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portent, a sign in the sky of great spiritual significance.
    The sun will turn into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord.

Chapter Fourteen
    That night I dreamed of Suicide Kings, Wayne Williams, Hahn Ling, Martin Fisher, and my mom’s funeral.
    Graveside. At Mom’s funeral. The living and the dead side by side in the folding chairs on the green AstroTurf spread out beneath the small awning and before the dark wooden casket.
    Mom was among them. Smiling at me, nodding her support of what I was saying to comfort those mourning her passing.
    I’m so proud of you , she mouthed.
    Danny Jacobs was sitting beside his mom, Cheryl. You couldn’t tell one was dead and one was alive.
    Dad’s old Irish Setter, Wallace, was sitting just outside the tent on the grass, tongue out, panting loudly, his red hair shining in the sun.
    Wallace had been dead a while. Dad’s inseparable companion for much of his too-short life, he had gotten sick and not left Dad’s house during the last several years before he died.
    Why hadn’t Dad replaced him? Grief? Busyness? Had he found companionship somewhere else? Why hadn’t I asked him?
    Martin Fisher was next to LaMarcus Williams.
    Where is Anna? Why isn’t she here?
    “The faceless man has her,” Martin Fisher said aloud, though I hadn’t voiced my thoughts.
    “You’ve got to get her back,” LaMarcus said. “And fast.”
    “She’s not here so she’s not dead,” I said.
    “That’s not necessarily true, my brother,” Wayne Williams said. “People can be dead and you not even know it.”
    The two Mollys were sitting together on the second row of chairs.
    Molly Gellar was a nurse I had dated briefly when I first moved back to Pottersville from Atlanta. Molly Thomas was the wife on an inmate involved in the first investigation I had conducted at PCI.
    “She’s not dead,” Molly Thomas said, her hair still wet and matted from where she had been pulled from the river.
    “She can’t be,” Molly Gellar added, bullet hole still in her head, the small round wound haloed by a reddish abrasion ring and the darker tattooing, stippling, and burn marks of the barrel.
    “People can be dead and they not even know it,” Williams added.
    “Don’t listen to them, honey,” Mom said. “We’re all alive––and all dead, I guess. Go back to the eulogy.”
    Suddenly there was an inmate in the last chair on the last row.
    No matter how hard I looked, I couldn’t really see him.
    “I’ve got a question,” I said. “How can I break him out of PCI?”
    “You can’t,” Hahn said. “We all die there.”
    “You’ll lose your job,” Molly Gellar said.
    “You’d go to jail,” Molly Thomas said.
    “It’s easy,” the inmate said. “I have to be someone else.”
    I nodded.
    “Can’t be me,” he added.
    “But how? How can you be somebody else?”
    “Put that big brain of yours to work on it,” Jordan Moore said.
    She hadn’t been there before. Now she was sitting in the front row looking as fresh as the morning and beautiful as ever.
    She was my first college girlfriend. She had been so much more than a girlfriend. She was the embodiment of pain and tragedy for me like few people were.
    “You’ll figure it out.”
    I woke haunted.
    Not afraid or disturbed, just haunted.
    I missed my mom. Was she really dead?
    I missed many of the others who attended her funeral in my dream, and felt as if I had just spent actual time with them. Now they were all gone. I was alone and lonely.
    If I could just roll over and touch Anna, hold her and have her whisper how much she loves me.
    But she too was gone.
    And in her absence I was utterly alone.

Chapter Fifteen
    The call that came the next morning wasn’t the one I was waiting for.
    “Chris Taunton is asking to see you again,” Dad said. “Says it’s extremely urgent and important. What’s going on?”
    “With him? I have no idea.”
    “Why’s he talkin’ to you and not us?”
    “I