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  “Yes, if he’s real, we’re going to catch him, and Julius Dickinson is going to take all the credit. And you’re going to be okay with that.”

  I raise my hands in surrender. “As long as we catch him,” I say.

  Books eyes me carefully, then pushes himself out of his chair.

  “If he even exists,” he says.

  15

  * * *

  “Graham Session”

  Recording # 4

  August 29, 2012

  * * *

  Hello, class. Do you mind if I call you “class”? I assume you’re listening to this because you want to learn, and when I say learn, I don’t just mean learn about me—background, motivations, etc.—but learn from me, too. Maybe not every one of you. Some of you just have plain ol’ morbid curiosity, looking for a peek at a “day in the life,” in the same way you slow your vehicle at the site of an accident, hoping for a glimpse of a split forehead gushing blood or a limp body on a gurney, a dead hand dangling down. But at least some of you out there, I’m sure, want to know more than how I do it and why I do it.

  You want to know if you could do it, too.

  Here’s the good news: you can! And I’m going to show you how.

  I’m going to walk inside now. It looks like it might rain. I’ll talk a little louder inside, and I hope you can hear me over the crowd noise, because this place is really starting to fill up.

  Just for your information, if you’re wondering how I’m talking to you while I’m in a crowd of people: my audio recorder looks like a smartphone, so I just hold it up to my ear and talk into the end with the microphone as if I’m on the phone with some friend. As long as I do the necessary things to sell it—pause occasionally while my phantom person-on-the-other-end speaks, sprinkle in some interrupted sentences, occasionally throw in a What? or Can you hear me now? or the like, scrunch my face and put my hand over my ear and concentrate now and again—no one will doubt I’m on the phone.

  For example, here I am, threading my way through the crowd forming in this bar, and I’m not three feet away from a guy who looks pretty intense, muscle-bound with a tight haircut, his T-shirt two sizes too small, that kind of thing, and I know that I can say whatever it is I want to say about him and he won’t so much as bat an eye because I’m speaking in a conversational tone with an electronic device against my ear. Here, I’ll show you. I’d like to have a few minutes alone with this fine gentleman so I could stick an ice pick through his ear and keep pushing until I hear a crunch, and then I’d like to set his body on fire with some kerosene and a blowtorch, and you have no idea at all that I’m talking about you, do you, my friend?

  What’s that? Can you—can you hear me now? Is that—is that better? Can you hear me okay?

  See, it’s a piece of cake. And this is one of the points I want to make to you, that I’ll keep returning to: whatever it is that you’re doing to further your goal, you have to sell it. I mean, sell it all the way, from start to finish, go all out, everything you have. It can be a big thing or a minor detail. Actually, it’s usually the minor details that derail you, when you have to be the most careful.

  So, for example, with me on the phone right now: when I’m done visiting with you, I could just drop the recorder-posing-as-a-phone into my pocket without doing the things you normally do when you end a call—say good-bye and punch a button or, if a call is dropped, shout into the phone, then look perplexed or disgusted and shake your head. I could give up the ruse, in other words, and just stuff the recorder in my pocket.

  But what if someone is watching me, for some reason? Or what if someone with a badge clipped to his jacket is watching the security video of this establishment later, looking for signs of something amiss? It’s not very likely, I’ll grant you, but what if that happened? Then they’d see me walking through the bar, appearing to talk on the phone, but then ultimately just slipping it into my pocket. They’d know I was engaged in deception. I would stand out to them. And standing out to people is not what you want to do. It is—pay attention now—the very last thing you want to do.

  So I’ll make sure, whenever I pick up this recorder to speak to you in any place where anybody could possibly see me, that I say, “Hello? Hey, how’s it going?” or some such salutation. And when I’m done with my session with you, it will be, “Talk to you later,” “See ya,” whatever, and then I’ll touch a button to indicate hanging up. Just so you understand, so I don’t confuse you.

  This matters because I expect that the police might—just might—be reviewing the video footage from this bar tonight when they learn that this was the last place that Curtis Valentine was seen alive. That’s him, over there in the corner, the guy with the ponytail and some extra weight in his midsection, the black shirt and blue jeans, his head down in a glass of foamy beer, awkwardly shifting his weight from one side to the other. He runs a website maintenance business out of his home called Picture Perfect Designs. I learned that from Facebook. He seems like a nice enough guy. I learned that from talking to him on the phone yesterday, when I set up this appointment, meeting for a beer at a local pub.

  Okay, he sees me now. We’ve never met in person but he’s guessing I’m his appointment, the way I’m looking around for somebody.

  Curtis? Hey, how are you? Nice to meet you in person. Hey, one second, let me finish up this call!

  Okay, class, I gotta run now. Talk soon. Bye!

  Sorry, Curtis. It’s great to finally meet you in person…

  [END]

  16

  BOOKS COMES to my place—my mother’s place, technically—to do more research and then spends the night. It’s the first night we’ve spent under the same roof since I broke off our engagement. Yeah, it’s weird. It’s Alice-in-Wonderland weird. But it’s a long drive back home for him from here, so it made sense for him to stay.

  But it’s kinda weird.

  We’re in the kitchen. I’m at the table with my laptop, checking e-mails and my familiar websites, while Books is cooking some pasta. He’s a better cook than I am, which isn’t saying a whole lot. Actually, we used to cook together all the time, opening a bottle of wine and nibbling each other’s necks while we chopped vegetables and stirred sauces. Good memories. I have a lot of good memories with Books. He’s the only person in the world besides Marta who ever truly got me, which, ahem, is probably why things didn’t work out.

  “You have any red pepper flakes?” Books asks.

  “I have no idea,” I say absently, combing through my e-mails of recent fires, eliminating the easy ones, flagging for follow-up anything that raises my hackles. “Look around.”

  “That’s great advice. I thought if I stood here, closed my eyes, and opened my hand, it would magically appear. You say I should look around?”

  My smartphone buzzes on the table. It’s Dorian. I’d called her earlier today and left a message.

  “Hi, Mom.”

  “You said you had good news,” she tells me. There is a faint slur to her words, a problem she’s had since my dad passed away five years ago. She never gets falling-down drunk, just likes to lubricate the edges with Tanq-and-tonics before dinner. It got worse for a short time after Marta’s death. Marta, I always thought, had been her favorite, their shared features and cheerleader-happiness thing. When I was growing up, Dorian was wont to say things to me like, I just don’t understand you, Emmy, when she really meant, Why are you so different from me? Why aren’t you more like Marta?

  “I do. I’m gainfully employed again.”

  “With who?”

  “What do you mean, ‘with who’? With the Bureau, Mom. I have my job back.”

  “Oh, that’s great. They brought you back early?”

  “Yeah. I showed them my research on the fires, and they agreed to open an investigation. With me on the team.”

  Silence. Mom was always ambivalent about this obsession I had with all these fires. She thought that I was looking for something positive out of Marta’s death, that if I could
tie it to a crime that I could solve, I could make it all mean something—Marta died so we could catch this killer, something like that. She has never believed that Marta was murdered.

  “This is where the mother says to the daughter, ‘That’s great, honey!’”

  “If I thought it was great, Emily Jean, I’d say it was great.”

  “Books is on the team, too,” I add, thinking that might perk up her attitude. She always liked Books. Everyone likes Books.

  I glance over at him, stirring penne noodles while the steam hits his face.

  “Harrison? I thought he quit the FBI after you broke up with him.”

  Lovely how she put that. “He did quit the Bureau, Mom, but not because I broke up with him. He quit because he’d done what he wanted to do, and he was looking for other challenges.”

  “I don’t believe that,” Mom says. “He quit because it was too painful for him to be in the same building as you.”

  “Well, he’s right here, so let’s ask him,” I say, feeling a little testy. “Books, come here and tell my mother why you quit the FBI.”

  Books puts down the wooden spoon he was using to taste the pasta sauce, wipes his hands with a towel, and walks over to the table. He takes my phone. “Hi, Dorian, how are you? I’m fine, thanks. Yeah, the book business is tough these days but we’re doing okay. How’s Naples? Good to hear, great… Anyway, the reason I left the FBI was because Emmy broke up with me.”

  He hands me back the phone. I’ve never seen so wide a smile on his face.

  “That’s not true,” I protest to my mother. “He’s just saying that.”

  “I’m not just saying that!” he calls out, his hand cupped over his mouth.

  “He’s not just saying that,” Mom joins in.

  “Mom, I gotta run. This has been one of our more enjoyable chats.”

  I punch out the phone.

  “That was real sweet, Books.”

  “Pasta’s almost ready. You about done with that research?”

  “Just about. I don’t think there were any arson victims last night.”

  “Well, that’s too bad. Actually—that’s good, right?”

  Books plates the food—penne with red sauce, steamed broccoli with garlic, a little salad. I notice for the first time some small flecks of gray at his temples, more noticeable with the longer hair. He catches me looking at him and I break my eyes away. If evading intimate moments were an Olympic event, I’d have a gold medal.

  By the time he’s opened the bottle of wine, I’m done with my breaking-news e-mails and regular websites. For now. They come in like avalanches throughout the day.

  “You work too much,” he says to me as he sits down.

  I make a face. “Coming from you?” The wine, something Books bought in town, has a coppery taste to it, too pungent.

  “Well, that was something I realized about myself when I left the Bureau,” he says. “Life isn’t all about work.”

  “No? What are you, taking up mountain climbing all of a sudden? Parcheesi?”

  “Don’t put down what I’m saying,” he says.

  “I’m not putting you down. I would never put you down.”

  Books takes a long drink from the wine, savors it in his mouth, swooshes it, swallows, then lets out a pleasurable sigh. “Leaving me at the altar was kind of a put-down.”

  “That wasn’t a put-down.”

  “No? What was it? A compliment? A ringing endorsement?”

  I kind of like Books like this, looser, more sarcastic, more relaxed.

  “It was a…life decision,” I say.

  “Oooh, I feel better already.” He winks at me. “Forget it, kid. I’m over it. Eat your food now, understand? You have to impress our team tomorrow.”

  17

  * * *

  “Graham Session”

  Recording # 5

  August 29, 2012

  * * *

  Hello? Hey, honey! I’m great. What did…oh, really? Great. What? It’s hard to get reception down here—oh, I’m in Champaign, Illinois. Remember that website maintenance company I was telling you about, Picture Perfect Designs? Curtis Valentine? Well, I’m in his basement office right now and I gotta tell ya, this place is a-mazing! No, even better than we thought!

  Curtis, I’m sorry, I hope you don’t mind me taking this call—we’ve been talking about this appointment all week.

  [Editor’s note: sounds of a man’s voice, inaudible.]

  Okay, so I’m walking away from Curtis for a moment and I want to tell you, my audience, something. I said I wasn’t going to let you see or hear what I do up close for a while and I’m not. I’m going to shut this off before I do it, but you have to see how good I am at this, how completely I’ve gained his trust, that I can just walk up behind him and steal his life away, how effortless it can be if you have discipline and focus, and yeah, I guess, I also want you to see how exciting this is for me. It’s still exciting. It never gets old. I wish you could feel this rush I’m feeling, the joyous pump of my heart and the electricity that fills my veins, this euphoria that overcomes me. I mean, you get it, don’t you? This isn’t about hate. This is about love.

  Okay, let’s do this. Walking back to Curtis in 3…2…1…

  Anyway, honey, you should see what Curtis can do with a website. I think we can do some crazy-cool business with this guy. Curtis is sitting at his workstation, and he’s got, like, what is it, Curtis, how many do you have, four?—four different computers working together, and he’s in this zone, like he’s consumed with what he’s doing, like—

  Like he has no idea what I’m about to do to him.

  [END]

  18

  BOOKS AND I show up at the Dick’s office at 5:00 p.m. as instructed, but we are redirected to a conference room down the hall. Scheduling this meeting at the close of the business day is a message in itself; the Dick is not planning on devoting much time to us. But then he makes matters worse by making us wait for more than two hours. Finally, at 7:15, he saunters into the conference room, munching on something (the jerk probably had dinner while we waited), and drops into a chair without acknowledging us. He spends ten minutes wiping his eyeglasses with that same silk cloth, which is his way of making it clear how important we are to him. Glasses, first. Investigation, second.

  He has brought two people with him, contract consultant and former agent Dennis Sasser and a research analyst named Sophie Talamas. This, apparently, is our team.

  Denny Sasser has a forehead of age spots, only wisps of white hair on top, sunken eyes, and narrow, crooked shoulders. He got mandatory at age fifty-seven and, after a couple of waivers from the director, retired. But he was retained as an outside consultant and has worked in several areas since then, the latest of which is asset forfeitures, an assignment that is about as desirable as a goiter. Usually that assignment means, We’re not going to be renewing your contract, pal. So he’s not exactly climbing the ladder, which is good because I don’t think he could climb a ladder if you held your hand under his fanny and pushed. He’s been with the Bureau since before the invention of electricity. The Dick tells us that Denny once worked on some arson cases, but I’d wager a mortgage payment that those cases took place back when you created fire by rubbing two sticks together so you could cook the stegosaurus you killed with a spear and dragged back to the cave.

  Sophie Talamas, I don’t know. She must be new. She’s younger than I am (which, unfortunately, isn’t saying a lot) and a lot prettier (see previous comment). Whether she’s good at her job or not, I have no idea, but she’s probably still wet behind the ears and will need some grooming, which I don’t have time for.

  So this is not what you’d call the A-Team. The Dick made sure of that.

  We’ve been set up to fail.

  “All…right,” Dickinson says, as he wipes the last specks off his eyeglasses. “I am not…going to waste precious resources…on a fishing expedition.” He dons his glasses and looks us over with disdain. “I’ve reviewed
the so-called research that Emmy has put together, and so far what I’ve concluded is that there is nothing here. There are a bunch of fires, of course. But there are fires every day in this country. There are fatalities in fires every day. All that I see here is that our Emmy has compiled a list of fires, all of which have been determined by fire investigators to be accidental.” The Dick shakes his head. “I don’t see a single case here where the United States could get a conviction in court beyond a reasonable doubt.”

  “That’s true,” I chime in. “He’s that good.”

  “He’s that good,” the Dick replies, “or there is no master criminal. These accidental fires really were accidental.”

  “If I may say,” says Denny Sasser, lifting his hand off the table, indicating that he is, in fact, capable of movement, “Ms. Dockery, I don’t see a pattern here. The cities are different. The victims come in all shapes and sizes—men, women, black, white, Latino, Asian, old, young, wealthy, middle-class, poor. What’s the unifying theme?”

  “These fires have taken place on every day of the week except for Sunday,” says Books. “So we have to consider a religious angle. Maybe a religious connection between the victims. Maybe they were all sinners, and this is a religious zealot casting the heathens into the fire. Or maybe a Satanic thing.”

  I have to admit, I’d noticed the never-on-Sunday thing but never attached any significance to it. Books did, though. It was the first thing he noted. Which is why I need him.

  “Satanic,” Sasser says. “Because of the fire?”

  Books shrugs. “Could be. We should consider a numerology analysis. Maybe the dates, or the addresses of the victims, or the ages. A connection to six-six-six, the number of the beast and all that. Sophie, that would be a good assignment for you.”

  Sophie, she of the large brown eyes, silky blond hair, and cute little figure, perks up. “Okay, Agent Bookman.”