Shadow Unit 11
Author: Bull Emma (author)
Date: 1901-09-15 23:20:43+00:00
Keywords: behavioral analysis unit; science fiction mystery; bau; fbi
Description: Contains The Small Dark Movie of Your Life by Leah Bobet, Walking Back To Houston by Chelsea Polk, Bulletproof by Emma Bull, Down the Rabbit Hole by Sarah Monette, and more.
Publisher: Distributed via Smashwords.

Shadow Unit

Book 11

*

Emma Bull

Elizabeth Bear

Leah Bobet

Chelsea Polk

Sarah Monette

Contents

Publishing Information

"Cookies"

"Any Other Day"

"The Small Dark Movie of Your Life" by Leah Bobet

"Fair"

"Post Mortem"

"Beta"

"Clash"

"Donation"

"Walking Back To Houston" by Chelsea Polk

"Courage"

"Anniversary"

"Bulletproof" by Emma Bull

"Survival"

"Down the Rabbit Hole" by Sarah Monette

Credits

Publishing Information

© 2007-2012 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.

“Cookies”

J. Edgar Hoover Building, Washington, D.C., October 2010

Brady was working late, and so was Daphne. These things happened a little less often than they used to, so she'd been biding her time for a while before the opportunity presented itself.

She appeared beside his desk with a fresh cup of coffee and two homemade sugar cookies, only slightly burned. "Here," she said. "Fuel that brain."

He gave her The Eyebrow. "Keeping in trim?"

"When Chaz goes home, I have to put it somewhere," she said. "So how did it go?"

The other Eyebrow, and a deliberate bite of cookie. "It?"

"Coming out to your parents?"

He washed the cookie down with a sip of coffee. Danny Brady was entirely too well bred to talk with his mouth full, so he successfully bought time by polishing off the rest of the cookie. While he chewed, she could see him going over the past year's worth of conversations, assembling the clues for himself. When he was done, he nodded.

Daphne felt like she'd graduated. A nice thing about their job: sometimes the skill set saved on lengthy explanations.

Except for when you were spectacularly wrong.

"Lousy," he said. "Well, Mom took it okay. She's happy I'm happy. Like that. Dad--" He shrugged. "I might get a deathbed conversion. But I'm not holding my breath."

Daphne, daring greatly, put a hand on his shoulder. She felt the fly-stung flinch ripple through the bull-broad muscle. "Profiling, at its root, relies on the fact that traumatized people are predictable. Or the inverse. That individual patterns of trauma result in predictable pathology."

He snorted. "Thanks for asking."

"Thanks for answering," she said. She let her hand fall. She remembered, briefly, how scary he'd been, way back when.

He gave her a sideways smile and stuck the other cookie in his mouth. A thumbs-up. It's all good.

And it was. Prickly and awkward and tangled up and complicated. But good, as good as it could be, after all.

“Any Other Day”

Washington, D.C. October 17, 2009

When Chaz told her he was going to do it, Daphne joked.

Anything else would have sounded as if she didn't have faith in his skill, his judgment. That's what he would have heard if she told him she was afraid, instead of what really scared her. So she said, "I wonder if florists will deliver ragweed to patients in traction?" and "You bring home any BASE girls, you'll have to feed 'em."

A delicate balance, seeing him off casually, and still making sure she did and said all the things she'd want to do if she never saw him again. Did he know what was going through her head? Hell, of course he did. Only Tricia knows her better.

Now Chaz is standing on a bridge looking into the goddamn abyss with the intention of jumping into it. And she's cleaning her kitchen, so she isn't wedged into a corner of the couch, hugging her knees to her chest and waiting for her phone to ring.

She makes a wry face at her reflection in the microwave door. Cleaning isn't done for pleasure at Chez Bunny. She and T. keep the place clean because it's part of making visiting friends comfortable. But she can't say it's on the household schedule, and when it happens, it tends to turn into a landing-at-Normandy production. Tiger, knowing the signs, hides under the dresser where the vacuum cleaner head doesn't reach, his ears flat against his back to indicate his disapproval.

Daphne wonders what he makes of it this time. Tricia is at her desk working on lecture notes; this venture into housekeeping is a solo project. Less beachhead invasion and more parachute-at-midnight-behind-enemy-lines.

No parachute imagery, please. She scrubs a last dried fleck of spaghetti sauce off the microwave wall.

She scours the inside of the oven by hand. She can feel her traps and lats and triceps muscles working, warm and easy. This is no challenge for them, not after all those overhangs and corners. The ones she would never have mastered if Chaz hadn't introduced her to climbing.

Hello. The point is to think of something else.

She rinses soap, grease, and soot off her hands and stalks out to the living room. Her iPod's in her coat pocket. She tucks it in the waistband of her jeans, pokes the ear buds in her ears, and goes back to the kitchen to rinse out the oven.

Of course, as soon as she's crouched over it with a wet sponge, "Black Horse and Cherry Tree" comes up on the rotation. Chaz crushes on KT Tunstall.

And there he is again.

Prohibition never did work. She turns off the iPod, wipes out the oven with a paper towel, and moves on to the sink.

This is one of the differences between her and Chaz. She loves climbing: the challenge, the risk, the joy of winning against gravity and her own limits and doubts. She has no desire to give herself to gravity, like chum thrown to a shark, in the hope she can cheat it at the last instant.

You don't try to put limits on your friends. You definitely don't hang your fear around their necks, hoping it will be a leash to pull them home.

At least she's not afraid he'll be kidnapped by a murderous gamma. Been there, done that, and leaving town on vacation isn't an automatic prompt to the universe to recreate previous disasters. She remembers, though, the terror of not knowing where he was, then knowing and not being able to reach him, then reaching him and finding him dying.

Maybe she's a little afraid of that. But not much.

A floor-joists-up remodeled kitchen ought not to be so much work to clean. Should it? Hard-water minerals have built up around the faucet mount and caked on the nozzle of the sprayer. Maybe they'll scour off. Maybe she'll have to chip the damned stuff away.

What she's really afraid of is randomness, chaos, Murphy's Law. There's only so much he can control. She knows he'll pack his own canopy, check every cable, inch of fabric, buckle, clasp, and ring. She knows he'll judge time and distance perfectly. But equipment still fails. Winds still gust out of nowhere. Chaz may be perfect, but the world around him isn't. There are things he can't control.

BASE jumping isn't safe. That's why BASE jumpers do it. That's why he's done it. Is doing it.

The smell of cleanser with lemon and bleach fills her nose. It's the smell of pushing back entropy. How many people has she strapped to gurneys and rolled into emergency departments? The automatic doors would slide open and let out a gust of air, overheated or overcooled, dry, reeking of cleanser and vomit, antiseptic and sweat.

Some of those people still died. Some of them did it to themselves, on purpose. Nothing pushes back entropy.

She braces against the edge of the stainless steel sink, her stomach roiling, her eyes burning. Her breath comes as if she's crying, but she manages to hold back the sound.

Entropy took Chaz's mother, his childhood. Entropy pitched him into the arms of William Villette and nearly killed him. Entropy ate Hafidha whole.

There's so much he can control. He knows how to jump from a bridge. If she didn't believe that, she'd have tried to stop him.

But he also knows how not to. What if he doesn't want to wait for entropy?

Ah. So that's what I'm afraid of.

"Daph?" says Tricia, from somewhere behind her.

A moment later her wife's arms wrap around her ribs from behind, warm, strong, pulling her hands away from the sink edge. She holds them stiffly in front of her, wet and blotted with cleanser, but only for a moment. Then she crosses her arms and grips, hug over hug, and to hell with whether she's making a mess of T.'s sleeves.

"It'll be okay," T. murmurs, her head snug between Daphne's ear and shoulder. "It'll be okay."

Even as Daphne fills her starving lungs and lets herself sob, she recognizes the care that went into T.'s words. "It will be," not "it is," and "okay," not "fine." Encourage, but don't promise what you can't deliver. Her wife has learned to talk like a first responder.

She's laughing and crying at once when she pivots in T.'s arms and returns the embrace.

*

The peach-colored glaze of sunset is gone from the west-facing windows when her cell phone finally twangs out the first few bars of Emmylou Harris's cover of "Ooh Las Vegas." Of course--they'd jump as long as the light lasted, but no longer.

She drops like a cannonball into one end of the sofa and thumbs the green button.

She can hear it all in his voice: the last of the adrenaline rush, the deep happiness, the attempt to hide both because he knows she worried while he enjoyed himself.

"Hey, Harpy. I had a good day. How about you?"

"The kitchen's clean."

"Oh, ouch."

"Are you kidding? Now you can bake in the oven without adding pizza cheese smoke to the brownies. So it was awesome?"

"I got in three jumps." A long audible inhale and exhale, the kind of breathing she'd heard out of him after an hour of yoga.

"Were they impressed with you?"

Chaz snorts. "So not what BASE is about. Well, okay, not for me. I don't want to get groupies. I want to get air."

But then, Chaz wouldn't notice if he were being admired. Too focused on what he was being good at. "Oh, you so want groupies. You've just got a type. Female, between eighteen and forty--"

"Dignified. Silence," he announces.

She snickers. "That only works on the Internets."

What would she do if he hadn't come back today? Gone forward, she supposes. It would feel like losing an arm.

He sighs again. Contented oxygenation. "Someday we should both go. Jump off a bridge together. It'll be fun."

"You know you're delusional, right?"

"Pfft. I'm about ready for second dinner. What would you and T. say to linguine carbonara, improv salad, and baked apples?"

The words alone make her mouth water, and she realizes she forgot to eat lunch. "I'll go out on a limb and guess 'Yes.'"

"Good thing, since I'm at your front door with a grocery bag."

The doorbell clangs. She lets the day slip behind her with all the others, good and bad, and comes out of her corner, ready for the next round.

"The Small Dark Movie of Your Life" by Leah Bobet

Part 1

New York City, NY, June 12, 2011

Today, physicians have many tools to use in trying to keep an individual alive, including the injection of chemicals, manual stimulation, electroshock, surgical invasion, and mechanical supports. Medical technology is improving constantly, pushing back the line of death. The final result of a determination that death has occurred is the release of the physician and patient's family from continuous and burdensome efforts to continue treatment. The question becomes, When should a physician stop such efforts? --The Handbook of Death and Dying, ed. Clifton D. Bryant

So no shit, there I was: Sunday morning in New York City, a coffee shop just off Rector St. station full of bankers and lawyers and the people they send to get their coffee for them; about to take my first sip of a Clover-made double espresso with my five-seed granola square in the off hand and that morning's Weekly World News slopping over the sides of the round Parisian café table.

That's when the nice young blond man staggered through the door, threw up, and dropped like he'd run out of batteries.

The Clover machine slowly hissed through its supply of steam. The bankers sucked in their breaths. I almost, but did not, spill my coffee.

Some habits die hard: In December 2010, an off-duty nurse in Altoona, Pennsylvania, performed life-saving CPR on a fourteen-year-old boy in the parking lot of her local supermarket. In September, a Montgomery County public safety officer responded to the call of a hostage-taking in Silver Spring, Maryland, and was first inside the building, even though he was not scheduled to work that day. So, "Federal agent, stay calm, please," I said, and put down my coffee cup, and moved, quickly but not frantically, between the tables to check the man for a pulse.

It was there, if thready. His eyes were open, dilated like dinner plates; hazel, I noted, after Caucasian, five foot ten, fit, no wedding ring. His mouth worked, and I tilted his head to the side to make sure he didn't choke if he lost what was left of his breakfast. Or I tried to: his neck was locked up tight.

That meant anything from anaphylactic shock to poisoning by Australian sea lion. "Miss," I said over my shoulder to the barista; she was young enough that she wouldn't mind being called Miss. "I need you to call 911."

There was a rustle in the direction of the counter: five people with cell phones and grim, braced faces. "One call, please," I added--it wouldn't do to swamp them with conflicting reports -- and moved two fingers slowly across the man's field of vision.

One pupil tracked. The other didn't, lagging like a tired toddler. The blond young man (good suit, treated with care; no smell of alcohol or cigarettes on him) kicked a little, and moaned. His pant leg slid up. There was something boxy strapped to his ankle: pedometer.

"Hey," I said, and watched to see if his pupils tracked. "Can you hear me?"

He mumbled. I leaned down closer; close enough to feel his shallow, sour breath on my cheek. The murmur resolved: "Should've been listening. Didn't pay attention. Should've paid attention."

"Yeah?" I said real quiet, against the sound of sirens rising, coming steadily into focus against uneasy voices and the wind outside. Likely too soon to be our sirens. It's only on television that the first ambulance you hear is actually for you.

He stirred. "My own fault," he murmured, and his eyes stared at something unreal or far away; something too personal to be visible to anyone separated out by walls of flesh and skin.

"I'm sure it wasn't," I said, mild, and his chin twitched; trying to shake his head no, shake it with utter conviction. A familiar feeling sparked on at the base of my spine: what we in the trade call something definitely hinky in progress.

I kept fingers around his wrist, hand in his hand, for two more minutes; until the paramedics arrived. They came in with a rush of clanking equipment and the standard, "Sir? Sir, thank you, we'll take it from here." I ceded the field, dodged the puddle of vomit; went back to my table. The newspaper had slid askew, and my coffee was cold. I sighted down the barrel of my arm into the cup, squinted, and drank it anyway.

A pair of police officers brought up the rear. The feeling in the room palpably relaxed, breaths exhaling, customers willing to make a noise again: two is what you get for matters of routine seriousness. One circulated, taking names, phone numbers; the other weaved her way to my table and invited herself to sit with a twitch of the hand.

"Sir, you're the gentleman who performed first aid?" she asked. The uniform rode starchy and stiff on her shoulders. New cop, or new enough that she still treated the job with a formal devotion. Academy graduates always wore shoulder-padded jackets on their first day on the job, too.

"Officer," I said, and inclined my head.

"The caller indicated that you're a federal agent."

"Retired," I said. Some of the guardedness left her: Not another loony old man. "But I still consult sometimes," I added; both the Federal Bureau of Investigation and one extremely selective motorcycling enthusiast agreed that I wasn't that old.

She nodded to herself. "Then you'll know what I need for a statement," she said, and did sit down after all.

I did. I gave her the statement, in factual, journalistic style. I ordered another coffee.

Once the paramedics had taken the nice young man away, and the police had taken everyone's number, and the coffee shop had reverted to a shaky, sideways-glance calm of people pretending to go about their day, I tugged out my cell phone, thumbed through the directory, and chose a number.

It rang three times, a standard three times, and then the click of a beige receiver lifting. "Reyes," a voice said, clipped and routine.

"Steve," I said, "it's Sol. I might have something for you here."

*

I was back in my hotel room in thirty minutes, and they had a file ready in an hour. The nice young man was one Joshua Shore, thirty-one years old, a software developer for one of the few Wall Street trading firms that had managed to stay big. No wife, no kids; he had a mortgage on a loft condominium in Tribeca, cosigned with a yoga-instructor-slash-modern-dancer girlfriend, from whence he habitually walked the half hour to work every morning. The intake information from Downtown Hospital, dated fifty-three minutes before, said cerebral aneurysm; nonresponsive.

It came through on my phone with a note appended at the bottom: will call in five, ER. Built-in reading time, I thought, and flipped back to the beginning to read it through closer. This message will self-destruct in three, two, one . . .

It all looked in order. These things happened every day: thirty-year-old entrepreneurs dropped dead of heart attacks in their home offices. Twenty-five-year-old grad students turned up with stomach cancer. Fit young professionals, in the prime of life, did, more often than we thought, just drop dead, or half dead, from cerebral aneurysm. The only reason we don't like it is because it feels unfair; because it offends our sense of narrative to have the young and deserving die young and deserving and the old live on to bury them.

It could very well be nothing.

The phone rang.

"If I'd known," Reyes said to the click of my own line, "I would have got you a Retired badge for your birthday."

I snorted. "That's me. Encyclopedia Brown. Even have a bodyguard named Sal."

"And here I thought you were a tough son of a bitch all your life," he said dryly. He would be in his office then, door shut. Professor Doctor Stephen Reyes didn't swear in front of other people.

"Oh no," I said. "I got beaten up on the playground all the time before she smacked a tetherball into the back of Jim Aldey's head."

"That's all it took?"

"Ten times. She took it off the rope to make sure," I said, and sighed. "So how's this looking?"

Reyes's voice darkened. "They got Shore into ICU fast. He's on full life support and unresponsive."

"It's only been an hour."

"Right," Reyes said. "According to Worth, though, there were no signs or family history of Marfan's, or Ehlers-Danlos, or kidney disease, and he didn't smoke. Blood pressure was high at his last physical, but not out of bounds. He didn't have any of the risk factors or telltales for an aneurysm."

Right. HIPAA, noun: a female hippo. "So this is spooky."

"It's spooky." Reyes sounded like he was trying to reassure. It didn't fit on him very well. "Villette and Worth are looking through NYPD incident reports for similar occurrences in the last couple years. If they find anything like a pattern, Lau will swing us the invite."

"On a hunch?"

He cleared his throat. When his voice showed up again, it was lower. "I take profiler instinct seriously. You know what we're looking for."

I'd also worked long enough with him to know when he wasn't saying everything. "And what's the other thing?" I asked.

"We don't know what long-term exposure to the Anomaly does," he said. "So it might not just be a hunch."

After all this time, the thought still chilled the tips of my fingers. I smoothed down the comforter of the hotel bed. It was serenely, aggressively cream-colored. "Well. I'll tell you if I get a terrible craving for deep dish."

"Right," he said, and my spooky profiler instincts told me the tension in that topic was mostly broken. "What're you doing in New York, anyway?"

I cleared my throat my own self. "Giving two talks, three book signings, and a meeting with my agent's film guy. Since I'm in town and all."

The cell phone let out a dry little hah. "Better watch out. If you step on Beale's lecture tour pension, he'll shiv you."

"In a kindly, grandfatherly way," I said, and signed off. I felt sweaty; dirty and hungry in a way that was only about a hundred milliNams large, but still didn't cooperate with that white, white bedspread.

"Hold my calls, Miss Brant," I told the silent cell phone, and headed for the ridiculous, amethyst-walled bathroom to shower the federal agency, retired, right off me.

*

The Barnes & Noble in Tribeca had one hundred copies of Life By Misadventure, fifty of Around the Elephant, and fifty of Rear View piled up behind a small folding table. By three that afternoon all three piles were reasonably depleted even with the rain, the fountain pen I found under a bed in the Watergate Hotel all those years back was almost empty, and the green message light on my cell phone was blinking like a kid who had to go pee.

It's me, the text said, signed one Esteban Reyes, mobile edition. We're coming.

It is the height of rudeness to text at a dinner table, on a date, or at your own book signing. I shoved the phone back in my pocket until such time as I was escorted to the back room to shake hands, use the bathroom, and collect my personal articles from the overhead bins.

There was cell signal in the break room. I looked around for enemy agents or general curious bystanders, unlocked the phone, and dialed.

"So you found something," I said when Reyes picked up.

"We did," he replied. The sound wasn't great; outside somewhere. I could hear the wind battering whatever sensitive little chip picked up his voice and carried it to me. "Three priors in the past eight months."

A little bit of breath hissed out between my teeth. It wasn't quite as dramatic as espresso machine steam. "Spooky."

"Spooky," he agreed. "We got in half an hour ago. Where are you staying?"

"They've got me at the W," I said. "There's an ancho chili steak at the restaurant. I've heard nice things."

"We're only the government," Reyes said dryly. "We can't afford nice things. We're at the Marriott down the street. You can come visit."

"We'll have sleepovers," I said, and flicked the orange plush armrest of the bookstore's break room chair. "Should I meet you there?"

"No," Reyes said. "Worth and I are at the scene, and then we're going to the hospital to talk to the family. Everyone else is at NYPD headquarters. It's closer than the precincts."

"Everyone else?" I asked, obscurely and suddenly surprised.

"Everyone."

The trickle of cold-packed hinky woke up, rolled over, and yawned.

"Headquarters," I said, mild. "Pretty fancy stuff yourself."

"It's the Wall Street community sheriff's department," Reyes said. "So don't go expecting drinks service on the plane. We'll meet you there."

"Vaya con whatever," I said, and ended the call.

The headquarters wasn't ridiculously far, in New York parlance. I traced lines, wandering routes through my memory; this part of town was iconic enough that mostly, things stayed where you left them.

I looked right, looked left for an exit strategy. The sales floor was busy at three on a weekday afternoon--apparently if business was big enough and some universities were close enough, you could skip out to book signings whenever you liked--but there was a principle to the thing.

"Mr. Todd, can I help you get anywhere?" It was the manager, bright-faced and professionally cheerful in that way you got used to bookstore managers being after you actually hit a fourth or fifth printing.

"Please," I said, and traced that line again, and abruptly changed my mind. "If you could call a cab for me, please? To the W Hotel."

Her eyes widened a bit. It was going to be a bad day for deconstructing the glamorous illusory lifestyle of the working writer. "Sure thing," she said, and sent a minion to the phones.

The bedspread was as intimidating as ever, except now housekeeping had been by and smoothed all the wrinkles free of it. I glared at it for a minute, poured myself a glass of tap water, and turned the fountain pen in my good hand for a minute.

Then I opened the hotel room safe, put the fountain pen in, and took my sidearm out.

*

Although deeply concerned with clinicians' intentions and actions, proponents of the traditional view do not discount autonomy and the role of patients in making end-of-life decisions. Proponents hold that, in general, clinicians ought not withhold or withdraw life-sustaining treatments without the authorization of the patient or a morally valid surrogate. However, proponents of the distinction also argue that the patient's autonomous authorization is not the only condition that needs to be met for a clinician to make morally justifiable end-of-life decisions. For example, autonomous demands for biomedically futile treatments need not be honored. But more importantly, proponents of the distinction hold the deontological view that some acts ought not be done, no matter what the consequences or the preferences of another person. --Daniel P. Sulmasy, "Killing and Allowing to Die: Another Look," Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics, 1998.

There's an inherent sameness to any given police department around the world; in fact, to any courtroom, or late-night greasy spoon: certain forms and habits that come prepackaged with the common purposes of a space. The waitresses will always be tired and sardonic, hair pinned up in ways that are just coming loose all night long. The tables for the defense will always be a little scabbed, the ones for the prosecution immaculate. The cop shop will always smell halfway like the greasy spoon, and be organized like a warehouse-slash-firetrap for solving way too many crimes.

When it's also the police headquarters for a major metropolitan city and is undergoing major renovations besides, all the rules go out the window.

The team had commandeered a boardroom from New York's Finest by the time I got to the station, far enough away from the sound of concrete and metal being wrestled kicking and screaming into shape to possibly get some work done. Folders were spread liberally across a faux-wood veneer table, Daniel Brady was setting up a pair of laptops in one corner, and a whiteboard lingered lonely as a cloud against one institutional painted wall. It had four faces on it already. I recognized Joshua Shore's, but barely; it looked different, smiling.

Esther Falkner was writing names and dates beneath the photos in the tidy, crabbed hand that would get her labeled precise, structured, hyperfocused if a graphologist happened to wander by. She looked up, smiled briefly. "Sol. Good to see you."

"Es," I said, and waved a hand. "Maybe you guys should get me that put-out-to-pasture badge after all. I had a real time getting in," I said, and dropped my shoulder bag on the nearest chair.

"I don't blame them," Falkner said. The range of documented responses to trauma, social or personal or institutional, is fairly small; all of them involve means of exercising control over an unpredictable environment. Compared to Langley Collyer, dates 1885 to 1947, who handled his father's abandonment of the family (or teenagers throwing rocks at the windows of his Harlem house, or his brother's blindness and slow mental and physical decay) by setting booby traps and hoarding decades' worth of newspapers, carding at the door to the cop shop was mild and downright reasonable.

"Neither do I. I'm just too young for that kind of touching on the first date." I commandeered one of the chairs and flipped open the top file. "So we have victimology?"

"Young professionals," Falkner said. "Pretty, successful, rising star types of young professionals. Lau's out finding a map we can ruin to find his borders."

"So there's enough to suppose a he. "

Falkner raised an eyebrow. "We always suppose a he, right?"

"Unless we suppose a she, " Brady added. "Which is possible in this case. Hi, Duke."

We exchanged short little nods. Doing things the manly way.

"But yes," Falkner said. "There's enough to presuppose a gamma. All four of our victims were treated at New York Downtown Hospital. Because all of them fell ill inside a two-mile radius. Not one of our cases so far occurred north of Canal Street."

That? Was spooky.

"That sounds like a comfort zone to me," I said. "Or the world's first case of crippling sewer-based alligator knockout gas."

"I'll go with the comfort zone," Falkner said, and shoved some very thin files my way. "Our first trick will be to fill these people's lives out, since there was never a police investigation on any of the incidents."

"Since there was never a crime," Brady added ironically, and lowered the lid of the laptop. I reached for the first file, opened it up: Jenny Xieli Chan, thirty-one years old, sharp haircut and designer suit jacket and a sharper look in her eye, stared back at me.

Chaz Villette pushed the door open with his hip, hands full of brown paper bags sporting some very intriguing grease stains at the bottom. "Duke," he said, and wrestled one to the floor. "Chinese. I got you Buddha's Delight."

It was only four. Long-term planning was a bad sign; it meant everyone was expecting a long, long night. At least this part of Manhattan was stinking with Starbucks locations. I ran a couple mental calculations; a not-that-old-yet man needing four hours of sleep a night to be reasonably functional has a meeting with his film agent at one the next afternoon, and there is a case traveling towards him at 60 mph. Should he cancel his appointment until further notice?

The door opened again, and "Map!" Nikki Lau said, waving it like a trophy. "Manhattan and environs. You wouldn't believe how hard this was to find."

"They don't sell them in the bookstores anymore, do they?" I said, and she shot me a strange look.

"They don't. But the tourist kitsch stands still have them," she replied. "Use wisely. I'm not getting another one."

"Yes ma'am," Chaz said. "All right. Map," and spread it out across the foot of the table. "Your coffee shop was here, right?"

I squinted down at the squiggles and green patches and lines; cities look so orderly on paper, in the theoretical mode. "Yup. He made it halfway through the door."

Chaz nodded with the terse satisfaction of an academic researcher on a scent and marked a red dot over the coffee shop. "His apartment is here," he said, and marked another several blocks northwest, not far from the bookstore. "And there are a very limited number of routes from here to there."

"So if he ran into our UNSUB on the way, the space he had to do it was relatively small," Brady added.

"I'll get Detective Phelps to start up a canvass, then," Falkner said, and slid out the boardroom door.

"Not only that," Chaz continued, "but the UNSUB's hunting grounds are going to intersect with the routes of our other three victims." He drew a wide, black circle around the hospital, perfect as a protractor.

"So we see if they were just as regular about their commutes," Brady said. "And connect the dots. Old-fashioned police work," he drawled. It was entirely too cheerful.

"I guess that means we need some dots," Chaz said, and commandeered one of the laptops. I went for the other; retired federal agent was enough to impress fresh new beat cops in the coffee shop setting, but on an actual case in the field it meant taking the desk duty before desk duty was thrust upon you.

It was a Bureau machine, tricked out with all kinds of databases and special clearances and the informational equivalent of a line of flames painted down the side. And luckily enough, my password still worked, thank you Stephen Reyes. I logged in, balanced a pen on the file folder to hold it open, and studied that confident, chin-out picture while everything booted to life. JD graduation, maybe. Or first day called to the bar. There were trees in the background that looked like a faraway memory of academia.

The laptop beeped. I stretched, opened up my Buddha's Delight, and started poking my fingers into the lives of what used to be three of America's future achievers.

*

It is not as easy as the man on the street thinks to stalk someone on the Internet if you are not Hafidha Gates.

Yes, Virginia, there are databases devoted to every niche thing a body does in the United States of America. They told me that Jenny Chan got her law degree at Harvard, but her bachelor's was in music history, and she played the violin, and, according to New York City Public Health, had a license for a corgi, twenty-five pounds, legal name Foxy Euripides Chan, and that she had signed insurance releases for hot yoga classes three quarterly semesters in a row. But that's official existence: the game face we put on to look nice and nonthreatening for the other nonthreatening mammals. It didn't tell me where she went to be alone.

The thing was, Jenny Chan and Joshua Shore were both frequenters of Facebook, LinkedIn, several professional forums, and Twitter, and each and every one of those were sealed tighter than the last beer in the house.

"Y'know, I'll say this for Facebook," I said over my shoulder. Chaz grunted idly: Proceed. "No identity theft threat ever made people lock up their personal data online as well as realizing how much their ex could find out."

"Their boss," Chaz said, and paged down through another screen of old credit card purchases; over his shoulder I could see MAC, Starbucks, Duane Reade, Trader Joe's, Starbucks, Starbucks, Starbucks. "The first rule of Fight Club is to take down all those drunk pictures and set everything to private before the job interviews."

"Don't trust anyone over thirty," I said. Chaz snorted dryly; there wasn't much moisture in here, not even with construction wound down for the day. I reached for my chopsticks, and they came up holding a delicious piece of air. Drat.

Chaz uncapped a green marker with his teeth, eyes still on the screen, and marked a few new dots on the map: Jenny Chan's favorite coffee shop. Her grocery store. Places she went between five p.m. and home. South Manhattan looked like a rainbow-colored starfish, one that had lost an arm to some wandering, malicious shark and had yet to regenerate itself well.

Chaz's cell phone buzzed, a tinny digital cluster of sirens and clangy chords: the Emergency! song. He sat up straight, slapped at the screen until the music stopped. "Hello?"

"I'm putting you on speaker," he said after a second, and set the phone back down on the table, fiddling with buttons until the hollowness of a half-empty line came pouring out.

"We're at Downtown Hospital," Worth said. Her voice was crackly on the cell phone's speaker: too much interference. Too many words in the air, bouncing off tall buildings and around the cellular towers. "The boss man wanted to interview Joshua Shore's girlfriend, so I went to chat up the medical records staff. Quicker than hitting up the insurance companies, after all."

"You ever want to become a muckraking journalist, you call me," I said. "Those FBI boys don't love you anyway."

She chuckled; a little huh. "Not like it'd get them anywhere. Thing is--"

"Thing is?" Chaz put in just fast enough.

"Not only did all four of our victims show up at Downtown with the same kind of aneurysm, without any of the risk factors, being otherwise in the prime of health? But all four of their families had to"--she paused fractionally; a half-comma's pause--"take end-of-life decisions."

For one short second, I saw Chaz Villette's face go slack. "He made them pull the plug?"

"He didn't make them," Worth said, and her voice was strung tight like a wire. "The condition resulting from the injury was such that the families and medical personnel had to choose."

A coffeepot in the other room gurgled. The silence between them deepened to the point where, if I hadn't known better, one might have thought that they'd forgotten I was here.

I coughed. Chaz's head came up like a motion-sensor light. "So if the UNSUB is going to get his jollies off the resulting suffering, he's got to be near the hospital. If the families are the target, and not the victims."

"I don't think that's it," Worth said. The funny sound wasn't out of her voice. "There hasn't been escalation, and there should have been."

"Escalation? Why?"

"Because he didn't get what he wanted last time," she said, and expelled an echoing breath. "Jenny Chan's still alive."

*

Scene: A nondescript, if large, residential-style building in Long Island, set back behind the shark-infested waters of a cracked grey asphalt parking lot. Enter two FBI agents, FALKNER and WORTH, low heels muffled by the carpeted floors.

(I'm not there. I'm only projecting; this reconstruction of events is based on witness interviews and historical data, meticulously assembled by our experts yadda yadda and so forth.)

An admitting NURSE greets them at the front desk, and FALKNER flashes her badge.

FALKNER: Federal agents. We're hoping to ask you a few questions about one of your patients.

The NURSE's eyes widen, in the manner of people who've got something to hide or just watch way too many procedural shows on Wednesday nights. She reaches for a phone, and her hand stops halfway, trembles.

NURSE: I'll have to--I can't--hold on, let me call the manager on duty.

FALKNER and WORTH withdraw quietly as the NURSE holds a short, barely audible conversation on the other side of the desk. Despite the state of the parking lot, the lobby area is clean and lush; no cracked vinyl upholstery and out-of-date magazines for this crowd. The chairs for visitors are fat-stuffed burgundy leather, and the lighting is clear but demure under the shades of standing lamps.

WORTH: It's like Idlewood won the lottery.

FALKNER does not reply.

The manager the NURSE has referred to is through the double doors between the lobby and the rest of the building in under five minutes. He extends a hand and introduces himself as DOCTOR SANCHEZ. His handshake is steely with concern.

SANCHEZ: How can I help you?

FALKNER (smiling reassuringly): We're here to inquire about one of your patients in connection to a case we're investigating. Ms. Jenny Chan?

They have received clearance from the family on the way. Their colleague, LAU, is still with MR. and MRS. CHAN--stepmother, not the mother--going over the background to JENNY's hospitalization. All of their paperwork is in order.

The relief in SANCHEZ's face is palpable. The agents are ushered in.

Things are--as always--less dressed up beyond the double doors. The floors are tiled for easy cleanup of spills, both accidental and bodily. The doors to each room back down from real wood to a more standard painted pressed board. The tingle of antiseptic, always at the back of one's throat in the institutional setting, creeps in to make WORTH's nose twitch. Overall, WORTH notes, the home is very neat and well-kept. This impression will be later backed up by the inspection results of the New York State Department of Health in their 2011 report, which will give the home a ranking well below the national average in the matters of percentage of patients with bedsores, pain, excessive weight loss, and loss of bladder/bowel control.

Jenny Chan's room is something between a nursing home bed and a children's hospital room: a vigil of battered stuffed animals, approximately twenty-seven to twenty years old, line the windowsill: horse, dolphin, four more FALKNER recognizes as Hello Kitty characters still extant in her youngest daughter's bedroom. There is a fat violin case gathering dust atop a dresser, which is also gathering dust, and a chair pulled up to the side of the bed. The warm afterimage of regular visitors is pressed into its back, the sag of its seat cushion. A radio hums Brahms on the nightstand.

WORTH eyes the stuffed animals; adjusts the paw on a scowling penguinlike thing. Something-Maru, FALKNER thinks. Her husband Ben started calling it Kobayashi Maru seven years and four months ago, and she hasn't been able to remember the proper name since.

WORTH: Doesn't seem like her.

FALKNER: It's the parents. You never stop seeing your kids as kids even when they can talk back about it.

WORTH nods. As would be apparent from her telephone logs and educational history, her father is not the sort to coddle; standard profiling techniques applied to a database of her previous remarks on children and child-raising would indicate that she likes to think that if she has children of her own someday, she would not be either. But she understands how illness, grave and immobilizing and voice-robbing illness, infantilizes.

SANCHEZ: She's in a persistent vegetative state. But she's better than she has been.

FALKNER: Oh?

SANCHEZ: She was comatose for the first few weeks. The neurological damage was sufficiently severe--

(And he pauses, compressing medical terminology, diagrams and shunts and blood and spit and percentages, into layman's terms.)

SANCHEZ: --for the emergency doctor to consider recommending withdrawal of life support. But the family refused, and had her moved here for long-term recovery.

Had the resources to have her moved here, both FALKNER and WORTH fill in. Jenny Chan's savings before her aneurysm, two months ago, were substantial. They will continue to be substantial even after she wakes up, in another seventeen days, and shapes her first mangled, tracheotomy-choked word. It will be hot. She will be too weak to kick off her blankets. The NURSE will run for the attending physician. It will be eight minutes before someone takes the blanket off.

FALKNER requests the two things they've come out this way for: the visitor logs for Jenny Chan's room, and her updated medical files. These things could have been scanned and e-mailed over, but in some tasks it is important to use the personal touch. There is always the thing out of place, the thing said in passing; the thing other people won't notice.

There is also, as in journalism, the question of bearing witness.

The visitor logs are varied at first: family, friends, coworkers perhaps. FALKNER pockets a copy for analysis back at the precinct: people to inspect or rule out or cross-check into the lives of Joshua Shore, Macy MacIntyre, Genevieve Scranton. Jenny Chan may be unfinished business. There might be something.

WORTH collects the medical file from the attending NURSE. Her hands are no longer shaky, but she will not meet WORTH's eye.

NURSE: Do you want her activity book?

WORTH lets out a breath. Of course; a log, for the patients with neurological issues. When they react strongly to things, what words they use regularly or don't use. The equivalent of bronzed shoes, locks of clipped hair, a hint of progress for the families.

WORTH: She's spoken, then?

NURSE: Not since she was admitted, no. But the stepmother told us what her last words were.

WORTH gets a tingle down her spine: spooky.

WORTH: Yes, can you find that for me?

NURSE: Oh, no need. That's easy. She said, "I didn't listen. I should have listened."

The NURSE tilts her head and smiles, quizzical, at the sober-suited professional profilers.

NURSE: Have any idea what that means?

*

Brady and Reyes returned from the canvass after nine, tired and monosyllabic. I looked up from my laptop screen--now featuring the entire current complement of the New York Downtown Hospital, cross-referenced for staff working at least three of the four nights in question or conspicuously missing from all of them, and the background checks thereof--and raised an eyebrow.

"Got it," Brady said, and sat heavily in the nearest chair. His shoes came off posthaste: one, then the other.

"Call Poison Control," Lau said from her corner, and ducked elaborately away from a shoe that never came. "What'd you get?"

"His route," Brady replied, and wheeled jerkily to the map. "The newsstand vendor saw him here"--a pointed finger--"and then a construction worker here, and then the coffee shop." He lifted the finger as Chaz uncapped a green marker and filled in the route behind it.

"Based on when his girlfriend said he left home and how many steps the pedometer had on it." Reyes added, "He didn't take any detours or stop to talk to anyone either. And nobody saw anything suspicious or out of the ordinary until he opened the coffee shop door and fell."

Chaz traced circles with his finger, frowning a little. "That intersects with Genevieve Scranton's financials here. She stopped at the vitamin store around the block the day of her aneurysm."

"She would have had to interact with our UNSUB that day," Reyes said, and pinched the bridge of his nose between two fingers. Also, we would have to know how to define interaction in the context of this UNSUB's mythology. And any kind of connection to build a victimology on except geography, age, and the having of money, in a neighborhood where everyone except the baristas and the cleaners had money. And a pony.

At least when you were hunting needles in haystacks, you knew you were looking for the sharp shiny metal thing.

The door opened and presented us with Esther Falkner and Daphne Worth. Falkner waved a sheaf of paper to and fro for inspection, and presented it on the table like a barn cat's latest kill. "Jenny Chan's updated medicals. They haven't gone digital yet, apparently."

They were both grim-faced; not grim-faced enough for a body, but that twitch Worth got with her fingers was alive and wakeful: a tug at the collar, down to the pocket. Probably the paramedic's equivalent of spectacles, testicles, wallet and watch.

"What's the other thing?" Reyes asked.

Worth nodded. "Jenny Chan's last words. Which were suspiciously similar to Joshua Shore's."

I lowered the fold of the laptop screen. There'd been an ache in Shore's voice, just so, when he'd said it. The ragged edge of something passed from hand to hand and fingered so often its molecules lived in your own skin. He'd looked so young for that kind of regret.

Brady frowned. "Is that a usual thing for people to say when they're dying?"

"Last words are kind of a conceit," Worth said, and flipped hair out of her face; another step on the stations of the cross. "Yeah, people have regrets, people say things, but the actual last words aren't as profound as everyone thinks. Usually it's something to do with a glass of water or that pain in your hip."

"I once knew a guy whose last words were Et tu, Brute? " I said, distracted.

Heads turned.

I shrugged a little. "California Shakespeare festival, 1984. Had a heart attack and dropped right in the middle of the stage. Got a standing ovation until Cinna realized he wasn't breathing. Ironically, the guy playing Brutus had been paying court to Caesar's boyfriend, and it rattled him so bad he moved across the country."

"So he knew," Chaz said.

"No," I said. "That was just the line."

Worth raised her eyebrows. "Thing is, Joshua Shore's were I should have listened. I should have been paying attention. Right?"

I closed my eyes; spooled back the imperfect little tape recorder in my head to grasp at the last one. "He said it was his own fault."

Worth's eyebrow hit its peak. "Makes you wonder what Macy MacIntyre and Genevieve Scranton said before they lost consciousness."

"Doesn't it," I agreed, and ambled over to the whiteboard. They had a nice selection of dry-erase markers here; nice to be the New York City Police Department and have a budget. I picked one up and inked Should have listened/own fault into a discreet corner. It was a glaring purple.

It couldn't be their own words. It's only in Agatha Christie, attempted posthumous government coups (see; Rodrigo Rosenberg, Guatemalan lawyer, who ordered his own assassination in 2009 and conveniently left a videotape blaming President Alvaro Colom for it lying around), or a rousing game of Clue that people reach up one bloodied hand and give you the last-minute clue. Nobody's sense of structure is that good. Only Caesar's, and that's because he read the stage directions; he knows that the story is about to end.

Worth caught my eye, nodded. She'd seen people die, a lot of them. She got it. Falkner frowned. "That's worth finding out. We have to interview the families anyway," she said, and tipped a nod to Lau. Set it up.

"Right," she said, and picked up her phone.

Reyes motioned with his chin: Outside, Solomon Todd. I got up--creaking knees--and followed him to the doorway, out into the quiet bubble between the noise of a precinct winding down and a boardroom just gearing up for the evening's work.

"Hit the sack," Reyes said. "Tomorrow's going to be a long day."

I must have gotten a look on my face.

"Because I need you rested," he said, and he knew why, and I knew why. So I just nodded, and tucked my head back through the door and said, "Bedtime for old men," cheerfully, and took the aggrieved groans with a bright and simulated good grace.

I logged off the laptop--we couldn't have anyone sending dirty pictures from government e-mail in the downtime, after all--and collected my jacket. Security was tight going the other way too, which was smart: There were all kinds of things you could have a field day with in the streets of New York if you'd been in an evidence room. I took my pat-down, showed my concealed carry permit--again--and slipped out the front door, knees aching, into the hot New York summer night.

The hotel was close enough to walk: twenty minutes, maybe, past Pace and the hospital and maybe a shortcut through the St. Paul's churchyard if I wanted to handle going by Ground Zero tonight. I stretched my legs--really needed to stop spending so much time in front of a computer--and wandered east, deeper into the downtown.

I was at Fulton and Broadway when "Spare change?" floated up from down by my knees; a heap of sweaters and peeling shoes with a beard and sunburn and voice. Homeless men, like teenaged vegetarians, are frequently cold in summer temperatures: the combination of protein deficit and a lack of body fat. The hand holding out the battered coffee cup was bony.

I dug into my pocket and pulled out a few dollar bills, dropped them into the cup. They landed softly on a sparse bed of pennies, nickels, quarters. I was cancelling a meeting with a film agent tomorrow morning. I could in fact spare the change.

"Thanks," he said, crackly and soft.

I stopped, looked down at him. He was younger than he sounded: thirty, thirty-three. "Take care of yourself, man," I said. And then walked west through South Manhattan, through the darkening streets, to the ridiculousness of my hotel room.

Part 2

"Such calamities offer a compelling argument for withdrawing care . . . [I would] regard Houben's fate as medically induced torture--I'd hope that my family would press a pillow over my face until my breathing stopped." --Jacob Appel, bioethicist

"We talked to him, tried to say goodbye. We saw the tears dropping from his eyes." --Linda Cai, niece of coma patient Zongwu Jin; CBC News

"Without them knowing that I could still hear, the doctors and specialists in front of me said to my mum that I would die. They even asked my mum if she wanted them to turn the life support system off after a few days . . . I've always thought, fuck what they think and say--or I would have been dead at the start." --Nick Chisholm, trauma victim; British Medical Journal, 2005

The precinct boardroom was halfway empty when I arrived the next morning, small wheeled suitcase in one hand and two bakery bags in the other. The suitcase went in the corner--one week's worth of clothes packed tight as only a foreign correspondent or airline stewardess could make 'em--and the bakery bags landed on the desk. The smell that cracked out might even have bought me halfway to forgiveness for having managed a full night's sleep. I felt remarkably not gritty-eyed. I would have killed me too.

Chaz Villette reached into the first bag without comment and cornered a sesame bagel by, apparently, nothing more than feel. "There's cream cheese and lox in the other bag," I said.

"Mm," he replied, and tapped a few keys. "You caught up?"

I was. My phone had buzzed, restless, all through the night: e-mails sent through the team loop washing up in its inbox. I'd read them all at breakfast.

"Macy MacIntyre's last words were pretty similar to the other two's, Genevieve Scranton's weren't recorded, we don't have a significant enough staff overlap on the four days in question to go with hero homicide and besides, everyone cleared their background checks, and there's a definite cluster in movement patterns on the block with the coffee shop."

"Gold star," Chaz said, and peered into the second bakery bag. He didn't look as if he'd taken Reyes's sage elder advice on that sleeping portfolio. "We've got a serious police presence out this morning. It's weekday traffic now." Our UNSUB's type hit the streets on Mondays: the Wall Street professionals, the career-minded, the upwardly mobile, streaming into the office towers for another day of business. Not at all thinking themselves vulnerable.

I nodded. "Where's everybody else?"

"At the hospital," he said. "Shore's parents got in last night, and Falkner wanted to speak to them. And Worth and Lau are looking at older aneurysm cases. Brady and Reyes are on sleep shift."

"And what're we doing?" I asked, and dipped into the brown paper bag for a bagel of my own.

He quirked an eyebrow and finally looked up at me. "Holding the fort."

Ah. "He didn't want to send you out on the canvass, did he?"

Chaz's mouth crimped.

I pulled out a chair and powered up the other laptop. It wasn't an unsound decision: a morning of jamming might just net us someone or something, but it would also put an agent out of commission for the rest of the day in an investigation that might last two or three or five. One look at the circles under Chaz Villette's eyes and I would have benched him too. But I also thought I could do everything when I was younger, and that it was in fact my solemn duty to do everything, preferably at greatest personal cost and with burnout to display like a badge so you could prove how much everything you'd been doing. I lost a couple fingers and started to think different. But it wasn't so long ago that I didn't have a certain measure of sympathy.

So I just sat down and perused the whiteboard again. Should have listened/own fault stared back at me. It couldn't have been their own words.

"Okay," I said, and looked into the faces of four bright young upstanding up-and-coming go-getters. "So whose words are they?"

Chaz looked at me, followed my gaze; worked it out himself. "What d'you mean?"

"They're too uniform. It's too . . . scripted. It's the thing someone else wants you to say before you die: I'll do this and you'll be sorry. Mostly people aren't sorry." They weren't. They died confused at best: I don't get it. What do you think I did wrong? People were unfortunately just as bad about personal responsibility in death as they were alive.

He squinted; the slight wasn't quite forgotten, but it was at least on the back burner now. "So the question is, who wanted them to listen when they didn't?"

"Who doesn't get listened to in this neighborhood?"

"Waiters," Chaz said. The crease of a very different frown was plucking at his forehead. "Interns. Those people who stand on the corners and try to get charity donations."

People who didn't have money. People who were on the other end of the power differential.

The tickle of a raspy voice pulled at the back of my brain.

"Homeless people," I said.

"Did he talk to anyone panhandling that morning?" Chaz said, and flipped through the stack of canvass notes again: newsstand, coffee shop, back and back and back--

The phone rang: a boom, and then Wonder Wom-aaan, Wonder Wom-aan. Chaz slapped at it. "Hello?"

"Hey," Nikki Lau said. "We have something for you here. Dr. James Singh, thirty-five. He used to be a neurologist at New York Downtown, until he lost a patient in a fuzzy kind of end-of-life case, hit the bottle pretty badly and got fired for it. And then he just disappears."

"Down at the bottom of the harbor disappears?" I asked.

"No forwarding address, defaulted on his mortgage, didn't renew his license to practice disappears."

"Hit the bottle disappears," Chaz said.

"Uh-huh--hold on a sec," she said, and the door opened: Lau and Worth, file in one hand and cell phone in the other. She hung up with a beep.

"Living on the streets disappears," I echoed. "Let me guess: the patient he lost?"

Lau nodded; she was flushed. It was only a five-minute walk from the hospital to the police station, but they must have hightailed it. A tinge of satisfaction tugged at the edge of her mouth. "Cerebral aneurysm. And he advised that the family pull the plug."

Chaz winced. Worth closed the door behind her, stone-faced.

"Let me guess," I said, to fill the gap. "Initial trauma."

Worth nodded.

"So," I said. "What are the chances he's living on the streets in the same neighborhood? Because we were having some thoughts just now."

Lau scrunched up her face. "We have to check the shelters," she said, and opened the door again; flagged down a passing officer as if she was a cab.

"If that's the trauma?" Worth said. "Either he'd go as far away from it as possible, or as close as he could."

"One other thing, though: How'd he survive as a gamma and an alcoholic?" Lau asked.

Chaz prodded the keyboard uncomfortably. "Alcohol's high in calories. It's not a long-term plan, but . . ."

"They're bad for you in different ways," Worth said. "It could balance for a while. If you're not jamming too much, and if you don't have a lot of alternatives."

"So it's all possible," I said, and everyone nodded. "And if you worked at New York Downtown, the site of your trauma, and you stayed in the neighborhood, you might be looking for people like you used to be to replay your big mistake on."

"He's not targeting the families," Worth said softly. "He's targeting himself."

There was a silence, chill and gulping. Then Chaz picked up his phone. "We need to get everyone in here."

"Already done," Lau said. "We called them on the way."

The rest of the team piled in inside ten minutes, rumpled and busy and keen like hunting dogs. "All right, give us the whole thing," Reyes said, and Lau gave it to them clean and concise. If, then, therefore.

"So he's trying to tell them something," Lau says. "And since people in cities usually just ignore panhandlers, or pretend they're not there, they ignore him. And it's vitally important to him, and he's a neurologist and knows the brain. So he just goes . . . well, pop. "

"And if he doesn't tell anyone the story, if nobody listens to him and does differently, he doesn't exist," Chaz added. "He's erased right out of life. It's a threat to identity for someone whose whole identity was already destroyed, and that's what brings up the initial trauma all over again."

"'I pass, like night, from land to land; / I have strange power of speech; / That moment that his face I see, / I know the man that must hear me: / To him my tale I teach,'" Falkner murmured.

"'Oh mother, tell your children not to do what I have done,'" Reyes replied, and they shared a very different look.

I picked up Lau's file and opened it, began to read. The rest of it, the sorting-out of details, the confirmation of names and locations for what we already gut-deep knew, wasn't important. This was.

*

Here is the story. So you know. So it exists.

Once upon a time there was a doctor and a patient, and the patient's brain was bleeding slowly through its own walls like a ghost trying to scare them off the ancestral territory of their own head. The patient was unresponsive. They didn't blink and they didn't talk. Medical insurance was expensive, and the outcomes were all bad, and hospital beds, long-term-care beds in an era where many, many baby boomers were stumbling and creaking and starting to fail, their parents drifting slowly out of this world in deliriums of morphine and opportunistic infection, were as rare as steak tartare.

(I wasn't here either. I was off to the side in Washington, D.C.; or riding a dirt bike through South America; or having a Clover-made coffee in a café in New York City, with the paper spread out across my table.)

The doctor was young: very young for a neurologist, whose average ages climbed up and up as the required residencies got longer and longer. He had 98th percentile scores on his MCAT. He had attended the best medical schools in the country. He was used to being right.

And the doctor, faced with those begging eyes, and the drip of fluids, and that fixed, empty stare, and the short emergency room hours of sleep, and their beeping pager, and the constant press of people inward, always inward, needing and crying and dripping and staring and bleeding for just one more bed--

--the doctor had to make a choice.

He made the choice. He talked to the family, and held the widow's hand, and spoke soft words about chances and quality of life and compassion and pain. He meant those words. They wept. They signed the forms.

The heart monitor didn't slow, and stutter, and flatten into monotone noise. That only happens in stories too. In real life, they take off the heart monitor and the IV drip, and the only noise left is the sound of uncertain breathing. It is up to you to notice when it stops.

The breathing stopped. It took five days.

On the seventh day the topographic brain scan finally came back. Backlogged at the laboratory for weeks and weeks, ordered by the family back when the patient had twitched a little in the right leg, flicked his eyeballs under the lids once or twice in an hour, its weather-system byplay of light and color landed on his desk to his attention. The aneurysm bulged like a stain. It showed what the CAT scans, the MRA had not.

Brain activity normal. Damage being routed around, compensated for slightly. A chance at living.

It was a mistake. It wasn't quite malpractice, but it wasn't supposed to happen that way.

(Zongwu Jin, 66, of Calgary, Canada, recovered from a coma caused by head injury long after doctors issued a do-not-resuscitate order, to the point where he could speak, write, and read. Rom Houben, of Belgium, fell into a vegetative state at the age of 20 after a car crash, and after twenty-three years of his mother fighting tooth and nail to keep him on life support, was proven to have normally functioning brain activity. Journalists interviewed him shortly thereafter; he answered their questions via an electronic keyboard in clear, short sentences. Briton Andrew Devine, 22, suffered severe brain damage in the Hillsborough football stadium disaster in 1989, but eight years later, was able to be fed orally and communicate with a touchpad. Tony Bland, also 22, suffered similar injuries in the same incident. His feeding tube was withdrawn after four years. It took him ten days to die.

These things happen. Medicine is imperfect. We can do terrible things, caught fast between despair and compassion.)

Nobody sued him. Nobody called him before the hospital board to explain his actions. These things happen, they said, because he was young, and because he was a rising star, and because the family had agreed, and the choice to be made was terrible, and because these things happen.

He studied the scans at night: the topographic and the CAT scan, the MRA next to them, over and over again. He ran his fingers over the maps of swollen arteries already rotting out of their skull. He should've listened; he should have been paying attention.

He lost weight. His colleagues whispered.

He began to drink.

*

Once upon a time a homeless man tried to get the attention of a sharp nice young professional--it was important that she knew it was dangerous; that it was so easy to not always be right; that she had to be careful, so careful where she put her feet--and the sharp nice young professional brushed him off, refused to listen, walked on by, and nobody saw anything out of the ordinary.

She didn't listen, and so the worn spots in her veins burst soft as snowballs, and she fell. And the choice had to be made all over again, until everyone started getting it right.

*

A profile's a story we tell ourselves. It doesn't have to be true. It just has to sort through the bombardment of random data, arm us to cope with the unfairness of it all; keep us from going mad with possibility until the stick-figure drawing we build ourselves can be replaced with the planes and textures of a real, human person who makes real, human mistakes.

We had the profile.

"All right," Reyes said. "Time to tell the nice people who we're looking for."

*

The men and women of One Police Plaza marched through the metal-detector doors of their precinct, down the steps, and into the bright streets of their city. Each pair had a photograph (He will not look like that now, Reyes said to them, thumb and forefinger over the man's clear brow, over steady eyes, over smile). They had instructions that the person of interest in this case was to be considered dangerous (Do not approach him, directly or indirectly). They had their radios.

Stephen Reyes and I sat in the boardroom, surrounded by the litter of investigatory activity, and waited.

"What're we going to charge him with?" I asked. The radio on the table crackled slightly. Reyes turned it up.

"We'll think of something. New York still has that panhandling law on the books, even though they're not enforcing it anymore. He might just come along for a chance at steady meals and a contribution to society."

"What if he doesn't?"

Reyes didn't look at me. "Worth picked up a sedation kit from the field office this morning."

I shoved myself up on my elbows, turned my chair until I was right in his line of sight. "You're planning something."

Reyes had a quality, manful poker face, honed by years of standing before academic funding committees and supervisory agents. "One might allow for that."

"This had better be good," I said.

He shrugged his shoulders slightly. The navy blue weave of his suit jacket inched up and down. "He seems to need people not to listen; the mythology hinges upon that. People don't listen, so bad things happen. We can take this one alive without a scratch," he said.

"Because he needs people to hear the story."

"Yes," Reyes said.

"Because stories not told don't exist, "I said, and gave him a little raised-eyebrow look.

"Anyway," he said. "We can bring this one in clean." Stephen Reyes parlance for We can save this one. He would never put it that way. Unprofessional.

"It's a gamble," I told him. Yes, and the sky was blue, and everyone who'd ever been on that Guyana trip back in '73 still checked their underwear for bugs every morning, even when it was folded up and came out of a drawer.

"You have to tell them," I said, and we locked eyes.

He nodded. "I will."

"Okay," I said, and flicked a stray sesame seed off of the table, onto the floor.

We waited. The radio crackled. It wasn't that big a neighborhood: nothing in New York really was, despite the illusion of abundance it projected. You got the same people in the same places at the same times, just like anywhere else. Even more than anywhere else, in fact: in the face of all that concrete, people stayed close to their familiarities. People lost their lives, lost their hope, and never went more than visual distance from the places where they'd left them last.

"You'd better get down here," Falkner eventually said, reeling an intersection, an address, an approach over the humming radio waves. "We've found him."

*

Climbed into bed. Terri said good night to me. Gave me a kiss. She woke up, said good night, gave me a kiss. I gave her a kiss back. I'd say, about 4:30 in the morning, I was, for some reason, getting out of bed and I heard a thud in the hall. I race out there and Terri was laying in the hall. I went down to get her. I thought, Well, maybe she just tripped or whatever. I rolled her over and she was lifeless. And it almost seems like she had this last breath.

So I held her in my arms, and I'm trying to shake her up. I ran over, I called 911. Her brother happened to live in the same complex as we did. I called him. I went back to Terri. And from there, six, seven minutes later, the paramedics . . . --Michael Schiavo, interview with Larry King, aired October 27, 2003

The police cordon was loose and flexible. It fluttered with the breeze, officers moving this way and that, keeping well clear of the homeless man sometimes walking, sometimes sitting, on the workday-littered streets of the Financial District. It whispered within itself by radio and hand signal, and calmly, firmly, undeniably turned the tourists and couriers away.

We didn't need directions to find the edge of the cordon. It set off a ripple of jangled nerves for two blocks in any direction. This was a lot more than the requisite two police officers.

Reyes and I caught up with the rest of the team on the north side of the circle. Falkner flagged us down efficiently, opened up the huddle to admit us in. It was warm. I was already sweating.

"Apparently there are some benches under the Brooklyn Bridge on-ramp where you'll get homeless people sleeping," she said. "We think he's heading over there."

"Well in sight of the hospital," I said, and Falkner nodded.

"Hasn't made us?" Reyes asked, and everyone shook their heads.

"If he has," Brady added, "he sure isn't acting like it."

"All right, "Reyes said, and dropped his voice. "We're going to not startle this one. We go in quiet and calm, and we escort him to the station. Our best tool today is this." He held up the sedation kit. "I'm afraid I'm going to need a volunteer."

Chaz's eyebrows went high enough to almost crest his forehead. "One volunteer?" he asked.

The air got a little dangerous.

I glanced at my good old friend Steve. Didn't need to say anything. He said he would tell them.

"The mythology operating here is that people don't listen, or that wouldn't be the last thing he feeds into their mouths: that they're sorry they didn't listen. That suggests very strongly that all we have to do is listen."

Falkner had a look on her face that felt very familiar. I'd been wearing it myself not an hour ago.

"The emphasis is right," Reyes continued. "And the psychology is right. And if he could just drop people outside of a set of restrictions, of causes, of . . . medical ethics, then there'd be bodies all over the south of Manhattan."

"And there aren't," Brady finished, like he'd bitten into a lemon.

"There aren't," Reyes agreed. "He's still a doctor. He still thinks in terms of protocols and preconditions. There are still rules. "

"And why go in this way?" Falkner asked. The way she kept the frost out of her voice was admirable.

"We need to keep things within his frame of reference," Reyes said quietly. "If we spook him into an unfamiliar situation, he'll panic."

And then we don't know what he'll do, everyone finished. Or we did. There was no telling how many veins, tiny and delicate, a motivated gamma could rip through in a minute, two.

They looked at each other: Lau, Worth, Villette. It needed to be a young professional; someone who still had mistakes to make. It needed to be someone who looked like his kind of bait.

Worth shrugged. "I know how to handle the syringe."

They nodded, slowly. One, then the other.

Worth looked up at Reyes and Falkner. Combed a hand through her hair. "If I'm going to pull this off," she said, "I need a change of clothes."

*

The pressed pantsuit had come out of Daphne Worth's go bag, but it didn't suit her: too-heavy fabric, the shirt too starched; a relic of that earliest age when she'd just been assigned to what everyone told her was a career mistake--that dead-end unit Down the Hall--and felt like she needed terribly to impress with her adult professionalism. It might have been in there ever since, for all I knew. It fit her like an old life.

She brushed hair out of her face, nearly smudging carefully applied makeup, and broke through the police cordon onto the sunny, deserted red flagstone walkway.

The man was sitting in the sun, leaned back on a weathered wooden bench nestled between a pair of highway ramps. Traffic rumbled overhead, steady and regular; yet more on the other side of the overpass and fence, where the surface road shot into the city. A little nest in the middle of the bustle, the traffic. Someplace anonymous.

The police cordon had pulled back; far enough so that he wouldn't see the sea of uniforms. We, plainclothes, commonplace, dangerous, pulled in closer. Took seats on benches far away enough to look like picnickers, tourists, normal people. Craned into our earpieces and listened.

I had loosened my weapon in my pocket a long time back.

"Hey," he said when she walked by, just as we knew he would, just as he had to. "Ma'am, I gotta tell you something."

I blinked. A too-young man, scruffily bearded, with a voice older and scratchier than it should have been. A hand thin, and not just from hard living.

Stop. Listen. Don't do what I have done. People don't ask you these things when you're old. A chill went down into my guts, and it had nothing to do with spooky.

"What's that?" Worth said. Her voice was low and calm; a paramedic's voice. The kind of voice you use with something that's bleeding. She slowed. Stopped. Turned.

I was too far away to see the expression on his face. Too far away to read the scene. "You gotta be careful," he said. "You think you know what's what. You think you have it all under control? Well, let me tell you, you don't."

Her ponytail bobbed. She was nodding. "That's true."

And now his head moved too: looking up at her. Looking up in a different way.

"You think you do, right?" she said. "And then something comes along, one regular day in your life, and just blows that all apart."

"Who are you?" he asked, wary, breathless. Knocked off script just enough to wobble.

"My name's Daphne," she said, and crouched across from him; put herself right in the line of sight and lower, lower down so he wouldn't feel a threat. "I've been hoping to find you."

I sucked in my breath. Chaz sat tense; his jaw tight. He was mirroring; monitoring. Looking for signs it was all about to go bad.

"Why?" Singh said faintly.

"You've been trying to show people, right?" she said. "That they need to be careful. That they need to listen. Well, we heard you. We paid attention."

She paused. "Make the offer," Reyes's voice murmured across the earpiece.

"And we know you've been hungry," she said.

He sat very still. Chaz's fingers were clenched tight around his own kneecap.

"You're not from the shelters," Singh said, suspicious.

Worth shook her head. "We're from a hospital," she said. "A good one."

Someone's breath hissed out over the line. No telling whose.

"Why are you doing this?" he burst. "Get out of here! Just--go!"

"Don't do it," Chaz warned softly.

Worth hesitated. And then she said, "I'm not turning away from you."

"You will," he said.

"Cut him off," Chaz said quickly. "He's trying to talk himself into it."

Worth's head came up a little; tension running down her back. "I'm not turning away from you," she said quick, irate. "You are. You're the one who's letting you down."

He stood up. My hand dipped into my pocket, pulled out the loaded weapon, leaned on the safety. She stood up. She stood her ground.

"The point isn't not to fail, James. We all fail," she said. "The point is that when you fall down, you get back up."

"This is not the script," Brady said tensely.

"Shh," Reyes cut in. "Doesn't matter. It's working."

"Look, you messed up. It was wrong. You made the wrong call, and you've been punishing yourself and punishing other people ever since. Now you have to get up and make a right one. Now you have to keep your oath."

"I broke my oath," he said, high and shaky. He swayed like a tree in the wind coming off the overpasses, dipping down below.

"Well, it's time to heal it," Worth said, and opened the case.

"Oh, neatly done," Falkner murmured, and the stretched-knuckle tension went abruptly out of Chaz Villette's clenched hands.

"I can't," Singh whispered. Even over speakers, over the airwaves, I could tell his heart wasn't in it.

"You can," Worth assured him, and pulled out the needle. "I'm going to give you a light sedative, okay? It's lorazepam. I'll show you the label. Take all the time you need with it."

"All right," he said, soft, hollow. I glanced up at the building down the path, checking for the snipers, for the glint of trained scopes and barrels I couldn't see. This was working. It was actually working.

"Right arm or left?" she said, and he proffered up an arm, rolled up the sleeve. She swabbed it with the efficiency of long practice.

The needle went into his arm, and Worth pushed the plunger down.

Singh's shoulders sagged. Too soon for the sedative to take effect: maybe it was going to work. Relief, I thought, and let out a breath.

"C'mon," she said, and took his arm carefully, and led him along the sun-dappled pathway to where we were camped out, to where the police cruisers and officers hid behind the curve of the wall. "You did good. It'll be all right."

They took one step, two, three. The traffic hummed along. I tucked the weapon away, and got ready to receive our latest houseguest with open arms.

Chaz startled beside me, sharp as an electric shock to the ribs. "Daphne! Harpy!"

Reyes swore.

She looked up. She looked toward us, sharp and surprised, and he started to run toward her, run right into the delicate, managed, careful arrest we'd spent so much time setting up.

And then I heard the honking, and saw the shadow, and then the on-ramp railing so far above us, and the relaxation on Singh's face that wasn't relaxation but resignation and finally looked up--

--and the mirrors glittered like sunspots

the engine quiet as labored breathing

and the horns beeping like heart monitors

faster and faster and faster

as the truck sparkled in the air

hung blotting out the daylight

and landed.

*

Incident report, New York City emergency services, filed June 13, 2011:

Overturned transport truck on Brooklyn Bridge on-ramp, 11:37 a.m. Truck swerved into on-ramp railing and fell approximately forty feet onto pedestrian walkway below; enough speed to break concrete safety barriers.

James Vijay Singh, thirty-three, of no fixed address, crush injuries due to fallen truck; dead on arrival at New York Downtown Hospital.

Special Agent Daphne Worth, thirty-six: crush injuries to ribs, right hip and leg, neck, skull. CPR administered by Supervisory Special Agent (Retired) Solomon Todd until paramedic division #71 arrived on scene 11:47 a.m. Admitted to surgery at New York Downtown Hospital 11:54 a.m.

Driver, Marcus de la Costa, fifty-four, dead on arrival at New York Downtown Hospital. Preliminary coroner's report suggests cardiac arrest and/or cerebral aneurysm.

Part 3

"Just don't leave me alone." --John Belushi, last words

The sirens came fast.

Chaz rode along, pressed into the corner of the bucking vehicle as if he would fold himself away and disappear if at all necessary. Stephen Reyes just stared after him, after the screeching ambulances with his mouth a little open. "We miscalculated," he whispered.

No, we hadn't. We hadn't miscalculated at all, but in the haze of heat and bustle and debris and shock, I couldn't tell myself how.

"We need to secure the scene," Esther Falkner told us. There were sirens in the distance. Sirens in real life are rarely your sirens. They were headed this way. I stood up from where I was kneeling--I was kneeling--and rubbed my eyes. There was blood on my hand. I wiped it absently on my pant leg. Airway, breathing, circulation. We all had our ingrained habits. "Sol, we need to move."

"Right," I said, and backed away from the shattered benches, the snapped young trees. The stains. I backed away and the emergency services personnel swarmed over the wreck, pulling and prodding and heaving. Looking for the ones who hadn't been knocked clear.

"Do you need anything?" she asked sharply. Looked me full in the face, one hand on each shoulder. "You're shocky."

I shook my head. She was shocky too. Her pupils were not even close to the right size. She just handled it differently. Combat training did that.

"I'll pull it together," I said, and went to gather up those of us who didn't have any combat training.

*

We blew into the emergency room at New York Downtown Hospital at 12:20, and Chaz Villette was standing in the corner, pacing a trapped little circle under the television set.

"Where is she?" Falkner asked.

"Surgery," Chaz said. He was pale around the lips; stricken. "Her legs are crushed, and her side, and there's a head injury--"

"Chaz," Falkner said, and then, "Agent Villette," which straightened him up like a poker. "They'll take care of her, okay?"

His lips thinned. He said nothing.

"We need to make police statements," she said. "I need you to go with the officer. And then I need you to eat."

He took his time coming back. He came back almost an hour later, smelling of fear-sweat and the kind of sourness that came off him when he'd been pushing himself way too hard.

"I called Tricia," Chaz said, and buried himself in the waiting room chair. "She's coming."

*

"One last drink, please." --Jack Daniel, last words

She was in surgery all day. We waited.

Lau ducked out sometime inside the first few hours. I didn't know she had gone until someone had mysteriously cleaned out that boardroom, every trace of our lingering presence in the NYPD, and Nicolette Lau was beside me, passing me the handle of my rolling suitcase. "The motorcycle's still parked at your hotel," she said. "But they'll leave it there as long as you need."

I nodded at her, dry-throated. She took a seat, picked up a magazine. Put it down. Waited.

John Worth arrived at five, hands in his pockets and jaw locked tight, with Tricia behind him in a whirlwind of terror: constricted throat and big eyes and every police wife's worst nightmare come alive. Chaz and Falkner intercepted them smoothly, took her by each arm, sat her down.

"Where is she?" she said, already shaking to pieces, breaking.

"In surgery," Falkner said. "They're working hard. We'll find out what's happening soon."

"Tell me what happened," Tricia said. "Tell me every single thing."

The doctor came out at nine. He looked exhausted, strained. He sat down in the chair next to our little cluster, and tried not to look like something set upon by a circle of wolves.

"She's pulling through," he said, and the air went out of every set of lungs in the place. "We'll be transferring her to critical care and life support is fully engaged. And the bleeding has slowed or stopped. That's the good news," he said.

"What's the other news?" her father said. He couldn't bring himself to say bad.

"Sir," he said, and that's when I knew it was bad news, because no doctor needed that kind of pause if it was not truly bad. "Ms. Worth's head injuries were severe. There was bruising and bleeding in the brain. We've removed a piece of her skull to limit damage due to the swelling, but there's no telling yet how it will react."

"Aneurysm?" Reyes said, unwilling, and the doctor shook his head no.

"Not an aneurysm. Just impact trauma," he said, and the weight on all our chests shifted. "I have to explain to you: She may wake up different. Her motor functions may be low. She may not be able to do things she could before."

He hesitated.

"She may not wake up," Tricia added dully.

The doctor didn't say no.

"I need to see her," Tricia said, and Chaz stood almost with her, a second behind, and then pulled back as if knowing somehow that it was a presumption.

"Soon," the doctor said. "Just wait a little longer."

*

"Please don't leave me. Please don't leave me." --Chris Farley, last words

"We didn't miscalculate," I told Reyes.

"What?" he said.

"We didn't miscalculate. The profile was right."

He wouldn't ask the question: So what went wrong? So I answered it for him anyway. "The problem was that he was always the target. He wanted very badly to die. And we finally gave him the necessary precondition to pull the plug."

He shifted in his seat. "Sol?"

"Yes?"

"I don't know if I want to hug you or punch you right now," he said tiredly.

"You think about that," I told him, and picked up another magazine I wasn't going to read.

*

They let the family into the ward a little past midnight. John Worth stepped out of the elevator at one, beckoned Charles Villette up. He was there for four hours.

I saw the look on his face, on Tricia's, when they came down.

People are not starfish. She was not going to grow back.

*

She was not stable enough to transfer home. She was nonresponsive. "She--" Tricia said, and glanced at Chaz, and then we all knew, we all knew how they knew "--she isn't there."

It didn't matter. We could do it. It didn't matter that long-term-care beds in the District of Columbia were rare as true love; Nicolette Lau would find one if it was the last thing she did. We would go in every day, regular as dish duty in the army, and sit by her side, hold her hand, wait. We would devote our lives to the waiting.

"I'm--I need to give it a week. I'm waiting a week," Tricia said. Her face crumpled. She tried to bring it under control three times, failed.

Lau looked at me, sharply. I swallowed.

End-of-life decisions.

"I have to wait," Tricia said weakly, and slumped down in the chair.

"We won't leave you," Esther Falkner replied, and covered that shaking hand with her own.

*

"Not like this. Don't leave me like this." --Layne Staley, last words

We waited, in shifts, in New York City.

Deathbed vigils are exhausting. I don't have any stories to tell you about this. I don't have any citations. I have sat by the sides of too many damned people as they lay dying, and I do not need to prove that this is damn well true. They drain the soul out of you. It drained the soul out of me.

Some people went home for a while. They had to.

Falkner spent two nights at home. She hugged her children. She closed the door of her bedroom and said private words to her husband, and maybe cried where it was safe and secure to do so. She changed out the clothes in her go bag to jeans and packed a trio of novels. She came back.

Brady flew out for a night and a day on the third day. He said nothing about it before going, and nothing before coming back; just I need to head home for a bit before I do something rash.

Reyes went back almost right away, carrying our reports and case notes on his back like Atlas. He took a meeting with Celentano immediately upon arrival. The proper paperwork was filed. The reservations at the Marriott, not as nice as the W, were extended indefinitely. When he came back, a card appeared on the side table in Daphne's hospital room: Get well soon. I caught a glimpse of it, propped up vertical. It contained familiar signatures.

Lau went back when Reyes returned and stayed three full days. Someone needed to hold down the fort at the office. We couldn't have the whole team out. She was the first point of contact, the first line of defense. There might be other cases coming in. We couldn't leave people alone who needed us. She called Brady at mealtimes. He picked up the phone regularly, at eight, noon, and five, and said into it, "Sorry. No change."

She came back on the sixth day. She came back drawn and pale, and said, "Pauley's manning the phones. He'll stay there as long as we need."

"You got a secondment out of Celentano?" Falkner said.

She shook her head. "It's a favor," she said, and shut her mouth tight.

Chaz stayed. He stayed around the clock.

On the sixth night, he drew Reyes aside and they had a sparking, heated argument, all gestures and sharpness behind glass. He stalked outside afterward; pulled out his cell phone as he rounded the corner to the elevator bank.

I raised an eyebrow. Reyes said, in a neutral, flat voice, "He's calling Idlewood."

Chaz didn't come back for an hour, even less than an hour, and when he came back he had a store-new iPad tucked under his arm. He strode through the ward, around the corner, and into Daphne's hospital room.

I followed him after a minute; peered in the door. There was wrapping on the floor, cardboard and thin Styrofoam. He was fumbling with the plugs. He kept missing the outlets. He hadn't slept enough.

"Hey," I said, and his head whipped up like a prey animal's. "You need a hand?"

His face went through fifteen kinds of no, of go away. "I'm not leaving," I said mildly.

His breath hissed out between his teeth. "That was cruel," he said.

I nodded and took the iPad out of his hands.

The wires went in the holes. The power flowed through the wires like a saline drip. The display blinked to life like a heart monitor. I hooked everything up and set everything up, and handed it to him, and stood outside so they wouldn't be interrupted.

"Hey," Chaz's voice said after a few minutes. "I'm here. You're on."

"Goddamn you," Hafidha Gates's voice said through the speakers, before he hastily, carefully turned them down. "Goddamn you how could you let this happen--"

There is no way for a grown man to cover his ears in a hospital hallway without having it noticed. I stood blank as a statue. I looked everywhere else.

"I'm turning it now," Chaz said finally. A rustle of blankets and mattress. "I'm turning it. I'm holding her hand for you, Wabbit love."

"Harpy?" she said, and her voice was breaking. The breathing tube hissed. There was no response. "Oh, no, Harpy. Harpy, baby, I love you, I'll always--" she said, and then there was a rattle, and a thick silence, and I dared to peer inside.

"Turn it off," I heard her say, as Chaz pulled the iPad away and held it to his chest, shielding one from the other and there was no telling which; shielding both. "Turn the fucking thing off."

*

"Don't leave me." --Alexander Graham Bell, on his deathbed

"No." --his wife Mabel Hubbard, in reply

A week passed. There was no change. I didn't leave.

There was no noble reason for this. I am a journalist and I stay where the story is no matter what.

Because a story you don't tell doesn't exist, and because eventually our own stories turn and stab us in the backs: that doctors don't fail. That our plans will make us safe. That an old, broken man won't outlive a young woman. Eventually our heraldry and shorthands eat us all, and we have to just tell the truth like we saw it with our own two eyes.

And so I stood outside like a sentry, and listened to the heart monitor be disassembled, and the IV pole wheeled outside of the room, and her father wrap big arms around his own body to try to hold his heartbeat in. Her wife shift in the creaking hospital chair and count dragging, irregular breaths. To her stutter, and shiver, and flatline wail.

The wail twinned in the chairs down the hall, in the thin tenor of Charles Villette, and broke into a dry, choking sob, and Esther Falkner wrapped her arms around his big shoulders and pulled him down onto her own as he struggled and fought to shake her off like a dog in the rain.

The floor was hard. My feet ached. The hospital smelled like bleach and brick and afternoon leftovers. I pressed my hands against the white-painted hallway wall, and it was cool and hard and stood indifferent to the tiny disaster behind it.

And there I was.

"I have tried so hard to do right." --Grover Cleveland, last words

“Fair”

New York Downtown Hospital, New York City, NY, June 14, 2011

"We have to talk," you say, and touch Tricia on the elbow. If it hurts just being in the same room with her, touching her is like pressing your hand on purpose to a hot burner. She feels like aching love and grief and terror, the ancient animal fear of being left alone.

You know it, you know all about it, you know.

You wish to the bottom of your soul there were somebody else to say this. Somebody should be saying it to you, making you believe it, fighting through your denial and getting you to see the truth. You should be one of the ones hitting walls and having hysterics.

You aren't. You're the villain of the piece, and if it's not the final service you wanted to do your best friend, you know it's one she would have appreciated. Asked for, if she could ask.

You know exactly what she would have wanted.

It's not fair.

Tricia takes seconds to respond, as if the signals from your voice and touch have to travel a long way through her nerves to find her. When she looks up, leaning back from the hospital bed, the bandages and purpled flesh, you can tell from the blankness of her expression that whatever she heard, she did not understand you.

"I need to talk with you," you say again, squeezing her elbow, trying to let the chant of anxiety in her head wash through you without drowning in it.

She nods and stands, understanding without being told that this is not a conversation you can have in front of Daphne. The empty space that used to be Daphne. She follows you into the hall, and you lean a shoulder on the wall, needing the support, and try to get enough air into you to speak softly, calmly, like a reasonable human being. Not like somebody squeezing words out through a broken heart.

She's so patient with you, which is so unfair, because she has no reason to be, no reason to be kind. You'd trade places with her wife in a heartbeat. Not for Daphne, even--for you, because you are a selfish bastard and you don't want to do this alone.

But--you guess--that's what you're going to do.

Tricia looks at you, giving you time, and lets her fingertips rest lightly against your shirtsleeve. You gulp air in and try to find the words, everything you rehearsed gone now. So much for that eidetic memory.

"She's gone," you say, finally, because it's all you can say, two syllables the most you can get out into the awful space between you. And you don't know what's going to happen, if Tricia is going to explode in your face and blame you (the way you are blaming yourself, with every breath that scours you out inside).

"She's right--" Tricia says, turning her head, hand reaching back to the open door of the hospital room, the denial but not the anger yet, and you shake your head and say, "She's not in there, T. I . . ."

Her breath stops, but you choke on the words for so long she gets them out first anyway. "You looked."

You nod.

"What do you mean, she's not in there?"

She's a teacher, of course. She knows the right question to ask to unlock the floodgates, and you stand there watching all her long wavy hair locked up and uncombed over her shoulders, thinking about Daphne twining a lock absently around her fingers, and you wish, you wish, you wish--

Except you don't really wish you were dead. That's the worst part. You just wish you wished you were dead.

You don't deserve what they had. All you care about is yourself.

True, maybe. But you can pretend it's not all about you, for a minute at least.

"She's not in the mirror," you say, very softly. "It doesn't--there's nothing to reflect. Like holding it up to see if somebody is breathing. There's not even a fog. I'm so sorry, I'm so fucking sorry--"

Tricia's face does the most terrible things while she works her way through that. But while you're apologizing she's squeezing your shoulder, and when you find yourself bent almost double around the pain in your gut she moves close and lets you lean on her. And that's so wrong, it should be the other way around.

"You're sure?"

You nod, but before you finish, she's already shaking her head at herself as if she's the one who's done something insensitive: Of course he's sure, you idiot. Don't be a brute.

"Oh, Platypus," she says, the only one outside of the team who calls you that. "Oh, sweetie. How many times did you try?"

"Ten," you say, turning to look at the wall. Ten, except it was five tries before you could make yourself look, edging up on her hospital bed like her hand was a viper that might rear up and strike you. Ten, because you made yourself promise you would stop after one more after nine. "T.--"

"Shh," she says, and you shh. Because you trust her, because Daphne loved her. Because she's everything Daphne deserved, and you can't begrudge either of them that.

She touches your face to get your attention back. She's crying, you're crying. She says, "I need to think about this."

You nod. It's not like there's any hurry. She's not in there; ergo, she's not in pain. Spared that, at least, if nothing else.

"I am so sorry."

"Me too." Tricia looks up at you. She looks away. "I need to think about this. Get some sleep or something. We'll talk about it in a couple hours."

You don't sleep, and you won't sleep, and you couldn't leave the hospital if you tried. But Tricia deserves her time alone by Daphne's side, and this isn't about you, no matter how much every breath feels like it comes out your throat dragging your intestines up on fishhooks. So you find a corner of a waiting room the team isn't in and you sit there, staring at the TV with the sound turned down, wishing God accepted trades or bargaining.

Dammit, you think once, a thought so profoundly selfish you hate yourself for an hour afterward, it was supposed to be her burying me. You're the one with the life expectancy that should be measured with an egg timer. You're the one who takes the stupid risks.

You're still hating yourself for it when you feel Tricia come toward you, and though you're trying not to read her you can sense the resolve in the room. She sits down on your right side and leans her shoulder against yours. Maybe this is easier without eye contact. Maybe.

"We'll give her a week," she says. "So we can all say good-bye. And in case miracles happen."

"I think you are doing the right thing," you say, because you do, and because it might someday help her, to have heard it.

She starts to say something and chokes it back, so you know it was angry. That's okay; you don't mind her anger. You suspect you deserve it.

But because Tricia is better than you, she keeps it to herself, and when she finally says something, it's soft, and gentle, and it kills your breath in your lungs and your heartbeat in your chest. "She knew how you feel about her," Tricia says. "And she loved you, too."

Knew. Loved.

This is really happening. It has really happened. It's real and it's over and there's no take-backs and no do-overs now. You tip your head back, because it makes it easier to breathe through the tears. You breathe through your swollen nose because if you open your mouth you'll be sobbing.

Tricia says, "Did you hear me, Chaz?"

You nod. You have to say something. You have to, for Tricia, because it's monstrous to sit here in silence when she's so brave and in so much pain.

"I wish it was me," you say, which is the wrong thing and half a lie and you want to keep saying it anyway, over and over like a chant, so you stuff your fists against your mouth and bite down on your knuckles and fold forward over your knees.

"Don't say that," Tricia says. "She'd hate to hear you say that."

She's right, so you bite your knuckles harder, and Tricia puts her arms around you and you throw one of yours around her. People walk past, doctors and nurses and aids and administrators and patients and visitors, every one of them blessing you with their selective blindness, honoring the bubble of grief that embraces you two. You hold on to each other for dear life, because sometimes that's all you've got.

Maybe that's always all you've ever got, and the rest of the time you're fooling yourself.

Sooner or later, you can talk again. Tricia's just tucked under your chin, not shaking anymore. You take a breath; it holds. You take another.

There's one more thing you can do, though. So you do it. Not expecting a fight, because another time Tricia's pride might drive her to do it herself, but right now it's busy holding her up off the ground. "I'll tell her father."

"Thank you," Tricia says. And leans her head against your shoulder.

“Post Mortem”

June 2011

Hafidha Gates is dreaming.

She stands with her feet planted solidly on the earth. She stands and watches the semi come down upon her--the irresistible force bearing down on the concrete barrier.

She reaches out--not with her hands. With her will. Into the network of linked silicon brains that control the steering, the brakes, the engine--

White smoke boils from the wheel wells with the stench of burning rubber. A horrible sound cuts the air. The trailer bends impossibly, coming around, swinging into the passenger side of the truck.

Jack knife. The perfect word. Metal crunches. The driver--already dead.

The cab of the tractor-trailer drifts to a halt three inches from her face.

"Gotcha," she purrs.

She bends forward and kisses the W in KENWORTH.

*

Hafidha Gates awakens, curled around a pillow, her body clenched like a fist. She chokes, rolls, just makes it over the edge of the bed before a bitter stream of bile forces its way between her teeth. She lies there for a minute, belly down on the institutional bed, gagging.

Nobody will clean that up for her.

You killed her, she thinks. This is your fault.

If you had been there, you could have saved her.

Don't you dare feel bad.

*

Frost doesn't mourn, not like the others. It isn't in her. And she has no plans to attend the funeral.

Hot water and harsh soap run over her hands. She scrubs, turns them, scrubs again, lathering to the elbows. You are, she thinks, a sociopath.

It's an interesting thought--it's always interesting to think about ourselves--but it's not a new one. She inspects it, turning like a cloudy jewel in the light of her attention, and sets it aside.

She rinses, and reaches for the gloves. Surgical gloves come sealed in sterile packets. The ones Frost uses come jumbled, hundreds in a box like a Kleenex dispenser.

No one to glove and gown her, here. Her patients don't care about a sterile field maintained, and honestly, there's not any reason to wash her hands before she starts the postmortem. This particular decedent will be buried in a closed casket. There's not enough mortician's putty and loving gloved hands in the world to turn this battered meat into a doll you could kiss goodnight before you slide it into the ground.

That's all funerals are. Kissing a doll goodnight. Turning on the light and fetching a glass of water before you leave the room. Propping the door open three inches behind you.

Just rituals.

Nobody cleaned her up before they put her on life support--or after for that matter. Frost wishes she could smooth the decedent's blood-spiked hair back from her brow before she starts the Y incision, anyway. As if to let her know that Frost will take good care of her; it's going to be all right.

It's not any different when it's someone you knew.

That's interesting, also.

*

The Johns Hopkins autopsy suite does not have a glass-walled, elevated room in which observers can isolate themselves from the smells and realities of a dissection. It's just as well, because Stephen Reyes might succumb to the temptation, and he needs to be here: he needs to bear witness. He walks between the six cold marble tables, toward the one at the end where Madeline Frost works, alone.

Frost has already started prepping the body. Because Worth's organs were donated, there's no need to make a new incision. She'll just have to snip open and expand the cavity to look at what remains. She'll saw open the skull. That's where all the damage was. Right now, she's washing the body. Water falls to the white-skinned corpse and, stained red-brown, flows down the table to the slotted floor.

Frost looks up. "Stephen," she says, because he's not here in a professional capacity. It had taken him a few months to figure out when she used a surname and title, and when she used a first name--but she had her rules, and she abided by them.

"Dr. Frost," he answers. "Will I be in your way?"

"Not if you stand over there." She walks around the table, still washing. A precise and factual answer, crisply enunciated and utterly toneless. He feels an unexpected rush of affectionate warmth for Madeline Frost.

There are no cloths, no bandages across Worth's face now. It looks like something you'd expect to find in a meat locker. Her abdomen is sunken, empty.

I am Eleanor, Stephen Reyes tells himself as he stands between those tables, performing the only final service he can, and I can look at anything.

It occurs to him that quoting James Goldman should be Brady's line, but surely Brady won't mind, this time, if Reyes is the last one out of the room. And it's true. He can look at anything. He can. He will. You must do the thing you think you cannot do. And that's an Eleanor, too. Eleanor Roosevelt, and that one should belong to Todd.

Maybe it's because he's not watching for his own sake, but for all of theirs. For hers. Because somebody should witness this, and somebody should remember it.

If Reyes were thinking in his own voice, he knows what words would come to mind. The ones Neil Gaiman put in the mouth of Death herself, when he made her a gentle and loving friend: When the first living thing existed, I was there, waiting. When the last living thing dies, my job is finished. I'll put the chairs on tables, turn out the lights and lock the universe behind me when I leave.

This is his responsibility, and that makes it his obligation. He'll watch until it's done.

When he raises his head, Frost is looking at him. She has a pair of surgical scissors in one hand. She's wearing a face shield and a plastic smock. Her skin is so pale it seems translucent, and her eyes are very blue.

"Are you sure?" she asks him.

"No," he says. "But I'm staying."

She stares, head turned over her shoulder like an owl, and then she turns away as quickly as if flicking off water. "Madeline Frost," she says. "M.D. June twenty-second, two thousand and eleven. Postmortem dissection of decedent Daphne Worth--"

*

Just a hair before midnight, New York State declares same-sex marriage legal.

So, do the morons in the New York legislature think that, before they spoke up, it was wrong? Do they imagine life is some kind of two-pole switch, and they can declare which way it's toggled?

John Worth mops his eyes with the heels of both hands. The tears just keep welling, and spilling.

Six states. Forty-four to go.

Forty-four times he knows he's going to weep shamefully, helplessly, at a loss made new and unbearable once more.

He thumbs the volume up on the television remote to drown out the sound of his sobs in the empty house.

*

There is no right thing to say. Falkner hates like fuck that she's the one who always has to say it.

There's no good time, either. She waits, the sun hot on her shoulders through her dark suit jacket, until Tricia is relatively dry-eyed, until two friends have approached, condoled, moved on.

John Worth stands beside her. One shouldn't judge by appearances, but Falkner doubts he's a comfort, beyond the comfort of acknowledgment. Don't discount the comfort of that, here and now.

People pair up in such unlikely ways. Worth was slim but sturdy, meticulous, careful of people's reactions, cautious in speaking up. Tricia Andreoli is deep-bosomed and big-hipped, with a soft stomach the released pleats of her skirt can't hide. Impulsive, outspoken, a little combative, as an academic ought to be. And good for Daphne. They'd all been able to see it. Tricia made Daphne like herself.

Tricia smiles when Falkner walks up. It makes her feel guilty. She opens her mouth to say the inadequate things.

But Tricia beats her to it. "I'm glad you're all here. She loved you guys so much I would have been jealous if I didn't know how happy the job made her."

How dead the job made her. It's like a blow to the face. But Falkner swallows the bile back down and unclenches her teeth. "I'd tell you how wonderful she was, but you know that already."

Tricia's eyes swim; she squeezes them shut. A drop crawls down her cheek anyway. "As my freshmen insist on saying, 'True dat.' They learn it from television, you know."

"Is there anything we can do?"

"I think I'm taken care of. But thank you, Esther."

Taking care of things is about all Falkner has to offer anyone. "Well, remember, you're family. If you need a parking ticket fixed, we're pretty well-connected."

Tricia's eyes widen, and she smiles. "I thought you were the one with no sense of humor."

"I am."

Tricia laughs aloud. It makes Falkner feel as if it had been-- a good thing, getting out of bed this morning.

She holds out a hand to John Worth, and he takes it. He lets her squeeze it. It drops to his side when she lets go. He's in his late sixties, but he looks older; the fit of his suit makes her think there used to be more of him, and the skin of his face sags as if it ought to have more flesh to cover. Under his jaw, the sun catches a patch of stubble he missed with the razor, and the white bristles sparkle.

"Your daughter was one of the best officers I've ever worked with," she says. There's no way she can explain to him how much that means. "And one of the best people."

His mouth squeezes tight; the skin rucks under his lower lip. "One says that to the parents." His voice is rough, but not loud. "To assure them they did a good job."

The suspect was hostile and uncooperative. It makes her feel better to have something she knows what to do with. "I wouldn't think you needed assurance, sir."

"I was proud of my daughter, Ms.-- Agent Falkner. I loved her."

She wants to say, "You loved your picture of her. We loved her." But of course, she doesn't. There's only one day of atonement a year, after all, and she doesn't want to end up with a list she can't get through in twenty-four hours.

Too late; the casket shining in the sun behind her is already a day's worth.

Oh, God damn that word. God keep the soul of the woman she'll think of whenever she hears it.

*

"Hey, Villette," Lau says, at Chaz's elbow. He's watching Brady pull a blossom from the coffin, and wondering; Brady doesn't strike him as the type for sentimentally pressing flowers.

At least they gave her lilies, and not roses. Sex and death. Chaz still stands well-upwind, wondering if the choice of flowers was influenced by Reyes.

"Hey," he says, and turns to look at Lau. Her face looks strange without makeup, naked and younger. She's not wearing sunglasses--the modern answer to the veil--and her lashes are spiked and dark, but otherwise he can't tell that she's been crying. He'd bet he doesn't look that together.

She touches his hand, and he reads that, and puts it on her shoulder, watching her straighten as if the weight of his touch were the opposite. "Drive me home?" she asks.

He nods. She came with Falkner, but Falkner is with The Family, which means with Tricia, and Chaz suspects that Lau would rather take the bus than intrude on anything that might bring Daphne's partner any fragment of relief.

They walk away in silence through the buzzing heat of the day, behind the screen of trees, to where the line of automobiles awaits them. As he prods the Blue Beetle through the District traffic, he steals glances at her, because he can't read her silence. She looks forward, at the scarred and dented dash, at the star crack in the windshield, at the skyline. If her eyes focus on any of those things, it doesn't happen when he's looking.

But in her driveway, as he's taking the key out of the ignition, she reaches across her body to put her hand in the crook of his elbow. And when he turns, surprised, she searches his face, searches so hard it almost scares him. Then that hand comes up and knots in his hair and pulls him down into a fevered, open-mouthed kiss, salty and slick, her eyes wide as she stares into his.

"Just so you know what you're getting into when I ask you if you want to come inside," she says, a little breathless. Her hand slides down to the nape of his neck, fingers flexing. Urging.

Oh, so many reasons not to do this. Friendship, professional relationship, hard-won respect. The inadvisability of haircuts and other major life decisions while in the throes of grieving.

She needs him, and she's asking. And she's whipcord and softness under her black tailored suit, smelling of clean sweat and talcum powder. And he knows if he goes with her, there will be whole minutes when he doesn't remember how badly he hurts.

His friend would have rolled her eyes, or laughed, or asked him if he'd lost his mind, or teased him, or said, "Dude, you so owe me."

Now his friend won't say any of those things, ever. He's left here alone, and this is not his fantasy. But then, he's pretty sure it isn't Lau's, either.

"You're sure?"

Bitten lip, flush across her cheeks and down to the collarbones--hard to spot, if you don't have the knack of it, but she's fair-skinned enough that he can see. "Do you want to come inside?"

"Yes," he says, and opens the door.

Lock, door, door again, security system. He's just following her lead. She backs him into the corner by the coat closet, light coming through the columns of narrow windows on either side of the door, and kisses him again. And he kisses her back, while her fingers slip inside the knot of his tie and he intervenes long enough to get the tie tack out.

"Funeral sex," he says, just to get things clear, clear as that sunlight drenching the air around them, and she nods uh huh and catches his lip between her teeth and it's all over but the screaming. They're both half-naked by the time they make it to the top of the stairs, his suitcoat discarded on the landing, her white blouse draped like a ghost over the banister, her small breasts shy behind lace. He knows where the bedroom is; this is Lau's house, he's been here a thousand times. Familiar and yet unfamiliar, because when he's been here before his arms have never been full of warm urgent girl before.

There's more sunlight on her bed. It's not made--the linens a jumble of mismatched stripes and polka dots in brilliant colors, scattered with throw pillows in the shape of the sun, moon, and stars. He flips the comforter flat before she pulls him down across it. There's central air, but the sunlight is warm.

"Let me get my wallet." Hey, a guy can learn.

"Nightstand," she says, and what with one thing and another that's the last thing that gets put into words for a while, other than "Here, like this," and "Oh, Jesus," and "Wait, wait, I need a minute--"

When they're naked (she's more perfect than he imagined, her flanks all curves and golden shadows, the long muscles of her thighs smoothed under healthy girl softness so she feels like resilient satin he never wants to take his hands off) he rolls onto his back and draws her over him, both because he wants to see her and because there are things about his body he doesn't want her to notice right now. The scars are reminders of too much hurt, and neither one of them needs any more pain today.

He's about to kiss her again when she stops him, one hand on either shoulder, and sets herself back a little, frowning in preparation to whatever she's going to say.

He almost calls her Lau before he remembers why that would be stupid right this second. "Nikki?"

"I probably shouldn't tell you," she says. "But I've only done this with one guy since my divorce. So if I suck, I apologize."

He supposes if he were a normal guy, if this were a normal assignation, he'd have to ask. But he knows her, and he's got the job he does because he's pretty good at figuring stuff out from context, and anyway at this point--skin to skin, her warm, soft belly molding to his groin--he can't honestly stop himself from reflecting little splinters of the emotions shivering through her: affection, grief, pleasure, chagrin, embarrassment, fear, and the craving so hot and empty it makes him gasp in need.

He's a little shocked to realize that right this second, Nikki Lau is the loneliest person he has ever met. Bulletproof, he thinks, and wonders if he's the only feral critter in the B.A.U. who knows better than to cry out loud. Whatever she gave to her ex, whatever it cost her to offer it, Chaz knows now that he snapped it off and took it with him when he left, and all these years later it's only just starting to grow back.

He pushes the blunt-cut hair off her cheek, and it swings right back against the elegant bone. "One," he says, "you have never turned in less than a 4.0 effort in your life, lady. And two, as a member of the male sex, I feel the need to respectfully mention that that's the wrong word for failure to perform under these circumstances."

Her frown turns into something else, screws up into a complicated grimace. For a moment he thinks she's about to cry. Lines draw themselves around her eyes, down to the corners of her mouth.

He cups the nape of her neck in his hand and--cursing himself a little--says, "They'll take my union card for saying so, Nik, but if you want somebody to hold you, you don't have to fuck me to get it."

If she was about to cry she's laughing now. "I think I do," she says. "Because you're not going to get close enough for me to let you, otherwise. Crap. I'm such a guy sometimes." She shakes her head. "Besides, I want to. Do you know when the last time I wanted to was?"

He knows a rhetorical question when he hears one. "If you're a guy, I'm very confused." He touches her breast, nipple in the soft center of his palm, and watches her face change, feels her lean into it. "All right," he says. "Shutting up now."

That's how he winds up more or less in charge of the operation. There's a moment when she's lying across him, her back nestled to his chest, his mouth full of her hair and the taste of the skin of her neck, his fingers wet and sticky while she clenches in long, rowing strokes around him, and the sun's too bright across his face, so he closes his eyes and misses seeing her come. He feels it, though, the rippling cascade so strong it's just this side of painful, thump of her skull against his collarbone, lancing sharpness of her nails in the back of his hand, and has no idea how he keeps her from pulling him after.

He does, though, and then she's languid and purring, relaxed bonelessly against him, warmer than the sunlight, giving him all the time he feels like taking to get there for himself. Whole long minutes when he can breathe, when his heart isn't breaking, until he loses all his breath in a rush and can't get it back, can't want it back, can't care if he ever breathes again.

*

Her head on his shoulder is dead weight, comfortable, heavy. "Well," she says, without lifting it to look at him. "It could have been Brady who made the pass."

"Are you kidding? Danny Brady makes a pass at me, I'm walking on air for a month. Only the best for him." He pauses, attempt to muster a suitably foreboding expression belied by the fact that he can't quite iron out the quirk at the corner of his mouth. "It could have been Sol. At which point I would know that my weirdness quotient had officially jumped the shark."

He feels her laugh start deep in her belly, and that it takes a while to bubble out of her. But then it stops, unfinished, as if she just thought of something. She sits up, straddling his hips, one hand still on his chest, the other crossed over her breasts, so all he can see is the sunlight on her flanks and shoulders. "Sol's still waiting for his princess."

Which makes him sad, because he knows that it is true.

"So," he says, words heavy on the humid air, blurred by the sunlight falling between them, "was that something you foresee needing to do again?" He winces as soon as it's out. Thank you, Captain Bad Segue.

She thinks about it. "No," she says, and does him the honor of not apologizing.

He puts his hand over hers. "Just don't expect me to say I'm sorry it happened." But then he lets his fingers slide across her hips and stroke the unbelievable softness of her thighs. He pulls gently, guiding. "Hey, you ready for a rematch? Come on up here."

She blinks over her shoulder. "Seriously?"

"If I only get one crack at this," he says, trying to feel the warmth of her honesty and trust--her friendship--instead of the sting of rejection, "I'm going to leave you with something to remember me by."

*

Several days later, a greeting card shows up interlaced with his usual afternoon pile of interdepartmental mail. It's not signed, and there's no writing in it. But it has a picture of a sorrowful beagle puppy on the front, and inside, the two words "I'm sorry" crossed out twice in thick black Sharpie.

*

Brady doesn't come into the burrow.

Brady brings you the flowers. They're inspected by the guard, who carries them around the barrier. Two lilies, white daisies, white iris: heady and half-sick in their sweetness, already browning at the edge.

By this, you know that outside your air-conditioned cairn, it's June.

"Where's Chaz?" you ask, and Brady shrugs through the Plexiglas and says, "He took Lau home."

"But you came."

He nods.

He doesn't visit often, but this is special.

"I'm sorry," you say, and the horrible thing is, you aren't. Or, you are, but beside the sorrow, dwarfing it, is a horrible quivering jellyfish delight, so much soaking pleasure in his pain. The it loves watching Brady suffer. And it loves watching you suffer as well. That pain is all its food, its only joy.

You bury your face in the flowers, though your hands want to twist on the stems. You could lean them in the corner of the sink and keep the stems in water, keep them alive and bright a little while.

But you won't.

You already know that you'll sit helplessly on the bunk and watch your hands pull them apart, bruise the petals, crush them into browning twists, until your fingers are rank with the juices.

And you'll enjoy it, too.

*

Reyes leans against the edge of the counter in the kitchenette, both hands on the lip, his back to the coffeemaker. He only picks up his head as Sol walks in. "Sol," he says, because it's after hours and he thought everybody else had gone home after the funeral.

"Steve," Sol says. He pours a cup of thick, cold coffee and takes it over to the microwave. There's a pause, while it whirrs and the table turns. "You all right?"

"No," Reyes says, then thinks about it, and snorts, and shakes his head. "No," he confirms. "How about you?"

Sol's coffee beeps. "I keep thinking," Sol says, as he slides it out of the microwave and sets it on the counter, "that the story doesn't go this way. That the author goofed something up."

"What do you mean?"

Sol crouches in front of the fridge, poking in the back until he finds the 2 percent milk with TODD written across the top. He keeps talking as he pours, stirs, returns the carton to the chill chest. "I mean I'm obviously in this story to be the guy who gets killed saving one of the beautiful young warriors. My mentoring is done. If they ever needed me before, they don't need me now. So why am I still here, and Daphne's gone? Something the editor needs to address, you know what I mean?"

He shuts the fridge, picks up his coffee, and walks out. After he's safely out of hearing, Reyes, who has been staring after him, says, "Yeah. I know exactly what you mean."

*

There's a funeral, and a wake, and friends, and relatives, and what Daphne would have called "All the Andreolis! So many Andreolis!" None of it means anything. It's a ritual, Tricia thinks. Something to tell you that it's time to fold up the worst of the grief and start pulling yourself together.

She tells herself she'll do that. Maybe. Tomorrow.

Daphne's team mostly doesn't come to the wake, and Tricia is glad. They have a secret, her and Daphne's work family and Daphne's father. They are inside a circle that no one else can breach.

They were there.

What happens now is for everyone else.

There's cake and coffee and tuna noodle casserole. Two kinds of fruit salad. More coffee. Some booze. Reyes does make an appearance, with his current flame, an archaeologist from Tennessee somewhere. Gray drops by: he says Brady went to see Hafidha. There's Pete Pauley and some of the other BAU types. Arthur Tan and his wife Padma Pavithra and their baby--who is hardly a baby now. Victor Celentano, brief and professional and repeating Falkner's offer that anything the Bureau can do, will be done.

Two or three of Daphne's distant relatives make appearances--a cousin, an aunt. Tricia's never met them before. The Worths aren't a close family.

The Director of the FBI was at the funeral. He doesn't come to the wake. Which is good: the house is too small for a security detail. Some of the Idlewood staff come, though, and some of Daphne's old EMT coworkers and college friends. That ex-cop who writes the true-crime stuff. That guy she was engaged to, who seems very cowed by the evidence of Daphne's life-after-Peter.

Daphne Worth was loved, and the evidence is all around Tricia now. It helps. A little.

Then they go home. Back to the cars and the hotels and the world, leaving Tricia alone in a rowhouse with a beautifully remodeled kitchen full of casseroles in tupperware and baskets of horrible apples. They save the worst fruit for the fruit baskets, she thinks. It looks so pretty, and tastes like Styrofoam.

Don't leave me alone. But they do--they leave you, and that's the way the world works.

She's sprung Tiger from his carrier--where he gladly spent the rush of the wake--and is scraping ambrosia fruit salad--seriously, who eats this stuff?--into the trash when the doorbell rings one final time. She glances at the clock. It's 11:30 p.m.

The peephole shows her Danny Brady, bulking to fill the stoop, hunched down a little so she can see his face. He grimaces apologetically. He must have seen her shadow.

Six more weeks of winter, she thinks, and opens the door.

"Hey," he says.

"Hey," she says, and stands aside so he can come in. "You okay?"

"That's my line." He holds up a shopping bag. "I just got back from Virginia. I brought some stuff--"

"I'm throwing out food," she says, locking the door behind him. She wasn't going to throw out the cake Chaz made--but she doesn't think she can bear to eat it either.

"It's Gruyére and crackers," he says. "Some grapes. It'll keep. Or, if you want me to stick around, we can eat it right now. I also have two bottles of Chardonnay."

She blinks. She wouldn't have taken him for a gruyére kind of guy. And really not a Chardonnay one. And then it sinks in, what he's offering.

She laughs. It still feels like theft. "I appreciate your attempt to comfort the widow," she says. "But I don't do boys."

And he grins at her--a little boy grin that makes his face look like it might crack--and answers, "That's cool. I don't do girls. But I do know what it's like to lie awake all night wondering what you could have done better, and what you should have done better, and frankly, I think it's better to get drunk."

Tricia knows he lost somebody. Daphne was never very clear about the details--she kept the confidences of friends--but Tricia can infer enough from silences to know that the big man her wife called the Cowboy had lost someone to the monsters. And that when it happened, he hadn't had anyone he could turn to--or even tell.

This is for him as much as you. She wonders what he'll tell her before morning. She wonders if it will help.

She takes the shopping bag from his hand. "Admit it. Gray picked the cheese."

"He wouldn't let me out of the house with a brick of Velveeta," Brady says easily. "Got a corkscrew?"

"Sure," she says. "And when the wine runs out, there's a bottle of vodka in the freezer."

*

"After a fashion, this is my fault." Hafidha swallows, her face ashy under the brown tone, faded now by too many sunless days. "If I had been there, I could have saved her."

Chaz looks down at his hands, rather than up at the Plexiglas and wire that separates them. He doesn't trust his face not to show his pain, and he doesn't want to give the Bug that much more reason to drive its talons into Hafidha. "Nobody could have saved her, Hafs. He ran a semi over her. And him. He killed the driver to make it happen."

Hafidha shakes her head, fingers tightening on the arms of her plastic chair. "Silly Platypus. Don't you know? Those things have computers in them."

“Beta”

Old Rag Mountain, VA, June 2011

If he had the wise old head the noobs thought he did, Stu would have turned back at Sperryville, when rain pebbled the windshield. But no, there was wise, and there was been-stuck-indoors-all-week-and-fuck-I'm-gonna-go-send-something. Somebody had to be as crazy-stupid and rock-deprived as he was. Stu hoped for a fellow boulderer, but he wouldn't bitch about top-roping, not today.

And there was always someone sending one of Old Rag's routes. Stu scowled past the slow wipers at the unvaried gray sky and made that, "almost always."

If it was still raining when he got to the mountain, he'd turn around and go home. Except it wasn't raining much... Nope, if he chucked it and went home, there'd be another day. If he slipped off slick rock or washed-down sand or wet moss and broke his neck? Not so much.

This close to D.C. they had climbers from everywhere. The Norwegians would boulder on ice, because they were crazy muthafuckas. French climbers from the embassy could be a pain in the ass, talking about Fontainebleau, and how Old Rag was gumby chow. Yeah, well, take a week off and go to Yosemite, man. Some people have big damn countries. No, that wasn't fair; the French guys were all right. And they could send a problem like fuck, you had to give them that. But he'd never seen any of them climb in the rain.

Stu nudged the truck up the paved road toward the Berry Hollow parking area. Through a break in the trees he caught a glimpse of a car's roof, light blue and bulbous. Could be hikers. But he had a feeling...

He made the corner into the parking area, and yeah, it was a manky VW that dated from back in the day before that Golf/Jetta/Rabbit noise, fenders pitted with rust, back lid held down with a twist of wire.

The Gecko and Doc Worthie, by the Goddess of Granite. And damned if the rain hadn't stopped. Suddenly the day promised not to suck.

Stu parked, hopped out of the cab, and dragged his crashpad and the nylon duffel with his chalk and shoes out of the bed of the pickup. Then he shouldered everything and headed up Saddle Trail.

Trailside Boulders was Stu's favorite bouldering anywhere on Old Rag. Big rocks, with everything from a nice warmup V2 to the burly V8 around Golden Crisp. Cracks, crimpers, traverses--and your reward for topping out was that sweet vista across the treetops, that made you feel as if you'd sprouted up out of the stone and could fly away if you wanted to.

Maybe the French climbers were right, and Fontainebleau was paradise. But Stu was pretty sure he'd never be happier in this incarnation than when he dragged himself up off that last hold and sat, sweaty and panting, on top of any problem in Trailside.

He picked his way through sticky mud in a low spot on the trail, and a cloud of midges went for his nose and mouth and eyes. Up higher, the breeze would blow them off.

The Gecko liked to boulder. Doc Worthie was more of a top-roper, but Stu thought she could be a damned good boulderer if she got over that unreasonable attachment to order. That pretty much summed them up: the Gecko was chaos, Worthie was order, and the two of them balanced out just right. The climbing version of Lethal Weapon.

The Gecko could have come from anywhere. He sounded American, but he looked like he was from space. Like David Bowie, in that movie where he played an alien. Over beers, Stu had heard other climbers speculate: the Gecko was some kind of spook, some Langley black ops mothafucka. Stu had made an obnoxious noise into his beer about that, but hadn't actually said anything. The Gecko might be an alien, but Stu was pretty sure he hadn't hit thirty yet, even on his home planet. Tough as new rope, yeah, and never gave anything up that he didn't have to, but a spook? Huh-uh.

Doc Worthie was a whole 'nother thing. When you met her, you met all of her; whatever she was like in the rest of the world, out on the rock she was wide open and straight up. Whether she was whooping and grinning because she'd nailed her first 5.9, or calling you a moron while she taped the stress fracture in your foot that you shouldn't have been climbing with, she was, well, one hundred percent her. Not to mention that she traveled with her own first aid kit and knew how to use it.

He'd passed Old Rag Shelter almost without noticing; the first honkin' big block of granite rose up and said hello. Nobody there. Stu listened for voices and heard nothing. But there were more problems further off the trail, and it wouldn't hurt to check 'em out.

He found the Gecko standing spraddle-legged at the foot of a slipped granite face, chunky for the first six feet, with so many bucket holds it was maybe a V2 max, and not even that for someone with the Gecko's reach.

But the Gecko wasn't looking at the first six feet. He was staring up at the smooth slab, like a baby headwall, that all that chunkiness had slipped away from.

Even for Trailside, it was tall. Strictly speaking, Stu wouldn't have called it a bouldering problem at all. Which meant they were top-roping, which meant they were probably setting a new route, since Stu had never seen anyone sending that face, or seen or heard beta from climbers who'd sent it. Heinous bouldering, but a decent assisted climb, if shorter than most. Maybe Worthie was learning route-setting or lead climbing.

Except, where was she? And why was there no pile of rope and harness at the Gecko's long, skinny feet?

"Hey," Stu offered.

The Gecko turned and blinked, as if Stu had called him back from the asteroid belt. "Hey," he answered. A little hoarse, like he hadn't said anything for a while.

"Where's Worthie? Couldn't she come out and play today?"

The asteroid belt wasn't just a long way away. It was also fucking vacuum cold. Which was how Stu felt standing in the path of the Gecko's expression.

Stu hadn't ever read "couple" off the Gecko and Worthie. He didn't know why--maybe because every other couple he knew had little pissy fights with each other, and those two never did. But the absolute blank ice cube of the Gecko's face seemed to say, Dumped.

What the hell did she take with her that would make somebody like the Gecko look like that?

Stu re-read the clues. No rope--but no crashpad, either. No spotter. Was the Gecko waiting, hoping someone would show up and agree to spot him? Who would also bring a pad, because the Gecko had driven all the way out to Old Rag without his?

The Gecko wasn't always wise about this shit. Besides, when Stu had said "Hey," he was pretty sure the Gecko had been eyeing the problem with That Look.

He'd planned to free solo. Without so much as another human in yelling distance.

Stu wanted to tell him off, point out that if he got himself half- or whole-killed, he was crapping on the community, because the Park Service would likely freak and ban climbers in the park. It was fucking bad manners, like not cleaning your protection off a route. But there was that vacuum-cold. The memory of it made Stu say, perky as a damned cheerleader, "You figure to send that? I'll spot you." Holy crap, he sounded bogus.

But the Gecko just shrugged.

Maybe Stu had read it wrong. Maybe the Gecko hadn't been planning an act of stupid. Or maybe he just didn't care if he had a witness.

Note to self: next time you think only crazy people would be out here, stay home. Stu unfolded the crashpad.

The Gecko started easy-peasy, as Stu had expected. That first six feet was practically a flight of stairs for him. He paused with his hands on that last gerry-rail ledge, tilting his head back to admire the wall. Then he hooked his toe over a little chickenhead of granite and started working up.

The holds got thin just over his head. Stu wanted to offer beta, but from where he was he had a crappy view of what was available for hands or feet, and no guidance to give. The Gecko was in a better position, right now, to find his route.

His knuckles disappeared into a jam crack, and Stu could see him cranking on that right arm, the muscles and tendons popping into relief as he dragged himself high enough to get a toe or an edge against a flake of rock. He caught one, then a solid little bracket for his other foot, and stood up, belly to the rock face, arms at full stretch. He scrabbled with the fingers of his left hand for a hold Stu couldn't see. Before Stu could squint out an alternate hold and yell it up to him, the Gecko squatted slightly over his toes, and sprang for it.

It was a beautiful thing, Stu admitted, while trying not to pee in his shoes. The Gecko had figured the deadpoint of his jump, where his fingers would catch the hold straight on instead of coming down on it, and it was like watching a thrown magnet stick to a refrigerator door. He scootched the pad over. At this point, if he tried to guide the Gecko's fall like a good spotter, the Gecko would likely squash him into roadkill, but he was there to minimize the heinously stupid, and he would do his job.

The Gecko found another handhold and hung from it like an orangutan. He smeared his shoe soles against the granite, inching upward. When he dug his right toe into the rock, Stu wanted to yell, No, it'll push you away from the wall, and you'll barndoor-- But the Gecko used the momentum to swing sideways and up to another pair of holds.

Stu wanted to cover his eyes. Too much dyno, even for the Gecko, who could be a goddamn flying squirrel when it came to getting from one hold to another. Stu moved the crashpad again.

Dude, don't bring shit with you to the problem. The problem is always more than enough to deal with. If it's not, you should be doing something else. That's what he should have told the Gecko, instead of offering to spot him while he tried to kill himself.

Of course, the Gecko would have had to want to listen. Stu didn't think that was likely.

The Gecko had hold of a decent little ledge, more than a crimper, and maybe could have stayed there. Except he'd cranked so hard, and Stu could see his legs shaking like a Chihuahua in a snowstorm, and his grip just...quit. There was an ugly noise when his flailing hand whacked into the granite, and the shriek that was a human nervous system overriding conscious control and objecting to the likelihood it was going to ohmigod fucking die. A long fall, longer than crashpads were designed for.

And the Gecko decked.

Stu really, really wanted Worthie there, even though, if she had been, the whole scenario would probably never have happened. But he knew a little about broken bones, and what kinds of injuries were serious enough that you didn't want to move a guy who had them. The Gecko was fighting to get air into his flattened lungs, and the panic of not-breathing made him struggle even as Stu warned, "Don't move, don't move!" and tried to hold him still.

The noise he made getting that first breath in sounded like gagging in reverse, and painful. Then he rolled onto his side and curled in on himself like a shrimp tail. Well, if he could do that, at least his spine was probably intact. The Gecko shivered on the pad, little staccato jerks of the shoulders and knees that looked involuntary, but he didn't moan or yell or make any sound after that breath.

"Where's it hurt?" Stu asked. The Gecko's left hand, for starts, which had hit the granite pretty hard and scraped as he flung it out to try for a save. The palm was oozing blood from a half-dozen gouges, and another track down his forearm looked like he had left some skin up there on the ledge.

But the Gecko shook his head. He was still curled up, and Stu couldn't see his face, but the jerking had stopped. After a moment, he unfolded enough to sit, his knees drawn up and his head tucked between them.

"Fuck," said the Gecko, after a minute. His voice shook.

Stu considered leaving it at that. But he did have a sort of duty that went with that image of the wise old guy. So he swallowed the lump in his throat and said, "The rock is what it is. You can top out or not, it won't change the rock. Just you."

The Gecko didn't move, didn't say anything right away. Maybe he was thinking about it. Maybe he was trying to decide if he felt okay enough to punch Stu in the teeth for sounding like a fucking fortune cookie.

At last he sighed. "Good beta, man."

Stu suddenly felt the adrenaline he was full of and didn't need. His teeth really wanted to chatter. "You know the procedure," he said. "Pass it on." And he sat beside the pad listening to the Gecko breathe, to his own breath in his nose, to the breeze, to whatever humidity and sunlight and stone sounded like, for as long as it took the pieces to slide back together.

FBI Headquarters, J. Edgar Hoover Building, Washington, D.C., June 2011

Daniel Brady spotted motion in his peripheral vision as a habit, as a survival strategy. Just because he was sitting at his desk in the middle of the entire Federal Bureau of Investigation first thing in the morning didn't mean he was going to turn it off.

So he noticed the movement at the desk cattycorner to his, and that it wasn't quite right. He looked up, but all he saw was Chaz Villette in his desk chair, hand on his mouse, waiting while his monitor woke up.

It was fifteen minutes before that visual alarm went off again. This time, he turned his head in time to see Chaz stand up.

Like an old, old man.

He also saw the slightly grubby gauze wrap on Chaz's left hand, starting at the knuckles and disappearing into his shirt sleeve.

"You okay?" Brady asked, just loud enough to carry across the aisle. The trapdoor in his stomach opened yet again, when he acknowledged the empty desk next to his own, the absence of anyone in overhearing range.

Chaz's face was about as expressive as a six-panel solid-core door. "I'm fine," he answered, and the precision with which he said it turned it into, Get the hell out of my business.

"What happened?"

Brady watched the complicated process in which Chaz started to shrug, remembered why he didn't want to do that, and did it anyway to prove he was just fine, thank you. "I fell."

"Off of what?"

Chaz tried to set him on fire with the power of his gaze, and when that didn't work, he turned on his heel and left the bullpen. Or rather, shifted his weight cautiously onto his back foot, turned, and limped toward the door to the hall.

Brady had no trouble getting to it first and holding it open for him. "You want to talk about it?" he asked.

"No."

"Sure you do. Briefing room all right with you?"

Chaz's jaw worked. That was probably him tying a nice bow around whatever savage and hurtful thing he was planning to say. So Brady headed him off. "I could knock you down with a fucking paper clip right now. Be a lot easier to just put up with me 'til I've had my say."

Chaz inhaled, exhaled, and march-limped to the briefing room.

Brady followed him in and shut the door. "We're a man down," he said, because tiptoeing up on it would just annoy them both.

Chaz's eyebrows climbed his forehead. "You were afraid I might forget?" His voice was hard and flat, and Brady thought he could hear it paving over a lot of soft ground underneath.

None of them ever forgot, not for more than a minute or two. When those minutes were over, memory came back like a knife fresh from the whetstone. "I thought you might have forgotten the context."

"What the hell does that mean?"

"What we're here for hasn't changed. If you can't stomach the work, that's all right. But if you can't, don't keep showing up and pretending we can still count on your ass."

"Fuck you."

Chaz said it calmly, as if it were an answer to Brady's little speech. It was, in a way.

"I'll take that as a reaffirmation of commitment."

One sharp exhale out Chaz's nose, which might have been exasperation or amusement.

Brady clenched his hands in his trouser pockets; the bite of his fingernails into his palms pushed him forward, made his voice as fierce as it needed to be. "In that case, you've got no goddamn business fucking yourself up just so you can suffer as much as you think you deserve. Because whatever you do, you do it to the team, too. You go into the field with anyone in the state you're in now? You might as well shoot 'em in the leg before either of you leaves the building."

Chaz looked anywhere but at him. Like an angry dog that couldn't fight back, like a trapped animal. Danny Brady, you are the worst sonofabitch of your acquaintance. Falkner might have been able to get at this another way. Hell, Reyes might have. But they hadn't, and it needed doing now, and when it came to Chaz Villette, Brady had a crowbar instead of a passkey.

Maybe he'd get a chance to apologize later. Someday. If they didn't die first.

"Are you done?" said Chaz.

"Yep." Brady crossed to the door and stopped with his hand on the knob. Natural dramatic pause. "I'm going back to work. Don't ever make me say all that shit again."

He went out, closing the door behind him. Because after you kicked a guy, you owed him a chance to nurse the bruise in private.

Funny how you could feel the ache in your own foot for days afterward.

“Clash”

Ashton, VA, July 2011

Chaz walks to Kay's office. He leans against the door frame, holding the door itself open, aware that he's living a lyric. Should I stay or should I go?

He asks, "Got a minute?"

She looks up, her eternal #2 pencil between her fingers, a strand of hair caught on the frame of her glasses. "Therapist, colleague, or friend?"

"Yes," he says, and steps inside. He shuts the door behind. He doesn't sit, but sways restlessly from one foot to the other.

"Special Agent Worth," she says.

He shrugs. Not exactly, but not exactly not either.

"I'm so sorry for your loss."

She sounds like she means it. Of course, she's paid to. But he's figured out by now that with Kay, it goes deeper than that.

"Me too," he says. "I mean, you knew her too."

Kay nods, accepting it because he needs her to. She does not swing out the platitudes that nearly everyone resorts to, and he's glad.

He says, "It's not... It's not that she's gone. I mean, it is, of course, but-- I just-- How did I wind up with the kind of life I can't walk away from, even when everything goes wrong?"

"Everything?"

"Hafidha," he says. "Daphne." The clutch of his throat catches him unaware halfway through her name. Angrily, he shakes his head, eyes stinging. "Everything that matters."

She doesn't argue. "And you want to walk away?"

He doesn't, though, and that's the scary part. Oh, yes, of course there's that bit that wants to bolt, that always wants to bolt. That thinks it would all hurt so much less if he just instituted the geographical cure. But he's needed here. Wanted. This is where he lives.

He shakes his head.

Kay asks, "How do you feel about that?"

Chaz laughs low and bitterly. "I think I hate it."

She stands up, lays her pencil down, comes around the desk. She leans against the front side and folds her arms. "Chaz?"

"Kay?"

That's a smile, near enough to pass for one. "Stepping out of my role as therapist for a moment here, this bears a remarkable resemblance to the state of affairs we refer to in our society as being an adult."

"Oh," he says.

"All things considered," she says, "I think you're doing okay."

“Donation”

Ashton, VA, and elsewhere

It was better to take donor organs from bodies that were still breathing, but Tricia Andreoli had the official power of attorney, and she said she could not bear it. She could not bear to let the doctors cut into the breathing, limp-armed body of her lover while that chest still rose and fell.

So they waited until the ventilator was disconnected; waited for the room to clear. And then came in, quick and quiet, with the equipment.

*

Daphne Worth's liver went to Iowa, to a fifty-five-year-old US Army colonel turned owner of a woodlot on a quiet country road. Blazing stars and Black-eyed Susans grew there in the spring. The colonel was once a drinker, but he had quit ten years back; poured every last little travel-sized bottle he'd hid in the cabinets and closets down the kitchen sink. He flung the last one so hard it smashed into bits in the drain, and then wrapped his arms 'round the knees of his sobbing wife and cried into them for forgiveness.

He was careful of his new liver. A month later, at his oldest son's wedding, he raised a glass to the boy and his brand-new bride, and toasted them with water.

*

This is all supposed to be confidential, of course. But Hafidha Gates is the woman who opened government databases like her mother could separate an egg, two perfect half-ovals resting in the palm of her hand and not a drop spilled out to the counter, and Charles Villette knows how to bargain.

"Official business?" she says, six a.m., pawing the sleep out of her eyes as he sets up the laptop.

"No," he says, and plugs in the USB mouse. "It's not."

This wakes her up. Her eyebrows rise in tandem; she takes in the set of his shoulders, the quick tight movements. "I should have known. Sunrise on a Sunday."

Chaz half-shrugs. "You know how much time off we get."

All of it, now, the beast in the back of her head snarls, and she puts a hand firmly over its muzzle. "So what're you sneaking behind Daddums's back?" she says; a reasonable compromise. A good balance in the neverending backdoor war that's care and spite, her words and the words that come out of her mouth.

"Harpy was an organ donor," he says.

It shocks all the bad words silent.

"I--" she starts. Wipes sleep from her eyes, but no, she is awake. "You want me to sneak in."

"I just want to know," he says. Fists clenched, head slightly ducked; a little, not a lot ashamed. The subject knows that what he is doing is wrong. But he doesn't care.

And then the rage is building, and it's not just the bug, not just the mad dog that paces her thoughts night and sunless day. "You know what I could do with that thing?" she says, her voice pitched to cut. "You want to know what a city full of traffic lights stuck on green looks like? How about every dam in the country opening at once? How 'bout we find someone else's medical files and smear them all over Times Square? "

He doesn't flinch. He visibly refuses to flinch. "She was your friend too," is all he says, so low it barely reaches over the roaring in her ears.

"She left me here," slips out, and oh God, oh Lord, that is unworthy.

Chaz Villette's face tightens. So, today's going to be a bad one, that crease around the lips says, and Hafidha cannot find it in her to disagree. "There's something in it for you," he says.

He pulls it out of his messenger bag, and she recognizes it. She recognizes it with the kind of start that silences the thing in her head even further, because there are some things, some precious things she refuses to let it touch. She reaches out, but his reflexes are just as fast as her own; he pulls it back an inch, away.

"If you don't cheat," he says, and presses the power button on the laptop with one long, brown finger.

She pulls her chair up to the keyboard.

She doesn't cheat.

*

Daphne Worth's heart went to a twenty-five-year-old woman, born with a hole in her own heart and one arm foreshortened, allergic to just about everything. Her mother was an engineer and her father an importer, so they could between them afford the quick and precise and sybaritically expensive surgery that gave their middle daughter a new one.

The woman makes clothes: a small, quirky line of recycled fabric and patchworks, sewn on a home machine, her prosthetic holding the rucks of cotton steady. Her parents do not approve: Your great-grandparents ruined their hands doing white people's laundry so you wouldn't have to. This is true. But she says, Ba ba, I love it, and life's too short, and her father turns his face away and cannot bring himself to argue.

Her grandmother still sews, sometimes. When the woman was little, her grandmother made her a stuffed bear from scrap fabric, misshapen and irregular and entirely abnormal. Her parents bring it to her in the hospital bed, wrapped in a plastic bag to keep safe the sterile recovery room where they will know, in a few days or weeks, whether she will pull through or die. She wraps her arms around it in her sleep those next nights, and the plastic crinkles like a lullaby.

*

Her kidneys went two different directions: one south into the Carolinas, one west to Oregon. They were sutured on the same afternoon into the body of a forty-five-year-old woman with lupus and a thirty-two-year-old man who had suffered from diabetes since he was a child in Brasilia. Her sons held her hands and cried openly; one had begged to donate his, but the hospital had called him too young. His husband held his hands carefully, tracing the half-moons of his nails until he slept.

Her pancreas traveled not far at all: just down the hall, where the doctors slid it into place instead of a New Jersey minister's cancerous one, and a delegation from his church hugged each other and thanked God for the kindness of donors three floors away from where Charles Villette and Tricia Andreoli wept.

*

"That's all," Hafidha says, and pulls her hands away from the keyboard like it's electric. "That's it. Take it away."

Chaz reaches in, deft as a mongoose, and pulls the plug.

The colour, the light on the laptop screen dies. Hafidha watches it hollow-eyed, hands literally held down between her bottom and the seat. They tremble: little fishes gasping for water, gasping in the plain good air.

"Make you feel better?" he asks after a moment.

"No," she snaps.

"Me neither," he says softly, and tugs the power cable from its jack. It dangles a moment in his hand, and then he wraps it, long-fingered, round and around its own bending black throat.

She waits until he puts the laptop in its padded bag, the cords and components and utterly unnecessary mousepad in the zippered pockets. Her hands are trembling. She will not say Give it.

He doesn't make her wait too long. He hands it over: a black Objekt 775 tee-shirt, rumpled; just another artifact of someone's abandoned laundry hamper. She squeezes it in her hand; holds it to her chest.

"It smells like him," she says.

She knows this can't be true. It's been over two years since Erik died; over a year since the smell of his body faded out of every tuft and molecule and cranny of the world. There is nothing left in the world that smells of him, not even in dreams, and she's tried. But for now she buries her face in the shirt and pretends, breathes in, breathes out, fixes it in her memory as something special and true.

"I'll see you next week," Chaz says, and lets himself through the anteroom door.

She stays there: not balancing, not trading off, not paralyzed with indecision but just present. She stays there in the dark created by worn cotton on closed eyes until the door buzzer rings, and "Ms. Gates?" floats to her ears.

She looks up: a guard and an orderly, the usual breakfast arrangement. Breakfast on an unbreakable plate, with utensils too dull to slice skin, or veins, or pancreas heart and liver. Suicides have a higher rate of organ donation than accidental deaths. Nobody knows why, but Hafidha doesn't have far to go to guess: after enough time in the hole you will do anything, everything to be useful; to make good; to be loved.

She balls up the shirt in her hand; tucks it under the chair. You're safe enough there, love, she tells it, and stands.

"Another day in Paradise, then?" she says, sharply, and picks up the tray.

"Walking Back To Houston" by Chelsea Polk

Act I

Washington, D.C., March 2009

Hafidha Gates comes into work 45 minutes early, every day. She never stops at the coffee station until Chaz gets there, since she buys coffee on the way (Wednesday: free trade, bird friendly, shade grown dark roast from Peru) safely contained in her spill-proof Thermos of the day (Wednesday: a vacuum-insulated quart's worth, lime green, white hibiscus print) and pours precisely doctored and piping hot into her mug of the day (also Wednesday: a plain white mug that simply says I'm blogging this with the handle glued on so well you can't nearly tell) and starts the bureau's computers the mundane way.

This is Hafidha Gates's routine:

She collects email that funnels into sorted and tagged folders from her public emails, covert addresses, and outright sockpuppets trawling web forums, usenet lists, Livejournal, and web data crawlers. While she pulls nice tufts of a handpainted alpaca top to continue from yesterday, her instant messaging service pops up on monitor three, logging into various chatrooms that support some of her sock puppets and anonymous accounts. Firefox asks her which identity to use--she nods for "newshound" and a half dozen windows all preset to various keywords tab in and populate.

But this morning, Hafidha pauses her spinning prep in favor of one email folder, flagged with one message.

Her favorite eBay seller has listed again.

Hafidha refers to that seller as objectsofdesire2112, even though Hafs knows that she is really Helen Danforth, 38, of Brooklyn, New York--a powerseller who gets unbelievable bargains in the garment district. Helen has exuberant taste, an eye for fabrics, and a tendency to write item descriptions with the passion of a true clotheshorse and the painful honesty of a young adult novel protagonist. Hafs has never purchased anything from her that was not exactly as described, down to the minutest flaw in construction.

Today, she's selling designer eyeglass frames, and Hafidha drums her feet in delight. Optometrists sell frames at a 300% markup when they're being modest. Objectsofdesire2112 starts the bidding on her frames at 5.99 each. Hafs is a kid in a candy store, but she especially likes the anodized titanium frames in swirling peacock colours--the blue and green, but also chips of golden bronze.

Hafs sets a modest opening bid on those, so she'll remember to set her automatic bidder when it closes in three days, and then practices wiggling her nose to make the computers dance through windows for her while she drafts alpaca into spiderweb.

*

The team is out today (Friday: 100% Kona, market price, a 20 ounce travel carafe with a clear lucite shell displaying carefully wound yarn of varying colours and textures, spooled around in an ombré gradation, from undyed ivory to oatmeal to burlap to sable brown.) Hafidha sets some searchbots to trawl for businesses in the area that sell a particular brand of barber scissors while she references records from seven different school boards, looking for disciplinary records involving forced hair cutting in 1991. She's reading about a gang of football players who overpowered a punk and hacked off his acid green liberty spikes. It's not a match for the profile, which indicates that the victim would have been female. But the mohawk story distracts her, because it's probably confirmation of a legend she knows from back in the FIDOnet days.

And that's how her beautiful eyeglass frames get sniped, right from under her nose. She doesn't even remember until the email flag pops up, displaying the first few words from the message.

"Robbed!" she swears under her breath, and clicks the link. She's one minute and three seconds too late to snatch victory from the blackguard's claws; her eyeglass frames sold to divinityjones92 for...

Hafidha whistles at the sum. Not bad from a $5.99 start. She twirls her spindle again and looks up the info on divinityjones92, interested in getting to know a possible nemesis in the acquisition of the cool. She doesn't bother with the feedback, preferring to see what divinityjones is currently buying or bidding. The price column on divinityjones92's bid list confirms that Hafs is dealing with an unrepentant sniper, with a penchant for accessories and an unusual fetish for silk neckties.

"Let's see who else's heart you're breaking today, highwayman Jones," Hafidha murmurs, going after the list of her current bids:

BLUE & SILVER CHOKER UNUSUAL LINKS **UNIQUE**

And she sits straight up, spindle parked by reflex. "The Hell."

The listing is by fishfood993, with under five minutes left. Hafs mouses down to the large photo automatically,

The choker has a pendant of oval lapis cabochons bracketed by silver motifs, fluted like the vanes of a feather split down the middle, or perhaps the nodding heads of swans. The chain links echo that same motif of feathers/swans, interlaced by their curving necks. It's a flapper collar, Hafidha knows. But more than that, she knows this necklace.

She's seen a picture of it in a case file.

Hafidha doesn't remember which case file, though, and it might not be the same piece. Crazy to think that it is the same.

There are four minutes and nine seconds left on the auction, and therefore, not enough time to doubt. She genies the cursor up and left on the screen, clicking into the sniper program she wrote. It's the big machine, and she doesn't use it unless she really covets something. She uses it to log into eBay as Virginiaboheme--a good identity, fairly generic, and unused for 94 days. She sets her top bid in a way that will guarantee acquisition.

Hafs doesn't have to put her spinning down but she parks the spindle as she starts a text to Chaz: what file is this? and wheels back to attach the photo before sending the message.

She can leave the sniper. The piece is hers. She's already running the seller ID and recording every piece of feedback given or received since the account opened--

Her phone vibrates and chirps. Belinda Green. Miss. person rep 2004 Madison WI. Remains found 2006, Wyo. fractures MTRSL and MTCL. Sol desk. L. 3 from bott. Y?

The bidding is at $278.91. Hafidha wiggles her nose. NVM

The response doesn't even take ten seconds. SRSLY

"Chaz, you're busy," Hafs says out loud. but sends: On ebay. Sniping now.

WTF?

"That's my line, Platypus." SRSLY

A short pause, then: Call Later? When Alone?

The auction ends at $308.44. Hafidha moves to pay automatically, but flicks the spindle again. Wait for the invoice. She wants an email contact from this person. She wants time to think.

She wants time to discuss it with her baby bruddah.

Later, she texts to him. Yes, alone.

*

Chaz cams her 30 minutes later. He's arranged comfortably at the table in his hotel room, and it's apparently pink shirt day.

"You found yourself a girl genius," Hafs says, already feeling the tension melt off her forehead.

"Hey, Hafidha. I'm supposedly analyzing the history of forced haircutting and ordering room service. Well, I really did order room service. It should be here, ah, soon."

Hafidha waves her plastic container of tom kha gai. "Oh good, we'll make it a dinner meeting. So I found Belinda Green's file, precisely where you said it was--"

"There were two files on his desk when I gave it back to him."

"I'm trying not to think about that. Well, between reading about how Belinda Green had her hands and insteps crushed before she died, I have been spending time examining our seller, fishfood993. There are 72 items of feedback, and I have managed to capture archived listings of the last...seven months."

Chaz's mouth curls up. "I thought the listings disappeared off the website after three?"

"Oh, they do. But the server just drops the links." Hafs sips a little coconut milk soup off her plastic spoon. "I've got it waiting to sneak into server maintenance for the rest. Anyway, fishfood993 tends to sell antique 20th century jewelery, of which I have a passing acquaintance," she says, tapping the Bakelite necklace at her throat.

"All right. So what do you notice about the listings?"

"Well, the reason why I've never bought anything from fishfood is because he doesn't tag his auctions to be of interest to collectors, which on the surface does not make any sense. We've all heard the story of the collector's great bargain from somebody who doesn't know what he has, but fishfood almost appears willfully ignorant. He's selling things that collectors would pull hair for, but he advertises it--look."

Hafidha sends him a file of a captured auction, depicting another necklace of hammered silver plates, hinged at cabochons of Baltic amber and pearl. "There's a level of jewelry collecting that isn't Harry Winston, but isn't pot metal and paste either. and a good piece will go for hundreds of dollars. Fishfood has a lot of that kind of stock--that necklace could fetch in the four hundreds if the right people knew about it, but it sold for--"

"Twenty five ninety nine," Chaz leans forward, peering. "You know, that's really pretty. Not in your colours, though."

"You know me that well, Chaz. And it's not like these pieces are one of a kind, so I could be grasping at nothing. But ORANGE & SILVER COLOR CHOKER/COLLAR **PRETTY**? That's no way to advertise a Trifari."

The knock sounds through the laptop's mic. "Hold on." Chaz gets up, disappears out of frame, comes back with a tray. "You know it is?"

"You can has cheeseburger? Outraged."

"We'll get two when I come back," Chaz promises. "Now, you know it's a Trifari?"

"I'm pretty sure. Costume would be shiny plated brass and plastic. The necklace I bought--if Belinda Green's insurance file is reliable--the blue and silver necklace I bought is Art Deco, from the Egyptian Revival style, with real lapis lazuli and solid sterling silver. Probably made in the 1920's. She had it valued at three hundred dollars. But fishfood acquires this stuff, probably from estate sales--he's not selling out of a single estate collection. The tastes don't match. So why not maximize on return by pointing it at the people who will pay the most?"

Chaz sits back with a home-cut french fry. "All right, so what's happened so far? You can see it's a gamma, but does it connect?"

Hafs takes a long, slow breath. "I got my invoice for the auction already. Came in less than a minute after the auction closed. The IP has been bounced to Russia and back. The paypal address I have leads to a mail drop in Cleveland, but fishfood993's location is given as Lexington, Kentucky, and the name on the PayPal address AND the mail drop doesn't pop up on my search to make a match to a real, moving around person. Fishfood's a fake. And..."

Hafs tries to swallow, can't, wets her mouth with iced green tea. "Belinda Green had an eBay account."

*

The last thing Hafidha Gates does before she leaves the office that evening is pay for her auction win, plus priority shipping, plus insurance.

The first thing that she reads when she returns to the office (Monday: free trade, organic Kenya coffee with proceeds going to orphaned girls, a stainless steel and black rubber thermos, and her caffeine molecule coffee mug) is an email to virginiaboheme's email address.

Subject: My Regrets

"Oh, really?" Hafidha murmurs to herself, and opens it.

Dear Virginia;

I am sorry to inform you that I cannot ship the auction you won on Friday. I had a most unfortunate accident here over the weekend and the necklace has been terribly damaged.

I have refunded your purchase, shipping, and insurance. My deepest regrets, and I hope that you will not think ill of my future listings.

John Victor

fishfood993

Hafs holds her coffee mug in one hand and twirls her pen with the other, glaring hard at the message header's automatic result--the IP resolves to a Russian remailer. He's covering his tracks like mad. And John Victor doesn't have an electric bill or a cell phone account or a parking ticket in Lexington, KY. Or Cleveland.

And now the necklace is broken.

Right.

Hafs clicks back to the listing, checks the bidding history, and cheers under her breath. The Big Machine did its job by out-sniping another sniper--but divinityjones92 wasn't the only highwayman with her crosshairs on that necklace. The Big Machine also beat Metalliclove1, who had set a maximum bid of $306.91, four seconds before the auction's closing.

Hafidha runs Metalliclove1's feedback and bidding history through her database crawler and finds that Metalliclove1 is a fan of fishfood993's listings. Which isn't suspicious. Hafs buys from many of the same sellers; that's just what people do.

But Metalliclove1 never won an auction from fishfood993 that doesn't have the odd dollar values of the last second auction. Most of the other purchases were low value items, with serious bidding wars on three items from another seller--classicallure25. Hafs sets to looking at that seller's store, sipping her coffee.

The first listing reads:

LIME GREEN & GOLDTONE BROOCH PIN **STUNNING**

"Goldtone, my ass," Hafs snarls. "That's a Miriam Haskell."

She's on the phone to Chaz before the page finishes loading.

Act II

The team is back. Hafs greets Brady with a smile and outrageously flattering compliments, mutually exchanged, gets in line behind Sol and Daphne for some of Chaz's coffee, and hovers once those two leave.

Chaz leans against the counters. "Okay, so what do you have?"

"Suspicion and conjecture," Hafs replies, pouring too much milk into her mug. "But I can't leave it alone. I set the sniper on the Miriam Haskell brooch using virginiaboheme again, and guess what? the listing got cancelled."

"Cancelled."

"All of them from classicallure25 and fishfood993. They are all gone. The good stuff and the junk. Now why would he do that?" Hafs waits, staring up at Chaz.

Who looks back, a little frown knitting his brows. "Somebody might think that the presence of that necklace on eBay is simple coincidence--"

"Oh, that C word we don't believe in--"

"--and you would have ended up paying too much for a piece of costume jewelry-"

"Antique costume jewelry-"

Chaz's eyes flicker from her face to over her shoulder.

"What's the conference in here?" Brady moves over to the coffee machine, pouring himself a cup.

"We were just--"

"Hafidha may have discovered a gamma operating on eBay," Chaz says, sipping coffee. Perfectly bland. An everyday thing to say.

Well, around here...

"What?"

"I saw the fnords, Brady Beautiful, on this listing for this necklace. and then I clicked and saw the picture, and I knew that I'd seen it somewhere, and so I texted Chaz and he told me where, but there was only a few minutes left so I sniped it. Hard. You still with me?"

"Right." Brady leans back on the counter and drinks a quarter of his coffee at a go, raises it to signal 'go on.'

"I won, I paid, and then the seller sends me an e-mail, oh no, it's broken. So I go digging around and find links to other accounts--another selling account and another buying account that seem designed to snipe certain items out from under buyers, and that sniper was on the necklace too, so I see where else he's sniping and that leads me to a listing with a designer mid-century brooch, so I put up a bid on that--same eBay identity, but on a different seller and poof." Hafs stars her fingers apart, like a puff of smoke or a bloom of fireworks.

"Poof. The listing got cancelled?" Brady asks.

"They all got cancelled. Both the accounts, all the listings. There could have been more than that, but that's the two that I found. He pulled up the listing on Belinda Green's necklace--"

"You can't be sure it's the same necklace."

"It may not be the same necklace but there is something definitely up with this fishfood person. And I checked Belinda Green's probate--the credit card statements indicate activity on eBay. She had an account. She had a necklace listed on her insurance that matches the description of the necklace she was likely wearing when she disappeared--a necklace that was not recovered."

"It likely disappeared because her killer kept it as a trophy." It's the obvious objection, the simple solution. "And what kind of killer would let that trophy out of his hands?"

"Gary Ridgeway would take jewelry from his victims and leave them as anonymous gifts for his female co-workers," Chaz moves to the coffee machine, spoons two heaping sugars into his mug. "We can suppose that seeing the jewelry on his unsuspecting co-workers gave him a chance to re-live the experience of the victim as a secondary outlet."

"And just how would that work on the Internet?" Brady demands. "Put it up on eBay and it can go anywhere. How does he continue to maintain control?"

"Well that's just it," Chaz says. "Hafs used an incredibly powerful auction sniper to ensure acquisition of the piece. The seller fishfood then wrote to her over the weekend to give her a refund, claiming that it had been accidentally damaged."

Brady rinses his coffee cup, leaves it in the sink. "Because Hafidha--or virginiaboheme, more properly-doesn't match what fishfood wants. Right? But--"

"Hafs. The second listing you found," Chaz says. "You never said. Did it have fnords?"

"No. No fnords. Wait. What does that mean?"

"At a guess?" Chaz asks. "That was more camouflage. Not like the necklace that did have significance."

Oh. "I know how he does it."

Chaz and Brady halt in mid-debate. "What?"

"Well, I know how he could do it." Hafidha shrugs.

Daniel Brady sticks his head in the fridge, comes out with a water. "Hafidha, I agree that something is going on but what if it's not what you believe it to be?"

"Then I'm wrong, and I'm out a few hours work."

"And if she's right, she will have exposed the murderer of Belinda Green and even more women."

Hafidha and Chaz turn to Esther Falkner's voice and the door.

"The person who murdered Belinda Green doesn't do that just once and then walk away. Hafidha, could you bring everything you have into the conference room," Esther nods to her. "About fifteen minutes?"

"Of course."

Esther gets a bottle of water for herself, and heads out of the kitchen.

"I have to get an email out," Brady says. "See you in fifteen."

Hafidha lets her shoulders fall, and rolls them. "I said I think I know how he does it, but I'm just guessing. What am I going to tell everyone?" She puts the first donut box in the trash, snags a custard-filled donut with chocolate icing.

"Hafs, it's okay. All you have to relate is what happened--what you did, and the whole chain. Point out where you're speculating, but play on the pattern."

"Pattern?"

"You have fifteen minutes to find other missing women or found bodies that were missing this specific type of jewelery, and evidence of an eBay account. And all you have to find is one, right now. In fifteen minutes."

"Fifteen minutes." Hafidha says, already moving for the door. "Easy. Watch this. Already doing it."

*

She watches Chaz the most. He follows with few fidgety gestures, even though he's heard most of it. Sol leans back in his seat, eyes narrow, but not in disbelief. More...considering. Daphne clasps her hands together, elbows on the table, sits forward in her chair. Brady tilts his chair back, but only a little. Falkner listens, jots occasional notes, looks back and makes tiny nods at all the right moments.

Stephen Reyes writes on his clipboard, glances at her over the edge of it by rote, doesn't actually look at her.

"And when yours truly managed to snipe the best price with only two seconds to spare, fishfood993--who likes to call himself John Victor, and can't decide if he lives in Ohio, where his PO box is, or Kentucky, as his eBay profile claims, sent an automated invoice with an anonymized email path--and then less than 48 hours later, another anonymized email with a refund and an apology, stating that the necklace had been damaged just that weekend."

"Do you have any information leading to the real identity of the UNSUB?"

Now Reyes looks at her, and Hafs almost wishes he wasn't. "No, my captain. What I have is a pattern. This is how it started, with this listing."

Hafs clicks the remote in her hand, and the slide shows a capture of the "BLUE & SILVER CHOKER UNUSUAL LINKS **UNIQUE**" auction results. "I can't show you what I saw here. On the slide, it's just black letters. When I saw the listing, it came up with the glorious Technicolor that I see as gamma activity on the Internet."

Hafs clicks the remote again, and the next slide shows the picture included with the eBay listing. She counts three and clicks to the photograph in Belinda Green's case file. "There's more than a wee bitty resemblance here. I have also discovered that Belinda Green had an eBay account, though I haven't found proof that she bought the necklace on eBay."

Hafs raises her hand and the screen now shows a woman's face. She's smiling, a pretty woman in her mid-30's, dressed in a pale green twinset with a pink enameled chrysanthemum pin on her left breast. "Jacqueline Kincaid, cellist, Seattle. Disappeared December 2005. Remains discovered in Hell's Canyon National Park, Oregon, February, 2006. The brooch she is wearing is a Trifari, probably designed by Alfred Phillipe, and apparently one of her favorite pieces. It was listed in her physical description on the original missing persons report. All of her clothing, purse, identification was found at the dump site. The brooch was not recovered."

Chaz shifts. His feet slide from atop the caster bars to the floor, one elbow landing smoothly on the table as he leans forward. Hafs clicks the remote again, silently counting to three before clicking the crime scene photo away. The scratches on Jaqueline Kincaid's face--her eyeless face--shutter and fade.

Blink, and now a woman with masses of dark curly hair, dressed severely in black, herself a backdrop for a collar encrusted with topaz, amber, and ruby colored cabochons. "Theresa Lee Strong, ethnic crafts importer. Disappeared from Mesa, Arizona December 2002. Identified through dental records when her remains were discovered in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument near Yuma in 2004. That necklace is art glass, meant to simulate fancy and semi-precious stones. She was often photographed with it, and her will specifically named it to go to a niece. The piece was never recovered."

Hafs clicks the remote again, and the next slide is a reconstruction of the small bones--or rather, an arrangement of the recoverable fragments of the bones of her left hand.

"This is a MasterCard statement from Jacqueline Kincaid," Hafs says, and magnifies the whole scan, and highlights purchases from eBay, Inc. "And here's a Visa statement from Theresa Lee Strong. The--relevant portions are highlighted."

Nobody speaks.

"I realize that the connections between these women are somewhat tenuous," Hafs says. "But with a little more time--"

"You'll find more," Reyes answers. "What have you noticed about the victims?"

"Well, they were all divorced women of reasonably comfortable means, working for themselves or in the arts. They come from different parts of the country, but all of them had eBay accounts and vintage jewelry that they were fond of that was not recovered when their bodies were discovered."

"You said in the kitchen that you know how he did it," Brady says.

"I know a way he could have done it," Hafs corrects.

"Well?"

"Hold on," Sol says. "We don't want that interfering with the victimology."

*

They use printouts from Hafs's findings on the board for everything but Belinda Green's necklace, to start. As they move on, facsimiles get replaced with file material.

They have Jacqueline Kincaid already. They have a photograph of her crushed hands, and an extensive report from the medical examiner who performed her autopsy, giving the opinion that her hands had been restrained with the fingers splayed out, and then smashed with a blunt object, like a sledgehammer.

Her feet, however, were probably crushed using a vise.

Hafs doesn't care that sitting cross-legged in her swivel chair is both unprofessional and unladylike. Daphne has to bring her hands out from the protective clasp at her breast, too.

Further physical examination indicated that Jacqueline had been raped, her eyes torn out, and she'd been manually strangled.

"The UNSUB is strong," Chaz notes. "Manual strangulation isn't as controllable as a ligature method."

"This UNSUB is angry, filled with rage," Brady says. "'I'll strangle you with my bare hands.'"

"But it's not a power and control urge from a sexual sadist. He doesn't manually strangle them to watch them die, because he puts their eyes out first," Daphne comments.

"His crimes are personal," Sol says. "What he does to these women is ritualistic and meaningful. And it stands to reason that he is doing to these women what he cannot do to the person he wishes."

"And that he can't, ever," Chaz says. "For some reason, the person who is the trigger for this rage is out of his reach, possibly already dead."

"Dead in a way that the UNSUB sees as unfair or inappropriate," Daphne agrees.

Hafs stops just to watch and wonder if they realize how they mesh when they do this. "So he's going around making sure that these women get what they deserve?"

Everyone turns to look at her.

"Exactly," Reyes says. "These women are like the woman who wronged him. What did you say that you found in common, again?"

Hafs answers. "These three women were all divorced. His mother? Abandoning him after the breakup of her marriage? His wife?"

Esther nods once, slowly. "Mothers tend to get custody of their children. The UNSUB's mother probably had him in her late twenties, and the divorce probably went through in her early to mid thirtiesâ€•the approximate age of the victims."

"Because there were things she valued more. Her hands, her feet, her eyes," Daphne murmurs.

"Show business?" Chaz asks. "Dancing, singing, acting? Art? Music? It's hard to make a career in those. Harder for a woman with a child. Harder for that woman as she gets older. And the victims--a professional musician, a folk art importer, and Belinda Green taught dance. All aligned with the arts and creative industries."

"Victims from all over America. He travels. His work necessitates travel. He could be a salesman, or--"

"Computer programmer. IT specialist. A hired gun--takes on a contract in a certain place, works there for a few months, finds somewhere else to go. He's got a good resume, and he gets out and moves on before his co-workers drive him out with pitchforks," Hafidha says. "He probably says that he works contracts because it's a way for him to travel around the country, that he likes the variety."

All eyes on her, again. But Hafidha is on a roll, now. She knows this person. She knows the type.

"He's reasonably well off, takes pride in his appearance, and he is undeniably handsome. He probably has a very nice car, an impressive apartment, and displays culture and sophistication. He is well read, an interesting conversationalist, and probably touch types at upwards of 80 words per minute. Because I'm telling you, I know how he does it."

"How does he do it, Hafs?" Chaz asks.

"I think that he can do something like what I can do," Hafs says. "I think that he uses the Internet to find the women who represent what he wants in a victim because he can tell what they're like. But where I just see gamma activity, he can do what in-person abductors do--he can profile the right victim across the Internet."

Daphne looks up. "That's scary."

"Yeah," Hafs agrees. "He might research them, but I think he can discern faster than that. He can read a buying history like a child abductor can read the body language that tells him that this child will help him look for his lost dog, or that this child will run away and find an adult."

Everyone looking at her now. Sol nods very slowly at Hafs, but doesn't say anything.

"He's a Lothario and a cyber-stalker. Think the eBay identity, fishfood--somebody bids on his bait. He checks them out. If they come up aces, he sells them the necklace. If they don't, he uses another identity, snipes it, and re-lists it later to try again. But if they do, then he stalks them, finds out where they hang out, and then gets to the real work. He seduces them online. They arrange a meet, and then he kills them."

"And once you buy one of the right pieces, you're marked for death. He's going to get that piece back," Chaz says. "He could take months to get to you, maybe even years. Many people contentedly carry on long distance relationships conducted almost entirely on the Internet, punctuated only by occasional meetings and nebulous plans for a future together."

Chaz shrugs, and examines his mechanical pencil, turning it in his fingers. Oh, Chaz. "And so he's probably got a collection of women on his line," Hafs says. "And none of these women have any idea that their Internet boyfriend is actually a killer.

"And if I'm right about what he can do...I need to back up a bit to explain. If my virginiaboheme identity had been the right type, he would have let the necklace go. But viginiaboheme has some trading rep on Make-Up Alley and is characterized as one of a legion of low-powered Washington office pool drones. Not an artist, dancer, craftsman. Just a regular person who shops too much. Also, if you look at Virginaboheme's OKCupid profile, she's listed as single-never married. Not the right type.

"But then I used that same identity to bid on a brooch that was under-listed that didn't sparkle and fnord, from an entirely different seller. Now we go into the land of If. If that brooch wasn't one of his key pieces, then why not sell it to virginiaboheme? And If the virginiaboheme identity wasn't suspect, why did classicallure and fishfood cancel every single listing on both accounts?"

"Because you think he made you," Sol says. "Cop or Jammer?"

"I don't know and I can't set up a test to find out," Hafs says. "But I'm not sure. I'm going to assume both. Which might make it hard for me to find his real identity."

"So if he is so good at hiding his real identity, how can we find him?"

"We don't find him--well, we find his personas. But we find his victims. They're not good at hiding, probably don't have the first clue how. People regularly post personal information about themselves, photographs of themselves, their full name, where they live, where they work. They socialize, they congregate, they make friends."

"We could develop a linguistic model of the UNSUB's language from these eBay profiles and search for distinctive markers, finding more auctions and their subsequent bidders," Chaz says.

"I'll keep looking for his victims. He could have more than one on the line, there could be more women in national parks. I need to stay away from looking for the UNSUB directly until I figure out how to get him."

*

Tuesday. Bird-and-Butterfly friendly organic Sumatra, from a coffee plantation owned by a woman who refused to go industrial or sell out to Starbucks. Hafidha sips from a sprightly hand painted yellow mug, searching eBay listings.

She's got classicallure, Metalliclove, and fishfood so heavily watchdogged he can't even edit an auction without her knowing about it. Not a whisper; she's doing what he expects.

Hafidha is hunting down John Victor's buyers, cross-referencing eBay usernames with social networking sites and interest forums. She's looking into women's lives as she pores through their forum posts and their internet journals--so many of them, so open and unassuming. She's found real names, photographs, even flimsy attempts at alter identities.

She knows that most of these buyers are not possibles. Many of them bought the pot-metal and junk that Victor salts his listings with, cover for his true bait. But she checks them anyway, searching out their lives, finding them so easily.

Maintenance data didn't give her much more than the seven months she already had. Icerocket dutifully searches names, coming up with very little--

Until.

bemusedamusedthe-- "Muse," Hafidha finishes, already clicking the link.

She holds the coffee mug in her hands as the photograph emerges. It's a tiny painting, postcard sized, a Monarch butterfly on a milkweed. It is exquisite, and it had been for sale for one hundred and fifty dollars, marked as sold.

There are one hundred and twenty-five comments on the entry. Hafs mouses down to the next entry: A pair of shoes, dropped haphazardly on a tiny, glittery purse. The attention to light gives an air of harshness to the scuffed stiletto heels and loose sequins; there's something chilling about it.

Price, one hundred and fifty dollars. Also sold.

Twelve comments.

Hafidha scrolls up, looking at dates: the shoes were posted June 2nd. The butterfly painting, June 3rd.

There are no postings after that.

Hafidha still doesn't click to read the comments on the last entry. instead she continues back in time, looking at each daily offering of a painting, weekends off, priced at the same one hundred and fifty dollars, some marked as sold, some not.

Then and only then does she start poring over comments.

"Your daily paintings were a glimpse of beauty I watched for every day..."

"So disappointed not to see any more..."

"Did you get a gallery showing, working with bigger media?"

"I love your work. I wish I'd bought one myself but I never made up my mind in time..."

"Does *anyone* know where bemusedamusedthe is? What she's doing? Why she disappeared like this?"

"Please come back!"

Hafidha blinks away the blur at that comment. She's already capturing the pages, the comments, the images hosted at Flickr. The computer can do it for her while she hugs a mug of cooling Sumatra in her hands and just breathes.

Please come back.

"Hey, Wabbit."

"Chaz," Hafidha whispers. "Chaz..."

His hand on her shoulder, then stroking across her back to the other. "Hey hey now. What is this?"

"I think I found another one. I think... She used a Livejournal, she was a painter, and she'd post a picture of a new bitty painting every day, like postcard sized? She'd post them every weekday and sell them for a hundred and fifty dollars and then she just...stopped..."

"Easy, now."

Hafs reaches for her mug, drinks cold Sumatra, goes on. "This comment thread is from people who friended her journal asking where she is," Hafidha says, and clicks the back button. "This is her work."

Hafidha wheels down the page slowly, looking at each little painting. Some are landscapes, others still life or object studies. Every one is meticulous in detail and luminous in mood, capturing a scene or an object and imbuing a response in oils.

When Hafs reaches the bottom of the page, she clicks for the next, and gasps.

It's a slice of an old-fashioned dressing table--cut crystal cream jar matching a boar bristled brush and comb, Irish crochet lace runner, an open jewelery box...

And in that box, a pink enamel pin shaped like a chrysanthemum.

Act III

amusedbemusedthe has a bulletin board all to herself--covered in printouts of her paintings. The dressing table piece is scarcely a month old, but Hafidha can't find a listing for the chrysanthemum pin from either of the three eBay identities "John Victor" has, and SixApart has her on hold.

Hafidha Gates leaves that canned music on speaker while she dives through all of amusedbemusedthe's account, noting with satisfaction that she, like many Livejournal users, has a first entry dated from before her journal's creation, locked to private.

Hafs knows what is in that post. Personal information and an emergency contact, that SixApart can get to in case of some kind of emergency. She'd like to get permission, since she can. Because there isn't enough--yet--for a warrant or court order.

Meanwhile, she's searching through this little corner of LJ for clues, contacts, connections...

Finally, a voice instead of muzak.

"This is Hafidha Gates of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I would like to retrieve some first post information on a Livejournal account," Hafs says.

An inquiry about the reason for wanting the information.

"The account in question was discovered in connection with a case the Behavioral Analysis Unit is currently investigating--"

A shocked interjection. "No, no, the FBI does not spend budget on making sure ordinary citizens are bad or good. Forgive my jargonization--the Behavioral Analysis Unit is an investigative unit of the FBI that uses psychology to catch certain kinds of criminals. Serious crimes, ma'am. The LJ in question...I fear that the owner is actually a missing person, and if I can get the owner's name and contact information, I can cross check with our records."

Reassured, but still questioning. "Oh no, ma'am. I only ask for the contact information this user provided as part of the First Post program. If I require any more, it will be because she is indeed missing and there is already a case in existence, and then I will be calling you back with a very official warrant to investigate the rest. I only want to make sure she is okay, and to get her help as swiftly as possible. Of course. The account name is amusedbemusedthe, no spaces of course because that's the character maximum--you've got it? Let me write this down."

Hafidha grabs a fluffy-headed acid green pen, and then drops it, paging instead to the NCIC database. Christina Fleming, nee Nemechek, thirty-six, of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, reported missing June 9th. Five-four, one-twelve, hair black, eyes brown, race black--Nemechek? Huh. Sex female...

She was listed as "unemployed" but that entry was later revised to "self-employed." No car, no driver's license, circumstances of disappearance flagged with "Mental illness," Name of reportee David Fleming, Christina's ex-husband of Philadelphia.

She's on the phone with Harrisburg PD. No hold this time; she's transferred directly to the detective. "Santiago."

A woman's voice. "This is Special Agent Hafidha Gates of the Behavioral Analysis Unit of the FBI. I'm calling to ask about your investigation of Christina Fleming, maiden name Nemechek. She was reported missing June fifth?"

"I'm glad you caught me here," Detective Santiago says. "One moment, I'd like to have the case in front of me. I'm surprised to hear from you--Ms. Nemechek doesn't qualify for Missing White Woman Syndrome."

"Lucky for us the Behavioral Analysis Unit is not the media," Hafidha says.

"Lucky thing. Here it is. Reported by her ex-husband, who if you don't mind me saying is one arrogant sonofabitch."

"Arrogant enough to--"

"Kill his ex-wife and then report her missing? I'd like to say yes, but his alibi is utterly solid. He was at a company ocean fishing excursion from before she went missing until the day he made the report--says that he went to meet her to give her her living allowance since--according to him--she didn't have a job, and she never showed up."

"The ex-husband's a creep?"

"I saw his type all the time on domestics. He's calm and collected, she's a hysterical wreck, he's believed, she's too cowed to say anything and the police believe she's a madwoman anyway." Hafidha can hear the snarl.

"And were there calls like that in their relationship?"

"One. Christina filed for divorce three months later. Seems David banks on his reputation, and wife-beating would spoil that. He let her go, but set conditions that he would only pay her alimony when they met in person, in a public and neutral place. Unusual."

"Yes, well. That type doesn't like to let go," Hafidha says.

"No they don't. You got anything help me nail this guy? I went over him with a fine-tooth comb. He wasn't there when she vanished..."

"You're thinking he hired someone to kill her?"

"It's a possibility, but I'll admit to you, I don't like the guy."

"He doesn't sound charming. You said, 'according to him, she didn't have a job.' What's up there?"

"She was an artist. A painter. She had a cool little business going on the Internet--"

"The postcard paintings. That's what led me to her."

"And she was making three times the amount her ex-husband was giving her just from those. She freelanced commercial art on the side, illustrating manuals and textbooks, even digital art--but he just looked down his nose at all of it."

"Did you find anything of interest on her computer?"

"Funny thing there. It was blank."

"I suppose that would be too much to hope for. Did you find any evidence that she was seeing somebody?"

"One thing. A month before she went missing, she got a prescription for the Pill. Other than that, no evidence of who she might have been seeing."

"Detective Santiago, you have been great," Hafidha says. "And while we have been talking, I've been requesting case information. You wouldn't happen to have anything that didn't make it to the computers?"

"I'll fax the whole thing, just in case. You coming up to Harrisburg? I'll put coffee on..."

"We're probably coming, and I will take you up on that."

*

"But that doesn't make sense. All the victims we have so far are white," Daphne says. "The crimes have a sexual component to them--"

"Considering these women are theorized to be substitutes for the UNSUB's rage against his mother, I find that pretty creepy--"

"But the point is that cross-racial sexual crimes are rare. Not impossible," Daphne forstalls the question even before Hafidha can correct her. "But if Christina Nemechek is one of fishfood's victims we have to look at the race as a break in the pattern."

"Well, believe in the impossible, because the marvelously forthcoming and making-coffee-as-we-speak Detective Santiago gave me another factor in the pattern--the personal computers of Belinda Green, Christina Nemechek, Jacqueline Kincaid, and Teresa Lee Strong were all wiped clean. John Victor is obliterating his tracks, and while we are finding more charges to hang on this creep, we aren't that much closer to finding the creep."

"She had two creeps too many, it seems," Daphne agrees. "Do you think that telling the detective that we were coming was a bit--"

"Presumptuous? I'll drive up there myself, take the weekend."

"I'll go with you," Daphne says.

"And me," from Chaz, walking into the conversation as if he'd been there all along. Daphne and Hafs both swivel--one in her chair, one on her heels--to face him.

"I've been in contact with her mother, Mahalia Nemechek. They locked up Christina's home and kept it like a shrine. If there's anything to learn there we can find it."

Daphne nods, and tugs on the hem of her shirt. "Right. Where she lived, how she lived, interview with friends and family--"

"I need to be in the same room as that computer," Hafidha sighs.

"Harrisburg is close enough that we can just drive. And Daphne," he said, handing her a file, "Race may not be a break in the pattern."

Daphne opens the file to a snapshot of Christina Nemechek. Hazel-green eyes stare back in amusement, narrow, up-tilted nose, high cheekbones, honey and buckwheat hair styled in big curls around skin the color of aged ivory.

Daphne blinks. Hafs peers over her shoulder, and says, "Oho. Christina Nemechek, I presume."

*

Hafidha glances up from a lapful of kid mohair yarn and a crochet hook to watch a motorist stare pop-eyed at Chaz's notion of a lane change, with enough time to smile apologetically. They'd made it in good time, even with the stop for second breakfast, and now Chaz follows the map he'd looked at earlier this morning to the police station, while Daphne looks over the too-thin report on Christina Nemechek.

"Didn't anyone realize that the NCIC report was completely inaccurate in giving her description? Everything on the sheet is completely wrong if you look at a picture of her," Daphne says, tossing the file down in disgust.

Hafidha winds Kidsilk Haze around her fingers, already chaining her way across the row and counting double-chain increases. "The One-Drop rule strikes again. The problem is that the barest content of the report is true, if not accurate. Though the hair? That gives me something to ask about."

"Like why her ex-husband said it was black?"

"She might have had it colored," Chaz says. "The man didn't know anything about her life beyond the meeting he forced every month. She could have had it lightened after the last time he saw her, and that could be another insight for victimology."

"Hair lightened, birth control pills, erased computer. Put it all together and I see an Internet romance. Still," Hafidha says. "If I can get anything off that computer...How did he do it, that's my question. Did anyone see him at her house?"

"That will depend on her neighbors," Daphne says. "Let's hope so. Parking spot," but Chaz was already sliding into it. "Heh, what am I thinking."

"You're getting better at not scaring people to death with your driving, baby bruddah."

"Actually, it's just that you guys trust me."

*

"Are you able to tell me that your interest in Christina Nemechek is not connected to any other missing women?"

Detective Santiago asks the question with a couple of matchsticks worth of hope in her tone, while looking up at Chaz. Over six feet tall herself, it may be an uncommon event. Chaz, for his part, shakes his head as he fumbles for something in a file, avoiding the handshake.

"I'm afraid not," Daphne answers, and when Detective Santiago turns warm brown eyes to her, offers her own hand in compensation. "I'm Special Agent Daphne Worth."

"Detective Carmela Santiago," she responds automatically. "I have a meeting room we can use, it'll fit the four of us, and I've got coffee."

"Is there someplace like a bakery nearby?" Hafidha asks. "We spoke on the phone. Please call me Hafidha."

"If you'll call me Carmela," the tall detective answers. "There is. Across the street, half block west."

"Be Right Back," Chaz says, and he's out the door in moments.

Detective Santiago watches the exit but doesn't comment. "So you're looking into a serial murderer?"

Daphne answers. "Yes. And for the moment, we'd like to work on this quietly. Media attention may have an undesirable consequence."

"You don't think Christina Nemechek is still alive."

"We can't give up on the possibility that she is still alive. Or that our UNSUB hasn't chosen another victim," Hafidha answers. "I'm very curious about Ms. Nemechek's computer. Is it here, or at her home?"

"It's at her home," Detective Santiago replies, and waves Daphne and Hafidha to follow. "We were allowed to do a very careful search, with Christina's mother and sister supervising to make sure everything was put exactly back where it was. We did it with their permission rather than get a warrant, and their knowledge of the house and its contents were helpful."

The room where Christina Nemechek's file and evidence wait for Hafidha has a lot in common with a schoolroom--the walls a minty green, the windowsills blessedly untouched by paint a soft red-brown, the lighting fluorescent tubes interspersed with twirling ceiling fans painted the same green.

Hafidha half expects a black-painted chalkboard and striped felt erasers, but a whiteboard perches in its place, blank and clean even of the caught dry-erase marks on the edges, but the table is all the heavy, scarred real wood Hafs could ask for. The wooden chairs roll on casters and swivel, and Hafs kicks hers away from the table and lifts her feet to let it spin higher.

"First, I have two guesses. You didn't find any data on the computer."

"We did have a tech look at it but he said it was wiped," Santiago says, from the long end of the room. A kettle whistles, and Hafs glances up just as the scent of dark roasted coffee hits her nose--

"Oh saints and stars. That's a French press."

"Cop shop coffee is a tradition, but why suffer?" Carmela sets the glass jug down where Hafs can keep a hungry eye on it. "You said you had two guesses."

"You know that there was a piece of jewelery missing," Hafs says. "A brooch, made of gold and pink enamel. In the shape of a chrysanthemum."

Carmela pushes the plunger down on the glass jug, pours a cup with an inch of clearance from the rim. "That's a very precise guess. With room?"

"Please."

Daphne gets up to fetch a glass from the drink station. "I'll just have some water. Detective Santiago, do you know if Christina had told anyone that she had met a new man, or were the birth control pills a surprise to her relatives?"

"Do you even need to read my case file?" Carmela looks between Hafs and Daphne, then her gaze goes to the door, where Chaz holds two white boxes from the bakery.

"Well, thank you, baby bruddah, but what did you get for Daphne and Carmela?" Hafidha asks.

"They're stacked two deep in these boxes," Chaz says, offering the first. "Pain au chocolat."

"Give us," Hafs says, and opens the box. "Ohhh. These smell real. Daphne?"

"You'd better take two if you want two," Daphne says to Carmela. "They'll be gone before you know it."

"There's a dozen in that box."

"Not for long."

Act IV

"I saw a barbecue place back there," Hafs says as she gets out of the feebmobile. "What would you recommend for lunch, Detective Santiago?"

"You--are thinking about lunch now?"

"Oh no," Hafs answers. "After we've had a look around. This is a very nice block."

It was. The residences of the North Sixth Street district were often crumbling, many homes boarded up, but this short block of five attached townhouses had the touch of care--fresh paint, repaired front porches, flower boxes.

"Christina, apparently. That one's hers," Carmela replies, pointing to the red-brick and gothic arched unit second from the left. "She bought it, got to know her neighbors, got them talking to each other, looking out for each other, and had her family doing a lot of the renovations. She had them do repairs for her neighbors. She made them allies."

"Give my girl time, she would have run this whole neighborhood," a new voice says, and a stout woman stands before Christina Nemechek's front door. "With pride, and unity. She always made things more beautiful. It was her gift." Carefully rollerset curls sway around her ears as she pushes the screen door wider, still standing in the threshold. She looks Hafidha over frankly, and nods. "You have it too. You know colour, and comfort. Never saw a lady from the FBI dresses like you."

Hafidha holds her laptop bag in the left hand to offer her right. "I'm Special Agent Hafidha Gates. I'm their computer expert. You must be Christina's mother."

"I'm Mahalia Nemechek. Never saw a computer expert dress like you. You make that crochet?" The woman nods to Hafidha's lacy, wide skirted overdress, deep green over an undyed jersey dress, high necked and long-sleeved.

"I did," Hafs agrees.

"Chrissy has some of my doilies," she says. "Come you all inside. I made lemonade--ooh, aren't you tall, young man. Come in, the parlor's cool."

Hafidha follows, moves to the parlor at the left, stops to get a real look. A dim room, but it smells of furniture wax and lemons; a ceiling fan stirs the air. An octagon-shaped rug borders space for six chairs to sit and have tea--a table shared by two seats. No two chairs share the same shape, their covers identical teal canvas.

"She did this herself," Daphne says. "That's a neat idea."

"Creative, resourceful, determined," Chaz agrees. "Determined to put her identity on every square inch of this room. There isn't anything in here that wasn't made or repaired or converted by her."

"Or her family. Sit you down, all of you. Young man, take the big chair, that's right."

"I'm Special Agent Charles Villette, Mrs. Nemechek. And this is Special Agent Daphne Worth."

"You're all looking for Chrissy. What do you think you can find here, after the police looked? They searched everything." Mrs. Nemechek pours lemonade into tall collins glasses, hands out one to each. Hafidha sips, expecting the sweetness of powdered mix, but the tart flavor comes from a lemon and only enough sugar to smooth it out.

"We look at different things than the police do, to enhance the information they gleaned from their search," Chaz says. "We look at behaviors, personality, and search for the character."

"You're profilers," Mrs. Nemechek says with a nod. "That's what you were doing. Looking at this room, making a profile of my daughter." She sits back, looks at Chaz, Daphne, Hafidha, waits for a demur or deflection. When they all nod, she lightly slaps one knee and nods again, and looks pointedly around the room. "My girl put her heart into this house. That no-good ex-husband, David-- he hired decorators, had that place all done up like a museum, looking like nobody lived there. What you see here--it's her. It's all here, and if it will help you find my Chrissy, then you're welcome to look."

"Thank you, Ma'am. Your daughter is a skilled artist," Hafidha says. "It was her miniature daily paintings that led her to us. Mrs. Nemechek, one of the paintings had a brooch in it, a pink chrysanthemum."

"She bought that on the E-Bay," Mrs. Nemechek answers, curls bobbing again. "She bought a lot of things there, for the house. Fabric for the chairs in the dining room, her teacup collection, oh, all kinds of things. She crawled all up in the attic here, at my house, she sanded and re-finished and had a hand in everything. Now I suppose you want to see it all. You're wanting to look at her computer, Miss Agent Gates?"

Hafidha nods. "Yes, Ma'am, I would."

"That would be in her office. It's upstairs. Leave the glasses, I'll get those," Mrs. Nemechek says, and Hafs follows her up the long stair to a small room at the back of the house.

"She had the back wall's re-wiring done up. This house was built before there was much electricity. The lights were gas." Mrs. Nemechek points to long pipes along the moulding on the walls. "Wires go through there, it's all grounded, and she had this room done up special for the computer. Are you needing anything?"

"This is perfect just like this, Mrs. Nemechek, thank you." Hafidha says, and lays her laptop bag on the desk.

"That's a funny bag," Mrs. Nemechek says, and leans forward to look more closely at it. "Those eyes. It's like those puppets on Sesame Street."

"I watched that show every day as a kid," Hafs says, and slides out her laptop, reminding herself to use the keyboard and the mouse.

"Chrissy did too. And all her brothers and her sister. I swear they learned to read, watching that show. And a little Spanish. They could sing all the songs."

"That's how they get you," Hafidha agrees, rolling a wooden chair out of the way. "The songs."

When Hafs drops to her knees with a penlight, Mahalia makes a noise of dismay. "Your pretty dress!"

"Machine washable," Hafs answers, and plugs her laptop into a surge protection bar. "And there's no dust down here, Ma'am." She's back on her feet and in the chair, smiling at the woman hovering nearby. "It's all very tidy."

She pulls herself back to the table, slips on nitrile gloves, and examines the tower before her. Footsteps up the stairs, not taken two at a time--Daphne. A quick glance over her shoulder confirms it, with a little wave.

"Hello there, now let's see what you've got," she says softly, and pulls a pocket driver set from her handbag. She's got the sides off the case and a light shining on the boards in a minute. "Checked for fingerprints, I see.."

"This isn't a bad machine at all. AMD chipset, nVidia graphics card, tons of RAM, Seagate Hard drive...she researched. or she knew someone who knew hardware well enough. Now let's juuuuust...there."

Hafidha slides the hard drive loose of its connections and nests it gently inside an IDE drive enclosure. "I'm going to look at this hard drive with some data analysis stuff on my laptop."

"Hafidha is our unit's technical analyst," Daphne explains. "If there's anything to find on the hard drive, she will find it."

"I don't even know how my television works," Mahalia says with a rich chuckle. "I press the button and pay the bill and everything between is magic. You must really love them."

"I do," Hafs says, her hands on the keyboard. "Okay, now I'm scanning. The hard drive isn't blank. there's still data here. It's just corrupted, degraded...but I think my program can handle it," Hafidha says, and stands up. "We'll just let that run. Now, sometimes artists will keep journals, idea books, but your daughter didn't write in hers, the report says."

"She drew every day, never took a day off. She did her paintings, those little ones. Not every day. She'd go out every day, walking somewhere, and take pictures, and then she'd take them home and draw from them or paint from them." Mahalia answers. "Even when she went on vacation--she would do that, go away for three days, and she'd come back with sketches and paintings and work--she drew pictures for medical books, she designed quarterly reports--she made a lot on those, so she could draw."

"Did she have a camera?" Daphne asks.

"A digital camera her brothers gave her for Christmas. She took it with her. Miss Hafidha, Miss Daphne...please. Please tell me what you know about my baby girl. Is she dead?"

Hafs glances at Daphne, and then to Chaz, standing in the doorway, Detective Santiago behind. "Mrs. Nemechek, we have a lot of information that forms a picture for us. A pattern that helps us fill in the missing pieces, shows us where to ask the questions, but they are mostly very good guesses."

"We can tell you what we guess, but we might be wrong. We could give you false hope," Daphne says, and nods at Carmela's opening her mouth to interject. "Our best guess at the moment is that she went to meet someone. Now you said in the initial report that she didn't have a boyfriend. Would it be normal for her to tell you about anyone she was dating?"

"We didn't talk about that," Mrs. Nemechek says. "I didn't want to ask her if she was seeing anyone interesting. I didn't want to remind her that she wasn't married. Chrissy's husband was a nightmare, you understand. He assumed she was white. Light eyes and freckles and she wore her hair straight--She cooked for him, he saw her neat little college apartment--poor but proud, and you know what I think?"

Four nods for her to go on.

"I think he thought a poor girl would be better for his needs. Someone to keep grateful. Someone to keep down, you see? He didn't even know her three months before they eloped, the deal done before she'd graduated--and that was their first fight. He said she didn't need a degree, she was his wife. She insisted, and wouldn't give in, and she graduated. She was the first," Mahalia says. "The first of her family to graduate college. We came. We all came. From miles around. Her aunt Odette and her uncle Jack and all her cousins, all come to kiss and cry, and he hid it well. But I wish I'd known, I wish I'd seen... I wish I could have done something.

"She made a mistake. An honest mistake. And I think he pushed it down, because to suddenly divorce his wife because she was black--that man cared a lot about appearances. He thought a lot of himself. He probably thought it made him better in the eyes of others. Colour-blind."

"I've heard that phrase before," Hafidha replies.

"Bet you have, beautiful tall girl like you," A fast smile for Hafs, and she goes on. "He controlled everything. But I didn't raise my girl to knuckle under. After it was over, I didn't want her to think that I was nagging her to get married again and start giving me grandchildren, so I never asked her if she'd met anyone nice. I wished that she would meet a nice man--or a nice woman, someone to be there for her. But that man--you know about the alimony."

"That he insisted that they meet in person for the payment," Chaz says with a nod.

"Yes. And she'd be so angry, the day before, the day after. He couldn't bear not controlling her. But I don't think he was responsible for my Chrissy disappearing. She'd never go anywhere with him, or on his say-so. If she saw him walking down the street she'd cross it to get away from him."

"So who would she go with, Mrs. Nemechek?"

"She would have had to believe that he was safe," Mahalia Nemechek answers. "She would have thought that she knew him. She would have thought that he cared about the things she cared about. She would have talked to him for a while, but she doesn't go out to meet people--you think she talked to him on that computer," Mahalia says. "Like eHarmony or one of them dating services."

Hafidha is too good at what she does to glance at Daphne or Chaz. "Your children didn't get away with anything, did they, Mrs. Nemechek."

Mahalia smiles, waves one hand. "I read Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers when I was young," she says. "These days Grace Edwards, Sara Paretsky, Barbara Hambly... I love mystery stories. Doesn't matter if I work out who did it before the end."

"That happens a lot?"

"These days," Mahalia nods. "I don't mind not being surprised. So when you fix up that drive, you can find where Chrissy went on the computer? Find her e-mail and see who she talked to?"

"Yes, ma'am, that's exactly what we'll do," Hafidha agrees. "From her computer, we can ask for more information from the companies she dealt with if we need it, but her drive will tell us who we need to ask."

"He did that," Mahalia says. "The man you're looking for, the one who took her. He put one of those viruses on her computer, so he could destroy her hard drive any time he wanted to. Can you fix it?"

"I will fix it. In fact, I should check to see how it's doing...excuse me a minute, Mrs. Nemechek."

Chaz starts asking Mrs. Nemechek about whether Christina went to jumble sales or thrift shops for her decorating, and Hafidha bends over her laptop, purposefully placing her hands on the keyboard. Many of the files are reconstructed, but some are too corrupted to repair. It would have to be enough.

Hafs mouses through the directory tree, noting that Christina's history and bookmarks were among those too corrupt to reconstruct completely. Targeted, possibly. It's what she would have done. She listens to Mahalia talk about Christina's teacup collection and clicks manually to open up Thunderbird.

It happens while the load splash is up. A buzzing, twanging instant that sours her mouth with the taste of metal, a bit of code sending a ping she didn't send--

Hafs pinches off her internet access with an annoyed flare of her nostrils...and then lets it loose, watching the little distortion speed away.

"Guys," she says, straightening up, "I found a Trojan."

Act V

"You set it loose," Daphne says, and lets her head fall back on the headrest with a thump. Harrisburg is behind them, Christina Nemechek's hard drive carefully wrapped in an antistatic envelope tucked inside a bubble mailer, sealed in a ziploc bag with an Evidence sticker on it, relevant paperwork stacked beneath.

"I set it loose," Hafidha agrees. "Impulse, but I think it's fine. I want the guy to freak out a little bit."

"He'll go to ground," Chaz says. "Or else he'll want to prove his wits."

"But you don't know which," Daphne says.

"He'll want to see who restored his hard drive. He'll want to know who is after him. He won't be able to resist. And while he's watching, he's going to see a technical analyst who plays World of Warcraft. Chaz, you feel like taking Unguilded out for a spin and driving the twinks of Emberstorm insane?"

"Me and Daphne?"

"You and Daphne. I'll bake you a pie."

"Apple?"

"Apple."

"But what will you eat, Wabbit?"

"I'll manage. Wish we could have tried that barbecue, though," Hafs says. "Speaking of, I'm starved, and I don't want to eat the other Powerbar."

*

"No one on defense," Daphne calls. "Again."

"Going back," Chaz responds, and the green-haired troll lopes across the field, returning to Warsong Hold. "Oh hi, mage headed for tunnel--"

"Box him in?"

"Yup."

"Daphne, you have a goat on the roof, hold by the flag," Hafidha cuts in.

"You saw that while you were making us pie?"

"That's a 51 inch LCD, honey. I can see his nose hairs."

Daphne keeps her gaze locked on the screen of the guest laptop she's using. "It's too big, I don't see how you can play like that."

"You get used to it," Hafidha says. "There he is again."

"Saw him," Daphne answers, and hits the draenei with a scatter shot, lays down an explosive trap, and jumps violently backwards, firing mid-flight. "How you doing, Platypus?"

"Coming," Chaz responds, and arrives just in time to click on the dropped Horde flag. "Ninja return!"

"Typical, I do all the work, you swoop in for the glory," Daphne says. "Wanna try and break that turtle?"

Chaz stretches his legs and raises the laptop, settling it back on his thighs. "We can if we get a healer."

"I have to be Hafs right now." Daphne practices running Hafidha's troll hunter, jumping, and twitching the mouse so her character faces the way she came.

"I'm apologizing for the inconvenience with pie. Two ovens' worth. Two!" Hafs holds one aloft like a trophy, and slides it into the oven and sets the timer.

"But what will Chaz eat?"

"Fried chicken," he says. "That I will make, while you are me. How's the UNSUB snare?"

Hafs doesn't need to look up from washing the mixing bowls. There's no disturbance in her hived off network, no dissonance of an intruder. Holding that small piece in her mind is easy. "He hasn't found it. Maybe he ran."

"You think he would?"

"If he's smart, he did. But curiosity kills the cat. Nearly done?"

"Alliance is holed up in their base. I'm ready to throw the match just to get out of here," Daphne answers.

"Yeah, do it. The pies are in. I'll shake the bait a little more."

Hafidha puts her good rolling pin back in its place, gives the counters a once-over with a rag, and tags Chaz's high five as she flumps down on the couch. "Switch."

Daphne hands her one laptop, Chaz hands his over to Daphne, and Hafidha manually alt-tabs out of idling in Orgrimmar to mimic a baseline tech looking over a task in the background. She opens Thunderbird on Christina Nemechek's hard drive again, and sets the little packet free--

It's bigger, this time. Only 16 bytes bigger. As small a Trojan as she could manage ...and she watches it ping and bounce and leap across continents, until it stalls on a server in Cambodia. "Oh hell. He's got his data stopping offshore."

"What?"

"Basically the program that he was using to tell him whenever Christina Nemechek used her computer doesn't go directly to where he is. It's stopped in Cambodia. Probably an account with one of their ISPs."

"Can you even get a warrant for that?" Daphne asks.

Hafs shakes her head and calls up the trace. "Camnet. Hmm, what the heck is--oh, ha! They're old, all right, their website brags about offering TelNet. So how did he get an account--oh you didn't," Hafidha cackles, and leans back. "Hired gun. He went over there to work. He got an account, and he kept it."

"So you can trace him by looking up all the American programmers who ever got a permission to work in Cambodia in the last fifteen years?"

"Only if he was really dumb and I break international laws."

"Are you going to?"

"No. I'm going to sit right here and wait for that packet to come out. I've got evidence sitting in my server closet right now pretending to be in Washington, which is so not Justice Department SOP. Let's not push it."

*

"I done caught me a wabbit," Hafidha says, and her indigo-haired troll jumps into the air, spins one-eighty, and flies "backward" at top speed--straight to Daphne on her troll shaman, and away from the crowd of pursuers trying to take the Alliance flag back.

"Did you No-Hands that Disengage?"

"Nope! All manual," Hafidha says as they run up the tunnel--Hafs dropping an Ice Trap partway up--straight into the battle at the Horde flag. Hafs checks the mental map of her network snare and watches that one dot, tiny and as irritating as a dead pixel, touching one port after another alongside her connection to World of Warcraft servers in Washington State. "He's quietly creeping up my network. Or at least wondering how he can creep up what he thinks is my network."

"So he caught your addition to his Trojan?" Chaz asks over sizzles and pops. He's standing in the kitchen, carefully lowering chicken pieces coated in spices and flour into a pot half-full of hot oil. Hafs is already yearning for a piece.

"As planned. Oh no no, kitty, you don't get our flag today--" Hafs's pink scorpion pet scampers across the room in pursuit, as Hafs scatter-shots the feral druid into losing player control for the few seconds her team needs to focus attack and get their flag back.

Daphne clicks the flag for return, and Hafs, standing on the return point, wins the last cap of the match.

"Top heals."

"What can I say? I know my triage, Miss Top Damage."

"Hafs," Chaz suddenly says, and something in his voice makes her stop and turn to look.

"You can see him," he says. "What if he can see you?"

"You mean, can he figure out that WoW isn't all I'm doing."

"Yes. Hold on," Chaz says, and turns all the burners to low. Then he's standing behind Hafs, hands on her shoulders. "I don't know if this will work, but you've got one shot at this, so--"

"What are you doing?"

"I'm checking him with the mirror. I want to know what he's assuming. You're a tech. You had the drive passed off, you took another look because if you can scrape up more data, your boss will be impressed. So you're cheating a bit, checking the drive mounted remotely with authorization to the Washington servers, checking in on it with remote desktop in between Warsong Gulch matches. Proving you can hold your own with the boys."

Hafidha nods and leaves Zaiyia the hunter dancing in Orgrimmar while she blinks the big screen tv into showing a graphical representation of her virtual network.

"That's him right there," she says, making one dot bright orange--then the flight tower of the Horde capital flashes back into sight, as Zaiyia jumps on a windrider taxi for an unnecessary flight to Thunder Bluff. "And I have no clue, right? the great Girl Geek is getting hacked."

"Making it all the sweeter when he pokes his way around your security. He found your addition to his Trojan, he knows the buck stopped in Cambodia...he's going to find out what you know and why the feds looked at Christina Nemechek's computer, all without you noticing. Because you aren't noticing."

"Just going to see if I can play the auction house in peace," Hafidha says. "Too bad I left those ports open, hey?"

"Yeah, who'd think of that?" Daphne agrees. "I'm going to keep playing my Death knight."

"DKs are so OP."

"Says the Hunter!"

"He's requesting directory information..." a tiny packet trips up the line, and Hafs watches it fly across the world and back, across the dense points of light that mark the servers attached to the Internet, tracing through his path until it lands in a bright smear of computers and servers in the Midwest. "Oh got you, you punk. Minnesota," she says. "Minneapolis has a field office, close by, that's good. Who's holding down the desks here at home--" Hafs looks up to the huge LCD; it obliges by changing the display to a list. "Sol? No. Pauley. Daphne?"

"Phoning. What should I tell him?"

"Tell him to check his email, and that we've got a person of interest in the murders of Theresa Lee Strong, Jacqueline Kinkaid, Belinda Green and Christina Nemechek sitting in Minneapolis, and we need to send some field feebs over there to pick him up."

"Right," Daphne says. "And how are you doing with your bait?"

Chaz answers "He still thinks she's not noticing him."

"Because I'm trolling Trade Channel right now with Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker," Hafs chuckles.

"He's getting the drop on the FBI, because he's just that smart. Also talented," Chaz murmurs.

"Oh right, silly me. Meanwhile, our UNSUB has tracerouted back to me, and I have his neighborhood. Though there's a lot of apartment buildings with highspeed...got a cross street. Fourth Avenue and First Street. On screen..." Hafs makes her big LCD pop up Google Maps, zooming down and down and down until she's looking at photos of the intersection.

"Okay. That's a nice neighborhood, I'd buy an apartment there...now." The view pops back to a map, but then a film pops over it, blacking out spots that represent buildings. "Eliminating every address where the person who owns it also lives there. This guy hasn't put down roots. He's renting, subletting, maybe from a management company. Now separating every address that doesn't have a monthly internet bill."

"You think he's hacking someone's router?"

"It's risky, but he might be that arrogant. A lot of people don't monitor access to their router, they just put up a password and leave it at that. All right. Now let's see, are any of these people named John Victor? Of course not! that would be too easy. Are any of those people first name J and last name V?"

"You think he aliases with the same initials?"

"Monograms are expensive. Annnd we have a bingo. James Vlasak rents a stylish psuedo-loft. He's in his fifth month of a six month lease at this address... and he's a Master of Computer Science from Caltech. Never works anywhere for more than a year, and oh, look. He just moved from Philadelphia last autumn."

"You are generating paperwork for this."

"Such a buzzkill. Tell Pauley to check his email again. And--hey Pete! We just need you to hold this guy down until we can come and get him."

"He says is he dangerous."

"Don't assume he isn't," Hafs says. "Definitely don't assume he isn't. Actually. Tell the field agents to take the stairs, and cut the power to the unit. The whole building if they have to. Or he'll format the evidence." In a lower voice, she appends, "With his brain."

"You think he can do that?"

"It's what I would do," Hafs says. "Now let's keep him busy."

Hafs logs out of World of Warcraft and starts laboriously typing an email report about how tricky it will be to restore any more data from Christina Nemechek's hard drive. She's halfway through a request to attempt to determine how such a sophisticated program could wreak havoc with erasing computer evidence when Fishfood abruptly blips out of her network.

Chaz stands up straight, and the warm pressure of his hands leaves Hafs's shoulders. Hafidha twists around to look up at him, then holds up a gentle fist.

Chaz touches her knuckles with his own, and murmurs, "Wonder-Twin powers, de-activate."

In the silence, Daphne's phone buzzes.

Chaz and Hafs turn to look at her, and she raises her chin. "He's dead. And he shot an officer, she's going to be okay, but Pauley says he only talked to them to lull them all in before he went suicide by cop."

"Can they identify him?"

"They're going to...yes, call us back," Daphne says. "Pauley says he needs to talk to the agents on site. And that he got your emails. And can you meet him on Monday."

"Yes, yes I can," Hafs agrees.

Daphne ends the call.

"If it were me, I would have taken monitoring control of the security camera network. Cutting the power was the right thing to do," Hafs says. "And may I say that I'm kind of creeped that I beat this guy by working out what would beat me."

"You may," Daphne says. "How could they have arrested him? How could they even get him in a squad car? I mean, if he can do what you can do...everything's computerized now. Everything." She sighs. "Dad's not gonna be happy."

"We couldn't have taken him alive," Chaz says. "He didn't need anyone to understand what he was doing."

*

"Hungrier than a gang of hobbits. Are they a gang?" Hafidha asks, and takes another bite out of a Ding Dong to keep her steady. Fried chicken rests on paper, blotting away the oil. It smells so good Hafs is ready to eat standing before her grill pan.

"Naw, it's a buffet of hobbits," Chaz says, putting dirty dishes in the dishwasher.

"Are you sure?"

"Of course I'm sure, I just made it up this instant."

"Now that's the authority we need around here," Hafs says, and pulses gently sauteed mushrooms and onions into a puree with her right hand while flipping three-cheese grilled sandwiches with her left. Fast food--as fast as scratch gets, at least, and easily divisible between jammers and baselines, with pie to follow.

"Maybe we should order in. I'm gonna be hungry again in an hour, and there might not be any pie."

Daphne snorts and starts to set the table. Her phone rings again, and she answers. Then she looks up.

"Pete says they found a room full of photographs and display cases with jewelry. The computer has movies. Photographs were printed on photo paper, from digital sources. Christina Nemechek--there's photographs of her. It's--it's reasonable to assume that she is dead."

"I figured she had to be," Hafs says. "But I wish...oh, damn it."

"She helped us find him, Wabbit. If it wasn't for her, we'd still be looking. He might have gotten whoever was next."

"Nothing's going to taste good now," she says, but she slides sandwiches to the cutting board.

"Are you still dizzy, Hafs?"

"I'll live, I'm pretty sure."

Daphne picks up a fistful of flatware. "Okay. What did you do? With the Wonder Twins bit. You did something. The both of you."

"You remember the jellybean thing?" Chaz asks, between stirring cream into the saucepan full of cream of mushroom soup.

"The jellybean thing. You mean the day you got that picture of your mom?"

"That's it. I was explaining to Hafs about how I won all those guess-the-jellybeans-in-the-jar things, and she got the idea to model it on a computer so she could see how I see it--and so I could see how other people see it. So I explained, and she put it on the screen."

"We started out wondering if we could do it together, but Chaz said it wouldn't work that way. This time, though..." Hafs says, slicing sandwiches in half. "Chaz got in front of me, used the mirror so Fishfood--James Vlasak--would believe what he most wanted to believe. That he was a better hacker than any girl wonder who could slog her way through the soul-killing bureaucracy of the feds, so he never took a moment to wonder if it wasn't too easy."

Daphne freezes in place, her fingers still on the handle of the soup spoon she just set down on a teal blue placemat.

"What?"

"You can influence people's thoughts," Daphne says. "From hundreds of miles away."

"No. I only used the mirror. And the distance was only possible with Hafs in the link. I can't connect across computer networks. She can."

"Are you going to tell anyone?"

Hafidha looks at Chaz just as his mismatched eyes drift and catch hers.

"What do you think they'll do if we tell them?"

"You think they'll get scared."

"I think they'll get the guy with all the keys who was going to kidnap E.T. Celentano would have a cat," Chaz says.

"Reyes would--" Hafidha goes silent, looks at Chaz, at Daphne. "I don't know what he'd do. And I don't want to speculate. And I don't want to know, right now."

"We'll decide together," Chaz promises.

"Pinky swear?"

Chaz holds his right hand up. Hafs links it.

After a moment, Daphne does, too.

“Courage”

Ashton, VA, August 2011

"I've been thinking about Daphne," Hafidha says.

"I've thought of her too," Katharine Allison says. "It hurts?"

Hafidha nods. "The Bug loves it when I think about her. About how I could have saved her, if The Bug hadn't won."

"The Bug wants you to think it's your fault."

"It is. I could have stopped that truck. I could have saved her with my wireless brain. The superpower of the 21st century," Hafidha says. "The Bug--"

Hafidha goes silent.

"Loves it when things go wrong." Katharine says. "The Bug couldn't have gotten better ammunition to use on you, could it?"

"No," Hafidha says. "Best thing that ever happened to It."

"Guilt. Of course you feel it," Katharine says.

"Because I'm alive and she's not. But this is different."

"Because you have a gift that could have changed things. The Bug keeps telling you the story were you were standing right there, and you would have known what was going to happen and that you would have been able to control that truck in time to stop it."

"What the Kat said," Hafidha agrees.

"Only you don't actually know if you would have been right there. You could have been tracking more of James Singh's life, finding the information we needed for intake."

"Could have been," Hafidha says.

"And then you'd be in exactly the same position. You weren't in the right place at the right time, and that has nothing to do with The Bug winning."

"So it's more Bugshit logic, you're saying," Hafidha says. "No simple explanation for anything important."

"And how does that sit with you?"

Hafidha thinks. "It makes it more human. The Bug wants me to think like a superhero. Wireless Girl saves the day--only whoops, institutionalized failure girl can't save anything. Bug logic."

"Bug logic."

"Kat." Hafidha says, shakes her head. "I'm being a jerk."

"That you or The Bug talking?"

"Dunno," Hafidha says. "I just realized I've been sitting here--Daphne's dead and gone, right down to the organ donation and I'm just whining me me me. I should have been the big hero. Only I'm useless. Oh, my pain, it hurts."

"Loss hurts," Katherine says. "Grieving hurts. The Victorians stayed in full mourning for a year. We talk about it like it was some stifling restriction. Dressed only in black, not allowed to celebrate--but you were allowed to grieve. You could cry. You could say that you wanted your loved one back, and that was allowed, expected, normal. Modern mourning doesn't even let you have a month before you get shamed into getting over it."

"The Bug is all over that too. Because Erik, and Daphne... Everything's fuel for It. Telling me that story that doesn't need to make sense." Hafidha sighs, leans back, consciously relaxes tense muscles. "I need this to be easier. Kat. What can I do to make this easier?"

"We've discussed a few possibilities," Katherine says. "Have you thought about them?"

"Yeah. And I'm still thinking."

"Do you want to talk about them?"

"No. Can you... Whatever it is you'd use to make the brochure. Can I read that?"

"I'll make you copies as soon as we're done."

“Anniversary”

Sulphur Springs, TX, August 25, 2011

The air conditioner ticks. It's one in the morning, heatwave-still, when Rosemary Gilmer Brady rolls over and says, "You can't just not talk to him."

Her husband humphs. She's been married to Jim for forty-three years. That's forty-two years and six months too long for him to pretend he's still sleeping.

"Jim," she says, and he gives up, turns over. His eyes catch the light from the streetlamp outside their bedroom window. His hair's sticking out; what used to be ashy blond turned the grey of a sky before the sun comes up long years ago. She reaches out to smooth it down. He jerks away.

"Oh, now don't go and be mad at me," she blurts.

He sighs. "I'm not, Rose." His shoulders are still stiff. All that rage still clogged up inside him, leaking into everything: a dirty dish, mail left on the coffee table, a car pulling ahead in traffic on the freeway this afternoon. Bitterness eating at everything.

She reaches over, touches that shoulder; eases it down from its hunch. This time he lets her. But he looks away.

"Rose, I don't want to talk about this."

"You're not sleeping."

"Yes, I was."

"You didn't sleep last night either."

His mouth quirks down. "This isn't one of your women's shows." Where talking can solve everything, she fills in. Where everyone always has to do it one way and that's the touchy-feely way.

Where the problem isn't real.

She pauses a second, looks him in the eye. "No, it certainly is not."

Rosemary Gilmer Brady's no master at putting one over on her husband either; nor does she really want to be. He gets the point.

"So you're all right with this," he says. His voice is thin and flat; he props himself up on his elbow, rustling the thin cotton sheet down. Pushing himself upward to defend.

"No," she says, and closes her eyes. She's got her own anger--that her son lied to her for--good Lord, years. Decades. Laughing behind their backs; the roommate really a lover, the protests about not being ready to settle down, about dangerous jobs, about long hours all a smoke screen, delivered casual as you please. All that glib lying to his own mother.

And then the gutted knowing: that her son felt like he had to lie to her. To her. Because if he didn't, she wouldn't love him anymore.

That in some ways, he was right.

She opens her eyes, and Jim is watching her, wary and weary. Untrusting. Not sure which way she's about to jump.

"But you still need to talk to him," she finishes.

"I don't"--he says carefully, measured and controlled--"have anything to say."

"Well, we've got to find something," she snaps, "because we've only got one son."

And now he sits up straight and his eyes aren't just streetlamp-bright, and the anger in his shoulders streams straight down into two awkward clenched fists. "Why do I have to?" he says, voice spiraling. "Why's it me? I didn't do anything, I didn't change, but I have to bite my tongue, I have to go to him--"

"Jim--" she says.

"It hurts," he shouts, and catches his breath, and no matter what Jim Brady's forebears thought about showing your emotions, even in front of your own wife, there's no taking that back. There's no reeling it in. His cheeks go red. He bows his head, loosens his hands. "I'm allowed to hurt."

"Yeah," she says soft. It hurts.

You want things for your children: safety and comfort and a happy marriage and family to grow old with, all the things that mean the most; all the things you've treasured like a lump, tiny and precious, lodged between your heart and your skin. And knowing he'll never get to hold his own child in his arms, never bury his nose in that faint hair and breathe in deep, never feel the explosion of those first tiny steps--

Never even know what he's missing--

It hurts so bad, and there's no way to say it; no right way to shed one tear because if you do, you're rejecting your child. You're trying to change who he is. You're a bigot and a coward.

I understand, is what she wants to say, calm and reasoned. It hurts, but he didn't do this to hurt us. We held him in our arms and dreamed all those big dreams and buried our noses in his little breaths of hair and were lost forever. He is our son.

"I'm never gonna have grandchildren," spills out instead, cracked and sobbing, and Jim lunges out, folds her in his arms, rocks and rocks soothing like a fussy night and a lullaby.

"Oh Rose, my Rose," he whispers, voice roughened and hoarse, as she cries the sheets wet in the dark. "It'll be all right, baby, I promise. I'll make it right," he says.

Rose and Jim Brady have been married for forty-three years. She can hear his thoughts and the space between his words.

I can't talk to him. Not now. But I'll try.

"Bulletproof" by Emma Bull

Act I

Washington, D.C., August 2011

Such a short distance between far enough and too far, between just right and too much. A twitch of the hand is all it takes.

Her fingers are barely inside the curve of the handle, but it's enough that when she reaches toward the counter for her ringing phone, she snags the mug. It skates across the kitchen table and over the edge. She doesn't have a grip and can't get one in time. With a pop, the mug hits the floor and breaks. China, white and screen printed, scatters like leaves.

"Lau," she says into the phone, out of habit; who else would answer her cell? At her feet she can see a triangle fragment of the cartoon on the mug: the head and neck of a vulture in a cowboy hat.

"You know the first thing I'm going to say is 'Sorry.'" Esther Falkner's mellow voice is thinned by the phone speaker.

She considers pointing out that the first thing Falkner said was "You know," but time is probably of the essence. "Emergency?"

"Work, at least. I wouldn't ask you to give up a personal day, but..."

"We're shorthanded." It doesn't need saying. How much of the glue of the universe is composed of things that don't need saying that get said anyway? And how many of those things are said in spite of pain like a jabbed bruise? "I'll be there in an hour."

"Thank you, Nikki." The clatter on the other end of the line is Falkner's desk phone dropping back into the cradle.

Lau thumbs the power save on her phone and lays it on the kitchen table beside the box and the gift wrap. She squats to gather the big pieces of the broken mug: handle, a wedge of base, the triangle with the vulture.

Before she knows it's coming, she bursts into tears.

*

I know what happens in these stories at the end, so I know what to expect. In fact, I'm counting on it. That probably makes me a cliche, but I get why my fellow cliches want this ending, and maybe other people will get it, too. I want somebody to pay attention, even if it's just this once.

And I know it worked because you're reading this. You're a total stranger, but you already know more about me than my parents and teachers and acquaintances. So I'm writing this for you, as if it's a prize for getting this far. Maybe you won't believe any of it, but I don't care. If you think I'm crazy, that's even more attention. Crazies get headlines.

I have brain damage. But since nobody noticed until I went to kindergarten, the doctors don't know how it happened. I may have had it since before I was born. It affects my ability to think abstractly. I had to learn to use a mirror. Paintings are flat boards with colors on them. I don't watch TV or go to movies.

If that was all, it would be okay. You can sort of get along without those things.

But I also can't do math. I mean, if you put four apples on the table in front of me, then take two to the kitchen and ask me how many apples are left on the table, I can give you the right answer. But if you write "4 - 2 = _" and tell me to fill in the blank-- It doesn't make sense.

Can you get along without that? Make a list of the jobs you can get without doing math, and without visual abstraction. Now check off the ones you'd actually want to go to every day.

There's your answer.

*

One could do a lot of things with a master's degree in electrical engineering, Special Agent Arthur Tan reflected. None of them involved much public speaking. And when he'd decided to parlay his M. Sc. into a place in the FBI (and disappoint his parents as a regrettable but inevitable side effect), he'd certainly never imagined himself speaking stuff like this to people like these.

"Go ahead, Agent Tan," said Stephen Reyes, at the far end of the table in the Anomalous Crimes Task Force's briefing room. The overhead fluorescents gave his brown skin a tarnished-brass tint, and his lids were heavy over bloodshot eyes.

On his right, appropriately, sat Supervisory Special Agent Esther Falkner, her dark hair pulled back so tight and smooth it might have kept her from frowning. The source of her legendary poker face, maybe? On Reyes's left, Nikki Lau sat with her elbows on the table. She was sharp-dressed and immaculate, and thank Dog for it, because the day she wasn't would be the day the world ended. Even so, she looked as if someone had scoured the shine off her.

As if in intentional contrast, Chaz Villette looked as if he'd taken to sleeping under bridges. His eyes were sunken in dark halos of skin, his shirt was wrinkled, and he needed a haircut more than Tan needed a raise, which was rather a lot. Danny Brady, in the chair across from Villette, might have been trying to hold everyone at the table upright by remote control, his spine was so close to vertical. He was almost as sharp as Lau, and might have had about as little sleep.

But I just met her, Padma had said when he brought the news home, in that way a person says the first ridiculous, illogical thing that comes into one's head when shocked. You met people, and sometimes, right after that, they died, and you never saw them again. Because the world was ridiculous and illogical.

The elephant in the room was good-sized, but it wasn't as if they hadn't already talked it to death. Now they had to clamber over the corpse and move on.

"Three bank robberies in the greater St. Louis area in the past week and a half," Tan said, and was glad when his voice came out steady and appeared to make it to the other side of the room. "All at branches of the Overland State Bank. All involved three gunmen wearing ski masks and carrying handguns. They hit the banks at the noon hour, moved fast, and took cash from the tellers and the customers. Nobody saw what they were driving."

"Why is this ours?" asked Falkner. Tan knew what she meant: What's the impossible freaky weirdness that makes this an anomalous crime, instead of a regular FBI investigation?

Tan drew a breath so big he could feel his shirt pull around his ribcage. "During the third robbery, one of the robbers pulled off his mask and began to shout at the customers and tellers. An off-duty police officer among the customers fired at him. The shot hit and killed a woman kneeling on the floor nearby. The officer was suspended and is under investigation, but she swears her aim was accurate and her line of fire was clear, that she couldn't have hit the bystander."

At that, Brady folded his arms across his blue dress shirt. "Well, she would."

"Yep. Except one of the bank guards swears to it as well. He says he saw the officer aim at a point a good thirty degrees from where the victim was kneeling."

"How does all this look on the security footage?" Lau asked.

Which brings us to our next freaky weirdness, said the voice of Egon Spengler in the back of Tan's head. "We don't have it," he admitted.

Two deep vertical lines appeared between Reyes's eyebrows, and he leaned forward so fast he might have landed on his face if the table hadn't been there. "Why not?"

"The president and CEO of Overland State Bank," Tan said carefully, and stopped to make sure he had the facts lined up before he continued, "refuses to hand over the footage from the security cameras in the third robbery."

Reyes, still frowning, sat back in his chair, and Tan would have sworn he was disappointed. The other four agents stared at him as if his last sentence had been spoken in Urdu. Oh, yeah, like you haven't heard stranger things around this table.

"And he says that's because why?" Villette asked.

"He says he's protecting the privacy of the bank's customers."

"Warrant?" Lau's voice had a failing tone, as if, once something as odd as a bank president refusing to share security-camera footage with law enforcement had happened, nothing could be relied on.

"Yeah, there was one of those. Mr. Eriksen went to jail rather than cooperate. His attorneys, when they bailed him out, framed the refusal as a blow for civil rights in a nation, I think it was, 'under ever-increasing electronic surveillance.' They also mentioned 'habitual and unquestioning compliance with police demands' and 'the corporate-customer relationship should be protected from third-party intrusion.' It's all in the case jacket."

His summary was received with appropriately stunned silence. Tan felt almost proud of having brought the report that produced it. "Speaking as someone who has on occasion questioned authority," he added, "this doesn't seem like the ideal moment for it."

He got an appreciative snort out of Villette.

"Not to get too technical," Brady spoke up, "but that's some highly questionable fucked-up shit. Has anyone called the guy on this?"

Tan shrugged. "Apparently he's much respected and very well liked locally. The sort of person who gets to be the face of fund-raising drives for children's cancer centers."

"He's a banker," Lau said, the way she might say, "He's a plague-carrying giant rat covered in puke."

"Apparently you can still get away with that in parts of the country."

Falkner coughed. Tan wished he knew whether it was a "focus, people" sort of cough, or the kind that pretended it wasn't amused. Pete Pauley had bet him twenty bucks Falkner wouldn't smile where Tan could see it. "For the time being, we'll have to settle for witness descriptions of the robbers," she said, level-voiced and grave.

"And look a little further into Overland State Bank and its employees." Reyes laid his palms on the table and nodded. "Thank you, Agent Tan, we'll follow up. You'll forward the case files?"

"Already on your desk, sir."

They all rose, and Brady held the door open and looked at Tan. Courtly, old-fashioned, and an unmistakable invitation to skedaddle back Down the Hall and leave the bug-hunters to get down to work.

So he did. He was relieved to wash his hands of the case. Of course he was.

And annoyed that he wouldn't get to watch.

*

I had a nanny when I was little, from when I started to talk to sometime in second grade. My mother called her "the au pair." Her name was Mari, and she was from Norway. She had short hair the color of straw baskets and pale gray eyes that were so deep-set they almost disappeared, and her cheeks were always flushed. She was shorter than all the other adults I knew, and she seemed soft and strong at the same time.

Mari read to me at bedtime. I didn't like fairy tales or picture books or anything that wasn't real. Maybe that was part of the brain damage, I don't know. She started to read from a kid's book of Norse mythology, and I said I didn't like it, because it was made up.

Mari asked me if I thought God and Jesus were made up. I knew the right answer was "no," even though I'd never seen them, because I'd get in trouble if I didn't believe in God and Jesus. Well, said Mari, that book was about people who were just like God and Jesus in the country she came from. So I let her keep reading.

That's when I learned about Balder. Balder the Beautiful. He was gentle and kind and everybody loved him and nobody would hurt him even if they could, which they couldn't. Except Loki, of course.

There's always a Loki.

*

"What strikes you about this?" Reyes asked when the door was closed and Brady was back in his chair.

Professor mode, Lau thought, which slowed down her response. So it was Chaz who said, "Why would one robber take off his mask, when he hadn't in the first two robberies?"

"And he's the one the off-duty cop took a shot at," Lau added. "Why?"

"Two 'whys,' to add to the one about the bank president withholding the camera footage." Reyes nodded. Lau felt a surge of satisfaction, and tamped it down. The side effect of professor mode: her undergrad reflexes came right back.

"No 'how'?" Brady asked. "As in, how did the cop manage to hit the victim if the robber was the only one in her line of fire?"

Falkner raised an eyebrow at him. "We don't know that yet."

"We need to know more about Overland State Bank and its CEO, as well as the officer." Reyes rolled his chair back six inches, which was all the room allowed, and slid out of it. "I'll call Todd and see if he can work the paper trail for us. Esther, I know St. Louis is your home turf, but would you mind if I took this?"

Falkner smiled. "Not a bit. I'm the one with kids, remember? And school starts in a week and a half."

Reyes ducked his chin in acknowledgement. "Villette, Lau, you'll go with me."

The sneaky team, Lau observed, and approved. They were the ones people tended to underestimate.

She caught Brady's eye across the table, and he nodded. With Todd retired and Hafidha in Idlewood, he was their shooter now. If they handled this right, it needn't go that way.

She was last out the door that Brady held, and they walked back to the bullpen together. "I'm a moron," she told him. "I got you a birthday present, but I broke it while I was wrapping it."

"The best present you can get me is to keep Chaz in the field until my birthday is over." A grin twitched at his lips, as if it had wrestled him and won. "As it is, I have to survive Todd. I'm gonna have desk drawers full of Jell-O or something."

"If you do, I want photos. Damn, I need to call Tricia right away," Lau said. "We were going to try out a new yoga class tonight."

"Tell her I'm bringing ribs over instead."

"Because that's so much like healthy exercise."

She expected him to zing her. Instead, after a moment, he said, "She still doesn't want to go out to eat."

Tricia had told Lau that, too. She never knew when something would remind her of Daphne, and she hated to break down in a public place.

Kind of like Lau after her father died. She swallowed the sudden tightness in her throat. "I'll let her know you're taking care of the cholesterol."

"In the hands of an expert." When they reached his desk, he touched her shoulder, and she stopped. "Hey, stay in touch, okay? And don't walk into anything."

That was Brady code for "Don't fucking die." Not something they used to have to say to each other.

"I'm on that, bro." She held up her hand, palm and fingers flat, and he high-fived her with his usual restraint.

*

I wanted to be Balder. I'd be embarrassed to admit that, but there are worse things to want to be, and I was a little kid. I got over it. You know, if I said I wanted to be just like Jesus, you wouldn't think that was weird. Even as a kid, I could see that Balder was the Norse equivalent of Jesus, the good guy with the tragic death. Frankly, I liked Balder better.

So I would stand as still as I could in the backyard for what felt like hours, hoping the birds and squirrels could tell I was gentle and kind, and would sit on my shoulders. Didn't work.

It didn't work on humans, either. Maybe I just didn't know, at age four or five or six, how to show I was harmless. But at no time could I say that everyone loved me and no one would hurt me.

*

Reyes was glad the jet was in use by some other department. The three of them would have been dwarfed by the half-empty cabin, and there would be nothing to fill the extra space but ghosts.

Too late to get adjoining seats on the commercial flight. Villette was two rows ahead on the aisle, putting virtual push pins into maps of greater St. Louis on his laptop. If the robbery locations suggested a pattern, he'd find it. Meanwhile, he had to risk either his kneecaps to the seat back in front of him, or his feet to the beverage cart in the aisle. At least he was young and flexible.

Lau was five rows behind Reyes. He wasn't sure what she'd be doing now; her gifts tended to call for boots on the ground and a powered-up cell phone. He hoped she was catching a nap, but none of them ever slept on the way to the scene.

Today's goal: don't get anyone killed, he told himself. The IA investigation into Worth's death had cleared him of wrongdoing, or as he thought of it, let him off the hook. Did that make any real difference to anyone in cases like this? Celentano was watching him--with Esther's help, most likely--for signs of failure of nerve.

Reyes was certain there were some. He wasn't a psychopath, after all.

He unfolded his tray table, took a notebook and pen out of his suit coat pocket, and began to list facts and questions about the three robberies.

*

I got put in special ed, of course. Except I was even an outcast by special ed standards. I couldn't draw pictures, I couldn't add and subtract...but I could memorize the multiplication tables, and I could read and write just fine. I was too screwed up for the normal kids, and not screwed up enough for the developmentally disabled kids.

In junior high I tried out for football, and made the team. Then we discovered I couldn't understand the diagrams for the plays. I wasn't a good enough player to make up for it. You'd be amazed how many sports and other extracurriculars use the kind of abstract thinking I didn't have the wiring for. It's a you-don't-miss-it-'til-you-haven't-got-it thing.

I wanted to be Balder, but that was never my destiny. My wyrd, it's called in those stories. I was born to be Loki: the one who can't fit in anywhere, the one nobody wants.

*

They reported to the local field office for form's sake, and to get access to cars and computers. Then they checked in to a pretty decent Marriott on the west edge of town. Lau tossed the relevant contents of her go bag on hangers, grabbed a bottle of water from the vending machine in the hall, and knocked on Reyes's door.

Chaz was already there, his laptop on the desk. Reyes occupied the not-very-comfy comfy chair, with a mug of tea on the table beside him, so she dropped down on the end of the bed, kicked off her loafers, and tucked her feet under her.

"Three points, two possibilities," Chaz said, and slid the laptop to where she and Reyes could see the screen. The robbery sites were dotted in blue. "Either this is a triangle, and the robbers' comfort zone is inside it, or it's a line leading toward or away from something."

"Or something else entirely," Lau said, since someone had to.

"Quiet, you. I'm good at this. Three robberies isn't a big enough sample to be sure, but it's significant that all the banks hit are Overland branches. There are plenty of other banks within the triangle--in fact, in two of the cases there was a competing bank across the street--but no other branches of Overland State Bank."

"So they're targeting Overland," said Reyes.

"Likely. So I mapped all the Overland branches, of which there are ten." Chaz tapped the keypad, and red dots bloomed on the satellite view of the St. Louis area. "And if I connect the dots--" He tapped again.

A solid yellow line zigzagged through the robbery sites, then split into three dotted ones. "Those are the three next closest branches to the last robbery. But only this one," he said, pointing to the red spot where the middle line ended, "moves them closer to here." He pointed to another red dot. "Which is the main banking location and central offices of Overland State Bank."

Lau considered Chaz's artwork. "They don't just want money, they want Overland. But they didn't hit its headquarters right away. They're advancing on it."

"They want Overland to know they're coming." Reyes frowned and sipped at his tea. "Hell of a risk. Someone has a grudge."

"Which is a little surprising, at least at a glance." Lau pulled her phone out of her pocket and called up the pages she'd bookmarked. "Jon Eriksen left Citibank to found Overland. Their focus is on local investments, keeping home loans within the community, supporting regional small business. They have a successful foreclosure prevention program, and an in-house credit counseling and debt reduction staff. Overland was a big sponsor of last year's Pride Festival, and collects donated food and clothing for the homeless every December in all their branches." She looked up from the display. "Basically, they're the most wonderful bank in the world."

"Too good to be true?" Reyes asked.

"Probably." She pulled up another bookmark. "Eriksen lives with his wife, Samantha, and their handicapped son, Luke, in a big giant house in Warson Woods, a far west suburb. He's a member of the Old Warson Country Club, and Concordia Lutheran Church, and is on the board of four St. Louis-area charities--miscellaneous, no single unifying interest there. He's a pretty mainstream guy. I wouldn't have expected civil disobedience from him."

"Can he be protecting the robbers?" Chaz wondered.

Reyes laced his fingers over one knee. "Or somebody, or something. Tell me about the shooting victim."

Lau's display showed the photo the newspapers had run at the time of the shooting: a round-faced, dark-haired woman in cute narrow glasses and bright lipstick, holding a plastic cup and smiling. From the lights in the background, it was taken at a Christmas party. "Lisa Hinata, twenty-four years old, married two years ago, receptionist at the service desk of a local Chevy dealer."

"Sounds innocuous. And the police officer who fired the shot?"

"Alma Herrera. Oh, bless you, Arthur Tam--he sent the interview transcript from after the shooting, and her career jacket with the police department. Good grief." She looked up to meet Reyes's raised eyebrows and Chaz's focused shoulder hunch. "She's a competition pistol shooter with the police team."

"Which makes it even harder to convince anyone she wasn't aiming at what she hit," Chaz observed in a colorless voice.

*

One day in second grade I came home from school and found my mom waiting for me with a glass of milk and a PB&J. It was always Mari who did that. Mari had had to go home, my mom said. Yes, it was very sudden. She was sure Mari would miss us. But now that I was at school all day, I didn't really need a nanny, did I? I think that was the first time my mother used the word.

I snuck into Mari's room before dinner. It was clean, tidy, and empty. The bedclothes were gone, including the pillow, everything down to the mattress. The drawers were empty. The closet didn't even have hangers.

Even the lamp on the bedside table was gone. Would you take a lamp to Norway, I wondered? Maybe they didn't have nice lamps like that one, with a yellow china base.

The room looked the way I felt. She could have waited and said good-bye, couldn't she?

Suddenly I wanted to find something she'd left behind. It was as if she'd never been there at all. She was like those paintings of trees and horses and sunrises that I couldn't see even though they were right in front of me.

I stuck my arm as far as I could under the bureau, and got nothing but dust. I crawled over to the bed and looked under it.

I found a broken piece of yellow china.

I still don't know what happened to Mari. Maybe you do.

*

Sergeant Alma Herrera looked uncomfortable in her comfortable clothes. Reyes knew enough about her background to sympathize: career law enforcement, commendations, promotions. If she was going to talk to the FBI, she wanted to do it in uniform.

Instead she sat in an untenanted office in the station house, her union-appointed attorney beside her. She wore yoga pants, a short-sleeved T-shirt, and sandals, and her chin-length dark red hair was half hidden under a lime-green bandanna. Her jaw worked, as if her tongue was probing a molar, and though her hands were clasped on the table, she picked at her cuticles with a thumbnail. Her eyes never left Reyes's.

"Sergeant Herrera," he said, after all the groundwork was laid, "I understand yours was the only weapon fired in the bank during the robbery."

A muscle stood out in the side of her cheek. "That's correct."

"According to witness statements, all three robbers were armed."

"Yes."

"Why did you open fire?"

She'd answered this before. But he could see her trying to return to the scene, to make sure what she said wasn't a photocopy of her statement on record. "The one guy took his mask off, and after that, he acted different. He was waving his gun around, pointing it at people. And he was saying things like, 'Are you scared? 'Cause I'm not.' I thought any minute he was going to start shooting."

"He was excited?"

"He was crazy. Like he was showing off."

Reyes admired the precision of the answer. "But not his partners?"

"They were collecting the money. But this guy acted like he only knew about firearms from watching movies." Her lips pursed. She disapproved. "He was the leader. I thought I could get control of the situation."

"You fired three shots."

She nodded. "I had a clear field of fire. He was against an outside masonry wall, away from the windows, and all the customers were kneeling on the other side of the tables. Every one of those shots was right on center of mass." She bit her lip. "They dug two of my bullets out of the paneling, and the third one... It hit that girl. They matched it to my service weapon."

"How did the other two robbers react when you fired?"

Herrera stared. Apparently no one had asked that. "They... They pointed their weapons at me, told me to drop my gun and kick it away. But they seemed-- I don't know, they seemed calm. And they kept looking at the leader, like they were checking to see he was still there."

"And their leader? How did he react to the shots?"

"He... He was smiling. A great big shit-eating grin, like, I don't know. Like he hoped I'd kill him. Except..." She trailed off.

Reyes leaned forward and peered into her face, trying to look as sympathetic as he felt. "Except what?"

"When the girl... When everybody saw she was hit. He was like a statue. And then he mumbled something, and I thought he was scared all of a sudden. Then he went crazy. He told his guys to move it, move it, and they all ran out."

In spite of the leader's sloppy gun-handling, he hadn't expected anyone to get shot. In fact, he sounded like an amateur...in charge of two pros. How would that happen?

Reyes asked her to describe the three men, and probed each description for details. But Herrera had already given everything she'd observed: the unmasked man white, in his early twenties, brown hair conservatively cut, square face, wearing grass-stained jeans and a gray hoodie, height about five-ten, weight maybe 145, 150.

"Skinny?" Reyes asked carefully.

"Yeah. The others were about the same height, maybe shorter, but they were built."

She thought one of the others had dark skin, but it was hard to tell past the ski masks and goggles and gloves.

"Thank you, Sergeant Herrera. You've been a great help."

And Reyes thought, but couldn't say, that he believed she was right. She hadn't missed.

Act II

I don't remember a time when my parents didn't fight. Or a time when I didn't know that was what they were doing. They have a master suite with its own den and bathroom, and sometimes--often when they came home from a party or a dinner or a trip--my mom would disappear into it, and my father would follow her and close the door. Then I'd hear their television or stereo, and the sound would swell as someone turned up the volume. I never heard their voices, just the TV or the stereo.

Maybe knowing about the Norse gods made me think that was normal. Those families fought all the time. They even killed each other. Since I knew from church that we were made in God's image, wasn't that normal?

So I didn't think much about it when my parents fought. What I feel stupid about was not noticing when it got physical. My mother would be stiff some mornings, or she'd limp, or she'd make an excuse not to get out of her chair, or bend over. From family photos around that time, it seems like she wore long sleeves a lot.

*

The Benedictine Monks hadn't made it past "Media vita" before Lau had pulled over to the curb of the winding shady road and thumbed the green button on her phone. "Hey, Chaz. Whatcha got?"

"The tech guy who handles the bank's security videos says Eriksen viewed the footage of the third robbery before he ordered it pulled off the servers."

Lau drew a satisfied breath. "So he knows what he's not handing over."

"Uh-huh. Not so happy is that the tech guy admitted he has no archive copies. Eriksen ordered them erased."

"Wait, he's refusing to hand over footage that has ceased to exist? While not mentioning that fact?"

"Makes it easier to refuse. Also to duck charges of destroying evidence and accessory after the fact." Chaz sounded grouchy. Was that caused by a shortage of lunch, or by Jon Eriksen? "The tech guy couldn't say whether the footage gives a good angle on the shooting. He only watched it through once, with Eriksen."

"But that means unless Eriksen knew what to watch for, he doesn't know where those three bullets went, either. So what's he hiding?"

"You notice none of us believe he's striking a blow for customer privacy?"

Lau snorted; inside her head it sounded like a soprano version of Brady. "We're damned cynical bastards. Though he could be protecting someone's privacy."

"But only for the third robbery?"

"He didn't achieve enlightenment until then?"

"Maybe. Uncle Duke is in the house back home and working on Overland's records, by the way. But he says financial institutions are, and I quote, 'harder to crack than George Bush Senior's online dating profile.'"

"Eew. Get that out of my head."

"Too late," Chaz crowed. "They say shared pain is halved. You at the Eriksen house?"

"The end of the driveway. So I'm maybe only, oh, a mile away."

"Reyes should be at Eriksen's office by now. Call if you get lost and we'll airlift you out."

Lau scowled at the perfect, dark-leafed maples and and oaks that shaded the curving drive. They reminded her of Ohio, of following Hafidha's faint trail and wondering which would be worse: finding her or not.

Daphne had been with her for that.

The house appeared between the trees as if a curtain had been pulled aside. It followed the contour of its rolling lot, with the double front doors on street level, a deck cantilevered off the back, and a lower-story patio opening onto a wide sunny lawn and the shore of a pond. It was made of gray stone and white-painted wood, and looked big enough to be the clubhouse for a good-sized golf course.

Lau parked in the paved turnaround that led to the garage and walked up the three steps to the entryway. Samantha Eriksen had promised her she'd be home all day, but Lau wondered if she'd thought better of that and used the length of time it had taken Lau to get there to duck out for an open-ended errand.

So she was almost surprised when the door opened. She was definitely surprised to see it was Jon Eriksen who opened it.

But this was not her first rodeo, thank you. "Mr. Eriksen. I'm Special Agent Nicolette Lau with the FBI." The flip of her ID folder was as smooth as a gunfighter's draw. "Your wife is expecting me."

Eriksen stood where he was, blocking passage and view both. "Yes, she called me at the office to tell me you were on your way. Why do you need to speak to my wife?"

"I'm investigating the robberies that occurred at three of your branch banks."

"Samantha has nothing to do with my business. She can't possibly tell you anything that could help."

Lau had always been good at improv. "Mr. Eriksen, our line of investigation suggests that these robberies might have had a more personal motive. We're concerned that someone is targeting you or your family."

She saw the instant when his eyes didn't quite focus on her, when his well-shaped mouth and chin went a little slack. Something in her speech had hit a nerve.

But Eriksen wasn't bad at improv, himself. He smiled when he said, "That sounds far-fetched, Agent. If someone wants to get at me, they can do it in much easier ways than robbing banks."

She returned the smile, tilted her head, shifted her weight onto her right foot. An off-balance stance was casual, intimate, nonthreatening. "You and I think so, Mr. Eriksen. But if criminals thought like us, they wouldn't be criminals. I know your time is valuable, but may I come in, just for a few minutes?"

He hesitated. Was he weighing what he had to lose, what she might see or hear, how cooperating or refusing could help or hurt him? He probably had his attorneys' number on speed dial.

A sensible man would use it. One who thought he was smarter than everyone else, though...

Eriksen's smile widened into a shiny white public relations campaign. "Very well, Agent...?"

"Lau. Thank you, Mr. Eriksen."

*

High school was better. My parents sent me to a school in Vermont for special needs kids. Sounds awful, doesn't it? But that was the first place where people took my screwed-up brain seriously, and didn't think that what worked for one of us would work for all of us.

They did tests and told me I'd already adapted a little to the damage. Neuroplasticity--as a baby, I'd been so desperate to learn to understand and talk that my brain had found ways around the messed-up parts. That was why I could manage abstraction in language. It might even be why I've been skinny all my life: the brain uses something like twenty-five percent of the body's calories, and mine was probably using even more to make up for the damage.

The doctor said I might still find ways to make my brain work more normally. But it would take a long time and a lot of training every day, and even then, "all better" wasn't a reasonable goal.

I didn't mind. The school helped me learn ways to cope. I got my first checking account, with a bank that wanted to expand its accessibility options. The occupational counselor said I could be a lawyer or a journalist if we could find a college that would wave the math and science pre-recs for graduation.

Good news, right?

*

The vestibule of the Eriksen house was a half-circle of slate-floored open space the size of Lau's bedroom and twice as high in the ceiling. Wide archways opened on the living room, the rear of the house, and a hall that must have led to the private areas. Eriksen led the way to the living room.

Samantha Eriksen sat on one of the low couches that bracketed the fireplace. Her face was as carefully arranged as a dinner table centerpiece, and about as mobile. Lau crossed the room to her and extended her hand. "Ms. Eriksen. We spoke on the phone."

Samantha Eriksen looked past Lau to her husband before she shook Lau's hand. "I'm sorry you came all this way, Agent Lau. There's really nothing I can tell you."

Over the fireplace hung a portrait in oils of Samantha and Jon Eriksen. It was a beautiful painting: impressionistic, with light flowing over the two figures from the window behind them. For all the loose treatment of the details, the subjects were perfectly recognizable. Lau thought it might have been done only a few years ago.

"Can either of you think of anyone who might have a grievance against you? Even if it's unreasonable. Someone you might have fired, or who claims you owe them money...?"

Both Eriksens shook their heads. Samantha said, "We have contracts with companies for housecleaning, lawn care, that sort of thing."

"I've never been comfortable with the idea of servants," Jon added. "As far as the bank is concerned, we have the highest employee satisfaction rating of any company in the state. Our people come to work knowing they're making a difference for their neighbors."

He sounded as if he was quoting from an ad. Lau nodded gravely, like Barbara Walters interviewing the president. "No unstable employees? Business rivals? Former romantic interests?"

A flash of anger in Samantha's face, but Jon only said, "No, nothing like that."

"How about your son?" she asked.

Jon Eriksen stiffened. "What about him?"

"Is there anyone who would want to make trouble for him? Has he had problems with anyone at school?"

"Agent Lau, perhaps you don't know, but my son is mentally handicapped. Of necessity, many parts of my life are public, but Luke is not one of them. We've tried to provide as much privacy and stability for him as possible, so he could live something close to a normal life. He has nothing to do with the bank."

"May I talk to Luke? Does he live with you?"

"He's living independently now."

"May I have his address and phone number?"

"No, you may not. I told you, his privacy is important to us. There's nothing to be gained and a lot of possible harm to be done by you trying to draw him into this."

Jon was getting louder and sharper with each sentence. And all the while Samantha sat silent on the couch, her hands clasped hard between her knees and her eyes on her husband's face.

"I see," Lau said, because she suspected she just maybe did. "Of course, you're right. You know best what your son needs." She watched Samantha's shoulders drop, watched a silent breath lift and lower her collarbones under her long-sleeved linen shirt. "Thank you so much for your time. I'm sorry to have disturbed you at home like this." She smiled from Samantha to Jon and back (again the head tilt, so disarming).

Jon raked his fingers through his thinning blond hair. "It's all right. We know you have a job to do." It didn't sound as if he believed it, but he was willing to say it to get her out of the house.

And get out she did. She maintained her body language all the way to the car; then she started it and rolled, gentle and unhurried, back down the drive. Once out of sight of the house she grabbed her phone and speed-dialed Chaz.

"Where are you?" he asked without preamble.

"Same place I was last time I talked to you. I've been nose to nose with Jon Eriksen."

"What?"

"Tell you when I get there. Right now, call Todd and ask him to find out every little thing about Luke Eriksen, Jon and Samantha's son. Extra credit for a recent photograph. Extra extra credit for showing that photograph to Alma Herrera and any other witnesses to the robberies you can lay your hands on."

"You think his son is robbing his banks?

"I think we need to find out."

*

You don't have to have brain damage to think differently from other people. I'd been so concerned with how differently I thought that I hadn't realized that. But when I came home from school and told my parents what I'd found out, my dad heard it as, "Your kid could be normal if he just tried harder."

So now I was retarded and lazy. Now I got the "You've always been a quitter" speech, and the "We paid a fortune for your education, and you wasted it" speech.

My dad, the motivational speaker.

My mom, in a half-assed way, tried to explain things. Fathers always identify with their sons. He was just frustrated that he couldn't help me. Because really, he loved me, and that's why he was frustrated, and when he was frustrated he got angry and didn't realize he was hurting me.

Yes, she was talking about my father and her. Because she started to have a real epidemic of bumping into things or falling down or spraining something or pulling a muscle about the time I graduated. I told her I knew where she was really getting the bruises. Then she yelled at me. How could I say things like that after the sacrifices they'd made for me, blah blah blah.

I wonder if she thought the yelling would keep me from noticing she hadn't denied it.

*

At the St. Louis field office, federal budget cuts had accidentally provided them with an empty room to use. Reyes sat on a corner of the bare desk and let Chaz and Lau have the tweed-nylon-upholstered visitors' chairs. They were probably marginally more comfortable than the file cabinets.

"Setting aside whether Sergeant Herrera should have fired at all," Reyes began, and Lau and Chaz winced in sympathy, "I believe her when she says she was aiming at her target's center of mass. I also believe anomalous activity was involved. Someone in that room was jamming."

Chaz's eyebrows twitched at Reyes's use of the word. It was what Chaz and Hafidha called what they did. Yes, he thought in Chaz's direction, I am teachable.

"Probably the unmasked robber," Lau added.

Chaz hitched himself up in his chair. "Given the likely mythologies, I'd guess the manifestation is either Force Field or Power to Cloud Men's Minds."

It took Reyes by surprise. But they'd been studying the anomaly the way the Behavioral Science Unit studied serial criminals back in the day, and for the same reasons. Anomalous abilities fell into categories, as did the circumstances prompting them.

And Chaz, who saw pattern the way most people saw shape and line and contrast, would have assembled those categories almost unconsciously.

Lau shook her head. "Force Field takes too much energy. He'd burn out."

"Not necessarily. He might have converted recently. And he'd only use it when he needed it. But it takes more energy than the alternative."

"Which would be," Reyes said, "that he made Herrera think she was aiming at him?"

"Takes less energy. But he'd need more understanding of perception."

"Empathy and abstraction," Lau summarized. "Remember the John Doe gamma in Chillicothe, the one who turned out not to be Lynn Van Metre? He could get so far inside someone else's head that he could use their eyes."

The phone on the desk jangled authoritatively. Reyes lifted the receiver off and clicked the speakerphone button. "Sol, you're on speaker."

"And a good afternoon to you, too, Stephen. I have treats for good girls and boys." Even his electronic voice sounded energetic and cheerful. Retirement, Reyes thought. Not such a bad idea.

"Give," said Lau.

"I'll start with Luke Eriksen. Twenty years old, attending Cahokia Community College. I'm sending his student ID photo to your phones and your nearest photo printer as we speak. He was diagnosed with a brain disorder at a very early age that interfered with his ability to understand visual abstractions and number relationships.

"He did well at Green Mountain Academy for Special Learning, however, where he was a resident student in tenth through twelfth grade. He wasn't insanely popular, but his teachers and fellow students seemed to like him. But counselors commented on his emotional immaturity. Apparently he was even more narcissistic than most teenagers, and had a hard time considering events from a point of view other than his own."

"Force Field," Chaz muttered smugly.

"Beg your pardon?" asked Todd.

"Never mind," Reyes told him. "Agent Villette was just patting himself on the back with his tongue."

"Ew?" Lau objected.

"What else?" prompted Reyes.

Todd continued, "He works for Stan and Sam's Yard Service when he's not in class. No record of a firearms permit or purchase, no criminal record. He lives in a rented room in the Sherman Park neighborhood."

Lau had produced her phone and poked at it. Now she turned the display toward Reyes and Chaz.

Luke Eriksen had conservatively cut brown hair, a square, hollow face, and a dissatisfied expression. He could easily be the man Herrera had fired at.

"And now," Todd chirped, "the financial news. Because information wants to be free, a trustworthy source leaked to me that JPMorgan Chase is in negotiation to buy Jon Eriksen's shares in Overland State Bank. Which will make them the majority shareholder."

Lau frowned. "But the whole draw for Overland is that they're locally owned and reliant on their community."

"That's very true," Todd replied. Reyes could hear the Cheshire-cat grin in his voice.

"Oh," said Lau, and slowly rocked forward with the pressure of the realization. "Oh. If word of the buyout spreads, the value of those shares could drop. At the least, the shareholders will freak."

With mock-gravity, Todd said, "At a time like this, the wisest thing a businessman can do is try to keep the waters untroubled."

Reyes wished Todd were in the room so he could throw something at him. "Up to now Eriksen has been so clean he might as well be Teflon-coated. But his son robbing his father's banks? That's messy."

"Hell," Lau replied, "that's national network news. Fox would freaking lead with it. This is why he killed the third robbery footage."

Reyes felt his smile pull at the scar tissue around his mouth. "You think Eriksen would be willing to talk to us again?"

Chaz stood up and reached a long arm for the doorknob. "I think he might if the FBI brings his son in for questioning."

*

People think my father is a great guy. Now there's a Balder figure for you: tall, handsome, distinguished, admired, everybody's best friend. But he's not Balder. He's Thor. He's the one with the temper that goes off like a crack of thunder, who'll kick a bystander into the fire to die just for walking in front of him at the wrong time.

I wanted to go to college, try to get into a degree program like the counselor at school suggested. But my father wouldn't pay for it. Good money after bad, he called it. And if I wanted to question his judgments about money, I should think about whose judgment had put food in my mouth and clothes on my back all my life. Now that I was eighteen, he didn't even have to do that, and I should be grateful...

Skip to the result: he registered me for vocational classes at the community college. A sampler, so I could choose which of the certification programs I thought I could pass.

Food Preparation Services. Correctional Officer. Landscape Maintenance. Oh, and my favorite: Social Services, where I might even get a special certification in Domestic Violence Intervention.

I was already employed in that, though. Because that's when he stopped hitting my mother and started hitting me.

Act III

Lau's phone shivered in her pocket during the report from the two agents who'd gone to bring Luke Eriksen in. She ignored it for the time being. Because Eriksen wasn't home.

"His landlady says he told her he was going to be out of town for a few weeks," Agent Clancy said, with the flawless skepticism of the career Fibbie. She rubbed at the freckles on the side of her nose and added, "So we phoned the yard service. He hasn't shown up for work the last two days. Want us to start canvassing known associates?"

"Please," said Reyes. "We'll help you find some."

So it wasn't until Lau got back to the Marriott that she had time to check her missed calls log. Her brother's number.

Good thing I had it on vibrate. The Air Force theme is a little disruptive.

She tapped in his number and got an answer.

"Hi, Bobby. Sorry for the delay."

"Where are you?"

She smoothed her hackles; he probably didn't mean to sound as if, wherever she was, she ought to be somewhere else. "St. Louis. And don't ask me how it is, because as usual I haven't had time to find out."

"You're in the middle of something, then."

"I'm off duty for the night. I hope, anyway. What's up?"

She heard him take a breath and puff it out. "I'm worried about Mom."

"Is she sick? What's wrong?"

"It's a lot of things. She's...not herself. It's hard to get her to leave the house, even to see the kids. I don't think she's eating right. And she cancelled her last dentist appointment, said she just didn't feel like it."

Lau weighed as much of that as she could. "A lot changed when Dad died. You say she's not herself, but, well, I think she's still trying to figure out who 'herself' is now."

"Look, Nikki--" He paused for long enough that she caught up to him. She knew what he was going to say. She shouldn't let him say it. "She's lonely. Someone should be there with her. At least for a few months, until she gets back in the groove. You know how she is--she won't take care of herself if there's nobody but her to do it for."

"By 'someone,' you mean me."

If they'd been in the same room, he would be shrugging. Maybe he was anyway. "I can't do it. And frankly, you and I are the responsible ones."

The implied compliment, the statement of solidarity. Bobby, don't try to play a player. "I'm busy right now, Bobby."

"With what?"

"Chasing bank robbers." She tried to make her tone convey the amount of patience she was drawing on.

"The FBI has lots of agents, Nikki. Mom only has one daughter."

"And three sons."

An impatient click of the tongue-tip off the roof of his mouth. "It's not the same."

"It doesn't have to be the same. It just has to be a human being who loves and cares about her."

He was too grown up, thank heaven, to say that ruled her out. "I'm not asking you to move in with her forever--"

"Bobby, are you afraid of her? Just...be her friend. She and I don't have a lot in common, but she thinks you're the coolest guy in the world. Go make her dinner. Bring the kids over and ask her to squirt 'em with the hose the way she used to do us. It's a hell of a lot easier than landing on an aircraft carrier."

He sighed. "Think about it, will you?"

"I have thought about it. I'm telling you the results. Go do this."

The call ended without either of them bringing up anything offensive the other had done during childhood. Lau considered that a win.

Brady would like this one. They regularly compared their families' expectations for them. Though lately Brady's focus had been more on his own expectations, and Gray's, and the process of bringing the two sets of expectations closer together.

Lau had already pushed the numbers to speed-dial Brady. She thumbed the hang-up. Brady was a grown-up with a real life of his own. She was still calling her friends to complain about her big brother.

"It's not faaiir," she whined, to make herself laugh. Her voice echoed in the tidy hotel room.

*

He started small. He'd give me a shove if he thought I wasn't going where he'd told me to fast enough. Or he'd give me a flat-palmed smack to the back of the head if I "smarted off," which was what he called it when I disagreed with him. Then there was grabbing, which left bruises on my arms, and throttling, and gripping the back of my neck and pushing my face into whatever he thought I wasn't paying enough attention to.

After that it's an easy step to slamming up against a wall, or the kind of backhand that knocks someone off his feet.

I was sort of glad he let up on my mother, but not that glad. I mean, Balder's mother went all over the world, getting everything in it to swear it would never do Balder any harm. She screwed up, true, but not for lack of trying. There was a distinct lack of trying on my mother's part. I know there are a lot of possible explanations for that. But I'm not Jesus, any more than I'm Balder. I feel sorry for her, but that doesn't mean I forgive her.

*

In the morning, a partial fingerprint found at the scene of the second robbery pinged the national database. It belonged to Shawn Lewis Clipman, who had been arrested at nineteen for a pair of unarmed robbery/assaults.

Unlike Luke Eriksen, he was at home in bed.

When offered a deal, he named his partners: Augustin Mercere, age twenty-six, and Luke Eriksen. The robbery had been Eriksen's idea, Clipman told investigators; he'd recruited Clipman and Mercere from their mutual workplace, Stan and Sam's Yard Service.

Clipman and Mercere were drawn in by the money. Eriksen told them anything the robberies yielded was theirs; he wasn't in it for gain. And though the other two men recommended going in very visibly armed, to subdue potential resistance, Eriksen insisted they not harm anyone. In fact, Eriksen's SW1911 wasn't loaded during any of the robberies.

According to Clipman, he and Mercere suspected a sting. But when they confronted Eriksen with their distrust, he insisted on a demonstration of his trust in them. He asked them to shoot him.

Clipman swore their shots couldn't hit him. He also swore that both he and Mercere were dead sober at the time.

He didn't know why Eriksen had pulled off his mask during the third robbery. Clipman was angry about it; in fact, he said the gang had split up over it. Eriksen would be recognized, Clipman told him, and they'd all be caught.

When Eriksen had laughed at that, Clipman decided he was too crazy to work with.

Reyes gathered a handpicked group of local field agents and police and, with Lau and Villette, outlined the plan.

"Luke Eriksen wants to be identified," Lau explained, her clear, carrying voice as authoritative as any news anchor's. "That's why he removed his mask during the third robbery. He hadn't gotten what he wanted out of the first two robberies; taking off his mask was a kind of escalation. He counted on being identified from the video footage. When Overland Bank refused to make that video available to the police, he must have been intensely frustrated."

Reyes picked up the narrative. "We can use that frustration to lure him out of hiding. Shawn Clipman's arrest is being kept from the news media. Instead, we're releasing a statement that we have no new leads in the robberies, and that without the video, we're unable to identify the unmasked robber."

Lau's eye-corner glance said she was ready to step in front of the cameras. They would need her; Eriksen's frustration could be split between his father and law enforcement, but he'd need a face to focus on. And Reyes was afraid of what Luke might do if his father bore the sole brunt of his anger.

Villette lifted his head in a way that shifted all the eyes in the room to him. "Eriksen's goal isn't robbery; it's humiliating his father. The robberies have failed to do that. We think Eriksen will escalate further and push his timeline. He'll try to confront his father directly, publicly, in the place where he's symbolically strongest: Overland State Bank headquarters."

They would keep the building under surveillance, Reyes told them; Eriksen wouldn't be long in coming. When he arrived, Reyes's team would be there. Reyes didn't mention one of his team was the Invisible Man.

He also didn't say that the other was Wonder Woman. Bullets and bracelets was the gamma's game this time, and he didn't want Lau playing.

*

It happened because I told them I was moving out.

It's crazy--I thought they'd be happy about it. I thought he would, anyway. If you smack someone around, doesn't that sort of suggest you wish they weren't there?

I told them I had a job with a yard-care service, and had paid the first month's rent on a room I'd seen posted on a bulletin board at college. I said I wanted to keep going to school, if they'd keep paying the tuition, but I'd cover my own living expenses from now on. I'd be independent.

My mom started crying. Why had I done all this without telling them? I didn't care about their feelings. I didn't love them. I didn't appreciate what I had. She ran off to that master suite and slammed the door while I was still trying to figure that out.

Then my father started yelling at me for hurting my mother's feelings. No, really.

At least I had a comeback for that. So we both raised our voices, and he knocked me down. But this time he straddled me and punched me in the face. He pulled his fist back to do it again.

I couldn't get away. My father's tall and strong, and you probably already know I'm a scrawny little jerk. I couldn't get out of range the way I always had before. My face hurt--my whole head hurt. Nothing was going to keep me out of the hospital or the morgue. I knew it.

His fist came down at me like a missile. It slid past my face, maybe half an inch away, and smacked into the hardwood floor. I felt kind of a pressure on my nose and cheek as it went by.

Weird how clear that is, because everything else for a while is confused. I think my father was screaming (maybe he broke something in his hand?). He might have tried to hit me with his other hand, because I felt that pressure again on the side of my face, and his fingers sort of flew by, as if they were skidding off something.

After that I don't remember anything until I was sitting at the kitchen counter, shaking and sweating. I'd eaten half a loaf of bread and a pound of frozen hamburger, and I didn't stop being hungry until I finished the rest of the bread.

*

"He's here," Chaz murmured in Reyes's earpiece. "Dressed as a bike messenger and carrying a shoulder bag."

On the other side of Jon Eriksen's half-open office door, Reyes saw Lau wipe her palms on her trousers and unholster her weapon. She still wore the navy jacket she'd had on for the news cameras; they wanted to make sure their quarry identified her.

He found he was clenching and unclenching his teeth. Luke Eriksen's not a killer. He's just a teenager past his sell-by date, who can't see that everything that makes him hurt isn't exclusively about him. It didn't keep Reyes from remembering New York, and Daphne.

Brisk footsteps in the hall. "Hey, Dad!" a hoarse tenor called from just outside. "I hear you're not cooperating with law enforcement--"

Eriksen was three steps into the room, his weapon aimed one-handed at the chair behind the desk, before he realized the chair was empty, and he wasn't alone.

"Luke Eriksen," Reyes said gently. "I'm Supervisory Special Agent Stephen Reyes of the FBI. I'm afraid we need to take you into custody."

Eriksen spun on one foot, staggering a little with the surprise. His gun swept Reyes and Lau.

He and Lau had the boy covered. Under the circumstances, how much difference did that make?

"You can put the gun down," Reyes told him.

Eriksen's face flushed mottled red, like a child working up to a tantrum. Then he clenched his teeth and grinned. "Can I?"

Lau said, "We know it wasn't loaded during the robberies."

"It is now."

And Reyes believed him. He hadn't come to this room to confront a crowd of innocent bystanders.

"I could say you don't want to hurt anyone, but I know that's not true," Reyes said, watching the pulse throb in Eriksen's neck, watching his gun hand swing its short arc between himself and Lau. "But Agent Lau and I are not your target. Harming us will only make it harder to get at your father."

Eriksen stood trying to decide if that was just talk.

"Mr. Eriksen," said Lau, "will you at least put down your bag?" Get him to agree to a small thing. Move on from there.

For an instant, Eriksen looked as if he'd forgotten he was carrying a bag. Then he glanced down at it, and an almost-smile moved his lips. "No problem," he said. He shrugged it off his shoulder and dropped it on his father's untenanted desk, all the while twitching the gun between Lau and Reyes.

"Why don't you shoot me, now that you've got the chance?"

Reyes felt more than saw Chaz step into the hall in front of the open door.

He answered, "Because we don't want to shoot you, Mr. Eriksen. We want to bring you in and talk to you. Please, just put the gun down."

"Really." It wasn't a question. "I think you haven't shot me because you know you can't. I think I'm gonna walk out of here."

They'd talked about this back at the field office. If Eriksen called their bluff, what would they do? Surely three of them could lay hands on him, bear him down under their weight.

It would depend on the manifestation. Their best bet was to talk him into surrendering.

Lau shook her head. "I think you won't do that until you know you've hurt your father as much as you can. If you make a statement to the police, won't that do the job?"

Eriksen's eyes narrowed. "You lied to the news on TV. You could be lying now. You could take me in and make me disappear, just the way my father wants."

There are my chickens, come home to roost, Reyes thought, his stomach sinking through the floor.

Eriksen was watching Lau's face; he smiled when she didn't answer. "I'm gonna go now. I really have to see my dad." He took a step toward the door. Reyes heard Chaz's weight shift, and wished Chaz was Brady, with Brady's size and leverage.

Then Lau stepped into Eriksen's path.

"Lau," Reyes warned.

"Lady, you don't get it!" Eriksen snapped. "You can't touch me!"

"Sure, I can." She lowered her weapon and pushed it into Reyes's hand as she went forward. He was too startled to do anything but take it. Then she stepped in, inside the reach of Eriksen's gun. She put her arms around him and clenched her hands on her wrists.

Eriksen staggered backward, but that only carried Lau with him. "Get the hell away from me! Are you crazy?"

"Lau!" Reyes said, but couldn't find anything to follow it with. She'd done this, and he had to back her up. Eriksen had to believe Lau was on script.

He had to believe Reyes wasn't afraid for her.

"Think of me as a reverse hostage," Lau said, her head tilted to see into Eriksen's panicky face. "You don't want anyone to shoot at you. They might hit me."

"I don't care if you get shot!"

"You cared in the bank," Reyes said, his voice clogged with tension.

"That dumb-ass cop! She didn't need to do that. Nobody would have got hurt!" Eriksen's voice was rising into a screech.

"The police and the FBI are outside. If you try to leave the building now, especially carrying a weapon, they'll shoot. People will be hurt. Agent Lau--a good officer and a good person--may die."

"Tell 'em not to shoot. Tell 'em there's no point. Don't you get it? I'm invulnerable!"

The boy was almost crying. Being invulnerable ought to mean that nothing could make you cry. Wasn't that so?

"Every invulnerable person has a weakness," Reyes told him. "Have you thought about that? Achilles and his heel. Superman and kryptonite. You have one, too."

"No. Nothing will hurt me."

"Yours is physics," said Reyes. He watched Eriksen's face. It showed a growing panic and sudden despair, but no comprehension.

Chaz spoke up from the hall. "He's right. Every blow you deflect uses energy. I can't hit you with a bullet, but I don't have to. If I keep shooting at you, how long can you keep deflecting them? It wears you down, doesn't it, until you can barely stay on your feet? How long do you think you could last?"

And from his face, Eriksen finally understood.

"Let us take you in, Luke," Reyes urged.

Eriksen plunged toward the door.

Lau lost her footing but not her grip; his charge pulled her with him. Gammas were stronger than they looked.

Reyes grabbed right-handed for Eriksen's gun arm. His fingers closed on a skin-warm surface that wasn't skin, but something hard and smooth and frictionless, an invisible halo half an inch from flesh or fabric. It was like trying to grip a melting sheet of ice.

Chaz leaped. He should have landed hard against Eriksen's chest and carried him back and down. Instead he skidded sideways across him--visibly skidded across Eriksen's unseen surface--and hit the side of the desk with a hollow thump.

Eriksen was in the hall, then through a fire-exit door.

And Lau was still with him.

*

I haven't seen either of my parents since that night.

I know this thing I have--it's crazy and impossible. But I've tested it. It's real.

Balder's gift, besides being beautiful and lovable, was to be invulnerable to (almost) everything. Since it was Balder, everyone was okay with that. But what if it was Loki who got that gift? What would he do with it? Especially after a lifetime of being the one nobody wanted?

You already know the answer to that, don't you?

Act IV

Lau could feel Luke trembling under her arms, under the glassy shielded surface she slipped and slid against as he dragged her up the fire stairs. The concrete stairwell bounced the racket of their passage back into her ears as if the building itself was shouting.

"Luke, you don't need to protect yourself. You can let go of the..." She had no idea how he'd think of that surface. "I'm not going to hurt you."

She couldn't tell if he'd even heard her. She felt as if she was trying to stay on the hood of a moving car by hugging a side view mirror.

How many floors did the damned building have? She tried to remember the elevator panel. It didn't matter; she wasn't sure how many landings they'd passed.

Then Luke slammed into the red bar of the door at the top of the stairs and added the high-pitched blat of the fire alarm to the noise. Daylight, and a stiff breeze, and rolling pea gravel under her feet. They were on the roof.

She let go and fell to the gritty surface. She was between him and the door, and there was no one here to take a shot at them. Besides, her arms burned with fatigue.

Luke stumbled backward and fell on his ass. He dropped his pistol, crab-scuttled away from her, and stood. He scrubbed at his face with both hands. They left tarry streaks across his sunken cheeks and his forehead.

"Alone at last," Lau panted.

Luke stared, horrified. Maybe he thought she'd gone nuts.

"Luke, I need you to listen to me." She had to stop for breath, but not long enough for him to protest. "This thing you can do? That didn't surprise us, did you notice? We know what's happened to you. And you're not the only one. We can take you to a place where people know how to help you. What you've got can make you dangerous. But you'll learn to manage it, and get counselling to help you deal with your problems. You can even take college courses, I bet. Let us take you into custody, and that's where you'll go. You haven't done anything very bad. You're a good person. You deserve a chance."

With that, she really did have to stop for breath. She didn't think she'd ever talked that much in one go in her life.

"What's in it for you?" he asked at last. "If I do that?"

Oh, thank God, he'd listened. "You can teach us as much as we can teach you. And seriously, the thing that's made you invulnerable? It can do a lot of harm. I don't think you want that. If you're in Idlewood, you won't have to worry about it, and neither will anyone else."

"So I'll be safe..."

"Yes. You will."

He stared hard into her eyes. "But I'll be locked up. Maximum security."

She wished she could deny it.

"All my life, my parents kept me out of the way, out of sight. I bet if my father heard about this place you've got, he'd sign me up yesterday."

"It's not like that--"

"It's an institution!"

Suddenly he was standing over her. Gamma-quick, of course. He crouched down and grinned into her face. "Know what the state motto of New Hampshire is?"

She floundered. The non sequitur made him sound mentally handicapped for the first time. "It's... 'Live free or die.'"

Not a non sequitur.

"I always thought that was a good idea." He grabbed her by the arm and hauled her to her feet. She tried to pull him off balance, but the gravel rolled under her shoes.

He dragged her to the edge of the roof. It had a masonry lip, knee high, and a lower projecting surface on the outside maybe two feet down. None of it was enough to break her fall if he threw her over.

It was his turn to hold her in a parody of a hug. "What are you planning to do?" she asked, and her voice wasn't steady.

"Eriksen!" Reyes shouted. He and Chaz stood in the open stairwell door, weapons raised. "Let her go!"

Luke ignored them. "Your boss and your partner think I've got a weakness." He stepped back toward the edge, and she tried to dig her heels in, to squeeze out of his hold. "They think they can find some mistletoe to throw at me."

What was it, ten stories? Twelve? "No. You can't survive a fall like that."

His arms clenched tight around her; she had to pant for breath. "No way to tell without trying, is there?" he asked brightly.

"You didn't want to hurt anyone. You still don't. You don't have to do this!"

"See you at the bottom, lady."

And the shove that pushed her away to stagger and fall to hands and knees on the gravel was equal and opposite to the force with which he threw himself backward off the roof.

She scrambled to the edge, and realized as she did that she was yelling, "No! Fuck. Fuck!"

Chaz was yanking at her shoulders, trying to haul her back. But she refused to yield until she was sure the little sprawled shape on the pavement of the courtyard below wasn't moving.

*

Reyes knew he was hovering, and was seriously fucking glad that nobody asked him to stop. And Lau was all right, except for the shocky horror that flicked across her face when no one had the decency to distract her with questions and demands.

Chaz brought her a paper cup of water from somewhere. It couldn't have been from Jon Eriksen's office, because that was full of police officers documenting the evidence of actions they'd already been told about. But Chaz's resourcefulness in matters of food and drink was legendary.

The surface of the water quaked, though Lau held the cup with both hands. Chaz helped her get it to her mouth.

"You did everything you could," Reyes told her. "More than anyone else could have, I think."

She shook her head.

"No, he's right," Chaz said. "You did everything right. It just...didn't work."

The plump, freckled agent from the local field office--Murphy? Casey? Clancy--came out of Eriksen's office and down the hall, into the little reception area with its caramel-colored couch where Reyes's team sat. She carried a manila envelope, unsealed.

"This was in his messenger bag," she said. "I thought you'd want to look it over before it goes into evidence."

Lau reached for it before either Reyes or Chaz could. She shook the contents into her lap.

White printer paper, maybe a dozen pages, with text in Courier. Lau stared down at the top sheet, then flipped to the next, then thumbed through the rest. Finally she raised her face, wide-eyed and blank.

"It's his story. For us."

*

The body was shipped to Baltimore, to the chilly, echoing autopsy suite at Johns Hopkins where Madeline Frost did her work. She did it again with her usual precision and thoroughness. No one could doubt she'd found exactly what she said she had: no broken bones, no damage to internal organs, no contusions or lacerations.

The deceased had probably lived for several minutes after impact. Even so, no amount of rapid response or medical skill could have saved him.

Luke Eriksen had died of starvation.

*

Nikki Lau sat in the breakfast nook of her mother's house in Reseda. Afternoon sun burned through the corner windows and onto her neck, but she stayed where she was. Her mother tugged the thermal carafe from its niche in the coffeemaker and refilled Nikki's cup and her own. Then she sat down across the table, smiling.

She did look thinner than Nikki remembered. "Have you lost weight?" she asked, before she realized the question might sound nosy and critical and any number of other things her mother might object to.

"Hah! You're the only one who noticed! You know, your dad and I always walked and played tennis and swam, but he loved his desserts. You'd be amazed how quick those couple extra pounds went off when I stopped keeping ice cream in the freezer."

Nikki decided not to tell her that Bobby had noticed, too, and thought she was losing her grip. "If I stopped keeping ice cream in the freezer, my life wouldn't be worth living."

Her mother snorted. "You and your dad. He used to take you to Dairy Queen twice a week in the summer, remember?"

"I remember," she said, and nodded and smiled while she swallowed down the tight hot feeling in her throat.

A week--she'd told Bobby it was all she could take off work right now. Reyes had more or less ordered her to take vacation time, but she felt guilty leaving even routine casework to be spread out among Brady, Chaz, Falkner, and Reyes. But she could spend a week in the Valley, mow her mom's lawn, take her out to dinner and a chick flick, whatever her mother wanted.

Whatsoever could be done, she would do.

You did everything you could.

"Bobby told me you practically ordered him to come see me," her mother was saying. "He and I have been having such a good time lately. I always left the boys to your father once they were grown up. I don't know why. But now I feel as if I'm really getting to know him as a person, and not just my son."

"He's a good guy," Nikki said, knowing it was inadequate. "And he loves you a lot."

"Don't say that in front of him. You know how men are about feelings."

She didn't--at least, not the way her mother meant it. But her mother had never met Chaz or Brady or Sol Todd or even Pete Pauley, who pretended to be the living embodiment of the Marlboro Man.

"That reminds me," her mother continued. "I need to get some things in order, and I don't know how the boys would feel about it. So I thought I'd see if you could help."

"Sure."

"I need to sort your father's things and decide what to keep for the boys and what to give away. I want you to give me a second opinion. And the computer--I never looked at his files, but someone should now. And go through the programs. I don't know what half of them do."

"I can start on the computer right now."

"Oh, good. I would have asked Bobby, but your father might have had things he didn't want the boys to see."

That was almost enough to make Nikki retract her offer to help. What did her mom think might be on the hard drive? Photos of her dad in women's underwear? And if so, why would it be better that Nikki saw them? But she gathered her courage and headed for the corner of the family room where the Dell tower lived, and left her mother to get to work in the bedroom closet.

Her father's files were the electronic version of a military man's new-made bed. If there were a way to introduce a quarter into the organization of labeled folders and subfolders and rigorously descriptive file names, it would bounce a yard high.

She found photos of fishing buddies, photos of a white-haired man she almost recognized standing next to a restored Corvette, and photos of the beach at Santa Monica and Malibu. She found copies of letters to old squadron mates, breezy and casual as a Christmas card note.

She was on the verge of deciding that her father had never committed a solemn thought to paper--or in this case, electrons--when she found the journal.

"Journal" wasn't the right word, perhaps; it was a leisurely, wandering meditation punctuated with dates, that began barely a year before he died. It was as if he'd been blogging for an audience of one.

He wrote with restrained disapproval about the gradual dismantling of the space program. He contemplated whether American military bases on foreign soil were an anachronism, or a way to shake young U.S. servicemen out of their preconceived notions. He observed that not only did SouthernCalifornia have seasons; it had rich, subtle, and utterly distinct ones.

And he wrote, finally, about his family. That he and his wife hadn't always understood each another, but he'd loved her unceasingly, and was humbled by her willingness to follow him into the upheaval of Air Force life and her ability to cushion that upheaval for their children. That he saw in each of his boys parts of himself, and often forgot they weren't merely copies until they did or said something he would never dream of, surprising and impressing him.

And he wrote about his daughter.

She said the Air Force wasn't for her. It felt as if she was rejecting, not just the Air Force, but me. But when she majored in Communications at UCLA, I imagined seeing my girl anchoring the local evening news, on her way to being the next Connie Chung. I could understand wanting that--that was a good career for a beautiful young woman.

When she took what she'd learned and wasted it, as it seemed to me, on law enforcement, I couldn't figure it out. If she wanted to keep the peace, why not the Air Force, where I could have helped her advance and kept an eye on her?

Now I see that's exactly why not. Nikki needed her own career, her own future, and her own path to it. She needed a trail I hadn't marked for her. My boys are brave and farsighted, but Nikki is braver than all three of them, in ways I can barely wrap my mind around.

Her hand shook as she slid the mouse and triggered the screen saver.

She'd always wanted her father to be proud of her. And he was--but she wanted him to be proud of her in more than just an I'm-proud-of-you-no-matter-what way. She knew he loved her. He loved all his kids. It would have been almost dishonorable not to love his children. But she wanted him to be proud of her the way she was proud of him.

Now she knew he had been. So why did her heart hurt so much?

Luke Eriksen had wanted his father to see him. "You know me," he'd written to unseen strangers in the pages he'd left behind. He valued that more than money. His father would have loved and understood someone just like himself; his own damage made it impossible for him to love anything else. But being just like his father was never a possibility for Luke. He would never have heard his father say, "I'm proud of you."

Nikki's father had typed out his pride. But he had never shared it with her.

Nobody was bulletproof.

You know how men are about feelings.

After a few minutes she wiped the tears off her face and woke up the display. She longed to delete the file, but she wasn't five anymore, cutting the blooms off her aunt's flowers because she was mad at her aunt. She turned on the printer and checked the paper level. Her mother would love to read this. Easier for her to reread it if Nikki printed it for her.

Luke Eriksen, who couldn't grow up. God help her, she did know him. But she was damned if she was going to be him.

When you punch someone, your fist hurts. --Gene Wolfe

“Survival”

Ashton, VA, October 19, 2011

It starts, like so many things, with a chance encounter.

One Wednesday afternoon in Virginia, Angelique Gates holds an insistent elevator door for Dyson Cieslewicz. And she smiles.

*

They come forward quietly.

Ingrid Lessing finds him first, through a labyrinthine system of SEO keyword filters and online alerts her last summer intern set up to monitor campus crime. He's posted his brother's pathology on true crime boards, on forums where people crowdsource unsolved disappearances, on blogs dedicated to the too-weird-to-be-true. Do you recognize this? Did this happen to you? Do you wake up, shaking, every night?

Ingrid reads the posting twice, three times, fifteen that day. She puts fingers to keyboard the night after that, suddenly trembling: He seemed so dedicated, she writes, sends off into the void. Solid. Competent. We had no chance.

Later, once they've talked more; once they're writing each day, or every other: Here. We can word this thing better.

Ingrid's professional description finds Bethany Strange. He said it was magic, she writes from a college server in Memphis; white print on black background in a way that makes Dice's eyes ache. I swam away. I ran. The FBI shot him to pieces.

Morgan Ross shows up in January, online all hours of the night, hospital-bound and bored. Ingrid Fromberg and Peter Hsiung first log into the new website Ingrid's old intern designs in March. They type in abbreviations and snatches. They post, after a while, an endless stream of baby pictures.

*

"You see this?" Solomon Todd asks late one evening, having stepped into Stephen Reyes's sanctum long after the office cleaners have gone home. Reyes runs a finger down the proffered iPad screen, scrolling, scrolling: She got hungry. He changed. That's when it started to happen. That's when she hurt me.

There's a pattern here.

It's so amazing being able to talk about this with people who understand.

We should all meet.

"No," Reyes says deliberately, leaning back in his leather chair. "Can't say I do."

"Good," Todd says, and blanks the screen dark.

*

Sunday is not Dyson Cieslewicz's usual day at Idlewood. Chaz Villette blinks when he comes around the corner, already tired, already low, and there's Dice in the elevator.

He wedges an arm against the door to hold it open. He smiles.

"Everything okay?" is the first thing Chaz says. People keep routines like Catholics keep rosaries; when they break them there is usually something wrong.

"Yeah," Dice says, ducking away, standing back to make too much room in the elevator car. The doors finally close. The wheels and cables hum. "Just heading down to the cafeteria for something."

"I could use a bite too," Chaz admits. He always could, really. Dice blinks--strange, because they've done this before--and finally nods.

"Sure," he says. "Come on down."

They've rearranged the cafeteria: There's a circle of chairs at the back, spread loose around a table covered in better-than-usual fare: bowls of salad, thermoses of coffee. A stack of cups straggles loosely along one end. Casey Ramachandran is there holding a clipboard, but dressed in sweater and sleek blue jeans. People stand in clumps or pairs, chatting, awkward, hesitant.

And every face in the room is familiar.

He counts Memphis. He counts L.A. and Mississippi.

He sees Hafidha's mother and father, and his chest constricts.

"Who organized this?" he asks, turning to Dice, back to the wall like a rat in a trap.

Dice shrugs, hands open, spread wide to the sky. "We all did."

"Chaz," Hafidha's father says, heads turn, and Ingrid Fromberg sucks in a breath.

"Agent Villette," Ramachandran says, and puts down his clipboard. "Come on in."

"I probably shouldn't be here," Chaz says. It's plain to see what this is. This is for survivors; this is for the people who made it out. This is for the ones who didn't know what was coming for them, building like a hurricane, until it landed on their heads and blew apart their lives. "I don't belong here. I don't want to intrude."

There's something pressing on his chest, about the size of a nighttime devil. Something that makes his breath come fast and his face as blank as quarried stone.

"I'd say you belong here," Angelique Gates says, low and irrefutable, and steps forward to take his arm.

"It's all right," she says, and pats a red plastic chair. "Coffee's on. Stay a while."

He steps into the room, and sits.

"Down the Rabbit Hole" by Sarah Monette

In 2005, LiveJournal user Crisper wrote, “January 27th is the birthday of Lewis Carrol, author of ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND. Alice fell down a rabbit hole into a place where everything had changed and none of the rules could be counted on to apply anymore. I say, let's do the same: January 27th, 2005 should be the First Annual LiveJournal Rabbit Hole Day. When you post on that Thursday, instead of the normal daily life and work and news and politics, write about the strange new world you have found yourself in for the day, with its strange new life and work and news and politics. Are your pets talking back at you now? Has your child suddenly grown to full adulthood? Does everyone at work think you're someone else now? Did Bush step down from the White House to become a pro-circuit tap-dancer? Did Zoroastrian missionaries show up on your doorstep with literature in 3-D? Have you been placed under house arrest by bizarre insectoid women wielding clubs made of lunchmeat?

“Let's have a day where nobody's life makes sense anymore, where any random LJ you click on will bring you some strange new tale. Let's all fall down the Rabbit Hole for 24 hours and see what's there. It will be beautiful.”

For Down the Rabbit Hole Day, LiveJournal user standuponit made the following entries:

January 27, 2009

6:16 A.M.

Naomi called at 12:01. She started to apologize, but I told her not to. I know her. She wouldn't call me at home if she didn't have to. And anyway, I wasn't asleep.

"It's bad, Travis," was the next thing she said, and I realized that that apology hadn't been as much an apology as it had been a way to buy time. She was rattled. And that meant it was bad.

"Tell me where," I said. I was already halfway out the door.

"The Sutter place," Naomi said, and there was no one around so I didn't have to hide my wince. The Sutter place hadn't had any Sutters in it since 1992.

"There in ten," I said and hung up. Too much irony in the sheriff killing himself because he's trying to drive and talk on his damn cellphone at the same time.

I realized as I backed the truck out that I felt this weird sense of relief. Another moment, my headlights cutting sharp wedges out of the night, and I figured out why.

I could finally quit waiting for something bad to happen at the Sutter place.

The Sutters had been all over the history of Camber and of Clayton County, but by 1992, there'd just been Paul Sutter and his wife left. Childless, good citizens, donated to local charities, close friends of the mayor, yadda yadda. The sort of people who, if they'd still been around, would've called me Sheriff Villette, with just enough emphasis--not to be impolite, never that, but just enough to show they didn't think I'd ever be able to fill Sheriff Leland's shoes.

But they weren't around anymore. Rosalie Sutter had died in 1990, laryngeal cancer and it'd been ugly, and after that, Paul Sutter had gotten a little . . . odd. I hadn't been here then, but I'd heard about it from Naomi and Ronnie and even from Sheriff Leland one night when he'd had maybe a little too much to drink. Paul Sutter had cut back his hours in his office first--not typical for a realtor, but he was past fifty and plenty wealthy for a widower with no children. But then he closed the office altogether, didn't try to sell it or anything. He let Darlene McCormick go with a severance package so generous that Darlene took a cruise through the Virgin Islands she was still talking about fifteen years later, which is even weirder if you know just how useless Darlene is in an office. He stopped going to football games, quit the bridge club he'd been playing in since before he got married. He stopped going to church. At first, Sheriff Leland told me, he'd talk to people who came to the house, although he wouldn't explain himself or even agree to the suggestion that there was anything wrong. But those conversations got shorter and shorter, and then he'd stopped answering the door. "And what could I do?" Sheriff Leland had said blearily. "Ain't no crime to prefer your own company, and he'd show himself at the window if I hollered long enough. He swore he was fine, he'd got food laid in, and all he wanted was for the whole damn town to leave him alone. So I did what he wanted. I left him alone." It was mid-September 1992, a year and a half after Rosalie Sutter's death, when Ronnie remarked to the sheriff that it sure had beeen a long time since anyone had sighted Paul Sutter, and how much food could he have stored in his house anyway? They went to the house, got no answer no matter how much they knocked and hollered, finally broke the door down. They found Paul Sutter in the bedroom, lying in his bed as tidy as if Peabody and Hamms the undertakers had laid him out themselves. Doc Gordon's best guess was that he'd starved to death three months previously.

So that was the Sutter place. Nobody'd been able to shift it, so it just sat there year after year, getting more rundown and overgrown--more and more the sort of place where bad things happened. The locals said it was haunted, of course, but it wasn't that, even though I knew why they said it--why no one would buy it, even out-of-towners who'd never heard of Paul Sutter. It just felt wrong, the way some places just do. And those are the places where the dark gets in.

Naomi was waiting for me at the foot of the driveway. She looked as rattled as she'd sounded, and I thought of the things I'd seen Naomi handle without turning a hair and felt pretty rattled myself.

"It's bad, Travis," she said as I got out of the truck, just like she'd said on the phone.

"Take it from the top," I said. "For starters, what are you doing out here anyway?"

"Mrs. Mitchell," Naomi said. I rolled my eyes, and Naomi snorted in that way she has when she doesn't think she should laugh, and I think we were both glad of a scrap of normality. Mrs. Mitchell spent her life minding other people's business; a good thirty percent of the calls we got in a normal month were Mrs. Mitchell, panting to share the "suspicious" thing she'd just seen.

But Naomi sobered again. "This was a little different, though. She said her neighbor's girl--Lizzie Hewett--saw a light at the Sutter place coming home from a study date, and she was too scared to call herself."

Lizzie Hewett was a sweet-faced high school junior, co-captain of the cross country team. I remembered that she herself preferred to go by Liz.

"So I said I'd swing by. And what with one thing and another, this was the fastest I could get out here. Wasn't no lights, but Lizzie wouldn't make something like that up. So I went up to check." Naomi stopped and hugged herself, as if it were cold.

"And?" I said, as easy as I could.

Naomi opened her mouth, then closed it again, shaking her head. "I thought I could just report it, but I can't. C'mon. Come see for yourself."

So I followed her and her Maglite up the driveway and around to the back of the house, where the sliding glass door was broken. By a tree branch, not by a human being, but it was a completely horrible non-surprise that somebody would see the opportunity and use it.

"That's how they got in," Naomi said.

"They?"

"In a minute, sheriff." Naomi only calls me "sheriff" when she thinks I deserve it--when I'm being stupid or an asshole. So I shut my mouth and followed her some more, careful of the glass.

The rooms were all empty except for the wall-to-wall carpeting that had been plush once-upon-a-time and now just looked ridiculous. And sinister, too, but I told myself not to be stupid--until we got upstairs to the master bedroom, and then I figured I could be as stupid and melodramatic as I wanted, because the blood was fucking everywhere.

The body was in the middle of the room, lying on its back; its arms were crooked up with the hands by the shoulders. There was a fan of blood across the beige carpet, like the poor bastard had staggered in a half-circle before he went down, and then a nauseatingly thick pool under the body's head and shoulders. And then from the fan of blood coming toward where we were standing in the doorway . . .

Footprints.

Human footprints.

Sneakerprints, in point of fact, and not big ones.

And even under all that blood, I could see the body was wearing a letter jacket.

"Oh fuck," I said, because it was Naomi and I didn't have to watch myself, and besides, she'd earned it. It's a mean trick, hanging somebody out to dry by playing it cool, and a lot of law enforcement in Clayton County, I'd learned, was about not being mean.

And Naomi nodded hard, almost like a muscle spasm or something, and said, "Can you tell who it is?"

We both knew all the kids at Clayton County High School by sight, but it was hard to match any of that up with this kid with his throat ripped out and blood as thick as paint on his face. I thought for a moment about going closer, but then I gave myself a good hard mental smack and got out my phone. "We'll find out soon enough," I said. I had Doc Gordon on autodial.

Me and Naomi and Ronnie are all the law there is in Clayton County, and we go to those continuing education conferences and learn what we can about crime scenes and forensics and what to do and what not to do, which pretty much boils down to "take pictures of everything ever" and "don't touch anything with your bare hands even so." Ronnie's good with the camera--and it helps, me and Naomi and Ronnie being all the law there is in Clayton County, for there to be something that's Ronnie's special purview, instead of me and Naomi doing it all faster and better and smarter--so I called him, too, and he took pictures and Doc Gordon took samples or specimens or whatever you call it, and Naomi and I measured the fuck out of those footprints. Either a girl or a younger boy, and whoever it was, they'd stopped and wiped their feet before they left the bedroom, which suggested a degree of cool-headedness that made both Naomi and me highly unhappy.

And then Doc Gordon sighed and straightened up and said, "Sheriff?"

"Whatcha got?"

Doc Gordon's mid-fifties, skinny and balding and kind of lawyerish to look at, but he was the guy took the bullet out of my leg the time Chip Priddy got liquored up and shot the hell out of his ex-wife's Datsun, and I couldn't have asked for anybody better. He said, "It's Vernon Weatherbee."

And Naomi and I looked at each other and we didn't need to say it. Because along with the horror and the tragedy and the fucked-uppedness of it all, we now had Marion Weatherbee to deal with, and that was enough to strip anybody's gears.

So when we were done with the Sutter place and what was left of Vernon Weatherbee, Naomi went to notify Dale and Marion Weatherbee--I leave bad news to her as much as I can, because she's better at it, and she takes it out in trade by making me babysit the drunks at Homecoming--and I went the other, back to the department to drink coffee and and write this all out and wait for morning so I can go down to Clayton County High School and start asking questions.

7:20 A.M.

Naomi came in at quarter of seven and went straight for the coffee. I didn't need to ask if it'd been bad, but I had to give her an opening, so I said, "Doc Gordon was right?"

"Oh fuck yes, Doc Gordon was right," Naomi said immediately, like tapping a keg that was ready to blow. "Vernon never came home last night, and they just figured his girlfriend was lying to them about it."

"Nice," I said. "Girlfriend?"

"Yeah. Fuck." She put about half the sugar bowl in her coffee and began grimly opening creamers, one after another. Naomi took her coffee black. "Peggy Marie Procnow."

"Oh jeez," I said helplessly, because Peggy Marie was one of the town Good Girls and seriously the last thing we needed to add to the mess on our plate. "You think she's our footprint girl?"

"No, I fucking well do not," Naomi said. "I cannot see Peggy Marie setting one foot on Sutter property, no matter what Vernon promised her."

"But the Weatherbees thought she'd lie to them," I said, as if I didn't know what kind of a horror Marion Weatherbee was and the things she'd accused adults of with less reason. My personal feeling was that Marion needed a therapist, if not some very heavy drugs, but it wasn't like anybody was asking for my advice.

Naomi turned around expressly to roll her eyes at me. "Don't be a dumbass, sheriff." And then her face changed. "You skinny piece of shit."

I grinned at her. "Count your creamers, Naomi."

She turned back, looked at the devastation, and cracked up.

"I'd give you hazard pay if I could," I said.

"And I have earned it," she said. "You know, I don't think I can drink this."

"I don't think you should try. Did the Weatherbees tell you anything helpful?"

She sighed, and her shoulders slumped. "Well, Dale knew about the door being broken. He was going to go fix it this weekend."

Every landlord in town had Dale Weatherbee as their maintenance man; he did it on the side of running the hardware store.

"So Vernon knew."

"Yeah. Dale says Vernon knew." She poured a fresh cup of coffee, put nothing in it, and came and sat down on the other side of the desk.

"So Vernon was cheating on Peggy Marie."

"That's kind of how I figure it," Naomi said. "But, you know, we don't know that. For that matter, we don't know he's dating Peggy Marie." She raised an eyebrow at me. The complicated social life of Naomi's teenage son had carried us through more than one drive across Clayton County, and I understood what she meant.

"Well," I said, "I guess I know where to start, then."

11:47 A.M.

Oh god I need a drink.

Or food. Food would do.

12:43 P.M.

So my first interview was with Peggy Marie Procnow, and I did that horrible thing they always do on TV shows, where I didn't tell anybody why I was there, just to send me Peggy Marie when she got to school.

She was white around the eyes when she showed up (7:30, plenty of time before the first bell), like I was every monster she'd ever imagined being under her bed. Which was pretty much what I expected. All teenagers have a persecution complex, and about three-quarters of the time, they're right.

Peggy Marie always looks to me like she should be modeling for Aryan Youth posters: tall and blonde, with those orthodontically perfect white teeth and bright blue eyes. And she's one of those girls who just radiates, I don't know, health or something. I hope for her sake high school isn't her glory days, but I'll understand what happened if it is.

"Good morning, Peggy Marie," I said. "Sit down, please."

She sat, on the very edge of the chair, and stared at me like a rabbit.

"You're not in any trouble, honey. I just need to ask you about Vernon Weatherbee."

And I watched her face. She was as transparent as a window pane, and I knew right off that she hadn't had anything to do with Vernon Weatherbee's death. Which I hadn't thought she had, but I'd been wrong about stranger things.

"Did Mrs. Weatherbee make you come down here?" she said, and she was indignant, but also upset. "Because I swear I wasn't lying, Sheriff. I didn't see Vernon at all after school yesterday."

"But you're dating?"

She made a face. "Sometimes. Sort of? I mean, I like Vernon and all, but . . ."

"But?"

"Vernon says he doesn't want to be 'married.'" And her air-quotes were sarcastic and hurt, both mocking Vernon and full of the memory of being mocked. "So sometimes we're dating and sometimes we're not."

"Depending on what Vernon wants, huh?"

"Oh god." Her face crumpled for a second, the toddler Peggy Marie shining through the teenager, but then she pulled herself up. "But why are you asking about Vernon? Is something wrong? Did he get hurt?"

"I'm sorry," I said, and I glanced for a second at Linda Hogan, the principal's secretary, who'd ponied up to play witness that I wasn't sexually harassing Peggy Marie or something. "Vernon died last night."

Peggy Marie didn't take it in at first; then I saw all that healthy color start draining out of her face. "Dead? Was it . . . was it a car accident? I know he drives that Camaro way too fast."

"No, I'm sorry," I said, and I don't know if it says something about me or something about the job, but I was breaking the news of her boyfriend's death to a sixteen year old girl, and what I wanted most was to be able to write a note to myself about Vernon Weatherbee's Camaro. Because where the fuck was it?

"He didn't kill himself," Peggy Marie said; there were tears in her eyes, and her voice wobbled hard, but she was adamant. "Vernon Weatherbee did not kill himself."

"No, ma'am," I said, because she'd earned a ma'am from me. "He didn't."

As Peggy Marie started to cry for real, Linda Hogan got up and came around to her, and gave me a look that wanted to lay me out like roadkill. "That wasn't a nice thing to do, Sheriff."

"I know," I said. "But I needed to talk to her before she started crying."

Peggy Marie gulped hard and said, "You can talk to me now. I mean, what happened? Or is it like on TV where you can't tell anybody?"

"For now," I said, "I really can't tell you the details. I'm sorry." Because if Peggy Marie hadn't been our footprint girl, that girl was still out there, and my job would be about a thousand times easier if she didn't know we were looking for her.

She nodded and gulped again and said, "Mrs. Hogan, I'm sorry, but could you get me a kleenex?"

"Of course, honey," Mrs. Hogan said, with another death-glare at me.

Peggy Marie was still trying to hold it together; there was more iron in her than I'd expected. She sniffed hard and said, "Can I help somehow? I mean, do you need to know . . ." Her voice squeaked off into nothing; she took a deep breath and brought it down again. "Is there stuff you need to know?" And I guess my face showed just how dubious I was, because she said, "I mean it," and she sounded like she really did.

"Okay," I said. "If you didn't see Vernon after school yesterday, who would've?"

And god bless her, she told me. Mrs. Hogan came back and handed her a box of kleenex (and said acidly to me that the principal wanted to know when she could make the necessary announcement or did they need to get me a copy of the Freedom of Information Act first?), and Peggy Marie blew her nose and gave me the rundown of Vernon Weatherbee's friends. She got the hiccups halfway through, but she stayed the course.

So I spent the rest of the morning interviewing football players. People make jokes about growth hormones in the milk, but sweet merciful Jesus on stilts, I'm not sure it's a joke anymore.

I didn't find anyone who'd admit to seeing Vernon after football practice was over, around five-thirty, but Howard Pulaski gave me a good description of Vernon's car (and confirmed that, yes, he was driving it yesterday--trust a car nut), and Freddy Carmody, who was the only one of the bunch man enough not to care that I could see he was crying, told me the names of some of the girls Vernon "hung around with."

"I don't want to get anyone in trouble, Sheriff," he said, taking a kleenex from the box I pushed across the table at him.

"The only person who's in any kind of trouble is the person who killed Vernon," I said. "And we don't know who that person is. Don't have the first idea."

Freddy Carmody's smarter than you'd think to look at him; he's going to get to college on football, the way most African-American boys in Clayton County have to, and then I don't think he's ever going to look back. I don't blame him. He understood what I was telling him, that I wasn't on a witch hunt, and that being one of Vernon Weatherbee's girlfriends didn't make anybody a murderer. So he said, "Vernon had a lot of friends who were girls, and he'd go to movies and stuff, but I don't think he was dating anyone but Peggy Marie." And he gave me three or four names, and then he stopped and rubbed his face and looked at me again. "And I saw him once or twice with Alma Finnister, but I don't know what that was all about."

"Alma Finnister?" I said, sorting through my head to find a face to put with the name.

"Yeah, you know," said Freddy Carmody. "Crazy home-schooled Alma Finnister."

"Right," I said. "I'd forgotten she was starting at CCHS this year."

"Oh yeah," said Freddy Carmody, and that was all I got out of him about Alma Finnister.

4:07 P.M.

I had to fight with myself about it, but I sent Ronnie to look for Vernon Weatherbee's Camaro. Honestly, I wouldn't trust Ronnie to question a can of tuna, much less a teenager.

So I got to go back to the high school. Lucky me.

The morning was football players. The afternoon was a mix of cheerleaders and girls from Vernon's AP classes. Where the boys had all been closed off and trying not to show any emotion, the girls tended to start crying before they sat down. And Peggy Marie was the only one who I'm sure wasn't using it to keep from having to talk to me. The rest of them, I can't tell.

But around the weeping, I got what I think is a pretty clear picture. Vernon was fun to hang out with. He was funny and he had a car and he had plenty of spending money (working afternoons and weekends in his dad's hardware store) which he didn't mind sharing. And Freddy Carmody was right. None of these girls had gone on dates with Vernon. They'd just hung out with him. Most of them thought he was kind of an asshole for the way he treated Peggy Marie, although nobody came out and said so, and I got the picture, a piece here and a piece there, that Vernon had been an asshole in other ways, that sometimes when he was funny, it was at other people's expense. Not that that's anything unusual for teenagers.

Nobody mentioned Alma Finnister, and she was the last person I talked to. Partly because she was the piece that didn't fit--the anomaly in the picture of Vernon Weatherbee I was building--and partly because, being the anomaly, she was my best candidate for those footprints, and I wanted her off balance.

Ganging up with myself against a teenage girl. I'm a real prince.

And boy, you could write a book on the ways Alma Finnister didn't fit. CCHS students aren't a real eclectic bunch. Oh, there's some kids who wear black and some kids who wear flannel, but mostly it's t-shirts and jeans, polo shirts and chinos, and the girls wear kicky skirts when they feel like it. Alma Finnister was wearing a dress. A calf-length floral print dress that looked like she'd borrowed it from her maiden aunt librarian if she had one. She was skinny, with bad posture and a bad complexion; her hair was mouse-brown, straight headed towards lank, and she had it pinned off her face with two barrettes like a girl about half her age. I don't know what color her eyes are, because she never once looked anywhere near my face.

And she lied.

She was a bad liar, and she was obviously scared out of her wits, but she had one thing going for her: she was stubborn as a mule. Her position was, she didn't know Vernon Weatherbee and she certainly hadn't seen him at all yesterday, and she stuck to it, even though she knew I knew it wasn't true.

And I didn't feel like getting out the rubber hoses and the bright lights, not least because Linda Hogan was still giving me the stink-eye. So after we'd been around the thing like a damn maypole three or four times, I let her go and went to find out how Ronnie was doing. Because really, she told me everything I needed with that lie. She did know Vernon Weatherbee, and she had seen him yesterday, but to get more than that--and to get something that wasn't a proof by opposites--I need some leverage. Which would be that Camaro.

Which, of course, Ronnie hasn't found.

8:34 P.M.

Well, it's all over now but the shouting.

And shouting we are going to have a lot of. A whole hell of a lot.

Naomi's on night shift this week--she and Ronnie trade off, because they still tell stories in Camber about Deputy Vincent Hollingsworth, back in the sixties, who was stuck on the night shift for six straight months and went completely batshit crazy. Deputy Hollingsworth came within about six inches of committing the only successful assassination of a public official in Clayton County history, and the first thing Naomi did, as soon as I was officially "Sheriff Villette," was move the filing cabinet so I could see the bullet holes.

"But the thing is," she said, and I've heard it other places, too, "he didn't try to shoot Sheriff Watson for being a sadistic son of a bitch, which he was. He tried to shoot him for being a hole in the world."

"A which in the what?" I said.

She gave me a helpless kind of shrug. "He was shouting it all over the place when they arrested him, and then at the trial, and then out at Mattichitaw until he died in '85." Naomi's Aunt Loula is still a nurse out at Mattichitaw Mental Hospital, so I figured I knew what her sources were. "A hole in the world. Completely crazy." And she shoved the filing cabinet back into place.

So nobody in the Clayton County Sheriff's Department ever works nights for more than a month at a stretch. But sometimes I kind of wonder if Deputy Hollingsworth felt about Sheriff Watson the way I feel about the Sutter place. I've never met a person who made me feel that way, but that doesn't mean such a person couldn't exist. And I've heard other stories about Sheriff Watson--about whom the nicest thing anyone has ever said was that he was a member in good standing of the KKK--and he sure sounds like a walking talking version of the Sutter place, like nothing good could ever survive near him.

Don't mind me. I get a little crazy myself sometimes.

I waited until Naomi came on duty--did paperwork and all the other ordinary shit that piles up while you aren't watching--and then gave her the rundown of what I'd learned.

"You think it's the Finnister girl," she said.

"Yeah. She's the only one I know for a fact was lying. And she was the only one who was scared."

"Oh she was not."

"Okay, okay. But she was the only one who was that scared."

Naomi nodded reluctantly. "So what do you want to do?"

"Well, Ronnie didn't find the Camaro anywhere, and Ronnie's thorough."

"Is that what we're calling it today?" Naomi muttered, but she flapped a hand at me, about half apologetically, to go on.

"So we know it's nowhere near the Sutter place, and we know it's not anywhere obvious. Because face it, a bright red 2002 Camaro is going to be hard to miss in Camber."

"Okay," said Naomi. "I'm with you that far."

"So somebody hid it. Either Vernon or our footprint girl, and I'm thinking it wasn't Vernon or we'd've found it in the Sutters' driveway. So I want to cruise by Alma Finnister's house and take a look."

"Is this the we-need-a-warrant kind of look, sheriff?"

"Well, that's why you're coming with me, Naomi," I said. "So you can testify it isn't."

"And if you don't spot the Camaro?"

"Then we think of some damn thing else," I said. "Come on."

The Finnisters lived across town from the Sutter place, meaning about a five minute drive. Aside from the home schooling thing--which most people took as an insult to the Clayton County Schools--there was nothing particularly crazy about Gordon and Dolores Finnister. They were devout Christians of a somewhat fundamentalist stripe, and the worst you had to worry about from them was getting pinned down and harangued about "Christian education." I was pretty sure that neither of them had grown up in the kind of restricted environment they were inflicting on their daughters--Alma had two younger sisters, Lois and Carol--but that's not legally child abuse, no matter what I think about it.

I turned left on Bucknell, and Naomi shot me a look. "Finnisters live on Bolt."

"And their house backs on Chester. Along the ravine."

"Oh," said Naomi. There's a good stretch of Chester Road with no houses--ravine on one side and the ugly ass-end of the industrial park on the other. In the summers, kids go there to make out and smoke pot, but in January, it's not someplace anybody wants to be. It's where I'd hide a car if I had to, and for Alma Finnister, it had the advantage that she could walk home with nobody the wiser.

We were about two lots down from the Finnisters' backyard when Naomi said, "Holy shit."

I braked and pulled over. Another second and I saw what she'd seen--a glint of red down among the scrub trees. We got out and went to the head of the slope.

Bright red 2002 Camaro. Vernon Weatherbee's license plate and a bumper sticker that said GO CLAYTON COUGARS!

I looked at Naomi. Naomi looked at me. We started down.

There was blood on the steering wheel, blood on the gearshift, blood on the driver's door, bloody smudges of fingerprints on the rearview mirror. And a stupid bobble-headed football player on the dashboard with Vernon Weatherbee's number painted on it in what looked like nail-polish.

"Jesus," Naomi said under her breath. "Jesus."

There wasn't much else to say. We hiked back to the car, took Chester to Ford, Ford to Bolt. Parked in front of the Finnisters' house. Nice enough house, no uglier than three-quarters of the houses in town. And the yard was immaculate. No children's toys, certainly no swing-set. Just winter-yellow grass and bushes waiting for spring, and a stupid concrete cherub in the flower bed by the door.

I rang the bell. Naomi stood back a little. Moral support and also just in case anybody did anything dumb.

Dolores Finnister opened the door.

"Mrs. Finnister," I said, hating every word. "I need to speak to Alma, please." And seeing Alma coming into the hall behind her mother, I added, "It's about a Camaro."

Alma Finnister went a horrible color, and her hands came up to her face. "I kept hoping it was a dream," she said, barely loud enough that any of us could hear her, and then she started to cry.

That was when the shouting started, and it's not done yet. I had to tell the Finnisters which lawyer to call--there's more than one that does criminal work in Clayton County, and more than one that does juvenile, but the only one I'd trust to hold a baby is Eli Chilcoate, and he has to drive in from Sparta. I just saw his car pull up, and in a minute, we'll go back to our so-called "conference room," and see if Alma Finnister can tell us what happened to Vernon Weatherbee last night.

11:59 P.M.

When Sheriff Leland died, his widow came to clear all his junk out of the office. I'd always liked Ruth Leland, in that way you like somebody you don't see often and never get to talk to much. She was an outsider like me--Sheriff Leland had met her at Texas A&M, and then they had one of those weird twenty-year-reunion courtships that led to her moving to Camber and marrying him. They had about ten years before the heart attack got him, which in some ways of looking at it is a lot of time, and in other ways, no time at all. She left Camber as soon after the funeral as she could, so the day she came to box up his personal stuff was the last time I saw her.

She didn't say much--she never did--but when she'd packed up the photos and the diplomas and certificates, she came over to the desk and touched the little statuette of Justice, with her blindfold and her scales, that Sheriff Leland had kept next to the phone. Mrs. Leland said, "Will you keep this?"

It was a funny way of putting it, not Would you like this? or even I think he'd like you to have this, just a simple, factual, yes or no question. And it's what I always think of when I remember Mrs. Leland.

I said yes, and Blind Justice is still right where Sheriff Leland put her. I'm looking at her now, and I'm thinking she's lucky to have that blindfold on. And I'm talking about her because it's saving me from talking about Alma Finnister, which is a pretty cheap and obvious ploy there, Travis. Cowboy up and get it down.

You know, I would've felt better if she'd been angry. Or if she'd been stubborn, the way she was this afternoon. But she wasn't. Alma Finnister was grateful. Because we were the adults. We could make it okay again.

Eli wasn't happy about it, but he couldn't keep her from talking. Couldn't keep her from confessing, and although I knew her parents weren't the Catholic type of Christian nut, there was something religious about the way Alma Finnister insisted on telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. She kept her hands folded in her lap and her eyes fixed on the wall just above the door, like every picture I've ever seen of Joan of Arc.

In a funny way, the hardest part for her to admit was the part that wasn't about Vernon Weatherbee with his throat ripped out: why was she in the Sutter house with him in the first place? She went an ugly red that made her acne stand out in magenta and fucsia, but she said, "He was my boyfriend."

"Everybody we've talked to says he was Peggy Marie Procnow's boyfriend," I said.

"He was my secret boyfriend," she said, and any other teenage girl would have rolled her eyes. "Mama and Daddy would have a fit if they knew I was even talking to a boy."

"And Peggy Marie?"

"Vernon said he couldn't hurt her by breaking up with her. He said when he graduated, he'd just let it die off. But he promised he'd write to me. Every week."

"Uh-huh," I said, and I guess I let too much of how I was really feeling into my voice, because she flared up like the Fourth of July.

"He did! He promised!"

"And that's why you were in the Sutter house," I said.

"Sheriff," Eli said.

But Alma was already talking. "We had to. There wasn't anywhere we could meet where somebody wouldn't see. And Vernon said it was okay because his father was going to fix the door on Saturday, so we were only sort of borrowing it. And we weren't going to damage anything. We just wanted to be alone."

"Vernon talked you into it," I translated.

That knocked a big dent in Joan of Arc, but she looked down at the table and nodded.

"Okay, honey," I said, because really, a little breaking and entering was the least of anybody's problems here. "Just tell us what happened."

"Well, we got in," she said. "Vernon had a flashlight and we looked around a little. It was really creepy, but it was kind of neat, too. So we sat in what we thought was the bedroom and we talked for a little. And then, um, Vernon kissed me. And I kissed him back." She lifted her chin, like Joan of Arc waiting for somebody to light the fire.

I thought some very nasty things about "Christian education," but I kept my voice gentle when I said, "Then what happened?"

I guess part of me had been hoping, even then, that she'd say, "then a one-armed man jumped through the window" or "then Vernon pulled out his Leatherman and started sawing." But she frowned, unhappy and puzzled and sick, and said, "I don't know. I just got so hungry."

"Alma," Eli said, and he was visibly alarmed, which is something you never want in a lawyer.

"I don't know!" Alma said. "I really don't. I was just so hungry," and she sounded dazed by it, even now. "So hungry and so angry, and then there was blood, there was blood everywhere, and Vernon was in the middle of it and he wasn't moving." Her voice rose and rose, and then she was crying, like Peggy Marie had been crying that morning.

I went out into the hallway; after a couple minutes, Eli came out to fetch Alma a Dixie cup of water.

"Insanity?" I said.

"What else can it be?" Eli said and went back in.

And that's the question, isn't it? The question I'm sitting here asking Lady Justice. Naomi came back from getting the Camaro photograhed and dragged out of the ravine, and she said, "You know, laryngeal cancer is a hell of a way to go."

"Hunger," I said.

"And, well, you know the stories, don't you?"

"Which stories?"

"About Darlene McCormick's 'severance package,'" Naomi said, with the most eloquent air-quotes I've ever seen.

It took a moment for the pieces to click together, and I felt my eyes go wide. "You mean . . ."

"Oh yeah," Naomi said. "And the way I heard it, Mrs. Sutter knew."

"That can't have made her very happy," I said and winced when my voice squeaked.

"Mrs. Sutter wasn't a very forgiving woman at the best of times."

"Hungry and angry," I said, echoing Alma Finnister.

"Not that Alma Finnister didn't have good reason to be angry at Vernon Weatherbee, but apparently she wasn't."

"No," I said. "She wasn't."

"But maybe," Naomi said softly, "Mrs. Sutter was."

I had a chill go straight up my spine like a cramp. "Naomi, you realize what we're talking about here is crazy."

"Crazier than a girl tearing her boyfriend's throat out with her teeth? Crazier than a man starving himself to death with a full pantry?" She shook her head. "I gotta go tour the county roads, Travis. You go home and get some sleep."

But I'm still sitting here thinking about Paul Sutter and Vincent Hollingsworth and holes in the world. And what do you do about justice when every version of the truth is crazier than the last? How do you make it okay? How do you do your job, Sheriff Villette?

Naomi was right. I need to go home. But I don't think I'm going to get much sleep.

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

- Publishing Information
- "Cookies"
- "Any Other Day"

- "The Small Dark Movie of Your Life" by Leah Bobet

- "Fair"
- "Post Mortem"
- "Beta"
- "Clash"
- "Donation"
- "Walking Back To Houston" by Chelsea Polk
- "Courage"
- "Anniversary"
- "Bulletproof" by Emma Bull
- "Survival"
- "Down the Rabbit Hole" by Sarah Monette
- Credits