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Twenty-third Street in a nearby town, Union Hills, three years ago. Eleven people died in the blaze, which was ruled arson. Even though state experts were called to help in the investigation, the perpetrator was never caught.
    “You think Hagel could have done all of this?” Hank asked.
    “This was almost a year after Hagel was killed.”
    The implications were hard to even contemplate. A minute ago we had assumed that Hagel was responsible for the corpse found on the capsule, because only he could have predicted Jenny’s murder. But there was no way he could have set the fire; he was already dead himself by then. Logic dictated that if someone else set it, then someone else committed the “capsule murder.”
    And someone else killed Jenny.
    I wasn’t quite ready to give in to that logic just then. All of this was so bizarre that there could easily be an explanation that neither Hank nor I could think of in the moment.
    For example, the first prediction referred to “Mrs. Chief” dying at the hands of her lover. Maybe “Mrs. Chief” had another meaning altogether; maybe it was some kind of cryptic message, and didn’t refer to Jenny at all.
    I expressed that to Hank, and he said that it was possible, even though neither of us believed that it was. In any event, we weren’t going to figure it out in the moment; we weren’t going to figure it out in many moments. It was just too weird.
    So all that was left to do was go through the rest of the predictions in the capsule, which we did.
    At which point weird turned into downright scary.

 
     
    There were ten other predictions in the box. All either directly or cryptically predicted a tragedy. One of them had fallen off to the side, so it was impossible to know where it had been placed in the packet. It might have originally been on top.
    In any event, it only confirmed what by then had become obvious, that the person who had made the predictions was also the person responsible for the body found with the capsule.
    It said T HE BURIER IS HIMSELF BURIED.
    The meaning of most of the others was unclear; they vaguely referred to possible events or people that I was unfamiliar with, but that I feared I would learn about very soon. Number four was all too clear: P OOR G EORGE. H OPEFULLY HE SOLD HIMSELF LIFE INSURANCE.
    It seemed as if it had to be referencing George Myerson, insurance salesman, who just twelve hours earlier was lying in his car at the bottom of a ravine.
    “Damn…” was all Hank could say, but I think it summed up things pretty well.
    Prediction number five was every bit as much of a stunner. It said M. H IGGINS, PURVEYOR OF LIES, WILL LIE IN PLACE FOREVER.
    It had to be referring to Matt Higgins.
    The last page was possibly the most ominous. It said W HEN THE WALLS COME TUMBLING DOWN, NOTHING WILL EVER BE THE SAME.
    I needed time to process all of this, and in the meantime there was still much to be done. I called Danny and Sheila back into the room, and Hank and I watched as they meticulously emptied all of the other boxes containing predictions. As far as any of us could tell, everything seemed to be in order.
    I told Danny that we needed all the pages in prediction box 19 thoroughly examined for fingerprints and DNA. Both types of identification would easily survive the passage of four years, if that’s when the pages were buried. There was always the possibility that the capsule had been dug up and the extra prediction box subsequently been inserted.
    “Use the state labs if you need to, or federal. I’ll make whatever calls I need to make.”
    I also asked Danny to photograph the pages before he started to analyze them, so that I would have copies right away. Then Hank and I went back to my office, and the next steps were becoming clear in my mind.
    “We’ve got a serial on our hands,” I said. “And it’s somebody in town, or close by.”
    “Why do you say that?”
    “Because I don’t buy that George Myerson was a coincidence. I think