“I laughed, but she was completely serious. And when I explained that the speed of light and the speed of dark were one and the same, she said no. That wasn’t true. She saw proof of this every evening when I said good night and flipped the switch. ‘Dark is faster,’ she said. ‘Dark is worser.’”

He’s still smiling, but it’s a sad smile now.

“Why are you telling me this?” she says.

He makes a sweeping gesture with his arm indicating the whole mess of casework on the floor and says, “I’m starting to think she was right.”

In Capitol Hill, the police were alerted to a missing manhole cover. When they investigated, shining their Maglites down into the shadows, they discovered a woman curled up in a ball and whispering to herself. Her body was covered in blood not her own. An award-winning architect who had never had so much as a speeding ticket, she was suspected of murdering two of her neighbors and the doorman of her luxury condo. Each body had an eye gouged out, and one was shaved and etched with ciphers. When the officers descended the ladder and tried to coax her up, she attacked them and scrambled off into the dark. She remains at large.

In Bellevue, a family reported a break-in, and the responding officers located a man in their basement, dead, with mushrooms budding from his mouth. His hand was gripped around a box cutter clotted with the blood and fur of the family dog, Waffles, whose carcass was later discovered in the backyard.

In Renton, in an apartment building, water poured through the ceiling of a first-floor unit. When the landlord knocked at the door of 2E, he received no answer, so he entered with his key, thinking he was dealing with a busted pipe. In the bathroom he found the shower hissing, the tub overflowing, the room full of steam, and a naked old man who spoke in an unrecognizable language. The landlord said, “Maybe it was Russian or Mexican or something, but it didn’t sound like it to me. It sounded like somebody trying to talk through a mouth full of mud.” He had disassembled his shaving razor and was in the process of carving out his left eye when the landlord wrestled him down and called for help.