*
I was at Whiteflower when the e-mail was finally discovered by a police department receptionist who was manning the phones on the night shift. Apparently she got bored; now we knew who checked the courtesy account. She alerted her superior, who alerted Detective Scott, who called Ostler, who called the rest of us and told us to meet at the old offices across the street. I told Brooke I was sorry to be leaving.
“You’ll come back?” she said. “I love you, you know. You need to come back so we can get married and live happily ever after in a little white house.”
“You don’t love me,” I told her.
She looked at the floor, the corners of her mouth sagging. “Do you love me?”
I hesitated, my hand hovering over the door. How could I answer that? I didn’t love her, not the way I loved Marci. Not even the way I loved my mom, and at least half of that love was hate. After a long moment I found my voice to speak. “I don’t know what that means.”
Her voice was pleading. “Then how do you know I don’t love you?”
“Because you’re alive,” I said, and banged on the door in a sudden rage. “The only people who love me are dead.”
*
“You’re not going to like this letter,” said Ostler. The whole group was seated around the conference room table: six people, and an empty seat for Kelly. Ostler looked at each of us in turn. “None of us are. Know before we read it that I’ve already contacted headquarters, and they’re dispatching people to check on your families.”
“Holy crap,” said Nathan, “how bad is it?”
Ostler looked at him, put on her glasses, and started to read:
“‘To the Esteemed John Wayne Cleaver, and The People He Occasionally Associates With.’”
“Nice of him to include us,” said Nathan. Ostler ignore him and continued:
“‘I hope you liked my last gift. The clues are important, and I trust you’ll enjoy them, but don’t overlook the body itself. Bodies are important. They are what makes you human. Your humanity is a gift, in a very real sense, and so I make a gift of it to you. Do not squander it.’”
Nathan snorted. “This guy’s insa—”
“Shut up,” said Diana.
“‘Because I am in a giving mood,’” Ostler continued, “‘I offer you another gift: the gift of knowledge. You seek to understand me, but do you really know yourself? Can you be true to what is in you if you don’t know what that is? I suggest that you cannot. Your secrets must be opened, to yourself and to the world. You told me you’re not like me. It is important to understand that you are.’”
“Hold up,” said Trujillo. “We’ve never communicated with him directly, have we?”
“We have not,” said Ostler. I didn’t look at Potash, and counted my breaths slowly to keep my face from changing color. Ostler didn’t look at me. “His last letter told us to kill someone and leave a note on the corpse. I think ‘you told me you’re not like me’ is a reference to the fact that we didn’t.”
I said nothing.
Ostler took a deep breath. “This is the part where it gets bad. You each have a file, but I’m sure you’ve noticed that some of the key details of your lives have been redacted out of them. I did that to keep our focus on the enemy, and not each other, but some of that information is about to come out. Know that none of this information is new to me: I reviewed it all carefully, and didn’t recruit anybody to the team that I didn’t trust.”
Nobody said anything; we just looked at each other in silence, wondering what horrible secrets were about to be revealed. What had Diana done? What about Nathan? I wasn’t worried about my own secrets—anything Ostler knew, the others could know as well for all I cared. It was the things Ostler didn’t know that I was worried about.
Did the letter really reveal secrets about Potash? How could anyone know that?
“‘Martín Trujillo is a statutory rapist,’” read Ostler. “‘She was willing, by most accounts, but the law does not consider a fourteen-year-old girl to be a reliable witness.’”
I leapt up from my chair. “You let him spend months alone with Brooke! He slept in the very next room!”
“I was nineteen years old,” said Trujillo. “That was more than thirty years ago.”
“And that makes it okay?”
“He served time,” said Ostler. “He’s had a flawless record since, with a long history of helping to enforce the law.”
“You shouldn’t have let him near Brooke,” I said hotly.
“I’m not a pedophile, John,” said Trujillo, “I was a dumb kid who made a dumb choice. ‘Rapist’ is a poor descriptor of what happened, but it’s the correct legal term and I don’t deny it.”
“How does The Hunter even know this?” asked Nathan.
“He probably had to register as a sex offender,” said Diana.