As the freight elevator creaked along at a snail’s pace, Justine stood alone on one side of the elevator trying to decide how best to phrase her question. After all, some things are better left unsaid. “Could you…” but then again. “Explain to me again why you had to make the coroner cry?”

  “This coming from a woman who’s killed more people than Dirty Harry and slaps around unconscious patients like they stole something.” Foster couldn’t help but laugh at the hypocrisy dripping from every word of her query. “You’re going to have to give me a second to process that question.”

  “Point taken.” Justine rolled her eyes, laughing at herself. “But I’m a little surprised that someone with your particular likes and intelligence would even know who Dirty Harry is.”

  “Of course I know who he is,” Foster shifted his satchel to a more comfortable spot on his shoulder. “I’ve watched all his movies, and I can appreciate his problem-solving skills.”

  “Really?” Justine found that admission very hard to believe. Why would a genius like him find anything of redeeming value in the way that mythic lawman dealt with problems? “You do know that he would generally just shoot everyone in sight until the bad guy was dead?”

  The elevator stopped with a lurch as its doors opened slowly onto the third floor. Before she could leave the confined space, Foster rested his hand against the door jamb, preventing her exit.

  “Yes…” his laughter faded away as he answered her question. “And the problem was solved. Sure, everyone may not agree with the solution. But it was solved.”

  “As much as this might declare me a hypocrite, shooting everyone in sight is not the answer to any problem.”

  “Don’t worry, Agent Rushing. No declaration necessary. I already know you’re a hypocrite.”

  “And I already know you’re an asshole, So I guess we’re even.” With that, she pushed passed Foster’s pitiful excuse for a barricade.

  “I don’t get it,” the AI’s tone was one of absolute sincerity. “That was supposed to be a secret.”

  “Hoover,” Foster replied, quickly following in step behind her. “It’s really not.”

  Down the hallway, Justine saw Meadows and Saunders talking hurriedly on their cell phones, and neither of them looked very happy. She spun around to confront Foster only to see him ambivalently striding down the hallway toward the two men without a care in the world.

  Something in her mind snapped.

  “Come here for a second.” Justine corralled him into a side hallway just off the main corridor and pressed him hard up against the wall. “Can we go over again what just happened down in the morgue? What does polio have to do with our investigation or that murderer?”

  “By itself, nothing… polio has nothing to do with the stranger.” He responded with an infuriatingly innocent look on his face. But there was something innate in Justine that cut through people’s bullshit. “And as far as the young woman having it, well… it was just a fascinating fact.”

  “What do you mean nothing to do with the stranger?” Justine couldn’t help but wonder why he phrased it like that. And why call it an ‘interesting fact’. “Ok, if that was the case, why make the lone gunman down in the basement cry like a bitch?”

  “Lone gunman?” again, another reference Foster didn’t understand. But he didn’t get a lot of her movie references, even when they were really TV references. “To be fair, Jonathan didn’t start crying until you blew up his laptop with that plasma gun I gave you.”

  “It’s called a slinger.” For the first time in a long time, Justine blushed. But that hint of weakness only made her press him harder against the wall. “But you’re missing my point, polio…?”

  “Time to fold.” Hoover said only to his friend. “You don’t want to be in the bed next to that guy, do you?”

  “No.” He looked into the agent’s steely eyes and sighed. “I don’t”

  “What?” she said, only slightly suspecting that he wasn’t talking to her. “Time to focus, Foster.”

  “Fine,” he said, completely wilting against Justine’s pressure, both figuratively and literally. “Haven’t you noticed that there’s something off about everything we’ve run across so far? Do you remember how the young woman had an abnormal rod in her leg?”

  “Yes,” she said, remembering the young woman slit open from knee to foot. “So…?”

  “And how her hairstyle denoted the use of an old-fashioned curling iron?”

  “So,” Justine’s brain was oblivious to the connections he obviously saw so clearly. “She likes old things.”

  “Then we find out that the young woman is infected with the polio virus. I mean, the polio virus.” He threw up his hands in a mocking fashion of “eureka” while Justine just continued to stare. “Don’t you see what all that adds up to?”

  “No… not really,” Justine lowered her hand in a mock show of defeat. “What does it add up to, Foster?”

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  Over the last two days, he had come to kind of trust this slightly-hair triggered agent. But the last time he shared his unconventional theories with someone, it cost him the last eight years of his life. Still, maybe Agent Rushing was different.

  “It means that woman down in the morgue is not from our time. And my original views on the signal were justified.”

  “What do you mean not from our time?” Hundreds of time travel plots from hundreds of movies and tv shows went whisking through her head. “And how is your,” still unsure of what all this meant, she lowered her voice to a whisper, “alien theory justified by such a far-out idea. What did they do? Go back in time, bring them back and brainwash these people into doing bizarre things?”

  “No,” Foster made a flippant face, amused by her questions. “That woman in the morgue, that man lying unconscious in that hospital room, they haven’t been brainwashed by aliens. Someone would have to be crazy to believe in brainwashing.” He began to laugh so hard that Justine couldn’t help but join him. “Plus, time travel isn’t possible.”

  “Well, that’s good.” Justine relaxed slightly. “I’m glad we got that straight.”

  “No…” On the verge of tears, Foster continued. “Those people weren’t brainwashed by aliens. They are the aliens.” Justine stopped laughing almost immediately. Foster, however, did not. “As for the time travel thing, I have no idea. But there’s got to be another explanation.”

  “What do you mean another explanation?”

  “Beats me,” Foster’s devilish grin reappeared. “But let’s find out.”

  The next few moments were a blur for the flabbergasted agent as the reformed mental patient shot past her like a rocket and cleared the distance between the alcove and the patient’s room in no time flat. Scrambling to keep up, Justine could only meekly waive to her partner as she flew past him. His only response was to wave back and sigh.

  “I have the answer!” He screamed at twitchy Dr. Pan. The frightened MD had been attempting to give the stranger another once over when the loud voice caught him off guard. Stumbling backward, he collided into a telemetry unit with a loud crash. “Turn off the drugs, doc. I need confirmation.”

  Still shell shocked from their previous run-in, Pan happily rushed to comply with whatever order Foster gave him. Within a minute, the numbing drip was off.

  “Foster!” Justine ducked inside and shut the door hoping to contain his outburst when the prisoner began to stir. “Maybe you shouldn’t be drawing so much attention to yourself.” She tried to console Dr. Pan. But he flinched more from her touch than Foster’s rants. “Especially when you’re saying things that might make you look crazy.”

  Foster smiled again. But this time, instead of finding it cute, Justine wanted to punch him right in the nose.

  Then, as if someone on high wanted to save the idiot scientist from a pummeling, the stranger’s head slowly rocked back and forth. His lips started to form some incomprehensible expression as everyone in the room, even Dr. Pan, assumed his first words would be “Breathe.”

  Instead, they were greeted by a pair of vacant eyes rolling aimlessly around like marbles while drool poured forth from the corners of his mouth.

  “I told you to take him off the drugs,” Foster complained.

  “He is off the drugs,” Pan squealed.

  Foster grabbed the stranger’s face and shook it violently. Initially, the man’s attention swayed to Foster. But soon, his gaze wandered from Justine to Dr. Pan before eventually settling on a bright set of lights just above his head. Seemingly mesmerized, the stranger offered little in the way of a verbal response.

  “Then why does he look like he’s knocked up on Thorazine?”

  “Thorazine?” Completely stupefied by that statement, the doctor pointed to the IV machine’s readout with a defiant finger. But the threat of Foster’s knowledge and the scowl radiating from Justine was enough to keep his ego in check. Instead of a frontal assault, Pan opted for a flanking maneuver.

  “How would you know what a Thorazine patient looks like, Mr. Evers? Spent a lot of time in mental institutions, have we?”

  Foster was about to respond when Justine stepped between them. “Don’t answer that.” Then, she pushed him back like she had in the hallway. And like the hallway, he relented to her touch.

  “Listen, Dr. Pan,” Justine said, trying to be soft and sweet like before with Freddy. And again, this move came off more unsettling than anything else. “Twenty minutes ago, this guy was talking and threatening your life with delightful glee. Now he looks like a vegetable. I need you to explain the sudden change.”

  “I can’t,” he confessed. “Morphine has many side effects, but catatonia isn’t one of them.”

  Foster slammed his palms down on the bed rail out of frustration and for the first time since picking him up at Wilson, Justine found herself concerned about what he was capable of. She leaned over the stranger and stared into his lifeless eyes and said, “What does this mean?”

  “It means that someone beat us to the punch.”

  “I don’t understand what that means, Hoover.” She said, more confused now than ever. “What do you mean someone beat us to the punch?”

  Foster looked around the room and quickly caught sight of the kind-hearted deputy standing in the bathroom doorway. “Wasn’t there someone else with you when we left? Wasn’t there another deputy?”

  “Yes,” the deputy half answered. Preoccupied with unwanted visits to funeral homes and hillside gravesites, all he wanted to do was curl up in a ball and die. But he still found it within him to answer the question.

  “Joseph Howlam, sir,” the words were forced, like pulling teeth. “After you and Agent Rushing left, Sheriff Meadows returned to check on the prisoner. Once everything was secured, he ordered Deputy Howlam to go home.”

  “Why?”

  “Joseph had been on duty for almost 37 hours straight.”

  “37 hours straight?” Foster looked back at the useless prisoner as his mind raced to find its footing. “Is that a normal thing for him to do?”

  “That depends on your definition of normal, sir.”

  “Well, he was on my list anyway.” Foster regarded the prisoner one more time with disappointed eyes before turning back to the sad deputy. “Where can we find him?”

  “Why?” Justine asked nervously. “What does he have to do with any of this?”

  “Final piece to the puzzle, Agent Rushing.” Attempting one more time to jumpstart his brain, he snapped his fingers near the stranger’s head. And like before, there was still no response. Only a vacant, dead look remained. “But before seeing him, we need to return to the RV. I need a secure location to make a phone call.”

  “Why?” She felt as though she had been asking that same question nonstop for the past two days.

  “You know,” Hoover muted Justine’s earpiece again. “He’s not going to take what you’re going to tell him very well. He’ll set those same dogs loose on you. Just like he did eight years ago. If it were me, I wouldn’t even give him the heads up.”

  There was truth in Hoover’s warning. But Foster had to give the Director one more chance to do the right thing. If things went wrong again, running was always a viable option. Hell, his friendly neighborhood AI had squirreled away enough money that he could live like a king in a place that couldn’t care less about aliens or whether there was a second shooter on the grassy knoll.

  Beginning to feel like the proverbial third wheel, Justine waited impatiently for an answer to her question. She got one.

  “Because, Agent Rushing,” Foster said calmly. “I need to talk to the director… privately.”