Whimpering behind his own blood-caked sock, Randy nods.

Ingersoll smiles, plucks out the sock between his delicate thumb and forefinger, and presses his own ear to Randy's mouth.

"Speak," Ingersoll says, and Randy spills it all.

Outside the meat locker, Ingersoll towels off.

The white towels, handed to him by Harriet, swiftly grow red.

Ingersoll hands over a plastic baggie. Contained within are two hands severed at the wrists.

"Boil them," Ingersoll says, "till the meat falls off. Like osso buco. Once you have the bones free from the meat, bleach them. Purify them with sage smoke. Then give them to me. I will choose which ones if any belong in my satchel."

Harriet nods, takes the bag. Frankie has a look like he's already tasting bile.

"You," Ingersoll says, thrusting his finger against Frankie's sternum. The finger is thin, delicate, like an insect's leg, but it still feels to Frankie like it might punch through his breastbone and puncture his heart. "Dispose of the body."

Swallowing a hard knot of what might be puke, Frankie nods.

"Now we know where Ashley Gaynes lives," Ingersoll says.

But he knows now that Gaynes is only the secondary prize. The girl. She's the one he wants. He reaches in the pocket of his white jacket and gently runs his hands across the binding of Miriam's diary.

He has some questions he'd very much like to ask her.

INTERLUDE

The Interview

It's a while before Miriam speaks again. Paul waits quietly, hesitant, pensive, as if any motion from him might shatter everything, might snap the fraying thread holding the sword that dangles above her head.

"I got pregnant," she finally says.

Paul blinks. "By who?"

"By whom, actually. You're a college student, learn your grammar. By Ben."

"Ben?" He looks puzzled.

"Yes. Ben? The one I had sex with? The one who shot himself? I'm sorry, did I tell that story to someone else just now? I admit, I fade in and out."

"No, sorry, I just thought, he's dead, how could he–"

Miriam snorts. At this point, she is three-quarters drunk. "We're not talking zombie sex; he didn't come lurching out of the grave dirt to fill my living body with his undead baby batter. We had sex one time, and that one time resulted in a pregnancy. That's the circle of life, Paul."

"Right. Got it. Sorry."

"Don't apologize, it's fine. I came back that night, escorted by the police, and my Mom already knew what was up, and the weeks after that – and after Ben shot himself – were spent cloistered away in my room with the Bible. I'm surprised she didn't duct tape it to my hands. She found all my comic books, which I kept under a loose floorboard with some CDs. She took it all away. If she could've stapled my vagina shut in the name of the Lord, I'm sure she would've."

"At what point did you know?"

She squints, thinks about it. "The morning sickness started… not quite two months after we did the dirty deed? Something like that. I woke up one morning and lost dinner from the night before, then ate some toast and lost that, too. I knew what it was because I'd been terrified of it. My mother's a big fan of consequence, always playing up how one's sins will be repaid by result, like poisonous fruit grown from a bad seed. Oh, you eat too much? That's gluttony, so here's some bowel cancer. What's that? You can't stop banging all those desperate housewives? Oops, looks like syphilis is rotting your cock off. Good luck!"