Miriam spends fifteen minutes in a small alley by a dry cleaner's joint just a minute's walk from the psychic. She smokes. She trembles. Her mind wanders.

Then she composes herself and heads back to the diner.

"She tell you your future?" Louis asks.

Miriam offers a fake smile. "Total scam. She had nothing to tell me I didn't already know. Ready to hit the bricks?"

TWENTY-SIX

Cul-de-Sac

The stink surprises Harriet. It is the smell of fresh, cut grass. It might as well be the scent of a fruiting body, of a corpse in a drain culvert left for days to the bugs and bacteria. For her, it's the smell of decay. The odor of utter stagnation. All her muscles cinch up like a too-tight belt.

Ingersoll, from the back of the Escalade (his presence upgrades them from the Cutlass Ciera, without question), sees her shoulders tense and says: "This is familiar to you, Harriet."

"Yes," she says. The word lies there, gutted of emotion.

Around her, the suburban boxes. The white-washed curbs, the bird baths. The solar lights, the clematis growing up around mailboxes. Pastel siding. Bright white rain gutters.

She wants to set fire to everything here, wants to watch it burn down to greasy cinder.

"I think I turn here," Frankie says, and then doesn't do what he just said. "No, shit, fuck, wait. This one. Here we go. These fuckin' little avenues all look the same. The houses, the lawns. Cookie cutter, copy paste bullshit." She can feel him eyeing her before, during, and after the turn.

"He doesn't know," Ingersoll says.

"He who?" Frankie asks. "He me?"

Harriet shifts uncomfortably. "No, he doesn't."

"How long has it been since I partnered you two?" Ingersoll asks.

Frankie has to think. Harriet doesn't. "Two years, three months."

"What don't I know?" Frankie asks.

"Nothing," Harriet answers.

"Everything," Ingersoll says.

"Tell me," Frankie says. "I wanna know. You know everything about me. I'm an open book over here. I don't keep nothing from you."

"Will you tell him?" Ingersoll asks as Frankie pulls up into a cul-de-sac, a suburban dead-end of same houses. Frankie looks to her.

She feels ill.

Odd, given that Harriet rarely feels anything. Does she enjoy the feeling, just because it's a sensation? Is torturing herself as much fun as torturing others?

She chooses not to answer Ingersoll's question or her own.

Instead, she says, "We're here," and gets out of the car.

"He does not kill them?" Ingersoll asks, his nimble fingers looking through a wicker mail holder hanging in the foyer.

"No," Harriet says. "He's a con artist. He cons them out of it."

Frankie yells from the other room, from a den office. "Nobody's here. He's gone."

Ingersoll nods. "Not unexpected. He will have left some trace. Some sign of his passing. More important, I want a sign of the girl's passing. You will find it. I will wait for you to find it."

He goes and sits at the breakfast nook in the kitchen and steeples his hands, sitting perfectly still and perfectly silent.