Then whose body had I seen taken from the house, charred black? I tried remembering my Mimico notes, which I’d shipped back to New York. Pavel was real, or he’d been real at some point. I’d been in his house, someone’s body was in there. What if that was the corpse of the real Pavel, dead before I even got to Mimico? Or maybe another subject from the trial, another failed test? I thought of Zeke in the tub. The burning house was another part of the fiction they’d been elaborating around me since I met Dr. Kriss. We’re going to make a great story together.

I wanted to get out of the Jeep, go running at the man. I had to will myself into one last act of restraint.

I sat cross-legged, jotted some notes, and watched them pop the little bottle. The man wore slim blue jeans and a red collared shirt, unbuttoned at the top to expose a white T and a tuft of black hair. As Pavel, he’d seemed appropriately impoverished and overmedicated, but now he was robust, his chest toughly rounding out the shirt, eyes alert.

I kept the binoculars on him, as if to see behind those eyes. I wondered if this was Rainer, the technician, if he knew where the bodies were buried, or scattered, or dumped. But he just stood there, inscrutable, sipping sparkling wine in the smoky light.

—

It was after one when he said farewell to the woman and got in the purple truck. The reverse lights flashed, and I clambered into the driver’s seat and started up the Jeep. I waited until he’d sailed by, then pulled out of the lot.

Even in low visibility, it wasn’t hard to follow that conspicuous ambulance. I tried staying within its blind spots, accelerating into a tailgate position whenever he made a turn then easing back and sticking to the wing. In just a few minutes we were on the outskirts of Arcade, where he veered off the road and bounced into a Burger King.

Neck craned, I kept my eyes fixed on the truck until he’d turned into the drive-thru, then had to bury my foot on the brake when I looked back at the road to find a Honda’s red brake lights flaring before me. The Jeep slumped to a stop just inches from the Honda’s bumper, the seat belt seized below my ribs. Horns blaring all around, I muscled out of the lane and into a turn, then looped around the block. But when I passed the Burger King, the truck was still in the drive-thru.