His bare feet slapped the wood as he raced into the other room.

North settled onto the bed and pressed play. Black-and-white footage rolled across the screen. In one corner, white numerals marked the date as 5/7/2011, and North’s heart beat a little faster. Seven years ago. The end of their freshman year at Chouteau.

The angle of the camera was poor: most of the field of vision was occupied by the glass-and-concrete vestibule of what looked like an herbal supplement shop—at least, that’s what North thought he could make out in the grainy picture. The camera had been mounted high and deep in the vestibule, probably by an amateur; this last part, North judged by the fact that the camera actually covered so little usable space.

But someone might not have noticed a camera like that, a voice said at the back of North’s head, and his heart beat even faster. Someone planning something. Someone who thought he had covered all his bases. Someone might have missed this camera, someone might have made a mistake because it’s such a shit-poor place for a camera.

The outermost quarter of the camera’s field of vision took in a stretch of sidewalk, a parking meter with a dinged-up pole, and a few feet of asphalt. North watched as the seconds ticked by on the digital clock. His heart had moved up in his chest. It felt like it was beating just below his throat now, and he had sweat under his arms, and something made him want to scratch himself everywhere—hard, nervous scratches to keep himself from going crazy. It was just some black-and-white security footage. Just old security footage from seven years ago. It was nothing.

And then, feet at the edge of the screen, then legs, then a hand at the side. A knife. North wasn’t sure that was what he was seeing, he wasn’t positive, but the long, pale strip, held against the man’s leg low, as though he were trying to hide it as he ran—it could be a knife.

Then nothing.

North’s heartbeat had doubled. Tripled. Had he just seen what he thought he’d seen? His body was sure, even if his brain wasn’t. Still trying to process the low-quality footage, he reached for the laptop’s screen to close it. The West End Slasher. Somehow Shaw had gotten a copy of a video that nobody else had ever seen—that, as far as North knew, nobody else even knew existed. Dread dropped in North’s stomach: what if Shaw were right? What if the Slasher were still out there?

“Keep watching,” Shaw said. Somehow his voice was still even; wasn’t he feeling the same terror marching through his gut that North was? Shaw was dragging on a pair of black jeans that looked surprisingly normal. Then hopping on one foot as he dragged the denim into place, Shaw made a half-circle, and North could see what was stitched in white thread on Shaw’s ass: Che Lives!

He groaned. Then, before he could say anything, movement on the screen attracted his attention again. This time, it was an automobile that whipped into the frame, obviously coming out of a tight turn—so tight that it hugged the curb, its wheels throwing up a particulate cloud of cigarette wrappers and broken pavement and pellets of blackened gum. North hammered the spacebar so hard that he thought he might have broken it, but that thought registered only at a distance.