That night, I scanned the contents of Ray’s CD, thinking, is this it? I’d expected waves of data, but there were just three folders, each pertaining to a different subject and containing spreadsheets and photographs. The spreadsheets compiled data from tests that had been run on the subject at Ocean General, the results of which I didn’t understand. I’d have to find someone to help me parse them back in New York.

I steeled myself before opening the photographs. Asleep in a hospital bed, an obese black man had his stomach held together with staples. In the next folder, an elderly white man had his cheek ripped off, exposing the black gums and molars and the purple root of tongue.

Then I came to the girl. At first glance, I thought surely she was dead, lying in bed as white as the camera flash, eyes locked in a narcotic gaze. I turned to another image. Her flat left breast was carved around the top, the silver stud in the nipple glinting in a slather of blood. My hand went to my chest.

I rifled through my notes and found the photo those two girls had given me of their friend Julia Rawls. I compared the faces, and it was her.

Scanning the spreadsheet in her folder, I couldn’t decipher much, but the record clearly stated she’d been discharged from Ocean General in December 2001.

I found the address the girls had given me for Tori’s grandmother’s house. I had to be on the road to Tampa early the next morning, but I wanted to tell them what I’d learned about their friend.

13.

Welded metal caged the windows and doors, and the entire bungalow was speckled with mold, lizards darting over the walls. I drove my thumb into the buzzer and waited, glancing at the vacant lot across the way. The one dim streetlight lit the weeds growing over the house’s foundation. Soon, I thought, this will all be part of the mayor’s Retreat 2010. Someone zipped by on one of Zeke’s black bikes, and was gone.

“Yes?”

I could barely see the old woman through the cage, a stooped shadow.

“I’m looking for Tori and Lina.”

She muttered something and the cage swung open. I followed her down the hall, the walls lined with family photos, their gold frames dull with dust. She turned into the empty living room. There was only one other door. I knocked.

“What, Grandma?”

The door cracked open. It was Tori.

“Hi,” I said. “Remember me?”

Tori was hanging out in her bedroom with Lina and a girl named Carmen. They were watching the Heat game on a flickering little TV. Tori wore that same Alonzo Mourning jersey and her bedroom was lined with basketball posters and banners, everything slightly outdated, like it had been decorated in the mid-’90s and forgotten.