Dead Air

Six months after Detective Nora Voss demolished the Meridian Building and closed the case, a construction worker digs something up from the rubble.

A sealed metal box. Eighty years in the ground. And an inscription that reads: If you are reading this, you are already receiving it.

Pete Alvarez has been hearing voices in the walls of his apartment for years. He called it the pipes. He stopped being able to call it that the moment he read those words.

The signal on 1410 kilohertz is back - weaker now, diffuse, no longer anchored to a building. Searching. And the man who designed it to survive demolition, who buried the instructions in the foundation in 1942 and has been waiting ever since, is still alive in a house above the Atlantic coast of Maine. One hundred and two years old. Still monitoring the frequency.

Nora follows the thread north. What she finds isn't a suspect. It isn't a crime. It's something she has been less and less able to call impossible - a man who reached full reception and came back, who spent eighty years leaving a trail for the people the signal would eventually find.

People like Pete Alvarez. Like Dr. Maren Solís. Like Nora herself, who heard her own name in the static six months ago and has been putting it away in the place she puts things she isn't ready to examine.

She's running out of places to put it.

Dead Air is the second novel in the Dead Frequency series.