Charlotte and her cameraman arrived on the scene of the fire as dawn was breaking, and all that remained was a charred pile filling most of a block, with a few unrecognizable bits of metal poking up out of red-hot coals. It was a good story, she knew. Tragic and ripe with conflict. She would have prime placement on the news, morning and evening. It was the kind of thing that would get national attention.
Yet, she couldn’t summon the same excitement that such a story normally gave her. As she stood in front of the wreckage and readied to speak into the camera, her mind was elsewhere, on the unknown face that kept reaching out, kept taunting her, following her. Was he watching her now?
“Let’s try that one again,” the cameraman suggested after she fumbled a line.
“I got it,” she said, as much to herself as to him.
A new message had come through the day before. Not a photo this time, just text.
Ask the sheriff how his FBI friend is doing.
Something had happened. But what? There hadn’t been a killing since the drug dealers. Her bosses at the network kept demanding updates. What was the killer’s motive? Why weren’t the investigators finding anything?
But to learn more, her only good source was David. And he had made it clear how he felt. He wasn’t wrong. She had betrayed him, and now there was a wall between them. A wall vaster and taller and stronger than all the years they had been apart.
She needed to go to him, though. Not to use him. Not to learn anything. But to tell him what the killer was saying. To warn him.
Sleep refused to come. There was the sharp pain in his cheek and the aches all across his chest and back, where he’d been kicked. Ibuprofen and whiskey had taken the edge off of it, but it was still there. His muscles in his back and shoulders and arms throbbed from the exertion of breaking through the roof.
It wasn’t just that. He stared at the ceiling and thought once again through the details of the case, going through each murder’s facts, imagining in his mind’s eye the wall he had created, the disparate webs, the parts that refused to compose a whole.
Did Private Austin Chambers fit into it? That was the thought that came again and again. There was something he wasn’t seeing. Something about the fight at the club that he knew wasn’t random. But if it held meaning—if it fit in some rational way—then how?
David forced his eyes closing, hoping that it would stop his mind from working. Blackness. And then, a vision. The same vision. The old courthouse. A window exploding. The darkened office. The body on the ground. Jason’s mutilated body. The killer, escaping right past him. And the deep-rooted feeling that he knew the answer to all of these puzzles already, he just hadn’t allowed himself to see it.
Hell with it. He stood up out of bed and got dressed.
David was waiting in the security queue at Site One when an answer came to him. Not an answer. Really, it was more that he realized the question he should’ve been asking.
The giant and spire were protected inside the massive fence and the army’s mile-wide buffer. Every sample of either was housed safely inside Site One. But then, if the killer was leaving traces of the spire on his victims, it begged to be asked: How were these crystals getting outside of Site One and through security? How had the killer become infected?
It was as he worked through this that David looked across the faces of the armed soldiers standing guard along the queue and landed on a face that he recognized. It was a fleeting recognition, but he also knew he could never forget it. It was one of the faces that had loomed over him in the bathroom of the strip club. The face of a man who had stood alongside Chambers and kicked the shit out of David.
Chambers was part of the crew tasked with the security of Site One. Conover and Geiger had said as much, David remembered. He surveyed the vast room. Was Chambers here even now?
Soldiers were stationed throughout the room. They watched over the body scanners. It was soldiers who did the pat downs. They controlled everyone who came in and out of this place. And everything.
David wanted to see Sunny, but he wanted to follow this train of thought before any of its details escaped him.
In his office, he stared at the wall he’d created, which was messy and disconnected, lacking any focus or clarity. All too well, it mirrored his thoughts.
He took a marker and next to Jason’s name began writing:
Affair. Phoebe Chambers. Husband Pvt. Austin Chambers. Security over Site One.
He stepped back then. There was something else about Jason’s murder. Something different. Something he’d never quite been able to summon as more than a gut instinct.
He forced himself to open the file, and he spread its contents across the table. A chill shot through him as he remembered that Jason’s body lay just yards away from him even now, frozen and alone in a darkened room.
He surveyed the crime scene photos. Some showed Jason as he had fallen, his body so destroyed it barely looked human. And then it struck him. That was it. That was the difference.
All the murders had been horrific. But the others were cleaner. Simpler. One killing blow and then the superficial wounds. Kapoor had had his arm cut off, but even that was nothing like the degree of violence inflicted upon Jason.
Jason had had the shotgun. He’d tried to fight back. But still, that didn’t account for the scope of brutality. Jason’s body had been torn apart, even after he was no longer a threat. It was personal in a way the others weren’t, vicious.
He looked again at Chambers’s name on the board, the line connecting it to Jason, playing out this possibility. Chambers had discovered his wife’s affair with Jason. He’d gone to confront Jason. They struggled, he overpowered Jason, and killed him. He would have access to a bulletproof vest, which could explain the third shotgun blast that seemed to have found its target. And he was a soldier, trained to fight, to kill.
Chambers had an alibi—the poker game—but that could be a cover story from his friends. The same friends that had showed up at the club and tried to kick in David’s ribs. So that attack, then, was a warning.
David took the marker and drew a line from Chambers to the two dead drug dealers, continuing to play out this possibility. Somehow, people were buying and selling fragments of the giant and using them as drugs. Chambers had access. If he and his fellow soldiers were smuggling out samples of Gulliver, then selling them into the drug trade, that could be the connection to those two victims. Maybe a deal gone wrong?
He stood back, mulling this, and drew a question mark over the connection.
There was another problem with the theory. There was nothing to connect Chambers to Holly and Kapoor, the first and second victims. Nothing to show that they’d ever crossed paths. No hint of a motive.
He pushed that out of mind. After all his time searching for an explanation, he had the start of one. He would run it down. But how? He’d gone to Conover the last time, only to be told it was a dead end. Did Conover know the truth? Was he involved? David couldn’t tell him his theory. Not yet. Which meant he needed to find another way to build a case against Chambers.
The thought of it excited him. Paying Chambers back for the beating in the club. Paying him back for Jason. For Erickson. For all the destruction he’d caused.
As David left, he found Sunny waiting for him in the meeting room between their offices. She seemed more tired than usual, turning to give him a wan smile as he approached. They’d said nothing of the sudden burst of intimacy between them, and it almost felt as if it had never happened.
“How are you doing?” he asked.
She shook her head slowly.
“I was examining Erickson’s body. There were traces of it on him. The spire. Just like the others. The whole time, I just kept thinking of him in that last moment. Imagining how scared he must’ve been when he died,” she said.
He wanted to tell her to push it out of her mind. That Erickson died quickly. Probably peacefully. That he was trained for times just like that. But it would be a lie. Erickson had died horribly. All that David and Sunny could do now was to help bring him some justice.
It had been almost a week since David had visited Samuel. Somehow the old man had continued to amass new piles of research. David supposed that Samuel had enlisted a nursing home staff member to help in his quest. David sat and listened as his grandfather explained his findings, holding up a hardcover book with dozens of dog-eared pages.
“It’s called parapsychology. The study of unexplained mental phenomena. Telepathy. Telekinesis. That’s moving objects with your mind. I know, I know. It sounds unbelievable. But there have been hundreds of studies going back decades. Even the military has done research into it. Here’s one example. They held up a random assortment of cards and asked people to guess which card they were holding. Again and again, the results came back above chance. Which means there is some connection between people’s minds.”
The old man handed David the book, the pages open, passages underlined.
“And how does this connect to the giant?” David asked.
It was like he’d missed a week of trigonometry and now had to race to catch up.
“The dogs, remember? They bark at the same time my brain comes online. It’s connected. The question is, how? There’s this theory within parapsychology that some force exists—psi—that bonds our consciousnesses together. We’re all connected, just in a way that’s invisible to us. Somehow every night the giant does something. Imagine him giving off this energy, sending a radio signal, except we can’t see it or hear it. We can only feel it. And the only effect it has is to make the dogs bark and for me to wake up. It makes no sense only because we can’t see it, so we assume it’s impossible.”
David glanced at the clock. Only half a minute left. Samuel followed his eyes and broke from his lecture.
“You need to be out there, David. I understand. I’m fine in here. I have some help. I have plenty to keep me busy. You don’t have to come.”
“I want to come, Grandpa.”
“I know,” the old man said. “But all too often, life has other plans.”
As if on cue, David’s phone buzzed, and he drew it quickly from his pocket. It could be dispatch. Or Priest.
It was neither. A notification from the app that tracked the motion sensors. He apologized to his grandpa as he opened it, and dark, grainy video feed appeared. The alley behind Vic’s. He’d just placed a new camera there, in the spot where they’d found Erickson’s body.
Something moved past.
The form of a man. His back to the camera. His head covered with a hood. David knew at once. It was him. The man he’d seen the night that Jason had died. The man he’d let escape once before.
The killer.
Samuel was talking again, his tone angry and confused. Their two minutes were up.
“Who let you in here?” he demanded.
David didn’t respond, instead sprinting out of the room and into the dying light. As the barking of the dogs quieted, he climbed into his truck and tore like hell across town.