"Rupert Beale thinks I'm his lab rat." Hafidha's eyes narrowed, and her fingernails
tack-tack-tack
ed on her closed laptop. "Wonder if he wants some bubonic plague?"
"Let's try to narrow down the geographic profile, then. And what's the status on Idlewood?" Falkner asked.
Lau shook her head. "They've kept a lid on information about the...the disturbance. So far, more or less. The families are cooperating. But how long that's going to last—"
"Call in favors," Falkner said, and looked at Chaz.
Chaz's iPhone was staring him down, and he wasn't winning. Still, he put the call off for as long as possible—two whole-grain bagels with almond butter and honey, five carrots, and a milkshake—before sighing, picking the damned thing up, and calling a number that was still near the top of his "recent" list.
It only rang once.
"Chazzie!" Tasha McAndrews said, delighted. "You up for Old Rag this weekend or do you have holiday plans?"
"Maybe neither," he said. Her voice eased the thing that tangled around his lungs, making it easier to breathe than it had been. "I need a super-duper huge favor, though."
"Name it."
"Hear it," he countered. "Look, your new senatecritter—"
"This is a work favor."
"After a fashion. She likes to try to stay on the right side of history."
"Inasmuch as one can, sure."
"Well, we've got some history on our six right now, closing from out of the sun. If you take my meaning."
She made a possibly noncommittal noise.
He continued, "Something's going to break soon. Break big, and break bad. And I think she—and possibly An Historic Personage to whom you once introduced me—would find it advantageous to get out in front."
"I'm doing
you
a favor?"
He smiled, and let it get into his voice. "Believe it. I'm going to offer information, but I'm going to ask for spin control. Want to go get lunch? This doesn't belong on a phone."
She said, "Sure. I'll text you," and signed off.
Chaz looked at Brady across the space between their desks and sighed. "We're still cops, right?"
"Technically, I suppose."
"Just checking."
Brady tossed him a blueberry Clif bar. "Thanks for letting me be Freamon."
Chaz had the opposite thing to an appetite, but he ate the Clif bar grimly. Between chews, he said, "We need to get ahead of Beale. Chasing after him isn't working."
Brady gave one of his big-dog sighs and leaned back in a chair that protested. "That's just it. Given everything I know about serial-killer psych, and given the amount of time and effort Beale has invested in us as victims—the lengths he's gone to to bait us, to torment us, and to generally gloat while we chased his laser pointers like a pile of spastic cats and never once looked for the hand—now that we're on to him, I'm shocked he's managed to keep from doing what I'd expect."
"Gloating?"
"I'd expect the cocksucker to be baiting us. Ripper letters. Digging his grave with his tongue. How's he keeping tabs on us?"
"Or he's gloating somewhere we wouldn't think to look," Chaz said thoughtfully. Two more gritty bites of Clif bar met their doom while he mulled it over. "That would please him even more, wouldn't it?"
"Chaz," Brady said. When Chaz looked up, he saw Brady grinning at him—the manic, bright-eyed
I see what you did there
grin. "Villette. What's the name of that crackpot website Dice and Reyes and Todd keep tabs on?"
"Call Todd," Chaz said, bolting out of his chair on a spike of adrenaline. "I need to talk to Hafidha."
He didn't quite shoot through the door to her burrow. Her lifted finger and concentrated expression brought him up short. He hung on the doorframe left-handed, leaning in.
As soon as her finger dropped, he blurted, "Hafs, if he was using his gammability—"
"—betability?"
He flipped his hand to indicate the immediate irrelevance of munchkining Rupert Beale's powers on the sliding scale of
Who's driving this bus?
"Anomability. To get stuff without leaving a paper trail. Like, misdelivered Amazon packages of Kraft macaroni and cheese or whatever. Would that make anything in the system come up colors for you?"
She pursed her lips. "Odds ain't bad," she said. "I'll go spelunking."
"Experts call it caving," Chaz said, with a tight smile.
The wad of paper she heaved at him only missed because he caught it. It crumpled, dry and light, scratching his palm. "Out," she said. "Momma's working."
*
Hafidha paused just inside the door to the bullpen, breathing quickly, a little disheveled. "Guys," she said. "Something just came up all colors." She paused. "Something weird. A mail-order box of a gross of condoms went missing on Monday in Ohio. The tracking information is all woo-woo."
That's the technical term
, Chaz thought, but did not say. The old joke stuck in his throat as he looked at Hafidha and thought of how different everything was.
"Yuck," said Lau. "God, I hope that isn't Beale."
"Could be a touring magician," Todd said. He looked around at the sea of blank faces. "
'Hope I didn't ruin your evening?'
No?"
"No," Falkner said. She didn't seem happy.
And
waves
of dismay seemed to radiate from Brady, so strong Chaz couldn't be sure if what he was feeling was the mirror or just garden-variety human empathy.
"It's Beale," Brady said. So upset he didn't swear. From the expressions on Falkner's and Todd's faces, they got it, too.
"Why would he want twelve dozen condoms?" Chaz asked.
"IEDs," Brady said. But Falkner started speaking at the same moment, and he let her take the lead.
"Pipe bombs," she explained. "You put the black powder in a rubber before putting it in the pipe. Then you don't have to worry about blowing yourself up if you don't wipe the threads down when you screw the caps on."
"What's he going to blow up?" Lau asked.
"Figure it out." Falkner turned on the ball of her foot and headed for her office. Once she was inside, door shut, Chaz saw her pick up the phone before she flipped the blinds down.
"Right," Todd said. "Brady, you and Chaz get on that. Hafidha, we get to find the condoms."
Chaz noticed that Todd was again giving orders, and still nobody seemed inclined to point out that he was a civilian now. In fact, Tan turned in his chair and asked, "What about me?"
"Keep working on the victimology," Lau said. "You've got the most distance from it." She sighed. "And I've got more phone calls to make."
*
Hafidha sat in her temple, heels drawn up so her legs rested crossed on her chair, fingers steepled before her mouth, eyes closed and face unseamed—a serene bodhisattva of the electronic age. Arthur Tan paused in the doorway to her temple, uncertain if he should enter or withdraw. But as he watched, her nostrils quivered and her eyes flickered open behind the pink plastic vintage frames.
"Is that coffee, Artful?"
"And it's yours," he said. He set it in the Designated Zone, marked off by yellow-and-black striped tape atop a filing cabinet that held yarn, not paperwork. Far away from any of the room's more modern technology. He pulled a bakery bag from one coat pocket and set it beside the coffee cup.
Hafidha snatched it like a mongoose nailing a snake, without rising from her chair or even uncrossing her legs. She peered inside and cackled. "Sticky pecan buns. Arthur, you shouldn't have."
"Can't have you wasting away." He laid a wet-nap next to the coffee, too.
Behind and around her, the flash of data across a dozen monitors continued unabated. She ate the pastry daintily, reverentially, but without hesitation. She chewed with her eyes closed, and sipped creamy coffee between bites.
She was nearly done with the second pecan bun when one of the monitors ceased its nauseating flicker and stabilized on something that looked like a page from a database. Around it, one by one, other monitors ceased their scrolling and settled on similar information. Tan felt a flutter of excitement in his chest, as if he were watching a slot bar come up cherries.
Hafidha looked up at him and smiled.
"Jackpot," she said.
*
"Mislaid shipments," Hafidha said, standing in the briefing closet and looking not at the projection screen but at her team. She knew what the screen showed—screenshots with highlighted lines, each showing where a shipment of something or other had gone undelivered and been re-ordered. She didn't know what her team would show. And it was strange and comforting both to see Reyes in his habitual chair once more, back to the wall. "Here's a job lot of electronic eyes; and here's one of plumber's o-rings. Some black spray paint. Framing nails."
Everybody else traded glances. Everybody except Todd, who kept his gunmetal eyes very calmly, very placidly on Hafidha's gesturing hands. The rest of the team seemed nervous, high-strung. Ready to move. Todd turned his devil duckie key fob over and over in relaxed hands, the left one cupped to hide his missing fingers.
Lau tapped her fingertips together. Blunt nails, painted dusty pink. "Todd, did you want to report on the Conceal This! web-site?"
He gave her a deferring wave. Reyes made a face, and Hafidha winced in sympathy, thinking of Hope Mitchell, and one of Beale's more successful attempts to fuck up all their lives. Hope had been a big fan of the conspiracy newsletter in its print zine days, before she knocked some of Reyes's teeth out with a chisel and got herself strangled by the Thing That Eats
T. rexes
.
Lau took a breath and continued,. "So Todd and I did a little digging on the message boards, and we found a bunch of messages that conform to Beale's writing style, though they were stamped from various different users. They're all posted through anonymizers, because the bastard is clever. But Hafidha hacked the back end for us, and there's one private message from one of Beale's apparent sock puppets arranging a dead-drop transfer of some 'highly sensitive' information with another user at a location off the highway, not too far from Gary, Indiana."
Hafidha said, "Which leads me to my next point. The notable thing about the data I've been pulling regarding misdeliveries is that, while a lot of stuff gets lost in the mail, in the past six months all of the ones that tweaked my spidey-sense... have gone missing in the upper Midwest."
Brady fidgeted with his coffee cup. "He's using his anomalous ability to redirect shipments to his safe house."
"Why not just order them using fake identities?" asked Tan, then answered his own question. "Right. He's baiting us. He wants us to find him."
"And who are we to disappoint?" said Chaz, but there was unmistakable tension in his voice.
"I asked Chaz to play pattern-master with the addresses I got," Hafidha said. She waved at Chaz, who didn't stand.
"He's got to be attempting some kind of countermeasures," Chaz said. "But the thing is, if we assume that in the wake of...Idlewood...he's moved to an endgame, he's only trying to stall us long enough to get set up. He won't want to sit and wait forever. If he wanted to
vanish
, he'd just vanish, and we'd never find him again. He could live in the wind forever, with what he can do. Or at least as long as the anomaly leaves him a liver."
Reyes made a noise. Everybody looked at him, and he waved it away with a hand, but they kept looking. "It's not an endgame. Beale thinks he's smarter than we are. He thinks he's smarter than
the anomaly
. But the behaviors observed by the BAU in our interviews with killers—all the way back to Douglas and Ressler—are still controlling him. He involved himself in the investigation. He pushed closer and closer to the people most likely to catch him, because he was sure we
couldn't
. He can't vanish until he's beaten the people who know about him, and is sure we know he's won. And since Beale thinks he can even beat the anomaly, he doesn't think he'll need an endgame. He thinks he'll live forever. Beating the odds is part of his mythology."
"Shit." Brady was looking at Reyes, shaking his head. "How are you even possible?"
"You've done okay without me," Reyes said.
Chaz looked at his hands. Hafidha held her breath. Everybody waited.
Chaz said, "The combination of the geographic profile and the offender profile suggests that he'll have gone home. He'll want familiar turf for his showdown."
"Chicago," Falkner said.
Chaz nodded. "Brady and Tan have a theory."
"He's still crazier than a barrel of shithouse rats." Brady looked around at the assembled faces, and offered an apologetic half-smile.
"That's not the theory," said Tan. "We've been looking at locations of previous trauma. But Beale values control, not chaos. His home base will be someplace where the odds
didn't
turn on him, where things always worked right."
Hafidha felt the lights go on, but it was Lau who spoke. "Uncle Gene and Aunt Linda. Captain of the wrestling team. The golden boy."
"He's at the farmhouse," said Brady.
"Great," Hafidha said. "Let's go set fire to it."
Chaz's head jerked up. "Hafs—"
"To flush him out, stoopid. Not to barbeque him."
"We can't." That was Reyes. Hafidha hadn't realized she could miss being annoyed by that tone of voice, but there it was; she'd missed it.
Brady snorted. "The hell we can't. Staties and the local field office will be all over it."
"Rupert Beale takes advantage of probability," Reyes said in his most clipped and professorial style.
"Which, with incendiary devices, makes a lousy cocktail," Todd sighed. He wiped his palms over his brow and what was left of his hair.
Tan cleared his throat. "Establish a perimeter and starve him out?"
"Crap. No, we can't," Hafidha said, which made everyone stare at her. But Reyes was nodding. She wanted to hit him for it, just a little. Instead, she said, "Secure perimeter, heavily manned and lit up like daylight twenty-four-seven...until something goes freakily wrong with the generators, or we get a nice Midwestern tornado, or everyone comes down with a fucking norovirus."
"We have to go in after him." Chaz said it, because her baby brother didn't let other people do the heavy lifting.
Brady scowled and smacked the wall behind him with the flat of his hand. Hafidha pretended not to jump at the boom. "He knows we're coming. He
wants
us to come."
Lau clasped her hands tight in front of her and leaned forward over them. "If we lose him now, we probably lose him for good. Chaz is right. Reyes is right."