The sheriff's office in Elko had a coffee machine that made coffee the color of tea, and Hassan drank four cups of it while a deputy with a gray mustache typed his statement with two fingers.
"Lion," the deputy said, when he'd read it back. It wasn't a question. He said it the way you'd say the name of a town.
Hassan looked at him across the desk. He had told it simply, in the voice he had left, which was not much. People missing. A town that kept people chained in a cellar under a church. A hunter named Kurt Brandt who had died getting them out. A shepherd named Josu Etxeberria who had died in the same place. He had not said the word ghul. He had not said hooves, or faces, or what twenty-six people had done with spades at the mouths of graves. He had lived in America nine years and knew which sentences turned faces.
"Your own deputy was in that cellar," Hassan said. "Chained. Ask him."
"Hale doesn't remember a thing after he pulled off the county road," the deputy said. "Says he must've hit his head. Doctors say he's lucky." He squared the papers. "We'll go look."
Marit was in the hospital in Elko with a man from the Swedish consulate who kept saying he didn't understand. Wes sat in the hallway outside her room for two days in his orange vest, because there was nobody to go home with. On the third day Marit came out in a wheelchair and sat beside him, and they didn't talk. When the consulate man came to take her to the airport, she wrote her mother's address in Gothenburg on the back of a hospital menu and told Wes to come in the summer, when it was light all night.
They went the next day, four trucks and a search-and-rescue team, by the county road from Highway 50. The deputy called Hassan at the motel that evening.
"There's nobody there," he said.
"Nobody."
"Nobody's been there in a long time, sir. That town's been dead since the seventies. There's a 1974 calendar on the diner wall and dust on the counter an inch thick." A pause. "And there's no cemetery. The whole thing's gone into a sinkhole. Old mine workings, maybe, or the water table. Took half the church with it. The ditch above it blew out and it's all mud down there. We're not sending anybody into that."
"Kurt Brandt is down there."
"Yes, sir," the deputy said, more gently. "I expect he is."
Hassan sat on the edge of the motel bed with the phone against his ear and thought about the dry street, and the diner's back step, and three knocks.
"Fish and Game says there's a big cat working that drainage," the deputy said. "They're sending a houndsman."
"Tell him not to go at night," said Hassan. "Tell him if he hears his name, not to answer."
The deputy was quiet for a moment. "I'll tell him," he said, and Hassan thought he might.
The report, when Dana got a copy three weeks later, called it "probable mountain lion predation" in the cases of Erik Lindqvist, Theo Park and Kurt Brandt, "accidental drowning" in the case of Josu Etxeberria, and "exposure and misadventure" for the six earlier disappearances. Caleb Rourke of Boise did not appear in it, because no one by that name had ever been reported missing in Idaho.
Dana read it to Hassan over the phone from Portland. Then she was quiet for a long time.
"I recorded the last episode," she said. "I've got the night at the stones. Kurt calling. Theo calling. I've got you and a church bell at dawn, and something on that slope that screams."
"What did you say? In the episode?"
"What the sheriff said. A predator in an isolated drainage. A vanished town. Marit's going home. Theo isn't." Her voice caught on his name and went on. "I didn't name the valley. I didn't name the trailhead. I changed the county." She breathed out. "Somebody goes missing, and somebody comes looking, and somebody comes looking for them. That's how it eats. I've got two hundred thousand listeners, and somewhere in those hills there's a thing walking around in Theo's face."
"And it would call them by name," said Hassan.
"And they'd answer," said Dana.
Leah came to Reno at the end of November on the Greyhound from Elko, in her black dress and a man's sheepskin coat, with Peio beside her in his red cap. It was her first time in a city since 1981. She sat in Hassan's small kitchen off Kietzke Lane and drank his coffee, which she said was too sweet, and ate his flatbread, which she said was very good. Peio and Adam sat on the floor with Adam's phone and didn't talk and were friends in ten minutes.
They had buried Josu in the churchyard at Iturri, and what was left of Ander beside him, with a priest up from Elko who asked no questions about the ash.
"I ring it now," Leah said. "Dawn and noon and dusk. Josu always rang it. Now I know why when I ring it." She looked out of the window at the parking lot and the brown hills. "I ring it for the nine, too. The ones we sent back down the ridge. I say their names when I can remember them."
"That's a kind of prayer," Hassan said.
"It's what I have."
Before she left she took the olive-wood beads out of her coat and laid them on his table beside the sugar. In the first week of November Hassan had driven up the north draw with two men from the mosque and a white shroud, and two of Leah's herders had lifted the floor of the hut for them without a word. Yusuf Nasser of Zahle lay now in the Muslim plot of a cemetery outside the city, facing the way he had always faced.
"His family," said Leah. "You can read his book. You'll find them."
It never went all the way.
Most nights were nothing. Adam went to school and played basketball and was rude about the dishes. He prayed the dawn prayer beside his father, and sometimes the others, and sometimes not. But some nights, two or three in a month, Hassan heard him get up in the dark and stand in the hall, and heard the window in the front room rattle as if a hand had tried it from outside. In the morning there was nothing on the glass. Adam never talked about it. He tied nothing to his waist. He started setting his alarm for the dawn prayer himself, and then he stopped needing the alarm.
A week before Christmas Hassan woke at twenty past five, before his own alarm, and lay still.
Somebody was calling in the street. A woman's voice, soft and hoarse, with a Homs accent, under the window of the front room. It was calling his son.
"Adam. My heart. Come down, it's cold."
He was up and in the hall before he knew he'd moved.
Adam was already at the front window in his pajamas and a hoodie, with his hair sticking up and his hand flat on his stomach. He had opened the window. The cold came in around him. He didn't look round at his father.
Out on the sidewalk, under the one streetlight, nobody was standing.
Adam put his hands to his ears. His breath went white in the dark.
"Allah is greatest," he called into the street, in Arabic, not loud. "Allah is greatest."
He gave the whole call, every line, the one for dawn included, and his voice didn't crack once. Hassan stood behind him in the hall and didn't help him with a word.
When it was done Adam shut the window and went to wash.
Down on the white frost of the sidewalk, under the streetlight, a line of narrow split prints came up to the front wall of the building, stopped below the window, and went back the way they had come.