She doesn’t wait to see what happens next but hurries into a minimart on the corner. The clerk gives her a look, and if he even thinks about following her around the store—which happens too damn often—she might be in enough of a mood to flash her badge and scare him. In the candy aisle, she pulls out her cell and texts yet another message to Jack. I don’t know what this is, she writes. Please. She isn’t supposed to release crime scene photos, but fuck it and fuck him. This is the only way she’ll get him to pay attention to her. She attaches several images of Ashley dead in her cell, including close-ups of the fungus spilling out of her eyes and nose and mouth. The same fungus she’s pretty sure she just spotted on the dog.

She almost never says please. Or sorry. They’re meaningless if you say them constantly, wasted words. She saves them for when they matter. They matter now. And she knows Jack understands that. Please, she writes again. I need you.

Not thirty seconds later, her phone rings. His voice is raspy but familiar on the other end of the line, saying, “I need you too.”

Inside the entry to his condo, she finds a mess of unread mail and newspapers on the floor. “Jack?” she says. “I’m here.” He told her over the phone to come on in. She can hear the shower running upstairs, so she takes the opportunity to snoop around. His television is balanced on a filing cabinet, and his couch has a broken leg, its corner propped up by several books. The kitchen is busy with beer cans, unwashed coffee mugs, and bowls of sludgy milk and cereal. A piece of paper catches her eye. On it he has scribbled a filamented design, the cipher she has grown familiar with. She folds it and tucks it into her pocket. “Jack?” she calls out.

The bedroom is worse than a college dormitory. A mattress on the floor. Bare walls. Piles of clothes and gear. Not for the first time, she wonders how she was ever married to a person like this. “Disgusting.”

She knocks at the bathroom door. “Jack?”

She might hear a muttered response and puts her ear to the door to listen before calling out his name again. The hollow-core door is damp, as if the water has been running for hours, as if the tub has overrun and filled the bathroom to the ceiling. “Jack, are you okay?”

The door shudders as a blade spikes thorough it. The splintered gouge is only inches from her face.

She doesn’t scream. She simply takes two steps back, withdraws her pistol from the shoulder harness, and kicks open the door. It slams into his body and sends him tumbling.