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Or so it appears, until a pretty girl with a southern accent says, “I don’t exactly know what the man looked like. But I was kneeling behind a pile of stacked-up traffic cones one night, trying to hide from that piece of shit McCarthy. I saw the car door open up, and some white guy stepped out and took a pee.”

“Can you tell me what he looked like?” Maddy asks, but the girl only blushes. Kailyn is the first to catch on.

“Since you were kneeling you saw his dick, but not his face, am I right?”

“Wonder if I would’ve recognized him,” Mama-Girl says, brow furrowed in concentration.

“Yeah. That’s right,” says the southern girl, still blushing. “But I heard him talking on his cell. He had, like, a French accent.”

“Like, how’d it sound? Try it out on me,” says Mama-Girl.

The southern girl tries on a French accent. She ad libs, “I’m on my way back now, or something like that.”

“You sound like you always do, like a girl who just got off the airplane from Atlanta,” says Kailyn.

The southern girl says, “Well, shit, I don’t know. Maybe it was more like German?”

French? German? Maddy knows she’s not going to get an accurate sound description.

“It’s okay,” says Maddy quietly. She can see that the girl is embarrassed that she can’t mimic the accent. “You’ve all helped a lot. I’ve got way more to go on now than I did a few hours ago.”

A green car. A man with an accent.

It’s not a big start. But it’s something.

CHAPTER 56

OUR BODIES ACHE. Our brains ache. But Margo, Burbank, and I carry with us a tiny bit of hope as we travel from Kyoto to Copenhagen.

Copenhagen, like Kyoto, is an extraordinary site of damage and destruction. But each of these cities is distinctly different in its kind of physical ruin. While Kyoto was a mass of stones and concrete and dirt, Copenhagen is a swamp of battered buildings. Rivers flow where streets once were, and sad citizens paddle along in makeshift rafts.

We are greeted by a seriously despondent Tapper. After our discovery of the warnings to Dr. Nakashima in Kyoto, we asked him to find out whether anyone who’d been present the day of the tidal wave had received similar messages. He has been trying with little success to uncover any threats that might have been sent to academics in Copenhagen.

“Here’s what I have, and it isn’t much,” says Tapper. “I went through hundreds of messages, maybe a thousand,received by personnel at a bunch of schools: Technical University of Denmark, Roskilde University, even the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. I examined the files of professors, visiting professors, student teachers, even the correspondence of maintenance workers and secretaries.”

As the list grows, energy leaks out of Tapper’s tone. Then he stretches out his arms in a kind of despair. “What in hell do I have to show for it?” he says loudly. He is clearly a man on the brink.

I am all too familiar with Tapper’s sense of frustration. I’ve been there. Iamthere right now. But I have neither the time nor the urge to play baby nurse and dispense comfort to my colleague.

“Exactly,” I say, somewhat sternly. “What the helldoyou have to show for it?”

“That won’t take long,” warns Tapper.

He snaps some buttons on his electronic device and shows me four messages that may be pertinent. Like the messages sent to young Jason’s late father in Kyoto, they are threatening and harsh. They promise tragedy if they are ignored.

Margo reads them as well, then leans back. “The first thing we have to do is speak to the people who received these messages. Who are they? Did they survive the tsunami?”

“One is a revered Danish botanist. Another is an honored female professor of ancient Scandinavian literature. The last is a Swedish teaching assistant who had only beenin Copenhagen two weeks—and they’re all at the bottom of the Baltic Sea.”

What can I do? What can I be? We can shape-shift into deep-sea diving creatures and scrape the bottom of the sea. But we have no ability to bring the dead back to life.

“But there is one other thing,” Tapper says.

Margo, Burbank, and I glance up hopefully.

“What? For God’s sake, what?” I say.

“There is one survivor. I was about to tell you—”