David did not wake.

He groaned and muttered in the sweat-soaked sheets.

In sleep, he kept writing new drafts of the dream, but in every one, he was Orpheus from the Greek legend, and she was Eurydice, and he betrayed her with a forbidden glance.

| 61 |

Wednesday morning, David was weary of sleep and in need of a bottomless cup of black coffee.

He switched on the TV to cable news. The day was already a dark carnival of the political pandemonium and media hysteria that had become too much the norm. Plus a nightclub shooting in Miami with twenty dead. Riots in Chicago. Churchgoers shotgunned in Memphis. Thirty dead in a terrorist attack on a synagogue in Israel. Two wars in the Middle East. He turned it off.

At the computer in his study, he accessed the law-enforcement website with the countywide police blotter.

Lukas Ockland’s name had been removed from the list of missing persons. Two others had been added: a thirteen-year-old girl named Reagan Ausbock, and a seventy-nine-year-old man, Juan Pedro Flores. Neither seemed a likely target for an assassin.

The list of homicides included no new names. Lukas Ockland had not been added, although perhaps the results of an autopsy remained to be revealed.

He recalled Estella Rosewater’s account of seeing the late Patrick Corley with Maddison on the eighteenth of August, just the previous year, at a restaurant in Menlo Park.

Menlo Park was in San Mateo County. When David searched, he found that San Mateo also offered a law-enforcement website with a countywide police blotter.

The archives were accessible, and within minutes he discovered that a murder had been committed in Menlo Park on August nineteenth. The victim was the wealthy thirty-year-old cofounder of a company intent on developing virtual-reality re-creations of real crimes to facilitate police investigations and criminal prosecutions, whatever that might mean. The murder had been intimate. A stiletto had been slipped between his ribs and into his heart, and he had been found naked in bed. More than seven months later, the police still had no leads.

David exited the website.

He switched off the computer and sat staring at the dead screen for a long while.

Later, he packed a suitcase for an overnighter in Sacramento. He included pictures of Emily, which he might need to share with Ronny Lee Jessup.

| 62 |

At 2:25 p.m., as David sat at the desk in his study, struggling to concentrate on the first-pass proofs of his latest novel, Isaac Eisenstein called from New York.

“I keep looking at those photos of your cutie, and it’s beauty and the beast, though King Kong was handsomer than you. She must see something in you that I don’t, boychik. Have you ignored my sterling advice? Have you shtupped her yet?”

“None of your business.”