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That was certainly very generous, which made Katie wonder exactly what had been in it for Hobbes. As a business relationship, it didn’t make much sense to her.

“Until the other day, you mean,” she said. “Until the two of you went on the run.”

“I suppose.”

“Because someone was watching the apartment.”

“Yes.”

“Who did Chris think that was?”

“He didn’t know. There were just times when he thought he was being followed. Well—times when he wassureof it. And it wasn’t just his imagination either, because I felt it too. And I saw things. There was a car that kept turning up on the street.”

“A red car?” Katie asked quickly.

Alderson shook his head.

She leaned forward. “Was it Michael Hyde he was scared of?”

“No, I don’t think so. I mean, I know why you asked about a red car. But the one I saw was big and black. Expensive. That’s why I noticed it in the first place, because it seemed so out of place in the neighborhood.”

She leaned back. Once again, she remembered there hadn’t been any photographs of Chris pinned to the wall in Hyde’s house. It seemed tohave been her family Hyde was stalking. But if that was the case, who had been hunting Chris and James Alderson?

Someone who enjoyed doing really bad things to people.

She shivered a little.

“Seems extreme to have gone on the run,” she said.

“It was Hobbes who told him to,” Alderson said. “Chris mentioned it to him when they were talking, and he said the old man went white. Then Hobbes got angry with himself, as if he’d forgotten something important. He told Chris the two of us had to get out of our apartment. We packed up and have been sleeping at my studio for the last few nights.”

Katie sipped the vodka, trying to process what Alderson was telling her. If Hobbes had told Chris to run, perhaps it was somethinghewas mixed up in and nothing to do with her brother at all. But that still left the question of Hobbes’s motivation for helping Chris in the first place. And also what had happened to her brother now.

“What about the book?” she said.

Alderson took a deep breath and then poured himself another drink. Katie waited for him to take a swallow before he continued.

“Right,” he said. “Jesus. So Hobbes had what you might call a collection.”

“Of what?”

“That’s the weird thing. Chris told me Hobbes was a nice guy. Gentle, kind, interesting. He’d been a philosophy professor once, and he had a library full of old books. But there was also something else. Hobbes had collected a lot of stuff connected to this horrible guy. This killer.”

“Jack Lock?”

“Right. I read up on him, and there’s too much to get into there. Let’s just say that Lock was an absolutely awful human being. He claimed God had shown him the future, and then he killed a bunch of kids because it was God’s will. A proper nutcase. Hobbes had a lot of Lock’s writing, along with other things that had belonged to him. Some of it was worth real money, but apparently the most valuable thing of all was a notebook.”

It’s supposed to tell the future.

“And this was what Chris was trying to sell?” Katie said.

“Yeah.”

“He stole it from Hobbes?”

“No.” Alderson shook his head quickly. “Hobbestoldhim to take it. This was a few days ago. Hobbes said he was dying and wouldn’t be able to employ Chris anymore. He gave Chris instructions on what he needed to do on his last day. He was to come in at a certain time, take the book, disconnect a camera in the room. Then leave and never look back. And that’s exactly what Chris did. He felt like he owed it to him after everything he’d done for him.”

Katie sat in silence for a moment.