Free The Ghost Network by Catie Disabato Page B

digest all this until tomorrow morning.”
    “For sure,” Davis replied.
    “But it’s like—I still don’t know what to do next.”
    “Maybe we should avoid him,” Nix said.
    “He’s not dangerous,” Davis said. “Just weird and sort of amoral. Just find him and talk to him.”
    “He broke into our apartment,” Nix said.
    “My apartment,” Taer said.
    “And he hurt Cait’s forehead,” Nix said.
    “The break-in, that’s something he would do. But he doesn’t hurt people,” Davis said.
    “I hit his head with a dictionary,” Taer said. “He hit me back in self-defense.”
    “Don’t defend him,” Nix said.
    “But this argument doesn’t matter because I don’t know where to find him,” Taer said. “Where’s his apartment?”
    “I can’t tell you,” Davis said.
    “You can’t or you won’t?” Nix asked.
    “I won’t,” Davis said, giving Nix a taste of the medicine Berliner would later feed me. “He won’t be there anyway. He doesn’t live there.”
    “Where does he live?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “We could go ask Marie-Hélène,” Taer said.
    “She won’t see you,” Davis said.
    “Well, then, what are we supposed to do?” Nix asked.
    “Look, I’ll give it to you that something is going on here, with Molly’s disappearance and Nick,” Davis said. “But I don’t know why you two in particular feel like you have to take it on.”
    “It’s her,” Nix said, meaning Taer.
    “Molly,” Taer said, thinking she was agreeing with Nix.
    “Okay, then. My guess is that hunting down Nick is the rightthing for you to do,” Davis said. “He knows way more than I do. He’ll be able to help you out. I’m just not sure how to find him.”
    Taer pulled Berliner’s sketchpad out of her bag. She held it out of Davis’s reach. “We have this,” she said.
    Davis held out her hand. “Give it to me.”
    Taer didn’t want to, but handed it over anyway. Davis flipped through the sketchpad, stopping at some pages, running her fingers along the middle binding.
    “I can’t decipher it fully. But I know what it is. He’d draw a map of wherever he went during the day. You see these arrows here? That’s his path.”
    Davis flipped to the last map in the sketchpad. In the margins, she wrote a key to the map. She defined some of Berliner’s personal annotations, like the arrows she had mentioned, labeled a prominent diagonal street “North Clybourn Avenue,” and made a few guesses of the names of some smaller streets branching off North Clybourn. She pointed out all the maps that were a similar shape to the last map, as if Nick was revisiting the same places.
    “What does this mean? This name here?” Taer asked.
    “Antoine Monson?” Davis asked. “It was Nick’s assumed name, I think, kind of a code name. I don’t know where it came from, but some of the screen prints in Nick’s apartment were signed Antoine Monson.”
    “Molly sometimes had me sign her into hotels as Antoinette Monson,” Nix said. “I didn’t think it was that weird, just some fake name to hide her.”
    “Huh,” Taer said. “Maybe it was some way they communicated with each other.”
    “Whatever,” Davis said. “I’m glad to be done with the stress of dealing with both of them, to be honest.”
    Nix and Taer left Davis cigaretteless, drunk, and wallowing in her own emotional filth. Davis gave the distinct impression that she wouldn’t be seeing or speaking to them again. The way she closedthe door seemed aggressively final. They went back to the Ramada Romulus; the lobby bar was still open. They installed themselves in a booth, ordered two Martinis, and gossiped about Berliner and Davis’s sex life. After the bar closed, Nix and Taer went up to their room. They danced together to music from Nix’s favorite band at the time, Sleigh Bells.
    Very late that night, or very early the next morning, when the music had switched to Taer’s favorite band, The National, they argued again about whether they