The Face of Death

In vengeance murders, you generally see more anger than joy. It's about destruction. What I had seen at the Kingsleys' was an almost equal balance. The messages on the wall, the disembowelments, these were compelled by rage, they fit. The blood paintings didn't. They were a sexual act. Memories to masturbate to.

That's just noise, I realize. The investigatory key is the vengeance motive. The other is an anomaly, but the human condition is filled with those. Interesting but not probative.

I turn back to the page.

SARAH ASKED FOR ME AT THE KINGSLEY CRIME SCENE, BUT HAD ALREADY PLANNED TO CONTACT ME BEFORE IT HAPPENED. (WHY ME?) WROTE A DIARY SHE CLAIMS IS PROBATIVE.

I can feel myself flagging. I want to continue, but I'm about to hit the end of my rope for today.

Concentrate. What's the assignment of resources for tomorrow?

BARRY AND I TO INTERVIEW SARAH KINGSLEY.

CALLIE AND GENE TO FINISH PROCESSING THE VARGAS CRIME

SCENE.

GET EVERYONE A COPY OF THE DIARY WITH ORDERS TO READ IT. IT WILL HAVE TO WAIT TILL MONDAY, BUT WE NEED DEEP BACKGROUND CHECKS ON SARAH AND ALL VICTIMS. FIND THE CONNECTIONS!

I read what I've written, nod to myself, satisfied. We still have a long way to go, but I can see him now. I've begun to feel him, and that's bad for him. A muted satisfaction purrs through me. Less than a day's gone by, and I already know why you do what you do.

I put the pen down and let myself go slack.

God, I'm tired. At more levels than just the physical. My cell phone rings. I look at the caller ID. Tommy. Something in me lifts a little.

Tommy Aguilera is more than a friend, but less than a husband. Not just a lover, but not someone I need beside me, night after night. Tommy is a possibility; that's the ten-words-or-less summary. He's an ex-Secret Service agent who now works as a private security consultant. We'd met when he was still in the Service. I'd been investigating a case involving a California senator's son who'd decided he liked rape and murder. Tommy was assigned to protect the senator, who was pro-life and had been getting a ton of death threats. In the events that followed, Tommy was forced to shoot this Fortunate Son. My testimony saved Tommy from a political firestorm that could have ended his career.

He'd told me then to let him know if I ever needed anything. I'd taken him up on this six months ago, and afterward, something interesting had happened: I'd kissed him, and he'd kissed me back. Better still, he'd undressed me and had wanted me bad, scars and all. It made me cry and helped me heal. Matt was the love of my life. He was my soul mate. He was irreplaceable. But I needed a man to tell me I was beautiful, and to prove it with sweat, not words. Tommy had done this with gusto.

We sleep together three or four times a month. I'm busy, he's busy, it's comfortable. The perfect arrangement, for now. I answer the phone. "Hey, Tommy."

"Hey. Thought I'd call you. Not too late, is it?"

Tommy gives new meaning to the word laconic. It's not that he's uncomfortable talking to people, or lacks a vocabulary. It's his way. He prefers to listen.

"Nope. I just got in, actually. I got called out to a scene."

"I thought you had time off. Packing and stuff."

Tommy knew what I was doing this weekend, and knew that he needed to stay away while I was doing it. His ability to understand this kind of thing was just another hint of the depth beneath his stoicism. "I did, but there was a girl at the scene. She had a gun to her head and was asking to see me. I had to go."

"Turned out okay?"

"It was bad, but the girl lived."

"Good." A long pause. "I knew what you were doing today. Didn't want to intrude, but wanted to see how you were doing."

Yes, I think, how are you doing?

I sigh. "I'm doing crappy. Can you come over?"

"On my way."

He hangs up.

Action, not words, Tommy's way.

Tommy knocks on the door and I let him in. He takes a look at me and leads me over to the couch without saying a word. He sits us down and gathers me up in his arms, and I sigh and lean into him. There's no hair stroking or words of comfort with Tommy. Instead, there's strength and certainty, as if he's saying, Whatever you need, even if it's just this.

I stay there, head against his chest, and wonder at the feel of him. It's like lying against a rock encased in velvet. Tommy is somewhere in between rugged and pretty, a dark-haired Latin man with the lithe muscled body of a dancer and the rough hands of a killer. He's the male version of Callie; women are drawn to him like lemmings to a cliff, yearning to jump off into those dark and guarded eyes. He's no model--he has a large scar at his left temple, an imperfection that only adds to his appeal--but he is handsome to the bone. He pushes me away, gentle.

"Want to tell me about it?"

I tell him. About the morning and afternoon and Sarah and the gutted bodies of Dean and Laurel Kingsley, the tub full of blood, the murders of Vargas and his as-yet-unknown companion.

"Gross," he offers.

"Yeah. It got to me."

He nods toward the notepad pages on the coffee table. "That about the case?"

"Uh-huh."

"Mind if I look?"

"Go ahead."

He picks up and scans each page. Puts them all back down and shakes his head.

"Sounds complicated," he observes.

"It always starts out that way." I look at him, smile. "Thanks for coming over. I feel better. A little."

"No problem." He looks around. "So . . . where's Bonnie?"

"She's at Alan and Elaina's for the night."

"Hmmm."

I look up at him, see a small smile playing on his lips. I grin and punch him in the chest. "Sheesh! All I said was I feel a little better, and you're already imagining me with my clothes off !"

Another small smile. "Actually, I'm always imagining you with your clothes off," he says.

Banter and playfulness, but I realize as I look at him that there's more to it than what's on the surface. Tommy likes to listen, and not just to what's being said. He listens with his eyes and with his mind, and he's been listening to me. He's offering sex because he's listened, and he knows I need contact, comfort, distraction. I angle my head up, he angles his down, and our lips meet. My desperation makes the contact electric, and need surges through me, emotional, mental, physical, impossible to separate. I grab the sides of his head and stick my tongue in his mouth. I taste Tommy, with a dash of beer.

I move into him so that I'm straddling his lap. He moves a hand up under my shirt, under my bra, a single motion. The feel of his callused fingers on my nipple is exquisite. I moan, and feel him go hard against me.

One of the reasons I've always been a fan of sex is that you can mix the primal with the tender, you can get just a little bit ugly, a little bit animal, and have it all turn out okay in the end. If you're already feeling dirty and conflicted and a little bit savage, as I am right now, sex can keep pace, right beside you.

I pull my face back from Tommy's, still holding his head between my hands. His fingers continue to knead my nipple, his cock continues to throb, and his eyes are clouding up with lust. "Fuck me right here," I say, my voice husky. "Tear off my clothes, bend me over the couch, and fuck me now."

He halts everything for a moment, the fingers going motionless, as his eyes search mine. He seems to find the permission-based-on-sanity that he needs.

He picks me up and off him, sits me down, and grabs my shirt, lifting it in a rough motion, bringing my arms over my head. The shirt comes off, is tossed aside, and he doesn't slow, reaching behind me, unsnapping my bra, yanking it from my shoulders.

He pauses for a moment, looking down at my breasts, and he pushes me on my back, and his hands grab and squeeze, rough without being painful, perfect, making me arch my head back and gasp. He brings his mouth to each one, sucking and licking just long enough to make me want him bad before he backs away. Now he undoes the button of my jeans, pulls down the zipper, and yanks the jeans down my waist, down my legs, taking my panties with them. I end up with my legs spread, fully naked now, wet, feeling like Jezebel-squared.

His mouth comes down between my legs, and I come immediately, crying out, explosions shivering across my belly, down my thighs. Time gets rubbery, and the world gets vague, and I'm rolling around in the sensation of it all, shameless, Eve with the apple, a cat in heat. His mouth leaves me, and he stands up, and I watch, dazed, as he undresses himself. When his cock springs free, I growl, and it's Jezebel-cubed, I'm reaching out for him as he slides on a condom. He grips my wrists, pulls me toward him, and then he grabs me around the waist, lifts me in the air, carries me over to the arm of the couch, and places me there, belly on the couch arm, hands against the cushions, ass in the air. I feel him maneuvering behind me, and then he's inside me, one hand on my flank, the other gripping my shoulder, thrusting, fulfilling my request. It's animal, it's primal. It's what I need: an irresistible force, a tidal wave, something to sweep over me, to drown me, and to take the corpses out to sea with it when it recedes.

I give myself over to it, and take what he's offering--guiltless sublimation. I have more than one orgasm as he works toward his own, and when it arrives for him, his fingers dig into me, as his whole body tenses, not enough to bruise, just enough to hurt a little, a brief, sweet pain.

Then it's over and we come apart, collapsing onto the couch, curling into each other, spent, satisfied, a little bit shaky. Tommy looks over at me after a moment or two. "Wow," he says.

"Wow back." I smile. I look into his eyes. "Thanks, Tommy."

"Anytime." I see that smile tugging at his lips again. "And I do mean anytime. "

I grin, kiss him on the cheek.

The shakiness of earlier is gone. I can still hear the dead whispering, but I have some distance now. Tommy disentangles and heads into the kitchen. I admire his backside going and his front-side as he returns, a beer in hand for him, bottled water for me. He sits back down and we re-entangle. I take a drink of water. Sniff the air. "Smells like sex."

"What's sex smell like?"

"Like . . ." I tilt my head and smile, the words coming to me. "Like new sweat and a clean cock."

He takes a swig of his beer. "Racy and literate at the same time." He kisses the back of my neck. "Sexy."

"Are you admitting that you love me for my mind?"

"Nope. I love you for your behind. I like you for your mind."

"Ass."

"What?"

"You said 'behind.' It makes you sound like a four-year-old. Say 'ass.' "

"Can't."

I turn and look at him, arch an eyebrow. "Are you kidding?"

"Nope."

I search his eyes, realize he's really not kidding. I snuggle back into him. Giggle.

"What a Boy Scout you are, Tommy. I had no idea."

"Eagle Scout, actually."

I can't help it; I dissolve into laughter at this. The movement my laughter creates turns into something else, and Tommy shows me that he definitely got his sex merit badge if nothing else. A

An hour later. We're each lying naked, backs on the carpet, feet propped up on the coffee table.

"I think that's it for me," Tommy says. He sounds pleased about it.

"A bad day has to be good for something."

"Speaking of that," he says. "I had a thought. Or two."

I turn over onto my side so I can see him in profile.

"What's that?"

"When you described the scene. Bodies bled out in the bathtub. You know they'd still have to be alive for that, right?"

"Uh-huh."

No blood flow when you're dead. The heart stops.

"But he still had to restrain them somehow. You mentioned drugs as a possibility. I think you're right. I'd bet he used some kind of a muscle relaxant. That way they'd know what was going on while it was happening. More thrill for him." He shrugs. "Just a thought."

I run a finger through the curls of his chest hair. He's not a bear; there's just enough hair there to provide visual and tactile input when needed.

Tommy's right, I realize. I'd given him a bare sketch of the day, but from it, he'd extrapolated a sense of the doer, of the doer's hungers, of the way the doer hungers. I'd thought of drugs, but muscle relaxant as a specificity . . . it was worth considering.

When did you consider it, Tommy-mine? Before we had sex or after? During?

I'm ready again, and I only wonder why for a moment. Most of the people I met today were dead. I'm not. Sex is a way to feel alive. I move my hand down farther and grab hold of something.

"I'll check that hunch out tomorrow," I say. "Now I want you to dig deep, muster up that Secret Service training, and do your duty."

He tweaks one of my nipples, puts down his beer, and we spend another hour or so proving that we're alive. A

Exhausted. Spent. Happy.

"I had another thought," Tommy says, breaking the comfortable silence.

"You sure seem to do a lot of thinking while we're having sex."

"I do all my best thinking when I'm naked."

"So?"

"There's a motivation that encompasses both pain and justice."

"Yeah, I know."

He raises an eyebrow. "Really?"

"The oldest one of all," I say. "Revenge."

"Thought I might have the jump on you with that one."

I kiss his cheek. "Don't feel bad. When exactly did you have time to think of that, anyway?"

He grins at me. "Orgasms clear the brain."

"So what you are saying, basically, is that this came to you?"

He rolls his eyes.

It occurs to me that I feel better. A lot better. I'd felt bad, he'd called, he'd come. We'd had sex and talked about work and--

I jolt inside as a whole new thought comes to me. Oh my God--are we a couple?

It's an idea as strange and alien as it is comforting and familiar. One of the things about being married for many years is the feeling of security that develops, the certainty of knowing that you always have someone in your corner. If everyone else fails you, or dies on you, or betrays you, you always have that other person. You are never really alone. To lose that is to lose a part of yourself. The empty space in the bed itches in the night like a phantom limb.

Have we crossed that line? The one that says "casual" on one side and "couple" on the other?

"What?" Tommy asks.

"Just . . ." I shake my head. "Just thinking about us. Never mind."

"Don't do that."

"What?"

"Don't think something and say it's nothing. You don't have to tell me what it was, but don't tell me it's nothing."

I search his eyes. Find no anger there, only honesty, concern.

"Sorry," I say. "I was just wondering . . ." I swallow, once. Why is this so hard to get out? "Tommy, are we a couple?"

He smiles at me. "Is that all? Of course we are."

"Oh."

"Look, Smoky, I'm not saying it's time for us to move in together, or to get married. But we're together. That's how I see it."

"Oh. Wow."

He shakes his head in amusement. "You were married for a long time. You're used to 'together' meaning love and marriage. I don't love you."

Something in my stomach tumbles and I feel sick. "You . . . you don't?"

He reaches out, strokes my cheek. "Sorry, I didn't mean that the way it sounded. What I mean is, I'll never say it unless I mean it, and I'm not ready to say it yet. But I can see a point coming where I will. If we keep going the way we're going, I'm going to wake up one day and love you. That's the road we're headed down. We're together."

More butterflies now but not the nausea-inducing kind.

"Really?"

"Truth." He squints at me. "How do you feel about that?"

I snuggle into him. "I like it," I say, realizing it's true. I do like it. Better, it's guiltless. I don't feel any disapproval from Matt's ghost.

But what about Quantico? Gonna make him fall in love with you and leave him flat?

It's another factor to take into account, I reply to myself, stubborn. More choices. Choices are good. Except it's not that simple and I know it. I could hurt Tommy with what I decide. The simplicity of a "new start" is an oversimplification of my life. I know that Alan and Callie and Elaina would back me to the hilt should I decide to take the position. Everyone would be sad, but the bonds there are too old and too strong. We wouldn't lose each other.

You can have a long-distance relationship with friends and family. Not with a guy who loves you.

Don't forget about your mute foster-daughter, your pill-popping friend, and 1for-two-me! Don't forget about a restless house you haven't finished packing away and a friend who just beat cancer and the fact that Matt's and Alexa's gravestones are here, not in Virginia. Who'll place the flowers?

"Know what I want?" I whisper, willing my ghosts away, for now. He shakes his head.

"I want you to take me upstairs and help me sleep."

He lifts me into his arms without a word and carries me up the stairs. We move past Alexa's room, but I don't think about that, and then we're in my bed, and he's got me, he's there, and I'm able to start drifting away, while he keeps me safe, my guardian against the dead. 14

"I TALKED TO THE HOSPITAL THIS MORNING," BARRY TELLS ME

as we walk through the parking lot. "They said that the girl was treated for shock, and she had some bruising on her wrists and ankles, but that otherwise there's nothing physically wrong with her."

"Well, that's something, I suppose."

I fill him in on my thoughts of last night, including my theory regarding vengeance as motive.

"Interesting. What doesn't add up, though, is Sarah. If we cut her and the Kingsleys out of the picture, it makes sense. Vargas is into kids, has been for a long time. Maybe he likes torture too, caning their feet. One of the kids grows up, comes and kills him. It even explains why he went easy on the girl. Closing the eyes. No disembowelment."

"Yes."

"But Sarah and the Kingsleys? I don't see where that fits in." He shrugs. "Still, I do like the revenge motive."

"Perhaps Sarah can shed some light on things."

"Hang on a sec," Barry says as we get near the entrance, nervous. "I need a smoke before we go in."

I smile at him. "You don't like hospitals either?"

He shrugs as he lights his cigarette. "Last time I was in one, I was watching my dad die. What's to like?"

Barry looks bleary-eyed. I notice he's wearing the same clothes he had on last night.

"Did you ever go home?" I ask.

He puffs a few times and shakes his head. "Nope. Simmons didn't wrap up until almost seven A.M. I had to call in a couple of software experts too. They're still there."

"Why?"

"The boy, Michael? His computer has some kind of super-duper protection program installed on it. They gave me the technical rundown, but it's over my head. Enter the wrong password and it wipes the hard drive clean. That part I understood."

Hey, try 1-for-two-me. You never know!

I suppress an eye twitch. "Interesting."

"It gets better. They say it's a custom job, very advanced, and--get this--they don't think the boy put it on the computer."

"Why?"

"Too advanced. Something about the level of encryption provided. We're talking beyond military-grade."

"It could have been put there by the perp then."

"That's my thought."

"It would make sense. He has something to say to us. That's why the writing on the wall at both scenes, why he called me to tell me about Vargas. He's telling us something, but he's doing it at his own pace."

"I like it when they get all clever like that. It means they're ripe for fucking up."

"Was anything else found?"

"We have the footprints and the computer. No prints, no hairs, no fibers. The feet are good though. We catch him, we can definitely get a match. Like I said--fucking up. Bodies went to the medical examiner, we'll see what happens there. Did you hear anything from Callie?"

"I haven't talked to her yet. I'll call her when we're done here."

"Maybe he was dumb there too." He takes another deep drag on his cigarette. "About the girl. I don't have much yet, but here goes: She's been with the Kingsleys for a little over a year, real name is Sarah Langstrom."

Sarah Langstrom, I think, trying the name on for size.

"I checked for a record," Barry continues. "She was arrested for drug possession when she was fifteen--smoking a joint on a bus bench in broad daylight. Nothing else came up. I'll get her file from Social Services tomorrow."

"She said her parents were murdered. When she was six."

"That's great. I love a happy ending." He sighs. "How do you want to handle interviewing her?"

"Strictly straight and narrow. This girl . . ." I shake my head. "If she feels like we're not being honest with her, or we're not taking her seriously--she'll stop trusting us. And I don't think she trusts us much anyway."

"Fair enough." He takes a final drag on his cigarette before flicking it into the parking lot. "I'll follow your lead."

Sarah has a private room in the children's wing of the hospital. Barry has a guard posted outside the door. Young Thompson again. Tired looking but still excited.

"Any visitors?" Barry asks him.

"No, sir. No one."

"Sign us in."

It's nice enough, as hospital rooms go, which as far as I'm concerned is like saying that it's the best one available at the Bates Motel. The walls have been painted a warm beige, and the floor is some kind of faux-wood. Better than white linoleum and institution-green, I admit to myself. There's a large window, and the drapes are pulled open, allowing the sunlight to pour in.

Sarah's in a bed near the window. She turns her head to see us as we enter.

"Aw, geez," I hear Barry say under his breath.

She looks small and pale and tired. Barry is appalled. This is another reason I like him. He's not jaded. I walk up to the side of her bed. She doesn't smile, but I'm happy to see less deadness in her eyes.

"How are you?" I ask.

She shrugs. "Tired."

I indicate Barry with a nod of my head. "This is Barry Franklin. He's the homicide detective in charge of your case. He's a friend of mine, and I asked him to take on your case because I trust him."

Sarah looks at Barry. "Hi," she says, disinterested. She turns back to me. "I get it." She sighs, her voice resigned and bleak. "You're not going to help me."

I blink, surprised.

"Whoa, honey. The local police are always involved. It's how things work. That doesn't mean I'm not a part of it."

"Are you lying to me?"

"Nope."

She stares at me for a few seconds, eyes narrowed and suspicious, gauging the truth of what I'm saying. "Okay," she says, reluctant. "I believe you."

"Good," I reply.

Her face changes. Hope, mixed with desperation. "Did you get my diary?"

I choose my words carefully. "I couldn't take the original diary. We have rules about how we handle things at a crime scene. But"--I raise my voice as I see her face begin to fall--"I had a photograph taken of every single page in it. Someone is going to be printing those photographs out for me today, and I'll be able to read them. Just as if they were the pages from your real diary."

"Today?"

"I promise."

Sarah gives me another long, suspicious stare.

There's no trust in this girl, I think. No trust at all. What had it taken to make her this way? Did I want to know?

"Sarah," I say, keeping my voice even and gentle, "we need to ask you some questions. About what happened in your house yesterday. Are you ready to do that?"

The gaze she gives me is filled with too much experience, a kind of empty indifference I've seen before in victims. It's easier to be indifferent than it is to care.

"I guess." Her voice is flat.

"Do you mind if Barry is here while we talk? I'll ask all the questions. He'll just sit away from us and listen."

She waves a hand. "I don't care."

I pull up a chair next to her bed. Barry sits down in a chair near the door. More of our easy dance. He'll be able to hear everything, but he'll remain unobtrusive. It won't be hard for Sarah to forget that he's even there.

There's an intimacy to victim recollection. It's personal. A sharing of secrets. Barry knows this, and he knows that Sarah is going to be most comfortable sharing those secrets with me.

She's turned her head back to the window. Away from me, toward the sun. Her hands are folded. I see black nail polish on every nail. Let's get this row on the shoad, inner-me says.

"Sarah, do you know who did this?" The key question. "Do you know who it was that killed the Kingsleys?"

She continues staring out the window. "Not in the way you mean. I don't know his name, or what he looks like. But he's been in my life before."

"When he killed your parents."

She nods.

"You said you were six when that happened."

"June 6," she says. "On my birthday. Happy birthday to me."

I swallow, stumbling inside for a moment at this revelation.

"Where did that happen?"

"Malibu."

I glance at Barry. He nods, makes a quiet notation in his notepad. We'll be able to track down all the details of this earlier murder, if it happened.

"Do you remember what occurred back then? When you were six?"

"I remember all of it."

I wait, hoping she'll elaborate. She doesn't.

"How do you know the man who killed the Kingsleys yesterday is the same man who killed your parents ten years ago?"

She turns to look at me, a faint expression of resignation and muted anger on her face. "That's a stupid question."

I regard her for a moment. "Well, then . . . what's a good question?"

"Why is he the same man?"

I blink. She's right. That's the most incisive question of all.

"Do you know why?"

She nods.

"Do you want to tell me?"

"I'll tell you a little. The rest you'll have to read about."

"Okay."

"He . . ." She struggles with something. Maybe to find the right words. "He said to me once, 'I'm making you over in my own image.'

He didn't explain what that meant. But that's what he said. He said he looked at me and my life the way an artist looks at clay, and that I was his sculpture. He even had a name for the sculpture, a title."

"What was it?"

She closes her eyes. "A Ruined Life."

The scritch-scratch of Barry's pen pauses. I gaze at Sarah, trying to digest what she's just said.

Organized, I think to myself. Organized but driven by something specific and obsessive. Revenge is the motive, and destroying her is a piece of it. A big piece.

She continues talking. Her voice is a little bit faint and faraway.

"He does things to change my life. To make me sad, to make me hate, to keep me alone. To change me. "

"Has he ever told you why?"

"He said, when it all started: 'Even though it's not your fault, your pain is still my justice.' I didn't get it then. I don't get it now." She looks at me, searching, inquisitive. "Do you?"

"Not specifically. We think this is about some kind of revenge for him."

"For what?"

"We don't know yet. You said he does things to change your life. To change you. What kind of things?"

A long, long pause. I can't tell what's moving through her eyes. I only know that it's sorrowful and huge and that it's not new to her.

"It's about me," she says, her voice small and quiet. "He kills anyone who is good to me or could be good to me. He kills the things I love and that love me back."

"And no one's caught on to this before?"

She goes from calm tones to a low roar in an instant, startling me. Those blue eyes are blazing. "It's all in my diary! Just read it. How many times do I have to tell you? God! God! God!"

She turns away, back to the sun once more, trembling and twitching and overflowing with rage. I can feel her pulling away, going inside herself.

"I'm sorry," I say, soothing. "And I promise, I will read it. Every page. What I need to know now is what happened yesterday. In the house. Anything you can remember."

Another long pause. She's not angry anymore. She looks tired, right down to her molecules.

"What do you want to know?"

"Start at the beginning. Before he came to the house. What were you doing?"

"It was mid-morning. About ten o'clock. I was putting my nightgown on."

"Putting it on? Why?"

She smiles, and that old hag Sarah keeps inside herself is back in full force, chuckling and ugly.

"Michael told me to."

I frown. "Why did Michael tell you to?"

She cocks her head at me.

"Why, so he could fuck me, of course."

15

"YOU AND MICHAEL WERE HAVING SEX?"

I'm proud of myself. I've managed to keep my voice steady and judgment-free at this revelation.

"No, no, no. Sex is something that happens between two people that are equal. I was fucking Michael. So he wouldn't lie to Dean and Laurel and make them send me away."

"He was forcing you?"

"Not physically. But he was blackmailing me."

"With what? What had you done?"

She shoots me a look of incredulity. "Done? I hadn't done any- thing. But that wouldn't have mattered. Michael was the perfect son. Straight As, track team captain. Never did anything wrong." The bitterness in her voice is like acid. "Who was I? Just some stray they'd taken in. He said if I didn't have sex with him, he'd plant pot in my room. Dean and Laurel were nice people, and they were good to me--

but they didn't have much tolerance for anything . . . unusual. They would have sent me away. I figured I could hold out for another two years, till I was eighteen, and then I'd be a legal adult and I could leave."

"So you . . . had sex with him when he asked you to."

"A girl's gotta eat." Her voice drips with sarcasm, and a hint of selfloathing that makes my heart ache. "He just wanted me to blow him and he liked fucking me." She looks down at her hands. They tremble in counterpoint to the hard face she's showing me. "Hey, I haven't been a virgin for a long time. What's the big deal?"

"The Kingsleys didn't suspect?"

Sarah rolls her eyes. "Please. I told you, they were good to me--but they really liked thinking that everything in their life was perfect." She hesitates. "Besides . . . they were good to me. I didn't want them to know about Michael. It would have hurt them. They deserved better."

"So, you were putting your nightgown on. What happened then?"

"He showed up at my bedroom door."

"Michael?"

"No, The Stranger. He just appeared there. No warning. He was wearing panty hose over his face, like he has in the past." She chews her bottom lip for a moment, caught up in a memory. "He had a knife in his hand. He was happy, smiling, relaxed. He said hello, acting all jolly and normal, and then . . . he said he had a gift for me." She pauses.

"He told me: 'Once upon a time, a man deserved to die. He was an amateur poet, this man, a gifted one. He made pretty words, but he was darkness inside. One day I came to the man, I came to him and I put a gun to his wife's head and I told him to write her a poem. I told him it would be the last thing she'd ever hear before I blew her brains out. He did what I said and I killed them, praise be to God. Once they were dead, I pulled their insides out, so the world would see their darkness.' "

The message, I think. He disembowels them so that we will see who they really are.

I note the religious bent as well. Fanaticism in serial killers is nearly always a sign of insanity.

But not in this case. His faith wasn't sparked by his desire for revenge. It's something he grew up with.

"Did he give you this poem?" I ask. "Was that the gift?"

"A copy, yeah. He said he retyped it for me. I put it in the pocket of my nightgown after he made me read it." She nods toward the table next to her hospital bed. "It's in the drawer. Go ahead. He was right, it's pretty good, when you consider the circumstances."

I reach over and open the drawer. Inside is a folded square of nondescript letter-sized white paper. I unfold it and read:

I T I S Y O U

When I breathe

It is you

When my heart beats

It is you

When my blood flows

It is you

When the sun rises

When the stars shine

It is you

It is you.

I'm a barely casual reader of poetry, unqualified to judge what I've just read. I only know that I like its simplicity, and I wonder about the moment in which it was written.

"It's true, you know," Sarah says.

I look up. "What's true?"

"If he says it happened that way . . . then it happened that way." She closes her eyes. "The Stranger told me that the ink on the original is smudged because the poet cried while he was writing it. It also has his wife's blood on it. 'Beautiful pinpoint drops,' he said, 'because the blood misted from her head when I shot her.' "

"Go on," I say. "What happened next?"

She looks off, her voice faint.

"He asked me how I liked the poem. He seemed genuinely interested. I didn't answer. He didn't seem to mind. 'It's good to see you again,' he said. 'Your pain is more beautiful than ever.' "

"Sarah, how accurate is your memory of the way he talks and what he says? Don't be offended."

"I have a gift for voices and what people say. It's not a photographic memory or anything. I can't remember it exactly, not word for word, not like that. But I'm pretty good. And I really concentrate on him when he's speaking. The way he talks. The things he does."

"That's good, it will help," I encourage her. "How tall is he?"

"A little over six feet."

"Is he black or white?"

"White and clean shaven."

"Is he a big man? By that, I mean, is he fat or skinny? Muscular or weak?"

"He's not fat, but he's not thin. He's very strong. He has a perfect body. Perfect. Not a flaw on it. He must work out like crazy. He's well built without being all pumped up."

I hear Barry's pen scratch away.

"Go on," I say. "What happened next?"

" 'I'm almost done sculpting you, Sarah,' he said. 'Ten long years, full of ups and downs and twists and turns and sorrow. I've watched you bend and break. It's interesting, isn't it? How many times a human being can shatter and still keep moving forward? You're not the same little girl you were when we began this journey, are you? I can see the cracks, the places where you had to glue yourself back together.' " Sarah shifts in the bed, restless. "This isn't exact, okay?

It's not word for word, but basically it's what he said and how he sounded."

"You're doing fine," I assure her.

She continues. "He had a bag with him. He opened it and pulled out a small video camera and pointed it at me."

"He's done that before, hasn't he?" I ask.

She nods. "Yes. He says he's documenting my ruin. That it's important, that without it there's no justice."

Killers collect trophies. The video is his.

"What did he do next?"

"He focused on my face, and he said: 'I want you to think of your mother.' " She turns to me. "Want to see what he saw?"

Before I can tell her no, I really don't, her eyes change and I forget to breathe.

They fill up with a grief and yearning as vivid as a sunrise. I see hope unfulfilled, a fundamental loss of heart.

She turns away. I can breathe again.

But how can she?

"What then?" I push out, a little shaky.

"He just sat for a little bit, watching me through the camera lens. Then he started to talk to me. 'Do you know what one of the most exciting parts of this is for me, Sarah? The things I can't control. Take this place, for instance. A family that is kind to you without being truly warm. A son who shows the world a perfect face, but blackmails you so you'll suck his cock. It's amazing. On the one hand, all chance. I didn't make this home. On the other hand, you are only here because of me. Did you ever think of that while Michael's cock was in your mouth? That you were there, looking up into his eyes, because of the things I've done?' "

Sarah gives me a sardonic smile. "The answer is yes. I did think about The Stranger, some of those times." I note that her hand is still trembling.

"Go on," I encourage her.

How'd he know Michael was abusing her? A mental note I keep to myself, for now. I don't want to break her rhythm.

"He got nasty, then." She stares off, remembering. "He said: 'Do you know what Michael made you, Sarah, the moment you got down on your knees in exchange for his silence? He made you a whore.' "

Sarah's hands fly up to her face, startling me. She covers her eyes and her shoulders tremble.

"Are you okay?" I ask her in a soft voice.

She heaves out a single deep breath, almost a sob. A moment passes and she drops her hands back into her lap.

"I'm fine," she says, toneless.

She continues putting a voice to the man she calls The Stranger.

" 'Chance, but not really,' he said. 'All I had to do was place you on the road, as God willed me to. I knew I could count on human nature to make your journey hard, as long as I was there to remove the kind ones. The ones that care are always a minority, Little Pain. A raindrop in a storm.' " She looks at me. "He's right. He may have stacked the deck and given my life a push, but the people that did bad things to me?" She rubs her arms as though she's cold. "He didn't make them do those things. They did them on their own."

I want to comfort her, to tell her that not everyone is bad, that there are good people in the world. I've learned to stifle this instinct. Victims don't want sympathetic words. They want me to turn back time, to make it not have happened.

"Go on," I say.

"He kept on talking. He likes to hear himself talk. 'Our time together is going to be done soon. I'm almost ready to complete my work. I've found the last few pieces I've been searching for, and soon, I'll reveal my masterpiece.' He stuffed the camera back into the bag and stood up. 'It's time for the next leg of your journey, Little Pain. Follow me.' "

"Why does he call you 'Little Pain'?" I ask.

"It's his pet name for me. His 'Little Pain.' " The look in her eyes is savage. "I hate it!"

"I don't blame you," I murmur. "What happened next?"

"I started to move toward the door, like he asked, but then I stopped. Useless, I know, but I felt like I needed to make him force me to walk out that door. Like it meant something that I didn't go on my own. Silly."

Maybe, I think, but it gives me hope for you.

"What then?"

" 'Don't be difficult,' he said, and he grabbed me by the arm. He was wearing thick gloves, but I could still feel how hard and strong his hands were. He led me down the hall to Dean and Laurel's bedroom."

She gives me a wistful look. "That window I was sitting at when you came in? I remember seeing it then, thinking what a beautiful day it was."

"Go on," I coax her.

"He pushed me down the hallway that leads to their bathroom."

She shivers. "That's where he had them. Dean and Laurel."

"Were they alive?"

Her gaze at me is weary. "Of course they were. They were naked, and they were alive. They weren't moving. I didn't know why until he told me. 'Drugged,' he said. 'I gave them an injection.' Mivasomething chloride he called it. I can't remember the exact name. He said it kept them aware, that they could feel pain and hear us but that they couldn't move much."

Score one for me on the drugs, and one for Tommy on the muscle relaxant, I think.

Something occurs to me. "Sarah, his voice--would you recognize it if you heard it? Not just the words or the way he speaks, but the tone of it?"

She nods, somber. "I can't forget it. I dream about it sometimes."

"Go on."

"He had Dean facedown. Laurel was on her back. He set his camera on a tripod, and put it on record. Then he picked Dean up like a baby, no effort at all, and stood him in the bathtub. 'Come here, Little Pain,' he said to me. I walked over to the tub. 'Look into his eyes,' he told me. I did." Sarah swallows. "I could see that he'd told the truth. Dean was . . . there. He knew what was going on. He was aware." She shivers. "He was also terrified. You could see it in his eyes. He was so scared."

"Then what happened?"

"The Stranger told me to step back. He angled Dean's head forward, so his chin stuck out." She cranes her own neck, showing me.

" 'When you know the moment of your own death, you know the meaning of both truth and fear, Mr. Kingsley,' he said. 'It makes you wonder what comes next: the glory of heaven or the fires of hell? I tortured a student of philosophy not long ago, a bad, evil man. I cut him, I burned him, I shocked him. I was waiting. I had told him before we began: If he could come up with a single original observation about life, I would end the pain. On the morning of the second day, while I was castrating him, he screamed: 'We are all living in the moments before our own death!' I kept my promise, and gave him release. I remember that truth before I kill someone.' "

Sarah swallows. "Then The Stranger cut Dean's throat. Just like that." Her voice sounds distant and amazed. "No warning. So quick. The blood spurted out. The Stranger kept Dean's neck angled so the blood would go into the tub. I remember thinking that I couldn't believe how much of it there was."

About five or six quarts in the average human body. Not even enough to fill up a kitchen sink halfway, but blood is supposed to stay inside, so six quarts can seem like sixty.

"What happened then?"

"It went on for a while. The blood was spurting at first, then it was dribbling. Then it stopped. 'Look into his eyes again,' he told me. I did." She closes her own eyes. "Dean was gone. Nobody home."

She's quiet for a moment, remembering.

"He lifted Dean out of the tub and laid him down on the carpet."

A long silence.

"And then?" I prod.

"I know what you're thinking," she whispers.

Her voice is filled with self-loathing, and she can't meet my eyes.

"What, Sarah? What am I thinking?"

"How could I just stand there while he did these things and not try to get away?"

"Look at me." I put some force into my tone and make her face me.

"I wasn't thinking that. I know: He could move fast. He had a knife. You didn't think you'd be able to get away."

Her face twists, once. She shudders, a wave, head to toe, involving the whole of her.

"That part is true, but . . . it's not the only reason."

Once again, she can't meet my eyes.

"What's the other reason?" I keep my voice gentle, free of judgment.

It's a sad little shrug. "I knew he wouldn't kill me. I knew if I just stood there and watched, and did what he said, and didn't try to get away, he wouldn't hurt me. Because that's how he wants me. Alive and in pain."

"In my opinion and experience," I say, after a moment, my voice careful, "alive and in pain is better than dead."

She appraises me. "You think so?"

"I do." I point at my scars. "I have to look at these every day, and remember what they mean. It hurts. I'd still rather be alive."

A bitter smile. "You might not feel that way if you had to go through it all again every few years."

"I might not," I say. "But the important thing is that, right now, you still do."

I can see her considering this. I can't tell what she decides.

"So," she continues, "he stood over Laurel for a minute, just looking down at her. Her body didn't move, she didn't even blink--but she cried." Sarah shakes her head, her expression haunted. "A single line of tears from the corner of each eye. The Stranger smiled at her, but it wasn't a happy smile. He wasn't making fun of her or anything. He almost seemed sad. He leaned forward and he closed her eyes with his fingers."

We hadn't known until now that he closed their eyes pre-mortem. It confirms my belief that men are his primary target. He closed Laurel's eyes because he didn't want her to see what was coming. Big deal--he still killed her.

I park these thoughts, for now.

"And then?" I ask.

Sarah looks away from me. Her face changes, along with her voice, becoming wooden, mechanical. When she speaks, it's a staccato. "He stood up. Picked her up, stood her in the tub. He slit her throat. Bled her out, dropped her on the rug." She's trying to hurry through this memory. It takes me a moment to realize why.

"You were closer to Laurel than you were to Dean, weren't you?" I ask softly.

She doesn't cry, but she closes her eyes tight for a moment.

"She was nice to me."

"I'm sorry, Sarah. What happened next?"

"He had me help him move their bodies into the bedroom. He didn't really need my help. I think he just wanted to keep my hands occupied so I couldn't run away. We carried Dean in first, and then Laurel. He grabbed them under their arms, I took them by the feet. They were so pale. I've never seen a person white like that. Like milk. We laid them on the bed."

She goes silent.

"What, Sarah?"

I see a little bit of that same emptiness I'd seen in her last night. Some of the girl at the window, gun to her head, singing a onenote song.

"He had a long leather case in his pocket. He opened it up and took out a scalpel. He handed it to me, and he told me . . . he told me . . . he told me . . . how to cut them. 'Throat to waist,' he said. 'One slice, no hesitation. I'm letting you do this, Sarah. Letting you expose what they really are, inside.' " Her eyes are a little glazed. "It's like I wasn't really there. Like I wasn't in myself. I just remember thinking,

'Do what you have to do to stay alive.' Thinking that, over and over and over, as I took the scalpel and I went over to Laurel and cut her open and I went over to Dean and cut him open and I peeled their skin back because The Stranger told me to and there was muscle, and he made me cut that too, and peel that away and now there's bone and guts and he made me put my hands inside and pull and pull and pull and it was like rubber Jell-O and wet and it smelled and then it was"--

her head slumps forward--"over."

The words had rushed out of her, not stopping, a flood. Emptying her and filling me, sewer water, a death-river, horror at high tide. I want to stand up and run away and never see or hear or think of Sarah again.

But you can't. She's got more to say.

I look at Sarah. She's gazing down at her hands.

" 'Do what you have to do to stay alive,' that's what I kept thinking," she whispers. "He just smiled and filmed the whole thing. Do what you have to do to stay alive. To stay alive. "

"Should we stop?" I ask.

She turns to me, dreamy-eyed but confused.

"What?"

"Should we stop? Do you need a break?"

She stares at me. She seems to come back to herself. She presses her lips together and shakes her head.

"No. I want to get through this."

"You're sure?"

"I'm sure."

Maybe, maybe not. But I need to hear the rest of it, and I think she needs to tell it.

"Okay. What happened next?"

She rubs her face with her hands. "He told me to come downstairs with him. I followed him, down to the family room. Michael was there, sitting on the couch, naked. He was paralyzed too.

"The Stranger laughed, and patted Michael on the head. 'Boys will be boys. But you already knew that, didn't you, Little Pain? Michael was a nasty boy. He had a video camera going while you were down on your knees. I found the tapes on one of my prior trips here to reconnoiter. Don't worry though, I'll be taking them with me. It can be our little secret.' He yanked Michael off the couch and dragged him across the rug." She frowns. "I still had the scalpel. He hadn't taken it away from me. That's how sure he was that I wouldn't try anything." She shrugs, miserable. "Anyway. He dragged Michael over to me, and he told me it was my turn. 'Go on,' he said. 'You saw how I did it upstairs. Ear to ear, a big red grin.' I told him no." She shakes her head, a gesture of despair. "Like it mattered. Like it would make a difference."

Her smile is pained and crooked and full of self-hate. "In the end, one thing you can count on about me--I'll do what it takes to survive. 'Do it,' he said, 'or I'll cut the nipples off your breasts and feed them to you.' " She pauses, looking down at her lap. "I did it, of course," she says in a small voice. She looks up at me, fearful of what I might think.

"I didn't want him to die," she says, her voice quavering. "Even though he blackmailed me and made me have sex with him and all those things, I didn't want him to die."

I reach over and take her hand. "I know you didn't."

She lets me hold the hand for a moment before pulling it away.

"God. Michael just bled and bled and bled. God. And then The Stranger had me help him carry the body upstairs. He put him on the bed, in between Dean and Laurel.

" 'It's not your fault,' he said. I thought he was talking to me, but then I realized he was talking to Michael. I was afraid he was going to make me cut him open too, but he didn't." She pauses. "I started to get mad. I think he saw it, thought I might actually try to do something, because he told me to drop the scalpel. I did think about trying to stab him. I really did. In the end, I did what he told me to."

"And you're here and alive," I say, trying to encourage her.

"Yeah." Tired again.

"What happened next?"

"He told me to come into the bathroom with him. He went over to the tub, and dipped his hand down into the blood. He started flicking it at me, saying, 'In the name of the Father and the daughter and the Holy Spirit.' He got blood on my face and other parts of me."

The teardrop spatter I'd seen last night, I think.

"Is that exactly what he said? 'In the name of the Father and the daughter and the Holy Spirit'? Not 'Father and the Son'?"

"That's what he said."

"Go on."

"Then he told me it was time to get busy. He said he needed to express himself. He took off his clothes."

"Did you notice anything about him?" I ask her. "Any birthmarks, scars, anything at all?"

"A tattoo. On his right thigh, where no one would ever see it unless he was naked."

"Of what?"

"An angel. Not a nice angel, though. It had a mean face and a flaming sword. Kind of scary."

An avenging angel, maybe? Is that how he sees himself, or is it just a symbol of what he's doing?

"If I had a sketch artist work with you, could you describe the tattoo?"

"Sure."

I don't see this perpetrator settling for a design selected from a book. He would have had the tattoo done to his custom and exact specifications. It's possible we could track down the artist.

"Anything else about him?"

"When I saw him naked, I could tell that he shaves his body. Armpits, chest, legs, his cock, everywhere."

This isn't uncommon for a clever, organized offender. Most make a study of basic forensics and work to reduce their chances of leaving trace evidence behind. Shaving body hair is something serial rapists do all the time.

"What about moles? Scars?"

"Just the tattoo."

"That's good, Sarah. When we find him, that's going to help us nail him."

"Okay." She seems listless.

"He took his clothes off. Then what?"

"He was hard."

"You mean he was erect?"

"Yeah."

I bite my lower lip, ask the question I'm dreading. "Did he . . . touch you?"

"No. He's never fucked me, or tried to."

"What did he do next?"

"He took two pairs of handcuffs out of the back pockets of his pants. 'I need to lock you down now,' he said, 'so I can do my work without worrying about you running off.' He cuffed my hands behind my back, and then he cuffed my ankles. He carried me into the bedroom and sat me on the floor. I didn't fight him."

"Go on."

"He went downstairs and came back up with a big pot."

"A cooking pot?"

"Yes. He filled it with blood from the tub and then . . ." She shrugs.

"You saw the bedroom."

He'd had himself a little party. Splashed the walls, finger paints from hell.

"How long did that go on?"

"I have no idea," she says, toneless. "I just know that when he was done, there was blood everywhere. He was covered in it." She grimaces.

"God, he was so proud! He finished up and he stood in front of the window for a second, looking out. 'A beautiful day,' he said. 'God made this day.' He slid it open and stood there, naked and covered in blood."

"He went swimming after that, didn't he?"

She nods. "He left me there, left the room, and a few minutes later I heard him splashing around in the pool." She looks at me. "I was starting to get fuzzy by then. Starting to go in and out. Getting crazy."

Who wouldn't?

"Anyway." She sighs. "I don't know how much time went by. I just remember lying there, and I felt like I was falling asleep and then waking up, but I wasn't really falling asleep--I don't know. It's like I was fainting, over and over and over. One of the times I woke up, he was back." She shivers. "He was clean again, no blood on him. He was looking down at me. I fainted again. When I woke up, I was downstairs, and he was dressed. He had that pot in his hands. 'A little here,' he said. And he tipped it, let some blood spill onto the rug in the family room. Then he said, 'A little there,' and went into the backyard and dumped the rest of the blood from the pot into the pool."

"Do you know why he did that?" I ask her.

The hard, too-old eyes are back. "I think . . . it seemed right to him. Like a painting. That spot on the rug, the water in the pool, they needed a little more red to be just right."

I stare at her for a moment before clearing my throat. "Fair enough. What happened next?"

"He sat down in front of me with the camera, pointed it at me.

'You've been many things, Little Pain. An orphan, a liar, a whore. My pain-angel. Now you're a murderer. You just killed another human being. Think about that for a minute.' He went quiet then, just pointing the camera at my face and recording away. I don't know how long it went on. I was out of it.

"He undid the handcuffs and told me he was leaving. 'We're almost there, Sarah. Almost at the end of our journey. I want you to remember, it's not your fault, but your pain is my justice.'

"Then he was gone." She gazes at me. "I went in and out for a little while. Things went black. The next thing I remember is talking to you in the bedroom."

"You don't remember asking for me?"

"No."

I cock my head at her. "Why did you?"

She gives me a measured look of consideration that reminds me, for a moment, of Bonnie.

"Since I was six years old, a man has been coming into my life, taking away anything and anyone I love. And no one believes he exists."

Her eyes move across my face, dancing along my scars. "I read about what happened to you, and I thought, Maybe she'd believe me. I could tell you knew what it was like. To lose everything. To be reminded of it, every day. To wonder whether dying might be better than living."

She pauses. "I got the diary a few months ago and I wrote it all down. Every ugly thing. I was going to find a way to contact you and give it to you." The shrug is small and bleak. "I guess I did."

I smile at her. "I guess you did." I bite my lower lip. "Sarah, what he said to you, about you being a murderer . . . you know that's not true, right?"

She begins to shiver. The shivers turn into shakes, full-body trembles, her eyes wide, her face pale, her lips white and pressed flat together.

"Barry, get the nurse!" I say, alarmed.

"N-n-no!" Sarah says.

I look at her. She shakes her head as an underscore and crosses her arms over her chest, hugging herself and rocking back and forth. I watch, poised to hit the call button. A half-minute goes by and the shaking subsides back to shivers, the shivers die away. Color comes back into Sarah's face.

"Are you okay?" I ask, feeling stupid for asking. It's an impotent question.

She moves a lock of hair away from her forehead.

"It happens sometimes," she says in a voice that's surprisingly clear. "Bubbles up out of nowhere, like a seizure." Her head snaps around, her eyes meeting mine, and I'm startled by the clarity and strength I see in them. "I'm almost done, do you understand? This is it. Either you find him and stop him or I'm going to take away the thing he wants the most."

"What's that?"

He gaze is steady but haunted. Firm yet lost. "Me. More than anything, he wants me. So if you can't catch him, I'm going to take me away for good. Do you hear me?"

She turns back to the window, back to the sun, and I could argue with her, I could protest, but I realize she's gone away from us for now.

"Yes," I reply, my voice soft. "I do hear you."

"So what'd you think about all that?" Barry asks. We're back outside, in the parking lot. He's smoking and I'm wishing that I could do the same.

"I think that was a horrible, horrible story."

"Got that right," he mutters. "If she's telling the truth."

"What do you think?"

"I've heard some crazy tales in my time. Seen a lot of lying. This didn't feel like that."

"I agree."

"What did you think about the suicide threat?"

"It's real."

That's all I say, all I need to say. I can tell Barry agrees with me.

"What about our guy?"

"I'm still fuzzy on this perp. Revenge is the motive to a near one hundred percent certainty. And it's everything to him. He was willing to give up personally mutilating the bodies so that he could force Sarah to do it. Hurting her was more important, more fulfilling, than cutting them open himself."

"But not killing them," Barry observes.

"Except when it came to the boy. Again, making her do it, his observation of her pain, was enough. But murder, per her, gives him an erection. Playing with the blood

.

.

.

that's ritual, that's sexual.

Watching her do it seems too cerebral." I rub my face with my hands, try to shake myself into a semblance of normality. "Sorry, I'm not being helpful."

"Hey, we've worked a few of these together. This is how it goes for you."

He's right, this is how it goes. Observe, observe, observe, think, correlate, feel, and do it all again until the killer's outline goes from fuzzy to focused. It's chaotic and jumbled and contradictory, but this is how it goes.

"Can you get a sketch artist over here?" I ask. "The tattoo will be distinctive, unique."

"I'll make it happen."

"I'll reach Callie and see what occurred at the Vargas scene. I'll make sure she calls you and fills you in too. Barring a big forensic break, I think the most productive path is going to be digging into everyone's past, with special attention to Vargas. That's where the answer lies. Based on the vengeance motive, and the way he treats the bodies of the children, I'm interested in the human-trafficking angle."

"That's one for you then."

"Why?"

"Apparently, the trafficking beef was federal all the way. FBI, in fact."

"Here?"

"Californi-yay. But I'll start rooting around in the Kingsleys' lives. Sarah's too. I'll check out her parents, see if they really were murdered. Oh yeah, and I'll follow up with the medical examiner. Damn, I'm busy."

"I'll make sure Callie gets you a copy of the diary."

We both stand there, thinking. Making sure we've covered all the bases.

"Guess that's it then," Barry says. "I'll be in touch soon."

"That apartment was a disgusting pigsty, honey-love."

"I know. What did you find?"

"Let's see, where to begin? Method of death was the same as the Kingsley family. Throats were cut, blood drained into the tub in the bathroom. Mr. Vargas was disemboweled. No hesitation cuts on him, however."

I tell her about Sarah.

"He made her cut them open?"

"Yes."

Silence. "Well, that would explain it then. Moving on. The young lady wasn't mutilated--as you saw. We don't have an ID on her yet, but she was young. My guess would be somewhere between thirteen and fifteen. We found a tattoo of a cross, with Cyrillic writing underneath it that translates to 'Give thanks to God, for God is love.' "

"Seems odd that an American girl would have Cyrillic writing tattooed on her. She's either Russian or local Russian. Which makes sense."

The Russian mob has become a huge player in human trafficking, including underage sex workers.

"The scarring on her feet is very similar to what we saw on the footprints recovered at the Kingsleys', except these are fewer in number by far. They also seem relatively fresh. The ME estimated, based on color and fading, that they're about six months old."

"Odd coincidence, don't you think? Both her and the perp having the same kind of scarring?"

"No, because I don't believe it's a coincidence. All the prints we recovered matched the two victims. We have a ton of hair and fibers. We also have a lot of semen stains, but they're all old and dry. You know, flaky."

"Thank you for that visual."

"I've only given the computer a cursory once-over, but I did see e-mail and various documents on it, as well as lots and lots of porn. Lots of porn. I'm having the computer brought back to the office, where I'll be going through it. Did I mention lots of porn? Mr. Vargas wasn't a nice man."

"Did the perp play with their blood?"

"If you mean, did he enjoy another round of finger painting, then no."

He gave up the mutilation of the Kingsleys to Sarah. Maybe the blood-painting was a substitute. A kind of consolation prize.

"What about the diary?"

"I'm off to the office, I'll print it out there."

"Call me when you have."

I reach James on his cell phone.

"What do you want?" he answers.

This kind of greeting doesn't surprise me anymore. This is James, the fourth and final member of my team. He's oil to everyone else's water, a saw blade against the grain. He's irritating, unlikable, and infuriating. We call him Damien when he's not around, after the character in The Omen, the son of Satan. James is on my team because he's brilliant. His intellect is blinding. A high school graduate at fifteen, perfect SAT scores, he had a PhD in criminology by the time he was twenty, and joined the FBI at twenty-one, the goal he'd been striving toward since he was twelve. James had an older sister, Rosa. Rosa died when James was twelve, at the hands of a serial killer wielding a blowtorch and a smile. James helped his mother bury Rosa, and he decided at her grave what he was going to spend the rest of his life doing.

I don't know what else drives James besides the job. I don't know anything about his personal life, or if he really has one. I have never met his mother. I have never known him to go out to the movies. He's always turned the radio off when I've been a passenger in his car, preferring silence to song. He's beyond careless when it comes to the emotions of others. He can flip between scalding hostility, or a thoughtlessness that embodies the ultimate in "I don't need to know how you feel, and in the final analysis, I really-- truly--don't care."

He's brilliant, though. An undeniable brilliance, blinding as an arc light. He has another ability as well, one that he shares with me, that binds us together, however unwillingly. He can peer into the mind of a killer and not blink. He can gaze at evil full in the face and then pick up a magnifying glass to get a closer look.

In those times, he is invaluable, a companion, and we flow together like boats and water, rivers and rain.

"We have a case," I say.

I brief him on everything.

"What does this have to do with my Sunday?" he asks.

"Callie will have the diary couriered to you today."

"And?"

"And," I say, exasperated, "I want you to read it. I'm going to do the same. Once we're done, I want to compare notes."

A long pause, followed by a longer sigh, very put-upon. "Fine."

He hangs up without saying another word. I stare at the phone for a moment and then I shake my head, wondering why I'm surprised.

16

"HOW'S THINGS, SWEETHEART?" I ASK BONNIE.

I had realized, in the parking lot, that everyone was in motion, everything necessary was being done. Which meant I could go be Mom for a little while. This was a skill you had to learn in law enforcement: how to make the time. The cases you are responsible for are important. Literally matters of life and death. You still have to get home for dinner sometimes.

We're in Alan and Elaina's living room. Alan's off running errands. I'd briefed him on the case in general, but have no duty for him at the moment. Elaina is bustling about in the kitchen, getting us something to drink. Bonnie and I are on the couch, staring at each other for no particular reason.

She smiles and nods. Good, she's saying.

"Glad to hear it."

She points at me.

"How am I doing?"

She nods.

"I'm fine."

She frowns at me. Stop lying.

I grin. "I should be allowed to have some secrets, babe. Parents aren't supposed to tell their kids everything."

She shrugs. A simple motion with specific meaning: Well, we're different.

Bonnie's body is ten years old, but that's where it ends. I feel more often like I'm living with a teenager than with a young girl. I used to ascribe this to what she's experienced, the things she's gone through. I know better now.

Bonnie is gifted. Her gift doesn't lie in child-genius, but in her ability to focus, to observe, to understand. When she sets her mind to something, she sticks with it to conclusion, examining things in a deep, layered sense.

I had raised concern about her schooling a few months back. She'd made me understand that I shouldn't worry. That she'd go back to school and that she'd catch up. She'd taken my hand and had led me into the family room. Matt and I had created quite a little library in there. We believed in reading, in the power of books. We had planned to pass this love and lesson on to Alexa. We'd paid a contractor to install wall-to-wall built-in bookshelves, and we never got rid of any book we read.

Matt and I would spend an hour or so together each month choosing specific volumes to add. Shakespeare. Mark Twain. Nietzsche. Plato. If we thought it had something of value to communicate, we bought it and put it on a shelf.

It was part collection, part working library. None of it was vanity. That was our rule: Never buy a book to gain the approval of others. Matt and I weren't poor, but we weren't rich, either. We weren't going to leave behind a huge material estate. We had hoped to will Alexa the usual things: a house that was paid off, memories of being loved by her parents, maybe some money in the bank. We also wanted to leave her something that would be uniquely us. Something only her parents would leave her, an inheritance of the heart. This library as a legacy, a small sampling of the collected works of man. The dream of this was something Matt and I shared, something we could do, rich or not.

Alexa was just starting to get interested in this room before she died. I haven't added anything to it since. I've had dreams of waking up to find it aflame, the books screaming as they burn. Bonnie had pulled me into this forgotten (avoided) place. She'd pulled out a book and had handed it to me. How to Sketch, by some unknown but obviously talented author. She'd pointed at herself. It had taken me a moment to understand what she was saying.

"You read this?"

She had smiled and nodded, pleased that I understood. She'd grabbed another, Basics of Watercolor. And another, Art and Landscapes.

"All of these?" I'd asked.

She'd nodded.

Bonnie had pointed at herself, had mimed being thoughtful, then had indicated the library with a sweep of her hand. I had stared at her, considering. It came to me. "You're saying, when you want to know about something you come in here and read a book about it?"

Head nod, big smile.

I have the ability to read and to learn, and the drive to do both, she had been telling me. Isn't that enough?

I wasn't sure it was enough. There were the three R's, after all. Well, okay, she had "reading" down, but hey, there were still the other two. And of course, there was the socialization aspect of things, peers and boys and just saying no. The complex dance of learning to share the world with others.

All of this had whirled through my mind. The fact that Bonnie had read books about art and painting and now painted on a regular basis--and painted well--had mollified me to a point, quieting some of my fears and allowing me to rationalize shelving the problem for another day.

"Okay, sweetheart," I had said. "For now, okay."

Her spiritual precociousness was evident in other ways; not just in her paintings, but in her ability to listen with complete attention and tremendous patience, in her over-mature ability to go right to the heart of emotional matters.

She was a child in many ways, it was true, but in some ways she was far more perceptive than I was.

I sigh. "Today I went and saw a girl named Sarah."

I tell her an abridged version of Sarah's story. I don't tell her about Sarah being forced to have sex with Michael, or the graphic details of the Kingsleys' deaths. I do tell her the important things; that Sarah is an orphan, that she feels chased by someone she calls The Stranger, that she is a young woman who's reached the zenith of despair and now sits ready to tumble downward, free-fall, into darkness, forever. Bonnie listens with interest and thoughtful intensity. When I finish, she looks off, deeply contemplative. She turns back to me, points at herself, then at me, and nods. It takes a moment for our telepathic shorthand to kick in.

"She's like us, that's what you're saying."

She nods, hesitates, then indicates herself with emphasis.

"More like you," I reply, getting it.

A nod.

I stare at her.

"You mean because she saw the people she cared for getting murdered, sweetheart? The way you saw your mom get killed?"

She nods, then shakes her head. Yes, she's saying, but not just that. She bites her lower lip, thinking. She looks up at me, indicates herself, and pushes me away.

Now it's my turn to bite my lip. I stare at her--and suddenly I understand.

"She's like you would be without me."

She nods, her face sad.

"Alone."

A nod.

Communicating with Bonnie is like reading pictographic writing. Not everything is literal. Symbology plays a part. She's not saying that she and Sarah are one and the same. Sarah is a young girl who has lost everything and everyone she loves and--here is where the semblance ends--who is now alone in the world. Bonnie is saying, She is what I could be if there was no Smoky, if my life was just foster homes and memories of my mom dying.

I swallow. "Yeah, honey. That's a pretty good description."

Bonnie has her scars. She's mute. She still has nightmares sometimes, nightmares that make her scream in her sleep. But she's not alone.

She's got me, and I've got her, and that makes all the difference in the world.

I could see Sarah with more depth now: Sarah screamed in the night, but there was no one there to hold her when she woke up. There hadn't been for a very long time.

A life like that might make you surround yourself with the color black, I mused. Why not? Everything was darkness, best to make sure you remember that fact, best not to let yourself indulge in the fantasy of hope.

A clink of glasses distracts me from my own musings. Elaina has returned with our drinks.

"Orange juice for the two of you, water for me," she says, smiling and sitting down.

"Thanks," I say, and Bonnie nods, and we sip our OJ.

"I heard what you were telling Bonnie," Elaina says after a moment. "About the girl, Sarah. Terrible thing."

"She's in bad shape."

"What's going to happen to her now?"

"I guess once she's released from the hospital, she'll go into protective custody. After that, it depends. She's sixteen. She'll either go into a group home or foster care until she's an adult or she's emancipated."

"Will you do me a favor?"

"Of course."

"Will you talk to me about this? Before she gets released from the hospital?"

I puzzle over this request for a moment, but only a moment. It's Elaina, after all. Her purposes are pretty easy to divine. Particularly when combined with her earlier revelation to me about being an orphan. "Elaina, it would not be a good idea for you to take this girl on. In spite of the obvious--that there's a psycho out there who seems to have a fixation on her--she's messed up. She's hurt, that's true, but she has a serious hard side to her. I don't know anything about her background, whether or not she does drugs or steals or . . . anything."

Elaina gives me one of her tolerant-but-loving smiles. A smile that says: I love you, but you are being thickheaded.

"I appreciate the concern, Smoky, but that will be between Alan and me."

"But--"

A quick shake of the head. "Promise you'll call me before her release."

End of conversation, game over, give it up if you know what's good for you--

but I love you. I smile, I can't help it. Elaina makes you smile, it's what she was born to do.

"I promise."

Elaina watches Bonnie during the day (and often the evening) for me. She and Alan have become a part of Bonnie's family. It works. They don't live far, there's no one I trust more, and Bonnie loves them both. I'm fumbling with the problem of Bonnie's muteness and I know--I know--that I have to address her schooling soon. But for now, this works.

They were even happy to bow to my fears, without questioning me or making me feel silly about it. Their house had been alarmed (upthe-wazoo style, same as mine), and Tommy had set up a simple video surveillance system. And of course, there was Alan, a giant with a gun, who slept here as well.

I owe them both.

"I promise," I say again.

Alan had returned. He was busy losing a game of chess to Bonnie. Elaina was in the kitchen making us all a late lunch while I spoke to Callie on the phone.

"Got the pages all printed out, honey-love. What now?"

"Print out another six copies. One for Barry, one for James, one for Alan, one for Assistant Director Jones, one for Dr. Child, and one for yourself. Courier Barry, James, Dr. Child, and AD Jones their copies at home. I'll call and let them know they're coming. I want everyone to read this. Once we've all gotten through it, we'll compare notes."

"Fair enough. What about your and Alan's copies?"

I look toward the kitchen and smile.

"Are you hungry?"

"Does the wind blow? Does the moon circle the earth? Is the root of a prime number--"

"Just get over here."

I am on the phone with Assistant Director Jones. I have called him at home to bring him up to speed on everything. One of the first things you learn in any bureaucracy, never let the boss get blindsided.

"Hold it," he says, interrupting me. "What did you say the name of the guy at the second scene was?"

"Jose Vargas."

He whistles through the phone.

"Better come see me tomorrow, Smoky," he says.

"Why?"

"Because I can tell you all about Vargas. The trafficking beef ? I was on that case."

"No kidding?"

Barry had said it was a federal case. The fact that AD Jones had been a part of it is unexpected. And maybe a plus.

"For real, as the kids say. Come see me tomorrow."

"Yes, sir."

"Good. Have you thought about the other thing we discussed?"

You're kidding, right?

"Some."

A brief pause. I think he's waiting for me to fill the silence, to expand on that one-word answer. When I don't, he lets it go.

"I want regular briefings. And I want to see that diary."

"It'll be on its way to you within the hour, sir."

Callie had shown up not long after I finished the call with AD Jones. Bonnie still played chess with Alan, who was teaching her the finer points of the game. Callie sat down next to Bonnie and the two of them began to play against Alan, who found himself fighting to keep pieces on the board.

It was during a rematch of this doubles tournament that Elaina managed to maneuver me into the kitchen, in her firm but gentle way.

"So," she said. "Are we planning to finish what we started on Saturday?"

1for-two-me?

I'm putting a cracker into my mouth as she asks me this, and I freeze mid-bite. I finish up and swallow, feeling guilty and evasive without knowing why.

"Smoky," she chides. She grabs me by the chin and brings my face up. "It's me."

I look at her, let a little bit of that patented Elaina-goodness flow into me, womb and warmth. I sigh. "I know. Sorry." I shrug. "Truth?

Of course we will. But when?" I shake my head. "I don't know yet."

"Fair enough. But you'll let me know?"

"Yeah," I mumble around my cracker, feeling like a child. "Of course."

"You've been doing so well, Smoky, and clearing out that home was a good idea. I want to make sure you finish, that's all."

Then she smiles, baldness and all, an Elaina-smile that makes further words unnecessary. A

It's early evening by the time the day winds down and Bonnie's yawning tells me that it's time to go. I'd stayed here later than I'd planned, but I needed this. Callie's jokes and Alan's mock-anger at being beaten by Bonnie at chess, Elaina's ever-present warmth and Bonnie's full-body grins, had all served to recover some of what this weekend had started out as: a normal life. Can you give all of this up? Should you? Is Quantico the solution?

Shush, I tell myself.

"I'm going back to the office," Callie tells me at the door. "I'm going to dig through Mr. Vargas's computer. I'm sure I'll find many distasteful things."

"Don't stay too late," I say. "We're meeting at the office bright and early tomorrow morning."

Elaina and Alan each get a hug, as does Callie, first from Bonnie, and then from me. I work with my family, my family is my work, that's how my life has worked out.

That's what you get for marrying the gun.

I'm in too good a mood to take my own bait.

17

"I'M GOING TO READ THIS FOR A LITTLE WHILE, SWEETHEART," I say to Bonnie. "I won't keep you up, will I?"

I have asked her this before, many times. The answer is always no. Bonnie could sleep through an air raid, just so long as she doesn't have to sleep alone. She shakes her head, smiles, kisses me on the cheek.

"Good night, honey," I say, and kiss her back.

One more smile, and she turns away from me, toward the cool shadows. Leaving me in my small pool of light, to think and then to read. I have my notepad pages from the other night. I add some things we now know.

PERPETRATOR:

Under METHODOLOGY I add:

INTERVIEW WITH SARAH LANGSTROM CONFIRMS HE DRUGS HIS

VICTIMS.

HE FORCED HER TO DISEMBOWEL THE ADULT KINGSLEYS AND

TO CUT MICHAEL KINGSLEY'S THROAT. (His behavior re: her is specific. WHY?) Under BEHAVIORS I add:

DISEMBOWELMENT IS A WAY OF REVEALING THE INNER "TRUE NATURE" OF HIS VICTIMS. CONTINUES TO SUPPORT THEORY OF REVENGE AS A MOTIVE. HE CLOSES THE EYES OF FEMALE VICTIMS PRE-MORTEM BUT HE

STILL DISEMBOWELS THEM. THEY MAY DESERVE LESS BUT THEY

STILL, IN HIS MIND, DESERVE.

PERPETRATOR CLAIMS EARLIER VICTIMS, INCLUDING A MARRIED

POET AND A PHILOSOPHY STUDENT.

ARTWORK WITH THE BLOOD IS AN ODDITY. EXTRANEOUS AND UNNECESSARY. WHY DO IT? SUBSTITUTION FOR LETTING SARAH CUT

THE VICTIMS?

MURDER GIVES HIM AN ERECTION, BUT NO VISIBLE ABUSE TO THE

BODIES, AND NONE PER SARAH'S ACCOUNT.

Of course, I realize, it could just be that his scalpel is his cock. The cutting could be the sexual act for him.

RELIGIOUS OVERTONES. GETTING ORDERS FROM GOD?

Under DESCRIPTION I add:

CAUCASIAN OR CAUCASIAN APPEARING.

APPROXIMATELY SIX FEET TALL.

SHAVES OFF ALL BODY HAIR.

VERY FIT, MUSCULAR. "PERFECT BODY." WORKS OUT (NARCISSIST). KEY: TATTOO ON HIS RIGHT THIGH OF AN ANGEL CARRYING A FLAMING SWORD. HE'LL HAVE DESIGNED THIS HIMSELF.

I add notes regarding the program found on Michael Kingsley's home computer. If put there by the perpetrator, it points to technical expertise, or access to technical expertise.

I consider the angel tattoo. It either represents his actions or it represents himself. He seems lucid enough for it to be the former, but the blood art falls on the crazy side, which is strange and unsettling. IS HE BEGINNING TO DECOMPENSATE?

Decompensation, at its simplest, is the act of something going from a stable state to an unstable one. It's not universal among serial killers, but it's a common phenomenon. Ted Bundy spent years as a careful, clever, charismatic assassin. Toward the end of his "career" he spun out of control, and this helped lead to his capture. Dr. Child, one of the only profilers I really respect, talked about this subject to me once, and what he said comes to me now.

"I believe," he said, "that all violent serial offenders are, to some degree, insane. I'm not referring to the legal definition of insanity. I'm proposing that finding joy in the murder of other human beings would not be the behavior of a sane individual."

"I can agree with that," I'd said. "Guilty by reason of insanity, so to speak."

"Just so. Serial murder is a behavior precipitated by a lifetime of prior stressors. It's an act that generates further stress. It demands paranoia, it's always obsessive, and the most important factor: It is not under the individual's control. Regardless of the possible consequences--

the probable eventuality of capture--he not only will not stop--he can- not. Inability to halt a behavior even when one knows that behavior is destructive to self is a form of psychosis, yes?"

"Sure."

"This is why, in my opinion, we see decompensation in so many serial offenders, be they organized, disorganized, or in between. The pressures, internal, external, imagined, real--build up and eventually break down the already damaged mind." He'd smiled, but it wasn't a happy smile. "I think the same raving lunacy sits there in all of them, latent and waiting to bloom. Provide enough stress and you can bring it to life."

He'd sighed. "The larger point being, Smoky: Beware of trying to put the monsters into easy boxes. There are no rules here, only guidelines."

The point in the present being: The blood art is not important. Revenge as a motive makes sense, and will help lead us to him. His treatment of the children is important, and will help lead us to him. The tattoo? Pure forensics. I need to concentrate on finding the artist, not figuring out its significance. Whether he feels he's like the angel or is the angel is, for now, just mental chatter. I take the page with the notes I'd written about Sarah. I correct her name now.

SARAH LANGSTROM:

BEEN WITH THE KINGSLEY FAMILY APPROX. ONE YEAR

Then I'm stumped.

What else have we really learned about her?

Two things come to me. I write them down because they're true, although neither is particularly significant.

SHE'S A SURVIVOR.

SHE'S LOSING HER MIND. SHE'S SUICIDAL.

That's an impetus at least.

More unresolved, but that's okay. Everything is about unceasing forward motion. Look, examine, deduce, posit, evidence, evidence, profile. We have a physical description of the perpetrator and we have a basic understanding of his motive. We have a living witness. We have a footprint. We know this perp keeps videos as trophies and when we catch him those videos will hang him.

We also have Sarah's diary and I need to read it and see where that leads. The victims are the key to him, and from what I can see, she is his favorite. The point of it all.

I set aside the notepad pages and examine what Callie gave me. The pages are white, blown-up, larger than the originals, easy to read. Sarah's flowing black cursive beckons, and she begins by speaking to me directly. Dear Smoky Barrett,

I know you.

I guess what I really mean is that I know about you. I've studied you in the way you study a person who could be your last and only hope. I've stared at your photograph until my eyes were bloodshot, memorizing every scar.

I know that you work for the FBI in Los Angeles. I know that you hunt evil men, and that you're good at it. All of that is important, but it's not why you give me hope.

You give me hope because you've been the victim too. You give me hope because you've been raped, and you've been cut, and you've lost the things you love.

If anyone could believe me, I think--I think--it would be you. If anyone could make it stop--could want to make it stop--it would be you.

Is that true? Or am I just dreaming when I should be slitting my wrists?

I guess we'll find out. I can always slit my wrists later, after all. I've called this a diary but that's not what it really is. No.

This is a black flower. This is a book of dreams. This is a path to the watering hole, where the dark things go down to drink. Like that? What I mean to say is: It's a story. Here on paper, that's where you'll see me run. The only place you'll see me run. Here on the white and crinkly, I can really move. I'm more of a sprinter than a run- ner, as I think you'll see, but the point is, ask me to explain what I've written out loud and I'll struggle, but give me a pen and a pad or a com- puter and a keyboard and I'm going to go, go, go. Part of this, I think, is because of the brightness of my mother's soul. She was an artist and some of it seems to have rubbed off. The rest of it, I think, is because I'm going crazy inside. Loony as a goony. The white and crinkly is where all the crazy comes out, unfiltered and screeching. A big black batch of mind-crows.

I have a rhyme for it (a crazy-rhyme of course): "A little bit of dark, a little bit of light, a little bit of shimmy-shimmy makes it just right."

I think about what I feel, in other words, and I write you a path to the watering hole.

I started writing about two years ago, in one of the schools I went to. The English teacher, a very decent man named Mr. Perkins (and you'll find out in a minute why I know he was a decent man), read the first story I ever wrote and asked me to stay after class. He told me, when we were alone, that I had a gift. That I might even be a prodigy. For some reason that praise brought out The Crazy. The Crazy is one of the creatures that drinks down there at the watering hole, dark- skinned and big-eyed and goony. The Crazy is angry. The Crazy is mean. The Crazy is, well, crazy.

So I grabbed Mr. Perkins's crotch and said: "Thanks! Want a blow job, Mr. P?"

Just like that.

I'll never forget the two things that happened. His face fell and his cock got hard. Both at the same time. He pulled away and sputtered and walked out of the room. I think he was afraid, and I can't really blame him. I also understand that the first of the two (the falling face, the dis- may) was the real Mr. P. Like I said, a very decent man. I walked out of the classroom, fevered and grinning and heart ham- mering. I walked out of the school and around the back and I pulled out a lighter and lit that story on fire and cried while it burned and blew away in the breeze.

I've written a lot since then, and I've burned it all. I'm almost sixteen years old now, as I begin writing this, and though I find I kind of want to burn it too, I won't. Why am I telling you this? For two reasons.

The first one is a broad one, bigger than a breadbox. I want you to know that my sanity has become something I can see inside myself, like a white line or a vibration of light. It used to be strong and constant, but now it's weak and flickers a lot. Dots of darkness fly around it, like a swarm of sluggish death-bees. Someday soon, if things don't change, the dots will overwhelm the light and I'll be a goner. I'll sing forever, and never hear a word.

So if I hiccup sometimes, if my needle jumps the groove, understand: I'm hanging on with my fingernails here. I spend a lot of my time watch- ing that white line of light, because I'm afraid if I look away, I'll look back and it'll be gone, but I won't remember it was ever there. The Crazy is down at the watering hole, and it's a short walk from that bad water to me saying or acting in ways I shouldn't, okay?

Okay.

The second reason is because of what comes next on the white and crinkly. I could have done a diary, I guess, a nice, dry, factual recount- ing. But come on--I'm GIFTED. I'm a PRODIGY.

Why not tell a story instead?

So that's what I've done.

Is it all true? That depends on your definition of truth. Could I read my parents' minds? Do I really know what they were thinking when The Stranger came for them? No.

But I knew them. They were my people. It may or may not be what they were thinking, but that doesn't make it untrue because it's the

kind of thing they would have thought. That's the point, don't you see?

The truth is that I don't know.

The truth is that I do know.

That's what recorded history is all about: three-parts truth to one- part fiction. The truth is in the time and place and the basic events. The fiction is in the motivations and the thoughts. Since history only exists if we remember it, is it really such a bad thing to fill it out with a little hu- manity, even if that humanity is imagined?

They were my parents, and I loved them, so I wrote them as charac- ters, and I filled them with thoughts and hopes and feelings and then I read what I wrote and I cried and I said:

Yeah.

That was them.

I dare anyone to tell me otherwise. Actually, I don't, because if they did, The Crazy would come running, you can bet on that. I'd probably slap them till they bled and scream at them until they went deaf and I went hoarse.

And no, they never told me about their sex life, but fuck you, they were people, they were my people, and I want you to feel them living and sweating and laughing so you'll feel it when they're hurting and screaming and dying.

Okay?

Some things I found out about afterward, by asking questions. I asked Cathy, for example, and she was truthful with me. I don't think she'd have a real problem with anything I wrote about her. I hope not. Some things are me describing how I personally remember feeling or what I remember thinking. Even though I'm filtering the memories of a younger me through the mind of an older me, the spirit of those memo- ries, the good and the bad, is true. I'm able now, at nearly sixteen, to give a voice to things I thought when I was six and nine and so on. Some parts are things the monster told me.

Who knows what the truth is there?

Okay, okay. I'm stalling, I know.

How should I begin it? Once Upon A Time?

Why not? No reason you can't begin a horror story the same way you begin a fairy tale. We're going to end up at the same place no matter how it begins: down at the watering hole, next to the dark things with too-big eyes and the water that sounds like a giant smacking his lips as it beats against the shore.

It'll help, as you read it, to think of it as a dream. That's what I do. A black flower. A book of dreams. A midnight trip to the watering hole. Come and dream with me, have a nightmare with your eyes open and the lights all on.

Once Upon A Time, there was a younger Sarah, a Sarah who didn't watch the white line of light and hadn't yet met The Crazy. No, no. That's true, but that's not where I want to start. So: Once Upon A Time, there was an angel, and she was known as my mom.

The first thing I remember about my mom is that she loved life. The second thing I remember is her smile. Mom never stopped smiling. The last thing I remember is that she wasn't smiling when he killed her.

I remember that most of all.

Sarah's Story

Part One

18

SAM LANGSTROM SHOOK HIS HEAD AT HIS WIFE, BEMUSED.

"Let me get this straight," he said, forcing back a smile. "I ask you when we should leave for Sarah's dental appointment. In order to answer, you want to know what time it is now?"

Linda frowned at him. "Yeah, so?"

"Well, babe, see--the appointment? It's already at a set time. Since we know how long it takes to get from here to the dentist's office--

how does what time it is right now have anything to do with when we should leave?"

Linda was beginning to get annoyed. She looked into her husband's eyes. She saw the twinkle there that never failed to make her smile. Eyes that said, I'm amused, but not at your expense. I'm just loving some character quirk of yours right now.

He loved her eccentric parts, and she knew that she had them, no doubt about that. She was a terrible housekeeper; he was a bit neat. She was a social butterfly; he preferred to stay at home. She was quick to anger; he was more patient. They were opposites in so many ways, but not in the ways that mattered. Their differences complemented each other, as differences in couples had been doing since time began.

In those parts of life where the rubber met the road, they were one person, they had one mind. Love each other until they died. Loyalty to each other, no matter what. Love Sarah, always, forever, unending. Their daughter was a representation of their most unifying principle: love and be loved. Their souls fit together in all the right places, but in other ways, they were worlds apart. As in this moment, where Sam's organized mind met her more Bohemian one and bounced off it with a smile.

"It has to do with checks and balances," she said, grinning back at him. "If we should leave at twelve-thirty to get there on time, but it's already twelve-fifteen, and I know it's going to take me twenty minutes to get ready, then . . ." She shrugged. "We'll leave at twelve thirtyfive, but we'll have to drive a little faster."

He shook his head at her in mock amazement. "There's something very wrong with you."

She stepped into him, kissing him on the nose. "The very thing you love about me, my perfect flaws. So, again? What time is it now?"

He looked at his watch. "It's twelve-ten."

"Well, see then, silly? We leave at twelve-thirty. That wasn't so hard now, was it?"

He laughed, he couldn't help himself.

"Fine," he said, shaking his head. "I'll let the beasts out and get the munchkin ready."

The "beasts" were their two black Labrador retrievers, known affectionately as the "Black Forces of Destruction," or, as Sarah often referred to them: "Puppyheads!" They were two sixty-pound bundles of largely untrained love and loyalty, savages, unfit for civilized company.

Sam opened up the baby-gate that he'd erected as a barrier to keep the beasts out of the rest of the house, and was rewarded with an immediate nose in his butt.

"Thanks, Buster," he said to the smaller male.

No problem, Buster replied, wagging his tail and smiling an openmouthed dog-smile. The larger female, Doreen, was circling him like a mentally disturbed person, or maybe a shark, asking the same silent but obvious question, over and over and over.

Is it time yet? Is it time yet? Is it time yet?

"Sorry, Doreen," he said as she continued to circle him. "It's going to be a late lunch today. But . . ." He paused, giving her an exaggerated, expectant look. "If you guys go outside, I might give you a treat!"

At the word treat, Doreen launched herself into the air like a pogo stick, all four legs off the ground, a spontaneous and full-body expression of ultimate joy. Hooray! she seemed to be saying. Hooray, Hooray, Hooray!

"I know," Sam said, grinning. "Dad is good, Dad is great."

He walked over to the cupboard and fished out a couple of MilkBones. Doreen continued to launch herself into the air, now truly overjoyed. Buster was not a jumper, he preferred to comport himself with a little more dignity, but he was looking pretty happy.

"Come on, guys and gals," Sam said and headed toward the sliding glass door that led into the backyard.

He opened it and stepped through. The beasts followed. He closed the door and stood, a treat in each hand.

"Sit," he said.

They sat. Their eyes had achieved missile-lock on the treats. "Sit"

was one of the few things they were trained to do. They would only do it if a promise of food was involved.

He lowered his hands so that they were level with the dogs' heads.

"Wait," he cautioned. If they tried to take the treats before "wait" was done, he'd make them "wait" even longer, something that was pretty unpopular. "Wait," he said, again. Doreen was quivering and starting to look a little bit crazy-eyed. Sam took mercy on her and issued the word they were waiting for: "Okay."

Two muzzles full of teeth leapt toward the treats in his hands, somehow grabbing the Milk-Bones without taking fingers along with them. Sam used this distraction to open the sliding glass door and step back into the house, closing it behind him.

Buster figured it out first. He stopped mid-crunch and looked at Sam through the glass, betrayal in his eyes.

You're abandoning us? he seemed to be asking.

"See you soon, buddy," Sam murmured, smiling.

Time to look for the other beast that lived in this house. He was pretty sure she was hiding. Sarah wasn't too keen on the dentist. Sam secretly agreed with her on this. He always felt just a little bit guilty when they took her to one of her medical appointments, knowing that it would invariably end in tears. He admired Linda's cool head and practicality in these matters. Pain for the child's greater good, the province of Mom. Not a strength for most fathers.

"Munchkin?" he called out. "You ready?"

No answer.

Sam moved toward Sarah's room. The door was open. He peeked his head in and saw his daughter sitting on her bed. She was clutching Mr. Huggles in her arms.

"Sweetheart?" he asked.

The little girl turned her eyes to him and stole away his heart. Woe, woe, those eyes said, expressive as a baby seal's. Woe to have parents that make you go to the dentist . . .

Mr. Huggles, a monkey made from socks, stared at Sam with accusing eyes.

"I don't want to go to the dennist, Daddy," Sarah said, mournful.

"Den- tist, honey," he replied. "And no one likes going."

"Well then why do they?"

The perfect logic of a child, he thought.

"Because if you don't take care of your teeth, you might lose them. Not having any teeth is no fun."

He watched his child mull this over, really think about it.

"Can Mr. Huggles come?" she asked.

"Of course he can."

Sarah sighed, still not happy, but resigned to her fate. "Okay, Daddy," she said.

"Thanks, babe." He glanced at his watch. Perfect timing to the end of these negotiations. "Let's you, me, and Mr. Huggles go find Mommy."

In contrast to the drama that preceded it, the visit to the "dennist's"

office had been short and uneventful. Sarah's guarded suspicion had finally given way to smiles under the onslaught of Dr. Hamilton's unending joviality. He'd even examined Mr. Huggles. This had led to a celebratory mood for the family, which had led to ice cream and a trip to the beach. It was nearly three in the afternoon by the time they returned home. The beasts forgot to be unhappy about being fed so late because they were just so darn happy about being fed now. There was some obligatory petting, the getting of the mail, the technical brilliance of setting up the shows to record for the evening. Sam called it "the arrival dance." It was the checklist you went through each time you left for more than a few hours and came back. The details of living. Some men, he knew, complained about it. He loved it. It was comforting, it was right, it was his.

"You ready for tomorrow, Sarah?" he heard his wife ask. Tomorrow was Sarah's birthday. The question was rhetorical. He winced at the squeal that came from his daughter's mouth. An earsplitting, semi-alien screech.

"Presents, party, cake!" she cried, jumping up and down in excitement. It was very reminiscent of Doreen earlier, Sam mused. The dog and his daughter had disturbing similarities at times.

"Don't jump on the couch, munchkin," he murmured as he looked through the mail.

"Sorry, Daddy."

A certain poised feel to the silence that followed made him glance over at his daughter. He braced himself when he saw the look in her eyes. Exuberant mischief. The promise that a mildly destructive act was about to happen.

"But," she giggled, a psychotic leprechaun, "can I jump on you?"

She let out a squeal that was the sound of a pig being murdered and launched herself into the air, coming down on him like a pillow filled with goose down and rocks.

He "ooofed" a little. More than I did a year ago, he thought to himself. Someday soon his days as a human trampoline would be over for good. He'd miss it.

Sarah was still small enough for now. He grinned and wrapped his arms around her.

"Zo . . ." he said, faking an exaggerated German accent and a sinister voice, "you know vat zis means . . . yes?"

He felt her freeze, quivering and giggling in delight and terror. She knew what was coming.

"It means zat ve will haf to resort to . . . tickle torture!"

The torture began, and there was more squealing, and Doreen started barking and leaping around while the long-suffering Buster looked on.

Silly humans and a stupid dog, he seemed to be saying.

"Not so loud," Linda Langstrom warned with a smile, watching as her husband and daughter dissolved into playful chaos. It was halfhearted. Don't blow, wind, she might as well be saying. The truth was that she shared in their delight. Sam was always so peaceful and practical, the calm to her storm. It's not that he was stiff--Sam had a dry humor that never failed to make her laugh, a way of seeing the comedy of life--but he had a certain . . . quietness. A tendency, not to take himself seriously, but to get serious. And yet he was always willing to toss that aside for his family. He sure tossed it aside when he proposed to her.

They were both in college. He was getting a degree in computer science, she in the arts. Some days their schedules conflicted. She'd have a night class that started an hour after his last day class ended, he had a night job--they really had to work to find time together on those days.

Sam had decided he was going to ask her to marry him and that he was going to be wearing a tuxedo when he did. It was one of his quirks: Once he decided to do something at a particular time, in a particular way, that was how it was going to be. It was a quality that could be either endearing or annoying, depending on the circumstances. It had been one of those "one-hour-window" days. There was no way he'd be able to get to their apartment (they'd been living together for a year), put on the tuxedo, and get back in time to propose to her before his night job started.

Sam's solution? He'd worn the tuxedo all day long, through all of his classes, through the heat of the day and the jibes of his fellow students.

The one-hour window arrived, and there he was, and he took her breath away. More than a boy, but not fully a man, silly and handsome and down on one knee, and she said yes, of course, and he skipped his job and she skipped her classes and they smoked grass and made love all night while the music played loud. They never managed to get all their clothes off; when she woke up in the morning, the bow tie from the tuxedo was still circling Sam's neck.

They were married a year later. Two years after that they had both graduated from college. Sam got a job right away with a software company, where he excelled. She painted and sculpted and took pictures, waiting with patient certainty to be "discovered."

Two years later and still unknown, Linda began to have serious doubts. The total certainty from her early twenties was beginning to wane as she hit twenty-five.

Sam had dismissed her doubts, in an absolute kind of way that she still loved him for.

"You're a great artist, babe," he'd said, holding her eyes with his.

"It'll work out."

Three weeks later, he'd come home from work, and had tangoed into her studio--literally tangoed, stepping and twirling toward her with an over-serious look on his face and a phantom rose between his teeth.

"Let's go," he'd said, holding out a hand.

"Hang on a minute," she'd said, concentrating on her brushstroke. It was a painting of a baby, alone in a forest, and she liked it. He'd waited, tangoing with himself.

Linda had finished and folded her arms, smiling at Sam as he danced. "What's up, silly man?"

"I have a surprise," he'd said. "Let's go."

She'd raised an eyebrow. "A surprise?"

"Yep."

"What kind of surprise?"

"The kind that surprises you, of course." He'd tapped his foot, had motioned with his hands toward the door. "Giddyap. Get a move on. Take the lead out."

"Hey," she'd said, feigning indignation. "I'm not a horse. And I need to change."

"Nope. Tarzan say Jane go, now."

She'd giggled (nobody could get her giggling like Sam), and had ended up letting him drag her out of the house and to the car. He'd driven them down the local highway, taking the exit that led to the new mall that had just opened. He'd pulled into the parking lot.

"The surprise is at the mall?"

He'd waggled his eyebrows at her. More giggling ensued. It was an indoor mall, and Sam had led her inside, through the milling crowds of shoppers, walking, walking, walking--until he stopped.

They were standing in front of a medium-sized empty store. She frowned. "I don't understand."

Sam had indicated the empty space with a sweep of his hand.

"It's yours, babe. This is the space for your store. You can figure out a name, haul in your art and photos, and make the public discover you." He'd reached out a hand, had touched her face. "You just need to get seen, Linda. Once they see you, they'll know what I know."

She'd felt like the air had been sucked from her lungs. "But . . . but . . . isn't this expensive, Sam?"

His smile had been somewhat rueful. "It's not cheap. I took money from the house, from our home equity line. You can survive for about a year without turning a profit. After that, it'll get a little dicey."

"Is . . ." She'd turned to him. "Is this smart?" she'd asked in a whisper. Wanting what he was offering her, but doubting her ability to keep it from hurting them.

Sam had grinned. It was a beautiful grin, filled with happiness and strength. All man, now, no boy at all. "It's not about smart. It's about us." The smile had been replaced by seriousness. "It's a gamble on you, babe, and win or lose, it's something we have to do."

They'd gambled, and they'd won. The location had been a perfect choice, and while she didn't make them rich, she made a good profit. More important, she was doing what she loved, and her husband had helped make sure of that. It didn't make her love him more, that was impossible. What it did was add a new layer of permanence and certainty. This was the secret to their love: its priority. They kept their love important, above money, pride, or the approval of others. They continued to love each other, in life and in the bedroom. Two years later, Sarah was born.

Sam liked to joke that Sarah was a "red-faced, cone-headed beauty." Linda had watched in wonder as that tiny mouth found her nipple with single-minded certainty. Life had thrilled through Linda, something undefinable but huge, new and ancient at the same time. She'd tried to get that feeling onto canvas with paint. She'd failed each time. Even the failures were magnificent.

Linda watched her husband and her daughter fight their ticklewar as Doreen struggled to be a part of it in her desperate, doggy way. Sarah was special. The cone-head had gone away within hours, of course, and as the years moved on, Sarah had only grown more beautiful. She seemed to skip caterpillar, going straight to butterfly, hold the cocoon. Linda wasn't sure where it came from.

"Maybe we'll get lucky," Sam would joke. "Maybe she'll get ugly when she becomes a teenager and keep me from having to buy a shotgun."

Linda didn't think so. She was pretty sure that her munchkin was going to be a head-turner.

"I think she's just the best parts of both of us," Sam had said once. Linda liked that explanation.

19

SARAH HAD BABBLED NONSTOP THROUGH SUPPER ABOUT HER

birthday, all excited eyes and energy. Linda wondered how in the world she was going to get her calm enough to go to sleep. A common parental problem, the "Christmas Syndrome."

At least during Christmas, she could tell Sarah that Santa wouldn't come unless she went to sleep. Birthdays were more of a challenge.

"Do you think I'll get a lot of presents, Mommy?"

Sam looked at his daughter, puzzled. "Presents? Why would you get presents?"

Sarah ignored her father. "And a big cake, Mommy?"

Sam shook his head, regretful. "Definitely no cake," he said. "Girl's gone wonky in the head. Soft in the noggin."

"Daddy!" Sarah rebuked.

Linda smiled. "Plenty of cake and presents, babe. But you're going to have to wait," she cautioned. "The party isn't until after lunch, you know that."

"I know. But I wish it was like Christmas, where you get your presents in the morning!"

Bingo, Linda thought. Sneaky, yet obvious. Why didn't I think of it before?

"I'll tell you what, sweetie," she said. "If you go to bed tonight-- on time--and don't give me any hassle about it, I'll let you open a present in the morning. How's that sound?"

"Really?"

"Really. If "--she held up a finger--"you go to bed on time."

Sarah nodded her head in that overenthusiastic way of small children, head all the way back, then chin to chest, repeat.

"Then it's a deal."

Sam was putting his daughter to bed. Buster followed them as always, his routine. Doreen was the kind of dog that loved everybody. She'd probably lead a burglar through the house with her tail wagging, glad for the company, hopeful she'd get a treat for being helpful. Buster loved too, but his love was sparing, his view of the world more suspicious. He picked few people to love, but those people were his, and he loved them with his whole self.

He loved Sarah most of all, and slept with her in her bed each night.

Sarah was under the covers. Buster jumped up and nestled beside her, resting his head on her small stomach.

"All set, munchkin?"

"Kiss!" she said, stretching her arms out toward him. Sam leaned forward, planting a kiss on her forehead, accepting her gossamer hug.

"How about now?" he asked.

Her eyes popped open wide. "My Little Pony!" she cried.

"My Little Pony" was a child's character, mixing fairy-stuff with pony-stuff, resulting in improbable light blue ponies with manes of pink. Sarah had a doll version that she slept with.

"Hmmm . . ." Sam said, looking around. "Where is My Little Donkey?"

"Daddy!" Sarah half-yelled, a mix of exasperation and delight. Fathers tease their daughters in many ways; this was one of Sam's. It had started a year ago, him substituting "donkey" for "pony." At first Sarah's distress had been real, but over time it had become a tradition between them, something he knew they'd laugh about together when she was older.

He found it on the floor next to her bed and deposited it into her waiting hands. She hugged it to her, wiggling farther under the blankets. The movement forced Buster to move his head. He glared and sighed, a deep, doggy-sigh. The lot of an unappreciated animal, he seemed to be saying.

"How about now?" Sam asked.

"You need to leave, Daddy," Sarah admonished. "I got to go to sleep so I can wake up and open my present."

"Propen your mesent?" he said, puzzled.

She giggled. Sarah loved when Sam made up spoonerisms--where you reversed the first letters of two words, like the "the spork and the foon." She thought that was the mat's ceow.

"Olive juice, munchkin."

"Olive juice, Daddy."

Another one of their silly traditions. If you mouthed "olive juice,"

it looked from a distance like you were saying "I love you." Sam had demonstrated this to Sarah when she was four. She'd thought it was the most brilliant thing ever, well worth repeating a few thousand times. Now they said it to each other every night. He had no way of knowing this would be the second-to-last time he'd ever say it.

Sarah squinched her eyes shut, and petted Buster, and tried to make her brain turn off.

Tomorrow was her birthday! She'd be six, almost a grown-up, which was interesting, but the presents, that's what she was most excited about.

She looked around at her walls, lit by the hallway bulb that came through the half-open doorway to her room. They were covered with paintings her mother had done. Her eyes searched for and found her favorite: the baby, alone in the forest.

Someone hearing about it, not seeing it, might think it was a scary picture. But it wasn't, not at all.

The baby, a girl, was peaceful, lying on a bed of moss, eyes closed. Trees were to the left of her, a brook to the right. The sun was out, the sky had some clouds in it, and if you looked close, you could see a smiling face in those clouds, looking down on the baby girl.

"Is it watching her, Mommy?"

"That's right, honey. Even though she's alone in the forest, she's never really alone, because the woman in the clouds is watching over her."

Sarah had stared at the picture, loving it.

"The baby is me, isn't it, Mommy? And the cloud-lady--that's you."

Her mother had smiled then, the smile Sarah loved so much. It had no secrets, no hidden meanings. It was just the sun, dazzling and happy and warm on your face.

"That's right, babe. That's what it is, for you and me and anyone else who looks at it."

Sarah had been puzzled. "It's you for other people too?"

"No, it's Mommy for other people. They could be grown-ups, out in the world, away from their mommies, but they're never alone, because Mommy is always there." She'd grabbed her daughter, had hugged her in a spontaneous motion that had made Sarah laugh out loud.

"That's what mommies are, and what they do. They watch over you forever."

The painting had been a gift on her fifth birthday. It hung on the wall that faced the foot of her bed, a talisman.

Her mother never bought her birthday gifts. She made them. Sarah loved them all. She couldn't wait to see what she was going to get tomorrow.

She squinched her eyes shut again, and petted Buster (who licked her hand) and willed her brain to turn off.

She fell asleep once she stopped trying, a smile on her face. A

The first thing Sarah realized when she woke up was that Buster wasn't there. This was strange; the dog went to sleep when she did, and got up when she did, every day.

The second thing she noticed was that the sun wasn't shining. This too was strange. It was night when she closed her eyes, morning when she opened them. That's the way it worked.

There was something about this dark. Something heavy and scary. It no longer felt like the dark before her birthday. This felt like the dark of a closet when you got locked in. Stuffy, hot, close.

"Mommy?" she whispered. Part of her wondered why she didn't say it louder. If she really wanted her mother to hear her, why was she whispering?

Her six-year-old mind provided the answer: because she was afraid something else would hear too. Whatever it was that was creating this scary dark.

Her heart was beating so fast, her breath was coming even faster, she was headed toward full-blown terror, the place of waking up after a nightmare, except that in those times, she always had Buster, and now Buster wasn't here--

Look at the picture, stupid, she ordered herself. She found her mother's painting in the dark. The baby, asleep on the moss, peaceful and safe. She fixed her gaze on the face in the clouds. The face that meant Mommy, that pushed back this scary dark, that said Buster was in the backyard, that he'd used the doggydoor to relieve himself, that she'd just woken up because he was gone, and that soon he'd be back and she'd fall asleep again and wake up in the morning, and it would be her birthday.

Her heart stopped hammering as she thought these things. Her breathing slowed and her fear began to subside. She even started to feel silly.

Almost a grown-up and acting afraid of the dark like a little baby, she chided herself.

Then she heard the voice and she knew it was the voice of a stranger, here in her house, in the dark. The terror returned and her heart skipped. She froze, eyes too wide.

" 'I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself,' " the voice intoned, moving toward her door. " 'A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.' "

The voice wasn't deep or high, but somewhere in between.

"Do you hear me, Sarah? A famous poet named D. H. Lawrence wrote those words."

He was standing outside her door. Her teeth chattered, though she was unaware of it.

This was beyond terror. This was waking up from a nightmare to find that the thing in the nightmare had followed you out, was shambling down the hallway toward your room to hug you, to hold you tight while it laughed and moaned and you screamed and lost your mind.

"We could learn a lot from the wild things. Pity, for yourself or for others, is useless. Life will go on whether you live or die, whether you're happy or unhappy. Life doesn't care. Ruthlessness, now that's a useful emotion. God is ruthless. That is a part of his beauty and his power. To do what is right, consequences or deaths of innocents be damned."

He paused. Sarah could almost hear him breathing. She could also hear her own heart, so loud she thought her eardrums were going to burst.

"Buster didn't feel sorry for himself, Sarah. I want you to know that he came right for me. No hesitation. He knew I was here for you, and he ran toward me without thinking about it twice. He was going to kill me to save you."

Another pause. Then a chuckle, low and long.

"I want you to know that so you understand: Buster's dead because he loved you."

The door flew open wide, and The Stranger was there, and he threw something onto Sarah's bed.

The light from the hallway lit up the object: Buster's severed head, teeth still bared, eyes wide with rage.

Sarah unfroze then. She began to scream.

20

"I NEED YOU TO WATCH, SARAH, AND I NEED YOU TO LISTEN. This is the start of something."

They were in the living room. Mommy and Daddy sat on chairs with handcuffs around their wrists and ankles. They were naked. Seeing her father nude embarrassed Sarah and added to her terror. Doreen was lying on the floor, watching them all, unaware that anything was wrong. Stay stupid, puppyhead, Sarah thought, and maybe he won't kill you like he killed Buster.

Sarah was seated on the couch in her nightgown, handcuffed as well.

The Stranger, as she thought of the man, was standing. He had a gun in his hand. He had panty hose pulled over his head. The panty hose stretched and twisted his features, made it look as though his face had been melted by a blowtorch.

Her fear was still there, still strong, but it had moved away from her. It was a scream in the distance. It was a waiting, a terrible waiting, the executioner's axe frozen at its apex.

Her parents were terrified. Their mouths were covered with tape but their eyes showed their fear. Sarah sensed they were more afraid for her than themselves.

He walked over next to her daddy and leaned forward so that he could look into Sam's eyes.

"I know what you're thinking, Sam. You want to know why. Believe me, I wish that I could tell you. I wish it more than anything. But Sarah's listening, you see, and she might tell others, later. I can't have my story being told until I'm ready.

"I can say two things: It's not your fault, Linda, but your death is my justice. It's not Sarah's fault, but her pain is my justice. I know, you don't understand. That's all right. You don't need to understand, you just need to know that these things are true. "

He stood up.

"Let's talk about pain. Pain is a form of energy. It can be created, like electricity. It can flow, like a current. It can be steady or it can pulse. It can be powerful and agonizing, or weak and just annoying. Pain can force a man to talk. What a lot of people don't know is that pain can also force a man to think. It can form a man, mold a man, make him who he is.

"I know pain. I understand it. It's taught me things. One of the things I've learned is that while people fear pain, they can tolerate much, much more of it than they think. If, for example, I tell you that I'm going to jam a needle into your arm, you'll become fearful. If I actually do it, the pain will seem excruciating. But if I do it again, every hour on the hour, for a year, you'll learn to adjust. You'll never like it, but you'll no longer fear it. And that is what this will be about."

The Stranger turned his gaze on Sarah.

"I'm going to stick that metaphorical pin into Sarah. Over and over and over, for years and years and years. I'm going to use the pain to sculpt her, like an artist. I'll make her over into my own image, and I will call her what she'll become: A Ruined Life. "

"Please don't hurt my mommy and daddy," Sarah said. She was surprised to hear her own voice. It sounded strange, far away, too calm for what was happening.

The Stranger was surprised as well. He seemed to approve, nodding and smiling with his melted face. "Good! There it is: love. I want you to remember this moment in the future, Sarah. I want you to think back and mark this as the last time you were without real pain. Trust me, it will sustain you in the coming years." He paused, examining her face. "Now, hush, and watch."

She watched as he turned toward her parents. Things still felt dreamy to her, all hazy and indistinct. Fear was there, horror was there, tears were there, but they were pinpricks in the distance. Things shouting at her from the horizon. She had to strain to hear them, and her reluctance to do so was heavy, crushing, a weight she couldn't lift. She'd looked into Buster's dead eyes, she'd screamed, and then her heart had gone away. Not for good, and not far, but far enough that she didn't have to listen to it shriek.

Buster . . .

There was anguish waiting in that word, a pain powerful enough to suck a soul under forever. At some level, she knew Buster was only the beginning. The Stranger was more than a black tide, he was an ocean of darkness. A huge, empty nothing in human form with a gravitational presence strong enough to bend light waves and laugh sounds and goodness.

The correct instinct of a civilized society is to protect the young from evil, but in doing so, society sometimes loses sight of a basic truth: A child is always ready to believe in the existence of monsters. Sarah knew The Stranger was a monster. She had accepted this as a totality the moment he'd thrown Buster's severed head onto her bed.

"Sam and Linda Langstrom," The Stranger spoke, "please listen carefully. The thing you need to understand is that death's inevitable. I'm going to kill you both. You need to dismiss any hopes you might have that you're going to live. Instead, you need to focus on what you can control: what happens to Sarah."

Linda Langstrom's heart had sped up when the man said he was going to kill them. She couldn't help it; the desire to live was visceral. But when he told them that Sarah's fate was still undecided, her heartbeat had actually slowed. She'd been looking at Sarah, worrying, only half-listening to the man. Now she turned her eyes to him, forced herself to focus.

The Stranger smiled. "Yes. There it is. That's one mix of love other than the love of God that comes close to having real power--mother to child. Mothers will kill, torture, and maim to save a child. They'll lie and steal and prostitute themselves to feed a child. There's a certain divinity to it. But nothing is ever as strong as the strength achieved when you give yourself over to God."

He leaned forward until his eyes were level with Linda's. "I have that strength. Because of that, I get to kill you. Because of that, I get to do my work with Sarah. Because of that, I never have to apologize. The strong don't have to be sorry. All they have to do is continue to breathe." He stood back up. "So, what does that kind of strength do when it's defied by a lesser love? It demonstrates its power by forcing choices. And now I'm going to give you some choices, Linda. Are you ready?"

Linda looked at The Stranger's face, examined the panty-hosetwisted features. She realized that trying to bargain with this man would be like bargaining with a rock, a block of wood, a rattlesnake. She was nothing to him, nothing at all. She answered his question with a nod.

"Good," he replied.

Was it her imagination, or was he breathing faster now? Getting excited?

"Here is the scenario. Sam, you need to listen to this as well."

He didn't need to demand Sam's attention; Sam had never taken his eyes off the man. Sam had been staring at The Stranger, his heart filled with a hate so pure it was almost unbearable. His desire to murder this man was excruciating. Just let me get these cuffs off, he raged inside, and I'll tear you apart. I'll slam your head against the floor until your skull cracks and I see your brain . . .

"Sarah will live. You are both going to die, but she will live. If you've had concerns, that should allay them. I'm not going to kill her." He paused. "But I could decide to hurt her."

He transferred the gun to his left hand, reached into his back pocket with the other and came out holding a lighter. It was flashy; a mix of gold plating and mother-of-pearl, with an inlaid picture of a domino tile on one side, the two-three piece.

He flipped the lighter open, and flicked the wheel with his thumb. A small flame lit, blue at the bottom.

"I could burn her," The Stranger murmured, looking into the flame. "I could torch her face. Turn her nose into a lump of melted wax, fry off her eyebrows, blacken her lips." He smiled, still looking at the flame. "I could sculpt her literally rather than figuratively, using flame as my knife. Fire is strong and ruthless. Absent of love. A living representation of the power of God."

He snapped the lighter shut in a sudden motion and returned it to his pocket. He moved the gun back to his right hand.

"I could burn her for days. Please believe me. I know how to do it. How to make it last. She wouldn't die, but she'd beg for death in the first hour, and she would lose her mind long before bedtime."

His words, and the certainty with which he delivered them, terrified Linda. A raw and ragged terror. She didn't doubt him. Not even a little bit. He'd burn her baby, and he'd smile and whistle as he did it. She realized that she feared this more than dying, and for a moment (just a moment) she felt relief. Parents like to think that they'd die for their children--but would they? When a gun came out, would they step between it and their child? Or would something more primal and shameful take over?

I would die for her, Linda realized. In spite of what was happening, this made her proud. It was freeing. It gave her focus. She concentrated on what The Stranger was saying. What did she have to do to keep him from burning her baby?

"You can prevent this," The Stranger continued. "All you have to do is strangle your husband."

Sam was startled from his reverie of rage.

What did he just say?

The Stranger reached into a bag near the couch, pulling out a small video camera and a collapsible tripod. He placed the camera on the tripod and positioned it so that it was pointing at her and Sam. He pushed a button, there was a musical tone, and Linda realized they were now being filmed.

What did he just say?

"I want you to put your hands around his neck, Linda, and I want you to look into his eyes, and I want you to strangle your husband. I want you to watch him die. Do it, and Sarah will not burn. Refuse, and I'll put the flame to her until she smokes."

The rage had gone away, far, far away. Had it ever really been there?

It didn't feel like it to Sam. He was dazed. He felt like someone had just hit him in the face with a hammer.

It was as if his ability to comprehend had been ratcheted up to a superhuman level. He was thinking in fractals, seeing the interconnectedness of everything in strobe flashes. Truths arrived in rifle cracks of illumination.

This leads to this leads to that . . . and the sum is always the same. He and Linda were going to die. He understood that with a sudden certainty.

Too sudden?

No. This man was implacable. He wasn't testing them. He wasn't pranking them, this wasn't a trick. He was here to kill them. Sam wasn't going to break free and save his family. There wouldn't be any Hollywood-movie moment of sudden redemption. The bad guys were going to win and get away clean.

This leads to this leads to that . . .

Only one outcome wasn't yet decided, the most important one: What was going to happen to Sarah.

He looked at his daughter. Sadness overwhelmed him. What would happen to Sarah? He realized he'd never really know. His little girl, if she survived this, would go on. Sam would end here. He'd never know if any sacrifice made had saved her or not. She looked so small. The couch was just a yard away, but it might as well have been a light-year. A new wave of sadness, choking and desperate. He was never going to touch his little girl again! The kiss he'd given her last night, the hug, had been the last of it. He looked over at Linda. She was listening to The Stranger, her eyes intent. Sam drank in the image of her chestnut hair and her brown eyes, and then he closed his own and remembered her so hard that he could almost smell her, a scent of hand soap and woman, as uniquely Linda as her DNA.

He remembered her clothed and classy, and he remembered her naked underneath him, in her studio, covered in paint and sweat. He remembered his daughter too. He remembered that the surge of love he'd felt when he first heard her cry was so strong it threatened to consume him. It was fierce, and it was huge, and it was larger than he could ever hope to be alone.

He remembered her laughter, and her tears, and her trust. Last, he remembered them together, the wife and the daughter. Sarah asleep in Linda's arms as a baby, after a long and colicky night. He remembered and he felt sad and he felt angry and he wanted to fight, but--

The sum is always the same.

He opened his eyes, and he turned to Linda, and this time she was looking back at him. He tried to make his eyes smile, tried to show her the all of everything inside him, and then--he closed his eyes, once, and nodded.

It's okay, babe, he was telling her. Do it, it's okay. Linda knew what her husband was saying. Of course she did--

they'd talked without words, plenty of times. We may be different in some ways, he was saying, but in those places where the rubber meets the road, we're one person.

One tear slid from her right eye.

"I'll remove his gag, and I will uncuff your wrists. You will put your hands around his neck and then you'll squeeze until he's dead. You'll kill him, and Sarah will watch, and it will be terrible for you, I know, but I won't touch Sarah when I'm done with the two of you."

He cocked his head, seeming to notice for the first time that something had passed between Sam and Linda.

"You've already decided, haven't you? Both of you." He was quiet for a moment. "Did you hear that, little one? Mommy is going to kill Daddy to keep me from burning you with fire. Do you know what you should learn from that?"

No reply.

"The same lesson as before. Mommy is going to be ruthless, and it's going to save you. Did you hear me, Sarah? Mommy's ruthlessness is going to save you. Her willingness to feel pain for you is going to save you. Strength, finally, to support that mother-love."

Sarah was hearing what The Stranger was saying, but they weren't real words to her. She believed in monsters. In the end though, the monsters always lost.

Didn't they?

God made sure that nothing truly bad happened to good people. This wouldn't be any different. It was scary, it was terrifying, it was terrible that Buster had died. But if she could hold it together, The Stranger wouldn't win. Daddy would stop him, or God would stop him, or maybe even Mommy.

She kept herself from believing what he was saying, and concentrated on waiting for the moment that it would all be over, and Mommy and Daddy and Doreen would be okay.

Linda Langstrom listened to The Stranger talking to her daughter. Rage and despair roared up inside her. Who was this man? He'd walked into their home in the middle of the night, without fear or hesitation. He'd entered their bedroom with a gun, had woken them with a whisper. "Scream and you will die. Do anything other than what I tell you and you will die."

His control had been absolute from the start. He was both the irresistible force and the immovable object, and now he'd backed them into a corner, with only one way out. She had to kill Sam, or the man would torture Sarah. What choice was left with such inexorable options? The Stranger was manipulating them, she knew this. He might still hurt Sarah. Kill her, even.

But . . . he might not. And that possibility, well . . . what choice was left?

Her rage was impotent, she was aware of that. Her despair was suffocating. Sam would die. She'd die. Sarah might live. But who'd raise her? Who'd love her?

Who would watch her baby from the clouds?

"I'm going to take off both of your gags. Sam, you will be allowed two final sentences--one to your wife, one to your daughter. Linda, you are allowed a single sentence to Sam. Exceed these parameters, and Sarah burns. Do you understand?"

They both nodded.

"Very good."

He removed Linda's gag first, then Sam's.

"I'll give you a minute. A sentence isn't much, when it's your last chance to speak. Please don't be frivolous."

Sam looked at his daughter and his wife. He glanced down at Doreen, who wagged her tail at him, stupid, lovable dog. He wondered at his lack of fear. On one hand, everything was bright and sharp-edged, on the other it was all a floating surreality. Shock? Maybe.

He made himself focus. What were his last words going to be?

What should he say to Linda, who was about to be forced to kill him?

What did he want his daughter to remember about this moment?

All kinds of things flew into his head, sentences with fifty words, apologies, good-byes. In the end, he let the words come from him without inspection, and hoped they were right.

He looked at his wife. "You are a work of art," he told her. He looked at his daughter. "Olive juice," he said, smiling. Sarah stared at him for a moment, surprised, and then she smiled the smile that had stolen his heart from the beginning. "Olive juice, Daddy," she said.

Linda looked at her husband and fought to keep herself from choking with grief. What was she going to say to this man? To her Sam, who'd saved her in so many ways? He'd saved her from her own self-doubt, had saved her from living a life without loving him. A sentence? She could speak for a year without stopping and it still wouldn't be enough.

"I love you, Sam." She blurted out the words, and at first she wanted to scream, to take them back, they weren't enough, that couldn't be the last thing she ever said to her husband. But then she saw his eyes and that smile, and she understood that while it wasn't the perfect sentence, it was the only one. She'd married her first love, the love of her youth. She'd loved him through laughter and anger, with kisses and yells. Love is where it started, love is where it was going to end.

She expected The Stranger to say something, to make fun of these last words, but he didn't. He stood and waited, silent. He seemed almost respectful.

"Thank you for complying," he said. "I really don't want to have to burn Sarah." A pause. "Now we're going to begin the strangling. It's not as easy as you might think, so please listen to what I tell you."

Linda and Sam listened to the man, but kept their eyes on each other. They talked without words. The Stranger droned on, giving Linda matter-of-fact advice on how to kill her husband.

"I don't need it to be painful, or to last for a specified time. If he goes quickly, that's fine. It just needs to happen. The areas you'll want to concentrate on are here and here." He touched areas high on each side of Sam's neck, near the jawline. "The carotid arteries. Cutting off the blood flow in those places will knock him unconscious before the lack of air kills him. Concurrent with that, you'll need to exert pressure forward with both hands in order to cut off the airflow through his windpipe." The Stranger demonstrated without actually touching Sam's neck. "Then you hold on till he stops breathing. Simple. I will re-cuff him from behind so he can't reach up to try and tear your hands away." The Stranger shrugged. "It happens, even with suicides. One man had pulled a plastic bag over his head, had taped it closed around his neck, and then had handcuffed his own hands behind him. I suppose he changed his mind once it started getting difficult to breathe. He almost tore his thumbs off trying to rip his hands from the cuffs. We don't want any of that here."

Sam was sure The Stranger was right. He could feel his own fear, far off but persistent. Knocking at his door.

Little pig, little pig, let me in . . .

No. He didn't want to die, that was true. But he was going to. This leads to this leads to that, and the sum is always the same. Save Sarah. You can't always get what you want. Life's a bitch----and then you die.

Sam sighed. He took one more look around. First at the room, the kitchen, the shadowy front area beyond that. His home, where he'd loved his wife and raised his child, where'd he'd fought the good fight. Then at Sarah, the living, breathing result of the love between him and Linda. Finally, he looked into his wife's eyes. A deep, lingering look, and he tried to tell her many things and everything, and he hoped she understood all of it, or some of it, and then he closed his eyes. Oh, Sam, no . . . Linda understood what he was doing, what he'd just done. He'd said good-bye. He'd closed his eyes, and she knew he didn't plan to open them again. Logic was a big part of who Sam was. It was one of the things she loved about him, it was one of the things about him that drove her crazy. He had this ability, to see things three moves ahead, to arrive at an understanding while she was still puzzling over it. Sam had probably known they were going to die long before The Stranger ever told them so. He'd examined the situation, had weighed the possibilities of the man's motivations, and had realized the inevitable. Everything since had been him waiting. And feeling.

"You go fuck yourself!"

The words came out of her mouth before she could stop them, driven by emotion, not logic. The Stranger paused, looked at her, cocked his head.

"I'm sorry, what did you say?"

"I told you to go fuck yourself," she snarled. "I'm not doing it."

She looked over at Sam. Why hadn't he opened his eyes?

The Stranger leaned toward her. He gazed at her for a long moment, and she was reminded of a statue. Stone, unfeeling, resolute. "You're mistaken," he said.

He put the tape back over her mouth, and then Sam's. He didn't seem angry as he did it. Without speaking, he walked over to Sarah, gagged her, grabbed her handcuffed wrists, and yanked her hands forward. He stuffed his gun in his pants, and reached into his back pocket, pulling out the flashy gold-plated lighter. Linda's heart froze when she heard the "snick" of it opening. His thumb pumped once on the wheel, and there was fire.

He made sure that Linda was watching as he held Sarah's palm over the flame for three full seconds.

Sarah screamed the whole time; The Stranger did what he had said was the only duty of the strong: He kept on breathing, calm and sure.

21

SARAH COULDN'T BELIEVE HOW MUCH IT HURT. SHE'D BEEN forced to stop crying so that she could breathe through her nose. All the far-away things were now close. Her emotions were a blinding sheet of white lightning inside her, terror, grief, horror. The monster was inescapable. She knew that now. This knowledge was destroying her. Her mother had raged as Sarah had been burnt. Linda had yanked so hard against her handcuffs that she would have torn the flesh on her wrists to the bone, if the insides of the cuffs had not been padded. Mommy was still Mommy, but she crackled with a threatening energy Sarah had never seen.

Even The Stranger was impressed.

"Magnificent," he'd said. "You are one of the scariest things I've ever seen."

Sarah had agreed.

"The problem, Linda, is that I'm scarier." He'd shaken his head.

"Don't you understand? You can't win. You won't beat me. I am strength. I am certainty. Your choices are unaltered: Do what I say, or watch as I burn Sarah into a semblance of a circus freak."

Her mother had quieted down then. Sarah had tried to look at her daddy, but his eyes were closed.

"I'm going to give you a few moments to collect yourself. A full minute. After that, you'll either tell me that you're ready, and we will move forward, or I will put the torch to Sarah in earnest."

Sarah quivered in fear at the thought of more fire, more pain. And what did he mean by "moving forward"? She'd been in her far-away place, waiting for the monsters to go away. He'd talked during that time, said something important. She strained to remember. Something about Mommy and Daddy . . .

Mommy killing Daddy . . .

She remembered, and her eyes opened wide, and the far-away place beckoned once more.

Linda struggled to get herself under control. She was full of white noise and static, one big short-circuit of the soul. Rage had taken over. She hadn't been able to hold it back. She'd seen red and the anger and futility had marched in, banishing what little equilibrium she'd had left. Her wrists ached, and she felt over-oxygenated and sick to her stomach from the adrenaline rush.

Sam, damn Sam, still had his eyes closed. She knew why, and she hated him for it. Hated him for being right. For knowing it was over, knowing there weren't any other choices, and for accepting that. No, no, she loved Sam, she didn't hate him. This was him, who he was. His mind was one of the things she loved most about him. His clarity, his brilliance. He was being so courageous right now. He'd said good-bye, closed his eyes, and left his neck exposed, ready for her strangling hands.

WWSD?

The saying had jumped into her mind: What Would Sam Do?

It was a mantra that she used when her emotions battled with her common sense. Sam was calm, Sam was logical, Sam was steady-asshe-goes. Capable of rage when it mattered, but able to let the small things go with a shrug.

When someone cut her off on the freeway and she started swearing out loud at them in front of Sarah, she'd take a breath and ask: WWSD? What Would Sam Do?

It didn't always work, but it had woven itself into the fabric of her, and it appeared now at the time when she most needed it. Sam would weigh the facts. Linda took a deep breath, closed her eyes.

Fact: We can't escape. He's handcuffed us, the cuffs aren't budging. We're trapped. Fact: He can't be bargained with.

Fact: He's going to kill us.

These last two facts were facts. The Stranger's calm resoluteness, the workmanlike way in which he did everything, including burning Sarah's hand, left no doubt about what he was and what he would do. He'd do what he said.

But will he spare Sarah if we do what he asks?

Fact: We can't know for sure that he will.

Fact: We can't know for sure that he won't.

It all led to what had caused Sam to close his eyes: this leads to this leads to that, and the sum is always the same.

Fact: The possibility that he will spare her is all that's left. The only thing we might still be able to control.

She opened her eyes. The Stranger was watching her.

"Have you made your decision?" he asked.

She blinked once for yes. He removed the tape over her mouth.

"I'll do it," she said.

That hint of excitement again, a ghost that appeared and disappeared in his eyes.

"Excellent," he said. "I'm going to re-cuff Sam's hands behind his back first."

He did this in quick, practiced motions. Sam kept his eyes closed and didn't resist.

"Now, Linda, I'm going to remove the handcuffs from your wrists. You could decide to have another one of your 'moments.' " He shook his head. "Don't. It won't get you anywhere, and I'll burn Sarah's left hand until it's a melted lump. Do you understand?"

"Yes," she replied, her voice full of hate.

"Good."

He removed the cuffs. She did consider attacking him, just for a moment. She fantasized about shooting her hands out, grabbing his neck, and squeezing with all the rage and sorrow in her heart, squeezing until his eyes exploded. But this, she knew, was pure fantasy. He was an experienced predator, alert to the tricks of his prey. Her wrists throbbed. It was a dull, deep pain. She welcomed the sensation. It reminded her of Sarah's birth. Beautiful, terrible agony.

"Do it," The Stranger commanded, his voice flat and taut. Linda looked at Sam, Sam with his eyes still closed, her beautiful man, her beautiful boy. He was strong in ways that she was weak, he had tenderness, he could be callous and arrogant, he had been responsible for her longest laughs and her strongest grief. He'd looked past her outer beauty to gaze upon the uglier parts of her, and had loved her still. He had never touched her in anger. They'd shared moments of sex as love and tenderness, and they'd fucked outdoors in a rainstorm, shivering as the cold water pelted their naked skin and she screamed above the wind.

Linda realized that she could continue this list forever. She reached out with her hands. They trembled. When they touched his neck, she choked.

Sense-memory.

The feel of Sam, igniting remembrance of another ten thousand moments. A million tiny paper cuts on her soul, she bled from them all.

He opened his eyes and a million cuts became a single, searing pain.

Of all his physical features, Linda loved Sam's eyes the most. They were gray, intense, surrounded by long eyelashes that any woman would envy. They were capable of such deep expression, of such emotion.

She remembered him looking at her with those eyes over a table on a wedding anniversary. He'd smiled at her.

"Do you know one of the things I love most about you?" he'd asked.

"What?"

"Your beautiful lunacy. The way you can arrange the chaos of a sculpture or a painting, but couldn't arrange an underwear drawer to save your life. The way you fumble through loving me and Sarah with your whole self. The way you never forget a shade of blue, but can never remember to pay the phone bill. You bring a wildness to my life that I'd be lost without."

Sam was loving her now, she could tell. Those eyes, those intense gray eyes, radiated emotion. Love, sadness, anger, pain, and joy. She fell into them, and she hoped he understood everything that she was feeling right now, every bit of it.

He winked once, and it made her laugh--a strangled laugh, but a laugh nonetheless--and then he closed his eyes again, and she knew he was ready, that she'd never be ready, but that the time was now. She started to squeeze.

"If you don't grip harder, he'll spend a long time dying," The Stranger said.

Linda squeezed harder. She could feel Sam's heartbeat beneath her fingers, could feel the life of him, and she began to cry. Deep, ropy sobs, wrenched from that undefinable part of her that was capable of hurting the most.

Sam could hear his wife crying. He could feel her hands tightening around his neck. She'd gripped in the right places; the blood flow to his brain was being cut off. It created a huge pressure in his head, along with a lightheadedness and a faint pain in his chest. His lungs were starting to burn.

He kept his eyes closed, looking into the black. He prayed that he'd be able to keep them closed while he died. He didn't want Linda to have to see him, to watch life leave him.

More burning now, panic was starting to come, he could sense it in the distance.

Fight it, Sam, he commanded himself. Hold on, it won't be long now, you'll pass out soon.

He would, he knew. He could feel it, black edges around his consciousness. Sparking. Once he fell into that blackness, that'd be it. That sparking was the last bit of himself. First he'd be enveloped by the black, and then he'd become the black.

Ooops . . .

He'd lost a moment there. Instead of sparks, there had been a flash, not of light, but of darkness. He realized that it wasn't something he was going to be aware of, it was going to sneak up on him. A flash of dark would come and then it would stay, forever. Another flash, but this one was brilliant, blinding, excruciating in its loveliness. He and Linda, naked in a rainstorm, the raindrops powerful and so cold. They shivered and they fucked and she was on top and lightning lit up the sky around her head as he came, so hard--

--Sarah wailing in the delivery room and he couldn't breathe and his knees were weak and he was filled with such triumph--

--Sarah rushing toward him, hair in the wind, arms wide, laughing at the world, Linda rushing toward him, hair in the wind, arms wide, laughing at the world--

OliveJuiceOliveJuiceOliveJuice--

The last flash, and Sam Langstrom died.

He was smiling.

22

LINDA'S MIND WAS EMPTY.

Sam slumped forward in the chair. She'd felt his pulse speed up underneath her fingers, then she'd felt it go faint, and then she'd felt it stop altogether.

She felt Sam's blood on her hands. It wasn't really there, but she felt it. One word ran through her mind, over and over and over, a huge black bat that blotted out the stars: Horror, horror, horror, horror . . .

"That was very well done, Linda."

Why doesn't his voice ever change? she wondered. It always sounds the same. Calm and happy, while terrible, terrible, terrible things . . . She shuddered once and fought back a sob.

Maybe he's not really there, inside. He's like a golem, clay made to walk without a soul to guide it.

Linda looked over at her daughter. She felt her heart sag inside her. Sarah's eyes were open, but they weren't seeing. They were staring. A "not there" kind of stare. She was rocking back and forth. Her lips were clenched together so tightly that they'd gone white. I know how you feel, babe, Linda thought in despair.

"I know that you are hurting," The Stranger said. His tone became soothing. "We're going to end that now, all that terrible, awful pain, forever."

He looked at Sarah, watched her rock back and forth. A string of drool had collected at one corner of her mouth and was falling, falling, falling.

"I'll keep my word, you know. So long as you do what I ask, and don't deviate, I won't hurt her."

You've already hurt her forever, Linda thought. But maybe she'd have a chance if she didn't die. You could recover from emotional trauma; there was no coming back from death.

The Stranger walked over behind Sam. He pulled keys from a jacket pocket, knelt down, and removed the cuffs from around Sam's ankles, then he removed the cuffs from around Sam's wrists. Sam toppled forward, thudding to the floor like a bag of sand.

"Here's what's going to happen," The Stranger said to Linda. "I'm going to give you these keys." He did. "Please remove the cuffs from your ankles." Linda did so. He reached behind him with his left hand, pulling a weapon from his waistband. "I'm going to place this handgun on the floor, here." He did so. He moved behind Sarah and put his own gun to the back of her head.

"In a moment I will begin counting. When I reach five, if you haven't used that gun to blow your own brains out, then I will shoot Sarah in the back of the head. Following that, I'll rape you for hours and torture you for days. Do you understand?"

Linda nodded, listless.

"Good. Now, handguns are powerful things. You could touch that weapon, something could spark, and you might feel that it's transferred its power to you. You might decide to do something brave and insane. Don't. The moment its barrel starts moving toward me, I kill Sarah. The moment that it points away from your head, I kill Sarah. Do you follow?"

Linda stared at him, not speaking.

"Linda," he said, patient. "Did you hear what I said?"

She managed a nod. It took all her strength. She was so tired. Sam I Am is gone, she thought. I feel dead already. She looked down at the weapon on the rug. The one she'd be holding soon. The one that would end this, that would let her join Sam, that would save Sarah (she hoped).

Handgun, handgun, burning bright . . .

"I'm going to give you the same gift that I gave your husband. One sentence only. This is your last chance to say something to Sarah."

Linda looked at her white-lipped, shivering, oh-so-beautiful daughter.

Will she even remember what I say?

Linda would have to hope so. She'd have to hope that her words would drill down somewhere into Sarah's consciousness, that they'd surface later and be a comfort.

Maybe they'll come to her in her dreams.

"I'm in the clouds watching you, Sarah, always."

Sarah continued to rock back and forth and drool.

"That was very nice," The Stranger said. "Thank you for complying."

There it was again, that rage. Linda felt white-hot and blue-flame, rolling lava, exploding suns.

"Someday, you'll die," she whispered, her voice quavering. "And it'll be a bad death. Because of this. Because of the things you do."

The Stranger stared at Linda, then smiled.

"Karma. An interesting concept." He shrugs. "Perhaps you're right. But if you are are, that will be then. We are in the now. In the now, I start counting." He paused. "It's going to be a measured count. Slow heartbeats. You have until I get to five."

"The last thing I'll be thinking of is going to be you. You dying a bad death."

The words were worthless, they'd change nothing, but they were the last resistance she could offer. The Stranger didn't even appear to have heard her.

"One," he counted.

Linda forced herself to turn away from her rage. To look at the gun he'd placed on the floor.

So this is it.

Extraneous things began to fade. It was if someone had turned down the volume on life. She could hear the beating of her heart and The Stranger's slow count.

One was over. Then would come Two. Then Three. Then Four. And then . . . ? Should she let herself hear Five? Or should she pull the trigger just before Five?

Why wait, don't hesitate . . .

One was still echoing in her brain as she moved toward the gun. She could hear it vibrating in the air. She found herself in an elongation of time, as if each second was filled with a lifetime of sharp edges and she was rubbing up against all of them at once. There's more pain in life than pleasure. It was something she knew as an artist, a secret ingredient she added to the potpourri of her paintings or sculptures.

The sharp edges, that's how we know we're still in the game. She knelt down on the carpet and picked up the weapon. She made sure not to point the barrel at The Stranger.

"Two."

It shocked her as he said it, like a slap in the face. The sting passed.

Linda marveled at the coldness of the steel. Its smooth polish. The heavy, brutal promise of the thing.

This end toward enemy, she thought, looking at the barrel. Someone invented this. They dreamed it, sketched it, tossed and turned about it. Let's take a hunk of steel and fill it with steel-jacketed birds, and let's send them exploding outward into other human beings.

"Three."

Her awareness of the number was more clinical this time. This weapon had a silencer on it. It was a gun that spoke of assassins and hit men and secret death. It was just a piece of metal, though. Nothing more, nothing less. It wasn't human. You didn't anthropomorphize a gun; you pointed it and fired.

What was it the marines said? This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this one is mine . . .

"Four."

Time stopped. It didn't just slow--it froze. She was covered in ice. Trapped in amber.

And then, a strobe-flash.

Sam on the floor.

Strobe-flash.

Sam in her arms.

Strobe-flash.

Sam hanging up the phone. His face white. Looking at her. "My grandfather died." Tears, and Sam in her arms again. Strobe-flash.

Sam above her, eyes clouded with a mix of love and lust, face contorted with pleasure. She urged him to hold on, just another second, just another second, just another second . . . This was that moment, she realized in wonder. That feeling you got as you hung on to the knife-edge precipice of near-orgasm, straining, trying to fend off the beckoning detonation and blinding light. The place where you stopped breathing, where your heart stopped beating, a moment of life and death.

Strobe-flash.

Sarah.

Sarah laughing.

Sarah crying.

Sarah living.

Oh.

God.

Sarah.

Linda realized in a final strobe-flash that she would miss this most of all: loving her daughter. She was pierced by a longing that was the sum of all the longings she'd ever felt or sculpted or painted. If pain could be rain, this was an ocean of it.

It came out of her in a howl. It wasn't something she could control. It sprang from her. A scream of agony to stop birds in flight. Even The Stranger grimaced at the sound of this howl, just a little. It was a physical force.

SarahSamSarahSamSarahSam

Strobe-flash.

The gunshot came and went in the room, a silenced thunderclap. Sarah stopped rocking for a moment.

The left side of Linda's head exploded.

Linda had been wrong.

Her last thought hadn't been about death.

It had been about love.

Hey, it's me. Modern-day Sarah. I'm going to write about the past and then take a break and come back to the present in places. It's the only way I'll ever get through this.

About my mom--maybe her last thought was about fear, maybe it was about nothing, I don't know. I can't really know. She was there and Daddy was there and I was there and he was there, these things are true. He made her kill them both while I watched, this is true. Is it true that my mom was that noble at the end, alone and suffering inside her head?

I don't know.

But then again, neither do you.

I do know that my mom had a lot of love in her. She used to say that her family was a part of her art. She said that without me and Daddy, she'd still paint, but all the colors would be dark ones. I like to think that she had some certainty, in that last moment, that what she was doing really would save my life, because it did, no matter what else happened later.

I don't know for sure whether her last thought was about love. But her last action was.

23

I CLOSE SARAH'S DIARY WITH A TREMBLING HAND AND GLANCE over at my clock. It's three A.M.

I need a break. I'm only just into Sarah's ordeal, and I already feel shaky and restless about it. She wasn't wrong; she has a gift. Her writing is too vivid. The happiness of the way her life used to be contrasts with the bitter humor of her prologue. It makes me feel sad and dirty. Wrung out.

What did she call it? A trip to the watering hole. I can see it in my mind. An obscene full moon in the sky, dark things drinking bad water . . .

I shiver because I also feel the fear rising inside me. Bad things happening to Sarah, a short step away from bad things happening to Bonnie . . .

I glance over at Bonnie. She is deep in sleep, her face untroubled, one arm thrown across my stomach. I disengage myself from her, lifting her arm away with the same gentle care I'd give to a ladybug I was setting free in the backyard. Her mouth opens, once, and then she curls into herself and continues to sleep.

In the beginning, she'd wake up at the slightest change or motion. The fact that she can now keep sleeping eases some of my concerns about her. She's getting better. She doesn't talk yet, it's true. But she's getting better. Now if I can just keep her alive . . . I slide out of the bed and tiptoe out of my bedroom, down the stairs, and into the kitchen. I reach into the cabinet above the refrigerator and find my secret vice and small shame. A bottle of tequila. Jose Cuervo, a friend of mine, just like the song.

I look at it and think: I am not an alcoholic.

I have spent time reviewing that statement, along the lines of "all crazy people say they're not crazy." I looked without giving myself the benefit of a doubt and arrived at that certainty: I am not an alcoholic. I drink two or three times a month. I never drink two days in a row. I get pleasantly buzzed but I never get truly shit-faced. There's a truth, though, a big, bellowing elephant in the room: I never drank for comfort until after Matt and Alexa died. Never, not once, no way.

It troubles me.

I had a great-uncle on my father's side who was a drunk. He wasn't the funny, friendly, charming drunk-uncle. He wasn't the artistically inclined, self-tortured, pitiable drunk-uncle either. He was embarrassing and violent and mean. He reeked of booze and sometimes worse. He grabbed me by the arm at a family gathering one time with enough force to leave a bruise, put his boozy mouth about an inch from my terrified face (I was only eight) and proceeded to say something garbled and sly and disgusting that I've never fully deciphered. The things we see as children make lasting impressions. That's the picture of a drunk that always stuck with me. Anytime I was drinking and found myself heading toward a little too much, Great-Uncle Joe's rheumy-eyed, unshaven face would pop into my head. I'd remember the smell of whisky and tooth decay and the cunning look in his eyes. I'd set down whatever I happened to be drinking at the time, and that would be it.

Not long after my family died, I found myself in the liquor section of the supermarket. I realized that I had never bought anything other than a bottle of wine, certainly not at a supermarket, definitely not in the middle of the afternoon. The tequila caught my eye, the song came to mind.

Screw it, I'd thought to myself.

I'd grabbed the bottle, paid for it without meeting the checker's eyes, and hustled home.

I spent about ten minutes at home with my chin in my hand, gazing at the bottle, wondering if I was about to become a true cliche. If I was about to become Great-Uncle Joe, a chip off the old block.

Nah, I'd thought. No one pitied Great-Uncle Joe. They'll pity you. It went down good, it felt good, I liked it.

I didn't get drunk. I got . . . floaty. That's as far as I've ever taken it. The problem, I think now, as I pour an inch (never more) into a glass, is that I continued this habit even after the agony of losing my family subsided. Now, it helps me with my fear, or in times of great pressure. The danger is in that arena: not drinking because I want to, but because I need to. I know that means it's not a healthy habit I have here.

"To rationalization," I murmur, toasting the air. I down the glass in a single gulp and it feels like I just swallowed paint stripper or fire, but it's a good feeling, putting pressure behind my eyes and delivering an almost instantaneous feeling of contentment. Which is the point. Contentment is so much harder to come by than joy, I've always thought. A single shot of tequila does it, for me.

"Jose Cuervo, da do do do dah dah," I sing in a whisper-voice. I consider a second shot, but decide against it. I cap the bottle and replace it in the cabinet. I rinse the glass, taking care to get rid of any lingering smell. More tiny red flags, I know: drinking alone, hiding it. In the end, I have to accept that, rationalized or not, my drinking isn't out of control, and hope that I'll recognize it if it ever becomes so. I consider the moment. Why is Sarah's tale getting so under my skin? Why the need to run to Mr. Cuervo right now? It's a terrible story, but I've heard terrible stories before. Hell, I've lived terrible stories. Why is this one hitting me so hard?

Bonnie's already nailed it: because Sarah is Bonnie, and Bonnie is Sarah. Bonnie is a painter, Sarah is a writer, both have lost parents, both are dark and damaged. If Sarah is doomed, does that mean that Bonnie is too? These similarities stoke my fears. Fear is what I struggle with most, these days.

I had played down the actual level of my terrors about Bonnie when I had talked to Elaina. The fear, when it comes, surpasses mere discomfort. I have hyperventilated. I've locked the bathroom door and crouched on the floor, arms around my knees, shaking with panic.

Posttraumatic stress is what a shrink would probably diagnose. I imagine that's accurate. But I'm not interested in talking my way through this. I'm going to suffer my way through it, and hope that I don't screw up Bonnie along the way.

I find what works best is to divert my thoughts in these moments, to think of something, anything else. What flies into my mind this time isn't particularly helpful.

1for-two-me, babe.

Why, Matt? I made my peace with Alexa. Why can't I make my peace with you? Why can't I forget about it?

He shakes his head.

Because you're you. You have to know. It's how you're built, how God or whoever made you.

He's right, of course. It's a truth that applies to everything: Sarah's diary, 1for-two-me, the future. It's one of the things that drives me forward, that helps me navigate through my fears: the desire to see how the story ends. Bonnie's story, the next victim's story. Whatever. What about my story?

Quantico. The second elephant in the middle of my personal room. It appears as I think of it, all sad-eyed and wise. I stroke its gray skin and realize what about it bothers me.

That it doesn't bother me enough.

Here I am, I realize, offered a plum because my face won't look right on a poster. Here I am, considering a move that would separate me from the only family I have left, that would end a new and possibility filled relationship with Tommy, that would pack away this house and all its memories for good--and all I can feel is a sense of opportunity. Considering leaving my friends and the life I've known should be tearing me apart. Instead, I am ambivalent. Why?

It's not like things haven't been getting better. Packing away Matt and Alexa's things is progress. No more nightmares is progress. Sharing even a small part of myself with a man other than Matt is progress. Why don't I seem to care more?

Enlightenment evades me for now, but I realize here, at last, is the discomfort I'd been looking for. Maybe I've been fooling myself. Maybe what I'd thought was emotional growth was simply me learning to walk in spite of my disabilities. Maybe the parts of me designed to feel most deeply have been injured beyond repair. That doesn't explain the booze now, does it?

With that it's time to shove the elephant away. He goes quietly, but stares at me with those wise, sad eyes that say, It's true, we elephants have long memories to go with our long trunks, but no tusks here, even though memories can have long teeth.

I lick my own teeth and search for contentment, but I can already tell that both it and sleep will be absent.

Contentment . . .

Wait, elephant, I cry. Come back.

He does, because he's my elephant after all. He stares at me with those patient eyes.

I just realized why. It's because for all the progress I've made . . . I'm still not happy. You know?

He touches me with his trunk. Looks at me with those wise, sad eyes. He does know.

I'm not sad or suicidal, but that doesn't mean I'm happy. Memories, yes, the elephant's wise, sad eyes say, memories can have long teeth.

Yes, I think, and the happy memories have the longest teeth of all. That's the problem: I've known true happiness. Real, fulfilling, down-to-the-bone, close-to-the-soul happiness. Feeling "okay" doesn't cut it anymore. It's as if I was on a drug that made the world glow and now that I'm off it, now that I'm going cold turkey, it's not that the world is bad, per se--but it doesn't glow, dammit. I'm not confident that Tommy or Elaina or Callie or the J-O-B or even Bonnie will make me happy in that way again. I cherish them all, but I mistrust their ability to fill the void, to bring back the glow. Ugly and selfish but true.

That's why Quantico appeals to me. A nuclear changeup, a mushroom cloud of "different," perhaps that's what I really need. A raw and brutal break to shake the foundation and rattle the rafters of me. The elephant plods off without being asked. I can talk to my metaphors without shame when I swallow tequila, it seems. Elephant, I think, thy name is "Not-Happy." Or maybe, "No-Glow."

Will Quantico solve that?

Who the fuck knows? I want a cigarette.

I sigh and resign myself to wakefulness. Time to shove aside the personal and drown myself in the professional. It's an old solution, but a faithful one. It doesn't glow, exactly, but it's guaranteed to banish the elephants that ail you. I plod back upstairs and grab my notes and return to the living room. I sit on the couch and try to organize my thoughts. I take the page titled PERPETRATOR and add to it: PERPETRATOR

AKA "THE STRANGER."

I think about what I've read so far in the diary. I begin to write, my notes now less structured and more extemporaneous. He was caused pain = he's causing others pain. Revenge. The question remains, though: Why Sarah?

The logical suspicion would be that he's making Sarah pay for something her parents did. But he told Sam and Linda that they were not at fault. It's not your fault, but your death will be my justice. Was Sarah simply chosen at random?

I shake my head. No. There is a connection, and it's not imaginary. I feel as though some aspect of it is staring me right in the face. Something about who he was speaking to . . .

I sit up straight, suddenly energized.

If Sarah's account was accurate, The Stranger was speaking to Linda when he said, Your death will be my justice. Linda specifically.

A phrase I had heard earlier today comes back to me: The Father and the daughter . . .

Revenge isn't random and he loves his messages. That wasn't a slip of the tongue.

I write.

What if the object of revenge goes back another generation? He said to Sarah yesterday, while he was flicking blood onto her, "The Father and the daughter and the Holy Spirit." He told Linda Langstrom, "It's not your fault, but your death will be my justice." Could we be talking about Linda's father? Sarah's grandfather?

I read it back to myself and experience that flush of energy again.

I'm in my home office, faxing the pages containing my notes to James. I didn't call him; James will hear the fax and wake up. He'll be pissed and grumble about it, but he'll read them regardless. I need him to know what I know.

The grandfather.

It feels, if not certain, at least very possible. The machine beeps to let me know it's done and I go back down stairs. I check the clock. Five A.M. Time marches on. I want the morning to come, and I want it here now, dammit!

A thought comes to me.

Sarah said no one's believed her about The Stranger. Why? From what I've read so far, that makes no sense.

I glance over to the diary pages waiting on the coffee table. I glance at the clock and the hours I have left to burn.

Only one way to find out.

Sarah's Story

Part Two

24

So how do you like the story so far? Not bad for an almost-sixteen-year- old, huh? Like I said, I'm a sprinter more than a runner, and we sure sprinted through that first bit, didn't we? A summary: Happy me, bad man comes, dead Buster, dead Mommy, dead Daddy, unhappy me. Now we'll take a jump. A leap to the next starting line. First, some backstory: I was hazy and crazy after everything that happened, and somehow both Doreen and I ended up in the backyard. Doreen, poor dummy, got thirsty or hungry or both and couldn't rouse me (I was too busy lying on the back patio, drooling on the concrete) and she started howling. God, could she howl. Anyway, so our next-door neighbors, John and Jamie Overman, called the cops because of all the racket and because I guess they peeked over the fence and saw me drooling and thought, Hey that's kinda strange. Two coppers showed up (cheezit!), a guy named Ricky Santos and a new rookie named Cathy Jones. Cathy becomes what we call an IM- PORTANT CHARACTER in my story.

Over the years, unlike most other people, she actually gave a poopy- doody.

More on her later. That's the thirty-second recap. Now we'll head back into third-person view.

Time for another trip to the watering hole. Ready?

1-2-3: GO!

Once Upon A Time, things were totally, totally screwed. . . .

SARAH SIPPED WATER THROUGH A STRAW AND TRIED NOT TO feel tired.

A whole week had gone by. A week of floating in marshmallows because of the drugs they gave her. A week of sly voices whispering in her head. A week of pain.

One day she'd woken up and hadn't started to scream right away. That was the end of her visits to Marshmallow Land. She still had dreams, though. In those dreams, her parents were (nothing they were nothings nothing at all)

And Buster was a

(puppyhead--puppyshead?)

(nothing nothings nothing)

She woke from these dreams shivering and denying, shivering and denying.

Right now she was wide awake, though. A lady-policeman was sitting in a chair next to the bed, asking Sarah questions. The lady's name was Cathy Jones, and she seemed nice, but her questions were puzzling.

"Sarah," she started, "do you know why your mommy hurt your daddy?"

Sarah frowned at Cathy.

"Because The Stranger made her," Sarah answered.

Cathy frowned. "What Stranger, sweetheart?"

"The Stranger that killed Buster. That burned my hand. He made Mommy hurt Daddy and hurt herself too. He said he would hurt me if they didn't."

Cathy stared at Sarah, perplexed.

"Are you saying there was someone in your house, honey? Someone that forced your mommy to do the things she did?"

Sarah nodded.

Cathy leaned back, uneasy.

What the hell?

Cathy knew that forensics had been through the Langstroms'

home and that they hadn't found anything to point away from a murder-suicide. There was a note from the mother that said: I'm sorry, take care of Sarah. There was the fact that Linda's prints were found in a number of damning places, notably the hacksaw that beheaded the dog, her husband's neck, and the gun she'd used to shoot herself. There was also the matter of the antidepressants the mother appeared to have been taking, no sign of forced entry, Sarah being left alive--if it looked like a dog and barked like a dog . . . Cathy had been asked by the detectives in charge to get a statement from Sarah for corroboration. A loose end, nothing more.

So what do I do here?

Ricky's voice came to her.

Just take the statement. That's what you're here for. Take it, give it to the de- tectives, and move on. The rest of it is not your problem.

"Tell me everything you remember, Sarah."

Sarah watched the lady-policeman walk out of her room. She doesn't believe you.

It was something Sarah had become aware of about halfway through her story. Adults thought kids didn't know anything. They were wrong. Sarah knew when she was being humored. Cathy was nice, but Cathy didn't believe her about The Stranger. Sarah frowned to herself. No, that wasn't quite right. It's that she seemed . . . what?

Sarah puzzled over the nuances for a moment.

It's like she doesn't think I'm lying--but she doesn't think that what I'm saying is true.

Like I'm crazy.

Sarah leaned back in the hospital bed and closed her eyes. She felt the pain riding in like dark horses. The horses, they'd gallop into her soul and rear and scream, their hoofs sending black sparks flying off her heart.

Sometimes the pain she felt had clarity. It wasn't a dull ache, or a background noise. It was a ragged wound, nerve endings, and fire. It was a blackness that swept over her and made her think about dying. In those moments, she'd lie in her bed in the dark and would try to get her heart to stop beating. Mommy had told her a story about this once. About wise men in ancient China who could dig an open grave, sit next to it, and will themselves to die. Their hearts would stop and they'd topple forward into the waiting dirt.

Sarah tried to do this, but no matter how much she concentrated, how hard she wished, she couldn't die. She kept on breathing and her heart kept on beating and--worst of all--she kept on hurting. It was a pain that wouldn't go away, that wouldn't lessen or subside. She couldn't die, so she'd curl up in her bed and cry without making noise. Cry and cry and cry, for hours. Cry because she understood now, understood that Mommy and Daddy and Buster were gone, and they weren't coming back. Not ever.

After the grief came the anger and shame.

You're six! Stop being such a crybaby!

She didn't have an adult there to tell her that being six meant it was still okay to cry, so she curled up in the dark and tried to die and wept and berated herself for every tear.

Cathy not believing her, Cathy thinking she was a cuckoo-bird, brought a new kind of pain.

It made her sad and angry. Most of all, she felt alone. A

Cathy sat in the patrol car and looked out the window. Her partner, Ricky Santos, was downing a milk shake as he gave her the once-over.

"Kid's story bothering you?" he asked.

"Yeah. Any way you slice it, it's bad news. If we're right, she's crazy. If we're wrong, she's in danger."

Ricky sucked on his straw and contemplated the insides of his sunglasses.

"You gotta let it go, partner. That's how it works for us uniforms. We don't get to follow things through to the end, not very often. We parachute in, secure things, turn it over to detectives. In, out, clean. You carry things around when you're not in a position to do anything about them, you're gonna go crazy. Why cops end up drunks, or at the wrong end of their revolvers."

Cathy turned to him.

"So you're saying--what? Don't give a shit?"

Santos smiled at her, a sad smile.

"Care while it's your problem. That's what I'm saying. You're gonna see a hundred Sarahs. Maybe more. Do the right thing for them while it's your job, and then let it go and move on to the next one. It's a war of attrition, Jones. Not a single battle."

"Maybe," she said.

But I bet you have a case you could never let go of. I think Sarah's going to be mine.

Saying it to herself made Cathy feel better.

Mine.

"I'll be right back," Cathy said.

Santos looked at her. He was inscrutable. A sphinx in shades.

"Okay," he replied, and sucked on his straw.

They had parked at a Jack in the Box next to the hospital. Cathy exited the patrol car and walked across the street. She entered through the front doors and wound her way down the hallways to Sarah's room.

Sarah was sitting up, looking out the window. The view was of the hospital parking lot.

How depressing. Way to promote healing, guys.

"Hey," Cathy said.

Sarah turned toward her and smiled. Cathy was struck again by the beauty of the little girl.

She walked over to Sarah's bed.

"I wanted to give you this."

Cathy held a business card between her fingers.

"That's got my name and number on it. My e-mail address too. If you ever need help with anything, you can get in touch with me."

Sarah took the card and examined it before looking back up at Cathy.

"Cathy?"

"Yeah, honey?"

"What's going to happen to me?"

The pain that Cathy had been keeping at arm's length tried to crawl right up her throat. She fought it back down with a swallow. What's going to happen to you, kid?

Cathy knew that Sarah had no living relatives. Unusual, but it happened. It meant she was going to become a ward of the state.

"Someone's going to come take care of you, Sarah."

Sarah mulled this over.

"Will I like them?"

Cathy grimaced inside.

Maybe not.

"Sure you will. I don't want you to worry, Sarah."

Man, those eyes. I gotta get out of here.

"Hold on to that card, okay? And call me if you need to. Anytime."

Sarah nodded. She even managed a smile and now Cathy didn't just want to walk out of the room, she wanted to run, because that smile was heartbreaking.

Gut-wrenching

"Bye, honey," she stammered as she turned and walked away.

"Bye, Cathy," Sarah called after her.

Back in the car, Santos--now shake-less--regarded her.

"That make you feel better?"

"Not really, Ricky."

He regarded her for another moment. He seemed to be mulling something over.

"You're gonna make a good cop, Cathy."

He turned the key in the ignition and put the car in reverse as Cathy stared at him in surprise.

"That's the nicest thing anyone's ever said to me, Santos."

He smiled at her as he put the car in drive and headed out of the parking lot.

"Then you need new friends, Jones. But you're welcome anyway."

25

SARAH SAT IN THE CAR AND WATCHED THE LADY CHANGE. Karen Watson had shown up in the hospital room and explained to Sarah that she was there from Social Services, and that she was going to take care of her. Karen had seemed really nice and had smiled a lot. Sarah had felt hopeful.

Once they were out of the hospital, Karen had changed. She'd begun walking faster, yanking Sarah forward.

"Get in, kid," she'd said, when they reached the car. Her voice sounded mean.

Sarah puzzled over the change, trying to make sense of it.

"Are you mad at me?" she asked Karen.

Karen looked at her once before starting up the car. Sarah took in the dull eyes, the carelessly coiffed brown hair, the heavy face. The woman looked tired. Sarah thought she probably always looked tired.

"I don't really care about you one way or the other, princess, if you want to know the truth. My job is to get a roof over your head, not to love you or be your friend or anything like that. Understand?"

"Yes," Sarah replied, her voice small.

They drove off.

The Parkers lived in a worn-out house in Canoga Park, which was located in the San Fernando Valley. It resembled its owners: in need of work that would never be done.

Dennis Parker was a mechanic. His father had been a good man, had loved fixing cars, and had taught Dennis the trade. Dennis hated the work--hated all work, really--and he made sure that everyone knew it.

He was a big man, just over six feet tall, with broad shoulders and beefy arms. He had scraggly dark hair, ever-present stubble, and muddy-colored, mean-looking eyes.

Dennis would tell friends that he liked three things above all others: "Cigarettes, whisky, and pussy."

Rebecca Parker was a stereotypical California blonde with too many sharp edges to be truly attractive. She'd been beautiful for about four years, from sixteen to twenty. She made up for her deteriorating looks in the bedroom--not that it took much skill to please Dennis. He was usually full of booze by the time he was trying to get into her pants. She had a pair of heavy breasts, a waist that had stayed slim, and what Dennis liked to call "a tight little panty-hamster."

(Note from Sarah: This is true. Theresa told me he actually said that once. Charming, yes? Oh, who is Theresa? Read on and find out.) Rebecca's job was simple: managing the care of three foster children, the maximum number they could legally take in. They were paid for each kid, and it was a fair part of their income. Rebecca's duties included feeding the kids, telling them to go to school, and making sure that neither she nor Dennis left any visible marks on the kids when they delivered a beating. The trick was to pay just enough attention to the children to keep Social Services from getting pissed off, but not so much that it ate into her own free time or--

most important--their bottom line.

Karen knocked on the door of the Parkers' house as Sarah stood next to her. She heard footsteps coming, and then the door opened. Rebecca Parker peered through the screen door. She was wearing a tank top and shorts, and had a cigarette in her hand.

"Hey, Karen," she said, opening the screen door. "Come on in." She smiled. "You must be Sarah."

"Hi," Sarah replied.

Sarah thought that the lady looked and sounded nice, but she was beginning to understand that looks could be deceiving. Plus the lady smoked--yuck!

Karen and Sarah walked inside the Parkers' home. It was clean, sort of. It smelled like stale cigarettes.

"Jesse and Theresa are at school?" Karen asked.

"Yep," Rebecca replied. She guided them into the living room, and gestured for them to take a seat on the couch.

"How are they doing?" Karen asked.

Rebecca shrugged. "They're not failing anything. They're eating. Neither of them is doing any drugs."

"Sounds fine, then." Karen indicated Sarah with a nod of her head.

"As I told you over the phone, Sarah is six. I need to place her quickly, and I thought of you and Dennis. I know you are looking for a third."

"Since Angela ran away, yes."

Angela had been a pretty fourteen-year-old girl whose mother had died of a heroin overdose. She was already a hard case and Karen had placed her with the Parkers because she knew they could deal with her. Angela had run away two months ago. Karen figured she was probably heading down the same path as her whore mother.

"It'll be the usual routine. You need to get her in school, make sure her shots are up to date, and so on."

"We know."

Karen nodded in approval. "Then I'm going to leave her with you. I brought her bag, she has plenty of clothes and underwear and shoes, so you won't have to worry about that."

"Sounds good."

Karen stood up, shook Rebecca's hand, and headed toward the front door. Sarah went to follow her.

"You're staying here, kid." She turned to Rebecca. "I'll be in touch."

And then she was gone.

"Let me show you where your room is, honey," Rebecca said. Sarah followed the woman in a daze.

What was happening? Why was she staying here? And where was Doreen? What had they done with her puppyhead?

"Here it is."

Sarah looked through the door into the room. It was small, about ten feet by ten feet. There was a single dresser and two small beds. The walls were bare.

"Why are there two beds?" she asked.

"You're sharing the room with Theresa." Rebecca pointed toward the dresser. "You can put your clothes in the bottom drawer. Why don't you go ahead and unpack your stuff, and then come meet me in the kitchen?"

Sarah had managed to cram all of her clothes into the bottom drawer of the small dresser. She'd arranged her shoes under her bed. As she'd unpacked, she'd caught a whiff of a familiar scent, the smell of the fabric softener her mother used. It had caught her by surprise, a punch in the stomach. She'd had to bury her face in a shirt to cover up her crying.