Flint was sitting at his desk playing with a set of Ace cards. Flipping them, one by one, into the air and watching them fall in sweeping patterns to the desktop, his lap, the rug at his feet. A colorful pattern of fallen cards, some faceup, some facedown. Guess the suit on those. One of them stared up at him from the center of his desk, its cap tasseled and face painted white; the Joker. That was how he felt right then, like a big joker with nothing more up his sleeve. He had been on the road for three days, in Texas, then South Dakota, then Boston, but his mind kept switching gears back to the Jackson Hydro case. It was driving him crazy. Soon he would be a genuine lunatic, as obsessed as Lee Harvey Oswald or Booth. He only hoped he wouldn’t do anything as drastic as they had. It just felt like he was missing something, that there was one more thing he could catch to make the whole mess clean itself up. He couldn’t shake the feeling that something very bad was about to happen if he didn’t find that one last piece of the puzzle.

He called down to the lab for the third time that day, and this time they had something for him on the sam- ples collected from the most recent trip to the plant. They had already run some additional tests. Regardless of his impatience, he hadn’t expected them quite so soon and was so surprised, it took a few seconds to register. Then he was out the door and on his way, thinking that maybe this time the catch had been made. He would call Pierce and put on some pressure if they had found something concrete.

As it turned out, what they had found was more than concrete. It was explosive.

In his new office, David was looking over the plans for the reservoir. Someone had already done a lot of work on them, but there were problems, and he meant to correct them fast. Now that he had the chance to be responsible for his own work, he wanted to make the most of it.

After a few minutes, he got up to grab a drink from the fridge (he thought that there might be one last Coke from the trip up) and stretch his legs. As he made his way across the living room, he studied the boxes that were stacked high by the closet door downstairs, a veritable mountain of cardboard, and thought bemusedly of his and Helen’s promise to each other before the move to take only the most necessary things with them. It had not turned out that way in the end, and how she had managed to pack even used candlesticks escaped him.