full twenty-four hours kissing every part of you and telling you how beautiful you are. And I know you’ve got some sort of screw loose in your head, and you don’t want to talk about this stuff, so just kind of rub my head if you heard me and you know you’re in for a crazy awesome twenty-four hours pretty soon.”
He held himself stiffly, but after a moment, he scrubbed one hand over my short hair.
“Good boy,” I said when I let him go. “Now get your laptop, come back here, and let’s snuggle while we work.”
To my surprise, he did. He fit pretty nicely against me, and I rested my chin on his shoulder while I read. Elien’s eyes were red for a while, and he kept blinking. I let him do what he needed to do while I searched for more articles.
After a couple more hours, I said, “Status report?”
“I’ve got nothing,” he said. “I mean, he obviously used this computer a lot, and it’s full of files. I was even able to get into his online accounts, email, that kind of stuff, because he had a password manager and it’s still active. But besides those pictures, there’s nothing relevant.”
“Well,” I said, “I figured out how to kill the hashok.”
“What? How?”
“Burn it.”
“Are you sure?”
“Whaley sounds pretty sure.”
“Who’s Whaley?”
I told him and said, “I guess he was a pretty serious ethnographer or whatever they call them, but he kind of went off the deep end before he died. He was convinced monsters were real. Told everyone he was being hunted. He lost his academic position, and it sounds like he hit rock bottom pretty fast. He sold all his papers to a tiny private college because he needed money.”
“Jesus. What happened then?”
“He died. Want to guess how?”
Elien shook his head.
“Animal attack,” I said. “Sound familiar?”
“That’s crazy.”
“Not really. Look what happened to David when he got too close. Look what happened when you and I started poking around.”
“I thought he figured out how to kill it,” Elien said.
“Well, I guess that was in theory more than in practice.”
“And what’s the theory?”
“Fire.”
“Ok.”
“He talks about the grass of the field burning, the chaff consumed by the cleansing flame.”
“Sounds Biblical,” Elien said. “Our monster isn’t Biblical.”
“Maybe he just liked a nice turn of phrase.”
“Ok, let’s assume he’s right. How do we find the hashok?”
“Well, let’s think about this,” I said. “Process of elimination. We know it’s someone who’s connected to DuPage Behavioral, right?”
“We don’t know that, but it’s a pretty safe bet. All of the victims have had connections there.”
“And it’s not Zahra, because she’s dead. And it’s not Richard.”
Shaking his head, Elien said, “I know you’re trying to spare me—”
“I’m not, actually. Richard was in the hotel restaurant with that guy, remember? Even if he had somehow managed to get to Zahra’s house, attack us, and make his way back, he’s got that guy as his alibi for the whole night. I asked after they took us in to the station, and one of them finally told me. Richard was with that guy all night.”
“Oh.”
“Sorry. It sucks to hear that.”
“No, it’s just kind of confirmation.”
“So,” I said, “who else from DuPage Behavioral has a connection to these victims? Can we find out which doctors they were seeing? Do you think that’s the pattern?”
“No,” Elien said slowly, “remember? All the doctors in the practice see people with PTSD. Their money makers are addiction and ‘distressed executives,’ but they all take patients with PTSD.”
“Do they all have access to each other’s records? If the records were computerized, anybody in the practice could have tracked victims easily.”
“Maybe,” Elien said. “I don’t know how secure those records are.”
“Somebody could have broken into Zahra’s office,” I said, “and examined the physical files.”
Frowning, Elien opened his mouth, but his phone buzzed, and he glanced at it.
“You can take it,” I said.
“No, it’s Richard.”
“You should take it.”
He shook his head. “It’s just a text. Muriel’s there, and she’s telling him I asked for a ride, which is crazy because—” He faltered and then looked at me. “Oh Christ.”
“What?”
“She has access to all the records because she does administrative work on top of seeing patients.” His words tumbled out. “She lives out by me too, Dag. She lives past us, upstream on the Okhlili. Right on the edge of the bayou. She drove me to the support group a ton of times. She would have recognized everyone; she could have pulled their files easily. She had her own private herd.”
“And