“Max, you have to stay away. It’s a fragile thing I’m putting together.”

“Understood, laddie. One more question, though: How does your theory of the old murders explain the current ones?”

“That’s simple. The Good Shepherd is trying keep us from realizing that the original six victims were the sum of one and five. Somehow The Orphans of Murder has the potential to expose that secret—possibly by pointing in some way to the one that mattered. He’s killing people to keep that from happening.”

“A very desperate man.”

“More practical than desperate.”

“Christ, Gurney, he’s murdered three people in three days, according to the news.”

“Right. I just don’t think that desperation has much to do with it. I don’t believe the Shepherd regards murder as that big a deal. It’s simply an action he takes whenever it seems advantageous. Whenever he feels that killing someone will remove more risk from his life than it will create. I don’t think desperation enters into—”

A call-waiting signal stopped Gurney in midsentence. He checked the ID. “Max, I have to go. I’ve got Lieutenant Bullard from BCI trying to get through. And, Max? Stay away from here tonight. Please.”

Gurney glanced out the window. The weird black-and-silver landscape raised gooseflesh on his arms. He was standing in a shaft of moonlight that crossed the center of the room, projecting an image of the window, along with his own shadow, on the far wall above the bed.

He pressed TALK to take the waiting call. “Thank you for getting back to me, Lieutenant. I appreciate it. I think I may have some—” He never finished the sentence.

There was a stunning explosion. A white flash accompanied by a deafening blast. And a terrific impact to Gurney’s hand.

He staggered back against the table, unsure for several seconds what had happened. His right hand was numb. There was a stinging ache in his wrist.

Fearing what he might see, he held his hand up in the moonlight, turning it slowly. All the fingers were there, but he was holding only a small piece of the phone. He looked around the room, searching futilely in the darkness for other areas of damage.

The first explanation that occurred to him was that his phone had exploded. His mind raced around the edges of that improbability, trying to imagine a way it could have been set up, a time when the phone might have been accessible to someone capable of that kind of sabotage, how a miniature explosive device could have been inserted and then triggered.

But that wasn’t just improbable, it was impossible. The concussive impact, the sheer force of the explosion, put its source beyond anything he could conceive of being fitted into a functioning phone. A dummy phone, perhaps, built for the purpose, but not the phone on which he’d just been speaking.

Then he smelled ordinary cartridge gunpowder.