He noticed there was a sleeper in the corner, crouched down, assiduously watching the young couple as if performing a scientific study. When Owen noticed his pale blue glow, the old man turned to him, winked, smiled, and gave a stiff mechanical thumbs-up. It wasn’t that the couple having sex was devoid of any allure, but with the other sleeper there, it was too much of a reminder of the creepy nature of his home invasions. Had the old man not been there, who knows what the librarian might have done. Instead of returning the greeting, he jumped up through the ceiling and roof and landed in the front yard. He was upset with himself for becoming what he’d promised he wouldn’t. Also, he realized that hadn’t checked to see if the young man was the one from the gas station. He should have looked for a beard, but it wasn’t what his sight had been trained on.

He moved down the street to the other place he thought might be the house of the attendant. As soon as he passed through the door, he saw the long-haired, bearded fellow sitting at a small table in the living room, the television on. In front of him was a notebook, a cup of coffee, and a silver nine-millimeter pistol. Owen walked behind the chair and looked to see what was written in the notebook. There was a list of four names, a line through three of them. The last, without a line through it and the only female name on the list, was Kiara. Owen’s first thought was it could have been the woman he and Melody had visited the night before. The man wrote something next to the woman’s name in a tiny, loopy script too small to make out.

Owen moved away and looked around to see what else he could find. There were local newspapers scattered on the kitchen counter. He saw the one in which the reporter called his admission that he hadn’t played the hero at the Busy Bee a confession. Then he could see from the headlines that all of them had front-page stories about the robbery. Stuck to the refrigerator with a magnet was a photo of what looked like, as far as Owen could remember, Helen’s killer. He had his arm around the shoulders of a woman holding a baby. She was definitely the young mother he and Melody had stumbled upon in the apartment building next to the school. Looking at the photo, he tried to figure out how he was going to let the police know about it. If he told them the truth, they’d send him away for psychiatric evaluation.