McPhee had stopped walking. His semicircular path had brought him directly in front of the half-open door, and after a moment of looking at whatever was behind it, he lowered the pistol and glanced back at Sarah. “It’s stuck open.”

“What?”

“Something’s shoved under it on the inside. Hold on.” Still moving carefully, he approached the door, bending down, and vanished behind it.

“Officer?” Sarah said.

McPhee reappeared holding a brown wedge of rubber. He was bracing the door open with his foot, and giving her an odd, relieved look. “Doorstop.”

“It wasn’t there when we came up.”

“Maybe your husband stuck it there. Or that security guard, what’s his name…Calhoun?” McPhee glanced behind the door again, down the stairwell. “There’s another one down at the bottom of the landing. Hold on.” He frowned, stepping behind the doorway again. “Wait, that’s not…”

The door slid shut.

14.

The ER supply cabinet was locked. After spending a few desultory minutes ransacking the nurses’ station for the key, mumbling synonyms for “shit,” Jolie had found herself faced with two equally unattractive alternatives. Either go back to Sarah empty-handed and admit defeat or go upstairs and try to find the kid an icepack on one of the floors.

Or go home and take a bath.

A tempting thought, one she would have pursued had it not been for the map that McPhee had shown her. Jolie couldn’t stop thinking about the map. She’d made the mistake of telling McPhee it might be valuable, but she thought there might still be a chance he’d fork it over, if she showed him the right kind of good time. Snapshots of Frank Snow were one thing—she could eBay them for twenty bucks a pop, easy—but a hand-drawn map in Snow’s own hand, written on a page out of a prison Bible? Who knew how much some nut would be willing to pay for that?

After all, Snow had been famous for his notes—his laborious handwriting scrawled on pages of either the Bible or porno magazines. Jolie even remembered seeing the notes reproduced on the news after his capture, with the more offensive language blacked out. The messages usually offered the victim some chance of survival, go or stay, run or hide, resist or cooperate. Devil’s bargains. Almost none of his victims had managed to survive, but the few who had…

Those few told a different story.

Experts on every level had dismissed their testimonies as irreparably tainted by the trauma they’d undergone, but the handful who had somehow escaped had agreed to speak only under terms of strictest anonymity. Variously and inconsistently, they were said to have whispered of a thing whose abilities were weirdly restricted, an entity in human skin, unable to take what he wanted from his prey unless at some point they themselves chose to let it happen. Jolie had read the reports with incredulous fascination. It was pseudo-superstitious bullshit, no question, but it made the notes Snow wrote infinitely more valuable than the garden-variety psychobabble.