“You won’t be abandoning anyone,” she assured him. “If I don’t call, we’ll be dead.”

“It won’t turn out that way. You’ll get your boy.”

She didn’t smile when she said, “Your lips to God’s ear.”

As she got into the Suburban, Bernie said, “Don’t forget.” She looked back at him. “Always and forever—mishpokhe.”

“Mishpokhe,” she said, letting the kh rattle against the roof of her mouth just right. She pulled the door shut, and Luther drove the Suburban out of the parking lot.

Bernie Riggowitz, being Albert Rudolph Neary, checked into the Hammersmith Family RV Park.

They assigned him to a nice, quiet space near the back of the campground. He hooked up only to their electric service.

With the air-conditioning full blast, he sat in the copilot’s chair and sipped from a cold can of 7-Up and took an acid-reducing pill and stared through the windshield.

There were palm trees so recently planted and fresh that they didn’t look the least bit sun withered. There was a big swimming pool with a wide deck around it. There were lounge chairs on the deck for people who wanted to tan. There were big red umbrellas shielding tables where you could play cards or whatever. The water in the pool was pale blue with a reflection of the sky and rippled with silver reflections of the sun. Everything was very pretty.

The scene turned his stomach, as if he’d eaten a pound or two of the sweetest prune-jam homantash anyone had ever baked. He knew he shouldn’t take a second acid-reducing pill. He chewed a pair of Tums instead.

He didn’t know why all this prettiness should sicken him.

Okay, not true. He knew why, all right. Much as he tried not to be negative, he couldn’t help but think that the afternoon might not turn out pretty in the end.

2

HENRY LORIMAR AND HIS PARTNER, Nelson Luft, neighbors of Robert and Minette Butterworth, had been helping authorities in the search for the kidnapped little boy when the obscene ranting had begun. For a moment, Henry thought it came from the sound system of their Lexus SUV, which he was driving; but then somehow he understood that it issued instead from deep inside his head. He was briefly frightened by this realization, until a still, small voice assured him this was the new normal, that all was well, that he should accept and move on with his work. This was nothing more than the whispering room, a high-tech communications system that linked the civilian volunteers who were searching for the missing child. Yes, whoever the ranting person might be, he was misusing the technology, but this was just the whispering room, one of the many advantages of the new normal.

Evidently, Nelson received the ferocious rant at greater volume or on a more penetrating wavelength than did Henry. While the rapid gush of vicious obscenities was offensive and distracting to Henry, it proved at once painful to Nelson, and soon became excruciating. Within the safety harness that secured him to the front passenger seat, Nelson writhed in torment, his hands alternately clamped to his head or pounding on the door, on the window, as though he was desperate to escape but had forgotten how to get out of the vehicle.

Each time fear rose in Henry Lorimar, a voice separate from that of the ranter counseled him to remain calm. There was nothing to be concerned about. If he just did what was expected of him, if he searched for the missing boy according to his instructions, all would be well. He would be happy, content, at peace.

Nevertheless, unable to concentrate on his driving, he pulled off the road. Shifted into park. Engaged the emergency brake. He left the engine running to maintain the air-conditioning.

The one voice ranted, loud and increasingly animalistic, but the other voice spoke so softly that it wasn’t a voice as much as it was like a conscience, an inner source of moral guidance telling him that he needed to do what he had been tasked to do, that if he did the right thing, he would be happy, content, and at peace. This conscience-like counselor was authoritative, irresistible, therefore not at all like a conscience, which could be ignored, but more like a … controller. Yet as much as Henry wanted to obey, he remained paralyzed because the louder voice bored into him, tore at him, though in a strangely thrilling way, drilling down until it struck nerves in him that didn’t flash with pain when touched but instead flared with pleasure, desires so deeply buried and so beyond his experience that he didn’t have words to describe them.

For a while, the outer world did not press upon his senses, and he lived entirely in his head, in the assault of words and wordless cries counterpointed by the quiet but insistent instruction of his controller. Soon, the ranter’s vocal transmissions were accompanied by fierce emotions—hatred, fury, lust—so scalding that they seemed to peel away layers of Henry’s identity, as superheated steam might peel away skin. With the sounds and emotions came images of extreme violence that seemed beautiful to him and sexual congress so intense that, in its way, it was another kind of violence.

At one point, Henry Lorimar became aware of the sound of the idling car engine, the cold air blowing from the dashboard vents, and the stink of human waste. The last of those sensations turned his head to the left, where his partner, Nelson Luft, no longer writhed in agony.

White-faced and frail, Nelson slumped in his safety harness, head turned toward Henry, mouth agape, blood dripping from the cups of his ears. He had soiled himself. He was alive, softly inhaling and exhaling, his gaze moving slowly over the interior of the Lexus, as if everything on which his eyes alighted was mysterious to him. When he met Henry’s stare, Nelson appeared not to recognize his partner of fifteen years, regarding him with the same puzzlement inspired by the steering wheel, the radio, and the cup holders in the console.

Cold horror and grief iced Henry’s heart, and he began to surface from the thrall of the hateful rant. But the conscience that was not a conscience pressed him to put the Lexus in gear and get on with the search for the kidnapped boy, as he had agreed to do, as he had been instructed. Everything else meant nothing. Nelson Luft meant nothing. Nelson could be dealt with later. Nelson could wait. Nelson would be fine. Henry needed only to do what he had been told to do, what urgently needed to be done, and then he would be very happy, content, and at peace.

As horror and grief melted out of him, however, Henry didn’t release the emergency brake or put the car in gear. Like the sea to the moon, he succumbed to the tidal pull of the rant. The interior of the Lexus faded from his awareness as the exquisite images of violence and thrilling fornication flooded in upon him, accompanied by raw emotions and the tsunami of words that darkled his mind.

How much time passed, Henry could not say, but eventually the ranter stopped transmitting. Gradually, Henry became aware of the vehicle in which he sat, although at first he could not identify it or recall its purpose.

The whispering room was quiet, no communications incoming, but another strange sound in his head troubled him: sputtering-sizzling, subtle but persistent. When his eyes were closed, he could see—or perhaps he imagined—a darkness in his head across which the radials and spirals of a web pulsed irregularly with light, as if a current of varying power coursed through those filaments.

Degree by degree, knowledge and functionality returned to him. He sat up straighter. He adjusted his shirt collar. He remembered the remaining places he and Nelson needed to visit in their low-key search for the kidnapped boy, and he realized that he had better get on with the task.

In the passenger seat, Nelson Luft no longer breathed. His stare was as fixed as that of a mannequin. Blood had stopped seeping from his ears.

This was nothing to be concerned about. Nothing important. Nothing that mattered at all. Nelson could be dealt with later.

The important thing was to get on with the urgent hunt for the missing and endangered boy. It was misguided and selfish to think that anything mattered other than finding the boy.

The vehicle reeked of feces, but that was a mere inconvenience. Henry could get used to it. He was already getting used to it. Soon he wouldn’t smell it at all.

He released the emergency brake and put the Lexus in gear and drove back onto the highway. He could drive, but he wasn’t at ease behind the wheel like he’d been before. Everything seemed unfamiliar to him, almost as if he were a young teenager again, just learning to handle a motor vehicle.