“Never heard of him,” Stack replied.
“He’s a beautiful man.”
“Okay.”
“Themost beautiful man.”
Stack didn’t reply.
Brier reached for the glass of water, now full again. “Want some more?”
Although Stack was still thirsty, he shook his head.
Brier set the glass back down and fixed his gaze back on Stack. “You’re sure, outside of the information here, and whatever this Fogel has at Pittsburgh PD, there is nothing else? Nobody else has copies? You haven’t told anyone else what you’ve found over all these years?”
Stack said no, and that was strange because he didn’t want to answer Brier’s question at all. The word came out anyway.
Brier leaned back in the chair again and rolled his head toward the door. “Get in here and take it all!” he shouted. “Take every last scrap!”
Three men came through the door, all in their late twenties, early thirties, wearing long, white trench coats like the man Stack had shot on the stairs. Two of them began carrying out the file boxes, while the third started taking everything down from the walls.
“What is this?” Stack muttered, turning back to Brier.
Brier was no longer sitting across from him. Instead, he found a young man with dark hair and darker eyes and the most horrible burn filling the entire left side of his face. It hurt Stack just to look at it.
Stack tried to stand again, couldn’t move. He looked down, and for the first time saw the ropes binding him to the chair at his arms, legs, and torso. He tugged at them, but they were tight, didn’t give at all. He looked back at the man across from him. “Who the hell are you?”
“I’m David Pickford.”
“You are a beautiful man.”
“Thank you.”
Stack’s eyes fell to the glass on the table. It was dry and filthy, covered in dust. Looked like it had sat empty for days, probably since the last time Fogel was up here. No water at all.
The men in white continued to remove everything from the room, nearly half of it gone already.
A phone rang. David reached inside his black leather jacket and took out a cell phone. He glanced at the display, then back at Stack. “I need to take this. It was a pleasure speaking with you. You’re going to fall asleep now.”
Stack did.
David Pickford pressed the phone to his ear, turned from Stack, and faced the corner of the room. “What?”
Latrese Oliver’s heavy breaths came over the tinny speaker. He swore he smelled the stank rot coming up her throat over the line. “We just missed them on Whidbey.”
David shook the image of her picking at her stump of an arm out of his head, tried not to think about whatever was happening on the inside of her scarred, half-dead body. He couldn’t wait to kill that miserable bitch. “I wouldn’t have,” he said.
“Well, you’re not here, are you?”
“I can’t be everywhere.”
Oliver ignored him. “Edward Thatch, Cammie Brotherton, Dalton, Stella, and the boy are all together now.”
“We had people at the ferry terminal, and you came down from Deception Pass. How did they get past you?”
“Edward Thatch kept a seaplane docked at the base of the cliff beside his house. We caught sight of it taking off from Puget Sound when we arrived.”
“A seaplane? How could we not know about a seaplane?”
