I had braced myself for a sudden jump to warp speed, but Harrigan surprised all of us by slowing down — and opening his window. The motorcyclist now had the perfect opportunity to get his grenade to its target.

But that didn’t happen, because in the next instant Harrigan had pulled a handgun from beneath his seat and, barely turning to look, shot the grenade right out of the man’s hand. The car shrieked to a stop as Harrigan slammed on the breaks and the motorcyclist, too close to stop and stunned by the shot, vaulted over the car, landing with a thud that was oddly muted considering it must have pulped his organs and shattered his bones.

Harrigan motioned us to stay inside the car, but there was little point as the driver of the motorcycle wasn’t going to pull the grenade pin on us much less stand up and walk again any time soon. Harrigan stopped a few feet from the man, then turned to us. “Sorry, but I think you need to see this.”

I got out of the car, Jimmy following close behind, and went to where Harrigan stood. The man lay on his back, arms and legs flung out as though he were making a snow angel in the dirt. The helmet had cracked off his head and I could see his face. It wasn’t him.

“It isn’t him.”

Harrigan nodded. “Copycat killer. I thought so.”

“How do you know so much about it?” Jimmy snapped.

“If he had really been the killer he wouldn’t be dead; we would be. Probably a local. Motorcycle hasn’t got much of a fuel tank on it.”

There were, in fact, copycat killers randomly targeting young Asian or even vaguely Asian-looking women. Usually their crimes were clumsy and unsuccessful, a bid for time in the spotlight, however brief. This guy probably saw us the last time we stopped to refuel and followed us. Either that, or he had just been one of a number of desperate people lashing out at whatever appeared, because nothing that appeared before him ever seemed good any more.

Harrigan spun on his heels and marched back to the car. There’s so much death around us these days I wouldn’t say Jimmy and I were necessarily shocked into inertia, but there was still something stunning about how quickly it all had transpired. The man on the ground was dead and we’d only been aware of his existence for less than a couple of minutes. We’d never know anything about him, and he’d never know anything again.

“Better him than us,” Jimmy snarled in clear imitation of Harrigan. I laughed quietly with him, though I knew he felt as uneasy as I did. Harrigan’s shot had the mark of a pro, and it made me wonder just who it was we were allowing to protect us. Nevertheless we followed him back to the car, the dead man already fading from our minds. There was no point in dwelling on him when there would likely be more deaths ahead of us.

“You need to answer some questions,” I said immediately to Harrigan as we roared off again. Harrigan nodded, clearly expecting this. “How much do you know? If you suspected Sylvia knew something, why bother with me? Why didn’t you just ask her yourself?”

“Waltz into her private secure hospital room?”

“Come on. Nothing is private or secure any more. I’m sure you could have figured out a way in.”

“But I doubt she’d tell me anything.” This was true. Sylvia would only talk to me, and not talk so much as vent.

“How did you know about Maggie?”

“Girl didn’t exactly keep a low profile.”

Also true. “But how did you know I knew her?”

Surprisingly, this was the question he didn’t answer right away. I figured he’d say he’d been following her, rifling through her stuff either before or after she died, and found some connection to me, even though we’d been careful. He wouldn’t meet my eyes in the mirror.

“Man, I’m sorry.” Jimmy. I looked at him, surprised again.

Still Harrigan said nothing, and I couldn’t tell if he was angry or sad or what. Finally he spoke. “Before my current clients contacted me I was working independently on trying to get that bounty on the head of the Lao Baby killer. I had a lot of leads and I had a strong feeling Maggie was next. I — introduced myself to her. Worked my way into her life, more or less. She figured me out pretty soon, saw through the alias, laughed when I told her I could protect her. She said she knew I was in it for the money.” He stopped and glanced out the window as if the road sign pointing the way to yet another dying town had transfixing qualities. “She didn’t care if she got killed, but she cared if you did, so she told me about you. Said to help you if something happened to her. Well, something happened. It was almost like she knew it would — and that I wouldn’t be able to stop it.”

That day came back to me. We were going to meet at a café in Williamsburg. Maggie was usually late to any meeting, but this time she was earlier than I was — by about a minute. I saw her several blocks ahead of me approaching the door of the café in the opposite direction. She looked up and saw me, and a smile started to break on her face. Then someone was coming out of the café, blocking her from me. A man, who suddenly thrust a paper bag at her and darted into the street. She should have been more alert. She should have dropped it or flung it back at him and run. She should have known better but the curious, fearless side of Maggie that so often got her into trouble kept her holding that bag a second too long, possibly with the intent of discovering what was inside, even though she should have known that its weight and shape was not that of anything sweet and gooey the man had just bought in the café. I knew. I knew without even looking what was going to happen, and when it did happen I was looking not at Maggie but at the man, crouched behind a parked car, who had done it — who looked straight back at me.

I felt Jimmy’s hand pressing my own and realized both Harrigan and I had been lost in our own painful memories. I willed him to speak again so I wouldn’t have to keep remembering them. He obliged. “After that I didn’t give a shit about the money. I just wanted to go after him. But I’d promised her, about you. Told her I’d protect you. I gave her my word.” A few more miles of silence.

“And then these clients, husband and wife, contacted me. They wanted their future children to get the longevity gene and they were willing to do anything to ensure it. I figured, fuck it, if they wanted to pay me for work I was already planning to do, fine. So that’s the deal. I give protection to you, find Lindstrom for them…”

“And fuck that fucker up for her,” Jimmy finished. It was a typically Jimmy comic moment, but I could see the men’s eyes meeting in the mirror and some kind of grim male bond occurring. Finally, they connected.

“You got that right,” Harrigan said.

After another pause and a dozen more miles he changed his tone back to the cool, businesslike one. “OK, I talked. Your turn. What do you know about Ruth Baxter?”

Jimmy seemed to be dozing off, so I sat up to talk more clearly. “If you’ve done your homework, you know none of the other scientists knows much. Each was a specialist and only worked on one small part of the project. Only Lindstrom knew everything, but the person closest to him was Ruth Baxter. She was a scientist as well, but also something like an office manager. She arranged for the pregnant women to come to the lab. She was also the one who arranged for the dismantling of the lab — including sending all of us out into the world.”

“What do you know about her?” he interrupted.

For a moment I wasn’t sure what he meant, but then I understood. “If she’s who I think she is, I remember her more than anyone else in the whole lab. She — cared about us. Everyone cared for us, but impersonally. We were lab rats, so they wanted us healthy. She was different, and not just because she’s a woman — there were other women in the lab too. I don’t even know how to put it; it wasn’t obvious, but I just remember feeling like she was the one person who saw us as human. Who kept her conscience.”

“That’s quite an indictment.”

Again for a moment he confused me, but those moments were getting shorter as I found myself understanding this strange man a little better. “You mean, how could she do it if she saw us as human? Is it worse to rationalize evil, like the rest of them did, or to know it’s evil and do it anyway, like she did?” He nodded. I shrugged. “Heavy duty stuff, Harrigan. All I know is she must be in her own personal hell right now knowing that the hell the rest of us are in is because of her.”

“Welcome to personal hell, then,” Harrigan said, gesturing before us. The Canadian border lay just ahead.

“Canada fucks you very much,” Jimmy murmured sleepily.

Harrigan got out documentation for the three of us; he’d managed to prepare it before we set off. I don’t know what magic he’d performed but we were waved in without a second glance. That rarely happens any more, even with so benign a border as this one.

Jimmy whistled softly. “Impressive.”

Harrigan continued driving, impassive as ever. I could tell he was unimpressed with himself. He had failed, after all, at the one thing that had mattered to him. Maggie. We all hoped he wouldn’t fail again.

+

It angered him that innocent women were being put in jeopardy by fools who tried to imitate his work, though he had to admit it gave him a tiny flash of pride. His success so far was already making him worthy of emulation, after all, and every time another copycat appeared on the news he couldn’t help but smile. But these bumbling idiots did not understand his mission at all, and it was likely they were merely seeking the pathetic thrill of destruction, though luckily so far they’d all been so inept that they hadn’t destroyed anything but their chance to stay out of prison for a couple decades.

They didn’t get it. He was not out to destroy but to save. He wanted to save the world from their sickness. And yet the world refused to see this. He had already been thwarted once in reaching his fourth success, then someone else had almost beat him to it, and now this idiot border guard was refusing to let him into Canada to try again. Wrong papers, the mouth-breathing simpleton grunted at him. Go back. For a moment he was tempted to ask, politely, Do you have any idea who I am? No? Well here’s a clue, and pull out his calling card. He couldn’t, of course. He had vowed to stick with the mission, harming no innocents along the way, even if they deserved a little harm.

So he would stick with it. Let her have this minor victory. He knew he would still win in the end, just like he had with Maggie.