Had someone already found the recordings? Someone else? Shaw moved on to the next drawer and found himself staring at what looked like approximately thirty baja hoodies. When had he worn those? When had he even liked those? And why did he have so many? He dragged them out and piled them next to the Elizabethan shirts. Shaw didn’t think anyone had found the recordings, not yet. If Barr and Reck had found them, they wouldn’t still be poking around with their noses in a twist. If Regina or Brueckmann or—

Now hold on.

There was something Shaw couldn’t quite put his finger on. Something about Brueckmann. Could he be the one who had sent the text?

For a moment, the thought thrummed inside Shaw. Then he pushed it away. He didn’t have enough to tie Brueckmann to anything either. So he was back to Regina.

If someone had found the recordings, this mess would have stopped. Or it would have taken a different turn—whoever had found the blackmail would have contacted the victims and started demanding new payments.

So the blackmail was still hidden. Where?

Yanking open the bottom-most drawer, Shaw stared at a motley of clothes he had bought and stashed over the years: long woolen scarves, one-piece underwear with a button flap in the seat, a pink vinyl jacket with creases sharp enough to cut, leather chaps—three of them, Shaw wanted to groan, why the hell did he have three of them—what looked like a 19th century pioneer bonnet. On and on. Shit. So much shit. But did he own one decent pair of jeans? Apparently not.

Staring down at the miscellany, Shaw felt a shadow swim through the deep waters of his mind. Something right here in front of him. Something swimming a little too deep for him to see it. And he needed to see it.

He stumbled downstairs, caromed off the wall, shot through the outer office to Pari’s shrieking, “I know you ate some of my cinnamon bun, Shaw, I know you—” and he caromed again off the front door, and a spoon whistled past him and gouged a piece out of the jamb, and then Shaw was shooting forward again, headed for the inner office, stumbling over the uneven boards, his toe a white-hot pulse of pain where he jammed it on North’s chair, and then he was sliding around his desk, knocking his own chair clear, gathering up handfuls of paper.

His doodles. That’s what North had called all of this. Shaw’s stupid doodles. But there was something here, something that Shaw’s subconscious had seen, something that he knew and didn’t know in the way that he had been accustomed to his whole life—and that he found so damn maddening.

One whole page of sketches of the Cardinals jersey. Then half of a page that said Dungeons and Dragons. And then fourteen lines of Cthulhu. And then four sentences punctuated with Shaw’s best squidlike-blob monster: What is not dead. What is not dead. What is not dead. But doth dreaming lie. And then with rough hatching, letters meant to look like an old Hollywood marquee, IT’S A HOME RUN!