She’s twenty-five. It can’t end here, not with a mother who relies on her, not with children needing to be conceived and born and raised, not with Davey waiting. The beast hits her again, and she is gone. She wakes briefly, realizes she’s being dragged across the blacktop, passes out, wakes to find herself in the back of his van, restrained with zip ties. Then unrelenting darkness.

In that palpable dark, a voice whispers insistently, “Emily is gone forever, she is gone forever, she is gone forever, and Maddison is but a walking corpse, a walking corpse . . .”

Other ghastly dreams tormented David throughout the night, but unlike the first, they were as amorphous as the molten wax in a lava lamp. He had drunk far less of the vodka than he intended, and the dreams were not conceived in the womb of inebriation. On waking at 8:40 a.m. Friday, he suffered no hangover, although the dread coiling in him was a blunted bramble entwining all his nerves. He sat on the edge of the bed and stared at his reflection in the mirrored closet door.

He examined the bed and the floor around it, but he found nothing out of the ordinary.

The straight-backed chair was tucked into the kneehole of the desk, where it belonged.

This unit had no connecting door to another.

The high window in the bathroom was small. No one could have come and gone by that route.

He went to the exterior door. The deadbolt was engaged, but not the security chain. He was certain that the chain had been in place when he’d gone to bed.

Whether Maddison was truly Emily or someone else, she couldn’t know he had a room at this motel. Neither could Patrick Corley.

David had felt watched the previous evening. He had called it paranoia, nothing more. And yet the chain dangled . . .

Maddison couldn’t have known that he had gone to Folsom to speak with the killer. She didn’t even know about Ronny Jessup.

Unless . . . Unless she was somehow Emily and therefore knew who had killed her.

And how crazy was that thought? As crazy as Jessup himself.

As David dressed, as he went out to find a restaurant, as he ate breakfast, as he contemplated the grim task ahead of him, as his dread did not relent, he decided that the extraordinary dream from Emily’s perspective must be either a product of his growing despair—or had somehow been induced by others. The latter explanation made no sense, but he considered it, anyway.

Supposing that the dream had been crafted and in some fashion inserted into his mind during sleep, using a technology he couldn’t comprehend, then it must be meant to dispirit him. If he could be convinced that Emily had been taken away by Ronny Jessup and was among the mummified remains of those fourteen who had never been found, and if he could be made to think of Maddison as some unclean thing, the equivalent of an animated cadaver, then he might be less likely to persist in his efforts to find her.