He pulled a white mask over his face and asked Harry for a scalpel, then pulled back the blanket covering the chest of the first patient and began to cut into the chest cavity.
“Where could he be?” Cathy said to Mike.
They were in Xander’s room, which was a total mess as usual. Cathy sat on his bed, where she often had before while Xander downloaded music for her. She’d always thought of this space as warm and inviting. Now it was just cold and empty without his presence.
Mike paced about, looking for anything that might lead him to Xander’s whereabouts.
Xander’s mother had let them go up, but had refused to go herself. She hadn’t been able to since she heard the news of his disappearance. His shirts littered the floor around his bed and his pants were strung across a chair at his desk. The drawers had been taken out of his dresser and thrown onto the floor. The room had been ransacked almost beyond recognition.
“Who would do this?”
Mike was repeatedly flicking the power switch of Xander’s computer on and off, with no result.
Did this happen to the computer before, or did whoever broke in do it? he thought to himself. “Uh, I don’t know. But I can take a guess.”
“The killer,” she said softly, a shiver running down her spine.
“He must have been looking for something. If he wasn’t, he probably would have killed Mr. and Mrs. Drew,” Mike continued. “The question is: did he find it?”
“I don’t know. But we’ve got to figure it out good and fast before that cop jumps to any more conclusions.”
“Well,” Mike muttered as he pushed aside an old bookcase. “If I know Xander, if he had something important to hide, he’d put it here.” He stepped aside, revealing the ventilation duct to her. He pulled the grate off of it and reached in. His hand came out, first clutching a bundle of adult magazines.
Cathy rolled her eyes in disgust.
“I’m pretty sure that’s not it,” he chuckled.
“Duh. Unless our sicko is a major, um, sicko.”
Mike reached in again, this time coming out with a little disk marked: ENGEN.
“What is it?” she asked, snatching it away.
“Dunno,” he replied, snatching it back. He held it up to his eye. “But I’m sure as hell gonna find out.”
Nothing.
And more nothing.
It seemed as though no matter what Tim did, there was nothing linking the Jacobies to existence. It was as if they had simply appeared dead in that house, out of thin air.
There was no record of them in any state, or even any country for that matter, that he could think to search. It was like they were phantom bodies.
This is it, he thought to himself, hunched over his laptop computer. This is what I need; this is what’s different. One of these things is not like the other and this is definitely it. If only I could figure out what ‘it’ was.
The only thing he had to go on was the name Engen, which he could only assume was a business, but there were no records of it. Anywhere. Ever. It was like it too simply existed on that one slip of paper and nowhere else.
He let out a heaving sigh and felt the uncontrollable urge to pick up smoking again, something he hadn’t done since he was a kid. His parents had told him that those things would kill him. Obviously they hadn’t grown up in Coral Beach, or they’d have realized that the cigarettes would just have to wait in line for the chance.
He closed his eyes tight, realizing suddenly that he hadn’t slept since Carl was killed.
When he opened them, he was looking directly at Carl’s desk across the room, next to the window.
His brow crumpled as he looked up, something sparking in his mind and then fading again.
“Now what was that thought I just had...” he asked, almost begging his mind to let it return. He clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, staring at Carl’s desk. “What are you trying to tell me, old friend?”
He sighed.
His fingers started to dance over the keyboard, as if they had a mind of their own. He went onto the national adoption agency and typed in both of the Jacobies.
No less than fifty hits came up with children they had adopted going back forty years or more, in almost every state and a few in Canada.
“Curiouser and curiouser...” he mumbled, scrolling down through the list.
Coral Beach High School Library.
They could feel the eyes on them. Somewhere in the back of their minds, they could sense it.
However, Mike and Cathy couldn’t really care less right now, as they popped the disk marked ENGEN into the school’s computer.
There was a little internet browser file labeled engen.com. Mike looked at it for a second, then brought the cursor up to it and clicked. Instantly, the browser popped up and began dialing in the name engen.com. When it did come up, the site was blank.
“This is what was so important?” Cathy wondered out loud.
“No. They’ve fixed it so that nobody will find out what was on that site,” he said, then pulled the disk out of the computer and looked at it. “Whoever they are.”
“Thirty-nine bodies done, one to go,” Lance said aloud, with a miniature sigh of relief.
“Yeah, sigh now,” Harry muttered, pointing a finger at the list of corpses. “But our
