Dryden wiped his prints from the .45 and set it on the concrete floor. Its suppressor was hot to the touch.
Marnie braked, killed the engine, and got out. Claire stepped out behind her. The two of them stood staring through the entry into the house.
“The computer room is downstairs,” Dryden said. He punched the button to lower the garage door again, then led the way back inside.
*
Before seeing it, Dryden had imagined the computer room would look like a scaled-down, slapped-together mock-up of the war room in every movie version of NORAD. Giant flat screens everywhere, a kind of digital nerve center with data streaming in from all over.
Instead it had a single computer. It was a desktop unit that might have cost five hundred dollars at Best Buy. It had a case and a monitor and a keyboard and a mouse, all sitting on a plain wooden counter against one wall of the room. It had a printer on the carpet nearby.
The monitor currently displayed a black screen with a blinking white cursor at the top. Nothing else.
Someone had stuck a Post-it note on the edge of the keyboard, with a line of text scribbled on it:
EXAMPLE QUERY: (YEAR)(MONTH)(DATE)search term goes here
Farther down the length of the counter were three chairs, each with a cluttered workspace in front of it: stacks of paper arranged in haphazard order, notecards pinned to the drywall above, photos and computer printouts everywhere. Dryden made his way past them, taking in details.
There was a card with bullet-point notes written in a neat hand:
■ Mark Squires is 31 as of Apr 10, 2026 (date of Newsweek interview)
■ Would have been 20 as of this past Apr 10
■ Attended Ohio State (NYT interview)
■ 2 students with this name enrolled there now
■ Lived in Atlanta during grade school age (NYT interview)
■ Figure out which Mark Squires at OSU used to live in Atlanta
“Look at this,” Claire said.
Dryden turned to her. She was standing before a long folding table butted up against the end wall of the room. There were short stacks of paper on it, orderly and squared, forming a row that ran the table’s length.
Dryden went to her side, along with Marnie.
For at least a minute none of them said a word. They only stared.
Each stack was topped with a black-and-white photo on regular printer paper. All the photos were of people, ranging in age from the midteens up to fifty. Each had a line of text written in red pen at the top: DOB followed by a date. Date of birth. Judging by the dates and the images, these were all pictures of the subjects as they appeared in the present day. They were the kinds of photos that could have been found on each person’s Facebook page, or in an employee or student directory online.
Every photo also had a red X across the face, with the word DONE written below it.
Claire exhaled slowly. Dryden thought he heard a tremor in the sound.
He moved to his left down the row, looking at each picture in turn. One stopped him: a woman in her late twenties, beautiful but with eyes that looked troubled somehow. Dryden slid the photo off the stack, and found beneath it a printed screenshot from a Facebook timeline.
The woman’s name was—had been—Aubrey Deene. Twenty-eight years old. Postdoc at Arizona State. She had attended high school in South Bend. The person with the red pen had written two words diagonally across the sheet, in big letters: DEFINITELY HER.
Dryden slid the printout aside and saw a text document below it. It was a newspaper article, formatted like the ones in Curtis’s binders. The headline read: DEENE CONFIRMED, HIGH COURT BALANCE SHIFTS TO 7-2.
The article was dated October 9, 2033.
“Oh hell,” Marnie said softly.
Dryden looked up. At the far end of the table, Marnie had raised a hand to her open mouth. Dryden followed Claire to where she stood.
The last four stacks in the line were all topped with photographs of college-aged girls. All four had the same date of birth written at the top, which would have made them all nineteen years old. All four were DONE.
Marnie had slid each picture halfway off the sheet beneath it, revealing three screenshots from Facebook and one from a Twitter account.
All four of the girls had the same name—first, middle, and last.
On each of the four social media printouts, the same scribble appeared in red ink:
1/4 CHANCE IT’S HER
The hand Marnie had raised to her mouth began to shake. She made a fist of it and dropped it to her side. For a long moment she remained quiet. Then she turned to Dryden, her eyes hard.