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“Vic. I want you to help me think this through. This man, Charlie Manx, we agree he was probably eighty-five years old at the time of his last medical exam. He spent ten years in a coma. Most coma patients require months of rehabilitation before they can walk again. You are telling me you cut him with this tapper key—”

“Tappet.”

“—and then he was shot but still had the strength to drive away.”

What Vic could not say was that Manx wasn’t like other men. She had felt it when he swung the hammer, a coiled strength that belied his advanced age and gaunt frame. Hutter insisted that Manx had been opened up, that his heart had been removed during the autopsy, and Vic didn’t doubt it. For a man who’d had his heart taken out and put back in, a nick in the ear wasn’t that big a deal.

Instead she said, “Maybe the other guy drove. You want me to explain it? I can’t. I can only tell you what happened. What is your point? Manx has got my twelve-year-old in his car, and he’s going to kill him to get even with me, but for some reason we’re discussing the limits of your FBI imagination. Why is that?” She looked in Hutter’s face, into Hutter’s bland, calm eyes, and understood. “Jesus. You don’t believe a f*cking word, do you?”

Hutter deliberated for a time, and when she spoke, Vic had a sense that she was choosing words carefully. “I believe that your boy is missing, and I believe you’ve been hurt. I believe that you’re in hell right now. Other than that, I’m keeping my mind open. I hope you’ll see that as an asset and work with me. We both want the same thing. We want your boy back safe. If I thought it would help, I’d be out there driving around, looking for him. But that’s not how I find the bad guys. I find them by collecting information and sorting out what’s useful from what isn’t. Really, it’s not so different from your books. The Search Engine stories.”

“You know them? How young are you?”

Hutter smiled slightly. “Not that young. It’s in your file. Also, an instructor at Quantico uses pictures from Search Engine in his lectures, to show us how hard it is to pick out relevant details in a clutter of visual information.”

“What else is in my file?”

Hutter’s smile faltered slightly. Her gaze did not. “That you were found guilty of arson in Colorado in 2009. That you spent a month in a Colorado mental hospital, where you were diagnosed with severe PTSD and schizophrenia. You take antipsychotics and have a history of alcohol—”

“Jesus. You think I hallucinated getting the shit kicked out of me?” Vic said, her stomach clenching. “You think I hallucinated getting shot at?”

“We have yet to confirm a shooting took place.”

Vic pushed back her chair. “He fired at me. He fired six bullets. Emptied his gun.” Thinking now. Her back had been to the lake. It was possible every single bullet, even the one that had gone through Manx’s ear, had wound up in the water.

“We’re still looking for slugs.”

“My bruises,” Vic said.

“I don’t doubt someone fought you,” said the FBI agent. “I don’t think anyone doubts that.”

There was something about this statement—some dangerous implication—that Vic couldn’t figure out. Who would’ve fought her if not Manx? But Vic was too exhausted, too emotionally spent, to try to make sense out of it. She didn’t have it in her to work out whatever Hutter was stepping around.

Vic looked at Hutter’s laminated badge again. PSYCH EVAL. “Wait a minute. Wait a f*cking—you’re not a detective. You’re a doctor.”

“Why don’t we look at some pictures?” Hutter said.

“No,” Vic said. “That’s a complete waste of time. I don’t need to look at mug shots. I told you. One of them was wearing a gasmask. The other was Charlie Manx. I know what Charlie Manx looks like. Jesus, why the f*ck am I talking to a doctor? I want to talk to a detective.”

“I wasn’t going to ask you to look at pictures of criminals,” Hutter said. “I was going to ask you to look at pictures of hammers.”

It was such a baffling, unexpected thing to hear that Vic just sat there, mouth open, unable to make a sound.

Before anything came to her, there was a commotion in the other room. Chitra’s voice rose, wavering and querulous, and Daltry said something, and then there was a third voice, midwestern and emotional. Vic recognized the third voice at once but couldn’t work out what it was doing in her house when it ought to be on a plane, if not in Denver by now. Her confusion delayed her reaction time, so that she was not all the way out of her chair when Lou came into the room, trailing an entourage of cops.

He hardly looked like himself. His face was ashy, and his eyes stood out in his big, round face. He looked like he had lost ten pounds since Vic had last seen him, two days earlier. She rose and reached for him, and in the same moment he enfolded her in his arms.

“What are we going to do?” Lou asked her. “What the hell are we going to do now, Vic?”





The Kitchen


WHEN THEY SAT BACK DOWN AT THE TABLE, VIC TOOK LOU’S HAND, the most natural thing in the world. She was surprised to feel the heat in his chubby fingers, and she looked again at his washed-out, sweat-slick face. She recognized that he looked seriously ill but took it for fear.