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always calmed John—until now.
    Johnny .
    At the state hospital, the boy had called him Johnny. Having read about Alton Blackwood, the kid knew John had slain the killer.
    Here seemed to be proof that Billy patterned his killing spree after Blackwood’s murder of the Valdane family twenty years earlier.
    When John retrieved the second document, CALVINO2, he discovered five photographs, the first of himself. It was part of a newspaper article about a citation for valor that he and his sometime partner, Lionel Timmins, had received more than two years earlier.
    In the picture, he appeared uncomfortable; in fact, he had been embarrassed. Having survived, as a boy, when everyone else in his family had died, he could do nothing as long as he lived that would make him, in the balance, deserving of an award for valor.
    He had tried to decline the presentation, but Parker Moss, Area 1 commander—who oversaw Homicide, Missing Persons, and Robbery, in addition to other bureaus, details, and units—insisted he attend and accept. Awards for valor were good PR for the department.
    The second photo in CALVINO2 was of Nicolette. Nicky. It was from the website of Lannermil Galleries, a fine-art dealer, the primary representative for her work. She looked radiant.
    John’s palms were damp. He blotted them on his pants.
    The file also contained photos of their son, thirteen-year-old Zachary, and their daughters, eight-year-old Minette—whom they all called Minnie—and Naomi, eleven. These three were snapshots, taken a month earlier, on the evening of Minnie’s eighth birthday. The only people present had been him, Nicolette, and the three kids.
    John could think of no way that these pictures could have been transferred to Billy Lucas’s computer. No way.
    Nevertheless, he recognized the document for what it must be: a file of homicidal desire, photographs of targets, the beginning of a murder scrapbook. Evidently Billy had intended at some point to kill them all, just as Alton Blackwood had wasted all but one member of the previous Calvino family.
    After exiting the document, John looked at the nearest window down which rain washed in the fading daylight, and he thought of the dark urine flooding across the glass partition between him and Billy.
    His disquiet quickened into fear. The house was warm, but he was chilled. He shivered.
    He did not feel less of a man or less of a cop for being afraid. Fear was useful if it didn’t foster paralytic indecision. Fear could clarify and sharpen his thinking.
    Calling up the directory again and scrolling through it, John searched for other document titles that might be surnames. Perhaps Billy had selected and researched other target families.
    Whatever the young killer’s plans had been, surely they were now of no concern. The security at the state hospital was layered and reliable. He could not escape. The psychiatric board would not deem him cured at least for decades, if ever; they would not turn him loose.
    Yet intuition warned John that his family was a target. The taut wire of his survival instinct vibrated, it hummed .
    When he found no obvious surnames used as document titles, he closed out the program and shut down the computer.
    From within the desk came a few bars of a song that John didn’t recognize. When he pulled open a drawer, the bars repeated, and he picked up a cell phone that must have belonged to Billy Lucas.
    No caller ID appeared on the display.
    John waited through fourteen repetitions of the song bite. When the call was not sent to voice mail, the caller’s persistence gave him the reason he needed to answer.
    “Hello.”
    He received no reply.
    “Who’s there?”
    Not a dead line. The hollow silence was alive, the caller unresponsive.
    The best way to engage in any game of intimidation was to play boldly by the rules of the would-be intimidator. John listened to the listener, giving him no satisfaction.
    After half a minute, a single word whispered down the line.