Ariel Mather paced the floor of her motel room, shaking with anxiety. At first she had insisted on going out to look for Orrin (“right now!”), but Bose had convinced her to stay in the room at least long enough to explain what had happened. Sandra sat on the unmade bed, listening carefully and not saying much, letting the crisis unspool around her.

“You went to lunch,” Bose prompted.

“Yeah, over to the coffee shop. We had hamburgers. Does that information help you in some way?”

“How was Orrin feeling this morning?”

“Pretty good, I spose, considering he was drugged last night.”

“Okay, he was in a good mood. What did you talk about?”

“Mostly about what happened since he left Raleigh. How he came to Houston and got hired by that man Findley. I asked him why he wanted to leave home in the first place—was it something I did wrong, was he unhappy there? He said no and he was sorry I worried so much about him. He said he just felt like there was business in Houston he had to take care of.”

“What business?”

“I asked him that but he was cagy. And I didn’t push, because I figured it was all over with now. We were going home—so I thought.”

“What else did you talk about?”

“The weather. This damn heat. It gets hot in Raleigh, but Texas! I don’t know why anybody lives here, honestly. Nothing much else than that. While we ate Orrin kept his notebooks in his lap, you know, those ratty notebooks of his, the ones you gave him back yesterday.”

“Did he say anything about them?”

“He showed me a couple of pages this morning, but he was real shy about it. There are words in there I didn’t think he knew … words I don’t know. I asked him, did he write this? Sort of, he says. I asked him how you can ‘sort of’ write something—was he holding the pen that made these words or was he not? He was, he says. Somebody with him at the time? No, he says. Then you wrote them, I said. Whatever they mean. He said it was just a story. But I don’t know about that, the way he clings to those pages. Why? Does that have something to do with him running off?”

“I don’t know,” Bose said. “What happened after lunch?”

“He asked me for some walking-around money.”

“Walking around?”