“—but I think he probably wanted to, and at the very least she enabled his fantasies. Anyway, I grabbed the picture and talked some smack about her, trying to get a rise out of him, trying to get him to respond. Because he’s in there, Holly, and I mean all present and accounted for. I was sure of it then and I’m sure of it now. He just sits there, but inside he’s the same human wasp that killed those people at City Center and tried to kill a whole lot more at Mingo Auditorium.”

“And he used Debbie’s Blue Umbrella to talk with you, don’t forget that.”

“After last night I’m not likely to.”

“Tell me the rest of what happened that time.”

“For just a second he stopped looking out his window at the parking garage across the way. His eyes . . . they rolled in their sockets, and he looked at me. Every hair on the nape of my neck stood up at attention, and the air felt . . . I don’t know . . . electric.” He forces himself to say the rest. It’s like pushing a big rock up a steep hill. “I arrested some bad doers when I was on the cops, some very bad doers—one was a mother who killed her three-year-old for insurance that didn’t amount to a hill of beans—but I never felt the presence of evil in any of them once they were caught. It’s like evil’s some kind of vulture that flies away once these mokes are locked up. But I felt it that day, Holly. I really did. I felt it in Brady Hartsfield.”

“I believe you,” she says in a voice so small it’s barely a ­whisper.

“And he had a Zappit. That’s the connection I was trying to make. If it is a connection, and not just a coincidence. There was a guy, I don’t know his last name, everyone just called him Library Al, who used to hand Zappits out along with Kindles and paperbacks when he made his rounds. I don’t know if Al was an orderly or a volunteer. Hell, he might even have been one of the janitors, doing a little good deed on the side. I think the only reason I didn’t pick up on that right away was the Zappit you found at the Ellerton house was pink. The one in Brady’s room was blue.”

“How could what happened to Janice Ellerton and her daughter have anything to do with Brady Hartsfield? Unless . . . has anyone reported any telekinetic activity outside of his room? Have there been rumors of that?”

“Nope, but right around the time the Saubers business finished up, a nurse committed suicide in the Brain Injury Clinic. Sliced her wrists in a bathroom right down the hall from Hartsfield’s room. Her name was Sadie MacDonald.”

“Are you thinking . . .”