eyes, can move. Only my arms and legs are stuck. Why?”
Brier shrugged. “God works in mysterious ways when you’re alive, but he pulls out all the stops after death. Shit gets crazy.” He leaned back in his chair. “How did you learn about Charter?”
Stack told him about the note Fogel had found in Thatch’s hotel room, the connections he made to several past employees. “The white vans showed up right after I started making those calls,” he said. “They’ve got to be from Charter. It’s all connected.”
Brier slammed a hand down on the desk.
Stack jumped.
Brier grinned. “Sorry, buddy, you seemed to be losing focus. Needed to bring you back.” He glanced around the room. “So everything you’ve learned over the years, all the data on this case, it’s all here in this room?”
“Most of it,” Stack said. “Fogel has the official records at Pittsburgh PD for some. The rest is here.”
Brier thought about this for a moment.
Stack frowned. “You don’t remember that? You kept the files going after I retired. Kept the investigation going. Fogel has your files.”
“Things get fuzzy after you die,” Brier said again.
“I still remember. Is that because I just died?”
Brier said nothing to this. He leaned back in his chair, then forward again, rocking on the back legs. “What do you know about David Pickford?”
“Who?”
“David Pickford.”
“Never heard of him,” Stack replied.
“He’s a beautiful man.”
“Okay.”
“The most 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