“I don’t know whether to be impressed at your technical skills or just creeped out.” Thackrey sat beside Victor on the sofa and smiled genially at him. From a pill bottle, he poured different colored tablets on the coffee table and picked out half a dozen oblong pink pills. Raising his glass, he swallowed the pills with a mouthful of wine.

Victor leaned close to the table and studied the pills. “Provigil?”

“Yeah, mostly.”

“Was that two thousand milligrams? Isn’t that, like, ten times recommended? You have anything else in your stack to slow it down?”

Thackrey drank the last of the wine. “Ever hear of the white-crowned sparrow? Tiny bird. White band on the top of its head. Each fall it flies from its home in Alaska to Southern California—twenty-seven hundred miles. Flies at night. Three hundred miles at a clip. Goes from sleeping nine hours a day in its habitat to an hour and a half in migration. The rest of the time it’s awake, its little beady eyes open. No one knows how it does it. Awake for ten days.”

“When’s the last time you slept, Ben?” Russell asked. “The stimulants in those things can build up.”

Thackrey smiled. “Bleaching your hair again, Russ? It looks even lighter than yesterday. What’s your thing now? The only blond Asian?”

“You used to be a good guy.” Russell looked at Thackrey. “What happened to you?”

“I got rich. I don’t need to be good.”

“You helped me.” Russell stood his ground. “You remember that?”

“I kept you from shooting yourself, you drama queen.”

“You stayed with me for three months. No one else would. What happened to that guy?”

“Let’s not get off subject here.” Victor spoke evenly. “We’re concerned about the pills, Ben, because you and your late friend got us into this situation. It would be nice if you weren’t lost in space for the next few days.”

“If you’ll recall, I’m not the one who caused it. Ask your buddy Russell.”

“Really? That’s how you’re going to play this?”

Thackrey faced Victor. “How about you just tell me why you brought me here?”

Russell stood in front of a laptop on the kitchen counter. “An investigation’s under way by part of the Santa Rosa Police Department called Violent Crime Investigations. VCI.”

“What do we know about them?”

“Website says they investigate seventy-five cases a year: homicides, violent assaults, robberies.”

“So who are they?”

“Not much about them on the public page,” Russell said. “So we hacked through their crappy, government-issued firewall and got into the personnel files. The team is a lead investigator and four detectives.”

Russell scrolled down the screen. “Lead guy is Lieutenant Edward Mahler. Been with the department eighteen years. Head of VCI the past twelve. Graduated from Princeton. Go Tigers. Served in the Army Rangers. Hobbies, reading and travel. Likes classical music.”