At the risk of being late for class, Denton took the long way to campus. His route would take him through downtown and right past the Moss Hollow Gallery.

There would be no time to stop in to see Linda, but he was compelled to take this small step to be near her, no matter how briefly or how imagined. He needed some kind of reassurance that she was okay. A glance through the window of her shop would be enough. He knew he was being irrational, but that knowledge didn't help.

The events of the morning had left him with an unshakable sense of impending doom. The streets may have been filled with sunlight, but it felt as if there were a shroud over the town.

None of it seemed real. It was more like a dream, or a movie, he had somehow stumbled into. Denton Reed should not be tracking down missing girls, in real life. He should not be standing around police stations or examining police reports on homicides.

The unopened blue file—he could smack himself. The lead on the girl's abduction had distracted him, and he hadn't gone back to read it.

Unlike the vagrant, the police had actually investigated that case. The contents of the thick folder tantalized him with its mysteries. Could there be a key clue in it? Would it lead to whatever or whoever was behind the strange influence that gripped all the victims? He would need to call Bill up and ask to see it.

Tomorrow, he thought. Today Bill was questioning witnesses and working the case. Hopefully, things would settle down by tomorrow. Hopefully by tomorrow, the madman would be behind bars and there would be no need to call.

He turned onto 5th Avenue and got stuck at the light. The gallery where Linda worked was six storefronts up ahead. His pulse rose as he noticed a white van parked right across the street. Its roofline rose above the other cars parked down the side of the road.

Denton chewed on his thumbnail, waiting for the light to turn green. Through the gaps in passing traffic, he peered at the truck, telling himself there was nothing sinister about it.

The second the light changed, he hit the gas so hard that the Mercedes squealed forward. Almost immediately, he stepped on the brake and slowed down to a crawl, as he passed the shop.

The van belonged to a plumbing company. The rear doors were wide-open, and Denton watched a middle-aged man in overalls store his tools away.

When he looked over at the gallery, two women were walking out, smiling and chatting. The glare on the windows was too bright to see inside, but it was clear that for everyone else, it was just a normal day in Bexhill.

The car behind him honked, and Denton sped up.

He cursed his foolishness. He hated how paranoid he was acting. The sign outside the Savings & Loan told him it was thirty-eight degrees outside, and he switched on the stereo and turned up the volume. Funky Hammond organ notes filled the interior of the car. Jimmy Smith laid down a blues riff as deep and flowing as a river, only to be met by Stanley Turrentine's tenor sax, echoing the notes back like a gospel choir. Denton hoped the soothing, familiar sounds would drown out the thoughts in his head the same way it drowned out the world around him.

He wasn't remotely successful.

For the rest of the drive, he tried to ignore the eights that popped out at him from license plates, mail boxes, and gas station prices. Worse still were the vans on the road. He refused to take any notice of them, not the five panel vans and not the fourteen minivans that crossed his path.

By the time he reached campus, his world had become a fragile place.

He parked in his usual spot at the back of the lot, by a row of poplar trees. No matter how late he was, there was always still some spaces back there. Most people didn't want to walk so far.

He crossed the campus to Gutterson Hall, unhurried but purposefully, and got to class just as the clock was hitting 10:00 a.m. The students settled in, talking loudly and slowly taking their seats, while he scanned over his lesson plan. Today, he was supposed to cover problems with erroneous assumptions. The central example of the lecture was misleading evidence on a subject's bookcase. During the course of the lesson, he would demonstrate the importance of not taking books in a person's possession as a direct representation of their personality. All too often any item purposely put on display hinted more at how a person wanted to be perceived, rather than who they were. The same principle applied to art on the wall.

Denton went through the lecture by rote. He didn't calculate it, but if he had done the math, he would have realized that he had given the same lesson exactly twenty-one times, twice a semester, for five and a half years. And tomorrow, he would give it again, to his second Observation Psychology 264 class.

After it was over, everyone filed out faster and less talkative than when they had entered. A few unstifled yawns could be clearly heard over the commotion. Denton took his time packing up his briefcase, letting them all leave before him. He hoped to get out without having to talk to anyone. Unfortunately, Monica Rainville came over to him.

"Here are the conference notes from the last two weeks," she said, handing over the bundle of paper.

Denton made a show of looking through the sheaf of handwritten pages. Monica's overly tidy script filling page after page with information he wasn't terribly interested in. The students were required to attend conferences, the teaching assistants were required to rank them, and Denton was required to pretend it was important to his curriculum.

"Very good," he said and slipped it in with his other course notes. "I filled out my time sheet for last week. You'll approve it before the deadline, right?"

"Yes, Monica." For three semesters she'd been one of his TAs. He had never once failed to okay her hours on time, yet she reminded him every week. At first, he assumed it was because she'd had problems with other professors she'd worked for. There were some horror stories around Milton about it taking months for assistants to get paid. But as he got to know her, he realized it was something more serious. The woman clearly had a moderate anxiety disorder. He had tried to steer her to Health Services with no success. He'd also tried to get her to self-diagnose and had even gone so far as to subtly slip her a GAD-7 questionnaire, but she failed to take his hints. The one thing he had not done was confront her with it. In the psychology department, diagnosing colleagues was a very touchy subject. He had once joked to Linda that it was like a mental institution where all the patients had degrees.

"Anything else?" A glance at his watch told him that the next class would be starting soon. They were the last two in the lecture hall. When she didn't answer right away, he headed for the door.

"I got a call from Stephen Kaling this morning," she said, following him.

Denton stopped and looked at her, waiting to hear what she thought was important about it. "He called to let me know he wouldn't be in class today. I thought it strange. He doesn't normally make excuses when he skips." "What was his excuse?"

"Get this, he said he had to file a missing person's report with the police. I'll give him points for originality." She rolled her eyes dramatically.

"Did he say who was missing?"

"Claimed it was his girlfriend. If I was dating him, I'd go missing too." She snorted, laughing at her own joke.

Concern showing across her face, as she noticed Denton's expression. "What?"

"Nothing." He bit back on the admonishment that formed on his tongue, as he turned and walked out into the corridor. She had no idea what she was saying. Best to keep it that way. Best not to worry her. Besides, he was in no position to tell her what was going on.

On the way to his office, that question bothered him: what was going on? Nothing added up. He ran through the evidence again in his head. Meyers had changed before he had been killed and so had the girl before she had been abducted—if she had in fact been abducted. The first victim was still an unknown. But what about the man known as Ray, how had he changed? He stayed in town longer than normal. Did that count? The homeless man should have left by the end of September at the latest. He was killed in the middle of November. If that marked an alteration, then the change happened months before his murder, not days.

Denton tried to remember the photos of the campsite. Other than the graffiti, was there anything else? Nothing had seemed out of the ordinary to him when he'd looked at them. But the pictures weren't very detailed; there were no close-ups of any of his possessions.

"Foley's gone too far this time." Cole Radnor walked up behind Denton and started complaining without any other greeting.

"What is it now?" Denton slowed down but continued toward his office door. He found it impossible to take Radnor very seriously. The man barely spoke outside of his classes, unless it was to moan or criticize. And he was in no mood to get dragged into Radnor's latest catastrophe.

"He sent me an email telling me I'd have to share my office with the new guy. Can you believe it?" He kept pace with Denton.

"Didn't you use to share it with Pat?"

"Yeah, but it's been mine since he left in May. I tell you, he has it out for me. Why doesn't he stick him in with Yu?"

Denton's eyes went wide in disbelief, thinking that Radnor wanted him to share his cramped office with the new professor, but then he realized that he had meant Jon Yu. Jon had one of the largest offices in the department, mainly because he brought in a fortune in research grants for the college. He also had full tenure and had been there for over twenty years. Radnor, on the other hand, wasn't even halfway through his tenure requirements, despite teaching at Milton for seven years.

"I read that paper he did in Psychology Interest," Denton said, referring to the new professor. He was young and eager, publishing every chance he got. He would be a welcome addition to the team when he started in January. So of course, Radnor saw him as a threat. "He had some interesting ideas on reinterpreting Hegel's dialectical method... seems like you two would have a lot in common."

He unlocked his door but didn't open it out of fear that Radnor would follow him inside.

"That's not the point. It's the principle." It felt like the tense whine of Radnor's voice should be accompanied by a childish foot stamp. "Three-oh-eight is my office, I've earned it."

Denton's grip on the door knob tightened.

"Foley's trying to force me out. But it won't work. I'm not going to let that bastard get away with it."

"I'm sure everything will be fine," Denton said brusquely, trying to get away. "Excuse me, but I have to prepare for a meeting."

"I'm telling you, he has it in for me. If he had his way I'd be meeting my students out in the street, or by some dumpster in an alley, or—"

"Under the train bridge." A gear slid into place in Denton's head and his voice came out barely a whisper.

"Huh?"

"Never mind." Denton locked his door.

"Where are you going?" Cole Radnor said to Denton's back, as he marched back down the hallway.