He gives a noncommittal nod and clears some crud from his throat. “She’s all healed up?”

“Long way from healed, but she’s bandaged. She lost several teeth. Seven stitches on her lip. Another five on her forehead.”

“Jesus.”

“I put in a call with provisional detention and they’ll escort her to interrogation in a half an hour. Chief said to make sure a lawyer was on hand this time, so there’s a suit in our way now. Things started off ugly and he doesn’t want anyone thinking we’re the reason she’s roughed up.”

He gestures at the tabletop of evidence and says, “What are you looking for here? Anything in particular?”

“Everything in particular.”

Chives circles the table, cocking his head this way and that, and says, “It’s like one of those Magic Eye books.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You know what I mean, yeah? In those books, there’s like a page of squiggles or dots or geometric shapes or drippy designs, but if you kind of make your eyes go unfocused, an image pops out. Like of a train or a snake or whatever.”

“Mmm,” she says, not really paying attention to him.

Chives coughs a few times into his fist and she says, “Do that into your elbow, please.” He continues to cough and she takes a few steps back from him, imagining the germs floating through the air like the black fluff of a diseased dandelion. “Chives. What the hell. When you cough into your hand, you just spread disease by touching everything. Didn’t COVID teach you anything?”

He clears his throat and pounds his chest. “Yeah. Sorry. Ugh.” He wavers in place and puts a hand on a chair to steady himself.

She picks up a composition notebook, one of dozens taken from Crotter’s home. In it, written in the same tidy small script carved into his victims, are recitations and meditations on Bible verses. The door, the door, the door keeps springing off the page and knocking at her mind. She’s seen all this before. What she needs is to notice something new. She reads and rereads pages, skimming over them, and it’s only then that her eyes blur—just like Chives said—and she notices a hidden pattern. The handwriting is typically neat. Straight lines. Compact lettering. Like the circuitry he worked with as a technician. But then, every other page or so, the penmanship dissolves into illegibility, almost like static pops interfering with the message. She has always dismissed this as a product of exhaustion. Crotter’s hand and eyes must have grown tired. But now she sees—in the letters coming apart—something that appears almost filamented. Something that looks like the lines etched onto the victim from the other night. A new translation.

Chives coughs again and distracts her. “Seriously, man,” she says. “It’s disgusting. And selfish.”