A weight hit my lap. I jumped.

Birdie brrrp-ed brrrp-ed and rubbed his head on my chin. and rubbed his head on my chin.

"Where's Harry, Bird?"

The cat brrrp-ed brrrp-ed again. again.

"You're right."

Gathering the feline, I crawled into bed.

Harry was sitting on a carved wooden bench outside Obeline's gazebo, the totem pole casting zoomorphic shadows across her face. She was holding a sc.r.a.pbook, insisting I look.

The page was black. I could see nothing.

Harry spoke words I couldn't make out. I went to turn the page, but my arm jerked wildly. I tried over and over, with the same spastic result.

Frustrated, I stared at my hand. I was wearing gloves with the fingers cut off. Nothing protruded from the holes.

I tried to wiggle my missing fingers. My arm jerked again.

The sky darkened and a piercing cry split the air. I looked up at the totem pole. The eagle's beak opened and the carved bird screeched again.

My lids dragged apart. Birdie was nudging my elbow. The phone was ringing.

Fumbling the handset to my ear, I clicked on.

"-lo."

Ryan made none of his usual sleeping-princess jokes. "They've cracked the code."

"What?" Still sluggish.

"Cormier's thumb drive. We're in. You available to scan faces?"

"Sure, but-"

"Need a ride?"

"I can drive." I checked the clock: 8:13.

"Time to make yourself useful, princess." The old Ryan.

"I've been up for hours." I looked at Bird. The cat looked back. Disapproving?

"Right."

"I was online until three-thirty."

"Learn much?"

"Yes."

"Surprised you could stay awake after such rigorous physical activity."

"Cooking pasta?"

Pause.

"You OK with last night?" Ryan's voice had gone serious.

"What happened last night?"

"Headquarters. ASAP."

Dial tone.

Fifty minutes later I entered a conference room on the fourth floor of Wilfrid-Derome. The small s.p.a.ce contained one battered government-issue table and six battered government-issue chairs. A wall-mounted chalkboard. Vertical-slat blinds on one dingy window.

The table held a cardboard box, a phone, a rubber snake, a laptop, and a seventeen-inch monitor. Solange Lesieur was connecting the latter two pieces of equipment.

Ryan arrived as Lesieur and I were speculating on the provenance of the serpent. Hippo was two steps behind. Bearing coffee.

Seeing me, Hippo frowned.

"Brennan's good with faces," Ryan explained.

"Better than she is with advice?"

Lesieur spoke before I could think of a clever rejoinder. "No coffee for me."

"I brought extra," Hippo said.

Lesieur shook her head. "I'm already stoked."

"What's Harpo doing here?" Sideswiping the reptile, Hippo placed his tray on the table.

Lesieur and I exchanged glances. The snake's name was Harpo?

Everyone sat. While Lesieur booted the laptop, the rest of us stirred powdered cream and/or sugar into the opaque brown sludge in our Styrofoam cups. Hippo went with two packets of each.

"All set?"

Nods around.

Lesieur inserted Cormier's thumb drive. The PC bong-bonged. bong-bonged.

"Cormier was security-conscious but amateur." Lesieur's fingers worked the keyboard. "Want to know his system?"

"Talk quick, this stuff is lethal." Ryan pounded a fist to his chest.

"Next time get your own freakin' coffee." Hippo flipped Ryan the bird.

Ryan fist-pounded his chest.

I recognized the jesting for what it was. Morgue humor. Everyone was on edge, jittery about the images we might soon see.

"The best pa.s.swords are alphanumeric," Lesieur began.

"Sheez." Hippo doing derisive. "It's the jargon not the coffee that's gonna take us out."

"An alphanumeric pa.s.sword is composed of both numbers and letters. The more random the combination, and the more characters included, the safer you are."

"Don't rely on your puppy's name backward," I said.

Lesieur continued as though no one had spoken.

"Cormier used an old trick. Pick a song or poem. Take the first letter of each word of the opening line. Bracket that string of letters with numbers, using the date of the pa.s.sword's creation, day at the front, month at the back."

The Windows screen opened and Lesieur entered a few more keystrokes.

"Generates a pretty good encryption chain, but a lot of us geeks are wise to the trick."

"A double-digit, multiletter, double-digit pattern," I guessed.

"Exactly."

Ryan was right. The coffee was undrinkable. Sleep-deprived as I was, I gave up trying.

"Working on the a.s.sumption that the pa.s.sword was created this year, I checked music charts, created letter sequences from the opening lines of the top fifteen songs for each of the fifty-two weeks, then ran combinations of all month-day number pairs with all-letter strings. Hit with the program's four hundred and seventy-fourth alphanumeric chain."

"Only four seventy-four?" Hippo's distaste for technology was evident in his sarcasm.

"I had to try both French and English."

"Lemme guess. Cormier was hot for Walter Ostanek."

Three blank looks.

"The polka king?"

The looks held.

"The Canadian Frank Yankovic?"

"You're into polka?" Ryan.

"Ostanek's good." Defensive.

No one disputed that.

"You should know him. He's your homeboy. Duparquet, Quebec."

"Cormier used Richard Seguin," Lesieur said.

Hippo shrugged. "Seguin's good, too."

"The week of October twenty-ninth, Seguin's "Lettres ouvertes" charted at number thirteen in Montreal. He used the opening line of a song from that alb.u.m."

"I'm impressed," I said. I was.

"A fourteen-character alphanumeric code will keep the average hacker out." Lesieur hit Enter Enter. "But I'm not your average hacker."

The screen changed to black. On the upper right was a graphic showing old-fashioned spool film, below it a playlist offering a dozen unt.i.tled selections. Digits indicated the duration of each. Most ran between five and ten minutes.

"The thumb drive contains video files, some brief, some with running times of up to an hour. I've opened nothing, figuring you'd want the first look. I also figured you'd want to start with the shorter clips."

"Go." Ryan's tone was devoid of humor now.

"This is virgin territory, people." Lesieur double-clicked the first listing.

The quality was poor, the duration six minutes.

The scene showed things I never imagined possible.

31.

T HE VIDEO HAD BEEN SHOT WITH A SINGLE HANDHELD CAMERA HE VIDEO HAD BEEN SHOT WITH A SINGLE HANDHELD CAMERA. There was no sound.

The setting is a room done in roach-motel cheap. The side table is wood-grain plastic. The double bed is plaid-quilted. A shadow hairlines from a nail on the wall above the headboard.

Normally my mind would have played with that. What had been removed? Terrible ma.s.s-market art? A print of beer-drinking dogs playing cards? Something fingering the motel's name or location?

No speculation this time. All my senses were focused on the horror center stage.