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information appeared on the screen.
    “Huzza! Hoorah! Hooray!”
    The truck was owned by a nonprofit corporation, Progress for Perfect Peace. That sounded nice. Warm and cuddly. Progress was a good thing. Perfect peacewas a good thing. Even a monster with lemon-yellow eyes and virtually no proper moral upbringing could see what good things they were.
    Progress for Perfect Peace had an address. In Rainbow Falls. Jocko printed it.
    After he backed out of the DMV, he looked for a Progress for Perfect Peace website. Wasn’t one. That seemed peculiar. Suspicious. A charity ought to have a website. Everyone had a website.
    Even Jocko had a website: www.jockothinksaboutlife.com. When he had an important insight about life, he posted it there. Maybe his thoughts could help other people. Just a few days ago he had posted: All muffins are tasty, but some are tastier than others—which isn’t an insult to the lesser muffins, it’s just the way life is. I like mine with jelly .
    Jocko checked public records for Montana corporations. No need to hack them. Progress for Perfect Peace, Inc., had an address. It matched the one from the DMV.
    The CEO was Victor Leben. The name was no coincidence. Victor Frankenstein. Then Victor Helios. Now Victor Leben. Victor .
    “Holy moly!”
    On the screen, the o in Victor seemed to be an eye. Watching Jocko. Victor would know Jocko found him. Victor knew everything.
    Jocko was wearing a T-shirt bearing the image of Buster Steelhammer, the greatest star in the history of World Wrestling Entertainment. The shirt usually made him feel brave. Not now.
    The o in Victor . Watching. Impossible. But Victor could do anything. Victor was omniscient.
    Bad. Very bad. Terrible. Catastrophe! Jocko suddenly became supercharged with negative energy. Nerves wound tight. Heart swelling with fear. Work it off, work it off. Dance! Dance! Jocko sprang to his feet on the chair. He danced desperately. The chair spun. Victor watched through the o in his name, somehow, some way, watched.
    Dancing, spinning, watched by Victor, Jocko was as good as dead. Jocko was a dead monster dancing.

chapter 7
    Behind the wheel of his Land Rover, Dagget followed a serpentine course through Rainbow Falls, hoping his lawman’s intuition inspired the many turns he made. He suspected that he was probably guided by nothing more than whim.
    In the passenger seat, Frost studied his laptop. On the screen, a blinking red dot on a partial map of the town revealed the current location of the patrol car driven by Rafael Jarmillo, the chief of police. The day before, they had secretly affixed a transponder to Jarmillo’s vehicle, and thereafter they had monitored his movements. Since the previous morning, the chief had visited a lot of places around town, only one of them with any apparent law-enforcement connection.
    “Yeah,” Frost said, “he’s not just paused at Montana Power and Light. It’s a full stop.”
    The Land Rover was fitted out with a police scanner, but Dagget and Frost no longer bothered to listen to it. More than twelve hours earlier, Chief Jarmillo and his men stopped using a common ten-code that any cop anywhere might understand, and began to use a code of their own creation. Frost had tried to crack it with his computer, but he had failed. The portions of the police transmissions that weren’t in this code were crisp statements, revelatory of nothing.
    “You want to go to the power company?” Frost asked. “See what’s happening?”
    “What I’m thinking is, while the chief is out and about, maybe we stop by his house, have a little chat with his wife.”
    Dagget and Frost, who had been in town three days, were agents with a unit of the FBI so secret that it was unknown even to the director of the bureau. They believed something was badly wrong in Rainbow Falls, but they didn’t have any clue what it might be. The whistle-blower who had alerted them to the situation knew only that during the past couple of years,