Part Three
Wednesday/Thursday

Genesis 41: 41–45

So Pharaoh said to Joseph, “I hereby put you in charge of the whole land of Egypt.” Then Pharaoh took his signet ring from his finger and put it on Joseph’s finger. He dressed him in robes of fine linen and put a gold chain around his neck. He had him ride in a chariot as his second-in-command and people shouted before him, “Make way!” Thus he put him in charge of the whole land of Egypt.

Then Pharaoh said to Joseph, “I am Pharaoh, but without your word no one will lift hand or foot in all Egypt.” Pharaoh gave Joseph the name Saphnat-Paneah and gave him Asenath, daughter of Potiphar, priest of Ond to be his wife. And Joseph went throughout the land of Egypt.

 

Saddleback Correctional Facility is in the foothills, near Golden, Colorado, about a half-hour drive outside Boulder. Much like it often was in Budapest, my mood is way out of sync with the scenery. Oceans of grain waving in the sparkling morning sun. Crisp blue sky. I see what might be an honest to goodness eagle riding the wind off to my right.

The star-spangled scenery does little to lift my spirits. Only serves as a reminder that, were I somebody different in a much better situation, I might currently be enjoying my stay on earth. I’d rather we were driving through a dark swamp in the dead of winter, occupied exclusively by crows and maggots.

We drive with the windows down, letting the warm wind whip against our ears. My right hip is killing me from the few hours of attempted sleep, contorted in the backseat of the Honda. Even four Tylenol PMs couldn’t put me down. Just lay still, listening to Courtney’s light snoring.

We picked up some oranges, apples and dry granola from a grocery store on the way out. I peel an orange and hand some slices to Courtney, who wordlessly swallows, keeping his eyes on the narrow highway.

The phone rings. Mindy, calling for the tenth time this morning.

“You wanna talk to her?” I say.

“I’m driving,” Courtney responds.

“I’m not going to tell her exactly what Rico said,” I say. “Can’t risk her finding the books on her own.”

“Fine. But have to make sure she doesn’t leak to the Senator that we don’t even have them.”

Courtney obviously has more credibility with her, but this is a nightmare scenario for his technophobia: speaking to a girl he’s crushing on, over the phone.

I hit call and she picks up almost immediately. I’m anticipating a screeching British earful, chewing me out for all but ignoring her calls and texts until now, but she seems to realize that she’s going to have to play nice.

“Where are you?” she says. “Did you find anything?”

“Colorado. And no.”

“Oh,” she says, voice souring. “This is Frank.”

“Courtney’s driving.”

He glances at me, dying to ask what she said about him.

“Speaker,” he whispers.

I put my hand over the mouthpiece.

“Don’t want to disrupt your concentration. While you’re driving.”

“Why didn’t you respond last night? Did you find anything on the security footage?”

“We might have something,” I say. “Actually wanted to ask you some questions. About Sophnot.”

“What are you talking about. What did you find?”

“It’s complicated, don’t want to get into it now.”

“Complicated? Please don’t patronize me.”

“Well, Courtney and I were wondering . . . well for one thing, if there’s a significance to the binding itself. If it’s more than just a cover.”

“Let’s meet and discuss this,” she says.

“Look, if you don’t want to answer my questions, that’s fine. I’ll call you later,” I say, about to just hang up on her when she says:

“Let me guess: You discovered what kind of leather he’s using.”

I grit my teeth. Courtney looks at me, eyes wide.

“You knew?” I hiss.

“Of course,” she says. “Do you know how many hours I worked with those things?”

“Then why didn’t you tell us?” I yell into the phone. Courtney is so distracted he nearly veers into a drainage ditch.

“Didn’t seem pertinent to you two.”

“Pertinent!? He’s been killing people to do this!” I shriek.

Mindy laughs dryly.

“Yes. It’s complicated isn’t it?”

I slap my palm over the receiver, emit a stream of curses, and try to control the anger in my voice.

“What else are you holding out on us?”

“About a decade’s worth of research, Frank. I apologize for not compacting everything into an executive summary of quick-hitting sound bites.”

“You didn’t think the fact that the books are bound in human skin was worth mentioning? What else do you know? What about a mask? Do the books say anything about a wax mask?”

I hear the sharp breath on her end.

“You have a lead about where they are don’t you?” she says. “Don’t lie to me. I’m not stupid.”

I don’t respond.

“I can help you find them,” she says carefully. “I know more about them than anyone on Earth besides the author.”

My shoulders tighten.

“Okay,” I say. “We’re running around town, looking into a few possible leads. But we’ll meet up tonight, alright?”

She takes a moment, considering whether these terms are acceptable.

“Wonderful,” she says.

“Can’t wait,” I growl, and hang up.

Courtney opens his mouth to speak, I preempt him.

“We’re not meeting up with her, and we’re not telling her a thing,” I say. “She’d sell us down the river in a heartbeat if it suited her needs.”

Courtney frowns.

“Like her or not,” he says. “In the end we might need her help to figure out Rico’s text message.”

I cross my arms.

“We’re not going to work with someone who keeps lying to us.”

I wait for Courtney to point out my hypocrisy. Instead he takes a gentler approach.

“You’d do the same thing in her shoes, Frank. You wouldn’t have told us everything you know.”

“We’ll keep stalling her until we find the books ourselves.”

“I’m not sure where your inherent distrust of women comes from,” says Courtney. “Did you have a good relationship with your mother growing up?”

I gawk at him. What makes him so utterly infuriating sometimes is the earnestness with which he says this shit.

“You’re a real piece of work,” I mutter.

“I’m just trying to help,” he says. His authenticity makes my forehead burn.

“I’ll make sure to bring it up in group therapy in prison,” I say, as SCF rises on the horizon. “Enjoy yourself today, champ. Will probably be the last time we’re in jail on the right side of the fence.”

 

As Saddleback appears on the horizon, I flip through the fake FBI IDs Courtney made for us five years ago during the Kanter case. We have no choice but to use them again, given the tight time line. I run over our story again in my head. The only reason they might take us seriously is that we’re coming to them with the truth: Oliver Vicks doesn’t seem to be in their prison.

Most prisons are content with two enclosure fences. Usually galvanized steel garnished on top with razor wire. But as the Honda nears the facility, I see that SCF has a super-max-type perimeter: There are the usual two outer fences, then a narrow strip of sand, then another thirty-foot wall lined with razor wire. And then the interior side of the inner wall is lined with huge coils of more razor wire, so inmates can’t even get anywhere close to the fence. The guard towers are imposing concrete spires that look built to withstand hurricanes. The ground around the outside of the prison looks like it’s been tilled, there’s a kind of featureless moat of uniform grey. Even if you somehow tunneled under all three walls, you’d be totally out in the open—easy pickings for the snipers in the guard towers.

This is not a prison built for rehabilitation, it’s a cage for monsters.

“Wow,” I say.

“Second-highest security in Colorado,” says Courtney. “Among the top twenty in the country, I read. 450 guards for 3,000 prisoners. Very high ratio.”

“So I guess we can rule out the possibility that Oliver escaped, eh?”

Courtney nods almost imperceptibly.

There’s only one entrance. One place where there’s a break in the outer two fences, and the interior one slides open. But if I was an aspiring escapee, I think I’d rather take my chances with the fences. Six booths windowed with what I’m sure is bulletproof glass house a dozen guards. As we roll up, three officers in grey uniforms with rifles strapped to their backs burst from a booth, hold up their palms, indicating for us to stop well short of the first line of defense. Then they trot out to the car.

An officer motions for us to step out of the car. He has a formless face and lumpy body—a dirty potato in polarized Ray-Bans. The two behind him have hands on the butts of their side arms, but don’t draw them.

“Visiting hours are Monday afternoons only,” Potato states, breathing heavily just from his little trot over.

“We’re from the FBI,” Courtney says. “We need to speak to someone in administration about a prisoner you have incarcerated.”

Potato seems momentarily paralyzed by this news.

“IDs are in the glove compartment,” I say.

He finally nods slowly, then gestures for two subordinates to confirm this.

My heart thuds as the other two officers advance to the car, pass within inches of me, and pluck our paper from the glove compartment. One of them inspects them seriously, as if he has a lot of experience examining FBI IDs—you don’t become a prison corrections officer because you’re good with nuance.

“Looks good,” one of them shouts to Potato. He seems slightly disappointed by this news.

“Hold tight,” he says, then retreats out of earshot and summons someone on his walkie-talkie. Has a brief back and forth, nods, then returns.

“Step out of the car. Leave the keys in the ignition. We’ll park it for you,” Potato says, pointing to a lot obscured by steel and wire. “We’ll check you, then take you to admin. Do you have weapons with you?”

“In the trunk,” I say, as we climb out of the car. “Two Magnums.”

A guard with a deep scar on his cheek joins the party, walks slowly over to the car and starts combing through our bags with infuriating deliberation, confiscating anything that could conceivably be used as a weapon, and placing it in a transparent plastic bag.

He takes particularly long going through Courtney’s red acrylic bag, the one that holds his tools. I can tell it’s killing Court to watch this guard paw his beloved implements—he’s really anal about his tools, to the point that he tries to fix them himself instead of replacing them, when possible, and doesn’t even like to let me touch them. But he just stares at his shoes and does what looks like a calming breathing exercise.

In the passenger seat, Scar finds what’s left of my Jack Daniel’s from last night. He unscrews the top and pours it out into the dust.

“Hey!” I say. “Look, I know it’s no McClelland, but I was still gonna drink that.”

“Sorry,” Scar replies joylessly. “No contraband gets in.”

He screws the cap back onto the now empty bottle and tosses it back into the rear seat. We wait while this lone officer concludes his ludicrously inefficient search—Why can’t this stuff even be in our parked car?—and then another CO climbs into the driver’s seat and pulls our rental through the gauntlet of security checkpoints. Gate creaks open, they wave the vehicle through, then close it.

Potato motions for us to follow him. The COs stare at us as we pass them in their booths, same dead look in their eyes I’ve seen in postal workers who do the same route for decades.

He takes us to a walkway to the side of the gate. We walk through a metal detector, and then are clinically and holistically frisked by a sad man wearing powdered latex gloves.

He must be a real bummer at his kid’s career days.

The only holdup is the iPhone in my pocket.

“No phones. Can’t have pictures or video,” he says. “I’ll put it in with your other stuff.”

A no-phone rule for visitors seems a bit over the top for ostensible FBI agents. But they have the guns, and I’m pleasantly surprised someone has agreed to speak to us. Potato leads us through the walkway—the only way in besides the vehicle gate.

I catch Courtney’s eye as we follow Potato: So far, so good right?

He replies with a raised eyebrow: Stay vigilant.

Waiting for us outside the tunnel is a stooped CO the same color as the asphalt he’s standing on. He can’t be much younger than sixty. He’s shorter and skinnier than me, but he’s rolled up his khaki sleeves to reveal sinewy biceps. Potato clasps his hands behind his back as we approach the man.

“Sir,” Potato says timidly. “These are—”

“I know.” The dark man nods and smiles at Courtney and I. “You two are from the FBI.” His voice is high and crackly, filled with humor.

Beside me I notice Potato shift his weight uneasily.

“Yeah.” I extend a hand. “I’m Ben Donovan and this is Leonard Francis. Are you an administrator? We had some questions we need answered.”

In response to this, the old CO breaks into a huge grin and takes my hand in both of his. He’s wearing a lot of very strong cologne, and there’s something vaguely effeminate about his tender grip.

“I’m Sergeant Don,” he says, eyes twinkling. “I deal primarily with overseeing our security team. You’re going to need to speak with the warden.”

“Perfect,” I say. “Glad he could make time for us.”

Sergeant Don cocks his head.

“Only the Lord makes time,” he says.

Then, ignoring Courtney’s outstretched hand, Sergeant Don simply turns and starts walking, stooped over, hands clasped behind his back. Potato rushes to follow the Sergeant, seemingly forgetting about us.

We jog across the hot asphalt to keep up with the two of them.

The scale of the prison complex is staggering. Three thousand prisoners is a lot. The buildings that must be the cell blocks are ten-story monstrosities of whitewashed concrete, pocked with hundreds of tiny reinforced windows. The five cell blocks I see are spaced out around a central yard the size of two or three football fields.

And I guess prison business is booming, because there’s a construction site on the west side of the yard. A new wing, presumably. Workers—whom I think might be inmates—in hard hats and bright orange vests are mostly congregated on a floor around the middle, about nine stories up. The finished floors beneath them are all shrouded in white tarps, like to protect them from rain or dust. The tower is even taller than the rest of the buildings—it will end up looking like a high-rise apartment. A crane lifts I-beams as thick as a man a hundred feet in the air. Sounds of shouting, clanging of metal on metal, drilling fill the air.

“Are those all prisoners doing the construction?” I ask Potato and Don’s backsides as they lead us along the yard’s south border fence. Nothing.

I try again: “Guess it’s good to have real work for them, eh?”

They ignore me.

I’m struck by the lack of greenery. This complex must be at least five square miles, and there’s not a single tree in sight.

Courtney gives it a swing: “How long you two been working here?” he asks their uniformed backs.

No response.

“You know anything about an inmate named Oliver Vicks?” I ask.

This question, finally, gets a reaction. Stops them both dead in their tracks. They turn around. Potato grimaces like why did you have to go there? Sergeant Don’s face tightens into a scowl.

“What?” he asks sharply.

“Oliver Vicks. Do you think we’ll be able to speak to him?” asks Courtney.

Potato’s face curls inward like he’s constipated.

The folds of Don’s already wrinkled forehead furrow even deeper in consternation. His little bald head is wet with sweat. Like a shiny eight ball. He scans my face slowly, as if he’s looking for something very specific.

“Be careful,” Sergeant Don says slowly. He looks like he’d like to say more, but the two of them turn and resume walking, perhaps slightly more quickly now.

Guess we hit a nerve.

They lead us to what must be the admin building and in through a side door, into an air-conditioned lobby that looks like a hospital waiting room. We follow them through a door, down a windowless hallway of white plaster that smells like Lysol. A few closed offices. One open, we see a man in a suit on a phone. We pass a few other grey-and khaki-clad guards in the corridor, who nod at our guides and eye us with curiosity.

Potato seems relieved to leave us at the elevator. Avoids our eyes and rushes away down the hall.

Courtney and I join Don in a cramped cage that creaks as it tugs us skyward, me pressing my back against the wall in a fruitless attempt to escape the cloud of patchouli fragrance emanating from some unspeakable crevice beneath Don’s uniform.

The doors open onto a small waiting room. With a jab of his chin, Don indicates that we’re to sit down in two puke-yellow chairs. He sits across from us and stares at the wall over our heads.

A receptionist behind a desk pays us no heed.

Across from us, Sergeant Don pretends we’re not there. His demeanor has definitely soured since we mentioned Oliver.

“The warden will be with you two in just a second,” the receptionist finally says, then returns to his computer. This prompts Sergeant Don to stand up and wordlessly exit the waiting room. I hear the ding as he enters the elevator.

I look at Courtney.

“Something happened to these officers,” I whisper. “They’re rattled.”

Courtney sticks his tongue in his cheek and nods in assent.

“Weird vibe here, for sure.”

We wait for only three minutes before the secretary says, “You two can go in now.”

He hits a button under the desk which buzzes the lock on the door. We open and walk through, only to find ourselves in a vestibule facing a second identical door.

“Security,” says the secretary from behind us. “Let the first one close and I’ll open the second.”

Courtney releases the first door, and for just a moment we’re squished together in a room the size of a phone booth. Then another buzz and the second door swings inwards.

Waiting for us is a stout man wearing a bright blue Hawaiian shirt. He’s probably early sixties, with a trimmed grey beard and very thick bifocals. He’s lost a lot of hair, and his face is wrapped in an endearing layer of grandfatherly fat.

“Nathan Heald,” he says, and smiles to us, extending a surprisingly delicate, smooth hand. His voice and demeanor are gentle—not what you expect from the warden of a maximum security prison. I shake his hand first, then Courtney.

“I’m Leonard Francis,” Courtney says, per our fake IDs. “And this is Ben Donovan.”

“Pleasure,” he says. His glasses are so thick that they blur his eyes pretty severely. He must have a prescription like a fishbowl. “Come sit down and let’s see if I can help you out.”

His office is a stark contrast to the sterile waiting room. Burgundy bookcases hold hundreds of volumes on prison management, most bound in grey or dark blue. The curtains, spread to look out onto the complex, are a preposterous lime green. He has some very cool artwork: aborigine figurines on top of the bookcase, cubist paintings on the walls. I spot expensive-looking chess and backgammon sets nestled between an ivory statuette of a dove and a heavy Monet book, and suffer a brief moment of nostalgia for Voci.

“You play?” I ask, gesturing to the set.

“When I can find a decent opponent.” Heald smiles. “Chess is like sex. Every man thinks he understands it, because he knows how the pieces move.”

I grin.

“I would never claim to be competent at either. I meant backgammon.”

“Ah, a backgammon player,” Heald says, and cocks his head at me as if to study me more closely. “I prefer backgammon too. I like the element of chance. We’ll have to play sometime.”

“Sure,” I say, though unless I’m incarcerated sometime soon it’s hard to conceive of a situation where that would happen.

The floor is a lush blue oriental carpet that matches his shirt. For a second I think of the oriental carpet in Sampson’s office, and cringe.

The warden sits in a swiveling office chair behind a metal desk and gestures for us to sit down across from him.

“So, the local constabulary!” he chuckles to himself.

Nervous?

He looks past us, out the window for a moment, Colorado sun reflecting in his bifocals. “What brings you gentlemen here?”

Courtney and I exchange a look. He nods almost imperceptibly to me like go ahead.

I say, “We have some questions about a prisoner here. Oliver Vicks.”

Heald’s face tightens ever so slightly.

“Sure,” he says, forcing out the syllable.

“Can we speak to him?” I ask neutrally.

Heald doesn’t respond immediately, just keeps staring wistfully out the window over my shoulder, like he’s recalling a poignant moment from his childhood.

Or maybe he’s been waiting for this visit for a while, and he knows the gig is up.

“Mr. Heald?” Courtney prods. “Would that be possible? To speak to Oliver?”

He clenches his jaw.

“No,” he says, still avoiding our eyes. “That won’t be possible.”

“Because he’s not here?” Courtney says.

He purses his lips and finally meets Courtney’s gaze.

“I don’t follow,” he says.

“Was it an administrative error?” I say. “Did you grant him parole and then realize you weren’t supposed to?”

Heald doesn’t budge, holds a pretty impressive poker face.

“Whatever it was,” Courtney says. “We know that Oliver Vicks is supposed to be here, and he’s not.”

The warden exhales slowly and lays his palms flat on the desk.

“Why are you here? What do you want from me?” he asks.

Courtney folds his hands in his lap and keeps his mouth shut. I do the same. Not exactly sure what’s going on here. Hopefully the silence will push Heald into throwing us a bone. Indeed, after an awkward silence that feels interminable, Heald says:

“He’s done something awful, hasn’t he?”

Bingo. He’s gone.

I nod slowly.

“Quite.”

“Murder?”

“It’s still an ongoing investigation,” Courtney says. Bad cop.

“But . . .” I grimace. “Between us . . .” Good cop.

Heald rubs his temples and shakes his head slowly. “God have mercy . . .” He brushes a grey eyebrow, seems to deliberate with himself for a moment. “You two have no idea what you’re dealing with here,” he says softly.

“So tell us,” says Courtney. “What are we dealing with?”

The warden rubs the tips of his fingers together. I notice the tight muscles on his forearms. He also looks like he has broad shoulders under that shirt. He’s one of those guys who gets stronger as he gets older. I can picture him at the gym out-benching all the young punks.

“You two want a drink?” he asks, and before we can respond, he’s on his feet pulling two books off his shelf to reveal a hidden bottle of Glenfidditch. “It’s contraband,” he says, pouring three very healthy servings, “but my post has a few advantages.”

Courtney shoots me a look of disgust: It’s eleven a.m.

Heald takes two of the lowballs and hands them to us. I accept mine and take a sip. Nice and oaky.

“No thanks.” Courtney smiles. “I’m not a big drinker.”

“That’s fifteen-year scotch,” Heald says. “I’m not pouring it back in the bottle.”

The label is facing me pretty clearly reads 12-year, but I keep my mouth shut.

Heald shoots down what’s at least a triple shot. His face flushes and he collapses back into his chair.

“I didn’t ask for this,” he says, strain in his voice. “Any of this.” He takes a deep breath. His affect reminds me of a coach at a press conference, helpless after a bad loss.

We just didn’t play as well as them, what do you want me to say?

“What happened, Nathan?” I ask.

He twirls his empty glass, like he’s ready for another one.

“Oliver Vicks was sentenced to life roughly twenty years ago, and SCF was his first stop, with no plans to transfer. This was just before my time, actually. I was hired about a year after his incarceration. For the first ten-plus years or so of his sentence, Mr. Vicks was—to the administration’s knowledge—a model prisoner.

“Not only did he not get into any fights, he helped break them up. He quickly developed a reputation as a dependable ally. A lot of inmates confided in him. He had no enemies, even though he’d commune with members of rival gangs simultaneously. This is almost unheard of, to be well liked by Hispanics, Blacks and Whites . . . it was most unusual. I even asked him for help on one occasion—an inmate had a horrible psychotic episode, and we asked Oliver if he could speak to the man. He did, and from what I understand, he even helped a bit.”

The warden trails off for a moment. Just as I’m about to prod him to continue, he does on his own.

“But after a few years the administration finally began learning more about the nature of the inmates’ respect for Oliver. How he’d managed to make so many friends. He had a sort of ideology that he’d started preaching, and apparently it had gained a lot of traction. By the time we found out about it, there were a few dozen prisoners who were, I suppose you could say, his followers. Converted, in a sense.”

“What was his ideology?” I ask.

Heald grips his empty tumbler.

“I’m no expert,” he replies. “But a few things are pretty clear: One is that he claimed to be a sort of prophet. He had some ideas about the changing tide in the relationship between God and man, that man had finally taken the upper hand, and that he knew how to exploit this.”

“Did you ever hear the name Sophnot?” I ask.

Heald flinches.

“Yes. All his followers called him that. I don’t suppose you know the meaning?”

We both shake our heads.

“It’s from the Old Testament. A word found only once or twice. It’s in the book of Genesis. Do you two know the story of Joseph?”

Courtney nods yes, I shake my head no. I’m considering trying to get him back on topic, but I figure all information is good.

“The quick and dirty: Joseph was sold by his brothers into slavery, taken down to Egypt and thrown in jail. He rotted there for years, until one day Pharaoh, the king, had a dream that nobody could interpret to his satisfaction. Joseph had previously interpreted a fellow prisoner’s dream correctly, and so eventually Joseph was brought to the Pharaoh. He correctly interpreted the dream, and Pharaoh was so impressed, saw the wisdom of this young Hebrew, that not only did he release him from jail, he made him second in command over all of Egypt. And there is one verse where the name Sophnot is mentioned. Pharaoh uses it as a nickname for Joseph, Sophnot Paneah, something like ‘he who solves riddles.’”

I glance quickly at Courtney and it’s clear he’s thinking the same thing, Oliver interpreted Sampson’s dream . . . that’s how it all started.

“So, I suppose that’s why he called himself that,” continues Heald. “He was also imprisoned, only to slowly rise in the ranks. As I was explaining, he was gaining more and more followers. He began holding what he called ‘demonstrations’ during meals. We let them happen at first, since they weren’t strictly speaking against the rules, but we quickly saw where this could lead—”

“What do you mean ‘demonstrations’?” I ask.

Heald shakes his head slowly, as if still in disbelief of everything that unfolded. “The first time, this one I only heard secondhand, he stood up in the middle of the cafeteria and declared that, with the help of God, he would turn a cup of steaming coffee into a block of black ice.”

Courtney raises an eyebrow.

“And?”

Heald shrugs. “Apparently he did it. Some sort of sleight of hand, I suppose. Others are harder to explain away so easily. The last one we allowed to take place, I was there. I saw it with my own eyes. He stabbed himself in the throat with a fork. One officer who was nearby, swore to me that he saw it pierce the skin. Oliver stuck it in, and blood poured out, drenching the lunch table beneath him. Then he pulled the fork out and there was no wound. The blood puddle remained, but Oliver was totally fine. We shut it down immediately, but it was too late. By that point he had so many admirers that all he had to do was utter the word riot and we’d have a total disaster on our hands. We put him in solitary. It was my say and I take full responsibility. But it was a horrible mistake. If he was a leader before, this punishment made him a martyr. His support grew exponentially. He was all the inmates talked about. The rumors spread . . . they said when he was released his next demonstration would be to resuscitate the dead. During his daily hour of freedom, he’d smuggle notes out to someone, and they’d be read aloud at meals. They were types of sermons. Again, nothing promoting violence, so it was hard to say whether or not to crack down even further. But when someone read a note from Oliver, you could hear a pin drop in the cafeteria. And perhaps you can imagine, that’s not exactly a common occurrence around here.”

Heald’s hands are locked tight on the table.

“What happened next happened too quickly . . . there was nothing I could do, short of call in the National Guard. Unbeknownst to me, two of our corrections officers became smitten with Oliver. They were stopping by his solitary cell to ask him advice, perhaps to ask him to ‘demonstrate’ again. Who knows. They weren’t exactly forthcoming about all of this when I grilled them later. But what seems clear . . . Four years ago, one of these two officers opened Oliver’s cell for him. Oliver walked out to the inner gate, and asked the guard there to open it. He did. Everyone in the watchtowers was looking. But nobody dared fire. There was total silence as he strode across the courtyard. Some inmates were on recess then—broad daylight—and they just stopped and watched—”

“Wait,” I interrupt. “Oliver Vicks told the corrections officers to let him out, and they did?”

Heald bares his teeth.

“You don’t understand. I spoke later to the one who opened the inner gate for him. The poor man was in tears. Offered me his resignation. But told me at the moment all he could think of was his wife, his two kids. He was terrified of what the prisoners would do to him if he refused. If he’d refused him or laid a hand on him . . . Oliver had only to snap his fingers to instigate a full-blown riot. Usually we can put a riot down with rubber bullets and gas, but this was different. Four out of five of these prisoners would have given his life to defend Oliver. Officers would have died. So Oliver walked to that front checkpoint. There were perhaps fifteen guards with rifles. They let him walk out. And that was that.”

Courtney is frowning intensely. I wonder how much of this he believes. I’m certainly skeptical myself, but it’s hard to conceive of why Heald would make something like this up.

“But after,” I say. “You didn’t tell anyone? Instead of a manhunt, you’re telling us you just kind of . . . pretended it never happened?”

Heald looks like he could use another couple drinks.

“What would you have me do?” he stays softly. “Implicate myself and my entire staff? And, anyways, I have to admit, ever since he left, things have been running very smoothly.”

Heald beckons us to the lime-green draped window. He points to the construction site. There are hundreds of prisoners at work on the scaffolded structure, all wearing hard hats and bright orange vests.

“Our new addition. A state-of-the-art facility that will house fifteen hundred inmates and allow us to expand our operation big-time. And the labor costs are dirt cheap because the prisoners are doing most of the work, with just a bit of supervision from outside professionals. Few prisons ever bother trying to get their inmates to do any sort of serious work, because it’s inefficient, and they don’t cooperate. But here, these guys work harder than anyone. It’s like a lingering effect of Oliver—camaraderie or common purpose, perhaps. But anyways, it wasn’t as if we were having problems afterwards . . .” Heald trails off.

I watch the prisoners at work. Wonder how many of them are still Oliver Vicks enthusiasts.

“What about the officers who let him walk?” I ask. “Do they still work here?”

“I conducted months of interviews, and ended up transferring a lot of our staff,” Heald says. “But at least they still have jobs. And aren’t being court-martialed. It wasn’t their fault. I really believe that. I would have done the same. I think you two would have as well. I mean, that day in the cafeteria. With the fork . . .” Heald clears his throat. “That was part of it, why the guards didn’t shoot him. They believed the bullets wouldn’t hurt him. He always said he already knew how he would die, and until that day nothing could hurt him. And after watching him stab himself in the throat and walk away unscathed, it’s hard for a man not to wonder.”

Courtney raises an eyebrow.

“Did he say how he’d die?” he asks.

The warden cracks a sad smile.

“He loved fried food. Always said that would be the end of him. Heart failure, I suppose. In fact, some of the prisoners who were closest to him, told me Oliver knew how his entire life would play out. That was one of the things he wrote about. Documenting his entire life, down to the minute. Everything that had already happened, and everything that had yet to happen. Do you . . .” Heald clears his throat. “Do you know where his books are? Did he get them back? I know he was handing them off to a visitor because of the volume limits on offenders’ personal possessions.”

I clench my jaw. Courtney sniffs.

Heald crosses his arms and turns away from the window to glare at me through his thick glasses.

“Have I not been forthcoming with you two?” he asks.

I lock eyes with Courtney. It’s hard to read exactly what my partner is trying to convey with this particular brand of frown. I think it’s skepticism.

“They have come up in the course of the investigation,” says Courtney.

Heald’s lips twitch.

“You don’t understand what they are, do you?” Heald asks.

Courtney studies the warden’s face.

“Do you?”

“I asked a simple question,” Heald says. “Do you know where they are?”

“I’m sorry,” Courtney says. “We can’t discuss that.”

“I’m trying to help you. Help all of us,” Heald says. “Talk to me.”

“I’m sorry,” Courtney repeats.

The warden smiles strangely at Courtney.

“I understand now,” he says, an unmistakable frost in his voice. “You’re the chess player. Very well. I suppose we’re done here.”

He returns to his desk, opens a drawer, and pulls out one business card. Returns and hands it to me, totally ignoring Courtney. “Detective Donovan, here’s my direct line—my cell—as well as my email. If you have any further questions, don’t hesitate to call. I’m happy to assist in any way I can.”

“Thanks for your time,” I say.

“Pleasure,” he says, and shows us to the door. He gives a cursory, ice-cold nod to Courtney. To me he says: “Detective, I meant it when I said I would love to play backgammon with you sometime. Best of luck with everything.”

 

Our drive from prison back to civilization is pretty quiet, both playing back details of the visit in our heads before comparing notes—a practice that ensures greater accuracy. Truth is, each time I think through everything Heald said, the more disturbed I become.

The fork in his throat . . .

Without consulting Courtney, I follow the highway signs back to Denver, and pull into the parking lot of a Whole Foods. Haven’t been inside of one since going expat five years ago, and am craving the comfort of overpriced goat milk yogurt and horseshit homeopathy.

And it turns out there’s no Whole Foods like a Colorado Whole Foods. These folks aren’t gonna buy their kale chips just anywhere. Many of the men here have bushy lumberjack beards and pierced ears. Some women have dreadlocks, and all look like they routinely give birth squatting in the forest.

I get a large coffee, muffin and cup of water and sit down across from Courtney, who filled up a bowl with leaves from the salad bar, and took an apple and a mango for dessert. He joylessly wolfs down his dry mesclun mix, then quarters the apple with a plastic knife—no small feat—and carefully carves away the skin.

“Well,” I say, slurping down some black acid. The coffee here is nice and strong. “I’m pretty sure if the books were in that prison, Heald would know. And he wouldn’t have gotten upset that we didn’t give him any info about them.”

“Mmhmm,” Courtney says, concentrating on picking the seeds from the core of the apple with the tongs of a plastic fork.

I pluck a brown recycled Whole Foods napkin from the holder, pour my water on it and dab my filthy face.

“I feel kinda bad for that guy, to be honest.”

Courtney is only half listening. Far more interested in sectioning his mango.

I pull the business card the warden gave me from my pocket and enter his number into Courtney’s phone: Warden Nathan Heald.

Courtney slides a piece of mango between his teeth and squeezes the juice out with his mandible.

“Frank,” Courtney says. “What kind of person could unite an entire prison? Talk his way out of a maximum security facility?”

I take a bit of muffin.

“You’re buying all that?”

Courtney frowns. “Two days ago I wouldn’t have. But . . .” He shrugs. “Oliver Vicks isn’t in prison. He was in the red house last night. So you tell me how he got out.”

“I know, Court. But that just doesn’t seem possible. I don’t care how charismatic you are . . . Selling used cars or something, fine. But nobody can charm their way out of prison.”

Courtney shakes his head.

“This is well beyond charisma. Those demonstrations for one thing—they must have been pretty serious illusions. Because if you think a few thousand hardened offenders are going to become believers based on a few parlor tricks, well.”

“What are you suggesting?” I say.

Courtney shrugs, taps on the tabletop.

“I’m not suggesting anything, but was just thinking. What if you lived in the time of Jesus. And for the sake of argument, let’s say he was really walking on water and so on. To be precise, Christianity wasn’t really founded until several decades after his death—but clearly this man had such a huge impact on people that, even several decades later, his memory was enough to start a world-changing religion. Why do you think he was so impactful? Was it the tricks? That’s part of it. But it was also him. The way he behaved.”

“I hope you’re not comparing Jesus to a deranged serial killer,” I say.

Courtney grimaces.

“I suppose I am. But only in the sense that they’re able to influence large groups of people. I mean, have you ever met a politician face-to-face, Frank?”

“Sampson.”

Courtney waves me off.

“No, I mean a real one. I was in the same room as Bill Clinton once. Some kind of fund-raiser—no, I didn’t pay. It was part of a job—and I watched him, the way he talked to people. Every time he met someone he focused exclusively on them for like twenty seconds. You could tell he made them feel like they were the center of his world for that moment. And every single person turned away glowing, beaming from ear to ear. It was like, there was an energy in the room, radiating from wherever he was.”

“You think Bill Clinton could talk his way out of SCF?”

“No I do not. Which means we’re dealing with someone. . . Honestly I can’t really imagine what he must be like.”

I take a dry swallow of banana muffin. I don’t like this line of thinking . . . we’re putting him on a pedestal.

“I’m thinking about what Rico did,” I say, changing the subject. “He thought we knew more about Oliver than we did. He thought we’d pretty immediately know what he was talking about when he said the books are where they belong, where Oliver will never go. Ya.”

“What?”

“Ya. He ended with that.”

I take out the phone and show Courtney the text again.

Left Boks wher they belong, where Soph never goes. Ya

“Didn’t notice that,” Courtney admits. “Maybe he was starting to spell another word? What starts with ‘ya’? What about yak?”

I squint at him.

“Yeah, Courtney. I’ll bet he was trying to tell us that he hid them inside of a yak.”

“Yakitori?”

I roll my eyes.

“Forget it.”

Courtney leans his head back.

“So far we’ve gotten some pretty unreliable eyewitness accounts . . . Everyone seems to have some skin in this game—” Courtney immediately winces at his poor choice of words. “But there are one or two other people who have talked to Oliver, who we haven’t spoken to yet.”

“Who?”

“The people from the restaurant in Colorado Springs where he called the police on himself.”

“That was twenty years ago . . .”

“Yeah,” says Courtney, “but it sounds like he was kind of a regular there. Maybe we track down some people who used to work there and interact with him. Especially that waitress. Maybe she can help us understand who this guy is . . . his motivation.”

He types a few things into his phone.

“It’s about seventy minutes south of here. We can be there by three.”

I raise a skeptical eyebrow.

“That’s a time suck. We only have two more days before Sampson drops the hammer on us. Think it’s worth it?”

Courtney clicks his tongue.

“I don’t like how little we know.”

I nod. Every case or job has elements of uncertainty. You learn to live with not knowing all the answers, maybe even long after the job is done. If you let yourself get frustrated and caught up in the myriad pieces that seem like they’re not even made of the same material as the rest of the puzzle, then you’ll never get anywhere. You develop an intuition that tells you which threads to follow; which ones will eventually lead you to the end, and which lead nowhere.

This feels different though. Even though I’ve been off the job a few years, I don’t think I feel this way because I’m out of practice. Rather . . . it’s not like a hard backgammon position, where you’re simply not smart or practiced enough to solve it . . . more like being shown a position of a board game from some alien planet. Can’t even tell which bits are the pieces, which bits are the board, or if it’s even a board game at all.

“Ninety-nine percent of murders, no matter how gruesome they are, or how mentally ill the criminal is, are motivated by one of three very simple emotions,” Courtney says. “Love, fear or shame.”

“What about hate?” I ask. “What about greed?”

“Ah.” Courtney smiles knowingly. “Common misconceptions. Hate and greed are secondary emotions that develop as a result of one of the other three. You hate someone because you love them and can’t have them, or because you’re scared of them, or they’ve made you feel ashamed. But you don’t just hate. And greed is usually motivated by shame. You want something because you feel inadequate.”

I mull this. Love, fear, shame.

“So which one are we dealing with here?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” Courtney says. “That’s the problem. We don’t understand why he did what he did, so we don’t understand what or who we’re looking for. We don’t understand the books, and we certainly don’t understand the man who created them. So let’s go see the place where this started. Where Oliver Vicks sat and started writing. One thing we do know: The man is intimately attuned to his physical surroundings. If he chose this place to begin the execution of a twenty-year plan, he probably had a very good reason.”

 

Architecturally, the Rocky Mountain Bar and Grill is about as unimpressive as it gets. Squat one-story building that looks like someone just stirred some generic building materials together and poured them into giant cookie-cutter mold. Only the green lettering and little mountain logo out front tells you it’s not a chain restaurant like IHOP or Ruby Tuesday. We’re one of three cars in a parking lot that could fit forty. It’s midafternoon, not exactly peak hours, but still I’d be shocked if this place ever fills up.

We leave the windows down—the small-town vibe makes you feel like you can do that—and trot over the hot pavement to the entrance. In addition to steps, they have a ramp for wheelchairs leading up to the front door.

Maybe they have a lot of elderly customers?

There’s a little rug to wipe your feet on, and the rest of the floor is white tile that perhaps sparkled sometime in the early seventies, but has been worn brown by years of repeated muddying and subsequent cleaning cycles. There’s a long bar, and maybe fifteen empty bar stools with green upholstery in varying states of ruin. The vibe they’re going for is family-friendly. They have some bottles of booze behind the bar, but I get the sense they’re rarely used. Smells like fried food and Windex.

There’s a man behind the bar whose broad tie-dye-clad back is to us. Doesn’t seem to have heard us come in. We stand in the entrance waiting for him to turn around and seat us. I clear my throat. Nothing. Courtney says:

“Excuse me? Sir?”

We’re answered by a round, tired-looking woman emerging from two saloon-style swinging doors on the far side of the restaurant.

“Kitchen’s closed till five, sweeties,” she says. “Sorry.”

The man looks back at her, still apparently unaware we’re here. She makes an elaborate hand gesture to him. He turns and sees us for the first time, points apologetically to his ear.

Deaf.

Courtney responds by signing something to him, and a broad grin instantly spreads over the man’s scruffy face. Beaming, he then turns back to the woman and paints some words in the air.

“If you two want to stay for coffee though, you’re welcome. On the house,” she says. “Not too often my husband finds someone new to chat with.”

Courtney and I oblige, sitting down at the bar. Him and the now-giddy barman already appear deep in manual conversation.

“Two coffees?” she asks. “Milk and sugar?”

“Actually,” Courtney says, turning to her, “Could I trouble you for a tea?” His face is creased, horribly apologetic, like he’s demanding she name her first son after him.

“Of course.”

I sit there with a stupid, uncomfortable smirk on my face while Courtney and the deaf barman commune.

“What’s he saying? And how do you know sign language?” I ask. Courtney waves me off and doesn’t answer.

“Fine,” I say. Pick up a menu next to me on the counter to keep myself occupied. Pretty standard American fare: grilled meats and fried starches. Only outstanding feature of the laminated menus is that they have each item written out in Braille beneath the English. Wheelchair ramp, Braille, guess because he’s deaf they’re sensitive to disabilities here. I think of the raised Braille-like writing in the books.

Wonder if Oliver was inspired by this?

“Courtney,” I say, “check it out.”

My partner holds up an apologetic index finger to the barman and turns to me.

“Frank, make yourself useful. I’ll speak to him, you speak to her. And try to look around.”

The matronly waitress returns with two mugs, both emblazoned with the same green mountain logo.

“Just let me know if you want refills.”

“Thanks.” I smile.

“Pleasure,” she says. She’s probably late fifties, face creased. Her arms and hands are thick and strong. Beneath her green, standard-issue canvas waitress skirt, I see bulbous calves, terminating in a pair of expensive running shoes. I guess if there’s one thing worth investing in as a waitress, it’s shoes. The skin on her face is splotchy and uneven.

“Ma’am,” I say, as she’s turning back to the kitchen, Courtney still occupied with her husband. “If you don’t mind me asking, how long have you been working here?”

She smiles sadly.

“Since the start, dear. It’s a family business. We own it.”

I proceed as if conducting verbal surgery.

“So then . . . you were here around twenty years ago?”

Her face darkens suddenly. She realizes what this is about.

“I was.”

“So the two of us, we’re private investigators. Would you mind if I asked you a few questions about Oliver Vicks?”

Her face goes rigid, and she snaps her fingers to get her husband’s attention. They have a furious exchange; it’s like their hands are playing some incredibly complex invisible musical instruments. By reading their body language and guessing, she isn’t super enthusiastic about answering any questions, while he’s a little more laid-back, maybe asking her what harm it will do.

Courtney intervenes with a raised hand and silently chimes in. Whatever he says seems to have quite an effect on both of them. They both nod, wide-eyed while he gesticulates. Finally she says to me:

“It’s true? He just walked right out the front of the prison?”

I glance at Courtney, who shoots me a look like I had to. I get it. Sometimes to get people to confide in you, you have to make the first concession.

“Yes,” I answer, leading her to a booth where we can talk without Courtney and her husband. Who knows how fluent Courtney’s sign language is—I want to get as much as I can from her in good old English. To my great relief, she sits down across from me.

“So he’s going to hurt more people, you think?” she asks me, voice surprisingly tender for someone whose exterior looks so well worn. A decaying jar filled with fresh honey.

“He already has, I’m afraid.”

“Dios mío . . .” Her head hangs mournfully. “Well. I doubt I can help you. But I’m happy to try.”

“You were here sometimes, when he was here?” I ask.

She nods.

“What was he like? How did he behave when he was here?”

She sits back in the booth.

“Pretty quiet. Just sat here, in that booth there—” She points to a booth closer to the kitchen. “Five hours every evening. During Becky’s shift. Started at five on the dot, ended at ten. Ate something first, usually steak and French fries. He loved French fries. Then he drew in his notebooks. He was very exact. He arranged all his tools carefully before he started working. He didn’t talk to me much. Didn’t have much interest. But he talked to the girl, you know. Becky.”

“What did they talk about?”

“It was mostly him doing the talking, to be honest. Weird stuff, the bits I overheard. I always thought he was trying to impress her by sounding smart or something. But I guess it worked.”

“She was impressed by him?” I ask.

“Yes.”

“Did they ever meet outside of here you think?”

She looks at her nails.

“I don’t think so.”

This woman has a lot to say, but needs to be asked the right questions.

“Who started coming here first? Oliver or Becky?”

Elaine thinks for a moment.

“Oliver, I think.”

“So what did he do before Becky had shifts here? He still came at the same time? Or that started only once Becky was hired?”

Elaine rubs her wrist.

“I can’t be sure, but . . . I think maybe he only started coming a lot once Becky was hired.”

“And the drawing? He did that all along? Or only once he met Becky?”

Elaine frowns. She’s never been asked this before.

“You know . . .” She exhales. “Yeah. I remember I waited on him a few times. And so that must have been before Becky came. And he wasn’t working. You’re right. He started this stuff once I hired Becky. It’s all my fault, in a way. If I’d never hired her, you know . . .”

Her eyes mist over and she makes a steeple with her rough hands.

“So just to confirm,” I say softly, “he started coming a lot, daily, only once Becky started having daily shifts?”

Elaine nods uncertainly.

“Pretty sure.”

“What does he look like?” I ask, realizing the only picture we have is the grainy photo that was in the paper, and a mug shot when he was processed.

“Average height, dark hair, thin . . . the thing I remember most is his eyes. The centers seemed too dark, and the whites too white.” She shudders. “It’s like they were made of bright plastic. You couldn’t miss those eyes.”

“You said he was drawing?” I ask. “Did you ever catch a glimpse?”

“Couple times I looked as I walked past. Just looked like lines and colors. I knew something was wrong just from that,” she says seriously. “Who just sits there every day and draws lines?”

I force a smile and nod that I hope engender empathy.

“You were here that night?” I ask.

She nods reluctantly.

“So then you must be . . .” I consult my notepad. “Elaine Rodriguez?” When she flinches, I try to reassure her: “I read the Gazette article you were quoted in.”

She crosses her arms as if it’s cold in here. But in fact the AC is doing little to counteract the greenhouse effect from the big glass windows.

“Yes. That’s me.”

“So . . . that night?” I ask, trying not to sound like I’m pleading.

“I already told everything to the cops,” she says. “He asked for Becky. I went back outside where she was and told her not to go talk to him. I could feel something nasty in the air. But I guess it wouldn’t have made much of a difference anyways . . .” She looks out the window, over my shoulder, like to avoid eye contact while she talks. “I didn’t hear everything he said. But he showed that screwdriver and said he, you know, told her what he’d done . . . After that I don’t remember a whole lot. The sirens and lights. They took him away.”

“What about Becky?” I ask. “Did she keep working here?”

Elaine shakes her head adamantly.

“Oh no no. Once it was time to talk about that, she said she couldn’t come back to this place again. And I understood, of course.”

“Do you think Oliver wanted Becky? You know, sexually?” I ask.

Elaine shrugs.

“Probably. She was a beautiful girl. I figure to myself, you know, that’s probably why he killed them. Some sick try to get her attention, you know? These head-cases think stuff like that will work.”

“Did he ever say anything like that though? Did you ever see him really proposition her? Maybe she rejected him and he was upset or something?”

“No . . . nothing like that really . . .” Elaine says.

“Then why do you think that was his motivation? If you never saw any evidence?” I’m badgering her a little. It’s a risky maneuver, could make her clam up, but gotta break some eggs . . .

“I . . . Well, I can’t be sure, but there was one thing he said I think. I can’t remember when it was. That night or not, or if I just made it up . . . he said something about her being his queen.”

“His queen?” I ask.

Elaine nods.

“Yes.”

I bite my lip.

“Anything else you might remember?”

“He said . . .” She squints, like the cloudy memory is hovering in front of her face. “Well, she was always curious about what he was drawing in his books too. And I think he said that night . . . he said she’d be his queen and he’d show her what was in the books.”

I raise an eyebrow.

“So, when would this happen? When would she be his ‘queen’ and he’d show her what was in the books?”

Important not to feed her the answer and tamper with her memory . . . Want her to say it.

Elaine frowns, like she’s confused herself.

“I guess . . . Well I guess he meant after prison. Because he knew the police were coming then.”

Although this was the answer I was expecting, it also makes my head feel light.

But surely he knew that he’d be getting a life sentence, for multiple premeditated homicides. Which means that, if she’s remembering correctly, he’d already planned his escape from prison. Sixteen years before.

I lower my head into my palms.

“How is that possible?” I groan loud enough to distract Courtney from his own silent conversation. He looks over at me from his bar stool like, everything okay? I wave him off: Don’t interrupt this.

“Elaine,” I say, massaging my temples. “This might sound like an insensitive question, in light of everything, but I’m only asking it because I want to understand the situation. You said before that you warned Becky not to speak to Oliver, but she did anyway. Do you think the attraction was mutual? Do you think she also liked him?”

Elaine rubs her bare bicep with a worn hand.

“Could be. She was young, you know.”

“I ask,” I say delicately, “because it’s now sounding pretty likely that Oliver sought her out after leaving prison. That he did exactly what he said he would do. And maybe, just maybe, Becky wouldn’t have told anybody that she saw him. She might have even helped him.”

Elaine’s face melts into disgust. She shakes her head.

“No. No.”

“Elaine.” I try to make my face look as kind as I can, but lean in a little to apply the emotional pressure. “When was the last time you spoke to Becky? Do you two keep in touch? Maybe you know how we could reach her?”

She blanches.

“I . . . I don’t know. . .  I . . .”

“Think about it, we could be helping her.”

Instead of responding, she waves her hand in the air to get her husband’s attention. He breaks off from his conversation with Courtney and they flash a series of impossibly elaborate signals to each other. She points to me once or twice, and I catch a gesture that looks like an inmate clinging to cell bars which I imagine is the sign for prison. They only talk half a minute—I consider that maybe sign language is more efficient than speaking.

When Elaine turns back to me her face is steel.

“She moved and changed her last name. She didn’t want people knowing she was that girl. Last I heard she lives in Pueblo.”

“How do you know that?” I ask, assuming Elaine did a little curiosity stalking, but trying to keep any accusation out of my voice.

“She came here to the diner a few years back,” Elaine says, grimacing. “Asking me for money. She was definitely in a bad place. She talked about how much everything messed her up you know. Couldn’t keep a job or anything. Then she emailed me a bunch after that, for a few months, to ask for more.”

“Did you give her money?” Courtney asks, from his bar stool perch.

“When she came in in person I couldn’t say no. But I ignored the emails . . . I . . . I was pretty sure she was on drugs.”

I nod.

“So any way you could check that email?” I ask. “Tell us her last name?”

Elaine sighs and pulls out her phone.

“Who knows if I still have it . . .” she says, scrolling. “You’re lucky I never delete emails . . . let’s see. Carlson. Becky Carlson. That’s her new last name. Don’t have any info besides that. But at least a few years ago she lived in Pueblo, about an hour drive south of here.”

I exhale with relief. Feel like a dentist after a successful extraction.

“Thanks so much for your time.” I stand up and tap Courtney on the shoulder. “Let’s go, we got what we need,” I tell him.

Courtney waves good-bye.

“Thanks to both of you for your time.”

“Help her if you can,” Elaine says, still sitting. “But please be gentle. She’s already been in more pain than I can imagine.”

 

Courtney drives while I search for Becky Carlson on his phone. We’ve done this drive before, five years ago. Drove straight from Denver International Airport through Colorado Springs, through Pueblo, right to Beulah—a nothing town with under a thousand people. The landscape outside seems unfamiliar though; whether that’s because I was drinking so heavily last time, or because last time it was winter. Guess I could down a couple Miller Lites as an experiment, see if that brings things into focus.

“Sampson keeps calling,” I tell Courtney. “Not as frequently, but twelve times today already.”

“If you accidentally pick up, theoretically he could track us by cell tower pings. Text him to stop calling us. That we agreed to bring them to him by four on Friday.”

I send the text.

Please stop calling. We agreed to bring books by four on Friday. We’ll call you if anything changes.

That seems to work, for the moment. According to the white pages site there are three Carlsons that live in Pueblo: R, Sam and L. Only Sam has an address listed.

“R could be Rebecca . . .” I say out loud. “Or Sam could be her husband.”

“Try calling R first,” Courtney orders.

“Call? And say what? Just wondering if you’re the girl whose whole family was murdered twenty years ago? Wanna grab a soft serve? Let’s check out the one with the address first. Maybe Sam is her husband.”

“I don’t want to waste time,” he says. “I want to drive back to the red house after this. See if Oliver’s been back there since.”

I reach into Courtney’s bag and pull out the GPS tracker. The chip hasn’t moved.

“Pretty sure if he’d been there he would have taken Rico.”

“If you have a better lead, I’m open to suggestions.”

Pueblo starts looking vaguely familiar once we pull off the highway. It’s a blue-collar city, built around a now-defunct steel mill. Lot of foreclosed homes, trailer parks, fast food drive-throughs, as well as a disproportionate number of gun stores and marijuana dispensaries.

Without explicitly admitting that Courtney’s right, I dial the number for R Carlson. Rings six times.

“Hello . . . ?”

I’m almost sure it’s her immediately. The surprise in her voice tells me this phone rarely rings: few relatives and friends. And I think Elaine was right: hoarseness, exhaustion, long drawn out syllables likely indicative of drug use.

I summon my gentlest, least threatening voice and decide to say everything like it’s a question. To more perceptive people, it’s an annoying conversational tic, but the subliminal uncertainty you project often puts unstable personalities at ease.

“Hello? Becky?”

“Who . . . is this?”

I give Courtney a thumbs-up. If her name wasn’t Becky she would have said so.

“My name is Andrew? I’m calling from FedEx in Colorado Springs? We have a package here addressed for Becky Carlson, with a phone number, but what must be the wrong address, because we’ve had three failed deliveries. We’ll hold it for you for a week if you want to come pick it up. Otherwise we’ll have to return to sender?”

Short pause.

“Package?”

“Looks like a warehouse—probably something you ordered from Amazon or something, and just mistyped your address. Anyway like I said, you can come pick it up from our central office in Colorado Springs? We’re on 53 East—”

“I actually live in Pueblo now . . . I must have put in an old address . . . without thinking.”

I feel guilty. This is too easy.

This poor girl.

“Ohhh,” I say. “Wow, yeah that’s quite a drive. Listen, I can probably get another delivery attempt sent out tomorrow. What’s your new address?”

“Um. 157 Mesa Road, apartment 4J. 80241.”

“157 Mesa,” I repeat, as I jot it down. “4J. 80241. Got it. I’ll get that sent out to you ASAP. Have a great day.”

“Okay.”

I hang up and immediately type the address into Google maps. We’re only seventeen minutes away.

“Stop at a bakery on the way,” I say. “Gonna have to be delicate with this one.”

 

157 Mesa Road is part of a huge low-income apartment complex. Dozens of identical white stucco buildings that must contain at least 300 units. This colony makes me only slightly less sad than the prison we were in this morning. We drive around the winding parking lot for ten minutes before finding 157. That phone number was her landline—could tell by the sound of her picking up the receiver—and every lost minute makes me nervous that Becky has left home. As soon as Courtney parks, I grab the pink paper bag filled with baked goods and we slam the doors shut, start up the outdoor staircase.

“I don’t want to lie to her about who we are, or what we want,” Courtney says. “It’s too dirty.”

“Just hope she doesn’t slam the door in our face,” I say, huffing as we climb.

“If she does, she does,” he says.

I have a fresh sheen of sweat on my forehead by the time we reach 4J, on the fourth-floor landing. I take a deep breath, and ring the bell. Hear a chime go off inside. Nothing. I’m about to ring again, but Courtney stills my hand.

“Don’t look desperate,” he says. Runs a hand back through his buzzed hair, which leaves it unchanged.

Slow footsteps inside. Peephole goes dark, but I pretend like I don’t notice. Just stand there, hands clasped in front of me, trying to look as uncreepy as possible.

Door opens in, but she keeps the chain on. It’s pretty dark inside, can’t see much besides a single wary eye and a pale, extremely thin arm.

“Yeah?” she asks. She has the voice of someone who smokes a few packs a day, but it could also just be exhaustion.

Most people would make the connection between our sudden arrival and the FedEx call a half hour ago—but she’s obviously not super with it.

“I’m Frank,” I say, “And this is Courtney. We . . .” I sigh, it’s a sudden relief to not have to lie anymore. “We need your help, Becky.”

“Who . . . are you?”

I blink. Think of the best way to answer that.

“Oliver Vicks escaped from Saddleback Correctional Facility. We’re private investigators who are looking for him, and need your help.”

I’m not sure what effect I expected that name to have on her. Maybe to faint, or cry . . . instead she makes a sound that’s like a whimper, but more primal. A yelp almost, like a dog might make if you stepped on his paw. But she doesn’t budge from her post at the door. If I had to guess, based on the dilation of her single eye and the way her weight suddenly shifts, pushing the door halfway closed, I’d say she is unable to even formulate a response verbally.

“I’m sure you don’t want to think about anything related to this,” I say. “But if we could just come in and talk to you for even ten minutes, it could really help us in tracking him down.”

She’s so overwhelmed, I think, that she can’t even process what’s happening. We have to appeal to her on some kind of very primitive level. Luckily I anticipated this.

“We brought you something to eat,” I say, and hold up the pink bag. “Carrot cake, croissants and muffins.”

She makes a sound like “Mfgh” . . . Her voice is horribly dry.

The door suddenly slams shut. I bite my lip. Then hear the chain clink, slide, and then the door pulls open to reveal Becky Carlson.

It takes all my willpower to force a smile, and not to stare. The skin of her face is chalk-white and flaky. Reminds me of an ancient piece of limestone left out and exposed to the elements for a thousand years. Blond hair is so thin and splotchy that you can see her white scalp in several places. She has loose skin around her neck, the kind you find on eighty-year-old women; it’s so wrinkled and saggy that it’s almost like a chicken wattle. It’s sickening to think she’s younger than me. She’s so thin that even her extra small T-shirt is swimming on her.

But despite all this, I can believe that she used to be beautiful. Her eyes are still a rich blue, and if you squint—imagine her with okay skin—you can form a rough picture of what she must have looked like at seventeen, when she smiled as she took your order.

“C’mon,” she rasps and gestures for us to enter. As I step across the threshold I’m physically jarred by the smell. Something like rotten meat or rancid cabbage . . . layer upon layer of odor. A pastiche of the worst kind of smells that combine to form an unequivocal note of decay.

The lights are all off, curtains drawn shut. We follow her across wall-to-wall carpeting littered with orange peels, empty Chinese food containers, clothes, magazines, soda cans, to a blue futon that, judging by the way she collapses onto it—less sits on than allows herself to be swallowed—is a central figure in her life. The only other place to sit is on a low glass table cluttered with cigarette butts and food stains. I clear enough space to sit down on the table, Courtney takes one look at it and remains standing. His hands are jammed as deep into his pockets as they’ll go, and he’s struggling, and failing, to keep the discomfort off his face.

There’s an open kitchen to our right. A mountain of dirty dishes in the sink, and the faucet dripping slowly. Two interior doors, both open. One to the bathroom—which I pray I won’t have to visit—and one to a bedroom with a bare mattress on the floor. There’s an ancient, bulky TV on the floor facing the futon, a cathode ray tube—haven’t seen a TV like this for at least fifteen years. Jeopardy is on, at low volume.

I put the bag from the bakery at the feet of Becky’s futon, and she leans forward, picks a croissant out and devours it in a frenzy that makes the hairs on the back of my neck tingle.

When she finishes, I say: “So Becky, we were hoping we could ask you some questions.”

“Okay,” she says. She opens her mouth for a stilted inhalation, and I catch a glance of her teeth for the first time. Many are missing. That and the strips of charred foil littered on the floor make a pretty convincing case for heroin smoking.

I think, with a horrible twinge of guilt, She actually might be more responsive if we encouraged her to smoke now . . .

“So that night. If you can—”

“I knew you’d come,” she says abruptly. “I knew you’d come looking for Sophnot.”

Courtney goes rigid. I crack my knuckles.

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“He told me.”

I swallow.

“Oliver Vicks told you? You’ve seen him? Has he come here?”

Her pale blue eyes narrow. “No . . .” she says. “Maybe it was a dream. Is he dead?”

My head is swimming a little from the smell. It’s entirely conceivable, I think, that she could be mistaking dreams and reality. It’s hard to know exactly which of her bizarre threads to follow . . . Oliver is clearly not dead, but better to let her keep talking than correct her.

“What else—whether it was a dream, or what—what else did he tell you?”

“Lots of things.”

Without looking, she reaches a ghostly thin hand back into the pink bag and extracts a second croissant.

“Can you just tell us one thing?” Courtney says, the first time he’s spoken since we came in here.

“Mmm . . .” She thinks for a moment as she tears apart the croissant like a hyena digging into an antelope. “About triangles,” she says. “About Pythagoras . . . what did he say about triangles?”

Courtney raises an eyebrow. I lean in, figure I must have misheard, but Courtney—still standing—halts me with a hand on my shoulder.

“That if one angle is ninety degrees,” he says, “then the length of the hypotenuse squared is equal to the squared sums of the other two shorter sides.”

“That’s right,” she says, nodding, encouraged. Through a mouthful of mangled white pastry she adds: “Always—right?”

“Yes,” responds Courtney. “Always.”

“So . . .” She’s suddenly energized, whether from the calories or the topic I can’t say, but I find her change in demeanor frightening. Reminds me of a limp marionette being manipulated, jerked around by an unsteady hand, or a corpse suddenly sitting upright during his own funeral and grinning. “Can God create a right triangle that doesn’t obey that law?”

I’m overcome with a sense of unreality. I’m getting a bit used to the smell, and the darkness. I imagine that this apartment is all that exists in the world, and that beyond these walls is an utter void which I remember only as some distant dream.

“I don’t know,” replies Courtney. “Yes, I guess. He’s God. He can do anything.”

“Wrong.” Becky laughs, a raspy sound that makes me shudder. “He could, but it would require a complete undoing of this world. God restricted himself in order to create the world—this is a simple example. He said, ‘In this world, there can be no right triangles that don’t follow this rule.’ It was a fact long before Pythagoras discovered it.”

I’m not sure I’m entirely following, but Courtney seems to be. This is not what I expected from this interview . . .

“But Sophnot,” she says. “He drew a triangle that didn’t follow the rule.”

“But you just said—” I start.

“And the triangle was empty. Really empty. There was no God in this triangle. It was outside his creation. Sophnot trapped God. Caught him in a contradiction.”

She finishes her second croissant. I wonder when the last time she ate was.

“You call him Sophnot,” I say slowly. “Did he call himself that when you knew him in the restaurant?”

This question takes the wind out of her sails. Her hands drop to her sides, and she falls backwards into the welcoming cushions of the blue futon.

“I, um . . .” she says, as she closes her eyes and nestles into the pillow.

“So only in the ‘dreams’,” I venture. “That’s the only time you heard the name Sophnot?”

“Mmm . . .” She opens her eyes, but they’re now looking somewhere far away. I don’t know why—maybe it’s the blue in her eyes—but I imagine she’s picturing herself on a sailboat, floating in the middle of a quiet sea. And for the first time since entering, I remember this is a real, breathing, living person, and my heart breaks for this victim, and fills with rage for the man who for twenty years has somehow been slowly torturing her, destroying her, until all that remains is this sallow husk.

“I’m sure it’s very painful to think about, but do you have any idea why he did what he did?” I ask.

“Did what?” she responds faintly.

Courtney and I exchange a quick glance.

This is definitely the right girl . . . right?

“You used to work at the Rocky Mountain Bar and Grill in Colorado Springs, right?”

“In another life,” she sighs. Her shoulder twitches.

Courtney squats down on his haunches, puts his face close enough to her to engage, but not to threaten.

“Becky,” he says. “Can you remember him ever telling you anything about his plans about the future? Maybe what he’d do after he got out of prison?”

“No,” she says flatly.

“Did he ever contact you, after the restaurant?” Courtney says. “Maybe in the last few years?”

She doesn’t respond.

“Do you remember him ever saying anything about you being his queen?” I ask.

The last word has a physical impact on her. She flinches like I made to slap her in the face. But then she closes her eyes again and, pulls her knees up onto the futon and tucks them to her chest.

“Stop,” she says.

“Becky . . .” I say. “I know we’re asking something very difficult of you, but if you could just search your memory . . . maybe he said something about the books?”

She doesn’t respond, instead starts breathing fast, then her chest starts heaving. Her eyes go wide and she retches, spilling forward out of the futon onto the shag carpeting. She’s on her elbows, sticks her forehead into the filthy carpet and clasps her palms over the back of her head.

“Becky?”

Courtney tries to brush her shoulder and she recoils from his touch.

“Don’t touch me!” she screams, looking up at him. “No, no . . .”

Courtney gives me a helpless look. She buries her face back in the carpet and groans.

Courtney points to the door. “Let’s go,” he whispers. “We’re just upsetting her.”

I’m torn. Don’t want to upset her further, but also don’t feel like we’ve gotten anything concrete yet.

“Becky—” I start.

“Yes. He said I’d be his queen,” she says, her voice low and lucid. “He said he’d make me a palace. And that my brother . . . my little brother. Every week I have dreams where he shows me my brother again. He’s still there. He’s still alive.”

I wince, thinking of the evidence we found contrary to this in the red house. Take a deep breath, and instantly regret it.

“Becky, simple yes or no: Have you seen Oliver Vicks—in real life, not in a dream—since that night in the restaurant?”

“I don’t know . . .” she whines, still crouched on the carpet. “I can’t tell what’s a dream and what’s real . . .”

Time to push it.

“Well, we spoke to him on the phone last night,” I say. “He’s definitely not dead.”

She locks eyes with me for a moment, as if trying to discern whether I’m telling the truth or not. And, if I’m reading this right, once she decides that wasn’t a lie, she crumples. Her elbows fall away. She drops flat onto the carpet and screams into the filthy shag. The muffled cry of anguish makes me shudder. Courtney can’t take it anymore—goes to the door and rushes out.

I stand up, trying to ignore how sticky the ass of my pants is. Before following him out, I write down our cell phone number on a piece of my notepad and leave it for her on her glass table. She’s sobbing and pounding her fists against the floor. It’s difficult to watch.

“Call if you want to talk,” I say.

I duck outside, but keep the door propped open with my boot. Courtney is a little white around the mouth, and the sweat on his brow has nothing to do with the heat.

“We can’t just leave her like that, can we?” he asks me softly.

“What choice do we have?” I ask.

Courtney looks like he’s about to say something, but then closes his mouth, stares at me, his entire face seeming to quiver. I close the door gently behind me.

“Man,” I say.

Courtney just nods and then wordlessly lopes down the stairs. He sits down cross legged on the curb next to the Honda. I squat beside him.

“I’m fine,” he says. “Just give me a second.”

“Take your time,” I say. “When you’re ready you need to call Mindy and ask her some questions.”

Courtney looks at me, shielding his eyes from the afternoon sun with a pale hand.

“Why?” he asks.

“I just started thinking in there, when she was talking about her brother, that we might have been thinking about these books wrong the whole time. We assumed that, like most books, what’s written on the pages is the most important part. And the bindings are just there to protect the pages.”

Courtney raises an eyebrow.

“What do you mean . . . ?” he says.

“What if, I mean, look if you’re an architect, what’s more important, the interior layout of the house or the way it looks from the outside?”

Courtney’s eyes go wide and the faintest smile escapes his lips.

“Neither. They go hand in hand. They’re one and the same.”

“Right.” I nod. “And the same could be said for a human body. Which is more important, all the stuff inside, the organs—or the exterior? The skin?”

Courtney nods as he stands up.

“So, if that’s the case, then it’s not as if Oliver is just binding these haphazardly, with whoever he happens to feel like killing,” Courtney says. “The first book was meant to be bound with her brother—”

“And the most recent was meant for Rico,” I say. “Why wouldn’t he be as patient and deliberate with these victims as he is with everything else?”

Courtney scratches at his neck like he has fleas. He’s excited.

“Why Rico?”

“No idea. Why Becky’s brother? Why any of these people? That’s why we have to talk to Mindy.”

Courtney shakes his head.

“Don’t follow.”

“There were twenty-four drawers in the file cabinet in the red house,” I say. “Rico’s picture was in the twenty-second. He was meant for the twenty-second book. Which means there’s two left. And if Mindy knows what’s written in those last two books—maybe she has some photocopies or something she can read—maybe she can figure out who he has planned for them.”

Courtney chews on his thumbnail.

“Maybe Rico knew who Oliver was planning to kill. And that’s where Rico thinks the books belong? With them?”

I shake my head.

“That’s a stretch. I was just thinking, if we know who he’s planning to kill next, maybe we can find him, turn him in, and get the money back. Which may not be a bad idea, because I’m not super optimistic about us finding those books in the next two days.”

“That’s good Frank,” he says. “Real good. I knew it was worth getting you from Budapest.”

I snort.

“Yeah, thanks for that.”

 

“Just to be clear, we’re not telling Mindy anything, right?” I say. Courtney’s got his penlight out in the passenger seat, examining the heretic’s fork collar from the red house, probing with a pair of tweezers and his lock picks, carefully avoiding the razor-sharp prongs on the front of the device. Mindy refused to talk shop over the phone. Insisted that if we wanted any info to come talk to her in her hotel in Denver. Honestly, I probably would have done the same in her position.

I let my sneaker sink down on the gas. The highways between Denver, Colorado Springs and Pueblo are remarkably straight. I’m so tired that part of me feels like I could just fall asleep on the steering wheel and have Courtney nudge me awake in a half hour.

“Mmhmm,” he murmurs.

“Not that we have all this figured out. We’re still clearly missing some basic facts . . .” I say. “Still don’t understand why anyone would want to go to prison for sixteen years. If he just wanted money from Sampson, is this really the most efficient way to do it?”

“Well,” Courtney says, as he toys with the device, “I think we’re pretty sure at this point that the books are more than just a lure for Sampson’s money. Man, how the hell do you open this thing?”

Something snaps. Courtney yelps and I jump in my seat.

“What the hell was that?”

Courtney shows me the thin line of blood in his palm. Two previously retracted blades have shot out into the interior of the collar. I don’t even want to think about what someone’s neck would look like after this thing activated. Porous.

“Are you okay?” I say.

“I’m fine,” Courtney replies, wrapping his palm with a bandage from his red bag. “This device is astoundingly complex.”

“Yeah? Seems pretty simple to me.”

“No I mean, the lock mechanism. There are two kinda weirdly shaped circular holes on either side of it. Each one has about thirty pins in it at varying depths . . . some are meant to be depressed, some aren’t. To unlock this you need two very precise tubular keys to be entered simultaneously. Otherwise—”

“You’re having a new ventilation system installed.”

“Yes,” Courtney says, and nods. “The metalwork is pretty staggering. I know locks, Frank. I’ve never seen anything like this. He made this himself. These must take him a month apiece to make. And there were at least seven of them just in that one room.”

We’re both silent for a moment, contemplating who we’re dealing with. Someone manipulative enough to talk his way out of a prison, and compulsive enough to handcraft instruments of torture.

“Here’s the million-dollar question,” I say, struggling to keep my eyes open. “These people he manipulates: Sampson, Becky, all the followers he allegedly had in prison, sure seems like they believe his hogwash. But does he? Or is it all just a ruse to get whatever it is he wants?”

Courtney is quiet for a moment. Just when I think maybe he’s nodded off he says:

“Are we sure it’s hogwash?”

I grit my teeth. I know where this is going. The same place it did five years ago, our last job together.

“What are you suggesting, Courtney?” I ask, knowing exactly what he’s suggesting.

“Well just . . .” He strokes his cheek. “The way he somehow knew Sampson’s dream, the way he knew he’d get out of prison sixteen years in advance, the way he’s apparently appearing in Becky’s dreams—”

“Becky is a heroin addict.”

“I’m just saying. As you pointed out, it also seems possible that he had his string of twenty-four victims planned out decades in advance. There was what Heald said about knowing every moment of his life, past and future. What if he really has some sort of actual methodology to, I don’t know, do something?”

I don’t respond.

“You know,” Courtney continues. “Like manipulate things. The universe or God, or whatever you want to call it.”

I chew on my lip.

“I didn’t know you believed in God,” I say.

“Well, I still haven’t ruled it out,” he says. I can tell he’s picking his words carefully. “Still in information-gathering mode, you know. Waiting to make an informed decision.” He clears his throat. “What about you, Frank?”

I stay silent, focus on the taillights of the sixteen-wheeler in the distance. I know what he’s getting at. I’ve been expecting this since we met in the Ritz in Budapest.

“Frank,” he says softly. “I know you have the tape.”

I inhale sharply.

“What do you mean?” I ask, maybe accelerating a little out of anxiety.

“You brought it with you up to that hotel room, killed Greta, and then left. The tape wasn’t found at the crime scene—it took me forever to confirm that, but I did. Which means you have it. I hope it’s somewhere safe. There are people who would pay a pretty penny for that thing.”

My first instinct is to lie. Tell Courtney he’s wrong. But he wouldn’t believe me, and at the moment I just don’t have the mental energy to think of a plausible lie.

“It’s somewhere safe,” I say.

“And what it says . . . Did you listen?”

“I heard a bit, in the hotel room. Didn’t listen since then though. Haven’t heard it all.”

Courtney is trying not to sound too eager. He’s like a little kid pretending he could live without a bag of candy.

“And what . . . ?” Courtney says.

“I do believe that there are things we can’t see,” I say. “I’m not saying God, and I’m not convinced there’s life after death, but there are things going on. I don’t claim to understand them, but . . .” I clear my throat. “Let’s just leave it at that.”

“When we get out of this,” Courtney says delicately, “Maybe you could take me to where you’ve stashed the tape?”

I look over at him. His fingers are interlocked, shoulders tense, eyes trained on me. Bandage on his hand looks to have done the job—cut wasn’t too deep.

“You know, I probably trust you more than I trust myself,” I say. “But you’ll just have to believe me when I say I’m doing you a major favor by not letting you ever see or listen to that tape.”

“That’s a no?” he asks.

“That’s a no,” I confirm.

Courtney goes quiet, probably mulling whether it’s worth it or not to keep prodding me. Seems to decide against it.

I watch miles of identical road melt in front of us and think about the tape, tucked into a tiny deposit box in a bank in Paris. I paid the fees for them to keep the box for me, sixty years, up front. In cash. Long ago decided that if I don’t go back for it myself, I don’t want anybody to. Best case, sixty years from now, some French bank manager opens the box, sees that thing, and tosses it in the trash.

 

It’s only ten at night by the time we pull into the parking garage beside Mindy’s hotel, but it feels like five in the morning. I keep seeing dark things flitting at the edge of my vision, little laughing faces that disappear as soon as I focus on them. I’m tired.

Mindy is staying at a very nice hotel. I’m shocked this kind of class exists in Denver, but apparently there’s quite a big tourism industry here. The lobby is all crystal, black and white marble floors, bellboys in humiliating outfits. But the lobby is nothing compared to the hotel proper: All thirty stories are visible from the ground floor atrium. It’s like they hollowed out the core of the whole building. Every floor has a balcony, from which you can see all the way down to the café on the ground floor. All four elevators are encased in transparent shafts, and you can see the guests inside ascending dizzyingly up to their rooms.

It reminds me a bit of Sampson’s house, but way less creepy. In fact, the openness—total lack of shadow, unbelievable illumination that’s filling what’s essentially one massive room—is very peaceful somehow.

Nobody hassles us in the lobby. Hotels are some of the easiest places to snoop around, because you’re just assumed to be a guest, and if you just act the part, most of the staff are too scared to incorrectly accost you.

We take the elevator up to the seventeenth floor. In the compact space, I get a real strong whiff of Courtney. He—like me—hasn’t bathed since leaving Sampson’s. Hopefully Mindy won’t object to us using her shower.

We knock on 1719. See the peephole go dark for a second, and then Mindy lets us in. Slams the door behind us and bolts it.

“Don’t touch anything,” she says before we can even sit down.

She’s wearing flannel pajamas and wrinkled white tank top. Her hair is out of control and her glasses are so dusty that they’re almost cloudy. Her mousey cheeks are bright pink, as if with fever.

The room is nice. Or, it was nice. Mindy has done a real number on it. I’m not sure I could soil a hotel room this much in twenty-four hours if I tried. She’s been ashing her joints directly onto the carpet. The surface of the only table in the room is buried beneath a mountain of papers, many stained with peanut butter. The room smells rank enough that I lose any self-consciousness I may have had about my current hygienic state.

She and Becky should hang out.

She sees me staring at the ash in the carpet. “It’s on Sampson’s card,” she says. “I figured since he’s already out forty-eight million, he won’t notice the cleaning fee.”

“So,” Courtney says, sitting on the edge of one of two twin beds. I pull a chair from the desk and sit down myself. “We had some questions for you.”

Mindy guffaws. Lights up a joint and doesn’t bother to open the window to the balcony.

“You two must be at wit’s end if you’re coming to old Mindy for help. For some reason, Sampson seems to think you have the books. But if you did, I’m quite sure you wouldn’t be here.”

I lean forward in my chair to read one of the papers on top of the heap and Mindy instantly jumps to snatch it away.

“That’s private research,” she snaps, and then realizes that her laptop is open on her bed and rushes to close it, but not before I recognize the Expedia logo on the screen.

“Looks like you’re at wit’s end yourself,” I say, “if you’re planning on flying. Where are you going? London? Along with your hand-copied pages?”

She glares at me, seems to consider lying for a moment, then shrugs.

“What else am I going to do?” she says. “I’ll never see the books again, and Sampson certainly isn’t going to let me continue staying in his guesthouse after the aquarium incident.”

“We might be able to find them,” Courtney says. “We have some information.”

I stare at him: Don’t tell her anything!

He lowers his chin and shoots me a serious look: Let me handle this.

“What kind of information?” Mindy says.

“A text from Rico,” Courtney says. “He stashed the books somewhere before he died. Sophnot killed him.”

I feel blood rush to my cheeks. I shake my head at him: What are you doing?

“Patience, Frank,” he says out loud, as if that ever made anybody more patient.

“What do you mean, Sophnot killed Rico?” she asks.

Courtney removes his camera from his acrylic satchel and shows her pictures of the crime scene. She slaps a hand over her mouth.

“Oh my god,” she gasps, and looks away. “I never . . . I thought he took the skin from the morgue or something.”

“C’mon,” I say. “He was in prison for murder. You never put two and two together?”

“It crossed my mind that he was killing other prisoners for this,” she admits, looking quite ill. “But . . . I knew Rico . . . We saw him yesterday.”

She takes a long draw, as though to medicate away the grisly image.

“So what was the text?”

“Done mourning already?” I ask.

She makes a face like she’s sucking on a lemon.

“Just show me the goddamn phone, yeah?”

Courtney looks ready to just hand her the iPhone.

“Hold on,” I say. “Let’s talk more about these bindings.”

Mindy folds her arms over her chest.

“What do you want to know?”

“What . . . I mean, what does it mean? Why do you think Oliver cares about binding them like this?”

Mindy throws her nearly finished joint to the carpet and grinds it out under her sock.

“I have a contact at Stanford, who has a lot of experience with this kind of thing. I spoke to her a few times about the bindings.”

“Wait,” I say. “How is this a common enough thing that there’s an expert in this field at Stanford?”

Mindy sighs, like she’s just now recalling how tedious it is to explain things to a slug like me.

“It’s not common anymore, obviously. I mean, it was never common. But there are a few dozen examples of this throughout history. The most recent documented binding of this sort was more than two hundred years ago. A doctor, for reasons I’m not entirely clear on, decided to bind a book he wrote on illnesses with the skin of a patient who died on his operating table. There was also one story of a guy who requested that a book be bound in his own skin after he died, and given to one of his pals. Anyways, it’s not like this is the only thing this woman studies, but there are a few such books in the Stanford library, and she’s familiar with them.”

“The other examples . . .” Courtney asks. “When else has this technique been used?”

Mindy nods, the topic obviously exciting her, the way I’ve seen gambler’s eyes light up at just the mention of poker. The books are the only thing I’ve ever heard her talk about at length.

“So, the thing I found most interesting was—well, it’s not confirmed exactly, but there’s a theory that several manuscripts from ancient Egypt—papyruses—were bound in human skin. They’ve mostly disintegrated—the leather wasn’t well preserved—but that’s one thing the woman at Stanford is looking into now.”

I shift in my chair.

“What kind of manuscripts?” I ask, thinking about the story Heald told us about Joseph going down to Egypt.

Mindy shakes her head.

“I don’t know—I don’t think she even knows. I sense her research is at a fairly early stage. But still, I thought it was worth mentioning. Pertinent.”

Courtney nods.

“Very interesting,” he says softly.

“So I had a thought,” I say. “Rico was supposed to be the twenty-second book. That’s twenty-two in twenty years, starting with the waitress’s brother. Pretty deliberate. No doubt Oliver could have gone faster if he wanted to. Do you think there’s like . . . is it possible he wants certain victims for certain volumes?”

Mindy’s eyes open a little wider. “Hmm.”

Courtney smiles at me, beaming like a proud parent.

I rub my fresh stubble and again regret shaving off my conversational comfort blanket. “And if so, do you think it could be possible to determine from the content of an unbound volume whose skin he wants for it?”

Mindy licks her chapped lips. I find her eagerness a bit revolting, given the context.

“It’s an exciting idea. And I can’t rule it out.”

“Can you look in the copies you have, see if you can find something?”

She snorts.

“Maybe if I had four months to kill. And even then, I only have about twenty hand-copied pages total, each from a different volume. As I’ve mentioned several times, there is a ton of cross-reference. Imagine trying to understand something fundamental about Crime and Punishment by just reading the first five pages. Now imagine those pages are in Russian, and you don’t read Russian, or know anybody who does.”

“Still, good thinking Frank,” Courtney says, probably unaware of how patronizing it sounds. “The Egyptian thing intrigues me. Doesn’t seem like a coincidence.”

“Because of the hieroglyphic nature of his writing?” Mindy asks.

Courtney raises an eyebrow.

“You don’t know what Sophnot means?”

“No . . .” she says. “What do you mean? I thought it was just a nickname he gave himself.”

“It’s from the Old Testament,” he says. “It is a nickname—that the Egyptian Pharaoh used once for Joseph. It means something like he who solves riddles. At least that’s what the guy at the prison told us.”

“You went to the prison! So how did he get out? Did he escape?” Mindy’s voice cracks. “Show me the fucking text from Rico!”

I clear my throat. Courtney looks to me. The phone is in my pocket, but I don’t reach for it. He turns to Mindy.

“First we need to address the event in which Frank and I manage to retrieve those books. I know you would like to take them yourself. That’s understandable. But the situation is pretty dire. Sampson thinks we have the books. He said if we don’t get them to him by Friday, he’ll call his friends in the FBI to track us down. He’ll probably tell them we stole forty-eight million dollars from him. It won’t be pretty.”

Mindy takes off her cloudy glasses and rubs her tired eyes.

“So why not tell him the truth? That you screwed up the swap.”

“I didn’t screw up anything!” I snap. “I still don’t think you’ve gotten through your head: The situation was fucked from the start. Besides, Sampson wouldn’t even believe the truth at this point. The reason he thinks we have the books, and is giving us until Friday at all, is because Oliver Vicks told him to.”

Mindy blinks. “How do you know that?”

“Because he told us,” I sigh. “Oliver Vicks—I guess it was him, he was using that voice thing—called us last night to tell us as much. Oliver is under the impression that we have the books because of something Rico said, I suppose. So if we just tell Sampson we don’t have them he certainly wouldn’t believe us over his man-crush. And even if he did, he’d still send the feds after us out of spite, for losing them. ‘I’ll clutch at your ankles and drag you down with me into hell’ were the words he used.”

Mindy plays with a clump of her nappy hair. Licks her dry lips.

“Wow,” she says. “You two are in trouble.”

“Well,” I say. “Don’t think your ankles are so safe. I’m sorry to tell you, but you’re in pretty deep, too, whether you like it or not. Oliver knows you were at the aquarium, too, and probably thinks you conspired with us to take his books. If we can’t find the books, or lead the cops to Oliver, he’ll surely encourage Sampson to have you arrested too. Or send those guys in khaki after us. I’m afraid you’re in the same boat as us.”

She puts her glasses back on and fiddles with her lighter.

“Okay,” she says.

“Okay?” I peer at her. “So . . . you’re fine with us returning the books to Sampson?”

She shrugs. “What do you want me to say? Okay. You made your case and I agree. Can I see the text now please?”

Courtney looks to me for approval. I turn my palms to the ceiling.

“Fuck it.” I pull the iPhone from my pocket, unlock it and pull up Rico’s text. “Lord knows we’re not getting anything out of it. And unless we find those books, come Friday our lives are going to be one long cavity search—and that’s if we’re lucky and don’t end up like Rico.”

She eagerly takes the phone from me.

“Left books where Sophnot never goes . . . Where they belong,” she reads thoughtfully. “Ya?”

“Could be a yak. Or a Yakitori restaurant . . .” Courtney starts. I roll my eyes.

“You make anything of it?” I ask.

“No clue,” she says, shrugging.

Is she lying to us? Is she just gonna go straight there afterwards and pick them up herself?

“That’s why we went to the prison,” Courtney says. “First to confirm that he wasn’t there, and then . . . well if Oliver escaped that might be the place he’d never return to. Maybe Rico made his way there before the guys from the aquarium caught up to him. There would have been enough time.”

“And?”

Courtney shakes his head. “It was a stretch anyways. But no, if Rico knew what happened in that place, the prison is the last place he’d stash the books.”

Mindy’s brown eyebrows furrow.

“Why. What happened in that place?”

I sigh. Maybe it’s because I’m too exhausted to think of clever lies, or because we basically have zero leads at this point, and nothing to lose, I explain everything Heald told us. About how Oliver just walked out the front gates four years ago. And then the visit to Becky.

Mindy listens patiently, growing increasingly perturbed.

“So if I understand this right,” she says, “You still have absolutely no idea where Rico stashed the books.”

I grimace.

“Right. So. Where does Sophnot never go? And why would the books belong there?”

I study Mindy’s face closely as she thinks.

“Why would Rico send you a riddle?” Mindy asks. “Why not just tell you exactly where he put them?”

Courtney sits up a little straighter.

“I don’t know,” he says.

“No idea,” I say.

“I mean . . .” Mindy scratches an eyebrow. “He must have been worried that Sophnot or those guys from the aquarium would see this text. And somehow, he thought this was a text that you two would understand, but those guys, or even Sophnot himself wouldn’t.”

“Or that it would at least give us a better chance at getting there first . . .” I say. “I think it’s probable that Rico only texted us once those guys hunted him down. Maybe after he’d dropped off the books, while he was running. If he just texted us an address and Oliver or the goons confiscated his phone, they’d just head straight there.”

“Of course, Rico wasn’t exactly in his right mind,” Courtney says slowly. “We think he’d been chained up in that room for years. He was malnourished, probably sleep deprived . . . frantic at the time of writing this. There’s a decent possibility that it’s not even sensical.”

We all consider this unsettling possibility for a moment—that we’re reading too much into Rico’s message.

“I have something that might help us,” she says. “Something I found a few years ago.”

She grabs her laptop, beckoning us to come closer. We sit on either side of her on the bed. She smells even worse than Courtney.

She opens a document with a bunch of links to old news articles.

“I found this stuff a few years ago,” she explains. “Was trying to learn more about Oliver himself. Almost everything online is just about the buildings he designed, articles about ribbon cuttings and so on.”

I spot a professional headshot of him in one of the open windows. He’s grinning, looks legitimately happy. And I shudder as I study his eyes. It’s subtle, but I can see what Elaine was talking about at the diner: The whites are too white. Glossy, like waxed ping-pong balls.

Mindy continues: “But then I came upon something I vaguely recalled hearing a few years ago, or maybe even reading, but I just never gave it much thought. Probably because it seemed to make so much sense: He’s not a properly licensed architect.”

I peer into the screen to read the article, but Mindy insists on paraphrasing it herself.

“A few years before he was arrested, it was uncovered that Oliver Vicks was a fraud. He’d never gone to architecture school. Never even went to university. In fact, he may not even have made it all the way through high school. He was first hired by a firm in Denver with a phony diploma from a small school in England. This was way before the days of the internet . . . couldn’t Google him. And by all accounts, he knew exactly what he was doing, so there was no reason to ever be suspicious. And once you’re in the company, working, getting contracts . . . why would anybody ever look into your past?”

“How was he found out?”

Mindy smiles.

“His firm had a project designing a huge industrial barn. To house hundreds of cows comfortably, with good lighting and ventilation—unlike the rest of the industry.”

“A dairy . . .” I swallow. “Sampson’s farm?”

Mindy nods.

“Somebody on the architecture side made a mistake in the plans, and only when the barn was nearly done did someone realize it wasn’t up to code. The firm claimed they weren’t liable for the cost of bringing it up to code, because the dairy hadn’t provided all the proper zoning documents or something. There was a civil case, for the damages. They were asking for a million and a half dollars for renovations. Everyone on the design team had to testify including Oliver. But during discovery by the dairy farm’s lawyers they did a fairly standard background check on him, and everything came out. That was the end.”

“What happened after?” Courtney asks. “Did he keep working?”

“No,” she says. “Obviously not. You can’t have an unlicensed architect designing buildings. It’s not even safe.”

“But everything he’d already designed . . .” I say.

“Was fine, correct.” Mindy nods. “Still, when I first found out about this I got ahold of someone who worked with Oliver on one project, told him I was a reporter, and he told me it was quite a scandal. He was shunned. Totally blacklisted. If this happened today, it would be all over Buzzfeed. Instead, there are just very few records of what happened after that.”

“Seriously?” I say. “Oliver blamed Sampson for outing him? It’s hardly his fault.”

Mindy shrugs.

“Don’t ask me to explain how Oliver Vicks thinks.”

“So,” Courtney says slowly. “You realized years ago that this was all an elaborate revenge by Sophnot?”

“I don’t think it’s a revenge thing,” Mindy says. “I figured Oliver just remembered James from the trial, spotted him in prison and saw an opportunity to get a US Senator in his pocket. Obviously it sometimes took on a sadistic flavor . . . advising him to cut off his genitals and so forth, but I think those were just further steps to ensure James’s future loyalty. Obviously I thought Oliver was still in prison. I never imagined that he’d somehow managed to get Rico to steal the books for him.”

“Well,” I say, spreading my hands. “I think it’s pretty clear now that it’s a revenge thing. He’s extorted forty-eight million dollars from Sampson. My question is, why the hell wouldn’t you tell Sampson this?”

“I did,” Mindy replies. “He already knew. Sophnot told him before James and I ever met. He told him it was part of God’s plan, that being stripped of his job as an architect forced him into the humility he needed. He thanked James for what happened.”

I shake my head.

“Well, there goes that. Was hoping we’d able to prove to Sampson he’s been had by showing him this.”

Mindy lights up another joint.

“It’s way too late for that,” she says. “It’s hard to imagine anything that could shake James’s faith in Sophnot at this point.”

“Shame,” Courtney sighs. “I told Frank earlier today. The only real motivators of crime are shame, love and fear. It appears we’re dealing with a man who is trying to rectify his public shaming.” He sucks in his boney cheeks. “In some ways that’s the worst. Insecure men are always the most dangerous.”

 

Mindy agrees to let us sleep there. It takes all my remaining strength to stay upright in the shower for long enough to soap myself up, wash my hair. Don’t bother to brush my teeth—my eyes are twitching and my vision is like a TV screen that’s not getting great antenna reception.

I don’t even ask Courtney and Mindy to turn out the light for me. My head hits the pillow and immediately I flit into a half-dream state, where I can still hear the two of them speaking quietly, laughing a little, but it feels like it’s a million miles away. And then I slip down into blissful darkness.

I’m the kind of sleeper who’s still aware of his surroundings—a part of me never goes off alert. I probably could have snoozed until noon the next morning if a soft, high-pitched sound didn’t jerk me awake around three.

My eyes shoot open, and I’m about to sit up and grab my gun when I realize what’s happening. Mindy is sighing.

Mindy. Courtney. One bed.

Would have preferred an axe murderer bursting through the door and slaughtering us all. A little rustle of bedsheets. A slippery sound like a wet suction cup that I pray is just them kissing.

There’s no way Courtney made a move. It was her. Trying to buy a little book insurance?

I try to ignore it, fall back asleep, but this genie won’t get stuffed back in the bottle.

I stay totally still. Don’t want to let them know I can hear them. The awkwardness would just be unbearable. At least I’m facing away from them . . .

They know I’m right here, right!?

Indecipherable whispering.

Rhythmic creaking of bedsprings.

God. Dammit.

Heavy breathing. Mindy makes a serious little gasp. It’s almost worse not seeing it, because I’m imagining it. Courtney’s bare boney back, Mindy’s face aglow in ecstasy, her hands squeezing his tiny ass, pulling him deeper . . .

Jesus, Frank. Don’t make this worse than it has to be.

“C’mon,” she whispers. Well, now I know I wasn’t imagining all of this. They’re really doing this. Mindy and Courtney are fucking three feet away from me.

Don’t they realize how goddamn tired I am? How badly I need this sleep? Maybe she knows I can hear. Maybe that kooky bitch gets off on that shit.

“Hit me.” Her voice is raw.

“What? What do you mean?” I hear Courtney whisper.

“Hit me. Hard.”

I hear a pathetic slap.

“C’mon, hard. Be a fucking man. Hit me. Punish me.”

Another slap.

“Like that? Sorry I’ve never really–”

“Harder. Punish me.”

The creaking quickens. The hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

“Hit me. Punish me. Tear my skin. Rip it off,” she groans. “Bind me.”

Creaking comes to a sudden halt.

“Stop, stop,” mutters Courtney. “Stop it.”

Mindy doesn’t respond. The bedsprings get a break for a moment, and I can’t tell exactly what’s happening in the other bed.

Then she says something softly that gets lost in the buzz of the air conditioner.

“It’s okay,” Courtney says softly.

“I’m so sorry. I’m sorry. It’s the books.” I think she’s crying. “They change you.”

A little chill shoots down my spine.

“It’s fine.”

A few minutes of silence. Then she murmurs:

“The language, the complexity, the challenge and epiphanies . . . it’s so exciting. But it’s like a drug. It rewires your brain.”

“There’s a lot there that you haven’t told us about.”

“Of course,” she says. She can’t keep the longing out of her voice. “You’d love them, Courtney.”

One of them shifts in the bed.

“But they were written by a criminal. A murderer.”

Mindy never responds to that. They go quiet. After about ten minutes I’m pretty sure both of them have dozed off.

But I’m completely wired. And their little bout of lust cost me another night of sleep—because I already know there’s no chance I’ll be able to settle down now. I go through the motions, close my eyes and sink deeper into the pillow but the projector in my mind’s eye whirrs to life, playing a hideous loop: Becky’s sunken face, Sampson’s self-imposed mutilation, the deep scratch marks where the leather collar was anchored to the bronze wall, the twenty-two passport-sized photos in the file cabinet. And dancing in and out of each scene is a ghost in a white wax mask molded to Rico’s face.

I toss around in bed, too hot, too cold. Four in the morning. Five. Air-conditioning starts and stops. Courtney snores intermittently.

I think about our visit to the grill, about our talk with Warden Heald, about the orgy at the red house . . .

Wonder how often that happens? Wonder if any of those kids have a clue what’s going on downstairs there.

Five thirty in the morning, and sleep is a distant memory. My body is so tired it hurts. My jaw kills from the shot I took from the baby bouncer, and my ribs hurt from a hit I can’t remember—maybe he punched me in the gut while trying to strangle me. Legs are sore from all the running.

I wonder where Oliver Vicks is at this moment. If we can’t find the books, the next best thing would be to find him and either lead the cops to him or just put a bullet in his brain.

Or maybe we’ll get lucky, and that heart attack he predicted will hit tomorrow.

Courtney is right. The guy isn’t crazy, in any conventional sense. He just happens to have a pretty wild belief set.

Which we still don’t understand . . .

I sit up. In the other bed, Mindy and Courtney are a tangle of limbs, with key junctures mercifully concealed by a stiff white sheet. I slide open the top drawer of the nightstand between our beds, and I feel around for the Gideon Bible I’d assumed would be there. Take it into the bathroom and flip the light on.

I sit down on the only chair in the room—mitigate the blasphemy by closing the lid first—and flip open the periwinkle cover. I immediately remember why I’ve never really tried to read this thing. Table of contents is words like Leviticus, Matthew, Corinthians, which I’m familiar with in name only. I leave the bathroom to get the iPhone and return to the holy throne. Google Joseph Egypt in bible. Genesis 37. It takes me about five minutes to locate these inscrutable coordinates. It starts:

Joseph, a young man of seventeen, was tending the flocks with his brothers, the sons of Bilhah and the sons of Zilpah, his father’s wives, and he brought their father a bad report about them . . .

The story of Joseph is long, and hard to understand. I recognize a few things from what Heald told us: Joseph’s brothers selling him to slavers who take him to Egypt, the place where Pharaoh calls Joseph “Sophnot” (Zaphenath-Paneah in this edition. Based on my extensive trove of biblical knowledge, I assume it’s the same thing). But the language is dense and archaic and maybe it’s because it’s five-thirty in the goddamn morning, or maybe because the Bible is the kind of thing you need a teacher to help you decipher, but every couple sentences my eyes go unfocused, and the words become little black ants scurrying around the page.

This story though . . . these fifteen pages must be damn important to Oliver Vicks. Is it possible he checked himself into prison, just to be like Joseph?

I slam the Bible shut and go back into the bedroom, letting the bathroom door close loudly, half hoping it wakes the two lovebirds up, and gives me an excuse to scream at them for ruining my night. I flop back down into bed.

What was I hoping for? A little-known passage where Sophnot—né Joseph–decides to go on a killing spree, and use his victims’ skin to bind his papyrus manuscripts, then gives the exact street address he hides out in?

Oliver Vicks. So fearless that he checked himself into prison, knowing he’d walk out when he was good and ready. Doesn’t fear death because he knows how he’ll die.

So would he really leave his precious skin hanging in the red house, because he was scared of us?

Doesn’t make sense.

I sit up again, and use the flashlight on the phone to find Courtney’s red acrylic bag on the floor. Rummage through his tools until I find the GPS scanner, and return to bed with it. Flip it on. It scans for three minutes and finds nothing. The chip is gone.

 

“Didn’t sleep well, Frank?” Mindy asks, between big bites of pancake at the hotel café. 7:30 a.m. Spent the last couple hours staring at the ceiling thinking about two things: 1) what happened to the chip and 2) if it’s a big mistake to bring Mindy with us to the red house to find out. I think her intentions might be alright—she certainly shared a lot with us yesterday. But after hearing her loopy pillow talk . . . She’s clearly not in her right mind and we can’t risk her doing something crazy. What if Oliver Vicks is there in the red house? Would she try to stop us from killing him because he wrote the books she loves? If she’s desperate enough to bang Courtney, well.

“No. No I did not sleep well,” I say.

“Sure looked like you went down pretty quickly,” says Courtney, wrapping up an absolute decimation of his fruit salad. He’s eating fast and avoiding Mindy’s eyes.

“Yeah, it was quick,” I say, as dryly as I can. “Quick, but not super satisfying.”

Neither of them seem to catch it. They just keep eating. All I’ve got is coffee and a cake donut. I feel sick.

“You two seem to have pretty healthy appetites this morning,” I say.

“Yeah well.” Courtney slurps down some orange juice. “We’ll need our strength today. It’s time to get access to any private CCTVs from around the aquarium, try to find Rico, and trace his path. It’s a shot in the dark—even if we can get some businesses to show us their footage, there are hundreds of angles to review. And there are only three of us, and we only have one day. But I think it’s our best chance. You should try to eat more, Frank. I’ll get you a bowl of oatmeal.”

Before I can protest, Courtney shoots up from his chair—obviously relieved at the excuse to extricate himself from the awkwardness—and rushes to the breakfast buffet. I watch Mindy drench a piece of pancake in syrup then scarf it down. I can’t tell whether I’m over-or underestimating her. Is she really trying to be cooperative? Or was her desperate performance last night a carefully calculated ruse, to convince Courtney to let her take the books to London with her if we find them.

You’d love them Courtney . . .

Courtney returns with a big bowl of oatmeal, garnished with strawberries.

“Try to force something down,” he says, putting a hand on my shoulder.

“Thanks, champ,” I growl, and devour a tasteless spoonful. “So you two then, you two slept well?”

Courtney stares at the bottom of his orange juice glass. “Yeah, pretty well,” he says softly.

“Did you sleep on the floor or something, Courtney?” I ask lightly.

“No, I mean. Well not on the floor, exactly . . .” he says, sounding like he has something stuck in his throat, awkwardly prodding some pieces of fruit.

“I just thought maybe after you two banged,” I say offhandedly, “she kicked you out of bed.”

Courtney drops his fork and goes deep red. Mindy continues eating, unfazed.

“Frank . . .” Courtney starts.

I shrug.

“You two are adults. You can do whatever you want,” I say.

“We thought you were asleep,” he stammers.

“I mean, I was asleep,” I say. “Before you started.”

“I don’t see why this is even any of your business, Frank,” says Mindy.

I turn to her slowly, raise an eyebrow in disbelief.

“Because I was next to you,” I say. “But hey, it’s not a big deal, really. Don’t worry about it. Next time I’ll get up and help. I’ve got a nasty right hook.”

“Stop, Frank.” Courtney’s face is burning.

“It’s fine,” Mindy says, seemingly unfazed. “I’m a big girl. I can take it.”

I smile.

“I’ll say. Courtney, come help me build a fruit salad, would you?”

This disturbs Mindy. Courtney looks first to me, then to Mindy, tugging nervously on the early sprouts of a mustache.

I stand up, grab him by the elbow, and half drag him to the breakfast buffet, well out of her earshot. He pushes me off of him.

“What are you doing?” he asks, not angry—he doesn’t really get angry—but irritated.

“Oliver was at the red house,” I say. “I checked the GPS last night. The chip died.”

Courtney’s features sharpen.

“That doesn’t make sense. If he took the skin, we should be able to track him. There’s no way he found the chip.”

“Do you know how you make leather?” I ask.

Courtney frowns.

“Vaguely.”

“I didn’t either, until I looked it up last night,” I say. “But after you hang the skin, you have to soak it for a long time, in limewater, so that it gets loose, and you can scrape off hair and shit.”

He rubs his pads of his thumbs and forefinger together.

“So the chip is in one of those metal barrels,” he says morosely. “Submerged, and surrounded by metal. I’ll bet that limewater is particularly corrosive too.”

“That’s my guess.”

“Alright,” he says. “So we’ll go there. Maybe he’s still there? That’s what you’re thinking?”

I shrug.

“Seems likely he’s been there in the past twelve hours or so. We have no idea where the books are. But if we can find him, arrest him, maybe get the money back for Sampson, that would sure be a close second best.”

Courtney mulls this, nods to himself, then looks over his shoulder at Mindy, sitting alone finishing up her pancakes. Turns back to me looking troubled.

“And you don’t want to bring her. You want to ditch her again.”

“Your intuition is phenomenal.”

“Frank . . .” he says. “What about all the help she gave us last night?”

I smirk.

“Yes, Courtney. All the help she gave us last night.”

He blinks emptily at me, and then his features sharpen.

“Frank, if you’re insinuating that . . . no. C’mon. That was personal. That has nothing to do with my professional inclinations.”

I cock my head at him like really?

“I . . . I,” he stammers, “we just like each other, okay? It’s not as if . . . it wasn’t some sort of elaborate ploy. I really think she’ll be helpful—she knows a million times more about Oliver Vicks than us.”

“Sampson, Becky, the dudes in khaki,” I hiss. “They’re not bad people. They all think they’re doing the right thing, because they’re up to their necks in this mythology. They’re not thinking clearly anymore. Mindy . . . I’m not saying she’s there yet, but after the things she said last night, I think she’s getting there.”

Courtney holds his gaze level. Doesn’t say anything.

“This is classic cult behavior,” I say. “Otherwise intelligent people going out of their gourds because of a charismatic dude with some crazy ideas about life. And honestly, you’re susceptible to this kind of stuff. You get excited and carried away by this sort of mumbo jumbo. I don’t want her around you. I want you cold and methodical. Because we have like thirty hours to either find those books or find their author, or things are going to get real fucking dark.”

His lower lip curls inward. Still he says nothing.

“Be objective, Court. I’m not saying she’s not brilliant. Hell, I think as far as she knows she does want to help. But what if we find Oliver and—”

“Mindy is coming with us,” he says calmly. “She cooperated with us last night. And she knows far more about Sophnot and his writing than either of us.”

I take a few deep breaths.

“You know I always trust you,” I say. “But I really think you’re not thinking clearly about this.”

He puts a boney hand on my shoulder.

“I promise you this. If we don’t find the books—or Oliver Vicks—it won’t be because we let Mindy tag along.”

I swallow a retort, and nod along. There won’t be any talking him out of this, I can see that. Not worth pushing it. I’ll just have to keep a very close eye on her.

“I suggest you worry about things pertinent to the task at hand,” he says. “For instance, something that’s been bothering me since what Mindy told us last night. We all agree that Oliver is incredibly smart, and personable. Surely he had good grades, and would have aced any interview. So why didn’t he just go to architecture school?”

 

The drive back to the red house is tense. Mindy knows she’s unwanted, and stays silent in the backseat. Courtney cleans our Magnums, while I drive. Three straight nights without real sleep. Little shapes, bats of light, seem to keep flying across the windshield. Courtney should probably be driving.

It’s a bit past nine when I park a quarter mile away, and approach the house on foot, Courtney and I first, pistols drawn. It seems unlikely that Oliver is just hanging around the dome, given that he knows we’ve been there before. But it’s a mistake to try to predict this guy’s behavior.

The other night the place glowed, and seemed to be alive. I was sure in the daytime the red shingles would sparkle, like solar panels, powering this dazzling structure. But in the morning light, the place just looks like an inflatable tennis tarpaulin tent.

I’m not sure whether I’m more relieved or disappointed that there are no cars parked outside.

“He’s not here,” I say.

“Don’t let your guard down,” Courtney replies.

The front door is unlocked. Pistols out, we enter. Red velvet hallways totally empty, and look recently steam-cleaned. We wander through the halls for a while, trying to find the chamber again, gradually becoming more relaxed as it seems clear this place has been fumigated.

Don’t feel any of the creepiness from the other night, when it was filled with coked up, gallivanting teens. In fact, I feel a little silly now for ever being freaked out by this space. In the sober light of day it’s totally harmless. The red walls look lame, the floor that just the other night appeared to me as infinite blackness looks cheap and poorly crafted. It’s like there was a spell when we were here last, and it’s worn off.

“Oliver designed this place?” Mindy asks, behind us. “For what? It’s not like you could live here.”

“Tuesday night we saw one practical application,” I say, without turning around.

I grip my gun a bit tighter as we find the descending staircase I’m pretty sure leads to the chamber. The flimsy pine door opens to the hallway where the foursome was embroiled on a mattress. The mattress is gone. At the end of the hallway, the blast door to the chamber is ajar.

I already know it must be empty, but my heart still speeds up as I burst in, pistol first, Courtney right behind me. The automatic lights flick on and indeed, the room is totally bare. No basin to wash your feet. No little stone on the floor for incense. Strong smell of disinfectant.

The tapestry that separated the room into two is gone—it’s just one long space now—and the place Rico had been hanging is empty.

The drafting table is gone, as are the tools or masks. Only thing left is the stone worktable—must have been too bulky to move. Courtney inspects the surface; he announces it’s been scrubbed completely clean. The only proof that the other night wasn’t just a bad dream are the designs painted on the walls and ceiling.

“He even took the barrels,” I say. My voice echoes sharply in the claustrophobic space.

“Didn’t leave a trace,” Courtney says.

“So let’s go. It’s still early. Have at least a few hours to try to get CCTV footage.”

“Why didn’t you tell me about these walls?”

I turn, and see that Mindy is still standing near the door, her back to us as she examines a maze of red, white and blue lines. I don’t know how she can just stare at it—every time my eyes catch the design I feel that familiar dizziness, the start of a migraine.

“What is it?” Courtney calls.

Mindy doesn’t respond. Jerks off her backpack, and pulls a folder out. Combs through it frantically, then returns her attention to the wall. Courtney looks at me like: See? I told you bringing her was a good idea.

I return a look like: We’ll see.

Mindy is on her knees, fanning out papers on the floor. We approach her.

“What’s going on?” I say, gesturing to the wall in front of her without staring. “Is this writing?”

“Of course,” she mutters, half to herself. “You thought he did all this just for aesthetic purposes?”

Courtney squints at the wall in front of her, rubs the place where his mustache would be, finding only the facial hair equivalent of a sloppily trimmed lawn. I force myself to stare at the wall as well, ignore the wave of nausea accompanying it. I don’t see how this could possibly be a language. It looks like a Jackson Pollock painting.

“What does it say?” I ask, finally looking down to the bronze floor.

Mindy snorts, and swivels around. Casts her hands out in front of her at the expanse of walls.

“Do you have any idea how much information is written here?”

I shake my head.

She turns and presses the tip of her pinky at a spot on the wall.

“Look,” she says. “Watch my finger.”

I fight the dizziness and watch as her pinky traces a path, and when I really look closely I can see that it’s following a white square that’s suspended above the red-and-blue chaos around it.

“See the square?” she says.

“Yes,” Courtney says quickly.

“Now how about this.”

Her pinky makes vertical lines through the square, and it takes a moment to see that she’s tracing black lines, negative space, through it. I realize that when I can see patterns in the madness, I feel less sick, because my eyes can focus just on the foreground.

“A white square with black vertical lines,” she says. “That’s a symbol I’ve seen several times.”

“What does it mean?” I ask.

“What does it look like to you?” she asks.

“A cage,” Courtney says.

Mindy smiles.

“Right. Depending on the context, it means either a cage, servitude, or prison.”

I think about what Heald told us, about one interpretation of the books was that they were the entirety of Oliver Vicks’s life.

“Is it the same text as the books?” Courtney says.

Mindy shakes her head at him in disbelief.

“I’ve had about two minutes so far to examine it, Courtney. Give me time. Let me see if I can make something of it.”

“Sounds good,” I say, and squat down on the brass floor, like a baseball catcher.

She scowls.

“I need to concentrate,” she says, and juts her chin at the blast door. “I need a month. But give me a half hour. We’ll take it from there.”

Courtney and I dutifully retreat to the velvet hallway. I immediately sink to the floor, the same place I dozed off Tuesday night. Courtney paces the length of the hall, hands clasped behind his back.

“I wonder if any of the kids who were here the other night know anything,” he says.

“Doubt it,” I say. “I’ll bet Vicks just likes having them around in case he screws up a skinning, and needs some fresh meat.”

Courtney seems to deliberately not hear this comment.

“Where will Sophnot never go?” he asks. “Where do the books belong?”

I roll my eyes.

“Ask me another couple thousand times, would you?”

“It’s likely somewhere within three or four miles of the aquarium. I doubt Rico got in a bus.”

“He certainly could have taken a cab,” I say. “I would have.”

Courtney keeps pacing.

“Court, you realize at some point this evening we have to consider making a run for it.”

He halts suddenly and looks at me.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean we’re supposed to get the books to Sampson early afternoon tomorrow. If that’s not going to happen, and we’re not going to find Oliver and get that money back, the best thing we can do is give ourselves a head start getting the hell out of Colorado.”

Courtney grimaces. He knows I’m right.

“Sampson has threatened to send the feds after us,” I say. “Maybe, maybe, if we’re already on a plane to Vietnam by tomorrow evening we’ll be able to hide for a couple years.”

Courtney’s frown stretches toward the floor.

“What about Sadie?” he says.

I bite my lip.

“Nothing would bring me more anguish than missing out on the rest of her life,” I say. “But if we don’t find those books . . .” I shake my head. “Better to be in hiding again than prison. Or dead.”

Courtney is still for a second. Can nearly hear the whirring of the calculator behind his eyes.

“Five in the morning,” I continue. “That’s when I say we give up. Drive to Denver International Airport. Can be on a plane by nine probably. We’ll call Sampson right before and tell him we’ll meet him in a few hours to buy us some time. By the time he realizes we’re not showing up we’ll be over the Atlantic.”

He shakes his head slowly.

“I don’t think I can leave,” he says.

“Don’t tell me this is because of her,” I growl.

“No. If we leave, this thing will just keep going. Nobody will know that Oliver is on the loose. He’ll just keep killing. If by tomorrow we have nothing, I’m going to the cops with everything. Pictures of Rico’s corpse. I’ll rat out Heald, they’ll go to the prison and confirm Oliver is gone—”

“You realize how dangerous that is, right?” I say. “Even on the slim chance that they believe you enough to investigate—that, best case, they find Oliver and pin everything on him—Sampson’s reputation will be ruined, and he’ll destroy you. He’ll try to say you stole the money from him, and will discredit you by bringing me into it. Will say you abetted an Interpol fugitive . . . I can’t even imagine the fallout from that.”

Courtney clenches his hands into sharp little fists.

“I know,” he says softly. “But the alternative . . . At the very least Oliver intends to kill two more people to finish binding his books. And if we know that and don’t do anything about it, we’re morally culpable.”

I rub my eyes.

“We didn’t ask to find this out,” I say. “We were just supposed to swap some cash for books.”

“We didn’t ask for it,” Courtney agrees. “But here we are.”

Mindy pulls in the blast door and walks out to join us in the hallway. There’s a wild look in her eyes.

“I need more time,” she says, “but this stuff is amazing.”

“What is it?” Courtney asks, before I can.

Mindy shakes her head in something like disbelief.

“I think . . . I mean it’s a lot of things. His writing always is. It’s less sophisticated than the writing in the books, so I’m making headway pretty fast. If I had to guess, he wrote this before the books. While he was still developing the nuances of his language—”

“But what does it say?” I blurt.

Mindy rubs her hair up out of her face, rolls her eyes like I can’t believe I have to work with this guy.

“It’s not the same content as the books. It’s some kind of story. Just one narrative.” Her voice is quivering with excitement. “He’s trying to figure the story out, but keeps reworking it. A lot of the characters and patterns repeat themselves, with slight variations—I think that’s him refining his thoughts.”

“What’s the story?”

She laughs way too hard. Kooky.

“I don’t think you understand how long it takes to decipher these things. So far I’ve spotted the prison symbol I showed you, that’s how they all start. He talks about prison, the books, dreams, money . . . Some of his favorite motifs, as we all know.”

“Can you show us?” I say.

Mindy nods, and we follow her back into the chamber.

“The pattern repeats itself over and over,” she says, taking us to one of the walls. “Here’s the prison symbol, I already showed you that.” Courtney and I nod, following her finger. “And here’s the books—” She points to a circle with lines shooting out from its circumference. Looks like a child’s sketch of a sun emitting rays.

“That doesn’t look like books,” Courtney says.

“Count the lines,” she says. “Twenty-four. With no beginning and no end. He uses this symbol sometimes in the books as a sort of hashtag equivalent, with one of the lines being longer to show that he’s alluding to something in another certain volume.”

Courtney’s eyes are wide.

“Okay,” he whispers. “What’s next?”

“Then this. The symbol which usually means dream, beside the one for money.”

I ignore the thumping in my temples and try to see what Mindy sees.

“I don’t see what you’re talking about,” I say. “Show us those two symbols again?”

She seems agitated. Wants us to leave so she can get back to studying this on her own.

“This is dream,” she says, tracing something that to me looks like a foot. “And here is money.” This one is what I’m sure is an animal’s head, with two horns protruding from either side.

“Whoa, whoa,” I say. “This is a symbolic language. How the hell does an animal face mean money?”

“It’s not all literal,” she says, an edge to her voice. Sounds like she’s regretting trying to explain anything to us. “Sometimes it does maintain the more literal meaning of cow, but sometimes it’s figurative. Money. Like cash cow.”

“And explain the dream?” Courtney says.

Mindy shakes her head.

“Honestly, I don’t have a clue what that’s supposed to be. But I’ve seen it several times before, and am pretty sure it means dream. In the books it’s often close to sleep and something that I think means imagine.” She steps back from the wall. “Give me four more hours here. I think I can get something more tangible about what he was trying to do here.”

Courtney scratches his scalp. I check out the symbols again. Like one of those 3-D Magic Eye puzzles it takes me a while of staring before I spot the white and black symbols Mindy pointed out to us just a moment before.

Prison. Dream. Money/Cow.

My stomach drops.

“Mindy . . .” I swallow. “How sure are you he wrote this before the books? At least twenty years ago?”

“Not certain, of course, but as I said, this is much simpler than the content of the books. It really looks like a precursor.”

I turn to face the two of them.

“I don’t think that symbol means either money or cow.”

Mindy raises an eyebrow.

“Perhaps you’d like to fact check my thesis as well?” she asks.

“I think the symbol represents Senator James Henry Sampson,” I say. “Oliver’s eventual money source, but also a dairy farmer.”

Mindy is silent for a second. A little hiss of air from between Courtney’s teeth.

“And the dream,” I say. “It well could mean any old generic dream in other places. But what does it that picture like to you two?”

Mindy says nothing. She’s staring again at the symbols behind me.

“A foot,” Courtney says.

“A foot?” I say. “Or a heel.”

Courtney’s eyes go wide.

“Sampson’s dream . . .” he whispers.

I nod.

“What if this isn’t a fictional story? What if this was Oliver Vicks’s whiteboard? His planning. His to-do list. What he’s refining here is his plan. Mindy, does that make sense?”

She doesn’t respond for a while. Retraces the symbols with her pinky. Her hand is shaking a little.

“What was Sampson’s dream?” she says finally.

“It’s the recurring dream he had that Oliver eventually interpreted for him,” I say. “That someone was behind him, dragging him down into the water, by his heel. He never told you about that?”

She shakes her head slightly.

“No,” she says softly.

“So what do you think about Frank’s idea?” Courtney says. “Could these be his plans?”

“Can’t rule it out,” she replies distantly. “Give me more time. A few more hours at least and I’ll be able to tell you.”

Courtney turns to me.

“What do you say Frank?” he asks. “I’m not sure if we have any leads better than what’s written on these walls.”

In response I pull the Gideon Bible from the hotel out of my backpack. Didn’t make it to the part about theft last night.

“I’m not sure about that,” I say, turning to my earmarked page. “I was reading through this last night. About Joseph. It’s increasingly clear to me just how obsessed Sophnot was with this story. I’d like to speak to a pastor or something. I know I’m missing all the nuance of this story. Maybe we can find someone while you’re working on this, Mindy. We’ll come back to pick you up after.”

“Fine,” she says, not seeming to care what we’re doing, as long as she gets her solo time with the drawings. “Courtney, go with him. I need to work on this alone.”

“We can’t leave you alone here,” he says. “He could come back at any time.”

She snorts.

“Yeah, I’m just a helpless woman. What would I do without my two men here to protect me? Leave me a gun. I’ve got as much of a chance of killing him as you do.”

“She’s got a point, Courtney.”

Courtney pulls his Magnum from his ankle holster and hands it to her.

“You know how to use this?” he asks.

“Not really,” she asks. “Explain it to me. Where does the bullet come out?”

He actually starts to answer her. She rolls her eyes, snatches the gun from him and slides it into the back of her pants.

“I lived with a Republican Senator for seven years,” she says. “It would be pretty pathetic if I hadn’t learned to use a gun all that time.”

Courtney nods.

“Call if you find anything, or need anything. And we’ll be back to pick you up in four hours, right? So one this afternoon?”

“Make it two,” she says.

“Okay.”

They look like they might kiss, but then they both overthink it, and settle on a hug that’s so awkward I have to turn away. As we walk to the door he even turns and seems to consider giving her another wave good-bye. I put my hand on his hip and push him out into the velvet-padded hallway.

“You were reading the Bible last night?” Courtney asks.

“Yeah. While you were lying naked in bed with a girl, out of wedlock.”

Courtney sniffs.

“It was pretty dense,” I continue. “But I picked out enough to realize what we’re dealing with.”

We’re out the front door. The fresh air is a relief.

“What do you mean? I read the whole Bible myself, but it’s been years.”

“I mean, last night I kept thinking about how important that story must have been to Sophnot, but I didn’t realize how important until just now. We saw the superficial similarities before: prison, dreams, his nickname, but that was a whole other level.”

“What do you mean?” he says.

I savor his question. It’s great to be one step ahead of him for once.

“The cow thing. I guess you haven’t read the story in a while. Pharaoh’s dream? Seven lean cows and seven fat cows came out of the Nile. That was the dream that Joseph was pulled out of prison to interpret. The cow/dream imagery drove it home. There’s no doubt that Oliver Vicks is obsessed with this story. He sees himself as a kindred spirit of this biblical character. And now I think it’s clear he might have even been planning things based on those passages.”

Courtney sniffs.

“Interesting.”

“So I thought if we could find a pastor or—”

“No,” Courtney says. “Genesis is part of the Old Testament. It was originally written in Hebrew, as you know. If we want someone familiar with the original language, and I think we do, considering Oliver was a bit of a linguistic purist as well, we need a rabbi.”

Anybody else would be lording this correction over me. Courtney is an impartial as a spellchecker.

“Fine,” I say. “A rabbi. Anything else, hotshot?”

“I wasn’t going to say anything, because I know you’re tired,” he says, “But if we’re going to meet a Bible scholar, I feel obligated to tell you that your fly has been open since we left the hotel.”

 

Courtney drives while I look up the numbers of synagogues in Denver. I’m surprised at how many Google results we get. The first five numbers don’t answer, and then I call something called the Chabad of Denver—the guy answers on the first ring. I put the devil machine on speaker for Courtney.

“Chabad of Denver,” he says. He’s clearly on a cell phone, somewhere busy.

“Hi, um, my name is Ben . . . I’m in the Denver area and, this might sound like a weird request, but I had some very specific questions about the Old Testament.”

The guy chuckles. “Why is that weird? Go ahead—what’s on your mind?”

“I . . .” I pause. “Are you a rabbi?”

“I am.”

“So could you explain the story of Joseph to me? Like, in serious detail?”

“That’s my job.”

“Listen, is there any way we could meet in person? I—we—will come wherever you want. It’s just that this might get detailed. We’re happy to pay or whatever. Not sure how it works.”

Another chuckle. “Sure. How’s next Tuesday? I’m free from two to four in the afternoon.”

I grind my teeth.

“It’s actually somewhat urgent. If there was any way we could possibly meet now that would be . . .”

“Say no more. Um . . . yeah today is pretty crazy but if you want to come to my house right now I can speak.”

I raise an eyebrow at Courtney. This dude is inviting two strangers to his house?

“Perfect. Where is it?”

“32 Madcock. When can you be here?”

“Um.” I put it into Google maps.

“Twenty minutes, okay?” I say. “We’ll drive as fast as we can.”

“No need for that. See you in twenty. Looking forward.”

 

The brick house is modest. One story. Tiny, token yard. Minivan parked in the driveway, alongside a tricycle. Netless basketball hoop.

I ring the bell and the door opens inward almost immediately to reveal a sixty-something man who’s positively beaming. His beard is reddish, with a lot of white. He has a black velvet skullcap and side locks. Wearing a white button-down tucked into black slacks. White strings—the kind I’ve seen before on religious Jews, but don’t understand—are emerging from a few spots on his black leather belt. Source unknown.

“Rabbi Yisroel Lieberman,” he says, smiling, and shoots out a pale white hand. “Call me Yisroel.”

“I’m Ben,” I say, “and this is my friend Lenny.”

Lenny sounds more Jewish than Leonard, right?

These names seem to please him immensely.

“Wonderful. Come on in.”

“Should we take off our shoes?” Courtney asks.

“No, no, don’t worry about it.”

We’re in a small living room that’s attached to a dining room. Something is cooking in the kitchen that smells like stew. The floor is littered with kids’ toys. Besides that, there’s a ratty green couch, and books. So many books. Every wall, from floor to ceiling, is bookcases. I take a closer look at one and realize that almost none of them are in English.

“Take a seat.” Yisroel gestures to the couch. We sit. “You want anything to drink? Tea?”

“No thanks,” I demur. I turn to Courtney, assuming he’s about to take the rabbi up on his offer. But am shocked when he declines:

“No, thank you,” he says. “Let’s get right to the business.”

“Of course.” Yisroel plops down across from us. “So . . . Yoseph?”

“Beg your pardon?” I ask.

Just then a door closes and a woman walks out of somewhere. Must be his wife. About the same age. Thick glasses, no skin visible below the neck besides her hands.

“Hi,” she says. “Can I get you something to eat or drink? Tea?”

“I already offered, Rivka,” Yisroel says.

But this time Courtney can’t resist:

“Actually, tea would be wonderful,” Courtney says.

“I’m fine.” I smile at her.

She steps into the kitchen.

“Sorry, Yoseph is the ancient Hebrew pronunciation of ‘Joseph,’” Yisroel explains. “Or really, I should say that Joseph is the English equivalent of the real way of saying it.”

“Ah.” Courtney nods. “The Y often turns into J right? Like Jehovah?”

The rabbi winces.

“Exactly. We don’t use that word, actually, but you’re right. Anyways. What about the story can I help you with? And, if you don’t mind me asking, why do you so urgently need to understand this Bible story? Thesis due tomorrow?”

I smile.

“Nothing like that. I . . .” I struggle for a moment to come up with a plausible lie. Then realize at this point, might as well just tell him the truth. “We’re detectives. Private investigators. And we’re searching for someone who seems to have taken a great interest in the story of Joseph. He even insists on being called Sophnot. You’re familiar with that name?”

Yisroel’s face darkens a little bit. He nods slowly.

“‘Tsaphnat’ is how I’d pronounce it. Tsaphnat-Paneah. It’s a bit of an obscure term. The nickname Pharaoh gave to Joseph. It’s only mentioned once or twice.”

“It means he who solves riddles, right? Because he interpreted dreams?”

Yisroel frowns.

“Yes, that’s if you think it was written in ancient Egyptian. Which most commentators do. Though, worth noting that if you read it as if it’s Hebrew, it translates more literally to concealer of faces.”

I think of the wax mask of Rico’s face and a little shiver shoots down my spine. Just in time, his wife carries in a cup of brown tea, stuffed with sprigs of fresh mint. She brings a chair with her, too, from the kitchen, because there’s no coffee table in here. Puts the tea down on the chair.

“Let it cool a moment,” she advises him, as if he’s experiencing hot beverages for the first time.

“Thanks.” Courtney smiles. Then Rivka leaves.

“Why would Pharaoh nickname him that?” I ask the rabbi.

“Great question,” he says, and smiles. “And for that, we need to go back to the start of the story. Do you know the basics, or—”

“Assume we know nothing,” I say. “I tried reading it last night, but it felt like reading Shakespeare. Missed a lot.”

“Okay.” He nods. “I’ll do the standing-on-one-foot version of what may be the most interesting—and most difficult to understand—story in the Old Testament. Maybe anywhere, if you ask me. Joseph was Jacob’s son. Jacob, his four wives, and their twelve sons—and an unclear number of daughters—lived in Canaan—somewhere in modern-day Israel. Joseph, despite not being the oldest, was Jacob’s favorite son. He even gave him a coat of many colors as a present. That sounds familiar, right?”

We nod.

“So, this favoritism was an issue. If anyone should have been the favorite, it should have been the oldest brothers. Joseph parading around in his father’s coat made his brothers jealous. But then it gets worse. Joseph starts having dreams. He tells his family that he had a dream: The sun, moon and twelve stars were bowing to him, Joseph. The sun was clearly his father, the moon his mother. In other words, he was prophesying that all his family would bow to him. As you can imagine, this didn’t go over well. The brothers, out of jealousy, decided to kill Joseph—the dreamer. They threw him in a well and left him for dead. He was then picked up by a group of traders, who brought him down to Egypt as their slave. He was sold as a slave to a member of Pharaoh’s guard, and then for reasons we probably don’t have time for, arrested and thrown into prison.”

“No, wait,” Courtney says, sipping on his tea. “That could be important to us. Why was he arrested?”

Yisroel checks his watch.

“The owner’s wife tried to seduce Joseph. When he refused her advance, she was so upset that she claimed that he assaulted her.”

Courtney scratches his cheek and looks at me.

“A refused advance . . .”

I nod grimly. Becky.

“Okay. Let’s keep going. What happened when he was in prison?”

Yisroel grins. I think he’s happy to have such attentive students.

“Nothing much happened in prison for a while, until one of his cellmates, a wine steward told him about a dream he’d had. Joseph correctly interpreted the dream: that it meant his cellmate would be taken from prison and returned to his former post, as Pharaoh’s cup bearer. Well, sure enough, the wine steward was taken out and exonerated. A few years later, Pharaoh himself had a series of dreams he didn’t understand—”

“About the cows,” I say. “Sorry, I remembered that bit.”

“Yes.” Yisroel nods. “Two dreams. One about cows coming from the Nile, one about stalks of grain. Nobody could interpret them to his satisfaction. Until this wine steward told him about Joseph, the boy who had interpreted his so accurately.”

I cross my legs. Think about Sampson, who was continually dissatisfied with his dream interpreters, until Oliver came along . . . from prison . . .

“Joseph indeed interpreted Pharaoh’s dream to his satisfaction: There would be seven years of grain surplus in Egypt, followed by seven years of famine. Joseph even advised the king to start saving grain now, so that they’d be the only people in the region with food when the famine hit. Pharaoh was so impressed by this young Hebrew that he instantly pulled him from jail, and made him his second in command over all Egypt.”

“And that’s when he gave him the nickname?” I asked.

“Yes.” The rabbi nods.

“So it’s about how he interpreted the dreams? How he solved the riddles of what the dreams meant?”

The rabbi tugs on his beard and meditates on this for a moment.

“Well, if you’re going to interpret it as meaning revealer, then yes. As I mentioned if you read it in Hebrew it has an almost opposite meaning. As a concealer of something—faces. And so, following the Hebrew translation, I believe the nickname is an allusion to what happened next in the story.”

Courtney leans forward in his seat, like an eager little puppy. Glad this is taking his mind off Mindy.

“What happens next?” Courtney asks.

Yisroel smiles.

“Sure enough, as Joseph predicted, the next seven years were great for crops. And the Egyptians were able to save a lot of leftover food for a rainy day. They accumulated huge storehouses of grain, all under Joseph’s supervision. And then the famine hit. People came to Egypt from all over the region, because their leaders hadn’t had the foresight to save up food. And to Pharaoh’s great delight, Egypt was making a fortune selling away some of their extra food. And then . . . then ten boys showed up at Pharaoh’s palace. Ten Hebrews who themselves were starving, and needed food to bring back for their parents.”

“Joseph’s brothers . . .” I murmur. “The ones who threw him in the pit and left him for dead.”

Yisroel nods.

“Yes. An interesting twist, isn’t it?”

“Coming full circle.” I nod.

“Here the story becomes a bit difficult to understand. There would seem to be two obvious routes to take here right?” Yisroel asks.

I nod, without really knowing for sure what he’s talking about.

“Yes,” says Courtney.

“And those are?” Yisroel asks, grinning.

“Well.” Courtney sips on his tea. “Either laugh in their face. Tell them the tables have turned, and now they’re going to get their just deserts. Or to show he’s the bigger man, and forgive them. Give them the food.”

Yisroel nods.

“But Joseph, strangely, takes the middle ground. See—the thing is, it’s been so long, and he’s wearing Egyptian clothes . . . he recognizes his brothers, but they don’t recognize him. It makes sense, really. Even if they thought this Egyptian viceroy bore a resemblance to their brother . . . it couldn’t be him . . . second in command over Egypt? So Joseph, well for lack of a better word, toys with them. First he accuses them of stealing from him, makes them terrified that he’s going to kill them. And then he insists on keeping one of them as a hostage until they go back to Canaan and bring their father and youngest brother, Benjamin down too. This whole sequence of events, this elaborate toying, I confess has always been difficult for me to understand. But finally, after all these games, Joseph can take it no more. Sobbing, he reveals himself: ‘It is me, Joseph! Is my father still alive?’ And the brothers embrace. And instead of sending food back to Canaan, he invites the whole family down to Egypt, and sets them up in a good spot. The family flourishes for many years in Egypt, until eventually a new Pharaoh arises, and since he has no debt to Joseph, he has no problem enslaving the Israelites. And that is more or less the story of Joseph.”

Courtney finishes his tea.

“So that’s how the Jews got down to Egypt,” I say. “You hear all the time about them being slave to the Egyptians, but not about how they got there in the first place.”

Yisroel nods.

“Yes. It’s quite a tale, isn’t it?”

I nod silently, mind frantically trying to connect all of this to Oliver Vicks.

“Wait a second,” Courtney says. “Forget the toying . . . I don’t understand. If Joseph was so powerful, and had apparently forgiven his brothers, why didn’t he contact them earlier? His poor parents thought he was dead . . . he could have helped them right away! Why did he let this drag on for years and years?”

Yisroel breaks into the widest grin of the day and slaps Courtney on the shoulder.

“We have a natural scholar here! That, my friends, is the question.”

“And the answer?” I say.

He shrugs.

“Many people have tried to answer that. Some answers are more satisfactory than others.”

“Is there an answer that you like?” asks Courtney.

Yisroel is silent for a moment, then nods slowly.

“The most common answer, which I confess I still find difficult, is that he let time languish this long in order to fulfill his prophetic dream. His brothers really did bow down to him, fulfilling his prophecy. Had he contacted them earlier, this wouldn’t have come to fruition.”

“And is that what you believe?” I ask, sensing that it’s not.

“I . . . I have another thought. Though it doesn’t cast Joseph—normally thought of as a hero—in the best light.”

I raise an eyebrow.

“Yes?”

“I think, simply, that Joseph had a flair for the dramatic. A very serious flair. He understood what a pivotal point this was in the history of the Jewish people. And he understood that the longer he waited to reveal himself, the more shocking it would be . . . he wanted to make a story that would be told for generations and generations. And he succeeded.”

“That’s kind of cruel.” I laugh. “Toying with people’s emotions just for the sake of a grand, dramatic finale.”

Yisroel nods. Then tugs on his beard, hesitates, and says:

“There’s another thought I heard once at the Shabbes table . . . I haven’t thought of it again until now but . . . I had a psychologist here as a guest, and he said, sort of as a joke, that if he had to diagnose the biblical character of Joseph objectively, based on this toying, his obsession with his prophecy coming true . . . well, it wouldn’t be pretty—”

“Megalomaniacal,” says Courtney. “Ruthless, lack of empathy . . . sociopathic maybe . . .”

Yisroel nods uncomfortably.

“But,” I add, “he always seemed to believe, genuinely, that he was doing the right thing.”

“And now you understand why so many people find this part of our canon so difficult.” He checks his watch. “I have to teach a class across town in fifteen minutes. I’m so sorry, I would have loved to chat for longer. It was a pleasure.”

We stand up and shake hands with him, thank him. He grabs his suit jacket, shows us to the door, and then follows us out.

“This man you’re looking for,” he asks us, outside. “He’s done something horrible, hasn’t he?”

I don’t say anything. Courtney nods.

“I meet a lot of people,” Yisroel explains. “Many are dealing with very nasty situations. I know the look.”

He smiles at us, then rushes down to his minivan. Throws his briefcase into the front seat. He turns on the minivan, rolls down the window to wave good-bye again.

“How did Joseph die?” I suddenly shout after him.

Yisroel grins.

“Old age. Natural causes.”

 

We’re five minutes from the rabbi’s house, trying to escape a suburban labyrinth, when Mindy calls. Courtney’s driving, so I answer.

“We just finished at the rabbi. How’s it—”

She cuts me off, breathless:

“What’s Becky’s number?”

“Becky?”

Courtney slams on the brakes right in the middle of the narrow street, seizes the phone from me and puts it on speaker.

“Mindy?” he shouts into the phone, as only someone unaccustomed to using them would. “Are you alright?”

“Fine. Left the red dome. Got a cab. I’m on the way to Pueblo.” She’s rattling off words like an auctioneer. It sounds like the window in her cab is rolled down and she’s holding the phone out in the breeze. “I need to speak to Becky. I think I’ve figured something out.”

Courtney pleads with his hands and eyes: What’s going on?

“The books are at her apartment?” I ask.

“What? No. Just text me her number, yeah?”

Courtney picks up the phone and obliges.

“Why do you need to speak to Becky? What did you find?”

“Just, em, I’m not sure yet. I’ll call you later okay?”

“No.” I snatch the phone from Courtney. “Mindy, tell us what’s—”

“I have to concentrate, buzz you later.”

She hangs up.

“What was that?” Courtney asks, his eyes as wide as polished dinner plates.

I shake my head.

“I think your girlfriend just screwed us.”

“What? What do you mean?”

“She knows something. She’s keeping us in the dark.”

Courtney snatches the phone from me and calls her back. His nostrils are flared in anticipation, and I can tell when it goes to answering machine because his face sours like a puppeteer just yanked the drawstring to pull the skin back tight over his bones. He hangs up and calls again. Same deal. He slowly places the phone in the cup holder.

I’m not sure how long the blue Saab has been behind us, honking angrily. Middle America. In NYC we’d already have our windshield smashed.

Courtney dutifully pulls us to the curb and lets the Saab pass.

“Well,” he says quietly, and doesn’t add anything.

Suppressing the I told you so reflex is surely my most noble gesture in recent memory.

“Yeah,” I say.

“I mean,” Courtney says. “She didn’t have to call at all.” He sounds like a guy trying to find the silver lining of his parachute not opening.

Hey, at least I’m more aerodynamic.

“Yes she did. For Becky’s number.”

“I guess we could drive down to Pueblo,” he says. “Go to Becky’s place.”

“Why? What are we going to do, threaten her at gunpoint to tell us what she found? She obviously doesn’t want to cooperate with us. She wants to find the books herself and take them to London . . . Just like she told us she wanted to on Tuesday.”

“She wouldn’t do that to us,” Courtney says.

I can barely contain an eye roll.

You’ve known this girl for less than a week.

“Okay,” I say. “Well, let’s be pragmatic. That’s what you always say. What now?”

Courtney seems to take a long time to wet his lips enough to speak again. Struggling to keep it together.

“I’m not sure this changes very much,” he says. “We still need the books. Or Oliver. Barring those, there’s also your suggestion to get as far away from this godforsaken flyover state as possible.”

We sit in silence for a moment. Two kids bike past on training wheels, their mom in hot pursuit, snapping photos with her phone. A squirrel shoots up an oak tree. It feels strange that the world is continuing to operate as usual around us.

“Let’s see where Sampson’s head is,” I say. “Haven’t heard from him since I told him to stop calling.”

Courtney nods in agreement, and hands me the phone.

I dial his cell phone, and am surprised by how long it rings. Last time we called him he picked up instantly.

“Frank! Courtney?” he gasps on speaker, like he just came up for air. “Where are you?”

“We’re in Colorado,” I say. “Not too far from you.”

“Listen . . .” he says, forces softness into his voice. “Anything I said before, I apologize. I shouldn’t have threatened you. I’m sure you two are in a tough spot. I appreciate that. Maybe you’re thinking I didn’t offer you enough money for this job, you’re thinking about holding onto the books until I shell out a bit more. Come on by and let’s talk about it. I’m one hundred percent open to paying you fellas more. But you just have to bring me those books by tomorrow.”

I shrug at Courtney: Not a bad idea, actually.

He looks at me like I’m an idiot and mouths: We don’t have them.

“I’ll give you whatever you want.” Sampson is still talking. Negotiating against himself. “Anything. I’ll give you a million dollars. But I need them by tomorrow afternoon. If I don’t get the books back to Sophnot by sunset, I . . . I don’t know what he’ll do.”

“Is everything okay?” Courtney asks.

I swallow a bitter laugh.

Yeah, everything’s just dandy.

“It’s fine, it’s fine,” Sampson says, a little too adamantly. “It’s just, well, I mean I spoke to Sophnot. He called me yesterday from prison. And it’s the first time, well, I mean I have to confess, I’m a bit concerned about what he will do if he doesn’t get them back in time. I don’t claim to understand his methods, of course, I don’t know how he could do anything since he’s in SCF but . . . Just bring them to me. Tomorrow.”

“What did he say, exactly?” I ask.

“He . . .” Sampson sounds like he’s on the verge of tears. “He knows about Mindy, somehow. About me showing her the books. I wasn’t supposed to do that. I knew that. I knew I was sinning, but I thought maybe Father would understand I had the purest intentions . . . Anyways he’s not upset, exactly. He does understand. But he’s talking now as if I have the books and am holding out on him. As if he doesn’t trust me. I just want to make this all right. He has so much love, so much love . . .”

I rub my temples.

“James,” I say. “You have to understand. Oliver Vicks is not your friend. He’s trying to make your life miserable. And as we tried to explain to you the other night, he hasn’t been in prison for years.”

“You’re not my friend!” he screams so suddenly into the phone I feel like my eardrum shatters. “Don’t try to play games with me! Bring me the books by four tomorrow afternoon or so help me, I swear in his holy name I’ll make you two beg me for your lives! I swear it!”

“Of course. Tomorrow at four,” I say, and quickly hang up. “Christ,” I say, rubbing my sweaty forehead. “What if we told him we don’t have them?”

“He wouldn’t believe us,” Courtney says. “Remember, Oliver told him that the swap went through. So obviously he’d just assume that we’d taken them for ourselves.”

I roll down the window and gulp down a few mouthfuls of hot air.

“How did this happen?” My throat is raw. “How did we get in this mess? We didn’t do anything wrong. We don’t deserve this. This has nothing to fucking do with us!” I punch the dashboard of the shitty rental car. “Goddammit, Courtney. Sampson’s going to ruin our lives. I didn’t ask for this shit. I signed up to swap a bag for another bag. That’s it. And now we’re stuck in the most unimaginable storm of steaming shit I just . . . I just . . .”

Courtney puts his hand on my shoulder.

“Take some deep breaths,” he says in a soothing deep voice. “Just think about that. Slow, easy, deep breaths.”

I try to obey.

In. Out.

“Now listen,” he says. “Here’s what I always tell myself when I’m tracking something, and it seems impossible: The books are somewhere. Okay? They didn’t just evaporate into thin air. Rico put them somewhere and they’re probably still there. We have a full twenty-six hours before we’re supposed to give them to Sampson. And we’re two very smart guys. This isn’t over.”

I look down in my lap and realize my hands are shaking horribly.

“I can’t think,” I say. “I’m exhausted. I need to sleep, even if it’s just an hour.”

“Sure,” Courtney says, pulling the Honda back onto the road. “Let’s find somewhere for you to sleep for an hour or two.”

“I’m sorry about Mindy,” I say. “I can tell you really liked her.”

He keeps his eyes on the road. Doesn’t reply.

“But Court, if she gets those books before us and leaves for London with them . . .” I’m too drained to describe the vivid image of strangling her with my bare hands, her eyes bulging out of her head.

“She’ll call us if she finds anything,” he says, mostly to himself. “She just needed to concentrate.”

I shake my head.

“I’ll bet you were one of those kids who bought dime bags of oregano in high school and couldn’t tell the difference.”

Courtney frowns.

“What do you mean?”

Exactly.

 

We stop at Walgreens and buy three maps of downtown Denver, snacks and bottled coffee. It’s two in the afternoon when we check into a $39/night motel in Aurora.

Courtney throws our bags on one of the two twin beds: He doesn’t expect to use his.

He sits down cross-legged on the filthy carpet, pulls out his notebook, and tears the pages out—arranging them so he can see them all at once. Then spreads out the maps and circles the aquarium on all of them. He wants to chart logical paths Rico could have taken after fleeing.

I collapse on my bed. Desperately want to sleep, but it will take me a little while to wind down.

“Wanna talk anything over?” I ask.

He doesn’t respond for a second, then sits back up and licks his lips.

“Sure,” he says.

That’s bad. If he wants to talk things over with me, it means he doesn’t have anything.

“We start with the questions, Frank,” he says, in a tone that’s a little bit lecturey. I let it slide. “First the questions, then the answers.”

“Okay,” I say.

“What are the questions? If you had a genie right now and could ask him three questions, what would they be?”

I bury my nose in the pillow.

“Never mind. You just do your thing.”

“Just—”

“Fine, fine,” I say, turning back to face him. “Um, first. Where did Rico put the books?”

“Wrong,” Courtney says.

“Wrong?” I say. “What do you mean?”

“That’s not the right question. The question is: Where are the books now? Now, granted, the answer to both is probably the same. But we can’t discount the possibility that someone else has found them already.”

I roll my eyes. Think he’s grandstanding a little, but whatever.

“Fine.”

“Now let’s call that question one,” Courtney says. “In order to answer question one, we need to answer at least one of a few subquestions. Namely—”

“Where would have been the most convenient place for Rico to leave the books? Where would Sophnot ‘never go’?”

Courtney nods, satisfied.

“Good.”

I clench my jaw. He doesn’t have any more idea about this than I do.

“Okay,” Courtney says. “What’s the second question you’d ask the genie?”

“Uhhhh.” I tap my chin. “Where is Oliver Vicks at this exact moment?”

“Yes. And the subquestions?”

I sigh.

“There’s a million. Why did he write these books in the first place? Why did he kill Becky’s family—was it unrequited love? Why does he need forty-eight million dollars . . .” I stop. Expounding all the things we don’t know is making me feel a little sick, and even farther away from sleep.

“Yeah,” Courtney says softly. “Right. All of that.”

He slowly lowers his head to his notes, and his face reverts to his default frown, which means his brain is cranking up to full operating capacity.

“Courtney,” I say. His head shoots up. “What did we decide about skipping town. If it’s five, six in the morning and we’ve got nothing . . .”

Courtney’s face goes a little stony.

“We’ll discuss that later,” he says. “I don’t like planning on failure.”

“We have to be reasonable though,” I say. “I mean—”

“Later,” he snaps, and returns to his notes. It’s not angry exactly, but I nearly jump at the sudden force in his voice. He’s obviously more upset about Mindy than he’s letting on, just swallowing it until this is over. Poor guy. Poor Courtney . . .

“Frank. I have an idea.”

Courtney is shaking me. I shoot up in bed and check my watch. I slept for seven hours, and it’s nine in the evening. Pitch black outside. I don’t feel the least bit refreshed. Was having nightmares, and I feel like I’ve been clenching myself into a ball and grinding my teeth.

“Why did you let me sleep?” I snap.

“I don’t know,” he says. “You just . . . you were so exhausted.”

I stand up and rub my eyes. Grab for a bottle of coffee.

“Have you just been staring at that thing for seven hours?” I ask.

In response, Courtney shows me a map of Denver, now covered in a web of pen marks.

“Rogers and Stern Partners is only three and a half miles from the aquarium. It’s where Oliver used to work, as an architect.”

I blink at him.

“I don’t get it.”

“Oliver would never go back to that place—he’d be too ashamed. But more importantly, he’d be recognized. So that’s why Rico left them there. Oliver couldn’t walk in there to get the books, even if he knew they were there. But we can.”

I mull this over.

“How would Rico know where Oliver used to work?” I ask

“I don’t know,” Courtney admits. “But same as me, I guess. An hour of Googling.”

I rub my bicep.

“The office is definitely closed now,” I say. “We’ll have to wait till morning.”

Courtney winces.

“Actually,” he says, “it’s a big office space. They have eighty employees. That’s a lot to search so . . . I thought it would be better to go in now. When it’s closed.”

“Ugh, shit.” I rub my temples. “Breaking into an office?”

“I don’t think we’ll have to break in, exactly,” Courtney says. “It’s on the twenty-third floor of a huge office building downtown. There should be a guard downstairs around the clock, even though the front doors will be locked, and a few people will be working late throughout the building. We should just be able to talk our way in.”

“Talk our way in?”

Courtney nods.

“This isn’t Manhattan, Frank. People here trust each other.”

I eye him.

“You really think there’s a decent chance the books are there?”

He squirms a little under my gaze.

“It’s the only thing I can think of,” he says—conveniently dodging the question.

“Guess we don’t have a huge amount to lose,” I sigh and grab the Honda keys off the dresser. “Let’s take all our stuff with us,” I say.

“So we can go to the airport after if the books aren’t there?” Courtney asks, clearly challenging me.

I pat his stubbly cheek. He seems jarred by the physical contact. Or maybe he just noticed how grimy my hands are.

“I guess a little sleep helped me think more clearly. I realized that if we flee, Sampson will cancel my passport immediately. And they’ll arrest me as soon as I come off the plane in Jakarta.” I smile grimly. “I think we’ll be in Colorado come Friday night, one way or another.”

 

There’s a Walmart Supercenter a seven-minute drive from the motel that doesn’t close until ten thirty. We stop there and buy cheap suits—for Plan A. Then duct tape, women’s stockings and syringes (Courtney carries a few doses of injectable Propofol in his bag)—for the somewhat kinkier Plan B.

The traffic as we get closer to the office building is absurd. Doesn’t take long to realize there’s a Rockies game tonight, and our building isn’t too far from Coors Field.

“Shit,” I mutter, taking a sip of what will undoubtedly not be my last Red Bull of the evening. “Rockies game. Just our luck.”

“I don’t know how people can watch football . . .” Courtney says. I don’t bother to correct him.

It’s a quarter to eleven by the time we pass the building that contains the architecture firm. Problem is there’s no parking. Every lot is open and catering to people here for the baseball game. But the game must have started a while ago, because the lots are all full. And you can forget about parking on the street.

Traffic is more or less gridlocked. Whether the game just ended, or these are people coming late to it, I don’t know. It’s taking almost four minutes to make it the length of a single block.

“This isn’t gonna work,” I growl.

“Keep looking, maybe we’ll find something.”

“What? Courtney—there’s nowhere to park.”

“Hold on, turn left here—we haven’t been down this road yet.”

I start obeying, then slam on the brakes as I realize there’s only one lane on this road, and all the parked cars are facing toward me.

“It’s a one-way road.”

I reverse to get back into the “flow” of traffic—someone honks at me. I flip him off. Think about how unfortunate it would be if we get pulled over by the cops now.

“We’re not gonna be able to park,” I say. “Not in any conventional sense.”

“What do you—”

I pull out of the traffic, and steer into a spot at the mouth of one of the full lots—in effect trapping several hundred cars inside the garage. Turn off the ignition.

“Frank . . .” Courtney seems roughly as horrified by this parking violation as he did by Rico’s flayed carcass. “This will get towed in minutes.”

“So we’ll get a new rental. On Sampson’s card.” I grin. “Take all your shit.”

I grab my duffel from the backseat. Courtney takes his attaché and red acrylic tool bag. We’re already wearing the suits. Glad we packed light.

People stare in disbelief as we leave the Honda there. Some people seem furious, but one guy actually rolls down his window and gives us a grinning thumbs-up.

Courtney tries again Mindy on the way to the office building. Shakes his head in frustration.

We’re the only people even remotely dressed up—everyone’s wearing jerseys or T-shirts of Denver sports teams. Lotta college-aged kids. See some DU and CU gear. Most of these people appear extremely drunk. I wonder if Thursday nights are always this crazy—or if a sporting event in the vicinity is excuse enough, even if you’re not attending.

Our destination is one of the taller buildings. A soaring rectangular prism of glass. The whole lobby floor is a Wells Fargo, and the rest is offices. Didn’t have time to do much due diligence beyond that. Hopefully it won’t matter.

“No guns,” Courtney murmurs to me, as we stand shoulder to shoulder across the street. “There are literally thousands of cameras in there. You pull out a gun, and the cops are swarming within minutes.”

“I know,” I say. “Let me talk to him, okay?”

“Sure, sure.” Courtney nods. “Honey, not vinegar, right?”

I restrain myself from mentioning that he’s the one whose face always looks like he just swallowed a mouthful of balsamic.

“I know.”

We cross the street, climb the exterior steps up to the revolving glass doors at the main entrance to the lobby. Inside, as Courtney guessed, the reception desk is still manned despite the hour. But there are two guys there, not one.

I breathe in deep, and then force a wide smile and rap on the glass of the locked revolving door. One of the guys looks up at me and points to a door to our right, then to the key card he’s wearing around his neck:

To get in when the building is closed, you have to use your key card.

The guy looks back down to whatever he’s watching behind the desk.

I knock again, and he looks up, now annoyed.

I spread my hands helplessly and pantomime: no card.

He looks at me blankly.

I wave him over. He looks at me like I’m crazy, and exchanges a look and a few words with his partner. They both look over at me. I smile and wave them over like, I’ll explain everything.

Both of them wearily stand up and trot over to the revolving door. One is probably in his sixties, pink faced, probably a retired cop. The other is young and looks like a punk—I’m thinking he was a troubled juvenile who’s cleaned up, and is super grateful to get this gig.

Stupid. They shouldn’t have both left their post.

The old one unlocks the side door, the one you’d use your card to get in through. We rush over. The two of them are standing in the entrance.

“Sorry sir, you need your card to get in after six thirty,” says the younger guy, clearly savoring his role as The Man.

Six thirty. . . we left the aquarium around what, four on Tuesday? He definitely could have just waltzed in.

“I know,” I say, with genuine exasperation. “Thing is, we rushed off to a dinner meeting that, as you can see, went late. And we left all our stuff in the office including our cards. Need those materials tonight—have a huge presentation tomorrow.”

The young guy crosses his arms, trying to look tough, and looks up at the older guy.

“You got ID?” Older guy asks. “Company ID or something?”

“Left it all upstairs.” I shrug meekly. “Dumb, I know.”

Old guy rolls his eyes, like what morons.

“What office?” he asks.

“Rogers and Stern, twenty-third floor.”

The young guy just stands there with his arms folded. If it was up to him, he’d turn us away, I think. He’s too scared to fuck up and lose this job. The older guy’s just doing this job to keep busy in retirement; doesn’t really give a shit.

“Alright. Come on in,” the old guy sighs and limps back to the check-in desk. “Lemme check the rosters. What are your names?”

I bite my tongue.

Gig’s up.

I make a move to retreat but Courtney puts a reassuring hand on my shoulder.

“Gregory White and Paul Buffet.”

He clicks through something, breathing loudly through his nose.

“Rogers and Stern, right?” he confirms.

“Yes.”

He frowns as he looks at the screen, then up at us.

“I had to shave my beard.” Courtney smiles. “Wife wasn’t having it.”

The old guy mulls this for a second, then sinks into his rotating chair, relief on his face evident.

“Justin—take them up to the office and let them get their stuff.”

Justin nods.

“I’ll wait down here,” Courtney says. “We don’t both need to go up.”

What the hell?

Our eyes meet for a second, and Courtney’s eyes flit to the older guy. I get it, if we both go up, we have no control over the old guy. If the old guy sees anything fishy on the CCTV, he raises the alarm.

Maybe Courtney plans to just talk this guy’s ear off. Try to convince him to go vegan. He’s got hours of material in that bag.

“Okay,” I tell him. “Be back in a few.”

“Come on,” says Justin, impatiently. I grab my duffel bag and follow him through the empty lobby to the elevators, the clicking of our footsteps echoing against the glass doors. He hits the up button, and smiles to me perfunctorily as we step into one of the six elevators.

“What floor, sir?” he asks.

“Twenty-three,” I say. There’s a magnetic reader on the elevator for cards, presumably needs to be used after hours. When the elevator doors don’t close, I smile at Justin. “We forgot our cards, remember?”

“Oh, right.” He nods, and beeps his. Elevator doors slide shut. Justin has his hands folded over his crotch. I wonder if he realizes what a classic gesture of fear that is.

That’s not good. He shouldn’t be afraid of me.

“You know what the score to the Rockies game is?” I ask, smiling.

He shrugs.

“I’m from Arizona. Hate the Rockies.”

My gaze zips to the mirrored camera discreetly tucked in the corner of the elevator. There are cameras everywhere in the public spaces: elevators and hallways. Only once we’re in the offices should the CCTV lose sight of us. Bulge in the right side of Justin’s tan suit jacket. Gun. Doubt night guards at office buildings keep them loaded, but you never know. They are right in front of a bank.

“No kidding!” I say. “I used to live in Arizona myself. Whereabouts?”

“Tucson,” he responds blandly.

“Beautiful city,” I say.

“I hated it.”

Strike two . . .

Doors open onto the twenty-third floor. Justin steps out first, waiting for me to lead the way.

Fuck. Fuck.

I choose right. Justin lets me walk ahead of him. I don’t like that, him padding along behind me at a safe distance. I think he might be more perceptive than I gave him credit for.

“Law office, right?” he says, behind me.

I turn back and grin, stopping in my tracks to see if I can spot the name of the firm on any of the doors behind him.

“Nah, architecture firm.”

Justin nods.

We don’t pass the architecture office. I have to take another right, and then another. If we end up back at the elevator bank, the gig might be up.

Only thing going for me is this guy is young, doesn’t want to screw up this job.

My heart drops. I see the glass entrance to Rogers and Stern now, but we’re almost back at the elevators . . . it obviously would have been faster if I’d just turned left initially.

Just ignore it. Own it.

I stride purposefully to the glass double doors of Roger and Stern, as if I’d known my destination all along. Stop at the place for the card key, and turn and grin at Justin.

“You know, I don’t think I remember seeing you guys around before,” Justin says, little tremolo in his voice.

My stomach knots, and I turn back to the door so my face doesn’t give anything away to him.

“Yeah, that’s cuz you work nights,” I say, forcing some humor into my voice. “I’m usually outta here at four.”

“Right, right.”

A little more reluctantly than I would have liked, Justin bends down and touches his key card to the lock. I hear a little magnetic click, and immediately push in the door to the firm and enter. Lights flick on automatically.

It’s a beautiful waiting room. Stylish white leather couches, some interesting potted trees trimmed into perfect spheres. The wall across from the entrance is all glass, offering a stunning view of the Denver skyline. But as soon as I step in, my heart sinks. I know there’s no way pallid Rico could have weaseled his way into this classy office unnoticed and just left a bag somewhere.

Never second-guess yourself in the heat of battle . . . I think . . . Maybe I’m just trying to convince myself to bail, because I’m scared.

I act like I’ve seen this waiting room a million times before. Turn left past the reception desk, to where the offices will be.

Oh boy.

It’s a really big space—will take a while to thoroughly search. The good news is that it’s an open-office type layout, looks like employees work a lot at big library-style communal tables—so I won’t have to break into many offices. Bad news is there are hundreds of file cabinets, and some of the tables even have built-in cabinets. No single cabinet could hold the duffel bag, but if someone took the books out, they could easily file them one at a time . . .

But who would put them in a file cabinet? Not Rico . . . not with those guys close behind me. I’d buzz into the office, hand the duffel bag to the receptionist, then scram.

I grind my teeth. I’m being overtaken by a feeling of futility. Can’t really blame Courtney, the idea had a certain amount of logic, but we acted pretty impulsively. Would Rico realistically have entrusted the books to a total stranger?

Maybe he dropped them off with a note . . . saying this is for someone in particular. Maybe it is in someone’s office or file cabinet.

I haven’t even scoped the entire office yet. There appears to be a communal space—maybe a kitchen and break room—on the far side—and who knows, maybe more offices. Even if this is all though, it would take me at least a half hour just to do a cursory search.

I hear Justin shift behind me.

Fuck.

“You just gonna stand there, man?” he asks, finally growing annoyed. “Get your stuff and let’s go.”

I turn back to him. I wonder how aware he is that—being in a private office space—we’re no longer being observed by his partner’s CCTV. I glance down quickly at the walkie-talkie clipped to the pocket of his suit jacket.

Old model. Won’t sound too crisp.

“Yeah, sorry, just had a few drinks at dinner,” I say. “Actually I’m just gonna use the restroom a second, sorry.”

I have no clue if there’s even a bathroom in this office, or if they use a communal one in the halls. Doesn’t matter. I rush around the edge of the maze of cubicles, toward the break room.

Justin comes after me.

“Sir, please. This isn’t my job.” He’s half pleading, half losing his patience. “I need to get back downstairs. I’m not even supposed to leave the desk during my shift.”

I speed up, dash around a large pillar and drop my duffel bag and pull out my ceramic knife. As soon as he rounds it after me I go straight for his right arm—the one that would grab his gun. Pull it behind his back, then wrap my right foot around his right calf and push him forwards. He face plants on the crisp white floor with an ugly smack. I fall down on top of him, keeping his arm pinned back.

“What the fuck,” he cries . . . One hard tug back and I’d break his arm in about four places. Instead I reach inside his jacket, pull out his gun and toss it away, then turn him over onto his back and tickle his neck with the tip of my knife.

“Justin,” I say softly. “I’m honestly very sorry about this.”

His arm is pinned beneath him, obviously causing him great distress. He makes a sound like a dying animal. I put the sleeve of my suit jacket in his mouth.

“Listen, kid,” I say slowly, seriously. “You’re going to be fine. I won’t cut you up unless you do something stupid. I’m just gonna lock you in an office. You’ll probably be there until morning, okay? But you’ll be fine. Okay?”

After a moment, he gives an unenthusiastic nod.

“I mean, I could break your arm if you want,” I say. “Would probably get you a few months of workplace leave. You want me to?”

His eyes go wide and he shakes his head frantically.

“Alright.” I shrug. “Just trying to be helpful.”

Keeping the blade nuzzled against his neck like a tender lover, I pull my duffel open with my other hand and remove my roll of duct tape.

I stand up. “Roll over,” I command.

“Don’t kill me, man,” he says, rolling over onto his stomach. I bind his hands behind his back with duct tape. Tie his legs together, then put the knife down and roll him back over onto his back.

“What’s your friend’s name? The old guy?”

“Fuck you,” he says.

I crouch down next to him.

“Look,” I say, looking into his terrified eyes. “Tell me the old guy’s name and you’re going to wake up tomorrow morning in one piece, alright? We both know this is way above your pay grade.”

“Fu—” he starts.

“Justin,” I say. “If the next word out of your mouth isn’t a name, I’m going to have to cut—”

“Ed,” he says.

“Smart boy.” I smile and pat his cheek. Then I gag him with duct tape and pull his walkie-talkie from his pocket.

“Ed?” I say into it, trying to imitate Justin’s mild Latino accent, slightly high-pitched tough-guy voice.

“Yeah.” Ed’s tired voice comes back, as staticky as I’d hoped. Doubt he’ll be able to tell I’m not Justin.

“This guy got sick up here. Throwing up. Drank too much. We’ll be a little while.”

“What? Sick?” he responds, sounds inconvenienced, but not in disbelief. “Goddammit. You gotta get down here. Can’t be alone at the desk for longer than a bathroom break.”

“Yeah, I know, but this guy is puking his guts out. Be back when we can.”

A pause.

“Everything okay up there? You want me to call this in?”

“No, it’s fine. He’s just puking. Needs a few minutes.”

“Goddammit.”

“Sorry, Ed.”

I take off my suit jacket and throw it over Justin’s face so he can’t see what’s about to go down. Grab his legs and drag him into the break room. I hear a grunt as I clip his head against the door frame.

“Sorry.”

I drop his legs, take a second to catch my breath. Then go out into the hall to do a lap. Figure out the best way to go about this methodically. Past the break room are four locked offices: Partner, Partner, Accounts, HR, two conference rooms and . . . a dark library. My heart speeds up.

If they were anywhere, they’d be here.

Lights in here aren’t automatic. I find the switch and an enclosed domed light fixture on the ceiling flips on. It’s a round room paneled in cherrywood bookcases. Reading tables, loungey hyper-trendy bean bag chairs, glazed wood floor.

Good news is this space is so uncluttered that I’d be able to spot them pretty easily. I do a slow lap around the perimeter of the room, scanning up and down each bookcase for unmarked spines of that sickly shade of yellow leather. Don’t spot them. Do it a second time, to make sure, then leave the library.

“Justin?” It’s the voice on the walkie-talkie. “What the hell is going on up there?”

Shit.

“Hey Ed,” I say. “Sorry will be just a few more minutes. This guy is really sick.”

“This is not okay.”

“I know, I know.”

I probably have fifteen more minutes, maybe twenty, until Ed realizes something is seriously wrong. Wonder if Courtney would risk drugging him with all those cameras around . . . ?

“Can I talk to Greg?” It’s Courtney’s voice.

“Yeah . . .” I say in Justin’s voice. Then, in my own, I croak: “Hey man. Sorry, just, those martinis hit me all of a sudden.”

“How long you going to be, man? We’re supposed to be at Hannah’s in fifteen.”

He’s telling me to hurry up. Doesn’t think he can hold off Ed for much longer.

“Okay. We’ll be down in ten,” I say.

I run back through the communal work room, to the reception area. Dive behind it, and search frantically for anything resembling the duffel bag. Nada.

I comb the work area, looking under every table. Will just have to leave the file cabinets—unlikely someone would have taken each book out and filed it individually anyways.

No bag.

Where Sophnot will never go. Where they belong.

My face is bathed in sweat. I undo a couple buttons on my suit jacket.

I check my watch. 11:19. We have sixteen hours until we’re supposed to get the books to Sampson. I don’t think they’re here.

Wait.

Maybe there’s something else that can help.

I rush back to the hallway with the four locked doors and try the one to HR.

It’s locked, obviously. I peer into the lock. Courtney could pick it in five minutes, or I could bust through with my electric torch, but that makes a mess and is likely to set off the smoke alarms. The rest of the office, however, is a glass wall. Closed curtains.

Rush back to the break room, where poor Justin is writhing on the ground. I pull my suit jacket from his eyes. He glares up in terror.

“Don’t worry, just needed this.”

I snatch up my duffel bag and rush back to the HR office. Unzip my bag and find my hammer. Wrap my suit jacket around fist and hammer and bring it down as hard as I can on the glass.

The first blow cracks it. Second goes through smooth, making a head-sized hole. Takes me about two minutes to clear enough out for me to enter the office.

Automatic lights inside come to life.

There are four file cabinets. Something of a relief, actually, considering how many HRs keep their files exclusively digital these days. I rip open one at random and grin.

Personnel files.

Takes me about three minutes to move through alphabetically until I find Oliver Vicks.

Nice and fat.

I grab the walkie-talkie.

“Greg is heading down now, I’m gonna stay up here and clean up for a sec. He made a real mess,” I say.

“What?” Ed is furious. “No, you get your ass down here now goddammit!”

I turn off the walkie-talkie, damming up Ed’s stream of curses. Head back through the work room, reception office, back into the hallway. Take the elevator down using Justin’s card, and shoot out into the lobby.

Both Courtney and Ed are staring at me in shock.

Realize I left my suit jacket upstairs, the top few buttons of my shirt are undone, and I’m absolutely dripping in sweat.

“Oh wow,” Ed says. “You do look sick.”

“Yeah.” I smile weakly. “Justin will be down in a sec.”

He notes the personnel file in my hand.

“That was what you needed?”

I nod.

“Yep. Have a good night, Ed.”

Courtney and I rush out of the Wells Fargo lobby before Ed has a chance to question us any longer. Once we turn the corner, I toss the muted walkie-talkie in the trash and collapse onto a park bench. Don’t realize how badly my hands are shaking.

Courtney sinks down beside me.

“No books?” he asks.

I look at him.

“Very perceptive.”

“How thorough—”

“As thorough as I could be in twenty fucking minutes,” I snap. I hand him Oliver Vicks’s file. “I got this, but it’s small consolation.”

Courtney wordlessly snatches it from my hands, and opens it.

“You’re welcome,” I say.

He doesn’t respond.

“Alright,” I say. “We need to get out of here. Ed’s gonna figure out pretty quickly that Justin’s indisposed.”

Courtney stands up.

“Which way did you leave the car?” he asks.

I can’t tell if he’s serious.

“I thought you understood,” I say. “I left the car blocking in thousands of sports fans in downtown Denver, during a Rockies game. I’d say the odds of it still being there are—”

“Like a mouse completing a game of solitaire on the surface of the sun?” Courtney raises an eyebrow, an almost smile.

“Right, right . . .” I say, suddenly dying for a drink. “Don’t expect a miracle every night though, champ.”

 

My skull might as well be filled with porridge. I’m trying to read the contents of Oliver Vicks’s file, but the words refuse to cooperate; swimming around on the page like little fish.

We’re sitting in a Starbucks inside the Denver Health Medical Center. Mostly because it’s open 24/7, and nobody will hassle you for loitering. I think a sick part of me also wanted to be around people who have it even worse than us—just to keep things in perspective. To this end, I also picked up a half liter of the cheapest whiskey I could find. It’s absolutely vile. Or at least, it was vile when I cracked it open. Four glugs later I’m starting to warm up to it.

We’ve been sitting here for hours. It’s already nearly four in the morning. I’ve “read” the whole file myself, but have processed perhaps a dozen words—none of them consecutive.

“Got anything?” I ask Courtney, as I have every ten minutes for the last few hours, with largely disappointing results. Initially when he doesn’t respond I assume he’s in The Zone. Then I realize his eyes are nearly shut and there’s a thin thread of drool oozing from the corner of his mouth. “Courtney?” I snap my fingers in front of his face and he calmly opens his eyes.

“Interesting. Mmh. Yes,” he says slowly, rubbing his eyes. “Yes. Just saw some interesting things . . .”

Courtney’s right eyelid starts twitching and he seems to be staring intently at something on the chest of my shirt. His head droops. I snap my fingers in front of his eyes again and he perks up, smiles in confusion.

“Hey,” he says.

“Courtney? What was interesting?”

“Right, right . . .”

“Have another Red Bull,” I say.

“No.” He lazily swats away at nothing. “I’m good. Um, what I was going to say . . . oh, his first interview. He faked recommendation letters from real people. But there was no reason to doubt him, because of his portfolio.” Courtney yawns and continues. “Listen to this note the interviewer jotted after looking through Oliver’s portfolio: Absolutely world class. Never seen such simultaneously brilliant detail kept in context of big picture. Clearly genius.”

“Okay . . .” I say. “That’s not really surprising though is it?”

“No,” says Courtney. “But in the first interview, Oliver already made demands. One demand specifically: He wasn’t going to do paperwork of any kind. No letters to clients or the city, no tenders . . . he said this stuff bogged him down. He said all he did was design. I think that kind of chutzpah would normally be a non-starter, but because of the quality of his work in his portfolio, and the sample assignment they gave him, they hired him.”

I scratch my chin.

“So now we know, that’s probably because he had no clue about the bureaucratic process relating to buildings, eh? He was a prodigy at these sorts of designs, but had no idea about the logistics because he skipped school.”

Courtney nods slowly, which I initially take as assent, but then realize it’s his head bobbing to keep from going smack into the tabletop.

We have so many papers. In just a few days, Courtney has taken hundreds of pages of incredibly detailed notes, on everything from Sampson’s story, what Mindy told us about the books, details from the scene of Rico’s murder, the interview with the warden, the story of Joseph . . . Now we have Oliver’s personnel file. So much data, but my data processing unit just won’t function. And not only is my once potent Red Bull/coffee/whiskey tandem failing to jack me up, I think it’s tearing apart my stomach lining.

Wait a second . . .

I reach down and scramble through my duffel bag.

“Where is it . . .” I mutter, scared maybe I tossed it at some point . . . No. My hands close on it. The Advil bottle I confiscated at the red house. I open it, take out a blue pill and place it on the tabletop between us. Courtney frowns.

“What is that?” he asks.

“No clue. Took it off some kids who seemed to be enjoying it at the red house.”

Courtney picks it up and holds it to the light, reading the identifying numbers on it. Then types it into his phone.

“Dextroamphetamine,” he says.

“What’s that mean?” I ask.

“It’s a particularly potent amphetamine. Used to treat ADD. You may know it by its brand name: Adderall.”

“Perfect,” I say. Courtney’s face falls.

I snatch his phone and scan the article from the FDA website:

Oral or intranasal use produces euphoria or high. Snorting dextroamphetamine will lead to effects within 3 to 5 minutes, whereas oral ingestion takes 15 to 20 minutes, with less potent effects.

I grab my hammer from my duffel, pour six blue pills in the middle of the table and delicately tap them into powder with the hammerhead.

“Frank!” Courtney scans around the Starbucks like a paranoid prairie dog, then back to me. “What the hell are you doing!?”

“I think it’s pretty obvious that I’m grinding this into a snortable powder.”

“In here?” he asks.

I glance around the Starbucks. It’s mostly empty, and the only other occupants—a pair of nurses in lavender scrubs, a clearly distraught set of parents—appear to be dealing with their own shit. I shrug, then tear up a page from one of Oliver Vicks’s professional evaluations, roll it up to make a little snorting tube. Use another bit of the paper to form four bright blue lines.

“Frank, this is not safe. I think that’s a huge dose. And you’ve been drinking—”

“Correct.” I grin. “This isn’t for me.”

Courtney’s eyebrows fly up so high that for a second they look like two little hairy worms crawling along his forehead.

“I don’t think so,” he says.

“You’re the one who can fit this stuff together,” I say. “I’ll supervise. Don’t discount the stress of being in the managerial role.”

“I’m not touching that stuff,” Courtney says.

“I’ve snorted it before,” I lie. “It’s not a big deal. You just feel more awake.”

Courtney shakes his head adamantly, like a little kid refusing his Brussels sprouts.

“Come on, man, it was prescribed by a doctor. It’s safe. What is there to lose? You’re so tired you can’t see straight.”

Courtney stares at the blue lines, frowning intensely.

“You do one first.”

“One of us needs to stay sober.”

Courtney crosses his arms defiantly.

“I think that’s a pretty compelling argument for me to assume the supervisory role.”

“Courtney,” I sigh. “I don’t claim to understand how your brain works. But I’ve seen you make connections that I never would have made in a million years. If we don’t figure out where those books are, I’m probably going to spend the rest of my life in jail. If this stuff can help you think . . .”

He closes his eyes for a moment, then opens them, wordlessly takes the tube from me and—for quite obviously the first time in his life—snorts a line.

Leans back into his chair, and his eyes go a little cross-eyed as the stimulant trickles down the back of his throat.

“Good stuff, right?” I say, knowing full well there’s no way he feels anything yet.

“I guess,” he replies. “It’s definitely subtle. Just feel a bit more energy.”

“Yeah, that’s because you only did one,” I say. “Take another.”

He raises an eyebrow.

“I don’t know, Frank.”

“If you really fuck up, the emergency room is upstairs. Hell, maybe we should just check ourselves in anyways. There are worse places to hide from Sampson and Oliver.”

Courtney obligingly snorts down his second line. Coughs a little. Then taps on the table.

“I’m still tired,” he says.

“Give it a minute . . .” I glance around the Starbucks again. Even if somebody had seen what we’re doing, I doubt they’d give much of a shit. I take the file back from Courtney and try to read it again. The words still seem to be moving around on the page. I’d take some, too, but I meant what I said: One of us needs to keep his wits about him, be the arbiter of reason.

I close my eyes and try to concentrate.

Oliver Vicks. Oliver Vicks.

Fakes his architecture credentials, refuses to do paperwork, but gets hired anyway and is very successful until he gets found out at the hearing and shamed, starts writing these books, kills Becky’s family, goes to prison, walks right out, sends Rico to steal the books, kills Rico . . .

I feel something on my wrist. My eyes snap open—I fell asleep. It’s Courtney’s hand. His pupils are huge and he’s blinking extremely rapidly.

“I think I feel it,” he says. “I can feel like, my heart, inside my chest. I can feel each palpitation against my ribs. My heart feels like, really really big.”

“Uh huh,” I say.

“Yeah, like, my heart is so powerful,” Courtney says. “But okay, let’s work.”

He snatches the file back from me and starts combing through pages rapidly, muttering to himself. “Yeah, good medicine, Frank. I think you were right. I’m gonna figure this stuff out. Shoulda used this before. Shoulda used this stuff years ago . . .”

I close my eyes again. Enter that nether zone between sleep and real life. The flickering lights of the Starbucks flash on the insides of my eyelids.

Fakes credentials, failed school, genius, megalomaniac . . . Thinks he’s Joseph . . .

“Frank.” Courtney is tapping on my wrist again, this time a bit more urgently.

“Figure it out?” I ask.

His head less shakes than spasms back and forth.

“My mouth is dry.” He opens his mouth wide and massages his left jaw. Then closes it, cracks his knuckles in rapid succession, then starts doing what I can only describe as a sitting salsa dance—like a single move that’s all clenched fists and elbows running on a loop. “My mouth is dry,” he repeats.

“That’s normal,” I guess.

“Okay.” He nods. “Okay. Good. I’m not worried, just checking.”

“Okay,” I say. “So. What do you think? Why would he—”

“The questions first,” he says, reaching a finger into his mouth to poke at the inside of his cheek. “First we need to organize all the questions. We’ll make a list. A . . . A very organized list. Then we’ll just check off the answers one by one. That’s our problem is we’re not organized.”

“No, our problem is we keep going in circles. We keep gathering information without understanding it.”

“Because we’re not being organized.” Courtney leans in close. “We’re not being thoughtful and patient enough. We’re not paying attention to subtlety.”

“Dude, those are just words. We don’t understand jack shit. Putting this in a spreadsheet isn’t suddenly gonna change that.”

“Okay, okay.” He nods. “So we’ll just read through everything. Carefully. Start to finish. Should only take like four hours if we go fast. So that takes us to the morning—”

I tune out Courtney. Something’s dawning on me, but it’s elusive. Not a fact, but a feeling, a common thread winding its way through everything we know about Oliver Vicks.

Drops out of school, fakes his degree, writes the books in his own language, writes his own notes on the wall in his own language . . .

“I’ll read each page, then you’ll read it, then we’ll summarize it—”

“Courtney,” I snap. “Stop talking. Let me think.”

I think about Oliver in the cellar of the red house, writing on the walls, developing his language.

Why? Why not just write in English? Or Ancient Hebrew? Or Latin?

So that nobody but him could understand it?

As sophisticated as Mindy claimed the language was, it sure looked kind of childish to me. Maybe the meaning is complex, but the drawing of the cow reminded me of the drawings Sadie used to bring home from kindergarten . . .

I sit up straight.

I think I know where the books are.

“Let me see the phone,” I say.

Courtney eyes me, as if suspicious of this request, but he slides it across the table to me. I go to our text message records. Most recent is Sampson, then Mindy, then the phone Rico used to text us from the aquarium. That’s all. The recent calls history is entirely consumed by Sampson . . .

“There was a phone number Oliver called us on, when we were at Sampson’s,” I say. “He used the voice transformer, and we thought it was Rico.”

Courtney nods.

“I don’t remember, but I think that’s the same number he called us from when we were at Wendy’s. It doesn’t matter actually. My point is that he never texted us. He wanted the pictures of the bonds faxed to him instead of just good old text. Why?”

“Maybe because he was in prison so long he was unfamiliar with cell phones. When he was locked up fax machines were all the rage.”

“Fine, could be,” I respond. “But Becky’s restaurant. The Rocky Mountain Bar and Grill. Did you happen to look at their menus? I did.”

Courtney squints.

“Uh, maybe glanced at one. Why?”

“The deaf owner . . . He wanted to make sure the place was handicapped-friendly. Wheelchair ramps. And Braille on the menu.”

Courtney nods ever so slightly.

“Okay . . .”

I grin broadly.

“That’s why he didn’t go to architecture school. That’s why he writes in his own language. Courtney,” I say. “I think Oliver Vicks can’t read.”

Courtney’s frown turns to stone as he considers this.

“He’s dyslexic,” I say. “I remember there were a few weeks when they thought Sadie might be dyslexic, because she was really slow starting to read. Turned out she just needed a little more time to get started, but at the time I was really worried and spent like a month reading all about dyslexia. There are studies where dyslexic people can read Braille far more effectively than written language. I think that’s why Oliver was at the grill before Becky ever started working there—it was the only place he could read the menu.”

“Dyslexic . . .” Courtney’s eyes are narrow, his shoulders clenched expectantly, breathing hard—he looks almost predatory.

“That’s why he wrote in his own made-up language that’s pictographic—he’s really uncomfortable writing in English. Or maybe he can’t at all.”

Courtney taps his fingertips on the table like he’s a stenographer taking notes on an invisible typewriter.

“Okay. I’m with you,” he says. “Because even if maybe he can read a little bit, slowly, he’s sensitive about this. Ashamed. He avoids any forum where he could possibly humiliate himself by making a mistake. Like text message. Or university.”

“Right,” I say. “And at this point, of course, he’s far more comfortable writing in his own language.”

He stops tapping his fingers.

“But so what?” he says. “Fine. Oliver can’t read. That doesn’t help us figure out where he is, or where the books are.”

I lean in closer.

“Oh, I disagree.”

Courtney fidgets.

“What. Tell me.”

“Rico was locked up in that room for years right? He didn’t have anything to do with himself but claw at his chain and look at the walls, and observe Oliver Vicks. Now even if he wasn’t the sharpest guy, I think it’s a reasonable assumption that after years in there he came to the same conclusion I just did. That Oliver Vicks just wasn’t comfortable with written English. So he’s running away from the aquarium wanting to stash the duffel somewhere, somewhere Oliver Vicks would never stumble upon them.” I smile. “Somewhere where books belong.”

Courtney lunges for his briefcase, combs through it frantically, until removing a map of Downtown Denver. Lays it flat on the table. Scans it desperately, until jabbing an index finger at a spot just a few blocks from the aquarium.

Something magical spreads across his features, bathing each one in turn in a shimmering glow. He forms a little O with his mouth and makes a sound that’s disturbingly similar to one I heard last night.

“There it is Frank. The Denver Public Library,” he whispers. “The public freaking library.”