The sunlight followed them a short distance down the wooded lane, but was quickly defeated by the accumulation of shadows. Suddenly late afternoon had become evening. They crawled around the bend and Thomas saw the cottage, almost identical to the way he remembered it: the deep porch, the gabled second floor, the fieldstone foundation. There was light in the windows.

'Someone's home,' Sam said, slipping her Mustang into park. She glanced at Gerard in the back seat, then looked at Thomas skeptically. 'So who's this guy again?'

Thomas had told them some bullshit about remembering an old friend of Neil's, someone called Danny Marsh, who now lived outside of Climax. He'd been deliberately vague as to why he thought this significant, insisting that he had a rare but reliable 'gut feeling'. But he had tried to throw in enough trivial details (such as giving the man a fictitious nickname, 'Perko-Dan') to at least defer their suspicions.

The idea was to simply get them to the cottage.

Here.

'Helloooo?' Sam chimed. 'Professor?'

Somehow, Thomas knew his relationship with Sam, whatever it was, would not survive this latest deception. Perhaps it was already dead. Control did its best, but he had to clutch his slacks to keep his hands from trembling.

'I lied,' he said.

'Here we go,' Gerard muttered from the back.

Sam frowned and smiled at once, as though unwilling to believe what she had just heard. Never, it seemed to Thomas, had she looked so beautiful.

'You what?'

'I lied,' he repeated, his voice far more calm than he felt. 'I needed to get you here.'

'I told you,' Gerard said to Sam. 'I fucking told you. Check the best before date, because this Twinkie is out of code.'

'What's going on, Tom? Why did you need to get us here?'

He nodded to the cottage. 'Because Neil's here.'

A speechless moment.

'Jesus-fuck-fuck-fuck!' Gerard cried from the back.

'Neil's here?' Sam snapped scathingly. 'What do you mean? How do you know?'

'You fucking fuck!' Gerard continued shouting, genuinely panicked.

Thomas found himself staring at the dashboard. 'He marked this place on my map, just as he wrote the website address on my lamp… I think he wants me to find him.'

'Then you go knock on the door,' Gerard said.

'Why?' Sam asked. 'Why would you do something like this?' Unlike Gerard, she was all business, and for some reason, this made him absurdly proud. Control slipped enough for him to blink at the sudden hotness in his eyes.

'F-for m-my boy,' he stuttered. He looked at Sam directly. 'I don't trust the others. Not Atta… Not even you, Gerard.'

Gerard sneered. 'Funny you should—'

'Shut up, Danny!' Sam snapped. 'You think the idea is to kill Cassidy, not apprehend him. Is that it?'