THE TWO-STORY CLAPBOARD HOUSE is surrounded by a mantle of real grass, shaded by four tall, flourishing phoenix palms. The property must have a deep-drilled well that allows the owners to pretend that they are living in a more hospitable climate than is the case.

A Buick Encore is parked alongside the road, twenty feet short of the driveway and north of the house. The sheriff’s-department Dodge Charger passes the Buick and parks just the other side of the entrance to the property, directly in front of the residence.

Dubose turns boldly between those vehicles, into the driveway, past a mailbox surmounted by a plaque bearing the name ATLEE. As he sets the brake and switches off the engine, he says, “Do you smell the something now, my friend? Do you smell it, see it, feel it in the very air?”

“Smell, see, feel what?”

“Looming crisis,” says Dubose and gets out of the VelociRaptor.

Jergen is relieved to see that the two sheriff’s deputies were among those at the market on Sunday, following the shooting of Gavin and Jessica Washington. They know Jergen and Dubose carry National Security Agency credentials. The locals forfeited jurisdiction on the Washington killings, superseded by federal authorities; and they are likely to relent without argument in this case as well, if that’s what Dubose wants.

“That’s Mrs. Atlee,” one of the deputies says, “Louise Atlee,” as a fortyish woman gets out of the Buick and approaches them. “She called nine-one-one to report a four-sixty.”

“Burglary?” Dubose says.

“Yes, sir.”

Agitated and distressed, Mrs. Atlee arrives. “Thank the Lord you’re here. Something’s gotta be done. I’m afraid maybe it’s too late, but something’s gotta be done. I turn in the driveway, a living room window shatters, just shatters! And … and …” Her mouth softens, her lips tremble, tears brim in her eyes. “And then my beautiful, beloved Wilkinson longcase is heaved into the yard like garbage to be hauled away. It was horrible, horrible.”

“Who is Wilkinson Longcase?” one of the deputies asks, his right hand resting on the grip of his service revolver now that burglary seems to have escalated to murder.

“It’s not a who,” Dubose informs him. “It’s a what. A George the Third longcase clock, what you might call a grandfather clock, made by Thomas Wilkinson, mid-to-late eighteenth century.”

With mixed emotions, none of them good, Carter Jergen regards his partner, the heretofore unrevealed antique-clock expert. Jergen is glad he wasn’t the one to ask who Wilkinson Longcase was.

Mrs. Atlee says, “My one antique, handed down through five generations, and now … now probably wrecked beyond repair.”

She extends one arm, one trembling finger, and Jergen looks where she points. The longcase lies on a side yard, canted against the bole of a phoenix palm.

“The clock crashes through the window, so I back fast out of the driveway, park along the road, call nine-one-one. I get out of the car, there’s this hellacious noise, just hellacious, inside my pretty little house, like someone smashing everything in my house.” Tears spill down her cheeks. “There’s shouting, too, cursing, two voices, a man and a woman. So I get back in my car, keep the engine running, ready to go. But then you’re here, and now it’s quiet, all quiet in there. Whoever it was, they must’ve escaped out the back.”

The concern that the perpetrators have fled the scene is at once allayed when the front door of the house opens and a naked woman steps onto the porch. Her hair is a wild, tangled mane. Her hands appear to be gloved in blood. She is Minette Butterworth, one of the adjusted people, whose wheelchair-bound sister Dubose shot three times the previous night.

9

THUNDER AVALANCHES DOWN THE SKY, shuddering the bones of the hotel in Beaumont, and shatters of rain break against the windows, near one of which Egon Gottfrey sits at a small table in the living room of his suite, working on the late Rupert Baldwin’s laptop.

He begins with a list of names. Jim Lee Cassidy, the Realtor in Killeen, who saw Ancel and Clare Hawk heading on foot toward the bus station. Sue Ann McMaster, the clerk at the bus station who ticketed them through to Houston. Lonnie John Bricker, the driver behind the wheel of the bus from Killeen to Houston. Tucker Treadmont, the discourteous Uber driver in Beaumont, who for $121.50 led them to an isolated rural property containing an abandoned house, reeking chicken coop, and ramshackle barn.

The one name Gottfrey needs and doesn’t have is that of the bus-station manager in Beaumont, such a nondescript character in an obvious walk-on role that, at the time, there seemed to be no reason to remember her. Using the NSA’s bottomless data troves and back-door connections to thousands of government and private-industry computer systems nationwide, he requires six minutes to discover that the station manager’s name is Mary Lou Spencer.

Assuming that Ancel and Clare Hawk indeed borrowed the Mercury Mountaineer belonging to the Longrins, and assuming that in fact they drove it to Killeen, where they abandoned it, the question then becomes: Did they really go from Killeen to Houston?

The Unknown Playwright has thrown Gottfrey into a puzzle pit, and if he doesn’t figure his way out of it, there is inevitably going to be pain.

Gottfrey is as sure as he can be about anything that the portly Tucker Treadmont, with his pointy-toed boots and man breasts and calculating greenish-gray eyes, never took the Hawks anywhere, let alone to that rotting house, stinking chicken coop, and tumbledown barn.

The easiest course of action is to track down Treadmont and torture the truth out of him. But that might be a mistake. If it’s expected he will take such action, he could be walking into a trap.

The Unknown Playwright wants him to be an iconic loner and a violent force. But the U.P. also doesn’t want anything to be easy for Gottfrey; otherwise, he wouldn’t have been sent chasing across half of Texas.

Apocalyptic, multifigured bolts of lightning flare and flare over Beaumont, as if some giant otherworldly spider is skittering through the city on white-hot electric legs. Runnels of rain on the window glass quiver with mercurial reflections.

Egon Gottfrey starts with Jim Lee Cassidy, the white-haired Realtor in Killeen, and rapidly builds a profile. Cassidy is sixty-six. Born in Waco, Texas. Served twenty years in the Army before retiring and taking up a career in real estate at the age of thirty-nine. Married to Bonnie Cassidy, maiden name Norton. Two children: Clint, thirty-three; Coraline, thirty-five.

Because Clint is approximately the age of the late Nick Hawk and because of his father’s military record, Gottfrey is keen to learn if the son volunteered with the Marine Corps, where he might have served with Nick. But Clint has no military history. He was born with talipes equinovarus, the worst kind of clubfoot. Early surgery corrected the condition but not enough to make him soldier material. Coraline has not been in any of the services, either.

Egon Gottfrey is patient. He is certain a connection exists between one of these people and the Hawks that will reveal where Jane’s in-laws went between Killeen and Beaumont. He will find it.

He likes being a loner. No chattering fools. No bolo ties.

Soon he moves on to the second name on his list. Sue Ann McMaster, the bus station clerk in Killeen.

To Gottfrey, the battlefield sky full of flash and flame and cannonade is not merely a storm, but also a celebration of his reinterpretation of his role. The Unknown Playwright is pleased. From time to time, Gottfrey turns from the laptop screen to the window and stares at the weather-racked day, which seems so real, but is painted in thrilling detail just for him.

10

A HOLLOWNESS IN CARTER JERGEN’S CHEST, as though something has fallen out of him … The oppressive heat, the sun glare, the deep strangeness of the situation together inspiring alarm, a sense of mortal peril impending …

Minette Butterworth stands tall and naked on the porch, staring not at the five people riveted by her sudden appearance, but at her hands, which she raises before her face as though bewildered to find them slick with blood.

To Carter Jergen, Radley Dubose murmurs, “He is one lucky guy.”

“Who?”

“Old Bob Butterworth, of course. The way she was dressed last night, who could know a body like that was under her clothes? Purely delicious.”

Although some effort is required to look away from the goddess of death on the porch, although Dubose should long ago have ceased to have the power to astonish and appall, Jergen stares at him in disbelief. “You can’t be serious.”

“My friend, when it comes to making the beast with two backs, I’m always serious.”

“Where is Bob?” Jergen suddenly wonders.

“I suspect his luck ran out.”

Minette lowers her crimson hands and moves off the shaded porch, slowly descending the steps with the measured grace of a high-fashion model, and even the hard desert sunshine flatters her. She stops on the walkway and at last directs her attention to those who have been transfixed by her.