Moss shook his head. “Like the rest of it, I didn’t want to know.”

“Can you tell us what he asked you about?” Danica said. “Anything you remember might help us.”

Moss thought about it. “There was an Army investigation into the accident. I knew that much, from his questions. It’s no surprise; there’d have to be an inquiry, after a mess like that. After a while, it seemed like Richard was focused on that investigation more than anything else. He seemed desperate to learn whatever he could about it. Was it still an open case? What were the names of those working on it? What information did they have? I guess that made sense. If he wanted answers, that was the basket with all the eggs in it.”

Moss made a face—the equivalent of a shrug. “And that’s it,” he said. “Now you know as much as I know.”

A long silence played out. To Dryden, it felt as if they were parked and idling at a dead end.

“Does any of this tell us why someone would be after us now?” Danica asked. “It feels like it could still be anyone.”

Dryden nodded but said nothing.

“Could it just be the military trying to finish the job?” Danica asked. “As in, they drugged us twenty-nine years ago to shut us up, and now they’re saying, ‘Screw it, let’s be thorough and just get rid of them.’”

“Seems like a stretch,” Dryden said. “Even for people like that.”

“Then who?” Danica asked. “And why?”

“Those are always the most important questions,” Dryden said.

But he had no answers. No solid guesses, even. For another long moment, no one spoke.

Then Moss seemed struck by something. He looked at Danica.

“You were the next of kin, right?” he asked. “When your father died?”

“The only kin.”

“So you must have gotten all his stuff.”

“Yes,” Danica said. “Why?”

“Was there a three-ring binder? It would have been blue leather, about the size of those little day-planners people used to carry around. Like five by seven inches.”

Danica thought hard about it, then shook her head. “I don’t remember anything like that.”

“He brought it with him every time he came here,” Moss said. “It was full of his notes. I remember thinking, I bet that’s the only place he writes any of this stuff down. I bet there’s not a word of this on any computer, any place someone could be recording keystrokes or getting into his files. That binder would contain everything he ever learned about the accident, whatever that amounted to.”

Danica still looked like she was trying to remember. Her eyes seemed focused intensely on empty space in front of her. But she could only shake her head again.