Some appear to have been murdered by familiars, others by strangers. Some are wealthy and others barely scraping by. They are men and women, young and old. White, Black, Asian, Hispanic. Some have criminal records, others don’t. Some committed suicide. Some are unaccounted for. And some are in custody and exhibiting symptoms of what she can only describe as a collective psychosis. The pattern seems broken, but there is always a logic system. If only her brain didn’t feel like a defective calculator that couldn’t process the algorithm. She has requested blood tests on all, but labs won’t move as fast as she needs them to.

If only her selfish, reckless idiot of an ex-husband would call her back, she could get some verification on her suspicions.

Instead she keeps hearing from the wrong person. Three e-mails and two voice mails from a reporter at the Seattle Times. Nothing has so far run in the paper, and she has to get out ahead of them. Because once this is out to the public, the case will no longer belong to her. A task force will be arranged. The FBI will get involved. There is nothing she hates more than losing control. But it’s more than that.

She can’t even get support from inside her own office. She told the sarge she might be onto something—she had a hunch—and if the hunch was right, it would result in a citywide quarantine. Here he cut her off and said, “Don’t you tell me that shit. Don’t you even start.” Seattle had been a launchpad for COVID in the country, and even with all the warning signs out of China, the city was impossibly slow to respond, reluctant to admit the threat. “How do you think they’d handle me telling them you’ve got a hunch? And no clear data to back it?” he said. “Denial. That’s how. So I hope you’re wrong, Abernathy.”

“I do too,” she said. “But I’m not the only one with a hunch. The Seattle Times—”

“No, no, no. You keep away from the press, you understand? You don’t say one fucking word to one fucking reporter or it’s my head in the guillotine.”

“Okay. For now.”

“For now? For now, my ass.”

Even with the phone off the hook, her desk is no longer a place she can get anything done. A police station isn’t a place where you can hide and think. So she heads off for a walk to the Sound, where the open water offers at least the illusion of solitude.