"Okay, what's the Army War College?" she asked once she'd settled in.

"It's a school in Pennsylvania where the military sends its senior leaders to learn lofty things. I taught there for about eight months, mostly on intelligence and pattern analysis. I did quite a lot of studying to prepare."

"Okay, so what's pattern analysis ... and what's it got to do with the boogieman?"

"A lot, in fact," he replied. "The first thing you have to understand about the science behind pattern analysis is that humans are a pattern seeking species. In a lot of ways, it's what makes human society possible."

"That is some bold shit, my brother," she teased after a long swig of beer. "You'd better be able come up with something to back that up."

"I've been thinking about this a lot the last few weeks. And I'm surprised it didn't occur to me before. Imagine ... imagine trying to describe a zebra to a child without using the words 'horse' and 'stripes.' We seek patterns in life, words and ideas that liken one thing to another. It's what allows us to remember things and to understand new concepts. What was it I told you about remembering numbers?"

"Oh," she sat up slightly, "you said, don't try to remember each individual digit, remember them in clumps and, if possible, try to associate those clumps with something. So, the license plate 74B1066 would be 74, the highway that goes through Peoria, B for battle, and 1066, the Battle of Hastings."

"Exactly," he said excitedly. Her friend was now fully channeling his inner geek. "Finding patterns and connecting things is what humans do, and you might even argue that all human thought consists of just drawing associations between one thing and the next."

"So, pattern analysis is what? Analyzing the way people think?"

"Close. You're like the best student I ever had."

She sensed he wasn't teasing, so to avoid blushing, she toed him in the ribs as if he were.

"No," he went on, "pattern analysis is looking at patterns in events, in my case the activities of foreign militaries and insurgent groups, and trying to divine future events from past precedent. The whole procedure can be incredibly complicated, so an important part of that process is challenging an analyst's own biases and preconceptions. Because it's easy in complex analysis of large volumes of information for an analyst to miss patterns that might be there, even obvious ones, but also for him or her to see patterns where there are none."

"You mean like conspiracy theories?"

"How so?"

"Well," she said, 'isn't that all a conspiracy theory is? Seeing patterns where there are none?"

"You really are the best student ever." This time he gave a start at the toe she pushed into his ribs. "I hadn't thought of that, but, yeah. And conspiracy theorists have that added comfort of having fellow-believers to confirm all their nuttiness."

"So, I'm nutty?" She managed to hide her smile.

"No. You know that's not what I meant. Look, the whole notion of combating biases in pattern analysis is that we all have preconceived notions of the world in which we live, sort of a baseline of how we view reality. These notions are, to a large extent, shared within communities. When those notions, that baseline, gets challenged or assaulted in a major way, it's sometimes difficult for individuals and for societies to establish a new baseline."

"Like what?"

"Conspiracy theories, like you said. They've always been around, but their popularity explodes in times of enormous social change, at times when people don't know what to think. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, we have a new world, the growth of which coincided with the birth of the Internet. Through the Internet, people have been exposed to this enormous ocean of new ideas and to staggering volumes of data, and a lot of people aren't certain what's true anymore. Just like an analyst trying to plot the activities of a terror cell, normal folks can be confused and inundated by an overabundance of information."

"Especially if much of the information is complete nonsense," she added. "I get that. But what about Kate Johnson and her crazy vision?"

"Now, here's the tender part. I don't think you've been exposed to an avalanche of new information ... anymore than the rest of us have. But your baseline, your core idea of what the world is has been shaken up in a radical way by ... well, first by your life being upended after your husband's death and more recently by your experiencing something incomprehensible at your home. I think all these errant thoughts you've been having are just your mind's way of making new connections, finding new patterns, and establishing a new baseline of what's normal."

"Okay, maybe," she said with a slow nod. "I mean, it's not like I haven't thought something similar ... maybe not in the same pretty words. But, if so, why that particular pattern?"

"Why are you having a hard time shaking the notion your best friend is a demon?"

"It sounds crazy when you say it like that."

"Can you describe it in a way that doesn't sound crazy?" He winked.

"Ah, well played."

"I'm not a hundred percent certain why," he said. "But I have an idea."

"I'll need another beer for this. Hold on." She dashed headlong into the kitchen and was back in a moment, once again lamenting the loss of her elegance. When she was with Otto, she never would have scrambled for the fridge in such an ungainly fashion. After she returned, Eli had his sketchpad in his lap and was doodling away. "Okay," she began, "why have I latched onto that one idea?"

"Well, lemme see, let's take a count of your various crimes. One, there was the studio exec who you thought I blinded in a gardening accident. Two, there was your former stepson who you fancied I mojo-ed in some way into punching me. Three, oh ... what was next ... oh, yeah, your neighbor got his head stove in by a demon steed ... all me. And, four, the pretty-boy got half his lip chopped off by a falling piece of equipment. What do all of those events have in common?"

She had to think for a few minutes. Hearing the tally of her nuttiness made her feel uncomfortable, but she was the one who'd broached the subject and who more or less had insisted on discussing it.

Crap.

"First," she said slowly, "they involve me, you, and people I know. They are people who did something against me." She smiled. "And you are very protective ... and have an unusual ... oh, I can't explain it. Eli, really, it's just a feeling I latched onto."

"Okay, let me ask you this. If I hadn't told you what my master's thesis was about, how would you have interpreted those four events?"

It took a few more drinks of beer and a knitted brow for her to respond. "Coincidence ... maybe," she said finally. "But ... the coincidence began before you told me about your thesis. I told you about Harry Kimball on that first night we went to dinner, before I knew what you studied in grad school. And I told you about his accident on our drive up to San Luis, also before that."

Eli narrowed his eyes as if thinking. "As I remember it," he said, "I asked you at dinner whether you wanted me to rough the guy up, or something like that. Was that what triggered your initial suspicion?"

"Well ... yes ... I know you were just joking. But when I told you about Harry in your truck, there was just this ... no. It wasn't a suspicion. It was just a flash, a stray thought.

"And when you had this flash, what did you think I had done to ... what was his name, Harry?"

"I just assumed you put some sort of secret-agent moves on him or ... I don't know."

He reached across the couch and gently massaged her neck.

"Thank you," she said. She felt oddly comfortable given the circumstances and certainly wasn't going to turn her nose up at a free neck rub.

"I think that moment during our drive to San Luis was just a seed," he continued gently. "You were under a lot of stress even before the Flying Guy, and you had a bizarre thought pop into your head. Kate, everyone gets those kinds of things. But I think later, after you saw something impossible, your mind latched onto that first event and began weaving connections it wouldn't otherwise have done. Those other events ... Cyril, Ted, your coworker ... all got woven into that same tapestry because they seemed similar."

He caressed her neck again even more gently. "I'm not making fun," he added. "I'm just trying to suggest that given the extreme circumstances that the pattern you saw was quite reasonable ... mistaken but still reasonable. Humans do that all the time. We frequently see perfectly rational patterns in a series of events that simply don't happen to be a real pattern."

Kate looked him dead in the eye. She'd absorbed every word he'd said. "God, you make a compelling argument," she said. "But I don't think I believe it, at least not all of it."

She sat up and turned directly to face him. "I don't think I'm seeing patterns that aren't there. Maybe seeing the Flying Guy woke me up to what's going on in the world around me. People see things all the time in their daily lives that they rationalize away. I mean, you did it with the Monkey Man ... for fifteen years. In fact, rationalizing has become our normal. If you can't rationalize something, bring it inside the norms of what we've come to think of as the real world, then the problem must be with you. That's become our national philosophy."

She reached over and gave him a warm peck on the cheek.

"There is something weird about you, Eli Pitt-Rivers. I'm not saying you're a demon. I'll happily admit that part was silly. But there is something weird and unconventional about you. You popped up full-formed and perfect at the age of fifteen, good at everything you do. You spent most of your life travelling the world as a secret agent, getting into impossible adventures, and then quit the army more than halfway through your career. Dad used to be in the service. He said nobody just quits once they make major, not when they're so close to their twenty-year retirement."

"I never denied I was an odd duck," he admitted, his mouth twisting in the way it did when he was trying to hide a smile.

"I don't think you're an odd duck. I think you're wonderful. And I've decided to follow your example and suspend belief on what's going on. But seriously. It might just be a coincidence Harry Kimball ended up blind days after I complained of him to you. It might be a coincidence Clancy decided to take poke at you out of the blue ... in front of a cop. It might be a coincidence a man who was trying to take my property and who menaced me in my own home days later ended up kicked to death by a demon steed. And it might be a coincidence that some guy who wanted to kiss your girl ended up with half his lip chopped off. Any one of those is a coincidence, but all of them?"