“His face changes, and his body changes,” Brad said, “but his voice never does. It’s called vocal uniqueness. He tries to change it—sometimes he raises the pitch, sometimes he lowers it, sometimes he even tries a little bit of an accent—but he doesn’t try very hard.”

I said, “Because he’s confident the physical changes are enough, along with the changes in location.”

“I think so,” Brad said. “Here’s something else. Everyone also has a unique delivery. A certain rhythm that’s determined by breath units. Look at the peaks. That’s Freeman punching certain words. Look at the valleys where he takes a breath. Now look at Ondowsky.”

They were the same, Ralph.

“There’s one other thing,” Brad said. “Both voices pause on certain words, always with s or th sounds in them. I think at some point, God knows how long ago, this thing talked with a lisp, but of course a TV news reporter can’t lisp. He’s taught himself to correct it by touching his tongue to the roof of his mouth, keeping it away from his teeth, because that’s where a lisp happens. It’s faint, but it’s there. Listen.”

He played me a sound byte of Ondowsky at the middle school, the part where he says “The explosive device may have been in the main office.”

Brad asked if I heard it. I asked him to play it again, to make sure it wasn’t just my imagination trying to hear what Brad said was there. It wasn’t imagination. Ondowsky says, “The explo… sive device may have been in the main of… fice.”

Next, he played a sound byte of Paul Freeman at the 1960 crash site. Freeman says, “He was thrown from the rear section of the plane, still on fire.” And I heard it again, Ralph. Those tiny pauses on section and still. The tongue touching the roof of the mouth to stop the lisp.

Brad put a third spectrogram on his tablet. It was Philip Hannigan interviewing the young man from Pulse, the kid with the smudged mascara on his cheeks. I couldn’t hear the young man, because Brad scrubbed his voice out along with all the background noises, like sirens and people talking. It was just Hannigan, just George, and he could have been right in the room with us. “What was it like in there, Rodney? And how did you escape?”

Brad played it for me three times. The peaks and valleys on the spectrogram matched the ones still running above it—Freeman and Ondowsky. That was the technical part, Ralph, and I could appreciate it, but what really got to me, what gave me the chills, were those tiny pauses. Short on what was it like, longer on escape, which must be especially hard for lispers to conquer.

Brad asked me if I was satisfied, and I said I was. Nobody who hasn’t been through what we’ve been through would have been, but I was. He isn’t the same as our outsider, who had to hibernate during his transformations and couldn’t be seen on video, but he’s certainly that being’s first or second cousin. There’s so much about these things we don’t know, and I suppose we never will.

I need to stop now, Ralph. I haven’t had anything to eat today but a bagel and a chicken sandwich and a little bit of a turnover. If I don’t get something soon, I’ll probably pass out.

More later.

15

Holly orders out to Domino’s—a small veggie pizza and a large Coke. When the young man shows up, she tips according to Bill Hodges’s rule of thumb: fifteen per cent of the bill if the service is fair, twenty per cent if the service is good. This young man is prompt, so she tips the full amount.

She sits at the little table by the window, munching away and watching as dusk begins to steal over the Embassy Suites parking lot. A Christmas tree is blinking its lights on and off down there, but Holly has never had less Christmas spirit in her life. Today the thing she’s investigating was only pictures on a TV screen and spectrograms on an iPad. Tomorrow, if all goes as she hopes it will (she has Holly hope), she’ll be face to face with it. That will be scary.

It has to be done; she has no choice. Dan Bell is too old and Brad Bell is too scared. He flat-out refused, even after Holly explained that what she planned to do in Pittsburgh couldn’t possibly put him at risk.

“You don’t know that,” Brad said. “For all you know, the thing’s telepathic.”

“I’ve been face to face with one,” Holly had replied. “If it was telepathic, Brad, I’d be dead and it would still be alive.”

“I’m not going,” Brad said. His lips were trembling. “My grampa needs me. He’s got a very bad heart. Don’t you have friends?”

She does, and one is a very good cop, but even if Ralph was in Oklahoma, would she risk him? He’s got a family. She doesn’t. As for Jerome… no. No way. The Pittsburgh part of her budding plan really shouldn’t be dangerous, but Jerome would want to be all in, and that would be dangerous. There’s Pete, but her partner has almost zero imagination. He’d do it, but treat the whole thing as a joke, and if there’s one thing Chet Ondowsky isn’t, it’s a joke.

Dan Bell might have taken the shape-shifter on when he was younger, but in those years he was content to just watch, fascinated, when it popped up from time to time, a Where’s Waldo of disaster. Feeling almost sorry for it, maybe. But now things have changed. Now it is no longer content to live on the aftermath of tragedy, gobbling grief and pain before the blood dries.

This time it brought the carnage, and if it gets away with it once, it will do it again. Next time the death toll may be much higher, and Holly will not allow that.

She opens her laptop on the room’s chintzy excuse for a desk and finds the email from Brad Bell she was expecting.

Attached is what you requested. Please use the materials wisely, and please keep us out of it. We have done what we can.

Well, Holly thinks, not quite. She downloads the attachment and then calls Dan Bell’s phone. She expects Brad to answer again, but it’s the old man, sounding relatively rejuvenated. There’s nothing like a nap to do that; Holly takes one whenever she can, but these days the opportunity doesn’t come around as often as she’d like.

“Dan, it’s Holly. Can I ask you one more question?”

“Shoot.”

“How does he move from job to job without being discovered? This is the age of social media. I don’t understand how that works.”

For a few seconds there’s only the sound of his heavy, oxygen-assisted breathing. Then he says, “We’ve talked about that, Brad and I. We have some ideas. He… it… wait, Brad wants the damn phone.”

There’s a smatter of talk she can’t pick up, but Holly gets the gist: the old guy doesn’t like being co-opted. Then Brad is on. “You want to know how he keeps getting jobs on TV?”

“Yes.”

“It’s a good question. Really good. We can’t be sure, but we think he jimmies his way in.”

“Jimmies?”

“It’s a broadcast term. Jimmying is how radio personalities and TV reporters move up in big markets. In those places there’s always at least one local TV station. Small. Unaffiliated. Pays peanuts. They mostly do community affairs. Everything from opening a new bridge to charity drives to city council meetings. This guy gets on the air there, does a few months, then applies at one of the big stations, using audition tapes from the little local station. Anybody seeing those tapes would get right away that he’s good at the job. A pro.” Brad gives a short laugh. “He’d have to be, wouldn’t he? He’s been doing it for at least sixty damn years. Practice makes perf—”