get away? You’re sure? Your job—”

“Be there by sunup,” you say. “Gotta ring my boss. I’ll call from the airport when I know my flight, okay?”

As he’s signing off, you’re thinking about what you’re going to say to Falkner. And hoping like hell you can get a redeye flight with an empty row, so there will be nobody to bother you if you lose it and start to cry.

Bulletproof.

Sure. And shatterproof, too. So why, as you hang up the phone, do you feel your glossy facade trickling through your hands like grains of sand?

“Grievous Bodily Harm”

Woodbridge, VA, December 2009

When Brady comes back with the pizza, Lau is gunning her way through a sea of blue uniforms, mowing down cops left and right. The controller’s sticky in her hands and the console music sets her ears ringing; it’s almost a relief when a pixel-animated nightstick spins stars across Brady’s television and gives her an excuse to toss the controller on the rug.

She snags a piece of the cheese and mushroom side off the glass and steel coffee table and rolls on her back on Brady’s thick rug, staring up at the point of the slice while she contemplates her most effective approach to The Bite.

“Probably grounds for dismissal,” she says, stretching her neck out.

“What, Feds playing GBH?” He grins, already halfway down his second piece of the pepperoni side, and reaches for his beer. “Catharsis. Even the ancient Greeks recognized a need for it.”

“Catharsis?” she mocks. She props herself on one elbow to eat. Over Brady’s halfhearted protests, she kicks her feet up on the couch like a teenaged girl on the telephone. “Who told you about that?”

“Purification,” Brady says. “Purging, cleansing, clarification. It’s one of the basic principles of theatre. You go and experience an awful thing, and you are thereby renewed. Cleansed of negative emotions. How the hell else do you explain Shakespeare’s tragedies? People sure don’t perform him for the cheerful endings.”

“Maybe it’s the doublets?” Lau offers helpfully. While Brady’s been talking, she’s been chewing, and she intercepts his hand as he reaches for her side. “Don’t make me stab you with a plastic fork.”

“Would you find that cathartic?”

“Only if it made you drop the pizza.”

She claims her slice, and they slouch for a while in companionable silence, listening to each other chew. Finally, Brady rinses his mouth with beer, swallows, and says, oh-so-casually, “So do you want to meet Gray tomorrow? If you’re not doing anything?”

Nikki sits up, and whatever flip and teasing thing she was about to say about introducing the boyfriend to the Work Spouse dies aborning. Brady’s leaning forward on the edge of his seat, nearly vibrating with tension. The offhand sound of his voice was nothing but acting, and they both know it.

She swallows whatever’s in her mouth, buying a moment. “I’d love to,” she says. “Where do you want to do this?”

“I’ll buy dinner,” he says, sitting back in transparent relief. “All you have to do is dress nice.”

“Great,” Nikki says. “Vet my wardrobe, why don’t you? What is this, Queer Eye For The FBI?”

She fills with warmth as he bursts out laughing, but not before he throws the napkin at her.

“Eight Second Rule”

Washington, D.C., May 2009

Nikki Lau stood on squeaking gymastics pads in the basement rec room of My Sister’s Place. Ten feet away, four nervous, elbow-clutching shelter residents and two auditing volunteers huddled shoulder-to-shoulder like herd animals trying to hide behind one another. Nikki herself was relaxed, confident, open and accepting in her stance and expression. She made a point of not looking like a predator, but she also made a point of not looking like prey.

She took a breath and began. “Ladies, I’m going to teach you to fight. You’ve heard this is a self-defense course, and that’s true as far as it goes, but what a lot of women have never had the opportunity to learn is that the best defense really is a good offense. You’re all strong. You’re all survivors, or you wouldn’t be here. You can all take anything the world can dish out, and you’ve proven that time and again.”

One of the women shifted restlessly. Discomfort with the praise, Nikki thought, making her restive. Sheila, she thought the name was, and made a mental note to look hard for things to complement that one on.

“You’re tough broads,” Nikki said, and got the laugh she was hoping for. “But the best defense, despite the cliche, is a good offense. It helps to walk tall, to stride out confidently, and to speak with authority. If you look like you can take care of yourself, people will treat you as if you can take care of yourself. We teach women officers to deepen their voices, to speak in commanding tones. It’s a social skill, and every one of you can master it.”

Gracie, the little fair-haired white woman, looked doubtful. The volunteer standing beside her, an older woman named Belle, brushed her arm very lightly with the back of her fingers, and Gracie relaxed.

Nikki smiled at her, swinging her arms. Taking up space, claiming her own space, but not encroaching on that of the residents or the volunteers. She kept talking to the group at large, however. “If you are attacked, do what you have to do. Odds are, your opponent is bigger than you, heavier, stronger. Odds are he’s more comfortable with violence, or he wouldn’t be using it to control you.”

She paused for emphasis, because the next bit was important. “I want you all to think about the Eight Second Rule. Here it is: if she’s going to win, a woman in a fight with a man has eight seconds to incapacitate him. After that, the advantage is all his, and her odds of taking him—or of surviving the fight—drop precipitously. Can anybody tell me what that implies about our tactics in a fight?”

The six women glanced at one another dubiously. When the silence had stretched just long enough to become uncomfortable, Belle cleared her throat. “If we’re in it,” she said, glancing at the women on either side for their permission to speak, “we had better be ready to finish it. Quick.”

Nikki Lau nodded. Of course, she knew this. She knew the practical applications of it, and when she taught these self-defense classes sponsored by a woman’s shelter, she made sure every single one of her students at least mouthed the cathechism, whether she understood it in her bones or not. She’d taught enough of them since she started volunteering here that she knew her lines by heart, and she knew that she herself—all hundred and twenty pounds and just over five feet two of her oozing authority and even cockiness—was the perfect example of what she was talking about.

“So how do you do that?” Gracie asked.

Nikki smiled. “Aggression,” she said. “Have you ever seen that youtube video where the housecat runs off a black bear?” One or two nodded, and all of them smiled or laughed. “We spend our whole lives, as women, being taught to pull our punches. I’m going to help you break that conditioning. I’m going to teach you to hit hard, and I’m going to teach you where to hit.”

She turned her head, still talking, as something funny caught at the edge of her peripheral vision. Something blurry, like a floater or a movement shadow. She shook her head. She’d probably imagined it, just like she was imagining the sensation of somebody watching from just out of sight. There was no out of sight in the rec room; it was a big empty square with no crannies or closets.

“Okay,” she said. “So who wants to beat me up a little first, before we go and practice on the kick bag?”

Again, the exchange of glances. And again, Belle stepped forward.

Nikki was grateful. It was always good to have a ringer in the group.

•

The class went well, especially after she got everybody to armor up in the padded suits and take turns hitting each other. The women seemed doubtful at first, but after Belle knocked Nikki down with a bum’s-rush and sat on her, they loosened up a little. These women had all been out of their abusive situations for at least six months. They were healing, and they had all volunteered to be here. It was good for them to roughhouse a little in a controlled environment. Among other things, it taught them that they weren’t made of blown glass, and that they weren’t forever going to be shaky and fragile. And if somebody did have a meltdown, well, there were three trained volunteers and three sympathetic peers on hand to help sandbag until it was over.

Meltdowns were part of the healing process.

Afterwards, Nikki went upstairs to the volunteer office to fill out paperwork and make notes in resident files. That weird itch on the back of her neck was back, cuing her to keep checking over her shoulder, but of course there was nothing. The free-floating anxiety reminded her of the months surrounding her divorce, that horrible sense that somewhere, unseen, the hammer was waiting to drop.

When she looked up the fourth or fifth time, somebody was standing in front of the desk.

Nikki had no idea how she’d failed to notice the shadow that fell over her, or seen the skinny body of the small ponytailed black woman who planted herself there foursquare. “Look at me,” she said. “Please, please look at me. Please tell me you can see me.”

She must be a new resident, because she looked vaguely familiar, but Nikki couldn’t quite place her name or where she’d seen her before.

“Of course I can see you,” Nikki said. “What’s wrong, hon? Do you want to sit down? Glass of water? I’m here if you need to talk.”

The girl couldn’t have weighed over fifty kilo, but she dropped into the square old upholstered chair in front of the volunteer desk like she was made of sacks filled with bricks. “I don’t know why I bother,” she said. “In five minutes, you won’t remember me.”

“Don’t be silly,” Nikki said. “How could I forget you?” She closed the file she was writing in, both for confidentiality and courtesy. This woman deserved her full attention. “What’s your name?”

“Renee,” the girl said. “And you’re Special Agent Nicolette Lau.” She held up a grubby, spindled bit of card, but did not offer it to Nikki. Nikki recognized it anyway; there were a dozen more in her wallet.

“I am,” Nikki said. “I’m sorry, did I offer you a glass of water?”

“No water,” Renee said. She blurred, and frowned, Nikki blinked rapidly and Renee seemed suddenly better-focused, but Nikki wasn’t sure the blinking had done it. “Look, you said—you said you know people like me.”

“Like you?”

She nodded. Nikki furrowed her brow, trying to remember what they had been talking about. “I’m sorry—”

“You’re forgetting,” Renee said. “It’s okay. People can’t hurt you when they forget you, except sometimes it hurts to be forgotten. You said, when we met before, that you knew somebody who was like me. You said you could help.”

“Maybe I can,” Nikki said. “Can you tell me what you need help with?”

The girl—what was her name?—looked down at her hands. “People forget me,” she said. “People forget I’m even here. Like you, you left me your card, and you don’t even remember.”

Gamma, Nikki thought, with a weird sense of déjà vu. Or beta. The latter seemed more likely. Gammas didn’t walk up and beg for help.

“I believe you,” Nikki said. It was, irrefutably, her card in the young woman’s hand. A card she could not remember having given her. “I want to help. What was your name?”

“Oh, god,” the woman said, making Nikki wonder what she had done to make her look so stricken, so helpless. “Here.”

She picked up the pen on the volunteer desk blotter and wrote on the back of Nikki’s card: Renee. She handed it to Nikki, and for an instant their hands brushed. Renee’s hand was warm and dry, her touch like feathers.

Nikki looked down at it. “Renee,” she said. “How can I help you?”

But when she looked up, the chair across from her was empty, and she couldn’t remember why she’d closed the file she was working on.

Early senility, Nik, she thought, and flipped the oaktag folder open again.

“Three-day Weekend”

Newport, RI, June 12, 2010

“You know, damned few of the world’s problems can be solved by punching something.” Gray Putnam smiled over the top of the steering wheel and out the rental car windshield, as if what he’d just said ought to get a rise out of his traveling companion.

Well, then, Daniel Brady wouldn’t disappoint him. “There goes my job.”

“Oh, come on. When was the last time you punched anything in the line of duty?”

“I shoot things. Does that count?”

“Okay, the last time you shot anything.”

Sometimes the problem couldn’t be solved by not shooting, either. Sometimes you showed what you thought was mercy, with your mouth Superglued shut. But when you finally told the truth, hell, you might as well have opened up with a shotgun.

And sometimes you knew you ought to shoot, but you checked your sight picture and your old answers were wrong, your old reflexes were useless, and you had fuck all for new ones. Two lives about to go pop, and nobody in position to stop them but you.

In the first case, the damage was fresh. In the second it was over a year old. Funny how little difference it made to the kicked-in-the-chest feeling he got when he thought of his mom and dad, or about Hafidha in Chaz’s arms in her last minutes of freedom.

Adulthood: the age when you realized your memories were never going to be all good.

Brady was aware suddenly of the silence in the car. Right, Gray’d had the last line. Brady’s cue. He flicked a look to his left.

Gray was watching the road, not smiling anymore. Pretending to concentrate.

“I’m thinking,” Brady lied.

Gray snorted. “You do that, Leo.”

Brady cocked an eyebrow. “That’d better be a reference to my job. Otherwise you just called me by your other guy’s name.”

When Gray was surprised into laughing, it came out like fast water over rocks, rising and falling and catching the light. “What, I only get one? Nope. That was short for ‘Leonidas.’ Just keep holding that pass, buddy.”

“Huh. At least I’m not doing it in a damn retread Italian gladiator movie, dressed in a bottle of canola oil and a loincloth.”

“We can work on that last bit.”

Brady hadn’t told Gray what had happened in North Dakota, of course. He’d told him there was a clusterfuck involved, that it had been ugly, but it had been sorted out. But Gray had a little experience his own self with Can Neither Confirm Nor Deny. Brady knew Gray had insisted on hauling him off to play with boats that Memorial Day weekend because Gray could smell the screwed-upness all over him.

Brady wasn’t sure how he felt about being readable. At least this time he’d been able to just tell Gray, yeah, I made the goddamn phone call. And Gray was hauling him off to play with boats.

The Rhode Island shoreline opened up ahead and to the right as the car bounced onto the choppy asphalt of an unmarked road. A little barn-red house with paint faded on the seaward side dug its toes into rocky ground on their left. The ocean glittered off the shoulder to Brady’s right, rocking gently as if tipped in a dish. “So is this good sailing weather?”

Gray’s precisely carved lips stretched, parted, showed his perfect white teeth. “Not bad. I like a little more swell, but this is good for a lubber.”

“That’s a sailor-type insult, isn’t it?”

“Certainly not. It’s a technical term for a guy who’s only been out on a sailboat twice before.”

“If you weren’t having so much fun saying it, I might even believe you.”

Gray turned onto an equally unmarked track surfaced in pea gravel. If you killed somebody out here and hid the body, how long would it take to figure it out? Brady couldn’t decide which was weirder: that he thought about shit like that, or that he felt nothing more than intellectual curiosity when he did.

“It’s a fun word. Lubber, lubber, lubber.”

“See, I was just thinking about what a great place this would be to dump a body.”

“LEO lubber. I find reminders of your copness disturbingly hot. Why is that, do you think?”

It had crossed Brady’s mind more than once that, for Gray, this was slumming. Even dressed up with a college degree and a suit and tie, police work would always smell blue-collar to some especially well-bred noses. Ugly job, dirty job, brought you into contact with nasty people.

Not our kind, dear. Gray’s family probably had nightmares about him marrying a woman who wore an ankle bracelet.

But Brady wasn’t going to judge Gray by his hypothetical family. After all, if the tables were turned, what would that say about Brady? “Tell me it’s not the cuffs. Too damn clichéd.”

“If I ever meet a motorcycle cop, I’m ditching you.”

Brady turned his face hard left and gave him both eyebrows.

Gray chewed the corner of his lower lip and gazed thoughtfully at the road. “Black leather riding boots. Mmm.”

“Damn. I didn’t know the cowboy boots were just you settling.”

The gravel drive rose and turned, and the Putnam family summer cottage lifted into view as if it had been assembled under the stage and hoisted on hydraulics for the audience to gasp over.

Brady reminded himself that ranch houses in Texas grew like this: a shotgun cabin or a dogtrot would spread a room at a time with each season’s stock sale. Once the Putnam “cottage” must have been a tight-clenched whitewashed clapboard Cape Cod. Over the course of a century it had sprouted a second floor, wings, verandas, sleeping porches, and a handful of big bay windows. The green sweep of its front lawn made a gentle incline to the gritty, pebbly New England beach with its silvered dock and red-and-white boathouse.

“Oh, fuck me,” Gray exclaimed, and not in a good way.

“What is it?”

Gray jerked his head, pointing out the windshield with his chin at a twenty-year old silver-blue Mercedes diesel sedan parked beside the house. “My grandmother’s.” He sounded ridiculously young, teenager-surly.

“We going to have to arm-wrestle her for the boat?”

Gray let the car roll forward on idle and glared at Brady. Then his sense of humor came back on duty. “God, no. I’d hate to send you back to your boss with something dislocated.” He squared his shoulders against the seat back. “It’s just...awkward. Wonder how long she plans to stay?”

Awkward, because if Gray had mentioned Brady to anyone in his family, it would have been as “a friend of mine.” A come-up-to-go-sailing, stay-in-the-guest-bedroom friend.

Be a grownup about it, Brady ordered himself. You can survive a weekend in the guest bedroom closet. Where he’d pretend he wasn’t remembering the taste of sweat and salt water on skin, the scrape of an unshaven cheek against his belly, or a glimpse of lower back, columns of smooth muscle bracketing the deep furrow of the spine, above the waist of a too-large pair of cargo pants. Where he’d try not to find sunburn on Gray’s dignified well-bred nose simultaneously absurd and arousing.

Gray cleaned up just fine, of course, but he touseled even better.

Steady there, Danny boy. Save it for when you can do something about it.

The porch wrapped the house on two sides; the front door opened onto the side that didn’t face the shore. Guests welcome; squalls, not so much. The white-haired woman reading in the bent-willow rocker by the door was a welcoming touch, too. Brady would have been entertained by the unfolding scene if he were in the audience. As an actor, he thought he’d better take his cues from the rest of the players. “Anything I should know, particularly, before I meet her?”

Gray pulled up next to the Mercedes and popped the trunk. “My father’s mother. Head of the family.” He shot Brady a glance and a grin and said, “We’re all terrified of her, but you figured that out.”

“Ahyuh.” It was as close as Brady could get to the Down East noise of assent that came out Gray’s mouth at unguarded moments. It must have been close enough to do what Brady intended, because a little growly laugh escaped the back of Gray’s throat.

“Oh, you mock me now. Come on, let’s get the buckboard unloaded.”

Gray, like Brady, was a one-carryon traveler, but they’d bought groceries on the way from the airport. Ordinarily Brady would have slung both their bags over his shoulder and wrangled the three paper sacks before Gray could get to them. Gray would then have tried to get a couple away from him, by fair means or foul, until they reached the kitchen and he was forced to admit defeat.

Decorum went with the guest bedroom, though. Only bellhops and lovers carry another man’s luggage. Brady unfolded out the passenger door and sauntered around to the back bumper, where he let Gray shoulder his own bag and claim the heaviest sack.

Gray’s grandmother lifted her chin and smiled as they reached the steps, and raised her eyebrows and smiled a little more as Brady climbed the last few to the porch. He knew how he looked: rising, rising, and holy goddamn, still rising. People didn’t always realize how tall he was until he was standing over them.

Gray bent to kiss her tilted cheek. “Hello, Nanna. I didn’t know you’d be out this weekend. Will we be in your way?”

“Not if the wild party doesn’t keep you up past your bedtime.”

Age had whittled away what soft lines her face might once have had. But it was a face that had probably always been defined by its bones, the sharp keel of the straight nose, the prominent cheekbones, the high wide brow and pointed chin. Brady figured her for a woman who’d grown up hearing she could never be too rich or too thin, and taken it to heart.

Her skin was crosshatched with wrinkles, pouched at her jawline, furrowed like crepe paper on her throat. Her hair glowed perfect white, a short waved bob that must have required a damned expensive haircut to look that uncontrived. Tiny pearl earrings, a button-front cardigan that pretty well screamed Lilly Pulitzer, and denim slacks likely from the same source or close to it.

How would she take it if Brady told her she had sisters among the oil-, cattle-, and semiconductor-rich in Dallas?

“This is my friend Daniel Brady, Nanna.”

Before Gray could start the second half of the formal introductions, his grandmother extended her hand, long and thin and wormed with veins. “Mr. Brady. I’m Margaret Putnam.”

Brady clasped her dry hand lightly and noted that she hadn’t said “Call me Margaret.” “Pleased to meet you, Ms. Putnam.”

“How do you know my grandson?”

Gray wasn’t quite State Department enough to keep the clog out of his throat when he said, “Brady’s the guy who rescued me when the car died in the rainstorm. You remember?”

“Oh, of course! Accept my belated thanks, Mr. Brady. I believe Gray said you’re with the FBI.”

Suddenly Brady was absolute dead sure that Margaret Putnam had known exactly who Brady was and what he did and that he was on his way to the house long before the rental car came into sight. He gave her the professional smile he used on hostile county cops and politically-connected suspects. “Yes, ma’am. The Behavioral Analysis Unit.”

Gray’s face was frozen in the good-natured expression appropriate to a state dinner in the embassy of a country about to break off diplomatic relations. Brady tried to send him reassuring messages without raising his eyebrows. He didn’t think it worked.

Margaret Putnam patted Gray’s forearm where it curled around the grocery bag. “Gray, dear, why don’t you take those things into the kitchen and put them away while I get acquainted with Mr. Brady?”

A muscle jumped in Gray’s jaw. He snugged the bag into a firmer grip and reached for the ones Brady carried. Brady ceded them with a nod and held the wood-framed screen door. Gray rolled his eyes once before he disappeared into the cool gloom of the old house.

“Have a seat, Mr. Brady.” Margaret patted a bench next to her rocker. It was maybe six inches lower. Good interrogation technique, he observed. He sat and folded his arms across his hiked-up knees, leaning into the little-boy pose instead of minimizing it.

“That means you’re a profiler, then,” Margaret continued. Her teeth were ivory with age, and one front upper had a corner chipped off. “A sort of mind-reader.”

She didn’t mean telepathy. Brady used the forced equality of their height to lock eyes with her. “Yes, ma’am. Not unlike the fellow in the sideshow who can tell you what photos are in your wallet. Though our ends are a bit different. We use patterns of behavior to track down predators and keep innocent people from becoming prey.”

Her smile stiffened slightly. “There’s so much satisfaction in doing work that makes the world better.” In the pause between that sentence and the next, Brady wondered if Margaret Putnam had done a day’s work in her life. “I know that satisfaction is important to my grandson.”

“I expect it is.”

“When one can combine personal advancement with a dedication to the global welfare— Well, I don’t think anyone could ask for a higher calling. Do you?”

Brady kept his face blandly receptive. “I don’t know, ma’am. Do you count the church?”

There—the lines around her eyes and mouth deepened. She was used to giving one good push and watching her opponent fall over. It had been a while since anyone pushed back.

“The family is enormously proud of Gray. We have great hopes for his future.”

“I think any family that wasn’t flat crazy would be proud of him. Grown men tend to have their own hopes, though. In my experience, those are the ones that count.” Brady straightened, pushing back from his knees, letting his shoulders widen. Letting his body say, I’ve been patient. But your time’s almost up.

“Is that in your professional experience?” Margaret asked, each word crisp, as if she wanted to be understood over a scratchy radio signal.

I don’t wear a goddamn ankle bracelet, Brady wanted to say. But the absurdity and sadness of the scene struck him hard and sudden, and he swallowed that and a few dozen other replies.

Margaret Putnam knew her grandson was gay. Probably the whole family did. But if they didn’t say it, it was Shroedinger’s Cat, alive and dead and neither, and nobody had to change course to account for it. Because that information would have to change everything, wouldn’t it? Impossible to think it might only mean changing “Gray’s girlfriend” to “Gray’s boyfriend,” “Gray’s wife” to “Gray’s husband,” and going the hell on with everyone’s lives.

No, one other thing would change. The lot of ‘em could quit working so damned hard to pretend that nothing needed changing.

It had been like running uphill, his Sunday call to his mother in which he would talk about everything except the one thing he couldn’t mention. Every Sunday the thing got bigger, until it crowded out the stuff she liked him to tell her, until it was a fight to speak at all. And week after week, year after year, she guessed more and said less. Each time she’d ask if he’d met someone, he could hear her struggle to say it. How could he love her, and have let her grind down like that?

Now here was Gray’s grandmother, protective and fierce, being whittled away by a fight she couldn’t win. You didn’t beat the truth, not in the long run. Brady’s mom could tell her that.

Gray could tell her, when he learned it. But Brady couldn’t.

He stood up, trying to move gently and not loom. Margaret’s chin lifted, her sharp nose proud and threatening as a pocket knife. Before she could launch another attack he’d have to parry, he laid two fingers on her sweatered shoulder, light as a breath, and let them drop.

“You want the best for him,” he said. “I get that. Don’t worry.” He took the step and half to the screen door and added, a little louder, “I’d better help your grandson put the groceries away, or he’s gonna think I came up here to slack all weekend.”

In the kitchen, Gray was stuffing the burger buns into the breadbox. Brady couldn’t tell if he was hurrying or dawdling. “No lasting damage,” Brady assured him with a grin.

“To you or to her?” Gray asked, but his expression was apologetic.

The screen door banged, and Margaret Putnam strolled into the kitchen. “Gray, dear, I should head back home if I’m going to miss the traffic. Visit an old lady now and then, all right?” She stretched upward, and Gray leaned down to receive a kiss on the cheek and give her one in return. Then she turned to Brady and held out her hand again. “Mr. Brady, I’m pleased to have met you. Don’t let Gray drown you out there.”

“No, ma’am.” He took her hand in a moderate clasp. “According to him, I can do that all by myself.”

She gave a crack of laughter as sharp and dry as a breaking branch, and nodded. Then she crossed the worn dark wood floor, through the door into the seaside light, and down the porch steps.

Gray turned slowly to Brady. “God fucking damn,” he said conversationally.

“Ahyuh,” Brady replied. This time he almost got it right.

“Meet the Family”

Woodbridge, VA, Memorial Day Weekend, 2010

Daphne looked at T. across the steering wheel and center console, tension tugging her skin over the bones until it itched with dry tautness. Tricia, of course, looked as plump and calm as a Buddha, if the Buddha wore hippie skirts. “You sure you want to do this?”

“What on earth are we going to do with a gallon of deviled egg salad, otherwise?”

Daphne sighed, shoulders dropping a half-inch away from her ears. Amazing how just her wife’s voice and crooked smile could lower her blood pressure twenty points. “Just—last time didn’t go so well.”

T. touched her leg lightly, above the knee. “For better or worse,” she said, and opened the passenger side door before turning to the back seat to pull out Tiger’s carrier.

•

Brady’s lawn was as dandelion-free and velvet-green as a span of Astroturf, and Daphne would have had to get down on her hands and knees and dig her fingers between the stalks to feel dirt to be sure it wasn’t. She could already hear voices in the back; they were slightly late, and it had been her fault for stalling. Now that perfect turf sprang back after every footstep as they crossed the side yard.

“I don’t know how he does it,” she muttered.

T. shot her a sly grin. “It’s a bourgeois lawn. Proves you either have the money or the leisure to maintain it. Status marker.”

“So it’s like a bowerbird’s bower?”

T. winked and dropped her voice as they came around the corner of the house. “Exactly. Only less blue tinfoil.”

“We could buy him a gazing ball.”

They walked in on a pocket-sized carnival. From the cars and motorcycles out front, Daphne had known that everybody except Reyes was already here, but it was still kind of an extended-family shock to see them all in the same place, with shorts and t-shirts on. Chaz was over by the badminton net with Bekk Falkner, playing doubles against Lau and Deborah.

“Unfair height advantage,” T. muttered, a moment before Lau spiked it over the net and Chaz face-planted trying to return.

The adult Falkners were on the deck, Ben slicing a watermelon the size of a school bus and Esther sipping a Lau-special Long Island Iced Tea—identifiable from a distance by the coils of dry ice vapor bubbling out of it every time she moved the glass. Beside them sat a dark-haired woman that Daphne did not recognize from the back until she turned her head to say something to Mehitabel Percy.

“Chaz, you sneak.”

“He didn’t mention Marti was coming?”

Daphne shook her head. “Now I know where he’s been all weekend.” The pressure-treated step creaked under Daphne’s foot. She shook her head and raised her voice. “Marti! What a surprise!”

The Las Vegas Metro officer rose, holding a glass of red wine out wide and picking her way over legs to hug Daphne one-armed, around the egg salad bowl. “It was supposed to be, hot stuff,” she said, and added an extra squeeze for T. “Oh my god, wait until you see the kitchen.”

“That’s why we call it the WTF BBQ,” Daphne said. “Chaz was threatening duck breasts. Did he deliver?”

“That’s not the half of it,” Marti said. “Here, let me get the door for you guys.”

“Hey,” T. said to Esther Falkner. “Can you watch the bunny for a minute? He won’t be any problem at all.”

“Bunny?” Esther said.

“His name is Tiger—”

Daphne nodded to Mehitabel—no Duke in evidence—and the Falkners on the way past. Ben looked like he was going to jump away from the watermelon and get the door, but Marti beat him to it.

The breakfast bar looked about like it always did on such occasions, all but swaybacked under the food. Behind it, Duke in an apron strung onion chunks and cubed meat on kebabs, and a six-footer with dark hair and cheekbones Daphne wanted to touch to be sure they were real was rolling up a roast spread with herbed butter.

“Hey,” he said. “You must be the Andreoli-Worths.” His accent made Daphne think of Democratic senators and yachting clubs. “I’m Gray. I’d shake, but I’m up to my eyebrows in butter.”

“Yum,” Tricia said, and bumped Daphne with her shoulder when Daphne choked.

Daphne put the egg salad down hastily and covered her mouth with her hands, turning away to cough.

Damn, she thought. Those are going to be some good-looking babies. The thought brought with it a paralyzing spike of pain, because Hafidha wasn’t here, and it should have been Hafidha she delivered the killer line to, via telepathy and Significant Eyebrows.

“Sorry,” she said, straightening up to four sets of concerned eyes. “Just swallowed my tongue. Where’s Brady?”

“In the wine cellar,” Gray said, jerking his chin at the door to the garage. “Fetching a case of Chateau Neuf du Pape.”

The door opened, pushed before Brady’s broad shoulder. He had a case of Coors balanced on one hip and a nervous rictus passing for a grin. “Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” Daphne said back. “Looks like a good party.”

“Couldn’t be otherwise.” He skated behind Gray and Sol and opened the fridge. “You want anything while I’m in here?”

“Ice cubes for a G&T?” Tricia asked.

“They’re already in the cooler thing on the liquor cabinet,” he said. “Help yourself.”

“What do you need carried out?” Daphne asked, as T. turned away.

Todd extended the platter of kebabs. “Tell Villette his reprieve is up. The grill should be hot.”

“He’s playing with the kids,” Daphne said. “I can lay ‘em on a grill and turn ‘em, if that’s all it takes.”

“Little girl all grown up,” Todd said, with an exaggerated sniffle. “There’ll be another batch in ten.”

“On it,” Daphne said, and slipped outside into a beautiful day, Marti on her heels with the tongs.

Esther Falkner had a spotted rabbit on her lap, shedding white and black fur all over her navy blue shorts. Tiger was pressing against her scritching fingers, a blissful expression on his little rabbity face—which meant, more or less, that he only looked mildly disapproving.

Mehitabel was shaking her head, one hand extended like Vanna White, paused in whatever she was saying for a guilty glance at the door before continuing, “Oh, the difference is that Thompson was a reporter who hung around with bikers for a year or so. Sol was a biker who made his beer money writing, until he got too old for the scene. You should have seen him, though. Skinny little thing in ripped up jeans and steel toe boots, always some kind of road rash or busted bone—you know that Bonnie Raitt song?”

As Daphne opened the grill lid, Mehitabel started clapping her hands and sing-songed, “Stop at the Mo-bil, pump up the flat wheel—”

“Oh!” Ben said. “’Papa Come Quick.’ I love that song. Yeah—” his turn for a guilty kitchenwards glance “—I can see it.”

Daphne could too, which was why she pressed her lips together to hide the grin and didn’t turn around as Marti did a little shoulder dance and picked up the chorus from the top, tapping her toes on the deck.

“Hah!” Mehitabel said, and joined in. She had a good voice, strong and rough around the edges, not much range but the song didn’t demand it. Ben started clapping his hands and when the chorus ended, he came in with the lyrics—just as the sliding door opened. Gray edged through, balancing his rolled and tied roast on a doubled paper plate. “Got room for—oh, music?”

“Got it,” Daphne said. She took the plates off his hand and made space on the cooler side of the grill for the roast, ensuring it had good contact before she closed the lid.

“Hold that thought.” Gray vanished back inside, leaving the sliding door wide.

By the time Mehitabel and Ben had made it back through the chorus, he reappeared, carrying a beat-up old Epiphone that looked like a junk shop prize by the neck. The possessive way he stroked the steel strings as he settled down on an open chair, however, said a lot about how the face of the guitar had acquired those scars.

He’s had it since college, Daphne thought, missing her saxophone fiercely. And he’s keeping it at Danny’s place?

It was in tune, and by the second verse he’d picked up a simple riff and was following Mehitabel and Ben while they stamped and chanted. Esther Falkner kept time with the hand that wasn’t holding the bunny, and against the railing, Marti and T. clapped and, shoulder-to-shoulder, swayed.

Steps rattled up the porch stair, and suddenly Chaz was on Daphne’s right, eerie music floating about him as he laid down an ocarina line on his iPhone. On the stair behind him, Lau and the Falkner kids swayed and fake belly-danced. Daphne laughed, and kept laughing, as Chaz turned in place and shook his body in time.

The open sliding door filled with Brady, Todd a little behind and to one side, and Daphne would have had to be something other than a behavioral analyst to miss the way his face smoothed out and his gaze hit Gray’s bent head and stuck.

She looked away. T., watching her, smiled.

The song ended with a riff and a flourish, a couple of the clappers hanging on until the bitter end. Gray looked up, caught Chaz’s eye as Chaz lowered the AOP, and grinned. “You can be my Art Garfunkle any time.”

“Dirty,” Danny said. “Now play ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’.’” It must have been a joke, because Gray laughed so hard he draped himself over his guitar, gasping.

“Figures,” Reyes said from behind a wall of Brady. “I would miss all the fun.”

“Thank God you’re here,” Lau said from the stairs. “I was starting to think I was the only single person in the world.”

“Well,” said Reyes. “I thought about bringing a date. But Victor said he had to wash his hair.”

Credits

Executive Producer: Emma Bull

Co-Executive Producer: Elizabeth Bear

Producer: Sarah Monette

Art Director: Amanda Downum

Technical Director: Stephen Shipman

Cover Artist: Kyle Cassidy

www.shadowunit.org

Table of Contents

- Book 9
- Publishing Information
- Credits