‘Your eye.’ She makes a circular motion at her own eye, as though I’m not sure what eyes are.

‘Oh.’ My bruise must be starting to show. ‘It was the dumbest thing. My neighbour, Shawn—he has this dog. I was trying to get to my car, and she ran under my legs, and I tripped. Hit my face on the side mirror.’

‘Where were you going?’ Norman asks. ‘In the car.’

‘To the library.’ It’s just the first thing that pops into my head.

‘At four am? That bruise looks about six hours old.’

I hold her gaze. ‘I’m not supposed to use my bathroom today. Someone came to clean off the mould yesterday, and there are still chemicals in the air. There’s a public bathroom just outside the library. It’s the closest one.’

Norman nods. But I still can’t smother the feeling that she knows I’m lying.

‘If a man goes to his doctor with an injury like that,’ she says, ‘you know what the doctor writes on his chart?’

‘Black eye?’ I guess.

‘DFO,’ she says. ‘Drunk, Fell Over.’

‘I don’t drink,’ I say. ‘But thanks for your concern.’

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 17

You’re in a room with a concrete floor. You have nothing other than an egg. Can you make the egg fall six feet without breaking?

‘Blake,’ Vasquez says, ‘you still working this case?’

‘Why wouldn’t I be?’

Thistle and I are in the basement, the air stifling thanks to the humming computers and the AC keeping the mould in the walls alive. No space above our heads, the ceiling only seven feet up.

‘I heard both suspects fled,’ Vasquez says. ‘It’s up to the Houston PD to find them now, right? Your job is done.’

‘I’m done when we find our missing men,’ I say.

‘What happened to your face?’

‘Dr Norman called it DFO. How’s your algorithm going?’

Vasquez gestures at the server humming in the corner of the basement. ‘So far it’s determined that all the dates you gave me were slightly cooler than average, that overall internet traffic was marginally higher, road congestion was a bit lower, and, most interestingly, that visits to hospitals were up by a tenth of a per cent. Is any of that useful?’

‘Not to us,’ I say.

Thistle asks, ‘Can you program it to look for missing persons or violent crime?’

‘I tried that. Nothing.’

‘Statewide? Nationwide?’

Vasquez just shrugs his movie-star shoulders.

I wish we could find out what was on Shannon’s computer or phone. But we still don’t have a warrant out for him.

‘How are you going with Ruthven?’ I ask.

‘Got his phone and his computer. Still working through the data. Nothing promising. He used a dating app, and we’re trying to track the most recent person he met.’

I say, ‘Can you get us a list of everyone he met with?’

‘Why?’