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Seresen. “What were you doing?”
    Seresen didn’t reply.
    “I need to know.”
    The alien looked up at the spangled sky. “The questions are contradictory, and I do not understand why they are important. To know where I am makes me less aware of what I am doing. And in knowing what I am doing, I lose awareness of location.”
    “Hazard a guess.”
    A pause. “It is probable I was in the center.”
    “Did anyone see you? Can anyone verify your whereabouts?”
    “I cannot be certain of either.”
    “Okay. So it’s probable you were in the center. What about the rest of your people? Were they with you?”
    “This is important?”
    “I told you this morning: someone’s dead. And we don’t know who or what caused it. Is it possible that a Torku went crazy or something?”
    A bat flittered out of the gloom, approached the empty space above the Line, then darted back toward the trees, not as though it had run into a barrier but as though it had sensed something evil.
    “You ask the wrong questions.” With that, Seresen turned away and disappeared into the darkening woods.

Chapter Seven

    FULL NIGHT had fallen by the time DeWitt reached the poor neighborhood of the Hollows. Streetlights cast golden pools on the asphalt. Frame houses crowded near the road like cattle gathering to fences.
    In each brightly windowed living room was a VCR and a big-screen Sony. Every refrigerator was stocked, the result of the Torku’s largesse. DeWitt hadn’t admitted his contentment to Hattie, for fear of being misunderstood. It pleased him that the hardscrabble poor had come into their own, not for justice, but for the sleepy satiation it brought.
    No more burglaries. No more holdups. Glutted by consumerism, Coomey, Texas, napped.
    But in the wealthier neighborhood on the other side of Guadalupe Road, vandals had painted a stop sign yield-yellow. Someone, uncharmed by the Torku’s magnanimity, had sprayed EAT SHIT on the side of the volunteer fire station.
    By the time DeWitt reached Foster’s well-kept Victorian house, he had lost his smile. Propping his notebook against the saddle horn, he made a note of the vandals’ damage; then he dismounted and climbed the stairs to the wraparound porch. Windchimes, nudged by the breeze, plinked like three-year-olds on xylophones.
    As DeWitt knocked, his gaze snagged on Foster’s ‘68 Corvette gleaming on the concrete drive. The classic car might have been used to transport the children’s bodies, but Loretta was too large to fit in that trunk.
    Foster jerked open the door, his bearded face in a grin. The white-haired banker might have looked snappy in his suit had the tie-dyed shirt under the vest not been such a hideous orange.
    “Hey.” His hand lifted, the index and middle fingers spread into a V. “Peace.”
    Without waiting for an invitation, DeWitt eased around the banker and into the warm living room. Arranged on the wall, fronted by scented candles, was the pictorial altar of Foster’s past: a young naked Foster, one of the many nude and beflowered disciples surrounding Timothy Leary; a clothed Foster smiling and shaking the hand of a thankfully-clothed Phil Gramm. Next to that was Foster’s framed college diploma and the photo taken the night of the Coomey High School Senior Prom: Foster’s possessive arm around a beaming, sixteen-year-old Janet. Janet’s blond hair was in a French twist, flowers tucked into its gleaming plaits. She looked different—younger, of course. She also looked happier than she had in years.
    DeWitt wrenched his eyes away. The dining-room door was shut, but behind it DeWitt could hear quiet activity. A rattle. The clack of something small and hard hitting a firm surface. What woman did Foster have in there this time?
    “Don’t mean to disturb you,” DeWitt told him, his eyes still on the door.
    The back of Foster’s hand collided with DeWitt’s chest. DeWitt staggered back a half-step in surprise and saw that the banker was holding a