* * *

 

—

Back inside the library, Quill’s companion waited, frozen in place, for what seemed like hours—maybe ten minutes. After the iPhone light disappeared, she had not heard another thing.

Taking a chance, she dug silently in her purse and found the switchblade she’d purchased in Iowa, where they were legal, as personal protection. She wrapped the knife in the tail of her jacket and pushed the button that popped open the razor-sharp four-and-seven-eighths-inch serrated blade, the mechanical unlatching muffled by the cloth.

She listened for another moment, then crawled down the aisle between the book stacks, got to her knees, then to her feet, and slipped over to the carrel. The door had a small, vertical-slit window, but with translucent glass.

She muttered, “Shit,” and waited, and waited, listening, tried the door, but it was locked. She turned on her iPhone’s flashlight and directed it down through the window but couldn’t see anything at all through the cloudy pane. Nothing was moving inside.

Quill, she thought, might be dead. He was probably badly hurt, at the least. She should call the police; but she wasn’t the type.

The thought held her for a moment. She didn’t owe Quill. He’d brought her into this. If he was still alive, and survived, she could tell him that she ran away and never knew that he’d been hurt.

The decision made, she turned off the light and slipped through the library, her lips moving in a prayer that wasn’t a prayer, because she didn’t know any, but simply a Please! Please! Please! addressed to any god who might be tuned in. She made it down the stairs and out into the river air, the Mississippi curling away beneath the bridge with anything but innocence: it had seen more murders than any single man or woman ever would.

A half block from the library, the woman folded the knife but kept it in her hand, her thumb on the spring release. On the far side of the bridge, she was swallowed up by the night.

 

* * *

 

—

Because he was murdered on a Friday night and had no firm appointments over the weekend, and missed only one day at the lab, Quill’s body wasn’t found until Tuesday, when an untoward odor began leaking under the carrel’s locked door.

Definitely not coffee.

Inquiries were made, a second key was found, the door was opened, the cops were called.

Quill had lived alone since his third wife moved out. Neither of his first two wives, nor his estranged third, made any secret of the fact that they thoroughly disliked him.

A two-week investigation produced baffled cops. The cops didn’t think they were baffled—not yet, anyway—but the Star Tribune and local television stations agreed that they were. And who do you believe, the cops or the mainstream media?

When no suspect had been produced after two weeks, Quill’s well-connected sister, co-heir to their father’s wildly successful company, Quill Micro-Sprockets, called her old friend and a major political donee, the governor of Minnesota.

The governor called the commissioner of the Department of Public Safety; the commissioner called the director of the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension; the BCA director called one of his supervisory agents; the supervisory agent, after a comprehensive course of vulgarity, obscenity, and profanity, made a call of his own.

At the end of the daisy chain was a Flowers.

CHAPTER

TWO

   Virgil Flowers walked out of a café in Blue Earth, Minnesota, slightly bilious after a dinner of brown slices of beef and brown gravy over brown potatoes and dead green beans, coconut cream pie on the side, with a pointless Diet Coke. He had to quit all that; he knew it, but hadn’t yet done it. He burped and the burp tasted . . . brown.

He’d taken three steps out the door before he noticed a motley group of twenty people standing in the parking lot, staring up at the sky to the south. When he turned to look, he saw the UFO.

There was no question about it, really.

The alien craft was obviously far away, but still appeared to be more than half the size of a full moon. It was motionless, hovering over the countryside like a polished dime, brilliantly lit, alternating gold and white light, almost as bright as the setting sun, and hard to look at without squinting.

A man dressed like a farmer, in mud-spattered jeans and muddier gum boots, said wisely, “It only appears to be motionless. It’s probably a jumbo jet headed into the Twin Cities, flying low and right toward us. The sun’s hitting it at just the right angle, and we’re getting a reflection.”

A pale woman with orange-blond dreadlocks, and the voice of a high school teacher, said, “No, it’s not a jet. It’s not moving. Line it up with that phone pole and you see it’s not moving.”

Virgil and the farmer edged sideways to line the UFO up with the telephone pole, and the woman was right; the UFO wasn’t moving. The farmer exhaled heavily, and said, “Okay. I got nothin’.”

More people were coming out of the café, attracted by the crowd in the parking lot.

A man in a plaid sport jacket said, “This could be the start of something big.”

“Like an invasion,” the dreadlocks lady said. She mimed a shudder. “Like in Cloverfield. You don’t know exactly what it is, but it’s coming and it’s bad.”

“Wouldn’t they invade Washington or someplace like that?” a thin man asked. “Why would they invade Iowa?”

A jocko-looking guy said, “Not because they’re recruiting for a pro football team,” and he and a jocko friend, who was wearing a red University of Minnesota jacket, exchanged high fives.

Somebody said, “I left my camera at home. Wouldn’t you know it? Probably see Bigfoot on the way back.”

A short, fat mail carrier: “I saw a show where the aliens completely wasted LA, but it turned out everything was being controlled from one central bunker, and when the Army hit that, all the aliens’ tanks and shit quit working.”

“Independence Day,” somebody said. “Where they nuked the mother ship, and then the fighters could get through the force fields?”

“No, I saw that one, too, but this was a different movie,” the letter carrier said. “Ground troops in LA. Got the aliens with a bazooka or something.”

A young man with black-rimmed glasses and slicked-back dark hair said, with the voice of authority, “Battle: Los Angeles. Thirty-five percent on the Tomatometer. The ground squad lit them up with a laser indicator so American fighters could target the alien HQ. Or maybe they called in the artillery, I don’t precisely recall.”

A young woman in a jewel-blue nylon letter jacket that matched her eyes said, “I hope they don’t get us pregnant with those monster things like in Aliens. You know, that ate their way out of your womb when they hatched.”