“Alec,” I said, “what can you tell me about the deaths of Kara Rider, Peter Stimovich, Jason Warren, and Pamela Stokes?”

He sighed. “When I was a boy, I was attacked by a nest of yellow jackets. I was walking along a lake, and I have no idea where they came from, but then, like a mirage, they surrounded me and swarmed my body in this great big cloud of black and yellow. Through the cloud I could just make out my parents and some neighbors rushing down the sand toward me, and I wanted to tell them it was all right. It was fine. But then the bees stung. A thousand needles pierced my flesh and drank from my blood, and the pain was so excruciating it was orgasmic.” He looked at me as a drop of sweat fell from his nose and landed on his chin. “I was eleven years old and I had my first orgasm, right there in my swimsuit, as a thousand yellow jackets drank my blood.”

Lief frowned and leaned back against the wall.

“The last time it was wasps,” Dolquist said.

“It was yellow jackets.”

“You said wasps, Alec.”

“I said yellow jackets,” Alec said mildly and looked back at me. “Have you ever been stung?”

I shrugged. “Probably once or twice when I was a little kid. I can’t remember.”

There was a silence then which lasted several minutes. Alec Hardiman sat across from me and looked at me as if he were considering how I’d look laid out in sections on a piece of bone-white china, forks and knives and a full service tray at his disposal.

I looked back, aware that he’d refuse to answer any questions I had at the moment.

When he spoke, I didn’t see his lips move until afterward, in memory.

“Could you adjust my glasses, Patrick?”

I looked at Lief and he shrugged. I leaned forward and pushed them back up to Alec’s eyes and he tilted his nostrils toward the space of bare skin between my gloved palm and shirt cuff, sniffed audibly.

I removed my hand.

“Did you have sex this morning, Patrick?”

I didn’t say anything.

“I can smell her sex on your hand,” he said.

Lief came off the wall just enough so that I could see the warning in his face.

“I want you to understand something,” Hardiman said. “I want you to understand that there are choices. You can make the right one or the wrong one, but the choice will be presented. Not everyone you love can live.”

I tried to get some saliva working through the sand stiffening in my throat and against my tongue. “Diandra Warren’s son is dead because she put you away. That one I get. What about the other victims?”

He hummed, softly at first, and I couldn’t recognize the tune until he lowered his head and the volume rose slightly. “Send in the Clowns.”

“The other victims,” I repeated. “Why did they have to die, Alec?”