Later that night, after the police stop by (and are not entirely helpful, finding no useful fingerprints), Becker finishes uploading the new issue. The others return from their trip to Alison's apartment and everybody compares notes.

The next day, Floyd hears back from the police that the license plate of the car he saw comes up as invalid in the DMV computer. Alison calls in to give them the number where she's staying and Ray asks her about the program she's working on for David Temple. She says it's a database, not unlike the product her company makes for modeling and theatrical agencies, but with a lot more data fields, including time and place of birth, genealogical information and other unusual data. She's not sure exactly what the product will be used for. She knows that Temple is a movie producer, and a friend of her boss, Ted McCoy. Ray relays this information to the rest of the group and somebody asks whether Alison entered any valid data about herself into the program during testing. Ray relays this question on to Alison who says that while testing the early stages of the project she entered her own name, along with those of friends, co-workers, fictional characters and so on.

That afternoon, Ray and George drive around LA, each gathering magic charges in his own particular way. Arnulph takes a drive out toward Alison's apartment and spots a blue convertible driven by a couple of guys matching the description he heard from Floyd. He attempts to tail them, but they spot him and quickly lose him in mid-day LA traffic.

That night, the whole gang go out bar hopping. This is not just irresponsible Thursday night partying, though, as they hit a couple of bars where clued-in occult types are likely to be found. They start off at The Eye in the Pyramid, a live music club downtown. Ray spots a local "duke," Jason Rice, sitting at the bar chatting up a young girl. He sits down and feeds Rice a line about "sensing the vibrations" that his new friend is 17 and her dad's a cop. Rice excuses himself and goes to sit at a table with Ray, George and Floyd while Arnulf flirts unsuccessfully with the girl Rice was talking to.

Rice gives them four interesting items. First, David Temple has just bought a new $5 million house, "up in the hills, looks like a castle. It belonged to that actor." (Floyd surmises that he's talking about a house that once belonged to Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.) Second, nobody knows who the "umbrella guys" are, but Janice Wainwright supposedly talked to them a couple of days ago. Third, the two guys who tried to break into the DAE offices are probably with the New Inquisition, Alex Abel's own private paranormal investigation bureau. Finally, he read that somebody listed the "lost" episode of Out of the Night on eBay, but eBay shut the auction down.

Next, they all traipse over to the Grove, a tiny little Goth club. They mingle for a while, and Floyd runs into somebody he knows who knows Janice Wainwright. They're introduced and Janice tells them about her run-in with the umbrella men. She works part time in her friend's vegetarian/health food restaurant. These two men came in and started asking questions about the menu. "I don't know if you've ever had someone ask you completely trivial questions and then hang intently on every word of your answer, but I found it very unnerving," she tells them. The last question they asked was whether the restaurant served Coke or Pepsi. When she told them they didn't serve any carbonated soft drinks, they seemed confused and left immediately.

Somebody says something about David Temple, and Janice tells them that his company had approached her about some kind of modelling or acting job, and given her a really long and detailed release form to sign. She has it with her and is happy to let the DAE gang keep it. Looking over the form, they're certain that it's meant as input into the program Alison Campbell is working on.

The time: A Wednesday night in October, the night before the new edition of The Dark Adapted Eye is posted.
The place: the DAE office, a loft on the third (top) story of a converted warehouse in Los Angeles.

Becker is working on assembling all the files and links for the new edition, the rest of the staff are variously helping or just hanging out in the office. A young woman arrives, seemingly quite distraught. The staff recognize her as Monica Lane, the subject of a story in the DAE about six weeks ago. (She'd been experiencing visions of past and future events. These events were the sort of thing that would be important to the person experiencing them, but not to the public at large. She'd be riding on the bus, for example, and get a sudden, vivid image of the woman in the next seat getting fired from her job, or getting a letter from an old high school friend. She'd been referred to the paper via a friend-of-a-friend route, and so Arnulph and the staff photographer met with her and wrote up a little piece about it. Shortly thereafter, the visions stopped. The article ran anyway, with a short addendum noting that Ms. Lane was apparently no longer having these experiences.) She asks, "You guys remember me, right? What's my name?"

When they all say, "Monica Lane," she bursts out, "No! No, it isn't!" After some boggling at this, they get her story. At lunch, some people in her office took up a collection to send somebody out to buy sandwiches, and she discovered her wallet was missing. She was about to call the police and report it stolen when she noticed that her coworkers were all calling her Monica. She asked why and they replied, "We've always called you Monica. That's your name, isn't it? Monica Lane?" She realized that she couldn't remember her name, but she somehow knew it wasn't Monica Lane. She didn't have any ID, since her wallet was missing, and she couldn't find any paperwork on her desk with her name on it. She went home, but her landlady remembered her as Monica Lane also. She couldn't find anything in her apartment with her name on it, either, and started going around to people who might remember her real name. No one at DAE remembers any other name, and the article about her is no longer in the online archive. While Becker roots through his drawer of backup tapes, the photographer looks through her files and finds a picture of this woman, but it's just loose in the box and she can't find the file it came out of. Eventually Becker finds the original story and sees that it's exactly the way everybody remembers it, except that the woman's name was given as Alison Campbell.

With that out of the way, the focus turns to figuring out what happened to her and why. Alison doesn't have any clues. She tells them about her job: she's a programmer for a company that makes database software for theatrical and modelling agencies. She gives them her phone number and address, then leaves to spend the night at a friend's house.

Ray thinks he might be able to pull off a similar effect, but it's not quite a standard cliomancer trick. He phones George at his favorite bar, promising him a bottle of Glenlivet if he helps them out. George stumbles into his car and drives right over, fortunately avoiding accidents and the police, as he's already well liquored up. In the meantime, the others decide that whatever happened to Alison most likely has something to do with her visions. They also speculate about the significance of the name "Monica Lane." Floyd remembers reading that some people think the name "Monica" comes from a Latin word meaning "advisor." When George arrives and is quickly filled in, he agrees with Ray that it could have been any one of twenty or so local people, he comes up with two names he considers likely suspects: David Temple and Mr. Black.

David Temple is something of a bigshot in occult underground circles. He's got his own little cabal of apprentices, groupies, and general hangers-on, and always tries to know everything that's going on in the LA occult scene. Mr. Black is a semi-mythical occult crimelord figure. Nobody's sure who he is or if he even exists, but a number of people have either claimed to be or been rumored to be working for him. None of the DAE staff have any knowledge about Mr. Black one way or the other, but they do all know that the drunker George is, the more likely he is to blame Mr. Black for just about everything.

Arnulph, Ray and the photographer decide to take a look at Monica/Alison's apartment to see if there are any clues to who stole her name and why. George tags along (despite being a bit disappointed that they won't let him drive). Upon arriving, they see that she lives in a fairly run-down building -- one of those two-story "cracker box" style apartment complexes where each unit has its own outside door facing onto a central courtyard. There's a security gate with a phone where you're supposed to push the button next to the name of the tenant you're visiting. Unfortunately, the glass is broken and most of the little white letters have fallen out, so they can't tell if "Campbell" or "Lane" is one of the names. Someone on his way out holds the gate open for them, and they get into Alison's apartment by quietly removing a sliding glass window. Inside, they don't find anything with Alison's name on it -- no bills, letters, magazines, checks, nothing. Only two things prove interesting in the shabby little apartment: Alison's address book and her computer. The computer is very new and very expensive looking, in contrast to everything else in the place. Starting it up, the photographer finds a spreadsheet were Alison records her monthly budget and expenses and sees that she's been sending quite a lot of money to her parents in Wyoming. The address book has three Wyoming phone numbers, labelled "Mom", "Dad", and "Dad's Doctor (Dr. Roderick)." There's also an entry (phone number only, no address) for David Temple. They suspect this is a fairly recent entry, but the only real evidence of that is that there are no names or numbers below it on the "T" page. Ray uses a spell to view the last time Alison spoke with David Temple. He "sees" her a couple of days ago, talking on the phone about some programming project.

As they leave the building, they notice a pair of young men in suits and overcoats, walking down the street carrying umbrellas -- the little rolled-up kind. They're not entirely sure if the men are watching their car or not. The photographer notices that they're walking in step, which probably doesn' t mean anything, but makes everyone slightly nervous anyway.

Meanwhile, back at the DAE offices, Floyd and Becker think they hear somebody downstairs. (At this point we should establish the layout of the building: there's a door on the street level with an intercom where you can be "buzzed in" to the building. The first floor of the building is all storage except for a tiny lobby and a small office used by the property management company. On the second floor are a theatrical costume company and a documents storage company. The third floor loft is the DAE office. Access to the second and third floors is via a self-service freight elevator. There are no internal stairs but there is a fire escape on the outside.) The freight elevator starts up. Floyd and Becker know that nobody in the building works nights, so Becker goes to his desk and gets out his taser.

When the freight elevator arrives, nobody is on it. As they look at the empty elevator, they hear the sound of breaking glass behind them, immediately followed by a man swearing and yelling "Let's get out of here." Running back to the other side of the loft, they are just in time to see two men wearing what look like surgical masks running down the fire escape. One is a big, young guy in a leather jacket, the other is a shorter grey-haired man in a crappy suit. They get to the bottom of the fire escape and jump into an old Plymouth convertible and race off down the street. Floyd memorizes the license plate number and notices a set of burglar's tools on the fire escape just below the broken window. Becker and Floyd surmise that the men had picked the downstairs lock, sent the freight elevator up, then doubled around to the back and up the fire escape, hoping to get the drop on them when they went to investigate the empty elevator, and that the younger guy panicked and ran when he broke the window. They phone the police to report the attempted break-in.