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computer password,” said Hood. “We’ll monitor his incoming messages every hour, and we’ll forward his correspondence to you, immediately. And you’ll have to do the same for us when you get the mail first. There’s no other way for this to work. You have to trust us and we have to trust you.”
    Seliah stood and looked down on them. “You steal Sean’s body and soul and now you even want his words.”
    “He needs your help,” said Hood. “And so do we.”
    She gave them her password and the three of them sat on the couch and watched the laptop screen and waited for Ozburn to reply. After an hour and no message from her husband, Seliah asked them to leave. When Hood asked for the Piper registration number she wrote it hastily on a notepad, tore off the sheet and handed it to him. She stared at the floor as they walked out, then shut the door behind them.

6
    When they were gone Seliah put on shorts and a tank top and running shoes and drove down to the pier and parked on the street near the ocean. The tourists were gone by now and the beach was nearly empty. There were lights on in the pier restaurants and a few diners in the sidewalk cafés beside the railroad tracks.
    She stretched, then set off north along the tracks, running the edges for a while, then running down the middle of them with the gravel shifting underfoot and the moon leading her on. Her heart felt like a weight inside her, a great, cumbersome anchor that was trying to drag her down. She tried to outrun it but couldn’t and it spoke her to anyway: He murdered three men this morning. He murdered three men this morning. Did you, Sean? Gentle Sean, good Sean? Do I believe Charlie and Janet? Do I dare not to?
    After the first mile she checked her wristwatch and, just as she suspected, she was faster than two days ago—already fifteen seconds off her last time. Even carrying a heart that felt like an anchor.
    She tried to concentrate on her stride and her breathing but all she could think about were the last four weeks. Four weeks and so many strange things for Sean and for herself. First there were Sean’s aches and pains and his crazy sexual appetite. Then a few days later he suddenly gets much stronger in the weight room, and his body is still aching and he hears things he shouldn’t be able to hear, and his eyes hurt so bad in light that he buys news sunglasses. What causes those things? Flu? Steroids? Drugs? The common cold? The plague? Sean had thought flu at first, but after a few days the symptoms were far stronger and stranger. Then the symptoms would vanish for a day or two. He took no steroids, no prescription drugs, no recreational ones. And he began sounding extreme, almost crazy, in some of his e-mails.
    And the extra-weird part, thought Seliah, was that a couple of weeks after Sean got stronger in the weight room, she started getting faster on her runs! And two weeks after Sean started hearing things loudly, even hearing things he shouldn’t be able to hear, Seliah start hearing them, too. Just like what happened to Sean, all those near and distant sounds would blend in her brain at night into mysterious, flowing melodies. Some were lovely. And two weeks after all Sean’s sensitivity to light and cold, she got those symptoms, too. And she’d become easily angered and provoked. Thoughts of violence came barging into her usually gentle soul. She was either too hot or too cold, and neither seemed to have anything to do with the temperature of where she was. And the insomnia and the sex and the terrifying dreams. My God , she thought, the sex was almost constant the last time we were together. That was two weeks ago, when they snuck a weekend in Las Vegas—snuck it from Sean’s criminal partners, from ATF, from the world. Undercover agents did it all the time. She was fairly sure that Charlie Hood suspected but he said nothing. And Sean’s crazy sex drive had all but killed me , thought Seliah. And now, now, two weeks later? I