It was his tail. The pressed shirt and clean haircut. The man Lux thought he’d lost at Guthrie Station. He had somehow known Lux’s destination and beaten him here.
Lux pulled him into the adjoining bathroom and rifled his pockets. He was carrying a gun and a badge: “Agent Samuel Moreno, Department of Homeland Security, Bureau of Narcoterrorism.” Lux left the badge and pocketed the gun.
Moreno wasn’t carrying anything else. No paperwork. No leads. It would probably all be on his embedded splinter, the chip behind his ear implanted in all NAU citizens at birth. Lux pressed behind Moreno’s right ear. No heartbeat, but Lux felt the telltale bump of a splinter.
Lux returned to the sleeping quarters. Browns and tans, heavy wooden furniture, and a painting fixed to the wall of Earthrise taken from Apollo 8. A striking bit of optimism and wonder in the dreary, clinical setting.
He tried the armoire and the dressers. Horace had left some things behind, but, as Carolyn had said, someone had already gone through them.
Lux scoured the scene, checking through the shirts and shoes, gently paging through the books on the night stand. He found a pile of handwritten notes, scattered across the small desk; apparently memoranda of group meetings, an assignment to help Horace identify and describe the emotions of his experience at the clinic.
Horace despised his fellow patients – “inmates,” he called them in the notes – and blamed his family for his admission in the clinic.