Matt picked up a flip camera, slung a backpack over his shoulder, and handed Amy a store map and a pencil.

“Just mark down every place I leave one,” he said. “Trinity will kill me if I lose any.”

“But if they’re not showing anything except the lighting grid,” Amy asked, “then why are you putting them out?” She followed Matt down the Bright and Shining Path deeper into Bedrooms.

“Because that’s Trinity’s plan.”

“And you’re super in love with her?” she said.

Matt didn’t answer. Amy knew the kind of effect Trinity had on male floor partners. All she had to do was act like a super-cute Japanese schoolgirl and she could recruit an entire army of ghost hunters.

Matt placed the first unit on a Sylbian bedside table. “Jason Hawes,” he said. “My favorite Roto-Rooter employee.”

Amy looked at him.

“I like to name the readers after TV ghost hunters,” he explained. “Write them on the map, okay?”

They walked along the Bright and Shining Path, leaving Bedrooms and weaving through Bathrooms and Wardrobes. Matt stopped every seventy-five feet to place another meter atop a Finnimbrun chest of drawers, inside a Liripip ultranarrow single-door wardrobe, on top of a membership kiosk outside Children’s. He named each one of them. “Lorraine Warren, chicken farmer … Ryan Buell, drama queen … Josh Gates, adventure whore.”

“What have you got against these people?” Amy asked.

“They jump to conclusions. They use the word energy without actually knowing what it means. They pretend to understand physics when they clearly don’t even know how their own equipment works. They call themselves scientists but beat up the scientific method and drag it through the mud. And worst of all, they’re terrible at being on TV.”

“Whereas you guys would be awesome?”

“Obviously,” Matt said. “Trinity has camera presence to burn. She’s funny, she’s got a great look, she’s comfortable around tools, and she can solder a circuit, which is totally hot. Even if we don’t get any apparitions on tape, we’re still going to knock this out of the park. We’ll chart the EMF spikes and drops, shoot in a bunch of different formats, like night-vision and infrared, record some suggestive electrovoice phenomena, use remote temperature probes to check cold spots, deploy motion detectors, and try to record any ultrasound we can find. When we’re done, we’ll have a buttload of awesome footage of the spookiest place on earth, which is this store, after hours, right now. Then I edit the hell out of it, and, ghost footage or no ghost footage, we’re going to have a kickass reel.”

It suddenly dawned on Amy.

“You don’t believe in ghosts,” she said. “At all.”

Matt powered up his camera. “I believe a ghost is a subjective experience. It doesn’t have an objective reality. It exists solely in the perceptions of the people who see it.”