“I’m sure you could,” the man says, “but no. He looks like a chill dude. We’ll just let him chill a little more.”

“He’ll freeze to death!”

“Girlfriend, you’ll bleed to death if you don’t get a move on.”

No, you won’t kill me, Barbara thinks. At least not until you get what you want.

But he could hurt her. Put out one of her eyes. Flay her cheek open. Cut off an ear. His knife looks very sharp.

She goes in.

14

Holly stands in the open door of the Finders Keepers office, looking down the hall. Her muscles thrum with adrenaline; her mouth is as dry as a desert stone. She holds her position when she hears the elevator start down. She can’t hit execute on the program she has running until it comes back up.

I have to save Barbara, she thinks. Jerome too, unless he’s beyond help.

She hears the elevator stop on the ground floor. Then, after an eternity, it starts up again. Holly steps backward, her eyes not leaving the closed elevator doors at the end of the hall. Her phone is lying beside the computer’s mousepad. She slips it into the left front pocket of her pants, then looks down just long enough to position the cursor over EXECUTE.

She hears a scream. It’s muffled by the rising elevator car, but it’s a girl’s scream. It’s Barbara.

My fault.

All my fault.

15

The man who hurt Jerome takes Barbara by the arm, like a guy escorting his best girl into the ballroom where the big dance is going on. He hasn’t relieved her of her purse (or ignored it, more likely), and the metal detector gives a feeble beep when they pass through, probably from her phone. Her captor ignores it. They pass the stairwell that until lately was used every day by the Frederick Building’s resentful residents, then enter the lobby. Outside the door, in another world, Christmas shoppers are passing to and fro with their bags and packages.

I was out there, Barbara marvels. Just five minutes ago, when things were still all right. When I still foolishly believed I had a life ahead of me.

The man pushes the elevator button. They hear the sound of the descending car.

“How much money were you supposed to pay her?” Barbara asks. Beneath her fear, she feels a dull disappointment that Holly would deal with this man at all.

“Doesn’t matter now,” he says, “because I’ve got you. Girlfriend.”

The elevator stops. The doors open. The robo-voice welcomes them to the Frederick Building. “Going up,” it says. The doors shut. The car begins to rise.

The man lets go of Barbara, takes off his furry Russian hat, drops it between his shoes, and lifts his hands in a magician’s flourish. “Watch this. I think you’ll like it, and our Ms. Gibney certainly deserves to see it, since it’s what made all this trouble in the first place.”

What happens next is horrible beyond Barbara’s previous understanding of the word. In a movie it could be dismissed as no more than a cool special effect, but this is real life. A ripple runs up the round middle-aged face. It starts at the chin and rises not past the mouth but through it. The nose wavers, the cheeks stretch, the eyes shimmer, the forehead contracts. Then, suddenly, the whole head turns to semi-transparent jelly. It quivers and shimmies and sags and pulses. Inside it are confused tangles of writhing red stuff. Not blood; that red stuff is full of flocking black specks. Barbara shrieks and falls back against the wall of the elevator. Her legs fail her. Her purse slips off her shoulder and thumps to the floor. She slides down the wall of the elevator with her eyes bulging from their sockets. Her bowels and bladder let go.

Then the jelly head solidifies, but the face that appears is entirely different from that of the man who knocked Jerome unconscious and forcibly escorted her to the elevator. It’s narrower, and the skin is two or three shades darker. The eyes are tilted at the corners instead of round. The nose is sharper and longer than the blunt beak of the man who hauled her into the elevator. The mouth is thinner.

This man looks ten years younger than the one who grabbed her.

“Good trick, wouldn’t you say?” Even his voice is different.

What are you? Barbara tries to say this, but no words will come out of her mouth.

He bends down and gently places the strap of her purse back on her shoulder. Barbara shrinks from the touch of his fingers but can’t entirely avoid them. “Don’t want to lose your wallet and credit cards, do you? They’ll help the police to identify you, in case… well, in case.” He makes a burlesque of holding his new nose. “Dear me, did we have a little accident? Oh well, you know what they say, shit happens.” He titters.

The elevator stops. The doors slide open on the fifth-floor hall.

16

When the elevator stops, Holly takes one more quick glance at the screen of the computer, then clicks the mouse. She doesn’t wait to see if the floor-stops, B through 8, gray out as they were when she and Jerome did their repair-job, following the steps Jerome found at a webpage titled Erebeta Bugs and How to Fix Them. She doesn’t need to. She’ll know one way or the other.

She walks back to the office door and looks down the twenty-five yards of hallway to the elevator. Ondowsky has Barbara by the arm… only when he looks up, she sees it’s no longer him. Now it’s George, minus the mustache and the delivery man’s brown uniform.

“Come on, girlfriend,” he says. “Move those feet.”

Barbara comes stumbling out. Her eyes are huge and blank and wet with tears. Her beautiful dark skin has gone the color of clay. Spittle runs from one side of her mouth. She looks almost catatonic, and Holly knows why: she saw Ondowsky change.

This terrorized girl is her responsibility, but Holly can’t think about that now. She has to stay in the moment, has to listen, has to have Holly hope… although that has never seemed so distant.

The elevator doors slide closed. With Bill’s gun removed from the equation, any chance Holly has depends on what happens next. At first there’s nothing and her heart turns to lead. Then, instead of staying put, as Erebeta elevators are programmed to do until they are called, she hears it descending. Thank God, she hears it descending.

“Here’s my little girlfriend,” George the killer of children says. “She’s kind of a bad girlfriend. I believe she’s gone pee-pee and poo-poo in her pants. Come closer, Holly. You’ll smell it for yourself.”

Holly doesn’t move from the doorway. “I’m curious,” she says. “Did you actually bring any money?”

George grins, showing teeth that are a lot less TV-ready than those of his alter-ego. “Actually, no. There’s a cardboard box behind the Dumpster where I hid when I saw this one and her brother coming, but there’s nothing in there but catalogues. You know, the kind that come addressed to Current Resident.”

“So you never intended to pay me,” Holly says. She takes a dozen steps down the hall, stopping when they’re fifteen yards apart. If this was football, she’d be in the red zone. “Did you?”

“No more than you ever intended to give me that flash drive and let me go,” he says. “I can’t read minds, but I have a long history of reading body language. And faces. Yours is completely open, although I’m sure you think otherwise. Now pull your shirt out of your pants and lift it. Not all the way, those bumps on your chest hold no interest for me, just enough so I can make sure you’re not armed.”