“Where’s the Oxy?”

I asked. “He says they’re in the dopp kit, whatever that is.”

She seized the shaving bag, unzipped it, and turned it over. A bunch of pill bottles fell out, along with two or three small packets done up in Saran Wrap. Not exactly a treasure trove. She yelled, “What the fuck is this?”

I barely heard her. I had flipped open the folder beside the computer, for no other reason than it was there, and I was in shock. At first it was like I didn’t even know what I was seeing, but of course I did. And I knew why Marsden hadn’t wanted us to come in here, and why he could feel shame even though he was dead. It had nothing to do with drugs. I wondered if the woman I was looking at had the same ball-gag in her mouth. Poetic justice if she did.

“Liz,” I said. My lips felt numb, like I’d gotten a shot of Novocain at the dentist.

“Is this all?” she was shouting. “Don’t you fucking dare tell me this is all!” She twisted open one of the prescription bottles and dumped out the contents. There were maybe two dozen pills. “This isn’t even Oxy, these are fucking Darvons!”

She had let go of me and I could have run right then, but I never even thought of it. Even the thought of whistling for Therriault had left my mind. “Liz,” I said again.

She paid no attention. She was opening the bottles, one after the other. Different kinds of pills, but not a lot of them in any of the bottles. She was staring at some of the blue ones. “Roxies, okay, but this isn’t even a dozen! Ask him where the rest are!”

“Liz, look at this.” It was my voice, but seeming to come from far away.

“I said ask him—” She swung back and stopped, looking at what I was looking at.

It was a glossy photograph topping a thin stack of other glossy photographs. There were three people in it: two men and a woman. One of the men was Marsden. He wasn’t even wearing his boxers. The other man was also naked. They were doing things to the woman with the gag in her mouth. I don’t want to say, only that Marsden had a little blowtorch and the other man had one of those double-pronged meat forks.

“Shit,” she whispered. “Oh, shit.” She flipped through some more. They were unspeakable. She closed the folder. “It’s her.”

“Who?”

“Maddie. His wife. Guess she didn’t run off after all.”

Marsden was still outside in the library, but looking away from us. The back of his head was a ruin, like the left side of Therriault’s had been, but I barely noticed. There are worse things than bullet wounds, a little something I found out that evening.

“They tortured her to death,” I said.

“Yes, and had fun while they were doing it. Look at those big smiles. You still sorry I killed him?”

“You didn’t kill him because of what he did to his wife,” I said. “You didn’t know about that. You killed him because of the dope.”

She shrugged as if it didn’t matter, and to her it probably didn’t. She looked out of the panic room, where he came to look at his awful pictures, and across the library to the upstairs hall. “Is he still there?”

“Yes. In the doorway.”

“At first he said there weren’t any pills, but I knew he was lying. Then he said there were a lot. A lot!”

“Maybe he was lying when he said that. He could, because he wasn’t dead yet.”

“But he told you they were in the panic room! He was already dead then!”

“He didn’t say how many.” I asked Marsden, “That’s all you’ve got?”

“That’s all,” he said. His voice was starting to drift.

“You told her you had a lot!”

He shrugged his bloody shoulders. “As long as she believed I had what she wanted, I thought she’d keep me alive.”

“But that tip she heard about your getting a big private shipment—”

“Just bullshit,” he said. “There’s a lot of bullshit in this business. People say all sorts of shit just to hear themselves talk.”

Liz shook her head when I told her what he’d said, not believing it. Not wanting to believe it because if she did, it meant all her west coast plans fell down. It meant she’d been conned.

“He’s hiding something,” she insisted. “Somehow. Somewhere. Ask him again where the rest of them are.”

I opened my mouth to say that if there were more he would have told me already. Then—probably because the terrible pictures had slapped a dazed part of me awake—I had an idea. Maybe I could do some conning of my own, because she was certainly ready to be conned. If it worked, I might be able to get away from her without whistling up a demon.

She grabbed my shoulders and gave me a shake. “Ask him, I said!”

So I did. “Where’s the rest of the dope, Mr. Marsden?”

“I told you, that’s all there is.” His voice was fading, fading. “I keep a few on hand for Maria, but she’s in the Bahamas. Bimini.”

“Oh, okay. That’s more like it.” I pointed to the shelves of canned goods. “See the cans of spaghetti on the top shelf?” There was no way she could miss them, there had to be at least thirty. Donnie Bigs must have really loved his Franco-American. “He said he hid some in those—not Oxy, they’re something else.”

She could have dragged me with her, but I was thinking there was a good chance she’d be too eager, and I was right. She ran to the shelves of canned goods. I waited until she was standing on her tiptoes and reaching up. Then I bolted out of the panic room and across the library. I wish I’d remembered to shut the door, but I didn’t. Marsden was standing there and he looked solid, but I ran right through him. There was a moment of freezing cold, and my mouth filled with an oily taste I think was pepperoni. Then I was sprinting for the stairs.

There was a clatter of falling cans from behind me. “Get back here, Jamie! Get back!”

She came after me. I could hear her. I made it to where those stairs swooped down, and looked over my shoulder. That was a mistake. I tripped. Out of other options, I pursed my lips to whistle, but I couldn’t do anything but huff air. My mouth and lips were too dry. So I screamed instead.

“THERRIAULT!”

I started to crawl down the stairs headfirst with my hair in my eyes, but she grabbed my ankle.

“THERRIAULT, HELP ME! GET HER OFF ME!”

Suddenly everything—not just the balcony, not just the stairs, but all of the space above the great room and the conversation pit—filled with white light. I was looking back at Liz when it happened, and I squinted against the glare, all but blinded. It was coming from that tall mirror, and more was pouring out of the mirror on the other side of the balcony.

Liz’s grip loosened. I grabbed one of the slate stairs and yanked on it as hard as I could. Down I went on my belly, like a kid on the world’s bumpiest toboggan ride. I came to a stop about a quarter of the way down. Behind me, Liz was shrieking. I looked between my arm and my side, because of my position seeing her upside down. She was standing in front of the mirror. I don’t know exactly what she saw, and that’s good, because I might never have slept again. The light was enough—that brilliant no-color light that came glaring out of the mirror like a solar flare.