“I forgot to take this out of my pocket.” Snow held up something, a folded silver square. “Mind holding on to it for me?”

Without really intending to, Mike felt himself reaching out and taking the thing. It was warm from Snow’s pocket, soft like a stick of gum. Holding it as far from his face as possible, he slipped it into his own pocket and flipped the toggle switch on the side of the machine, raising the table and aligning the laser light just above Snow’s eyes. The table slid deep into the mouth of the magnet until only Snow’s feet stuck out, encased in beige canvas prison shoes. From here Mike could see Snow’s fingers laced together on his chest, as poised as a corpse at a viewing.

“Oh, and don’t worry about your son,” Snow’s voice drifted out from inside the tube. “I’ve got special plans for him.”

Mike looked in. “What?”

Silence now, so unresponsive that Mike could almost have imagined the whole thing.

He’s messing with you.

Yeah, but how did he know—

Lucky guess. Just start this thing and get it over with.

Mike left the room, closed the door behind him, and sat down to scan.

“What was he doing in there?” Jolie said. “Asking you on a date?”

“He stinks.” Even out here, Snow’s smell was stuck in his nose just as the killer’s words were lodged in his head. Mike selected the first sequence and waited while the radio frequency amplifier started its warm-up on the other side of the glass. He couldn’t stop thinking about how Snow had grinned at him from inside the head coil, eyes so bright they might see in the dark, and the way his smell had soured, thickening as the man snapped to life.

Don’t worry about your son.

He took the silver square from his pocket, turned it over in his still-gloved hand. It was a piece of tightly folded paper, slightly damp, wrapped in grimy aluminum foil. He peeled the wrapper away, unfolded the paper.

It was a torn-out page from a hard-core skin magazine, its once-glossy sheen so faded and creased that Mike couldn’t tell the gender of the bodies depicted on it, only that they were all naked and complexly knotted together in twos and threes. There were words written sideways across the pictures.

Holding the page under the desk, Mike turned it lengthwise to read. Black marker was scrawled across the page forming thick crooked letters, a hasty child’s handwriting:

You have a choice. Stay and do your job or take your family and get out. Make this decision RIGHT NOW. You won’t get another warning.

Mike frowned, read the note again, not comprehending. His family wasn’t even—

“Whoa, Mike, he’s already moving,” Jolie said. Mike looked up through the glass into the scan room. Deep inside the tube of the magnet, Snow’s knee had started to bounce.

You won’t get another warning.

Behind him, he heard a voice say, “Daddy!”