entrance alcove. I followed him in and closed the door. The house was only modestly furnished but I ignored this because my attention was immediately drawn to the rear wall of the living room. The wall was made entirely of thick glass panels offering a spectacular view of the entire Valley sprawling below the house. I crossed the room and gazed out. At the far rim of the Valley I saw the rise of another mountain chain. I stepped close enough to the glass so that I could see my own breath against it and looked down into the dark arroyo directly below. A sense of unease at being at such a precipice licked at me and I stepped back as Backus turned on a lamp behind me.
It was then that I saw the cracks. Three of the five glass panels had fractures spidering through them. I turned to the left and saw the disjointed image of myself and Backus in a mirrored wall that had also been fractured by the earthquake.
“What else happened? Is it safe to be in here?”
“It’s safe, Jack. But safety is a relative thing. The next big one could come along and change everything . . . As far as other damage, there is a floor below us. Was a floor, I should say. Clearmountain said that is where the damage was. Buckled walls, broken water pipes.”
I put my computer bag and pillowcase down on the floor and turned back to the rear window. My eyes were drawn to the view and I bravely stepped to the glass again. I heard a sharp creaking sound from the direction of the alcove where we had come in. I looked at Backus with alarm.
“Don’t worry, they had the pylons checked by an engineer before they even started the sting. The house isn’t going anywhere. It just looks like it is and sounds like it is and that’s what they wanted for the sting.”
I nodded again but not with a lot of confidence. I looked back at him through the glass.
“The only thing going somewhere is you, Jack.”
I glanced at him in the mirror, not sure what he meant. And there, quadrupled in the broken reflection, I saw the gun in his hand.
“What is this?” I asked.
“This is the end of the line.”
In a rush it came to me. I’d taken a wrong turn and blamed the wrong one. In that moment I also came to the realization that it was the flaw in my own interior that had led me the wrong way. My inability to believe and accept. I had taken Rachel’s emotions and looked for the flaw in them instead of the truth.
“You,” I said. “You are the Poet.”
He didn’t answer. Instead he gave a small smile and a nod. I knew then that Rachel’s plane hadn’t been recalled and that Agent Carter was not coming with a tech and two good agents. I could see the true plan perfectly, right down to the finger Backus must have kept on the phone while he faked the call in my hotel room. I was alone now with the Poet.
“Bob, why? Why you?”
I was so shocked I was still calling him by his first name like a friend would.
“It’s a story as old as any of them,” he replied. “Too old and forgotten to tell you. You don’t need to know it now, anyway. Sit down on the chair, Jack.”
He signaled with the gun toward the stuffed chair opposite the couch. Then he aimed the gun back at me. I didn’t move.
“The calls,” I said. “You made the calls from Thorson’s room?”
I said it more to be saying something as a stall for time, though in my gut I knew that time was meaningless to me now. No one knew I was there. No one would be coming. Backus laughed in a forced, scoffing manner at my question.
“The luck of chance,” he said. “That night I checked in for all of us—Carter, Thorson, me. Then I apparently mixed the keys up. I made those calls from my own room, but the bill had Thorson’s name on it. I didn’t know that, of course, until I took the bills from your room Monday night while you were with Rachel.”
I thought about what Rachel had said about making your own luck. I guessed it applied to serial killers as well.
“How’d you know I had the bills?”
“I didn’t. Not for sure. But you called Michael Warren and told him you