Unless they weren’t chosen. Unless they did the choosing. Maybe he didn’t find them. Maybe they found him—or them. Maybe there’s more than one observer after all.

We needed a tox screen from each of these victims.

I put a request through to learn if there was Selzucaine in any of their autopsies, then contacted DeYoung to see if I could get more agents on the case. I tried Greer’s number, but he didn’t pick up. I’d left him a voice message earlier, so I decided not to leave another one now.

I returned to the videos, but watching the people die over and over again was emotionally devastating.

At last, I took a deep breath, paused the current video, and rubbed my forehead.

In order to get a break from watching people take their own lives, I turned my attention to the code and jotted Remember death on the top of the page, then searched online for cryptography programs and for codes with dashes and dots, but Braille and Morse code were the two that kept popping up.

As I was trying to figure out my next step, I heard from Ralph. “Made it up here. I’m in the city.”

“Excellent. Your flight?”

“Choppy. I’m alive, but just barely.”

In my job, I rarely have the luxury of focusing my attention on only one case at a time. Most often it’s a balancing act that I never quite get balanced. Even though I was investigating Jon Murray’s death, I was also entangled in this business with Mannie. And the longer I worked on each case, the more convinced I became that they were somehow interconnected.

“By the way,” Ralph said, “you ever hear of a zedonk?”

“A zedonk?”

“On the plane, I was flipping through a magazine someone left on the seat beside me, and there was this article about zedonks.”

“I’m guessing that’s a mixture of a zebra and a donkey?”

“Yeah. Which is odd enough in itself, but I kept thinking about how at least it’s better than the alternative.”

“The alternative?”

“A donkbra.”

“Um, yeah. I would say so.”

“Other combinations wouldn’t be much better either.”

“Other combinations?”

“A hippopotabra. A chiwawabra. A crocabra. A German shepabra.”

“Ralph, it sounds like you’ve been spending time with my stepdaughter. I could hear her saying that.”

She looked at me questioningly from where she sat on the couch.

“Speaking of her,” Ralph said, “how’s it going this weekend? Christie still gone?”

“It’s going well. She flies back tomorrow afternoon. Tessa keeps asking me to let her drive even though she doesn’t have her license yet. Is that normal?” I was speaking lightheartedly and loud enough for her to hear.

“Yes,” she said.