“I’m sorry. What authorities? Do you have a direct line to the president I don’t know about? Twenty-five billion dollars a year. Aerial surveillance technology. Private security contractors that take out dictators. That’s what I’m up against, Luke, and the only thing that can stop people like that is a thermonuclear warhead or the threat of one. You have any lying around?”

“You’re not a killer, Charley. Trina Pierce was not a killer. Everyone knew it no matter what they said. No matter what I said. Don’t do something crazy just ’cause you think you still have to prove that to the world.”

“The world? I don’t want the world to know about any of this. I want the world to leave me alone for the first time in my life. To stop treating me like my mother being raped and murdered by those monsters makes me special. Because when the world does that, they make Abigail Banning feel special. Jesus Christ, Luke. My entire life I’ve been forced to indulge sick freaks on the Internet who want to turn that woman into their own Hannibal Lecter, and the minute I finally got free of them, Dylan Fucking Thorpe shows up and throws me headfirst into this nightmare. So if I’m really stuck here, I’m doing things my way.”

“I appreciate your anger, Charley. You—”

“Oh, don’t patronize me. You don’t—”

“Then stop talking about your damn feelings and start talking about the facts. I spend my weekends reading about this guy. For starters, they don’t know if he is just one guy. But he’s on his way to being one of the most proficient, if not the most proficient, serial killer in American history. I mean, do you even know the first thing about him? What this guy does requires months of planning on top of some sort of medical expertise. And he’s managed to abduct both his victims from public places without popping up on a single security camera.”

“That’s not true. They’ve got him in Santa Monica last week.”

“Because he wanted them to. He’s never been caught on camera when he didn’t want to be, Charley. The guy makes the Bannings look like amateurs.”

“The Bannings killed for nine years before a deliveryman recognized me from an age-progression photo. They were not amateurs, Luke.”

“His abductions are not on camera. They haven’t even pinpointed the abduction sites. Do you realize the kind of skill and patience that takes in this day and age?”

“Ten bucks says they’ve got him on tape, and we just don’t know about it because they’re holding it back so they can eliminate false confessions. The cops did the same thing with five different pieces of evidence in the Banning case.”

“Oh my God. Is that what you just sent Bailey to do? Hack LAPD and the FBI?”

“Well, you could ask your brother, but he doesn’t discuss procedure, remember?”

“This is insane,” Luke whispers.

“You’re right, and it’s been insane for forty-eight hours, and I gave you an out, and I didn’t have to tell you about any of it, so screw you for judging how I’m handling it.”

“I’m not judging you. I’m trying to keep you from destroying what life you have left.”

“I made the choice in the middle. Just like you said. And when I’m done, there’s a very good chance the Mask Maker won’t be killing women anymore.”

“You are . . .” Luke begins, shaking his head. But instead of finishing he pulls out his phone. “Nuts,” he says as he starts dialing. “You are completely nuts, Charley. And I wouldn’t be doing right by you if I let you . . . I mean, this just . . . this has to stop right now.”

“What the hell are you doing?”

“I’m calling Mona, and I’m telling her everything. We’ll figure something out. We’ll get you some kind of help. Aerial surveillance technology, my ass. Dylan Psychofuck is probably a lying psychopath who’s following us in a truck with some binoculars. He could be lying about everything.”

“Put the phone away, Luke.”

Instead he turns his back on her and puts several feet of distance between them.

She closes her eyes, grits her teeth, tries once more to turn anger into a trigger event. She won’t crush his face. Just his phone, and then hopefully, by proxy, some of his massive crusader’s ego. But it doesn’t work. Anger’s not enough. Rage is not enough. She needs stark terror.

Should she attack him right now? Make him fight back in a way that will trigger her? But is that worth the risk? If he does go through with this call, she can just deny everything and make Luke look like the crazy one. A betrayal, sure, but isn’t that what he’s doing to her right now?

And then the light changes and the traffic starts streaming past the library, and she sees a giant refrigerator truck with the cheerful logo of some produce company on its side round the distant corner. The driver accelerates when he sees a green light waiting for him a half block ahead.

“Hey, Phil, is Mona on duty?” Luke says into the phone.

Charlotte walks to the edge of the curb.

“Tell her it’s urgent. Is she on her cell? . . . How far? . . . No, I mean how long has it been going to voice mail?”

The truck approaches, engine bellowing, huffing exhaust.

This time it will work. Because this time it’s not a car being driven by a loved one who’s practically family. This time it’s a truck driven by a stranger. A huge truck. And maybe the driver’s late for a delivery or a pickup or a hot date or who knows what else; what she knows is he’s sitting about seven or eight feet off the ground and won’t see her if she steps in front of him at just the right moment.

The truck’s only a few yards away now. And as she studies that grill, visualizes herself stepping in front of it, she feels the tingling in her hands, the slowly accelerating drumbeat of bone music. The onset of terror.

Maybe she’ll need to break a bone. Maybe the truck will have to tear into her before the Zypraxon in her system blooms. But surely an attack from a giant, moving wall of metal will be perceived the same way an attack from a rageful human would.

Why would the terror be any different, any less effective? And maybe she’ll find out what kind of miracles Zypraxon can work on a freshly broken femur.

“Tell her I need to talk to her right away,” Luke says. “She needs to call me on my—”

“Luke!”

He spins, looks her in the eye.

“Watch this!”

She steps off the curb and thrusts one arm out in front of her.

Luke’s terrified shouts and the truck’s squealing brakes deafen her.

Despite her best efforts to keep them open, she screws her eyes shut. She’s rocked back on her heels as if from a sudden, strong wind and in the same moment it feels as if her arm has exploded into flame. Then she tilts forward onto the balls of her feet again, and her lips kiss the steel grill.

The truck didn’t stop just in time.

She stopped the truck just in time. With one arm.

When she opens her eyes again, she’s dwarfed by the truck’s grill, and her arm’s buried deep inside it, in a fresh gash that looks custom designed just for her. The pain, in its Zypraxon-muffled form, ricochets up her forearm, sings through her shoulder, then arcs across her upper back before it leaves behind a dull, throbbing ache she’d normally associate with lifting something heavy. The entire process feels as if the pain searched for a place in her body where it could perform its expected, agonizing work, but it kept getting denied entry, so it decided to give up and evaporate altogether.

The truck shudders, as if its very carriage is coming to terms with the miraculous strength that just brought it to a halt, a force that was not just sudden and powerful enough to stop it but impossibly precise.

Slowly, she removes her arm from the hole.

She’s bleeding from a dozen different scratches. The bruising is fierce and terrible. In her fist, she holds on to a chunk of metal from the grill. She passes it to her left hand, then twiddles all of the fingers on her right. They work perfectly. No additional spike of pain shoots up her arm. Nothing’s broken. The skin’s a mess, but the bones are intact.

With her left hand, she slowly crushes the chunk of metal and lets it drop to the concrete.

Then, a few feet away, Luke makes a sound like a bird that doesn’t know if it’s dawn, dusk, or feeding time. She’s never seen someone who literally looked as if he were about to jump out of his skin before, but that’s how Luke looks. He’s in a half crouch, his arms spread on either side of him, as if preparing to dive through the air to knock her out of the truck’s path. He’s frozen in midcrouch, his mouth agape and his eyes wide. Without meaning to, he tossed his phone. It lies on the pavement a few feet away.

The driver’s screams come to a sudden, choked halt when he sees her. Reflexively, she hides her not-injured-enough arm against her chest and covers it with the other. “I’m OK,” she cries. “I’m OK.”

Just as the truck driver drops from his cab to the sidewalk, she hops up onto the pavement as if the entire event were nothing more than a brief stumble. At the sight of this, the driver lets out a moan so full of relief it sounds almost sexual. He clasps one hand to his chest, forcing breath back into his lungs.