This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Text copyright © 2019 by The Koontz Living Trust

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

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eISBN: 9781542016216

Cover design by Phantom City Creative

1

The sky is the blue of a birthing blanket, the day newborn and filled with the light of innocence, when the air brakes of the bus whistle softly, waking him. He has arrived in Worstead, Texas, looking for trouble, on this Friday in June.

The bus is bound for Houston, and this is merely a quick hop-on, hop-off stop en route.

He steps into the aisle. Rather than consign it to the luggage compartment, he has kept his small white suitcase with him.

Carrying the bag, he exits the bus. He is the only passenger disembarking in Worstead, population 11,546.

A young Hispanic couple wait to board. The man is thin and intense. She’s pregnant, radiant. Maybe they are victims of the world, or maybe they are the parents of its savior. Life is a weave of infinite possibilities, though some are more likely than others.

The treeless, dusty street is lined with two- and three-story buildings with flat, parapeted roofs. Constructed of local limestone or rust-colored sand-struck bricks, many date back to the days of gunslingers and stagecoaches that were ripe for robbery.

The morning is warm. Later it will be stifling.

He checks his iPhone and discovers one text message. As always, it is from Ace of Diamonds, who manages his nomadic life. He doesn’t know who Ace might be, whether male or female.

This message is just a reminder: ALEX HURKOS, BLUE RIBBON MOTOR INN.

The Blue Ribbon Inn is visible from the bus station, and he sets out for it on foot.

His name isn’t Hurkos. He doesn’t remember his name.

Indeed, he doesn’t remember anything of his past prior to this itinerant life he’s been leading for two years. He knows—a better word is believes—that his amnesia is a medical matter beyond his control, but he senses that it’s also somehow a choice he has made.

He currently calls himself Ben Shepherd. A magazine left on the bus by a previous passenger featured an article about a police dog—a German shepherd—that lost one leg in a violent encounter but persevered through rehab and didn’t retire. The dog’s name is Ben.

At the Blue Ribbon Inn, no ID is required because Ace of Diamonds prepaid and made certain other arrangements with the management. Nameless has no credit cards. He rarely carries identification of any kind, not even in false names.

The front desk clerk, one Roxanne Cortez, wishes him a pleasant stay and winks at him. He returns the wink.

The room is large, clean, and comfortable. He doesn’t wear gloves and won’t bother to wipe down any surfaces prior to leaving, for he has no fingerprints. They were removed with the application of a series of lightly applied acids and CO₂ laser treatments. This he remembers, for the memory affords him peace of mind.

In the closet hang two pairs of jeans, two shirts. They are not his size, of course, much too small, but that doesn’t matter.

During his time in Worstead, he will wear the same sport coat, shirt, and jeans that he’s wearing now. If all goes well, he will be done with the job before the day ends, and then be on his way.

Except for the toothpaste and toothbrush, the toiletries in the bathroom are not suitable for him and are merely stage dressing.

In a nightstand drawer are a car key labeled with a license plate number, a smartphone with functions specific to this mission, and a radio-wave jammer.

He doesn’t know who pays for what he needs. Now and then he is overcome by curiosity and considers seeking answers. However, he understands as if in blood and bone that he is better off not knowing, and the desire for enlightenment always passes.

Because he slept little on the bus, he prepares himself for what lies ahead by taking a three-hour nap. He always falls asleep instantly and always wakes at the time he has predetermined.

After a long shower, freshly dressed in his only clothes, he opens his small white suitcase. Among other things, it contains a zippered pouch holding forty thousand dollars in hundreds and twenties.

The bag also contains a Galco shoulder system for a pistol. The fit is tight but comfortable.

The pistol is a Springfield Armory TRP-Pro .45ACP. Five-inch barrel. Seven-round magazine. A sound suppressor.

With the pistol holstered, he pulls on his sport coat and drops a spare magazine in one pocket, the radio-wave jammer in another.

He closes the suitcase and stows it in the closet.

Leaving the room, he hangs the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door.

Parked in front of the room, a rental Ford sedan bears the same license plate number as does the key. He puts the pouch with forty thousand dollars in the trunk, in the spare-tire well, and locks the car.

He walks to the coffee shop associated with the motel, asks for a window booth, and orders a late lunch.

He has a view of the street. A few clouds have hatched in the sky; though at ground level the day is still, a high-altitude wind harries the clouds. Flying across the faces of the buildings, the shadows resemble dragons, as if Texas has gone Tolkien.

This is a world of wondrous beauty and deep mystery, of which he has considerable appreciation, and this awareness shapes him no less than life experiences shape others. Some psychologists would argue that a man stripped of his past must be an emotional cripple, because we are made of memories. However, this long-enduring world, wrapped in more mysteries than Nameless, functions superbly, and he also thrives, an enigma even to himself but with a solemn purpose.

Another text message arrived while he was showering. Now he reads it. Two names that he already knows. Three addresses.

2

Jennifer Demeter lives in a modest stucco house on two acres south of the town limits. A pair of large oaks frame the isolated residence. An old Honda is parked in a carport from which paint is peeling like sunburned skin. The wood of the porch is the weathered gray that high-end designers strive to achieve for wealthy clients and that the poor endure because they lack money for paint.

Worstead exists to serve a county of ranches and farms. Jenny works from home, the accountant for Worstead Farm Supply.

He parks the Ford in the gravel driveway. Before he gets out, he lowers the windows to ventilate the vehicle in the summer heat.

The porch steps are made of cinder blocks. The floorboards creak. The front door stands open behind a screen door.

Flitting between the yard and trees, brown-headed cowbirds issue slurred whistles, but no sound comes from the house.

He knocks loudly, waits, and knocks again.

The hall lies in gloom, with a doorway to a sun-filled room at the far end. Backlit, she appears and slowly approaches, seeming to drift like a spirit reluctantly returning to this world.

As she draws near, he sees that she carries a can of hornet killer. Set on STREAM, with a twenty-foot reach, such a potent pesticide might provide a better defense than pepper spray.

“Mrs. Dwayne Demeter?” he asks.

“Ever since high school,” she says. “Who might you be?”

“Ben Shepherd. I was with Dwayne in Afghanistan.”

Whether this claim is true or not, he doesn’t know. He might—or might never—have been in Afghanistan.

“I don’t think Dwayne mentioned any Ben Shepherd.”

“There’s special ops and black ops. When we’re on black ops, we don’t talk about teammates by name while they’re alive, in service. Anyway, I knew Dwayne only on his last tour of duty.”

“Were you with him when?”

“When it happened? Yes. It was quick. Gone in a second.”

Her lips are pressed tight as she considers his words. It’s what she wants to believe. She isn’t the kind of woman who wants it prettified, to be told Dwayne lingered long enough to say, Tell Jenny, I love her, but she also doesn’t want to be told he suffered.

“You still on the team?” she asks.

“No, ma’am. I’m civilian now. As much as I can ever be.”

She studies him through the screen. “Why’re you here?”

“Russell Soakes.”

Having lowered the can of hornet killer, Jennifer Demeter raises it again. “You tell him to go to hell.”

“If it comes to that, ma’am, I’ll send him there.”

He speaks without bravado, matter-of-factly, and she seems attuned to this nuance of tone. “You’re what—the Lone Ranger?”

“No, ma’am. I don’t have a horse named Silver.”

“Russell Soakes is a snake.”

“No argument.”

“Are you some kind of law?”

“No, ma’am.”

“The law’s useless to me.”

“Then it’s time for a new approach to the problem.”

Dubious, she studies him through the screen, which renders his face in pixels as it renders hers. “So what’s in it for you?”

“It’s something to do.”

She regards him in silence. Her stare is clear and blue. In spite of her losses, there is nothing drowned in those eyes. Her spirit is buoyant and breathing.

Nameless is patient, with nowhere to be but here.

“Is it something Dwayne did for you, so you want to give back?”

“Exactly,” he lies, for it is an explanation that will put her mind at ease. He has allowed her to conceive it herself.

She lowers the can of insecticide. “Maybe I’m losing it.”

He doesn’t press her to let him in. At this point, she will distrust even the slightest encouragement.

The sturdy aluminum screen door has neither a hook-and-eye latch nor a sliding bolt. She uses a key to unlock the blind deadbolt, which doesn’t provide a keyway on his side of the door.

She lets him in and relocks the door. “I’m working in the kitchen. End of the hall.”

She doesn’t want to turn her back on him. He leads the way to the kitchen.

Lacking air-conditioning, the house is a steeping pot.

Seraphina, ten years old, sits at the kitchen table, reading a book. She is a beautiful child with a halo of lustrous golden hair. She looks up from the novel, smiles shyly, and returns to her story.

The door is open to a screened—no doubt locked—back porch, where twelve-year-old Max is ensconced in a wicker chair, also reading a book. He looks up furtively, and then at the page again. “It’s wrong to pen up a boy his age,” says his mother, “but I can’t let either of them out of my sight with Soakes in the world.” She puts down the hornet killer. “Iced tea, Mr. Shepherd?”

“Thank you, yes.”

She has been peeling apples and slicing them into a large bowl of cold water. She puts the bowl in the refrigerator. She produces a pitcher of tea and pours two glasses and sets them on the table.

He settles in a chair across from Jennifer Demeter. Seraphina is to his left, seemingly lost in her book.

Sweetened with peach nectar, the tea is delicious.

“How did you hear about Soakes and me?” Jenny wonders.

“Better you don’t know. After whatever’s going to happen to Soakes happens, it’s better you know less than more.”

She watches him drink the tea. The knuckles of her hand are sharp and white as she grips but doesn’t sample her glass of tea.

“This feels like dreaming,” she says.

“It isn’t.” He indicates the girl. “Should we talk privately?”

“They’re young, but I don’t keep anything from them.”

“That’s not a bad way to be.”

“It’s the only way to be in this situation. Soakes pretends to be obsessed with me, but it’s not me he really wants.”

She is a fine-looking woman, thirty-two, fair of face and form, with an engaging quickness of mind and fullness of heart.

Nameless glances at Seraphina. Jenny nods grimly.

With that revelation, a vision sweeps upon him. He puts his tea down without spilling it as the future washes into the room.

Pajama-clad young Max is crumpled in a corner of the kitchen, his face broken into a jigsaw puzzle by hammer blows. Jenny lies facedown, the back of her skull cracked and concave, the pieces held together by a mortar of extruded brains. Seraphina is not present. Russell Soakes and a curly-haired man with a port-wine birthmark on his forehead enter the room with canvas tarps and duct tape. They begin to bundle the dead mother and son in sheets of black plastic.

Nameless is bent forward in his chair, his head clamped in his hands, as if to press out the vision that has overwhelmed him.

Jenny says, “What is it? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Just . . . it’s hideous, to think of him with her.”

If he tells Jenny the truth—I have this strange ability—she will want to know what he has foreseen.

He won’t share the vision with her, though not just because it is so terrifying. He will not share it because then she will ask if he can prevent this horror from occurring.

Sometimes he can. Sometimes he can’t. Certain events are lightly sketched on the future and can be erased. Others are woven into the fabric of all that is to come and resist being unraveled.

He never knows whether he will be successful.

His memory extends backward only two years, but there is much in it that he wishes he could forget.

3

A sea of emerald grass shimmers on both sides of the highway, and the sky is bigger than the land below, the few early clouds having been burned off by the sun. The emptiness appeals to Sheriff Russell Soakes, as it has since he was a child; from the vast lonely vistas, he infers that there are no boundaries, no rules, that each man and woman is a hunter with hungers to satisfy, and that the satisfaction of them is the only good for which to strive.

Cruising his county in a black-and-white Suburban, Russell is in a foul mood. He has needs that are currently not being fulfilled.

He lost his temper with Wendy, his most recent plaything, and by the time he worked off his anger on her, he needed to put her deep in a hole. There’s not been a girl in the playpen for a month.

Having grown tired of Wendy even before he killed her, he worked out a plan to get Seraphina, but Jenny Demeter somehow tumbled to his true intentions.

If he could have drugged the family, put Jenny and Max in their beds, replaced Seraphina with an unconscious Wendy, and engineered a leak in their gas furnace—leading to an explosion and fierce fire—little but charred bones and teeth would have remained. The county operates a coroner system rather than a medical-examiner system, so there is no forensic pathologist to worry about. The coroner, Cecil Blocker, owns one of the town’s two funeral homes and is beholden to the sheriff for a number of reasons; he would identify Wendy’s remains as Seraphina’s on Russell’s say-so and think nothing of it.

But now Russell isn’t welcome at the Demeter house, Wendy is in a hole too deep for coyotes to dig her out, and the sheriff has yet to devise another low-risk plan to get the exquisite Seraphina.

He should give up on the Demeter girl, but he is obsessed with her. Besides, he can patrol the main highways, pull over a hundred cars—two hundred—on one pretense or another, without finding a tender creature to his liking. High standards complicate his life.

His yearning for Seraphina brings him past the Demeter property a few times a day. But on this occasion, he is drawn to the place by a text message received on his personal smartphone. It is sent by Deputy Harry Carlisle and says cryptically, SOMETHING’S GOING DOWN AT 600 SMOKETREE ROAD, which is the Demeter address.

When Russell arrives, he discovers an unfamiliar vehicle in the driveway. He stops on the shoulder of the county road, plucks a pair of binoculars from the passenger seat, and glasses the Ford and the house beyond it. No one is in sight.

He adjusts the focus, clarifying the Ford enough to read its Mississippi license plate. He puts down the binoculars. He grabs the police-band mic, contacts the dispatcher, provides the plate number, and asks for a registration check. Then he drives on before someone at the house might see him lingering.

4

Jenny escorts Nameless through the house so that he can see what she has done to make it secure. There are three small bedrooms, a living room, a study, and one bath. The carpets and furniture are old and worn, but everything is as well scrubbed as Jenny herself.

Each double-hung window is latched and fitted with a battery-powered alarm.

In the master bedroom, he says, “You have no air-conditioning, no way to get a night draft.”

“Used to have in-window units for the bedrooms. Took them out. A man like Soakes could get his hands on some kind of sedative gas, use air conditioners to pump it in on us. Does that sound paranoid?”

“Not at all. Sounds like you’ve thought this through.”

Russell Soakes, thirty-nine, is the sheriff of Worstead County, which has no other law-enforcement agency. His daddy, Harlan, is in his forty-third year as chairman of the county board of supervisors. Uncle Curtis is a respected judge, and Uncle Ned is the district attorney. In all but name, this is Soakes County.

“So we sweat nights until this is over. If it’s ever over.”

“Soon,” he says. “You have something more than hornet killer?”

“A Walther nine millimeter. Double action. Ten rounds plus one. Keep it bedside. Or I’m in the yard, then I have it on my hip.”

He doesn’t ask if she can use the pistol. She’s clearly a woman who knows the truth of the world and takes it seriously.

“Kids are homeschooled,” she says. “If I have to go into town, they go with me. My friend Ainsley, she does most of our shopping.”

As they step into the hallway, he says, “So tell me how this started, how Soakes came into your life.”

She glances toward the kitchen and then goes into the living room. When she sits on an end of the sofa, he sits on the other end.

“We lost Dwayne three years and five months ago. I didn’t think there’d ever be another man. But even with the kids to look after, loneliness eats at you like the dry rot. Each day, you feel lighter, hollower. Then you have to accept he’s not going to do a Lazarus.”

5

Jenny meets Russell Soakes in a supermarket.

She’s in the produce section, selecting cantaloupes.

He stops his cart nearby and asks, “How you know they’re ripe? Half the time, I cut ’em open, they’re green.”

He’s six feet two, good-looking, and in his sheriff’s uniform. Jenny’s late father was Air Force, and her late husband was a Navy SEAL. She associates uniforms with goodness and reliability.

That morning, they’re talking cantaloupes, and that evening they’re having dinner together at a steakhouse.

He’s charming and has funny stories, as do all lawmen who deal with the dregs of society. Criminals are as absurd as they are evil.

But he’s more interested in her life than his. He draws her out about herself, Dwayne, the kids. He almost seems to be interrogating her, but when that thought troubles her, she chastises herself for being suspicious and ungenerous.

Most guys only endure stories about a date’s children, but Russell Soakes actually encourages Jenny to tell them. He seems to be genuinely curious about Max and Seraphina, what their interests are, how well they do in school, how they handled losing their dad.

They date twice a week. He’s courteous, courtly, good company. He doesn’t kiss her until the fourth date. Just on the cheek. He doesn’t believe in casual sex, says commitment has to come first.

As often as not, he wants to make their dates family affairs, including Max and Seraphina. The four go to the movies, a spring carnival, a church picnic. He encourages the kids to call him Uncle Russ, and they’re won over, having been long without a father.

Jenny isn’t falling in love, but she’s falling in like.

Then one day the previous month, May, when the kids are in school, she pays a visit to Calvin Baynard, owner of Worstead Farm Supply. She does most accounting work from home, but she and Calvin meet twice a month on various matters, usually related to taxes.

Having left Calvin’s office, as she’s crossing the sales floor, she’s approached by Sue Kern, manager of the ranch-sales division. Sue pulls Jenny into an aisle of horse tack for a private chat.

Sue has this cousin, Lana Varner, whose dad, Wylie, had a thing about drinking and driving until he T-boned an eighteen-wheeler at high speed and decapitated himself. Seventeen years ago, when Lana was twelve and Russell Soakes was a deputy, not yet sheriff, he made a habit of tailing Wylie, issuing written warnings for driving under the influence, escorting him home, but never arresting him.

Then one morning, when Lana’s at school, Wylie wakes up hungover and finds Deputy Soakes sitting in his bedroom, watching him, eyes like a predator’s assessing prey. “Sorry to intrude,” Soakes says, “but I need to have your attention while you’re sober.”

He offers Wylie a deal: If he will provide what Soakes wants, he can keep driving drunk, and Soakes will protect him. Otherwise, the next time Wylie’s caught, Soakes will arrest him, Wylie will draw a gun, and Soakes will have to kill him in self-defense.

“I don’t have a gun,” says Wylie.

“You’ll have one on that occasion,” Soakes assures him.

The alternative is that the two of them sit down with Lana, explain how it’ll be for a year, with Soakes now her secret boyfriend. He likes them when they’re ten, eleven, and twelve. Thereafter, he has no interest, so it won’t be something she has to do forever.

The Varner family isn’t tightly knit. Lana’s mother, Karla, walked out when the girl was five. They haven’t seen her since. Karla wanted a child; Wylie never did. He’s living easy on an inheritance just big enough that he can’t drink it away, and he has no job to give him respectability. The Soakes family owns a quarter of the county; they’re a law unto themselves, and as sure as birds can fly, Russell will be sheriff one day. Wylie takes the deal.

Lana says no, calls her father a pig. Wylie doesn’t know what to do, but Russell does. He says all the girl needs is discipline, and he applies a lot of it when Wylie goes on a weeklong bender.

In the horse-tack aisle of Worstead Farm Supply, Sue Kern finishes telling Jenny about her cousin Lana. “Soakes never touched her after she turned thirteen, but she was terrified of him. When her daddy tried to drive under a Peterbilt and lost his head six years ago, Lana finally had some money of her own. She was twenty-three by then, and she moved to San Antonio.”

Sue is nervous talking about this. She has no proof, but she believes her cousin. “I like you, Jenny. I like your kids, and Dwayne was a hero, served his country. But if you ever say I told you about Soakes, I’ll deny it. There’s maybe ten places in the country where free speech still works, but this isn’t one of them.”

After what Sue tells her, Jenny thinks back over the family dates: the way Soakes took Seraphina’s hand, as a father would, on the crowded carnival grounds, but never Max’s hand; how he smoothed her windblown hair with avuncular affection after she and Max got off the Tilt-A-Whirl; how Seraphina sat in his lap at the church picnic, his hand on her bare knee, Seraphina wearing shorts. What once seemed innocent now strikes Jenny as sinister seduction.

She tries to ease out of their relationship. At first, Russell seems to be clueless, unaware that she wants to put an end to it. He keeps trying to make dates. She explains that it isn’t him; it’s Dwayne still in her head and heart. Although she thought she could move on, three and a half years later, she can’t. Russell acts hurt, sends dozens of roses with pleas for a second chance, says he has no illusions he could ever replace Dwayne.

A week after she stops taking his phone calls, she wakes on a Saturday morning to the smell of coffee brewing, bacon frying. When she puts on a robe and goes into the kitchen, the kids are in their pajamas, eating a breakfast that Russell has cooked. He’s telling jokes. The kids laugh. He sees Jenny and smiles. “You want eggs and bacon? Or I’ve got blueberry pancakes keeping warm in the oven.”

His boldness chills her. A hardness in his eyes doesn’t match his tone of voice or his carefree demeanor. Because she doesn’t want a scene in front of the kids, she eats until Max and Seraphina are done and hurry off to their own pursuits. As Russell sits across the table from her with a cup of coffee, she pushes her plate aside.

“How’d you get in here? The house was locked. The kids didn’t let you in.”

“A man with a broken heart sometimes does desperate things.”

“You don’t have a broken heart, Russell.”

“I’m a hundred ways sad. I want this to work.”

“You and me?”

“Didn’t I just say? Why else am I here?”

She dares to say it. “Seraphina.”

He stares at her in silence. Then: “That’s a vicious thing to accuse a man of. Who put that idea in your head?”

“Nobody. I just woke up to what I’ve been seeing right before my eyes.”

They go back and forth like that for a minute or two, and then he gets up from the table, his face flushed. As he walks out, the last thing he says is, “Best keep your sick suspicions to yourself. Anything happens to you, those kids might be declared wards of the county. Then what?”

6

Nameless and Jenny are sitting on the sofa, Seraphina in the kitchen, Max on the screened and locked back porch.

“That’s the day I changed the locks,” Jenny says. “Pulled the AC units out of the bedrooms, put alarms on the windows, practiced with the pistol, stopped going into town for anything. Waiting for him to come here and try something. I can’t accuse him. Who would believe me? Can’t go after him. I’ve got no authority, no power.”

“I do.”

“You said you aren’t the law.”

“I’m not,” he says. “But I’m something. You remember eight years ago, a girl named Tammy Sugars went missing?”

Jenny grimaces. “She was ten years old. They never found her. You mean—Soakes? But didn’t Tammy disappear when she was staying with her grandmother in Gastonville? That’s two counties from ours.”

“Which takes suspicion away from locals here. The grandmother was shot and killed, Tammy abducted, no witnesses. And five years ago, a girl named Sarah Corley, her family set out from Worstead for Austin. Police never found their car, not a trace of any of them.”

“I’m going to carry the Walther indoors, too, from now on.”

“It’s more than Tammy and the Corleys. Two state highways and one interstate cross the county. Thousands of people pass through every week, many from out of state. Once in a while, people go missing. It’s hard to say whether they vanished here or in another county—or even if they went missing here in Texas rather than in an adjoining state. They just never show up where they were going.”

A siren on the county road turns both their heads toward the window. If Soakes is coming here, he won’t do it with the siren cranked and the lightbar flashing, but they wait anyway until the vehicle passes and the sound begins to die away.

Nameless says, “During the last seventeen years, while Soakes has been a deputy and then sheriff, you’d be surprised how many people disappeared after passing this way. Their bodies are sometimes found, sometimes not. Often the vehicles they were driving are used in other crimes, so you figure that when they were fixing a flat tire, some horror other than Soakes came along, maybe MS-13 thugs. Country’s crawling with psychotic gangsters from Central America. But in six cases, whole families disappeared, their vehicles never found. Four had a female child between the ages of ten and twelve. The other two families each had two girls that age.”

Although sharp morning light slices through the day beyond the windows, paling Jenny’s brow and cheeks, unrelenting gloom pools in most of the humid room, socketing her eyes with shadow, so that he is aware of the skull beneath her skin. “Tammy, Sarah, and eight other girls. Ten in seventeen years. And the families of the eight. He can’t have done it alone. Do you know who else?” she asked.

“I know one other. Probably so do you.” He describes Soakes’s curly-haired companion with the port-wine birthmark on his forehead, but he doesn’t tell her about the vision in which the man appeared.

Jenny looks at a window and the awful white sunlight, as if a demonic apparition watches her from beyond the glass. “That’s Harold Carlisle. Part-time deputy.”

“Yes.”

Her stare shifts to Nameless. “He had a younger sister, Carla, did time in the women’s prison at Bridgeport for a blackmail scheme that ended in manslaughter. But Harry’s ashamed of her—he’s a total straight arrow, always doing work for the church, this charity and that.” She shivers. “Part-time deputy. You know his main job?”

“Yes. He teaches sixth grade at Worstead Elementary.”

She wraps her arms around herself to thwart a chill. “Maybe Tammy and Sarah were his students. He’s not the only sixth-grade teacher. Even if they weren’t in his class, he’d have known them.” As if her heart is sinking helplessly in view of an overwhelming peril, she says, “Two lawmen, one also a teacher. What’s happening to the world, Mr. Shepherd? Is it all falling apart?”

“Well,” he says, “for sure, we’re not living in an age of truth and grace.”

7

Sheriff Soakes is eleven miles from the Demeter residence when the dispatcher calls to say the Ford is registered to Roger Louis Hurkos and Alex Josephine Hurkos of Jackson, Mississippi.

Soakes is stunned. Roger and Alex Hurkos are the parents of Wendy Hurkos, the most recent girl in the playpen. They are dead in their buried Range Rover, and their daughter lies in another grave.

They have been on a missing persons list at the National Crime Information Center website ever since they vanished fourteen months earlier, during a trip to Tucson, Arizona. The names mean nothing to the dispatcher. There is no reason for anyone to suppose that Roger, Alex, and Wendy met their fate in Worstead County; therefore, no investigation has been conducted here.

This alarming development, coupled with the fact that Jenny Demeter is talking to whoever is driving the Ford, unnerves Russell. But Jenny has nothing on him. No proof of his intentions toward Seraphina. No evidence. She would be batshit crazy to try to rat him out. The biggest risk that he ever took was with Lana Varner, seventeen years ago. Since then, he has been more careful, prudent. He doesn’t let them live when he’s done with them. His record as sheriff is exemplary. There’s not the slightest blemish on his reputation. He’s an enlightened progressive lawman so well liked by constituents that he was elected and then reelected by the largest of margins of any sheriff in the state. A case can’t be made against him because he didn’t have a chance to do anything to Seraphina.

Maybe it’s time for a fire at the Demeter residence, even if it must include the tragic death of beautiful Seraphina.

8

Southbound on a two-lane county road, heading for Meadowland Ranch, Nameless receives a text message. Ace reports that the GPS transponder on the patrol car exclusively used by Russell Soakes currently puts the sheriff thirty-two miles northwest of Meadowland, apparently conducting a standard patrol. Harry Carlisle, sixth-grade teacher and part-time deputy, is doing desk work at the department headquarters. No one is likely to be at the ranch.

This hundred-acre parcel of grassland lies south of Worstead. The stables once housed prize-winning quarter horses. Sixteen years earlier, when Russell Soakes inherited the land from his maternal grandfather, Lucas Bronstead, he sold the livestock.

The two small houses, once occupied by the property manager and two horse trainers—Lucas lived in town—are now badly deteriorated.

Russell doesn’t rent them out because he says he doesn’t want the headaches of being a landlord. However, it is suspected that he has another purpose for the property.

An eighteen-thousand-square-foot brick building is a combination garage and museum in which Grandpa Lucas stored an antique car collection. Russell sold off the cars and fired the two men who maintained them.

Lucas Bronstead was a true believer in a looming societal collapse. It is thought he constructed a secret bunker under the garage, without the approval of the building department. Anomalies in the filed plans suggest this deep redoubt might be accessed through a supplies closet in the office that Lucas maintained here.

Nameless parks the Ford beside the handsome garage, where the car can’t be seen from the highway. He sits with the cold air from the vents bathing his face, preparing himself for what lies ahead. He knows too well how cruel some people can be, what horrors they are capable of committing.

He switches off the engine. There is no turning back. This is his life: confrontation with the darkness that has nothing to do with an absence of light.

From under the driver’s seat, he retrieves a LockAid lock-release gun issued to police. At the nearest man-size door to the building, he inserts the LockAid pick into the deadbolt keyway and pulls the trigger until all the pins are flicked to the shear line.

Stepping inside, he switches on the lights. Soakes does not use the garage. He supposedly intends to tear it down when he develops the property. However, he maintains the power supply.

The only vehicle in this vast space is a backhoe that stands on the gray ceramic-tile floor like a beast from the Jurassic era.

Nameless proceeds to the end of the building that once was devoted to the mechanics’ workshop and Lucas’s office. The tools were sold with the cars. The old man’s office is now unfurnished.

Webs quiver in the corners of the ceiling. Spiders react to his entrance, legs plucking gossamer harp strings without making music.

The walk-in closet features empty shelves to both sides. At the back is floor-to-ceiling pegboard from which eight stainless-steel hangers protrude. Perhaps brooms and mops once were suspended from them. He tries pulling on each hanger without effect. However, one of them turns like a doorknob, and after three rotations, something clicks. The wall, which is actually a heavy steel door, swings inward to reveal a landing and a flight of stairs.

The grandfather’s end-of-civilization retreat.

Nameless finds a light switch, hesitates, and descends.

The first subterranean room features rows of shelves, floor to ceiling, which must once have held years’ worth of canned and dried food. All those provisions have been removed.

Maybe Soakes doesn’t expect society to collapse. Or perhaps anarchy appeals to him; if it comes, he might want to be loose in the world to enjoy the rape and murder born of such ultimate chaos.

There are other rooms, furnished for decadent pursuits, but no prisoner currently abides in them.

In the last chamber of all, the concrete underfoot is mottled with dark stains. He suspects this is the killing floor.

His heart knocks against its caging ribs. Acid rises in his throat. He can’t control his psychic gift. Expecting a clairvoyant montage of cruelty, violence, and demonic lust that might test his sanity, he flees in a moral panic and returns to the ground floor.

Sometimes a vision lasts not mere seconds, but minutes. On one occasion, he endured forty minutes of detachment from reality. When that vision relented, he found himself on the floor, curled in the fetal position, lying in his vomit.

His clairvoyance is time travel achieved without leaving the present. The curtains of the past part, and he sees what has been; the mists of the future clear, and he sees an event yet to occur.

Now and then, the experience is more than just seeing; he enters the scene as though living it, all five senses involved.

Mostly he is a mere disembodied observer. However, on rare occasions, he occupies the point of view of a killer or a victim, feels the subject’s emotions, senses his or her thoughts—and is nearly undone by empathy.

His greatest fear is that, trapped in the perspective of a homicidal sociopath long enough, his mind will be degraded and he will thereafter be in sympathy with evil.

Now, in the garage again, he pushes a button to raise one of the big segmented roll-up doors.

The backhoe key is on the operator’s seat. The engine turns over, and he drives the machine out of the garage.

The mission-specific smartphone, which he will destroy when he completes this job, provides him with a detailed topographic map of the property. A blinking red dot marks his position, and a blinking blue dot indicates the site he must inspect.

According to one of yesterday’s messages from Ace of Diamonds, computer-enhanced photos taken by a private-sector satellite show suspicious topographic irregularities at the northern end of the property. Nameless is expected to excavate one of these six sites.

In fifteen minutes, he uncovers the corroded roof of a white sedan. Five years earlier, the Corley family, with daughter Sarah, had set out from Worstead to Austin in a white Buick—and had vanished as if abducted by extraterrestrials.

He switches off the backhoe, jumps down from the seat, and walks to the edge of the excavation. As the possible future had washed over him in Jenny Demeter’s kitchen, so now clairvoyance brings him a moment out of the past.

A sullen gray sky overtakes the blue, wind replaces stillness, the wild grass shudders, warm air is banished by a chill, but there is no sound in this vignette. The hole before him is perhaps eight or nine feet deep, ten feet wide, almost twenty feet long, ramped at one end, and at the head of the earthen ramp stands the white Buick sedan. Through an open door, he can see a man and woman, no doubt the Corleys, sitting in the back seat, bound hand and foot with duct tape. Chains around their necks secure them to the headrests behind them. Sheriff Russell Soakes shuts the door. Harold Carlisle, part-time deputy and schoolteacher, operates the backhoe, which stands behind the Buick. The hydraulic rams move, and the clawed bucket bumps the back of the Buick, presses against it. Evidently, the car is in neutral, the hand brake off. It tips forward and rolls down the ramp, coming to rest in the bottom of the hole. As the sheriff watches, Carlisle commences scooping masses of loose earth from a pile beside the excavation, dropping one after another atop the vehicle. In the silence of this vision, the victims’ screams can’t be heard as, trapped in their car, they are buried alive. The girl, Sarah, is in the bunker under the garage; though the slow murder of her parents is cruel and horrifying, Sarah’s fate will be worse.

When the vision passes, he is standing beside the immense grave, staring down at the roof of the four-door coffin, trembling not with fear but with rage.

The other five “topographic irregularities” no doubt contain other vehicles, other families, including Wendy Hurkos’s parents, Roger and Alex, in their Range Rover.

9

Russell Soakes is accustomed to control, not just control over his deputies and other employees of the department, and not merely control of the series of playthings that have pleasured him in the playpen, but also control over every aspect of his life. He is a master manipulator; if he can’t get people to do what he wants one way, he’ll get them to do it another, with charm or psychology or physical force. Jenny has denied him Seraphina, but no one has ever permanently denied him what he wants. He always finds a way.

As he cruises his kingdom, the mystery of the Ford registered to Wendy’s parents bedevils him. The driver can’t be a remaining member of the immediate Hurkos family, because Roger, Alex, and Wendy were the lot of them: no other child; no former spouses. If some relative has driven the Ford from Mississippi, how would he know Worstead County was where the Hurkos family had been abducted? How would he know the abductor had recently targeted Jenny Demeter’s daughter? Anyway, this is the real world, not television; there are no whiz-bang amateur detectives, no Agatha Christie–type characters, going around solving crimes. And neither state nor federal police agencies work like this, pull stunts like this. Someone is trying to wage a little psychological warfare against Russell.

Certain activist groups will play games, use guerrilla tactics, run scams on the suspects they’re pursuing, and subvert the law in the name of justice. Has Jenny dared to approach such a group and slander Russell by claiming he molested her daughter? What fools would listen when she has no evidence?

Unless . . . Maybe she has persuaded Seraphina to lie, to claim that he made her perform obscene acts when Jenny and Max were not present. All children are innocent—which is why their destruction so excites Russell—but within each is a liar and worse, waiting to evolve. This is what he believes, what he knows. He was innocent once, though not for long. Those who are corrupted in turn corrupt the innocent. That is the only purpose of humanity: to deceive, to use, to dominate and destroy. If Russell doesn’t dominate others, he’ll be dominated, a fate he won’t accept.

Worrying that Seraphina’s mother has bewitched the child into making false accusations, he finds himself returning to the Demeter property almost without realizing where he is going. Coasting by on the county road, he discovers the Ford is no longer in the driveway.

His personal smartphone rings. It’s Harry Carlisle, and he’s highly agitated. “Russ, damn it, I just got a phone call—”

Interrupting, Russell says, “How’d you know something was going down at the Demeter place?”

“What’re you talkin’ about?”

“Your text message just a little while ago, about something going down at Six Hundred Smoketree Lane.”

“I didn’t send any damn text message.”

“But the car from Mississippi—”

Harry interrupts. “Damn it, Russ, listen to me. This girl—must be a woman fakin’ the voice, but it sounded like some little girl—she calls and says, ‘Mr. Carlisle, get me out of this hole.’”

“What’re you talking about? What hole?”

“The bitch says she’s Wendy, so what hole you think she’s talkin’ about?”

“Oh, shit,” Russell says.

“Shit? That’s all you’ve got to say? Shit? Somebody knows!”

“Can it, Harry. We’re not discussing this on a phone. Quit early. Take a sick day. Go to your place. We’ll discuss it there.”

“But if somebody knows—”

“Your place,” Russell insists and terminates the call.

If Harry didn’t send a text message, then someone masquerading as him, spoofing through his phone, wanted Russell to see the Ford in Jenny’s driveway. Now some woman’s trying to psych out Harry, trying to unnerve both of them. Who?

He and Harry are partners in rape, kill buddies, each other’s best friend, though Russell well knows that there is no such thing as a friend, only codependents—and enemies. In a crisis, kill buddies sometimes kill each other trying to save themselves.

Russell has for so long been absolute master of his domain that even the slightest threat to his sovereign position alarms him; a splinter of danger feels like a sword at his neck. If some relatives or activists think they know something and are waging psychological war on him and Harry, what might they be looking into while they’re here, what other aspects of Russell’s life?

The greatest risk to him is Meadowland Ranch. Except for Lana Varner, seventeen years earlier, when he was just getting started having fun, he’s been careful. In the process of breaking Lana, he learned from her that Harry, her teacher, had made inappropriate moves on her. The discovery of another man with forbidden tastes justified Russell to himself. Then he inherited Meadowland Ranch and realized that a partner would make it easier to capture and imprison future playthings—and be more exciting because of the greater outrages that could be committed on the captives. They had been careful with Tammy Sugars and Sarah Corley. Since then, until Seraphina became a target, they’ve preyed only on travelers from outside the county. But under the ranch’s grasslands, the cold truth is buried, awaiting discovery.

He’s nearing Meadowland Ranch, in the grip of dread, an emotion he is accustomed to inspiring in others, but one that is new to him. There is no reason to panic. No one in county government and no judge under the influence of the Soakes family will issue a search warrant without Russell knowing about it in advance. He enjoys influence with state authorities, as well, and no investigation of him can be mounted without his knowledge.

Arriving at the ranch, he at first finds nothing amiss. He lets himself into the former antique-car garage, switches on the lights—and smells lingering exhaust fumes. Clods of moist earth are stuck in the deep tread of the backhoe tires. The engine cowling is warm to the touch. The big claw-toothed bucket is caked with dirt. He and Harry had washed the machine after its most recent use.

At 5:25 on this long summer afternoon, the air is warm, sticky, but that isn’t the cause of his sudden sweat. This can’t happen: his property violated, his authority challenged. Russell feels as if the apocalypse Grandpa Lucas planned for is breaking on the old man’s heir, the present convulsing, the future sliding toward an abyss.

He returns to the Suburban and races overland to that far corner of the ranch where the dead are embarked on a subterranean highway to nowhere. In the same vicinity, several playthings have been discarded in deep but less elaborate holes, sans coffins and under blankets of powdered lime.

The Buick in which Sarah Corley’s parents share the back seat has been partially excavated.

Even if Jenny Demeter has reported him to someone, how can they know about his playpen at Meadowland? How can they know the vehicles were buried, and how can they know precisely where to dig? Their knowledge makes them seem . . . magical, supernatural.

There is no sign of whoever used the backhoe.

Russell turns in place, three hundred and sixty degrees, but the only thing moving is the tall grass trembling in a faint breeze.

The sky is empty of birds, no insects buzz, no traffic sounds reach him from the distant highway, as if everything that once lived has perished—or as if he has died and is condemned to wander alone through an uninhabited netherworld.

The Buick has been found. It can’t be unfound. It can’t be dug up and moved in a timely manner. If they know where to look for one vehicle, they know where to look for six. They’ll be back. Filling in the hole avails him nothing.

And yet he climbs into the operator’s chair and starts the backhoe and scoops into the excavation all the dirt that has been extracted from it. Covering things up has worked for him all his life. Lies, faked data, altered records, threats, bribery: There are numerous tools with which to conceal the truth, although nothing has been quite as effective and reassuring as six or eight or ten feet of compacted earth. So he fills in the hole and conceals the Buick again. He returns the backhoe to the garage, closes the big door, gets into his Suburban, and drives into town.

He does not think that burying the Buick again is an act of either desperation or insanity. He is the farthest thing from a madman. He is one of the few sane men in this world who know the truth of life, that it is a meaningless snarl out of which a man with willpower can weave whatever future he wants for himself.

In a crisis, fortune favors the bold. He needs to find whoever was in that Ford. If they drove in from Mississippi, they’re maybe at a motel. There aren’t many motels in Worstead worth staying at, only three that rate two stars.

If he can locate these interlopers, he can deal with them. And he has no doubt that he can locate them.

10

A text message from Ace of Diamonds informs Nameless that the GPS on the sheriff’s Suburban indicates that he is back in Worstead, approaching the Blue Ribbon Motor Inn.

Timing is everything now.

The stately Victorian house sits on one and a half acres in the best neighborhood of Worstead, layered with mass-produced millwork that the locals call “gingerbread.”

A sign on a stave, placed prominently in a flower bed, declares PROTECTED BY VIGILANT EAGLE HOME SECURITY.

The driveway leads around the large residence to a detached four-car garage at the back of the property.

Nameless parks behind the house. From the trunk of the Ford, he retrieves a package that Ace or an associate has placed there.

On the back porch, he puts the package on the floor and uses the LockAid lock-release gun to disengage the deadbolt on the door.

He assumes that the house alarm is set. If a door or window is opened, a sensor will signal the home-base computer elsewhere in the house, usually in a closet. Typically, the homeowner then has one minute to enter a four-digit disarming code; if the code isn’t entered, the alarm company is notified and calls the police.

However, the one weakness in the system is that the sensors communicate with the home-base computer by radio waves. Ace or whatever team Ace works with has learned the frequency on which Vigilant Eagle systems operate.

From a sport-coat pocket, Nameless extracts the compact radio-wave jammer that was left for him in his motel room. He activates it, opens the door, and puts the jammer just inside the threshold.

He retrieves the package from the porch floor. He enters the kitchen, stands listening for a moment, then quickly passes through the laundry room and enters the garage. In six minutes, he completes the task that brought him here.

When he returns to the kitchen, a dog is waiting for him. A big German shepherd.

He didn’t know the sheriff had a dog. Ace and crew are superb at gathering information that allows for a friction-free operation, but they aren’t all knowing.

The dog’s head is raised, ears pricked forward, body tensed, tail low and still.

Nameless meets the shepherd’s stare, trying to assess its intent. Pet or trained guard? Mere guard or attack dog?

“Hey, fella.”

The shepherd growls.

11

Roxanne Cortez, the desk clerk at the Blue Ribbon Motor Inn, is at the end of her shift. Sheriff Soakes knows her because she’s the mother of a young man, Lorenzo, who has been nothing but trouble; Lorenzo is serving time in the federal prison at Bastrop, and his mother lives in shame because of his offenses. She respects the law and is pleased to be able to assist Sheriff Soakes.

Damn if Alex Hurkos isn’t registered at the inn. Of course, the description Roxanne provides doesn’t match that of the Alex Hurkos who is rotting in a buried Range Rover. Not even close. The real Alex was a brunette with a Mediterranean complexion, dark-brown hair, hazel eyes, five feet two; but according to Roxanne, this Alex is blond, blue-eyed, about five feet seven.

The big motel-office window faces the wing of the establishment in which Alex Hurkos has a room, and Roxanne happens to have seen the guest driving off in a Ford like the one at the Demeter house.

She doesn’t have the authority to open Room 22 for Russell. But the manager is Richie Legardo, with whom Soakes went to high school, and he’s eager to be of assistance, which he damn well better be, considering that the Soakes political machine controls the issuance of business licenses and can also use health department inspections as a weapon. Richie unlocks the room for the sheriff and leaves him to his investigation.

Room 22 contains nothing to suggest who this Mrs. Hurkos really is. Shirts and jeans hang in the closet. In the bathroom are the usual toiletries and a woman’s makeup kit. A white suitcase contains half a dozen paperback romance novels, changes of lacy underwear, a bra—and a nine-by-twelve manila envelope.

The contents of the envelope shake the foundations of Russell’s confidence. The photographs are snapshots from family albums, each enlarged to eight by ten. Tammy Sugars. Sarah Corley with her parents, all smiling at the camera, standing behind a birthday cake with ten candles. The eight other girls and the members of their families who disappeared with them. All here. Including the real Alex Josephine Hurkos; her husband, Roger; and her daughter, Wendy. Sometimes there’s a pet in the picture—a dog or a cat. Everyone looks so alive, unaware of the fate awaiting them, such easy prey because of their naivete, their innocence.

Russell sorts through the photographs with fear but also with increasing anger. He’s furious that his privacy has been violated, that anyone dares challenge him. As if any of these people mattered. They didn’t. They were plebs, fools, pathetic losers who couldn’t defend themselves or their children, born to be used.

His personal smartphone rings. It’s Harry Carlisle. “I’m at home. The bitch called again. Didn’t pretend to be a little girl this time. She wants money. A lot of money.”

“I’ll be right there,” Russell interrupts.

“Come around to the back door.”

Russell takes the damning photographs with him and stops at the front desk to ask Richie Legardo to keep a watch on Room 22. “Call me at once, on my personal phone, if this Hurkos person returns. I’m depending on you, Richie. This is important.”

The manager writes down the number, clearly thrilled to be a trusted colleague of the sheriff. Richie is a pencil-neck geek who was everyone’s target in high school, and he probably has always dreamed of being a hero. “I won’t let you down, Sheriff.”

“Call me Russ. We go back too far to be so formal.”

Roxanne Cortez is just leaving for the day. When she says good night to Richie Legardo, Russell catches her winking at the manager. Maybe they’re getting it on together. She doesn’t wink at Russell, but it wouldn’t mean anything to him if she did, because she’s like twenty-five years too old for him.

When he returns to his Suburban, the sky is burnt orange across the west, the light rapidly coagulating into a blood-red smear.

Behind the wheel, Russell decides to resist the urge to use the lightbar and siren to cut three minutes off the trip to Harry’s place. The situation calls for calm, for prudent, considered action.

Family power has made Russell the sheriff, but he is tough, smart, and shrewd enough to do the job well. Because he understands himself so completely, he understands the criminal mind. He has solved many cases. And now he suddenly sees the truth of this one.

The bitch called again . . . She wants money. A lot of money.

Before starting the engine, Russell sits for a few minutes in stunned recognition of the truth, working through the details of how it must have been done, putting together the pieces.

12

In his new life, his past walled off to him, Nameless has not known dogs. If he has any sense of them, of how to read them, it must be a kind of intuition based on experiences in the previous life of which he retains no memory.

The growling isn’t fierce, but low and inquisitive. Nameless is nonetheless hesitant to move because the dog is powerful, its teeth are sharp, and its capacity to do damage is considerable.

The German shepherd is one of the most intelligent breeds, but of course no dog can know when the master it serves is evil. If this animal has been instructed to subdue an intruder by any means, it will do so, and if it has been trained to kill, Nameless is in great peril.

He has the pistol, but he doesn’t draw it. The thought of destroying such a beautiful creature profoundly dismays him. Maybe his reluctance is evidence that, indeed, he has had experience with dogs in his previous life.

However, the operation has entered a clockwork phase. Timing is everything now. He needs to be certain places at appointed times. If the schedule isn’t kept, Sheriff Soakes might escape the fate that has been so carefully planned for him.

As Nameless moves cautiously across the kitchen, the shepherd stays close to him, panting, and then dashes ahead to block the back door. The sound it makes seems more a grumble than a growl, less a threat to attack than an invitation for the intruder to take a seat at the breakfast table and wait for the master to come home.

Common sense suggests Soakes wouldn’t train a dog to kill or savage anyone in his house, given the legal ramifications. A cop’s dog might instead be taught to subdue and detain a suspect until backup arrives. Subduing might still require a bite or two.

“Nice place you have here,” Nameless says. He moves away from the door. The shepherd follows, watchful and suspicious.

In one corner of the kitchen, a bolstered dog bed looks comfy, but there are no balls or other toys.

After considering this for a moment, Nameless says, “I’ve got an interest in interior design. Mind if I look around?”

In the downstairs hallway, the dog follows close behind, repeatedly bumping its snout against his legs as it sniffs his jeans. Abruptly it dashes past him, into the foyer, and turns to face him, blocking the front door. Still no wagging of the tail.

The study contains another dog bed, no toys. Neither bed nor toys in the living room or dining room.

None of the exits features a pet door. Someone must come by once a day to toilet the pooch.

The panting shepherd follows him up the stairs to the second floor. A tour reveals only a single dog bed here, this one in the hallway outside the master suite. No toys.

Apparently the absence of toys signifies to the shepherd that it is on guard duty, that this is not playtime.

A psychopath like Soakes might think of the animal as more of a tool than a pet, but surely there is one ball somewhere. Most likely it’ll be in the kitchen, near the door to the backyard, where any vigorous play would occur.

Nameless starts to descend the stairs, perhaps too quickly. The diligent dog growls and snaps at his ankles without biting. He loses his balance, stumbles, and grabs the railing.

The shepherd races past him to the bottom of the stairs, into the foyer, where it stands sentinel at the door and snarls as if to say, This far and no farther.

In a praising tone of voice, as though this is all just a test, Nameless declares, “Good dog. Very good dog. You are such a good, good dog.”

He checks his watch. This is taking too long. But there’s nothing else to be done.

In the walk-in pantry off the kitchen, while the dog watches from its post at the back door, Nameless finds one tennis ball, a loop of braided rope for tugging matches, and a single plush toy rabbit with a squeaker. Evidently, Sheriff Russell Soakes believes that too many toys can corrupt a guard dog.

He also finds a jar of dog biscuits. He pockets half a dozen.

In the kitchen again, Nameless tosses the ball to the shepherd.

The dog watches it bounce, bounce, bounce.

On the second try, the ball bops the shepherd on the snout. With a whine of frustration, the dog watches it roll away again.

On the third toss, the animal snatches the treasure from the air—and begins to wag its tail.

“Bring,” Nameless says. “Gimme, boy. Bring.”

The shepherd drops the ball at his playmate’s feet.

Nameless takes it to the open hallway door and with a snap of the wrist rolls it hard toward the front door.

With a yelp of delight, the dog sprints after it, retrieves it in the foyer, and bolts back to Nameless, who throws it again.

This time the shepherd returns, ball in its mouth, to discover his new friend sitting on the floor, his back against the kitchen island. After happily accepting two cookies, the dog curls in his companion’s lap, and they have a brief but joyful cuddle, during which Nameless is able to read the name on the dangling collar tag: “Attila.”

The dog chuffs in response.

Two minutes later, when Nameless goes to the back door, his four-legged guard doesn’t block his way. He picks up the radio-wave jammer and opens the door.

The dog watches expectantly, hoping to be invited into the yard. Instead, Nameless says, “Remember me, Attila.” He closes the door and switches off the jammer, activating the alarm again. He has no way to lock the deadbolt. If Soakes comes home through the door between the garage and the house, however, he might not notice this lapse in security.

13

After his visit to Room 22 at the Blue Ribbon Inn, sitting in his patrol car in the parking lot, Russell Soakes has figured out just what has been done to him, the full nature of the deception. And he knows what to do about it.

From the console box between seats, he retrieves a small bottle used only when acquiring playthings for the playroom. He inserts it in an elastic sleeve on his gun belt.

Harry Carlisle lives two blocks from Russell’s residence, in a two-story Craftsman-style house that belonged to his late parents. The sheriff parks in the driveway. Carrying the manila envelope of photographs, he goes around to the back of the place and climbs the porch steps. Without knocking, he enters by the kitchen door.

At the breakfast table, Harry sits with a bottle of Macallan and a glass of Scotch on the rocks. He looks nervous, desperate. “What’re we gonna do, Russ? I can’t go to jail, be some hulk’s boy toy. It’d be a death sentence. Whoever she is, she wants more money than God has. She knows where the bodies are buried. Shit, she knows everything.” The deputy’s hands shake as he gestures extravagantly. Perhaps realizing that he’s overplaying it, being too theatrical, he clasps both hands around the glass of whisky.

Russell sits at the table, not across from Harry Carlisle but catercorner to him, to be closer. “Somebody’s been to Meadowland, used the backhoe to dig up the Corleys’ Buick.”

“Oh, Jesus. How could anyone know about Meadowland?”

“Must’ve been told.”

Harry blinks stupidly. The current glass of whisky isn’t his first of the evening. “Told? Who could do the telling, for Christ’s sake? They’re all dead out there. Weren’t a ghost told anyone.”

“No, you’re right, my friend. It weren’t a ghost.”

“How can this happen, Russ?” Harry’s gone so pale that his port-wine birthmark seems to glow like neon. “How can this happen, all the precautions we took?”

“I filled the hole in again, hid the Buick.”

“What good does that do? Whoever the bitch is, she knows. We’re done. How can this happen, how can it happen?”

“It can’t,” Russell says. “It won’t.”

When Harry takes a drink, the glass rattles against his teeth, and Scotch dribbles down his chin. He wipes his face on his sleeve.

He’s rough on the girls, as brutal as Russell, but in fact there is no substance to him. He’s a pit bull with a tender young thing who’s less than half his weight, but put him against someone his size . . . Well, he’s good for nothing but desk work, which is why Russell assigns him to the office. As successful as they have been when prowling for little quail, it is nevertheless a mistake to partner with someone as weak as Harry.

Beyond the kitchen windows, the sky glowers red and purple. Shadows emerge from the corners of the room and gather around the table. The only electric light comes through the open door to the downstairs hallway.

“What do you mean, ‘it can’t, it won’t’?” Harry asks. “It already has happened. It’s all falling apart on us.”

Russell smiles warmly. He pats Harry’s arm reassuringly. “I’ve got it all figured out, buddy. It was a sleek plan, except for one thing.”

Harry regards the sheriff as if he’s gone mad. “Got what figured out?”

“She’s a tough broad, and smart. She can operate a backhoe, dig up the Buick.” He opens the manila envelope and spills the photos onto the table. “She could’ve gotten all these from the smartphones we took off the families when we killed the adults.”

Harry regards the photographs with horror. “Where’d you get these? I smashed the phones, drilled out the batteries. The phones are long gone.”

“Are they, Harry? Or did you put the phones in a Faraday box, so they couldn’t be located by GPS? Did you put them in a Faraday box and lock them away in your basement here until nobody was trying to find them anymore? So you’d have . . . mementos?”

Harry Carlisle is aghast. “What’re you saying? I did what you told me! I did everything the right way. Nobody got those pictures from the phones. The phones are done and gone.”

Russell doesn’t argue. He just quietly walks his deputy through the evidence. “I’m cruising around, get this text tells me something is going down at the Demeter place. So that sets me up to see the Ford in the driveway. The text came from you.”

“I didn’t text you today,” Harry insists. “I called you twice, but I never texted.”

“Maybe some hacker spoofed it, sent a text to me through your phone account without you knowing. Is that your story?”

Harry needs to take another drink.

“When I called the license plate in for a registration check, who did the dispatcher give it to? Who chased it down? You, Harry?”

“You’ve got a totally wrong idea here, Russ. This is way off base. I never checked out any Ford registration.”

“The dispatcher can tell me. But if you didn’t do it, then that may just mean the registration in the Mississippi DMV is a phantom insert, part of the scam. You know how phantom inserts are done, how hackers pull that off. I know you know, because you attended that two-day workshop on the very subject, Harry.”

“The state attorney general’s workshop on how to identify a phantom insert, about how hackers do it, not how to do it myself. It was you who was invited to go. You sent me. Damn it all, Russ, we’re in this together. One of us gets caught, the other has no hope.”

Russell draws his pistol, and Harry flinches, and Russell puts the weapon on the table, well out of his deputy’s reach. He doesn’t intend to use it. The gun is meant to keep Harry distracted. “Funny how this woman, she phones only you, not me, maybe because I’d recognize her voice. When I started to think about that, it helped me understand the one thing that didn’t make any sense.”

To take a drink of Scotch, Harry holds the glass in both hands. He doesn’t spill any this time. The course of the conversation has made the whisky more precious to him.

After he swallows, his attention fixes on the pistol. “What one thing didn’t make sense? What’re you talking about?”

“If some relative of the Hurkos family, now in possession of their second car, their Ford, even maybe some activist, whoever—if they had any reason to suspect Wendy and her folks had disappeared in Worstead County, why would they pay a visit to Jenny Demeter?”

“I don’t know.”

“To confirm my interest in young girls? But how could they possibly know I’d tried to make a move on Seraphina?”

“You’re all mixed up about this, Russ.”

“Nobody knows about Seraphina except you and me. It was the two of us worked out how to do it—the house fire, maybe using Wendy’s body to pass for the burned remains of Seraphina.”

“Her mother knows, Jenny knows.”

“And she’s scared shitless of me. She’s not going to gossip to anyone about it. She’s smarter than that.”

Harry reaches for the Macallan.

“Don’t touch the bottle,” Russell warns. “A bottle like that could brain a man, knock him cold. I’ll pour for you.”

As Russell fills Harry’s glass to the brim, the deputy says, “I wasn’t driving that Ford, and I didn’t dig up the Corleys’ Buick. I was in the office all day. You can verify that.”

“Drink up, Harry. Don’t even think of throwing it in my face.”

“Jesus, Russ, you’ve got this so wrong,” Harry laments, but now he needs a deep drink of the Scotch more than he needs air.

“How’s Carla doing since she got out of Bridgeport? She’s been paroled, what, three months?”

“My sister? You think I’m reckless enough to tell that wild-assed bitch what you and I have been doing all these years?”

Russell conjures the expression of a man whose feelings have been deeply hurt. “As I recall, blackmail was her specialty. I wonder how much she wants from me. Two hundred thousand, three hundred? Split it with you? Then you and me go on with the girls, like before, me so stupid I don’t know I’ve been screwed by my good buddy and that it’ll happen again?”

“Jesus, no. Nothing like that. Shit, Russ, you gotta believe me, I don’t even know where Carla is since she got out of prison. She hasn’t been in touch. We never were close.”

Putting his right hand on the gun that lies on the table, Russell says, “Judging by the description Roxanne Cortez gave me, Carla is staying at the Blue Ribbon Inn under the name Alex Hurkos. Driving a Ford with Mississippi plates.”

Dumbstruck, Harry’s attention is riveted on the sheriff’s right hand resting on the pistol.

With his left hand, Russell withdraws the bottle from the sleeve on his gun belt, brings it above the table, and sprays Harry in the face. When they hunt little quail together, they both carry chloroform, but Harry is not armed at the moment. Like so many surprised motorists attacked in this manner, Harry Carlisle passes out instantly. His fingers peel away from the glass of whisky. He slips sideways in his chair, slides off it and onto the floor.

14

As Russell drags Harry Carlisle through the single-story house and into the master bathroom, as he strips him naked and places him in the bathtub, as he draws a tub full of hot water, as he gets a razor blade from a packet in the medicine cabinet, he employs the chloroform four more times, to be sure the deputy doesn’t regain consciousness. He isn’t concerned that an autopsy will discover traces of the chemical in Harry’s system. Chloroform is highly volatile and breaks down quickly. Besides, Cecil Blocker, funeral-home operator and coroner, lacks the laboratory and the skills to detect anything less obvious than a bullet wound, and the sheriff will oversee the handling of the remains of his valued deputy and dear friend.

After he shuts off the water, he uses the razor blade to cut deep into Harry’s left wrist. He doesn’t make the mistake of also cutting the right wrist. The first wound would have left Harry with little strength in his left hand. He drops the blade in the water, which is swiftly taking color from the severed radial artery.

He puts down the lid on the toilet and sits there to witness Harry’s death.

There is still the matter of the sister, Carla. When she can’t make contact with Harry—or when she finds his corpse—she will most likely approach Russell directly with her demands. He will play the frightened pedophile, dreading ruination, and maneuver her into a mortal situation. Before then, however, he will find out where she’s living, which will be in her parole file; he hopes to surprise the bitch. He’ll make no effort to nail her at the Blue Ribbon Inn, not after having inquired about the guest in Room 22.

All will be well. It always is. The future is clay, and Russell is a master sculptor.

15

Nameless stands in the doorway between the dark hall and the dark bedroom, watching the drama through the open door of the well-lighted bathroom that lies twenty feet away. He turns and quietly leaves the house when Harry Carlisle’s fate is certain.

16

Sheriff Soakes returns to his splendid Victorian home. The interior is as modern as the exterior is quaint: sleek Scandinavian furniture, Tufenkian carpets, contemporary art-glass lamps; the large paintings are abstract expressionism, an explosion of bright colors and powerful shapes.

He gives Attila a bowl of kibble. When he lets the animal out to toilet, he discovers the back door is not locked.

Marvin Orkley, a deputy, had been by during the day to take the dog for a walk. Orkley reset the alarm but forgot to lock the door. Russell will give him an earful in the morning.

Attila gets his ball from the pantry and wants to play, but Russell has much to do and no time for games. “Bed,” he commands, and the shepherd obediently goes to his mattress in the corner, where he lies, chewing on the ball.

Russell makes a roast beef sandwich with Havarti cheese and dark mustard, and he washes it down with an icy beer while he sits at the computer in his study. He seeks details of Carla Carlisle’s parole online, from the records at Bridgeport, and finds her address in Austin, as well as her cell phone number. If his interest in her is discovered later, he can credibly say that he contacted her to tell her that Harry had recently been seriously depressed, that the deputy felt badly about having turned his back on her, and that she would lift his spirits if she reconciled with him.

When Russell has the information that he needs, and when he has finished his sandwich and his beer, he locks the manila envelope of photos in his safe and goes upstairs to change from his uniform into civilian clothes. When Carla returns to the Blue Ribbon Inn and discovers the envelope of photos is missing from her suitcase, when she can’t reach Harry, she will freak out and split, most likely return to Austin, where she’ll probably hunker down behind locked doors and think through her next step, which might be to pack up whatever stash she has, break parole, and do a full fade.

If she isn’t already in her apartment when Russell arrives there, he will be waiting for her when she walks in. If he gets there after she’s home, he’ll be waiting for her when she dares to leave. He is a superb plotter of criminal operations but an even better improvisator.

He has no doubt how this will end. The future is malleable, and he shapes it as he wishes, a god who creates his world and rules it without mercy.

In his walk-in closet, having taken off his uniform, barefoot and wearing only his briefs, Russell is selecting clothes for the night’s adventure when a man with a gun appears in the doorway. This development suggests that some unknown sculptor has appropriated the clay with which tomorrow will be made.

“Who the hell are you?” Russell demands.

Beside the intruder stands Attila, the stupid ball in his mouth, wagging his tail.

“At the Blue Ribbon Inn,” the stranger says, “I’m Alex Hurkos. You’re probably under the misapprehension that I’m Carla Carlisle.”

The man squeezes off a shot. A sedative dart, not a bullet.

Russell Soakes swoons down into darkness.

17

The Ford with Mississippi plates is parked across the street from the house where Russell Soakes is just now waking to find himself in his walk-in closet, the door wedged shut by a straight-backed chair. The man who is neither Ben Shepherd nor Alex Hurkos nor Carla Carlisle makes a call with the mission-specific phone. Another phone rings in the package that, earlier in the evening, he wired into the gas furnace in the Soakes residence. This triggers the detonator, which ignites six pounds of concentrated accelerant more volatile than napalm, which spreads fire through the basement and up through the ceiling into the ground floor at an initial rate of three feet per second in a 360-degree burn pattern.

Although the Ford’s engine is running and the wheels turning when he makes the call, he isn’t even at the end of the block when the gas line is breached and the explosion blows out most of the windows in the Soakes residence.

Harnessed safely in the passenger seat, Attila drops the ball that he’s been holding in his mouth in expectation of play, and he barks once.

Richie Legardo lives twelve blocks from the sheriff. By the time Nameless is a fourth of the way there, smoke will be pouring under the jammed-shut door of the sheriff’s walk-in closet, and Russell Soakes will be screaming for help. By the time Nameless is halfway to the Legardo house, the temperature in the closet will be well over a hundred degrees, and fire will be eating through the floor. When Nameless is three-quarters of the way, the sheriff will be clawing at the door, though the door will be on fire, burning inward toward him, and perhaps just then the closet floor will give way, dropping Soakes into a maelstrom of flames, into the heart of the fire, where he so richly deserves to be.

It’s a hell of a way to kill himself. But in the morning, they’ll find the sheriff’s confession and suicide note on his computer at work.

When Nameless arrives at Richie’s modest bungalow and pulls into the driveway, the Blue Ribbon manager is standing on the porch with his arm around Roxanne Cortez, whose son, Lorenzo, was framed by the sheriff and sent to prison for twelve years for crimes committed by Russell’s nephew, Bradley. Richie and Roxanne are marveling at the brightness of the fire glow that fills the eastern sky even at this distance. Richie, who was mercilessly bullied by Russell Soakes in high school, smiles as their co-conspirator climbs the porch steps.

They don’t know his real name—or that he doesn’t have one. They know only that he is the man whom Ace of Diamonds and Ace’s research team prepared them to receive. There is nothing to be said. He is here only to give each of them ten thousand dollars in cash, money they initially declined when Ace suggested a reward for their cooperation. They take it now and thank him, and he says, “Have a nice night.”

By the time he drives all the way to the Demeter residence to say goodbye to Jenny, Max, and Seraphina, nothing is likely to be left of Russell Soakes except blackened bones and a jaw filled with heat-cracked teeth.

Sue Kern, who first told Jenny about Lana Varner, has called to report the explosion and fierce fire at the Soakes house in town. Flanked by her children, Jenny greets “Ben Shepherd” and a genuine shepherd with neither hornet spray nor a pistol.

Moths flutter around the golden porch lamps, exaggerated wing shadows flaring across the floor and across the family standing safe thereon.

“It’s over, isn’t it?” Jenny says.

“For you, yes. For the sheriff and one deputy, yes. There’s no chance of them evading punishment or entrapping someone else to take the fall for what they’ve done. But it’s not over for the Soakes family that raised him and their political machine that made it possible for him to use the law as a weapon and a shield.”

Attila has taken a fancy to Seraphina. He sits before her, looking up at her with adoration, his tail sweeping the porch floor.

“You said you’re not the law,” Jenny recalls.

“And I’m not.”

“They’re going to say . . . vigilante.”

“I’m not that, either. The technology changes the vocabulary. Vigilante justice is born of emotion and too often punishes the innocent. In this world of computers, satellite tracking, and so many other government surveillance tools, all of them accessible to hackers outside the government, the truth can be found with enough effort. If sometimes local law enforcement doesn’t want to find it or the courts don’t want to hear it, or if those who expose it might be ruined or killed for their efforts . . . Well, it’s now possible for justice to be delivered nonetheless.”

That is all he knows—or thinks he knows—about what Ace and the research team do.

“Anyway,” he says, “Carlisle and Soakes will be deemed a murder-suicide.”

“Your name isn’t Ben Shepherd, is it?”

“No.”

“I’d like a name to remember you by.”

“Ben Shepherd is as good as any. I’ll always remember yours. I have a fascination with names. Jennifer is derivative of Guinevere, which is Welsh for fair. Demeter is the Greek goddess of marriage and social order. Both names are appropriate in your case.”

He produces an envelope from a coat pocket and gives it to her.

“What’s this?” she asks.

“Ten thousand dollars.”

“What for?”

“Call it a reward for helping me, for being unafraid to tell the truth about Soakes.”

“It’s more like a guerdon,” says young Max, who hasn’t spoken before.

“Guerdon? What might that be?”

The boy, as bookish as his sister, says, “In days of old, a good king might reward one of his subjects for courage and service to the crown by having a trusted knight deliver a guerdon, a bag of gold coins.”

“I’m no knight,” Nameless demurs.

Jenny smiles and shakes her head. “So you say. But I think Max has just spoken a truth that earns him a little guerdon of his own.”

As the three stand bathed in golden light enlivened by wing shadows, Nameless thinks that he could do no better in this world than stay here and make a life with them. But romance isn’t his fate, nor domesticity, nor lasting peace.

On her knees, petting the dog, Seraphina says, “Mom, can we keep him?”

“He’s a good dog,” Nameless assures Jenny.

“I love him,” Seraphina says. “I already love him.”

He returns to the Ford and follows the driveway to the county road. He’s only part of the way there, smiling about the happiness with which the girl embraced Attila, when he feels the vision descending. He comes to a full stop, shifts into park.

A montage of images flicker through his mind: A dimpled little girl who’s maybe Seraphina’s age, a girl with a ponytail, holding a floppy-eared plush-toy rabbit (the scent of peppermint); pale early light, a great blue heron, four feet tall, foraging in shallow water, long neck craning up from a search for a fingerling or frog, one yellow eye with large black pupil regarding him with foreboding (from it, a rapid, throaty kok-kok-kok); a young blond waitress in a white uniform with blue trim, smiling as she places a menu on the table before him (the aroma of coffee); a sullen-looking bearded man, glancing at him, his stare poisonous, green eyes like distilled venom; some kind of stone or concrete tower, tall and arched, seen through a rain-spattered windshield, wipers sweeping back and forth (thump-thump, thump-thump); a swarm of vehicles, trucks and cars, sliding-colliding on rain-slick blacktop, sliding-colliding-tumbling (blaring horns); the floppy-eared toy rabbit lying in the rain, still in the grip of a child’s severed hand (screaming).

He is gripping the steering wheel so fiercely that his hands ache. Gasping for breath. Heart pounding.

During the two years he has been on these missions, Nameless’s clairvoyance has shown him both things that have happened and that are yet to happen. But he has never experienced a flickering montage like this. The visions haven’t previously involved either smells or sounds, nor have they been as intense as what just washed through him.

By whatever strange science has blessed—or cursed—him with this power, he has always known whether he is seeing something that has occurred in days gone by or will occur in days to come. This time, however, he feels as though the past and future have been revealed to him simultaneously, which is surely wrong, illogical.

A grave sense of responsibility presses on him and, curiously, a weight of grief that brings tears to his eyes. But grief for whom, responsibility for what?

He can’t summon clairvoyance when he wishes. He could wait here the rest of the day and through the long night, and learn nothing more.

The unshed tears recede. The metronome of his heart now marks a slower tempo.

He has work to do.

He puts the car in gear and drives to the end of the lane. At the county road, he hesitates to turn either left or right. Just then he gets a text message from Ace of Diamonds with a destination. He heads east, from which every tomorrow always comes.

The story continues . . .

Check out the next episode of Dean Koontz’s NAMELESS, Photographing the Dead.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dean Koontz is the author of more than a dozen New York Times number one bestsellers. His books have sold over five hundred million copies worldwide, and his work is published in thirty-eight languages. He was born and raised in Pennsylvania and lives with his wife, Gerda, and their dog, Elsa, in Southern California.

ALSO BY DEAN KOONTZ

Ashley Bell

The City

Innocence

77 Shadow Street

What the Night Knows

Breathless

Relentless

Your Heart Belongs to Me

The Darkest Evening of the Year

The Good Guy

The Husband

Velocity

Life Expectancy

The Taking

The Face

By the Light of the Moon

One Door Away from Heaven

From the Corner of His Eye

False Memory

Seize the Night

Fear Nothing

Mr. Murder

Dragon Tears

Hideaway

Cold Fire

The Bad Place

Midnight

Lightning

Watchers

Strangers

Twilight Eyes

Darkfall

Phantoms

Whispers

The Mask

The Vision

The Face of Fear

Night Chills

Shattered

The Voice of the Night

The Servants of Twilight

The House of Thunder

The Key to Midnight

The Eyes of Darkness

Shadowfires

Winter Moon

The Door to December

Dark Rivers of the Heart

Icebound

Strange Highways

Intensity

Sole Survivor

Ticktock

The Funhouse

Demon Seed

Jane Hawk

The Silent Corner

The Whispering Room

The Crooked Staircase

The Forbidden Door

The Night Window

Odd Thomas

Odd Thomas

Forever Odd

Brother Odd

Odd Hours

Odd Interlude

Odd Apocalypse

Deeply Odd

Saint Odd

Frankenstein

Prodigal Son

City of Night

Dead and Alive

Lost Souls

The Dead Town

Nonfiction

A Big Little Life: A Memoir of a Joyful Dog Named Trixie