Mike Sweeney sat in his cubicle at the station with two desktop computers running and his laptop open. The printer was chugging out page after page of the names of those from the tattoo conventions who’d offered to cooperate without the requirement of a warrant. Privacy policies for events like that were internal and informal, and many of Mike’s requests came in via local FBI offices. Besides, it wasn’t like he was seeking political or medical information.
Mike was systematically going through the printouts while also running database searches to cross-reference information. The slowdown was that no two of the conventions used the same damn programs for registration, so there was a ton of cutting and pasting.
Work was therapy for him. He was in a lot of pain from last night. Only some of it was physical. Most was what Crow called an “existential freak-out.” Gayle and Patty had seen a side of him Mike hated to show, and he was afraid Dianna had, too. He was deeply ashamed of that “other Mike.” The animal Mike that was a legacy from the Trouble. It didn’t matter—or, mattered a tiny bit less—that he’d risked that transformation for a good cause.
But it was a risk. His control in such situations was always a crapshoot. Although he’d never lost that control yet, he had to accept that it was a possibility. There were thousands of years of folktales arguing that real control was impossible.
He’d had to go all the way home like that, too, because his clothes were shredded rags in what was left of his cruiser. That was still something he’d have to explain.
Work was calming. Work was orderly and normal and even searching for a freak like Owen Minor had a comforting structure to it. It’s why Mike liked puzzles. Sudoku, jigsaws, cryptics, nomograms, explicit and implicit math problems, Masyu … all of it. He scored exceptionally well on the kinds of IQ tests that skewed toward patterns and logical problem-solving. Less so on abstractions, but police work was mostly logical.
He found Owen Minor’s name on an attendee list at a tattoo convention in Anaheim, California, more than a dozen years ago. When Mike cross-referenced, that he found that Malibu Mark had been at the same event.
“One down,” he said aloud.
“What’s that?” asked Gertie.
“Nothing.”
“That wasn’t me,” she said. “There’s old egg salad in the trash.”
“I was talking to myself,” he assured her.
Mike worked through the other lists and found no other mention of that name.
“Plan B,” he said, but kept his voice too low for Gertie to hear. One of the most well-known things about people—criminals and civilians—was that when they picked a fake name for any reason there was a statistically high likelihood they would use either one or both of their initials. John Doe might pick Jack Dole, or something like that. Even though Web security people warned against this all the time, the practice was a mnemonic. People remembered easier when some part of their name, particularly their initials, was the same. So, he did a search on that and found a fair few O.M. or M.O. names, and worked his way through them, eliminating most by simple Net searches using interjurisdictional search engines.
A few oddities emerged and he added them to a special list. They included Orson Mouche, Orlando Mosca, Omor Musculiţă, Oliwier Mucha, Ohit Māchi, and several others. All specifically ethnic names. French, Polish, Bangla, Romanian, and so on.
Mike sat and looked at the list. There were seventeen names like that, scattered all across American tattoo convention records. Mike tapped a pencil eraser against his teeth and thought about it. Sure, tattoos were a worldwide thing, with long histories, but the pointedly ethnic names seemed wrong to him. Contrived. When he checked, there was a smaller percentage of overall names at each convention that were ethnic in both given and surnames, with exceptions for Indian, Pakistani, Chinese, and Western European. Few of these names, though, fit into those categories.
So the next step was to match those names against Agent Richter’s list of conventions where possible victims had attended as either guests or professionals.
By the fifth name he checked Mike could feel his pulse quickening. Four out of five. Then seven out of nine. Then fourteen out of seventeen.
“Holy smokes,” he said.
“I’m not smoking,” said Gertie curtly. “You know I gave that up.”
He ignored her and began plugging those names into the police search engines. He searched all seventeen just to be sure.
He got three hits. The other fourteen were fake names.
Then he searched the surnames for clues, to see if there was anything there beyond an ethnic name that started with O. That came up with nothing useful. Then he tried the surnames.
The very first one he tried was Mucha.
And time seemed to stop.
Mucha was the Polish word for “housefly.”
“God,” he breathed.
He plugged in the Spanish name, Moscarda.
Blowfly.
The French name, Mouche.
Fly.
All of them.
Fly.
Lord of the damn Flies.
“Got you, you bastard.”
“That’s not a nice thing to—”
“Gertie,” he snapped, “please.”
She lapsed into a hurt silence, but Mike didn’t care. He was onto something. He loaded a translation program and began searching for foreign-language words for fly, horsefly, housefly, and blowfly. And found every single name on his list of fourteen.
Mike was excited now and his fingers trembled as he began focusing his search. Looking for someone with one of those names who lived here in Pine Deep. He knew that Owen Minor used that name when booking a reading at Dianna’s place and at Patty’s, but he did not own a house under the name. He tried DMV, real estate and tax databases, and others.
And twenty minutes later he found the name.
He found the home address.
He found where the man worked.
Mike found everything.
He grabbed his hat and ran for the door, yelling orders to Gertie over his shoulder.