“Caroline!” George cries as the cop walks inside. I tip my hat and duck along the edge of the rows, trying to reach the furthest corner of the store. “My sweet baby doll. Haven’t seen you in a lifetime!”

“Didn’t know a week was a lifetime, George.” She’s laughing already, slinking up to his counter and pinching the edge of his magazine. “Are you still reading this shit?”

“Every day,” he says, putting a hand to his chest. There’s a twinkle in his eyes that lets me know he’s held a high schooler’s crush on this girl since the first tim she walked through the door. “It’s my new Bible.”

“Oh, and what was your last Bible?” She sets her elbows next to his cash register as I creep along the refrigerated shelves of energy drinks. “Hustler, right?”

“Shiiit,” he says, tossing the magazine to the side, “I wish I could stock Hustler up there. Maybe then I wouldn’t complain about my hours so much.”

“Only because you wouldn’t spend as many of those hours working, yeah?” I’m sure that Caroline winks and touches him on the arm, or flips her hair and leans over the desk; whatever she’s doing, she should keep it up for at least another thirty seconds.

George barks in laughter and I round the corner of the last aisle. The front wall is all glass; there’s no way to hide here. I step into the vulnerable light and walk in long, silent strides until I reach the door.

“So long, Jake!” George calls. Perhaps he’d been watching me this entire time.

I don’t turn my head to face him. I tip my hat low enough to cover my upper lip and crush my elbow against the door. Jarring pain shoots through my shoulder and into my spine. The jangle of the door catch resembles the grinding horn outside jail cell walls.

“Who’s that?” I hear Caroline asking, just as the door closes behind me.

It takes me six seconds to get inside of my car and roar the engine. I can see sweet Caroline glancing out at me, again and again with her eyebrows raised, while George laughs and shakes his head. She has a hand against the holster on her hip.

Adrenaline pumps into my eyes and puts blotches in the spaces between my focus. It’s the rush of a roller coaster at its peak, but it’s also the thrill of passing through stadium gates with a scalped ticket. I hate that it feels good, that it gives me the control and momentum to swerve out of the space and onto the freeway smoothly enough that Caroline doesn’t have the time to see all the digits on my license plate.

My eyes dart back to the store as I fly past it, but I’m not sure if Caroline has dashed to her car or called me into another unit. Either way, increased distance and detours are imperative. The noose may be tightening, but it’s not on my neck yet. They can’t take me while I still look like a criminal.

Fifteen minutes later, I’m inside my convenience store. There are cameras everywhere and it lies dangerously close the freeway, but I can’t go to the crime scene unprepared. I only have one shot, so I need to be there with the right tools.

George is watching me as I file through his stock, but he doesn’t pay me any attention. His nose is stuffed inside a magazine whose cover loudly promises photographs of celebrities without makeup. The idea, I suppose, is to show readers that their idols aren’t any more perfect than the rest of us, but the effect is closer to a horrified cry against any celebrity who doesn’t properly wipe the humanity out of their face before they step out of their limousine to buy their morning coffee.

The thought stops me in my tracks long enough to be a warning that my five-hour nap wasn’t as helpful as it should have been.

I bundle my items into my hands like a set of twin babies and dump them onto the front counter. George sniffs at me and takes an inventory of my purchases: a roll of zip-sealed plastic bags, a set of tweezers, large wooden tongs, a small bottle of whiskey and a new hip flask.

“That’s a hell of an odd set of tools,” George says through a chuckle.

“It’s an odd job,” I reply.

“I bet,” he says, tossing my things into a plastic bag. “At least you look better than you did when you bought all those sleep pills.”

“Better?” I flip through my wallet and grin. “Could have fooled me.”

“Maybe they’re working better than you think,” George says with a shrug as he takes my card. “That shit is stronger than you realize. Shouldn’t give it to kids or you’ll get the bastards addicted like” — he snaps a tattooed finger — “that.”

“I think we’ve had this conversation before,” I say. I try to sound irritated but the familiarity gives me some momentary peace of mind. “I’ll certainly be on the lookout for an epidemic.”

“Damn straight you will.” George shoots me a conspiratorial nod. I reciprocate before I take my card back.

“Have a nice day, George,” I say. My heart feels like it might settle into a regular beat, until I turn my head to toward the door.

A patrol car is pulling off the freeway and into the lot in front of the store. It doesn’t have its lights on and it’s taking a long time to line up the parking space. The cop inside must not be on duty now. Thank Christ.

A female patroller, brunette with a face too soft to be more than six months out of the academy, steps out of the vehicle and scratches her armpit. She doesn’t notice, or doesn’t recognize, my sedan. Still, if Doyle has anyone hunting me, then he’ll have made sure that she’s going to recognize my face.

I take my shopping bag and sidle up against the smoothie machine in the back. George has his nose in the magazine again, so he doesn’t notice, but I don’t give a damn if he thinks I’m acting suspicious. I’m trapped; I don’t know what to do next.

The sun cranes over a cloudless eastern sky. Everything seems washed out, viewed on an old television with a bad antenna. I rub my eyes again and stand in front of my horrendous parking job, trying to orient myself before I take any action.

The car’s sweltering inside. I revive the engine as soon as I sit down and crank up the airflow, trying to cool off the oven. My car smells like body odor and heat, which can’t be far from the smell of my coat at this point.

I have files strewn across the backseat with little care for structure or organization. I’ve been treating too much of this like an improv act; despite everything that’s been done to me, I hadn’t much felt the stakes until now.

Frank was a child rapist and a murderer; I couldn’t bear the stain of that reputation or the idea of Katie and Sarah wondering how they never saw it and gasping at the thought of having been so close to me. It would kill them both, and I would die, too.

At least it forces me to have the proper sympathy for Nick Bianchi. Jail officials try to protect their most “at-risk” convicts, the ones who harm children, by withholding their crimes from other inmates. Of course, jails keep their secrets almost as well as police departments.

I shake off the thought. The Dollhouse Killer case file is on the floor behind the passenger seat. Picking it up with one hand forces an angle that almost snaps my shoulder, and my exhaustion only makes the folder heavier and less wieldly.

Stacy Pierce, bundled and held against Peter Goddard’s chest in a flimsy photograph, is the first thing I see. It’s too much. I retch but restrain my innards and toss the photo into the back seat where it won’t threaten to sneak back into my vision. Behind it is the report on the barn where she was found.

That hellhole wasn’t a dried husk after all. The crime scene notes are blessedly brief, bolstering my hope for missed evidence, but they describe something closer to an empty laboratory, cleaned and compartmentalized to the obsessive degree typical of a serial criminal.

Most important now is the address, described at the top of the document. It’s not as far away as I might have thought; an hour’s drive, maybe two if I’m cursed enough to hit traffic. If I move fast enough, I’m not sure it would ever occur to Doyle to try to find me inside the scene of a crime he thinks I could have committed.

I hear a faint whine on the horizon, too far to be sure that it’s the patrol but close enough to be worried. Even if my intuition is wrong, I have no other choice; the barn is my best lead.

I pull away from my home and drive away from the sound behind me. The roads here may be wide with a horizon almost as barren as the neighboring desert, but this is a small neighborhood with plenty of ill-marked intersections. If they want to find me, they’ll have to figure out where I’m going on their own.

“There are three patrol cars coming to your house right now.” Dave must be hiding in his car; if he is, he wouldn’t have much longer now. “If that’s where you are, I’d suggest not being there soon.”

“Why?” Each step I take drives a nail into my temple, but I force myself to maneuver into the kitchen. The bottle of vodka sits on the kitchen counter, distressingly empty. “What does the list prove?”

“If we’re sure that Nick Bianchi isn’t the killer,” Dave says through a lot of heavy breathing, “then the handwriting on that list is the only evidence that anyone else did.”

I lean against the kitchen counter and stare into the whirlpool recesses of my sink. Dave’s right; I don’t have any way to tie Frank to anything yet, and I’ve behaved suspiciously enough in the past few days to warrant being locked up for a few days while everything’s sorted out.

I don’t have a reasonable explanation for the list, after all. I’d explain the actual situation in a heartbeat if Flytech hadn’t already threatened me with the depth of their tentacle grip on the police department. The list itself was delivered by their people, with my scrawl instead of a type-written copy. They knew what they were doing.

“This was Flytech’s contingency plan,” I say. The thought isn’t helping my headache. “If I crack the story open, they use me to reseal the gaps.”

“It’s certainly possible,” Dave says. “Either way, your shit has confused and pissed off Doyle enough that he’s willing to run with it. I’ll do what I can from here, but Doyle has me on desk until you’re found. You’ll have to do some dirty work on the run.”

“Dirty work?”

“You have to forget about Flytech for now. Just get proof that Frank’s the killer and save your own ass.” I hear some shuffling, like Dave’s pushing the phone against a cheese grater, then his voice, even quieter than before. “I have to go. Try not to be in fucking handcuffs when I see you, Jake.”

I have my mouth open to reply, but he hangs up before I get the chance. I slide the phone into my pocket and rub my eyes, still groggy, still having a hard time believing that I haven’t slipped back into some nightmare.

Nick Bianchi is a lead to Flytech, not Frank, and proving his innocence while under such suspicion wouldn’t give me the chance to connect the rest of the dots. Dave’s right; I have to solve the original case, with my hands instead of my mind.

These were leads I’d planned to investigate with more care and forethought, but I have the work laid out before me and I know where to go. San Alto didn’t have all the links in the chain when they worked their best crime scene; I do.

If Frank’s barn was his base of operations, the place where he stored Stacy and other girls before he disposed of them, then somewhere inside I’ll find something with fingerprints. SAPD could have found prints, too, but they wouldn’t have known which body in the morgue to run against their findings.

San Alto’s detectives worked the scene after they’d closed the case; why be thorough? They must have left holes somewhere. They must have left something behind at the scene. They must have.