I dug through the pile of photos, looking for the lobby image. It was just a few photos down, marked with a red circle from Kelly’s meeting with Brooke. The jacket looked the same as the hallway image, but the face was hard to discern—dark hair, no beard or mustache, paunchy. An incredibly average-looking man.
“Do we have a name yet?” asked Ostler.
“I’ve sent it back to headquarters for facial recognition,” said Kelly, “but without a better image the computer’s not likely to find anything. This is one we’re probably going to end up doing by hand, so I hope you’re all excited to sit down with old case binders and start flipping.”
“There’s got to be a better way,” said Nathan. “Are there traffic cameras outside? I haven’t noticed.”
“In Fort Bruce?” asked Diana. “Come back in five years.”
“There’s a camera in the parking lot,” said Kelly, “but it’s out of order. I can try going to the other businesses in the area and hope we get lucky, but unless he stopped at a gas station immediately before or after his visit that’s almost guaranteed to be a dead end.”
“Brooke said nothing to me,” said Trujillo, “so if I had no idea she saw anything, this Withered might not know either. Our best hope for now is that he still thinks we don’t know about him.”
“He?” asked Potash. “Or they? This could be a sign of a much larger counterattack than we’re imagining.” The group started grumbling, but I ignored them and studied the photo. There was something about it …
“Don’t jump to conclusions,” said Ostler, trying to regain control. “The last thing we need is a panic.”
“The last thing we need is to get murdered,” said Nathan. “It could be weeks before we figure out who this guy is, and by then we could all be—”
“Did you ask at the front desk?” I asked. Kelly looked at me, and I turned the photo to face her. “Look at his position there—he’s either just changed directions for no reason in the middle of the room, or he’s walking away from the receptionist.”
The room went quiet, and Kelly studied the image a moment before closing her eyes. “I’m trying to remember the layout of the lobby. Leaving the front desk at that angle would take him toward…”
“The dining room,” I said, and looked at Trujillo. “Did you walk through there?”
“We never do,” said Trujillo. “Too many knives.”
I looked at Ostler. “The dining room is for residents and their guests only; unless he’s accompanying somebody, he wouldn’t even be allowed in.”
“Why does this matter?” asked Nathan.
“Because it means Meshara has a cover story,” said Ostler, picking up my line of thought. “If he was just walking around watching people the nurses would get suspicious, so he’s made friends with a resident. That’s his excuse for being there. And that means he’s been there more than once, which means the people at the front desk might recognize him.”
“It’ll be an Alzheimer’s patient,” I said. “Someone who doesn’t remember anyone, so no one will think it’s weird that he doesn’t remember this guy.”
“How do you know that?” asked Diana.
“I don’t know for sure,” I said. “But that’s the way I’d do it.”
Ostler looked at Kelly. “Ms. Ishida?”
Kelly stood up, taking the better of the two photos with her. “I’ll check it out. Potash, come with me—nobody should be alone now that we know we’re being followed.” The two of them left, and the rest of us looked at each other.
“What does this mean?” asked Trujillo. “Practically, I mean? I’ve worked on serial-killer cases, but never one where the investigators were being hunted. Has this ever happened before?”
“Nobody was hunting John,” said Nathan. “I mean, the Withered named Nobody was hunting John.”
“That’s a weird name for a Withered,” I said. “Is ‘Nobody was hunting John’ also Sumerian?”
“This is serious,” said Diana. “Can you please stop making jokes for five damn minutes?”
“Let me fill in some gaps for you,” said Ostler. “In the process of hunting John, the Withered named Nobody killed four girls John knew, including his girlfriend, then tried to kill Brooke, then burned John’s mother alive. So maybe humor is a defense mechanism, and you need to cut him a little slack.”
So now they knew my history. Judging by their silence, it kind of freaked them out.
Trujillo was the first to speak. “So I take it the answer to my question is ‘yes, we’re in incredible danger.’”
“All I knew about Nobody was her name,” I said. “We know Meshara’s name, face, and location, and we have a good lead on finding more, plus anything else we can get out of Brooke. We can do this.”
“And how many of us die in the process?” asked Nathan.
“Better us than civilians,” said Diana.
“I am a civilian!” Nathan shouted.