A Grave Talent

A Grave Talent

Book 1 in

Kate Martinelli

series

Laurie R. King

A Grave Talent is an exceptional first novel which introduces Casey Martinelli, a newly promoted, female Homicide detective with a secret to conceal, and Alonzo Hawkin, a world-weary cop trying to make a new life for himself in San Francisco.

These two very different detectives are thrown together to solve a particularly ugly crime - the murders of three young girls. All the children are similar in appearance and all are found near a rural colony, home to those who have dropped out of the rat race. Amongst them is one woman, the enigmatic artist Vaun, who is hiding the terrible truth about her past and her real identity.

There is only one obvious suspect, but as they get nearer the solution, Martinelli and Hawkin realize the crimes are not necessarily the sexually motivated killings they had seemed. There is a coldly calculating and tortuous mind at work here which they must outmanoeuvre if they are to prevent both further killing, and the destruction of a shining talent.

This sensitive and absorbing first crime novel was awarded America's highest accolade for a first crime novel and marks the start of an exciting series featuring Casey Martinelli and Alonzo Hawkin.

for Noel

Other sins only speak,

murder shrieks out

—John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi

Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark,

and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales,

so is the other

—Francis Bacon, "Of Death"

PROLOGUE

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The first small body was found by Tommy Chesler one cold and drizzling afternoon two weeks before Christmas.

Before dawn that morning Tommy had left his cabin with his venerable and marginally accurate deer rifle under his arm and a handful of shells in his pocket, his heart set on a supply of illicit venison. He had no license, it was not the season, and hunting was absolutely forbidden where he planned on going, but that did not worry Tommy. Not much, at any rate. However, he did exercise a fair degree of caution, lest a ranger from the park happen upon him, and he stuck to areas where nobody was likely to be that time of the year, particularly in the rain.

Unfortunately, that included the deer.

At one o'clock, wet through, hungry, and in as bad a temper as he was capable of, Tommy turned for home. Two hours later he was pulling himself hand and foot up the greasy, nearly vertical path made by generations of agile hooves toward the telltale clearing in the trees that meant the Road rising atop the hill above him. He shook his head in disgust at the fresh prints and droppings and decided that he'd just have to go to the Newborns and ask for some of the pig they'd slaughtered last week. Trade some firewood, maybe, or split shakes for their addition. Truth to tell, pork was better than venison anyway. Venison you could roast or you could stew, but most of it had to be given away, and you got tired soon enough of what was left. But pork, now. Pork you could roast and stew, and you could fry and mix with apples and eggs, and make bacon, and—.

Tommy's mouth started to water at the thought of cracklings and red-eye gravy, and when he heard a quick scuffling noise and half saw something lying twenty feet from the edge of the Road, his mind was so occupied that it took a minute for his eyes and ears to interrupt.

Tommy stopped dead, his right foot already touching the jumble of scree that the bulldozer had pushed over in the last grading, and an expression of laborious thought came into his normally blank face. Tommy was not, at the best of times, a man who found reflection easy, and now, tired and distracted, he pulled off his hat and rumpled up his hair as if to stimulate his brains. He wasn't stupid; Tyler had reassured him on that point. He was just—careful. Deliberate. Perhaps that explains why Tommy did not immediately turn to the object that had caught his eye but stood for a long moment looking up at the Road. Perhaps there was some other reason. However, turn back he did, deliberately. There was a further scuffle (weasel, Tommy thought automatically) that moved away rapidly through the low shrubs; with care Tommy walked around a tangle of dormant poison oak, and there before him was a foot, the remains of a small, cold, gray, naked foot.

His eyes focused with great concentration on the delicate, round nail of the littlest toe, so as not to have to look at what that toenail was attached to, and the thought came firmly into his mind that he really wished he'd stayed home that morning and worked on the roof instead of coming out here illegally hunting for deer, and when his thoughts marched inexorably on to the idea of ham, Tommy Chesler was suddenly very, very ill. It took some time, but his stomach eventually stopped trying to crawl out of his throat. He rinsed his mouth with the cold water from the little flask he always carried and tried to think what to do. Tommy may have been none too bright, but he was a gentle man, and he loved children. Without looking too closely at why, he knew he did not want to leave this spot to fetch help—from the freshness of some of the spoor (weasel, yes, and fox and—) there might be nothing to come back to. Another man would perhaps have shrugged his shoulders and gone on down the trail, unwilling to display his deer rifle to all and sundry, but not Tommy. As clearly as if she (or was it a he?) had spoken, Tommy knew that this child, what was left of her (it did have longish hair) was his responsibility. It was not often that Tommy was made responsible for another human being, and he was not about to fail this one. Even if she was dead.

A signal was needed, he decided. The nearest houses were about two miles off, so it would have to be a big signal. He stood thinking intensely, oblivious to the bite of the wind and the thick smell, until an idea came trickling up into his mind, the memory of a grainy cowboy movie seen on Tyler's ancient television set. He looked at his gun, and at the handful of ammunition from his pocket. Ten bullets, and one in the gun. They would have to do. He pointed the heavy gun vaguely upward and fired. Paused and fired again. Another pause, and once more. Two minutes later he repeated the three shots and wondered somewhat guiltily where those bullets would come to earth. After another wait he did it again; then, ever tidy, he gathered up the spent shells and wondered what to do next. Perhaps it wasn't necessary to stand quite so close, he decided. He pulled himself back up the slippery hill to the Road, and the response came: three spaced shots. He loaded one of the two remaining bullets and fired it. One shot came in answer. Happy now, he squatted against a tree where he could keep an eye on the hillside below, and waited.

The events that followed were predictable, if unprecedented. The Riddle brothers arrived, and though their reaction to Tommy's find was not as dramatic as his (for they had come expecting to find trouble and had presumably not been thinking of ham), they climbed back onto the Road considerably subdued and swallowing convulsively. Tommy and Ben Riddle set off downhill to the Dodson farm five miles away, and within the hour a pigtailed Amy Dodson was skittering off down the road on her sure-footed little hill pony, Matilda, toward Tyler's Barn and a telephone, four miles further. It was nearly midnight before the police teams arrived at the earthly remains of Tina Merrill, having lost one four-wheel-drive vehicle and its driver (who was flown out with a broken leg) into Tyler's Creek. They did not know the name of the child at first, of course. It took a couple of days to match the dental X rays and the traces of a long-healed fracture of the right arm with the gap-toothed grinning child who looked out from hundreds of bulletin boards and telephone poles throughout the Bay Area, but the identity was certain.

It was not a good Christmas for the Merrill family.

Because Tina's body had been out on the hillside for so long, it was difficult for the pathology people to be certain, but it did not appear that she had been abused in any way before she was strangled. She had vanished in San Francisco on her way home from school, on the Wednesday after Thanksgiving, and was left in the woods not too many days after that. Her murderer had apparently carried her naked body to this spot half a mile down the fire road from where it entered the state reserve, where Tommy Chesler found her ten days later. The overworked detective who was handed her case held out little hope of an immediate arrest. His name was Alonzo Hawkin.

The second child was found six weeks later, fifteen miles away as the crow flies, and in considerably fresher condition. The couple who found her had nothing in common with Tommy Chesler other than the profound wish afterwards that they had done something else on that particular day. It had been a gorgeous morning, a brilliant day following a week of rain, and they had awakened to an impulsive decision to call in sick from their jobs, throw some Brie, sour dough, and Riesling into the insulated bag, and drive down the coast. Impulse had again called to them from the beach where Tyler's Creek met the ocean, and following their picnic they decided to look for some privacy up the creekside trail. Instead, they found Amanda Bloom.

Amanda, too, was from over the hill in the Bay Area, though her home was across the water from Tina's. There were a number of similarities in the two girls: both of them were in kindergarten, both were white girls with brown hair, both were from upper-middle-class families. And both of them had walked home from their schools.

It was the third death that set off the fireworks, even before the body was found. Samantha Donaldson disappeared from the fenced-in, manicured front garden of her parents' three-and-a-quarter-million-dollar home in the hills above Palo Alto on a sunny Monday in February. She reappeared some hours later, quite dead, on Tyler's Road. Samantha was five years old and had shiny brown hair, and with her disappearance the low-grade fear among Bay Area parents, particularly those with brown-haired, kindergarten-aged daughters, erupted into outright panic. From Napa to Salinas, parents descended on schools, sent delegations to police stations, arranged car pools, and held hundreds of tight-voiced conversations with their frightened children about the dangers of talking with strange people, conversations which brought feelings of deep, inchoate resentment on the part of the adults at this need to frighten kids in order to keep them safe.

The Donaldsons were important people on the peninsula. Mrs. Donaldson, a third-generation San Franciscan, was the moving force behind—and in front of—a number of arts programs and counted the mayor of San Francisco among her personal friends. So it was hardly surprising that within two hours of Samantha's disappearance Alonzo Hawkin's other cases were taken from him and he was put in charge of directing the investigations in all four counties. He was also given an assistant. He was not pleased when he heard the name.

"Who?" His worn features twisted as if he'd smelled something rotten, which in a way he had.

"Katarina Cecilia Martinelli, known as Casey. From her initials."

"Christ Almighty, Ted. Some nut is out there killing little girls, I'm about to have half of Northern California come down on my head, and you assign me some Madonna in uniform who was probably writing parking tickets until last week."

"She made inspector a year ago," Lieutenant Patterson said patiently. "She's new here, but she got a first-class degree from Cal, and the people in San Jose say she's competent as hell, gave her a citation to prove it."

" 'Competent' means that she's either impossible to get along with or so nervous she'll shoot her own foot."

"I know she's green, Al, and we probably wouldn't have promoted her to detective yet, but I think she'll work out. Hell, we were all young once, and she'll age fast working with you," he said, trying for camaraderie, but at the lack of reaction on Hawkin's face he sighed and retreated into authority. "Look, Al, we have to have a woman on it, and the only ones I've got better than her are involved, in a cast, or on maternity leave. Take her."

"I'd rather have one of the secretaries from the pool."

"Al, you take Martinelli or I'll give the case to Kitagawa. Look, I want you to take this. I read the reports on the cases you handled in Los Angeles, the two kidnappings, and I like the way you worked them. But I have to have a woman's face on this one—I'm sure you can see that—and I just don't have anyone else free. I'd give you a more experienced woman if I could, but at the moment I don't have one. Believe me, Al, I want this bastard caught, fast, and I wouldn't do this to you if I thought she'd be in the way. Now, will you have her, or do I give it to Kitagawa?"

"No, I want it. I'll take her. But you owe me."

"I owe you. Here's her file. I told her you'd want to see her at six."

ONE THE ROAD

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I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only

the essential facts of life, and see what it had to teach, and not,

when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

—Henry David Thoreau, Walden

"Good Heavens," I cried. "Who would associate crime

with these dear old homesteads?"

"They always fill me with a certain horror. It is my belief, Watson,

founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London

do not present a more dreadful record of sin

than does the smiling and beautiful countryside."

—Arthur Conan Doyle, "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches"

1

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San Francisco was still dark when the telephone erupted a foot from the ear of Katarina Cecilia Martinelli, Casey to her colleagues, Kate to her few friends. She had it off the hook before the first ring had ended.

"Yes?"

"Inspector Martinelli?"

"Yes."

"Inspector Hawkin wants you to pick him up at the front entrance in fifteen minutes. He says to tell you they found Samantha Donaldson."

"Not alive."

"No."

"Tell the inspector it'll be closer to twenty, unless he wants me in my pajamas." She hung up without waiting for a response, flung back the tangle of blankets, and lay for a moment looking up into the dark room. She was not wearing pajamas.

A sleep-thick voice came from the next pillow.

"Is this going to be a common occurrence from now on?"

"You married into trouble when you married me," Kate snarled cheerfully.

"I didn't marry you."

"If it's good enough for Harriet Vane, it's good enough for you."

"Oh, God, Lord Peter in my bed at, what is it, five o'clock? I knew this promotion was a mistake."

"Go back to sleep."

"I'll make you some breakfast."

"No time."

"Toast, then. You go shower."

Kate scooped clothes out of various drawers and closets, and then paused with them tucked under her left arm and looked out the window.

Of all views of the bridge that dominated this side of the city, it was this one she loved the best—still dark, but with the early commute beginning to thicken the occasional headlights that passed at what seemed like arm's reach. The Bay Bridge was a more workmanlike structure than the more famous Golden Gate Bridge, but the more beautiful for it. Alcatraz, which lay full ahead of the house, could be seen from this side by leaning a bit. Kate leaned, checked that the defunct island prison still looked as surreal as it always did in the dark, and then stayed leaning against the frame of the window, her nose almost touching the old, undulating glass. She was hit by a brief, fierce surge of passion for the house, for the wood against her right hand—wood which that hand had stripped and sanded and varnished eighteen months before—and for the oak boards beneath her bare feet that she herself had freed of the cloying flowered carpet and filled and sanded and varnished and waxed. She was not yet thirty years old and had lived in eighteen different houses and had never before understood how anyone could feel possessive of a mere set of walls. Now she could. Perhaps you had to put sweat into a house before it was home, she speculated, watching the cars curve past her. Or perhaps it was that she'd never lived in anything but stucco before. Hard to get passionate about a house made of plywood and chicken wire.

This house was about as old as things get in San Francisco, where even the Mission is a reconstructed pretense. Its walls had smelled the fire of 1906, which had destroyed most of what the earthquake had left. The house had known six births and two deaths, had suffered the indignities of paint and of being crowded by inappropriate high-rises filled with absurdly expensive apartments, which greedily devoured the incomparable view from Russian Hill. The house was a true San Franciscan, fussy and dignified, immensely civilized and politely oblivious of the eccentricities of neighbors. It had several balconies, a great deal of hand-worked wood, heavy beams, crooked floors, and a pocket-handkerchief lawn that was shaded by the upstarts and by a neighbor's tree. Kate hoped that the house was as content with her as she was with it.

"I ought to flick on the lights," said Lee from behind her. "Give the commuters a thrill." Kate dropped a shoe, realized with a spurt of panic that she'd been standing there mesmerized by the lights for a good two minutes, snatched up the shoe and sprinted for the bathroom.

Toast was waiting for her downstairs, and a large thermos of strong coffee and a bag of sandwiches, and Kate pulled up to the curb in twenty-one minutes. Hawkin was standing on the sidewalk in front of the Hall of Justice, a raincoat over his arm, and climbed into the seat beside her. He tossed his hat negligently over his shoulder into the back.

"You know where you're going?" he said by way of greeting.

"Tyler's Road?"

"Yes. Wake me ten minutes before we get there," and so saying he wadded his coat against the door and was limp before they reached the freeway.

Kate drove fast and sure through the empty streets to the freeway entrance, negotiated the twists, merged into the southward lane without mishap. She was grateful for the reprieve from conversation, for although her round face was calm in the gray light and her short, strong fingers lay easily on the wheel, the fingers were icy and elsewhere she was sweating.

She left Highway 280 and pointed the car west over the coastal range, and in the gray light of early morning she made a deliberate effort to relax. She arched her hands in turn, settled herself back in the seat, and reached for the attitude she tried to have before a long run. Pace yourself, Kate, she thought. There's nothing you can't handle here, it's just another small step up the ladder; Hawkin's no ogre, you're going to learn a lot from him. Apprehension is one thing, it's only to be expected—news cameras, everyone's eye on you—but they're not going to see below the surface, nobody's interested in you.

True, it didn't help to know that she was there for a number of reasons that she wouldn't exactly have chosen and did not feel proud of. It amused her to think that she counted as a minority, advanced prematurely (but only by a degree) due to unexpected vacancies and one of those periodic departmental rumblings of concern over Image, Minorities, and the dread Women's Movement, but it was not amusing to think that she had been assigned to this specific case because she was relatively photogenic and a team player known for not making waves, that she was a political statement from the SFPD to critics from women's groups, and, worst of all, that her assignment reflected the incredibly outdated, absurd notion that women, even those without their own, were somehow "better with children." Humiliating reasons, but she was not about to cut her own throat by refusing the dubious honor. She just hoped the people she was going to work with didn't hold it against her. She wasn't sure about Al Hawkin. He had seemed pretty brusque yesterday, but…

Kate had presented herself in his office the evening before at precisely six o'clock with the same nervous symptoms that had stayed with her until this morning, the icy hands, sweating body, dry mouth. He looked up from his paper-strewn desk at her knock, a thickset, graying man in a light blue shirt, sleeves rolled up on hairy forearms, tieless, collar loosened, in need of a shave. He pulled off his glasses and looked at her with patient, detached blue-gray eyes, and she wondered if she had the right room. He hardly seemed to be the terror rumor had him.

"Lieutenant Hawkin?"

"Not any more. Just 'Inspector.' And you're…?"

"Inspector Martinelli, sir. Lieutenant Patterson told me to come here at six o'clock." She heard her voice drift up into a question mark, and kicked herself. You will not be a Miss Wishy-Washy, she ordered herself fiercely.

"Yes. Do you drive?"

"Drive?" she repeated, taken aback. "Yes, I can drive."

"Good. I hate driving. Take an unmarked, if you like, or you can use your own car and bill the department, if you have a radio. Doesn't matter in the least to me. All I ask is that you never let the tank get less than half full. Damned inconvenient to run out of gas twenty miles from nowhere."

"Yes sir. I'll use my own, then, thanks. I have a car phone. Sir."

"The name is Al."

"Okay, Al."

"That stack of folders is for you to take home. I'll expect you to have read through them by tomorrow. See you in the morning."

With that he had put his glasses back on and taken up another file. Trying hard to keep her dignity in the face of the dismissal, she had gathered up the armload of papers and gone home to read into the early hours. First, however, she had filled the tank. And checked the oil.

A generous ten minutes before they arrived Kate spoke his name tentatively, and he immediately woke and looked around him. A few fat drops hit the windshield. She flicked on the wipers and glanced over at him.

"Looks like we'll be needing those raincoats," she offered. He gave no sign of having heard, and she flushed slightly. Damn, was he going to be one of those?

Actually, Alonzo Hawkin was not one of those. Alonzo Hawkin was simply the epitome of the one-track mind, and at that moment his mind was on a very different track from the weather. He missed little, reacted less, and thought incessantly about his work. His wife had found him dismal company, and had immersed herself in their two children— schools, dance lessons, soccer teams. Six months after the younger one left for the university, the presence of a continually distracted husband who worked strange hours and slept stranger ones had proven more than she could bear, and she too had gone. That was a year ago. He had stayed on at his job in Los Angeles, but when he heard of the opening in San Francisco and thought that it might be nice to be able to breathe in the summer, he applied for it and got it. With surprisingly few regrets he had left the city where he had lived all his adult life, packed up his books and his fish tanks, and come here.

Hawkin woke, as he always did outside of his own bed, without disorientation, his thoughts continuing where they had left off. In this case they ran a close parallel with those going through Kate's mind. Hawkin strongly suspected that he, the new boy, had been thrown this very sticky case in order to save the necks of the higher-ups. He was an outsider, easily sacrificed, in the event of failure, on the altar of public opinion. If he failed, well, they would say, he was so highly recommended by his former colleagues, but I guess we were asking too much of a guy who doesn't know the area. If he succeeded, it would, he was sure, be arranged to reflect well on the judgment of those who chose him. Perhaps it wasn't entirely fair to be so suspicious of their motives— after all, the department was short-handed at the moment, and he did have a couple of very successful kidnapping cases to his credit, so he was the logical one to take this one. He knew, however, that there was a certain amount of time-buying going on, and he'd been given the prominence, in the face of a near-hysterical public and the considerable force of Mrs. Donaldson, while the department above him decided what it wanted to do. Disturbing, but he'd probably have done the same. No, he corrected himself, he probably wouldn't. Al Hawkin liked to be in the middle of things. He'd just have to make damn sure he succeeded.

He wondered if this reserved, almost pretty, alarmingly young police inspector at his side might turn out to be as competent as her record and her driving seemed to suggest. He hoped to God she was, for both their sakes. Hawkin squinted up at the heavy sky and sighed, thinking of Los Angeles.

"Looks like you're right," he said aloud, and missed her surprised look as he stretched over the back of the seat for his hat. "Is that coffee?" he asked, spotting the thermos on the back floor.

"Yes, help yourself. There's a cup in the glove compartment."

"No sugar?"

"Sorry."

"Oh well, can't be helped," he allowed, and slurped cautiously. "Good coffee. How'd you have time to make it?"

"I didn't. I have a friend."

"Must be a good friend, to make you coffee at five-thirty in the morning."

"Mmm."

"Well, he makes decent coffee, but next time have him throw some packets of sugar in for mine."

Kate opened her mouth, and shut it again firmly. Time enough for that, another day. Other matters pressed.

"About the body—who found it?" she asked.

"One of the women on the Road, Terry something, Allen maybe. She's a nurse, works the odd day in town, always weird hours. She leaves her two dogs at Tyler's place, at the beginning of the Road, and walks home. At two in the morning, can you believe it? Anyway, a couple miles up the Road the dogs started getting jumpy at something down the hill, and at first she thought it was a skunk or a raccoon, but her flashlight caught it, and it was the girl. She woke a neighbor and sent him down to Tyler's to phone while she stayed with the body. That's all I know. We'll interview her at Tyler's later. I told Trujillo—the local man on the case?—to round up everyone on the Road and bring them down. We couldn't possibly do a door-to-door—it'd take us a week."

"The Road is bad? Is that why the woman has to walk home?"

"Wasn't that in the stuff I gave you yesterday? Maybe I never bothered putting it into the case notes. Anyway, the whole area is owned by one John Tyler. Nice fellow, but a bit eccentric even by California standards—he regards himself as some kind of modern-day country squire living on a landed estate, with overtones of an ecological garden of Eden. No electrical lines into the area, no telephones, and cars allowed up the Road only two days a week. More than seventy people up there, some of them nine miles from a telephone, along an old fire road that washes out every third year."

"Sounds fun," said Kate, wondering how her car was expected to tackle that.

"Doesn't it? All the inconveniences of modern life with none of the benefits. It does limit the field considerably, though. There are locked gates at both ends of the Road— locks changed a few months ago, residents have the only keys—and the body was found about two and a half miles up."

"Was yesterday one of the days cars were allowed?"

"Trujillo says yes, and that people who work in town tend to shop for groceries and such those days and drive up at night, so nobody pays much attention to cars on Monday nights."

"Great. Well, if it's a dirt road there should be tracks left, if they get to them soon."

"Depends on what time they were put there. They had rain here after midnight. Yeah," he said, seeing her expression, "it goes like that sometimes."

"Maybe we'll luck out. Do you know if this is the same Tyler who runs a big medieval weekend every year? It seems to me it's held at a place called Tyler's Barn, everyone in costume, archery contests, that kind of thing."

"Sure to be. The place is bristling with lances and broadswords and God knows what. Here we are. And somebody's tipped the press."

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It was an impressive sight, despite the ominous and growing cluster of press vehicles lined up on the seaward side of the paved road, from beat-up sedans to two shiny vans whose letters proclaimed their channels and whose silver mobile transmitters jutted toward the lowering sky. Tyler's Barn sat on the edge of a twenty-acre clearing, which at this time of year was green enough to be called a meadow. Two huge, pale horses turned their rumps to the human fuss and grazed. Hills covered in redwoods rose dramatically beyond. There actually was a barn, though from here it was nearly hidden behind a big, old wooden house (lodge was the word that came to mind) and a vast, open-sided shed with a rusting, corrugated metal roof draped with leafless vines. The shed seemed to be filled with automobiles and farm machinery, but from the Road it was nearly obscured by the high wire fence, intertwined with more bare vines, that had lined the Road for the last few miles and that continued solidly around the next curve, broken only, Kate saw now, by three gates.

The first gate was a simple, sturdy metal affair wide enough for a truck, and from it the double ruts of a dirt track climbed through the meadow to disappear into the trees. The gate was mounted on a pair of what looked like telephone poles, from which was suspended a tired wooden sign, the width of the gate, which proclaimed this as TYLER'S ROAD. A heavy chain and padlock held the gate shut, and a man with a uniform and regulation rain slickers, sitting in a police car, ensured it stayed that way.

A quarter of a mile down the Road they came to a second gate. This one was simple, low, and wooden, graced by an archway and more vines (some leaves on these—were they roses?), tastefully accompanied by another large uniform and slickers. The third gate was metal like the first, but twice as wide, and opened into the barn's yard. At Hawkin's directions Kate turned into this gate, which was standing open, and held up her ID. The guard waved them through into an acre or more of gravel, a rough triangle edged by the long shed, the house (which was even larger than it had appeared from the Road), and the sprawling barn, to which sheds and lean-tos of various shapes, sizes, and eras had been attached like barnacles to a host shell. She pulled up next to the house, and a slim young man in a beautifully cut gray suit emerged from the door of one of the barn's appendages and trotted across the gravel to greet them.

"Morning, Inspector Hawkin, and you must be Inspector Martinelli. I'm Paul, Paul Trujillo."

"Casey," she offered in return. His handshake was trim like the rest of him, his hands neat, his dark eyes friendly under black, carefully tousled hair. At the moment the wouldn't-you-like-to-run-your-fingers-through-my-hair effect was flattened somewhat by the thousands of tiny pearls of light rain, but Kate could see the intent.

"So, Trujillo, what do we have so far?" Hawkin asked, and the three of them drifted across to the isolation and shelter of the car shed for Trujillo to give his report. Kate was amused to see him actually squaring his shoulders a fraction as if Hawkin were his superior officer rather than officially his counterpart.

"I just got down from the scene about ten minutes ago myself, but Tyler seems to have things here under control. He's giving us three rooms downstairs to take statements in, and the residents are beginning to come in. He's even doing us a lunch."

"What did you find at the scene?" Hawkin demanded, waving away these housekeeping chores impatiently.

"My preliminary findings are being typed up now, you'll have them before you leave, and I told the Crime Scene people not to move anything until you'd seen her. Basically, though, the Medical Examiner estimates the time of death between one and five yesterday afternoon. Strangled, like the others, by a strong right hand of average size. No mutilation, no signs of sexual… no signs of molestation. The Examiner had to leave, but she said she'd be available this afternoon if you want to talk to her. She'll also try to get the autopsy speeded up for us, maybe tomorrow morning. She said to tell you not to expect any surprises."

"Do we have someone who can test for prints on the body?"

"We did that first thing, sir. The Kromekote cards drew a blank, but the Magna brush test gave one very rough partial on the right index finger, from just under her ear."

"More than we got from the other two. Maybe the lab'll get lucky and find some fibers. Have the parents been notified?"

"Yes sir. They'll be at the morgue later to make a positive ID, and they want to talk with you then, they said."

"I'll bet. Tell them I'm occupied up here. No, don't say that, they'll drive up here and we'll have a circus on our hands. Tell Mrs. Donaldson I'll telephone her tonight at her home."

Trujillo pulled a maroon leather pad from his trouser pocket and a gold pen from inside his jacket and made a note.

"Deputy Harris will be at the morgue, too—" he began.

"Who?"

"Harris, the man in charge of investigations from Santa Clara County. If she died there, which the doc thought likely, there's the question of jurisdiction."

"God, you'd think they'd all be wanting to give it away, and instead of that we've got four counties fighting for it. I'm surprised the FBI hasn't grabbed it away from us."

"Well, sir, Agent Pickard has been—"

"Oh, Christ, Pickhead himself is in on it now, is he? Okay, let's see." Hawkin put his thumbs through his belt and drew in a deep breath of air that carried equal parts of salt, evergreen tree, wet rust, and fumes from the van generators across the way. "Right. We'll arrange a meeting with you, Martinelli, and me, and Alameda, Santa Clara, the FBI, Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all." Trujillo made another note. "Let's just hope we can keep Mrs. Donaldson out of it. Tell them all that I want them to bring complete reports to the meeting, so we're not just making noise. We'll want the postmortem results, the Crime Scene findings, and anything the lab has ready. Also the complete interviews with the families and all the neighbors of all three girls, diagrams of the kidnap sites, and psychological profiles of all three victims."

Trujillo looked up, aghast.

"But, that'll take days."

"So much the better. Now, what can we give Pickhead to keep him out of our hair? Ah, VICAP. Tell him I want a list of every child dead or kidnapped across the country who fits the description of our three. Limit it to the last ten years. I also want a detailed profile of the killer. Have you ever talked to VICAP, Casey?"

"I submitted a case to them last year."

"The Violent Criminal Apprehension Program," he mouthed scornfully. "Submit the completed form to your local Criminal Profile Coordinator, who forwards it to the Behavioral Sciences Investigative Support Unit, who feed it into the Almighty Central Adding Machine. And do you know what the profile will read? 'White male, middle income, above average intelligence, grew up in a dysfunctional family, juvenile record of minor crimes involving fire-setting and cruelty to animals, may or may not be married, all his neighbors find him likeable but quiet.' End quote."

Kate wondered if she was expected to say something along the lines of, "Remarkable, Holmes!" It was just a bit too easy to mock the FBI's profile system, which, give it credit, occasionally pulled off a real coup of identification. Hawkin seemed to realize this, because he shook himself and subsided, and cleared his throat.

"As I was saying. A meeting of all and sundry when we have the paperwork together. Use the word 'brainstorming,' Trujillo," he directed. "They'll like that. Press conference so we can all prove to the taxpayers how busy we are. Find out how long it's going to take them to assemble their reports, and I'll work it in. Thursday or Friday, the early afternoon."

"Great," said Trujillo, and snapped his notepad shut. "Did you want to see Tyler now, or go straight up to the scene?"

"I'd better see him first, it'll only take a minute."

"He's in his workshop, around back of the barn."

"I know where it is," said Hawkin, and walked off across the gravel.

Kate and Trujillo followed him through the door into the little building, where two men looked up from their contemplation of the object on the workbench in front of them. For a wild instant Kate thought it was a dismembered arm, until her eyes took in the metallic gleam and she recognized it as the detached arm of the suit of armor that stood in the corner. The Japanese man remained seated, but the other, older man stood up and, wiping his hands on a white cloth, came around to meet them. He was a small man, barely taller than Kate, about forty years old, and he moved with a heavy, twisting limp. His shoulder length hair, brown streaked with gray, was gathered into a pony tail, and his beard was trimmed low on his jaw. He wore a loose homespun shirt, more nearly a blouse, tucked into faded but ironed blue jeans, and soft leather boot-moccasins on his small feet.

"Hello, Inspector Hawkin," he said. "I cannot say I am exactly glad to see you again, considering the reason you're here, but you are welcome."

"Thank you, Mr. Tyler. This is my assistant, Inspector Casey Martinelli. I appreciate your allowing us to bring half the county to your house."

Tyler waved it aside. "The house is used to it. Some of the residents are setting up the tables Paul asked for. I left it to them; hauling furniture around isn't my specialty, and I had to come out here and get Toshiro started." He looked embarrassed. "I would have asked him to come some other time, but I made the arrangements months ago for him to be here, and I couldn't reach him this morning to cancel them. I hope it doesn't—." He broke off, though Kate could finish the sentence in her head: "—seem callous."

Hawkin spoke calmly. "No, of course not, no reason for everything to come to a halt. You go on with it. I have to go up the Road now, but I'll need to talk with you later."

Tyler looked relieved at this forgiving attitude, and Kate wondered if Hawkin was trying to soften him up. They left the two men and went back into the half-drizzle, and before they were out the door Tyler had resumed his conversation with Toshiro the armorer.

"It's the vambrace, you see, that binds when I raise my sword…"

Hawkin took no notice but spoke unceremoniously to Trujillo.

"What have you got to take us up in?"

Kate was relieved that it was not to be her car that tackled the dirt track and stood with him as he looked past the obviously inadequate cars near the house and toward the shed, with its row upon row of bumpers fronting a mind-boggling collection of rust and dents—two, four, and six wheels, round bodies and square, old school buses, campers, pickups, Volkswagen vans and bugs—and half a dozen shapes covered tightly with dusty canvas shrouds.

"The county cars are all pretty busy but Tyler's loaning us his wagon. It'll go anywhere."

He pointed to an object so large, so old, and so apparently immobile that Kate had assumed it was a display, useful for entertaining children, like the hulls of planes and trains that occasionally grace playgrounds. It looked thoroughly rooted to the ground, resting on cracked tires as high as Kate's waist, doors sagging, windows cloudy with the abrasions of the decades. It had once been red.

"That?" Hawkin stared in disbelief.

"Yes, it's great," said Trujillo with enthusiasm. "It used to be a fire wagon in the thirties, and Tyler keeps it up something great. Of course, parts are hard to get, and it won't go more than forty without the doors flying open, but for getting up the hill there's nothing like it."

Hawkin turned his attention from the vehicle to the man.

"I didn't realize you knew him so well."

"Tyler? Known him for years."

"Maybe they should've put somebody else on this case, then."

Trujillo smiled gently. "Inspector, you'd be hard put to find a cop in the county who doesn't know Tyler and consider him a friend. It's a small place."

"I see. Okay, let's get on with it. Are you going to drive this thing?"

"Good God, no. Tyler wouldn't trust me with his baby. Mark Detweiler's the only one who's allowed to touch it. He'll be driving. Mark?" He went to the door and stuck his head inside. "Mark! Anybody seen Mark?"

After a few minutes of confusion a slow mountain of a man, gray braids reaching to the waist of his ancient jeans, plaid shirt hidden by a beard nearly as long, emerged to plant his heavy boots on the plank steps and survey the yard through a pair of smudged horn-rimmed glasses held together by a twist of wire and dirty duct tape. One gold earring glinted through the foliage.

"I'm coming," he rumbled. "Just hold your horses. Just wanted to use the John. Kinda fun to be able to flush." He grinned merrily at them, revealing a missing front tooth amidst the gray fringe, and climbed up into the driver's seat. Hawkin watched, openmouthed, as the man methodically tied the door shut with a hunk of frayed rope, jerked the window up with a pair of pliers and inserted a wedge to hold it almost shut, and fished around in the mends of his jeans for a pocket, from which he pulled a key.

"What's the matter, Al," murmured Kate as she climbed past him. "Didn't have such classy chauffeurs in Los Angeles?" He shook his head, once, and followed her into the back, Trujillo in front. With a roar and a massive cloud of blue exhaust the starter caught, and they rumbled out onto the road, a leviathan among the minnows.

The reporters would get some fine footage for their pain of turning out so early, thought Kate, and saw a scramble to record the parade of wagon, high-axled coroner's van, and the handful of lesser vehicles that brought up the rear.

Trujillo turned as they went through the gate and saw the expression on Hawkin's face.

"We do have the four-wheel drives, but they're both already up the Road. I didn't think you'd mind this thing, and we needed the others to get the teams up there and to go up notifying people. I hope you don't mind," he repeated, hesitantly.

"Oh, no, it lends the proceedings an air of dignified purpose, evoking the ponderous wheels of justice turning. Don't let me forget to use that for the news cameras, Casey, in case they missed the symbolism. It's quite all right, Trujillo, it serves to remind me of the unswerving support given us by our superiors. So encouraging."

Trujillo did not seem entirely encouraged by this response, thought Kate, straight-faced, but any answer was cut short as the wagon turned a hard corner and juddered to an abrupt halt that had all but the driver off their seats.

"Brakes work fine," was Detweiler's phlegmatic comment. The car face-to-face with their very bumper, filled with white-faced passengers, reversed into a wide spot a hundred yards up the road. It was the county's shiny new four-wheel-drive car, and it contained three women, two men, and a gaggle of excited children, all of whom watched the procession in wonder. The uniform of the man behind the wheel did not look entirely fresh, Kate noticed, and she had a sinking feeling that her own khaki trousers would soon look the same.

"That'll be the second bunch, coming down," said Trujillo. "Like I told you on the phone, I don't know how many of them we'll persuade to come down to Tyler's, but we'll get as many as we can. This third body will shake them, especially the ones with kids, and they'll cooperate more than they might otherwise. Some of them, though, you'll have to just go see. There's six or eight who are real hermits. You'd need a court order to pry them out, and even then they might just walk into the woods for a couple of weeks."

"A nice, straightforward investigation, I can see now."

"It is a bit different from San Francisco. Sir."

"It's a bit different from anywhere."

"That was Tyler's original idea."

"Well, it succeeded."

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Samantha Donaldson was small for her age, forty-two pounds at her last checkup, but she looked even smaller now, her thin body huddled into the rotten log that had stopped her from rolling down into the creek that ran, at this point, about fifty feet below Tyler's Road. Kate's hands wanted to reach out and brush the leaves from the tumbled hair, wipe the dirt from the surprised little mouth, close the puzzled eyes, but instead she took out her notebook to record Hawkin's remarks and allowed her eyes to avoid the child's neck.

A couple of hours later they stood watching as the lifeless object that had been Samantha Donaldson, hands wrapped in bags against any evidence her nails might be hiding, covered in dirt and leaves, having been prodded, examined, and photographed in ways it never would have been in life, was folded into the anonymity of a body bag. The men moving the tiny burden onto the stretcher were well used to death, but there was none of the customary easy black humor here.

"You okay?" asked Hawkin as the disturbingly small parcel was carried past them.

"I'm not about to faint, Al," she snapped. "I've seen dead bodies before."

"Yes," he said, responding not at all to her tone. "But a dead child is a terrible thing."

"Yes." And because his voice was honest and his own loathing lay openly on his face, she answered in kind. "Yes, it's pretty awful. I probably would feel sick if it didn't make me so angry."

"You wouldn't be the first. The first dead child I had, I couldn't keep anything down for two days. Better to stay angry. Now, tell me where you think the murderer stood to throw her down there."

They found one vague ridge of mud that might or might not have been from the side of a shoe, braced to hurl forty pounds into the air. It was so beaten down by rain that it was impossible to define and could easily have been pushed up by a horse's hoof some days before. Other than that, there was a depressing similarity to the sites where the other two bodies had been found, and by the time the wet, aching team had finished their backbreaking examination of the hillside, they had accumulated a number of rusty tin cans; one broken Coke bottle, old; two buttons, one very old; a handful of odd bits of machinery; a half-buried car tire; a short length of ancient chain with a stub of leather dog collar attached; one cheap ballpoint pen, almost new; and an assortment of paper scraps, including a soggy matchbook from a bar in San Jose.

All that was much later, though. The doors slammed shut on the ill-filled bag that contained what had once been a little girl, the stoic team started down the hillside with their own, smaller, evidence bags, and Kate and Hawkin ducked under the yellow tapes and climbed back into the wagon.

"Back to home base?" inquired Detweiler.

"No, not much point in it yet." A couple with baby, child and dog trudged by, all in bright nylon ponchos. The woman smiled shyly, the child stared from the man's back. "They'll be drifting in for another hour or more. I want to see the Road again, up to the top, if this thing'll make it."

"No question about that," said the driver, sounding hurt. "She may be slow, but she's sure."

"Slow she is. Casey, do you have that map? I want you to make a note of the houses as we pass. It'll make things easier when we get back to Tyler's. Now, whose house is that?" Hawkin pointed past the driver's nose to a shack near the Road, and Kate prepared to mark it on the map with her pen.

"That ain't a house, that's Jenny Cadena's goat shed." Kate wrote in the name. "Only now Harry Gustavson's using it to store the window glass for his house." She crossed out the first name, wrote in the second. "Come to think of it, though, Bob Riddle was staying in it for a while after his brother Ben threw him out. I wonder if he's still there?" He peered incuriously at the blank walls as they passed.

Kate looked at the map and sighed. "Anybody have pencil?"

Slowly they rumbled up the narrow, muddy road, stopping twice to let carloads of residents slip by and once to help change a county car's flat tire. Slowly they reached the upper end of the Road, guarded and heavily gated, and slowly they turned back. Just below the Road's summit Hawkin leaned forward and touched Detweiler's shoulder.

"Stop here for a minute, would you? Come with me, Casey."

The two detectives walked thirty yards back up the Road, rocks prodding the soles of their city shoes, and stood looking down at a tumble of rock and brush.

"That's where Tina Merrill was found. Her father had a heart attack last month, did you know that? Her mother's lost twenty pounds and eats tranquilizers, and her honor-roll brother is failing his last year of high school. The murderer dropped her here on the Road like a sack of garbage, and after a few days something dragged her off down the hill."

The hillside was nearly silent, with only a few birds, the click of the engine, their breathing. The sun came out and Kate began to feel warm, but Hawkin didn't move.

"What is he after?" he muttered, staring hard up the dirt track. He looked as if he were straining to look back three months, to see that day in late fall when a figure had carried its macabre burden down the road. "What is he doing?"

"I'm sorry, I don't understand."

"Neither do I. Neither do I." He suddenly looked at her, as if he had just noticed her presence, and began dutifully to explain.

"The bodies are unmolested; he's not the more obvious kind of pedophile. It isn't money; there's no ransom. He just picks them up, so carefully that so far he's been invisible, and strangles them. After that he removes their clothing and leaves them on or near Tyler's Road. Why here, a hundred miles from where he's picked them up? Why is he doing this?"

He cocked one eyebrow at her and turned back to the waiting behemoth, and though she knew he wasn't expecting an answer, she wished she could give him one. All that came to mind was, "So maybe he's a nut case," and that was so obviously inadequate that she said nothing and followed him meekly back down the rough surface that passed as Tyler's Road.

Five minutes later Detweiler stopped the wagon on a hilltop at a wide, clear area with, incongruously, a picnic table. The temporary, enthusiastic sunshine illuminated glimpses of the Road below them and revealed a wedge of the distant, turgid sea. A scattering of roofs and cleared fields peeped from the vista of dark redwoods. The occasional gleam of solar panels and two high-tech wind-powered generators were the only indicators of the twentieth century.

"Nice, huh?" grunted Detweiler. "Tyler says he's going to build up here when he gets old and gray. I doubt it. He likes to be in the middle of things. Always will." He put the wagon back into gear and they lurched downhill, the engine whining now as it kept the ex-fire truck from flinging itself down to the sea. "Oh, yeah, I forgot old Peterson's place. It's up there, see the flag?" The flag was an old scrap of torn sheeting. "Up along that pathway. No, he doesn't have a drive. When he built the place he carried everything in by foot."

Kate wrote in the name Peterson and reflected that a housing inspector would have a grand time with the violations on this hillside. She said something of the sort to Detweiler, careful to avoid the impression that she was in any way connected with such a low breed of bureaucrat.

"Oh, yeah, well, what they don't know won't hurt them. Actually there's been an ongoing war between Tyler and the county over the building regulations. At first they said that all the houses had to be wired for power, even if there wasn't any for miles. So there's half a dozen places with wall plugs and empty light fixtures, and kerosene lamps. Right now he's trying to get around it by having the whole Road made into an experimental, non-profit organization. Has a state senator on his side; he may do it yet. That's Riddle's place, do you have that?" he asked Kate.

"Yes, Ben Riddle, whose brother Bob may or may not be there or in the Cadena-Gustavson goat shed-storage barn."

"Clear as mud, eh?" He laughed heartily, and Kate wondered if he ever ran out of cliches.

The litany continued to wind with the Road.

"That's Brother Luke's place. He and Maggie've lived there since Tyler first got the idea. He used to be a monk somewhere. Not now, though. They've got five kids. The Dodsons live there, funny place, real dark. Nice clearing in back for the ponies, though. Angie's little girl Amy loves her pony. And I told you about Vaun, way up there? She's an artist, real good one." Visions of castles and maidens with starry-eyed unicorns danced in Kate's head. "The Newborns—those little house things are for the pigs. And Tommy Chesler you know."

Coming down the mountain they stopped to pull the county car out of the creek bed into which its four driven wheels had taken it, and as they continued down, they picked up several parties of chattering hill folk who might easily have been going to a hoedown rather than to a murder interrogation. (What is a hoedown, anyway? wondered Kate.) Kate found herself wedged between Hawkin and a very large, damp young man who smelled of dog, and with an even damper and more fragrant baby on her lap. After ten minutes a high voice from somewhere in the front asked if anyone had Ivanhoe.

"Is that a disease?" wondered Kate aloud.

"It's my baby," the voice answered.

"Is it hairless and wet?"

"Probably."

"Then it's here."

"Oh, good. I just wanted to make sure he got in. You can keep him until we get to Tyler's."

"Thank you," said Kate gravely, and tried to decide whether the bouncing was from the ruts or from Hawkin laughing, and if the latter, what she should do about it. In the end she did nothing.

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The multicolored crowd that whirled in and out of the rooms in Tyler's house was like something from another world, or perhaps several worlds—part Amish, part Woodstock, part pioneer. Children ran yelling and shrieking among the knees and the furniture, dogs wandered in and were thrown out into the rain, the smells of bread and spaghetti sauce and wood smoke mingled with wet clothing, underwashed bodies, and the occasional aura of stale marijuana. Tyler had given the police three rooms downstairs, furnished with a motley collection of tables and desks, where they prepared to take statements. Kate stood in the main room—the hall— with its fifteen-foot ceilings and the floor space of an average house, and wondered how Hawkin intended to proceed with a murder investigation in this chaos. For the first time she was very grateful that he, not she, was in charge.

As if he had heard her thoughts Hawkin appeared at her elbow.

"As I said, a nice straightforward investigation. I'm going to talk with them, and I want you with me. Over at the fireplace." Within two steps he had disappeared, and Kate pushed through the throng in his wake, wishing that her mother had married a taller man. At the massive stone fireplace, beneath a display of broadswords that fanned out in a sunburst, they stepped up onto the high hearthstones and stood looking out over the sea of heads.

"May I have your attention, please? Please, may I have your attention, there are a few things I need to say." He was not shouting, but he pitched his gravelly voice with a sharp volume that filled the room and reached into the adjoining doorways, and gradually faces turned in their direction and the battering pandemonium began to die down. Children were hushed, kitchen pans stopped crashing, and the assembled residents of Tyler's Road turned to hear what this necessary evil, this representative of oppression, wanted of them.

"Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Alonzo Hawkin. This is Casey Martinelli. As I'm sure you all know by now, we were sent down from San Francisco to coordinate the investigation into the murders of the three little girls whose bodies have been found in this area. I'd like to thank you all for coming down to Tyler's. I know—I have seen—what an inconvenience it is for some of you to get down here, but it is saving us a great deal of time, and after all, time saved may mean a life saved."

He had their full attention now. A small baby began to whine, and the mother settled it to her breast without taking her eyes off Hawkin.

"We are here to take statements from you in hopes that the pieces of information you give us can be put together and lead us to the killer. I don't need to tell you that the murderer is somehow connected with your Road. You all know that, and I expect that's why a lot of you are here. It is not nice to think that one of your neighbors might be linked to the murder of three children. Might even be that murderer." Eyes dropped, lips smiled nervously, and fear turned a crowded room into a lot of people trying not to edge away from each other.

"We are not here, I will say now, to worry about drugs, housing code violations, or who is sleeping in whose bed, unless of course any of those things are related to the murders. We may ask you about drugs or violations, but it's not what we're after. Any of you are free to choose the police officer you want to take your statement. Because there are so many of you to keep straight we'd like to take your photograph with an instant camera and attach it to your statement. This is only to make things run more smoothly. You will be asked a series of questions, some of which may sound unnecessary or rude or just plain silly. Please answer them. None of us are playing games, and we're every bit as anxious to finish here as you are. From the looks of it," he added with a smile, "perhaps more so."

There was a mild commotion in one corner, and a little voice piped up, "—to have games, Mama? Is that what he said?" Grateful, nervous laughter skittered through the room, and Hawkin's smile broadened.

"That reminds me, you see that little man in the corner over there?" Heads craned, and an enormous man with extremely black skin and an inadequate uniform lifted an identifying hand. More laughter, now uncertain. "That's Sergeant Fischer. Bob Fischer hasn't seen his own kids for two whole days now, and if you want to send your kids to talk to him while you're giving your statements, he'd be absolutely overjoyed. He'll show them all his walkie-talkie and his handcuffs, but, uh, Bob? Try not to lose the keys this time, okay?" Relaxed laughter now, which Hawkin gathered up in his final words.

"One last thing. I know it's a bit late for saying this, but I'd appreciate it if you'd not talk to each other about what you may have seen, or what someone else thinks they saw. Your statement needs to be yours, and yours alone. We'll sift it over, and if we need further information about something, we'll come and find you. There are seven of us here to take your statements, if you would please begin at that end of the room, take one set of forms for each adult. We'd better get started." He held them for a moment with his eyes. "Thank you for your assistance. There's some bastard out there murdering babies. I think you can help us find who it is. Thank you."

"Ever coach a football team, Al?" Kate murmured in his ear as the meeting broke up.

"What do you think I was doing just then?" he replied. "Take a desk. I'll let you know when I'm going to talk with Tyler."

The morning wore on, with the painstaking business of names and numbers, photographs with the instant camera, locations on the map, questions: Where do you work? Have you ever been arrested? Where were you on the Wednesday after Thanksgiving, on the twenty-fourth of January, yesterday afternoon? Did you see anyone yesterday afternoon? Did anyone see you yesterday afternoon? Did you see or hear a car on the Road yesterday evening? Do you smoke anything, use matches, go into bars, own a car, drive a car, have any other pieces of information that might possibly be related? On, and on, and on.

Answers were recorded, reactions to certain questions were noted, voices dropped, and tempers flared. Hawkin moved in and out of the rooms, chatting, encouraging, defusing hot spots, disappearing to walk through the mud to speak with the newsmen. Gallons of coffee and herbal tea were drunk, children were laid down for naps, a hugely pregnant woman began to look pale and was sent off to an upstairs room. At one point a plate of vegetarian spaghetti and hot bread appeared in front of Kate, and she and her interviewee slurped at each other and got sauce on the forms.

At one o'clock Kate found herself in one of the more difficult interviews of the day. Not that Flower Underwood wasn't cooperative—she was, and friendly and intelligent besides. It was her child who created the problems.

The child was a boy, or at least Kate assumed it was a boy, for the woman didn't correct her when she asked how old he was. He was an utterly irrepressible two-year-old who took her pens apart, ate one of the forms, emptied her purse three times (wallet and keys went into her pocket after she pried them from his inquisitive fingers), and climbed up onto his mother's lap to nurse five times, the last time squirting Kate with milk from the unoccupied breast. Deliberately. Into this stepped Hawkin, who put his hand on her shoulder as she was writing.

"Pardon me, Casey, but when you're finished you might like to join Tyler and me upstairs. All the way to the top of the stairs, third door on your left."

Kate nodded her agreement and looked up to catch the tail end of an extremely odd expression on the woman's face.

"What is it?"

"Nothing, really." She was stifling amusement.

"Something about upstairs? Was that it?"

Flower Underwood's lips twitched, and finally she burst out laughing, which caused her son to pull back and stare at her, milky mouth agape.

"Well, you know," she said helpfully, "the downstairs of this place is pretty public. Everyone on the Road uses it like a living room."

"And upstairs—the top floor—is not public, you mean? Quite private, in fact?" The woman's eyes were sparkling, those of her son drooping as she caressed his back. "By private invitation only, that sort of thing, yes?"

"That sort of thing," she agreed.

"Have you been up there, to the top of the stairs?"

"Not in quite a while, though I don't imagine it's changed much. Or Tyler either, for that matter." It seemed a good memory, thought Kate, judging from the face across from her.

"Would you say that many of the women on the Road have 'been upstairs'?"

"A fair number. Probably most of the single women at one time or another, maybe, oh, a third of the attached ones."

"I would have thought that would cause a lot of trouble."

"Not here. In suburbia, perhaps, but not here. And Tyler's very careful not to get too close if there's another man involved who would object. He's a good man, very caring, very generous."

"With money?"

"With everything." Again the amused, fond smile crossed her face.

"He only invites women upstairs?"

"Oh, no, men too. Not to bed, of course." She giggled at the absurdity of the thought, and Kate was struck dumb by this outcrop of conventionality. "He takes guys up there to play chess, I know, or just to have a drink or a smoke if something's happening down here and he wants some quiet."

"But you're sure it's no more than that?" Kate persisted.

That gave her pause, and Kate had her turn to be amused, to see that Flower Underwood was troubled by this idea, whereas Tyler's wholesale hetero relationships had fazed her not at all.

"No, he invites a lot of people up to his rooms, not just to sleep with them. I've never heard of him sleeping with a man. I'm sure I would have. There's no hiding anything on the Road, not for long. No, I'm sure Tyler's a normal man," she said, firmly rejecting the possibility.

" 'Normal.' "

"Well, straight, anyway. At any rate, he is very sweet. In bed, I mean."

This interview is getting out of hand, thought Kate, and tried to pull it back to earth.

"Does he have any children?"

"A couple for sure. He has a wife, or an ex-wife, I guess, who lives in L.A. with their daughter, who's ten or eleven. There's also a little boy here on the Road who's probably his, though it's hard to be sure because he's only three. There's a couple other possibilities, but the mothers aren't sure."

Kate's eyes involuntarily strayed to the sleeping blond terror, and the mother's eyes followed.

"No, not this one. You'd only have to see my old man to be sure about that. She looks just like him. Say, if you want to know what the men do—" Her voice faltered as a thought struck her and strengthened again as she pushed it away. "If you want to hear about Tyler's rooms from a man, you could talk to Charlie. Charlie Waters is my old man. He's down here all the time, playing chess with Tyler." Her voice trailed off and her eyes rose to search the room beyond, and Kate thought it a good time to call the session to a halt.

"Thank you very much for your time, Ms. Underwood. I really appreciate your coming down today," but the woman had already risen with her groggy burden and headed for the hallway.

Kate scribbled her signature and dropped the papers on the next table—where Bob Fischer was talking to a man, with three peaceful children distributed over their two laps—and sprinted for the stairs.

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The stairway was lined with odd bits of old weaponry, a small tapestry, a cloak pinned out fully to show off its thick embroidery, several framed photographs of castles and people in colorful medieval costume, and similar elements of Tyler's passion. At the top landing a full set of armor, with both arms and its helm in place, stood guard over a locked glass case that held numerous small objects, bottles and combs and such, which Kate did not pause to examine. Voices came from the third door on the left, so she knocked lightly and opened it.

"… decided on a maximum of a hundred and fifty. Ah, come in, Inspector Martinelli. We were just getting started. What will you have to drink?" Tyler stood up and moved to a tall, glossy cabinet made of several kinds of wood, and Kate allowed herself to be talked into a glass of soda water. Tyler presented it with a flourish and went to stand by the open fire, his back to the stones and the heavy mantelpiece.

His air of jovial goodwill seemed somewhat strained, and Kate soon diagnosed that the source of his nervousness was Hawkin, who was sitting comfortably back into a leather chair with a somnolent expression on his face and a glass of amber liquid on his knee. Tyler's eyes kept glancing off the relaxed figure, as if by avoiding eye contact he might escape a blow. It was a reaction Kate had seen many times before, but she was a bit surprised to see it in Tyler.

Hawkin picked up the conversation again, continuing where it had been left, and with half an ear Kate listened to Tyler's plans for his land, proposals for a grant and tax-free status, the balance between convenience and freedom from gadgets. She listened, but she also studied the man's surroundings, the room at the top of the house.

The room was magnificent, wrapped in glass on three sides, with the tiers of hills soaring up at one end and the fields across the Road flowing down to the sea at the other; from the middle the owner could survey the graveled triangle and the comings and goings of his tenants. From the fourth wall jutted an open-sided granite fireplace, dividing the space in half visually. This was a lordly tower, and even if Flower Underwood had not said as much, Kate would have known immediately that this was where Tyler lived, not in the casual funk of the ground floor or in the relatively impersonal hallways Kate had glimpsed from the middle landing. Here Tyler had no need to bolt a broadsword down for fear of accident or theft, no need to limit the furnishings to sturdy dark chairs that would neither intimidate the residents nor show the effects of their children's heels. Here John Tyler could be what he was: the sole heir to three generations of money. In California, three generations is a long time.

The room was not flagrant in its opulence. The walls were smooth redwood, the floor polished oak with an inlaid pattern of some darker wood running around the edges. The intricate carpet underfoot was wool, not silk; the buttery leather of the chairs and sofa showed signs of long use; the beams and mantelpiece were of the same unadorned redwood as the walls. The solid wall to Kate's left held a cluster of watercolors on this side of the fireplace. The other wall was hidden from where Kate sat, but she could see another group of chairs at the other end of the room around a low table with a chess set. Her attention was caught by a change in Tyler's voice.

"… wine, Inspector Martinelli? No? Very abstemious of you. Inspector Hawkin? You don't mind if I do?" He limped over to the cabinet again and poured more of the amber liquid into his squat glass, then put the bottle with the unpronounceable name back on the shelf. A smoky fume rose from the glass, and he returned to put his back to the fireplace before he sipped from it. At bay, thought Kate, though Hawkin looked less like a pursuer than he did an old, well-fed hound drowsing in front of the fire. It was an odd way to question someone, she thought, and waited impatiently for him to get on with it. Soft voices drifted up the stairs, distant pans rattled, a child cried, and raised voices from the road outside reminded her of the gathered media. Finally she couldn't stand it.

"When you say 'we decided,' Mr. Tyler, just who do you mean?"

Tyler looked relieved at the question, and Hawkin shot her a quick glance.

"You're looking at him. I get in the habit of saying 'we' because I do consult the people who live here, and my various money men, but ultimately I decide. I still find it faintly ludicrous to think of one person 'owning' a stretch of forest, but it's mine in the eyes of the law. I prefer to think of myself as the landlord, keeping out undesirables and maintaining the road. If anything it owns me, not I it."

"The land lord," said Hawkin, making it two words. "A nice feudal concept."

The oblique accusation seemed only to relax Tyler, as if he were settling into an old, familiar argument.

"There's nothing wrong with a feudal system," he began, "not if it retains the key element of responsibility. It's popular to think of the lord of the manor as a parasite who drained the peasants of their hard-earned products and spent all his time drinking and hunting deer—"

"And screwing wenches," contributed Kate unexpectedly. Tyler looked at her cautiously until he decided that she didn't mean anything by it. Hawkin raised an eyebrow.

"Yes, that too, but it was his responsibility to protect the people from invaders, to make judgment in a dispute, to provide for the old and widows and orphans, so they wouldn't go hungry. The deer hunting and the riding to hounds were not just sport—deer ate crops, and foxes killed farm animals if they weren't kept down. The whole idea of hierarchy and authority is bound up, in the feudal system, with responsibility. The peasant had few rights and privileges, but then he was only responsible for producing a certain amount more than his family needed. The greater the rank, the greater the accountability. Why, do you know," he said, warming to his argument and the whiskey, "in ancient days the king was seen as being responsible for the life of the land itself? He was cheered and begrudged nothing when food was plentiful and the people healthy, but if the crops failed or there was a drought or a plague, he was seen to be the cause of it, and the people would slit his throat to restore the land to fresh life. That's the real origin of 'The king is dead; long live the king.' "

He was totally caught up in the thought of this anachronistic threat to himself, and his eyes gleamed with the relish of it.

Without raising his eyes from the contemplation of his glass, Hawkin placed a gentle question into the room.

"What do you think of human sacrifice, Mr. Tyler?"

Kate felt the hairs on her arms rise and her head snapped around, but Tyler had not yet realized that the old hound was no longer drowsing.

"Human sacrifice—any sacrifice, for that matter—is a means of feeling in control of one's fate by giving the gods what they want before they can take it. By offering them the best, the purest, the newest—" The words strangled in his throat as he saw what he had been led to say. His eyes flew to Hawkin, who looked back at him with the patient air of an old hunter waiting for his prey to panic, watching neither in triumph nor in glee, but certain of the outcome. Tyler's face drained bloodless above the dark fringe of his beard, his knuckles showed white around the glass he held. The room's only movement was the slow dip and rise of the whiskey in Hawkin's glass as he swirled it around and around and around, waiting.

"I… You don't… You can't think…" Kate thought the man would not look much worse if one of his jeweled daggers had been pushed into his belly.

"Yes?" coaxed Hawkin.

"You can't think I had anything to do with it?" He spoke in a hoarse whisper.

"Can't I?"

"You can't be serious."

"No?"

"Why would I do something like that?"

"Why would anyone, Mr. Tyler? You've just given me what could be construed as a motive, have you not? You would be physically capable of it, would you not? This is your land, and you know the comings and goings of the people here better than anyone, do you not? So can you tell me, Mr. Tyler, why I should not consider the possibility that you, as you say, had 'something to do with it'?"

Tyler stared at Hawkin, searching his face for anything other than the polite curiosity with its hint of steel that it now presented. He looked to Kate, found no help there, and lurched about to face his fire. A minute passed, then two, while the two of them sat and watched his back and the movement of muscles along his jaw.

Suddenly his arm shot out and the glass exploded into the fire with a billow of blue flames. His voice began low and the words bitten off in rage.

"Why did he have to come here with his filth? This is my land. My land! Bringing his sickness here and defiling us like this. I'll never be able to go up the Road without seeing this last child, never go up to the top without thinking of the first one, the smell—" He broke off, one hand gripping the mantelpiece. They waited.

Steps came in the hall, a tap at the door. A flash of anger crossed Hawkin's face, and after a moment Tyler turned, his color high but his anger gone, looking both annoyed and relieved at the interruption.

"Yes?"

"John?" The door opened and the tall, gentle-faced woman with corn-silk braids wrapped about her head who had brought Kate lunch looked in. "I'm sorry to break in like this, but Jenny Cadena's going into labor. Her water broke, so she'll go too fast to get her home. What room do you want her in?"

"But she isn't due yet, is she?"

"Only two weeks early."

"How about the green room?"

"That bed's too soft. I thought either the quilt room or Alice's room."

"The quilt room is better; there's nobody downstairs at that end. Strip the bed first, though, would you? Did you call the midwife?"

"She'll be here in an hour, and Terry's with her now. Sorry to bother you."

"S'okay, hon, I'll poke my head in when we're finished here and see how you're doing. It'll be nice to have another baby born in the house—it's been a long time."

She smiled affectionately at him and nodded vaguely to Hawkin and Kate, and the door closed.

"Shouldn't you get her to the hospital?" asked Hawkin.

"Oh no, she'll be fine. This is her fourth, and she's never had any problems. Quite a few of the women come down here to give birth. The midwives don't have to go up the Road, and there's the insurance of the phone and the highway if something goes wrong. Never has so far, touch wood," and he flicked a fingernail lightly against the mantel, "but it goes easier when they know help is available." He was calm now, and met Hawkin's eyes steadily. The interruption had firmly restored him to his position of mastery, and Hawkin reluctantly accepted that nothing would be gained by pressing on that day. Still, his main goal had been achieved; he'd have to settle for that. He started again on a different tack.

"Can you tell me who is not down here today?"

"Offhand I can name a half a dozen. Old Peterson, of course. He comes out of the hills once a year at Christmas, to visit his mother in Santa Barbara, and stays until the end of January. Never other than that."

"His full name?" asked Kate, pen poised.

"Something like Bernie. I'd have to look it up, to tell you the truth."

"That would be helpful. Who else?"

"Vaun Adams. Tommy would've told her, but she's probably busy painting. Ben Riddle is in San Francisco for a few days. I think Tony Dodson is off on a job somewhere, probably be back tonight or tomorrow. Susanna Canani is in Florida with her kids. Hari Bensen I haven't seen, or his lady Ursula." He thought for a moment, then shrugged. "There might be one or two others. If I think of them I'll let you know."

"Do you keep close records of the residents?" Kate asked. He laughed.

"Are you kidding? Half of the kids here don't have birth certificates, and a few of the adults. A lot of them make a point of having no bank account, social security number, driver's license, voter's registration card—not all of them, by any means, but there's a handful of residents who are greater purists—fanatics, if you prefer—than I can afford to be."

"Strikes me you've laid yourself right open for some not very nice people to come in."

"I don't know that keeping track of people's past is any insurance against that. We don't let just anyone in, you see. It's the one place where everyone over the age of twelve has an equal say, whether or not to allow a specific individual in after a four-month trial period. Three-fourths of them have to approve a residency application, or the person goes. I can veto someone, but I can't override their negative. So far it's worked fine. In fact, one time we voted out a couple, and a few weeks later I found out that they'd been arrested for some knifing that had happened the year before in Arizona. There was something wrong with them, and after four months we knew it."

"Don't you have problems with the county and the tax man and all?" asked Kate.

"I pay two full-time lawyers to keep my affairs sorted out. I tell them what I want to do, they tell me how to do it."

"Their names, please," asked Kate, and added them to the growing list.

Hawkin scowled at his glass for a moment.

"It remains to be seen if your method of weeding out the twisted ones has been one hundred percent effective, Mr. Tyler. Tell me, why do you think the bodies were brought here to your Road? Who do you think it is, this person who has 'brought his filth here'?"

"I wish to God I knew. It feels… I feel like someone is doing this to me personally. I know that's ridiculous, and I would certainly never say such a thing to the parents of those little girls, but it is how I feel. Like someone's got it in for me, laying dead children on my doorstep, and yes I'm aware of how absurd and egocentric it is, but I can't help it. And no, I can't think of anyone who would want to do that to me. God knows I've thought about it."

"Mr. Tyler, there's something else that's been puzzling me. Maybe you can shed some light on it. If the murderer didn't want the bodies found, he could have chosen a thousand better places between here and the Bay Area. If he did want them found, his method seems a bit chancy. Any ideas?"

"Not so very chancy. Certainly this last one would have been found within a day or two. It's a relatively built-up part of the Road, and that patch of ground is pretty open. And the one they found along the creek, even that would have been discovered before too long. It's a public footpath, up from a public beach, and even at this time of year people use it regularly. I had to put in a fence along the creek to keep people out. She could have gone longer if the weather had been bad, I suppose." His face twisted in a parody of humor and he gave a short bark of desperate laughter. "Christ, what a macabre conversation."

"Yes. You were having a meeting that night, the night Amanda Bloom was left here, weren't you?"

"Yes, from eight until about one in the morning. It was impromptu, or anyway it wasn't supposed to be here, but the place we were supposed to meet, one of their kids came down with the chicken pox, so we met here instead."

"A political meeting, wasn't it?"

"Sort of. A group of us coastal landowners who oppose oil drilling off the coast. I gave their names to Trujillo at the time."

"And nobody saw anything."

"He must be invisible; nobody sees him anywhere."

It was an opinion that Kate had heard before.

"And the first one? Tina Merrill? It was quite some time before Tommy Chesler happened across her."

Tyler pushed himself abruptly away from the fireplace and went to pour a fresh glass of the smoky drink. Kate and Hawkin watched him patiently. It took two swallows and a circuit of the room before he spoke.

"I would have found her on the first of December if I'd been here. I always ride to the top of the Road on the first and then come back and put on a party for the residents, but I wasn't here. I had to fly to Seattle very suddenly on the thirtieth; my uncle was in an accident, and I didn't get back until the third."

"You told me that, yes," said Hawkin. "And you drove up the following day, was it?" Kate saw he was puzzled— wondering why this should so trouble Tyler.

"Rode, on horseback. On the fourth. And she wasn't there. Not on the Road, anyway, though she must have been just over the edge. She didn't… it had been cold," he ended, and took another swallow.

Hawkin's face took on a look of polite incredulity, and after a moment Kate realized that in spite of the weeks of evidence and despite Hawkin's fairly explicit words to the general assembly downstairs, the man Tyler was only now allowing himself to face the inevitable conclusion: that someone on his Road was responsible for the deaths of the three girls.

"And everyone on the road knew it was your habit to be on that stretch of the Road on the first of December. So there's a fairly good chance that whoever put her there meant for you to find her."

"I… think so. Which means whoever is doing this didn't just pick the Road off a map."

"No, Mr. Tyler, I think that is a pretty safe bet." Hawkin drained the last drops from his glass into his mouth and set the glass lovingly on the table. It took just a few minutes to wrap up the interview, arrange for access keys and a room for Trujillo and one other for the night, and make a list from Kate's notebook of the information they needed. They walked down the stairs together, and Tyler left them on the second floor landing to survey his private obstetrical ward. Hawkin leaned against the wall and lit a cigarette.

"Give me your reactions so far."

"To Tyler?"

"To everything."

Kate thought for a moment.

"Did you notice that the only person here who wears a watch is Tyler's lady friend with the blond hausfrau braids?"

Hawkin looked surprised and then began softly to laugh. His face was transformed, and he looked considerably younger.

"Very good, Casey. No, I hadn't consciously seen it. The chatelaine with the watch and the keys to the storehouse, eh?"

"I only noticed it because I thought my watch was running slow, and when I went to check it I couldn't find anyone who had one. After that I began to study wrists. They may all have pocket watches, but no wristwatches."

"Interesting."

"About Tyler. He really was horrified that you connected him with the murders, but it didn't look like guilt or fear. His anger was real, too, though I wish I could have seen his face."

"Mmm," was Hawkin's only response. After a minute they descended from Tyler's ivory tower to rejoin the fray.

6

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Two hours and several residents later Kate pushed back her chair, scrubbed at her face with both hands, and went to join the line outside the toilet. As she walked back towards her desk, a hand from the kitchen thrust a steaming mug at her, and she buried her nose in the life-giving smell of fresh coffee. She carried it through the much-peopled living room and beyond to the long covered porch, where the clean air smelled of salt and trees and the rain that dribbled off the roof. A pile of wet dogs thumped their tails at her, and when she ignored them, tucked their noses back into each other's flanks.

Some thoughtful soul had draped a piece of canvas over the rose bower, and the guard, hearing the front door close, peered out at her, raised his own steaming cup in greeting, and stepped back under the shelter. Beyond his casual canopy she could see that the newsmen had arranged a series of more elaborate tents and marquees, some in bright colors, so that the space across the Road was beginning to resemble a high-class gypsy encampment. She could hear a mutter of voices and after a moment pushed her lethargy aside long enough to move to the far end of the veranda for an unobstructed view of the tent city.

Hawkin was there, talking with the newsmen. He looked every bit the proper police investigator, in a belted trench coat with the requisite crumpled fedora in his hand. He was facing away from her, but she could see that his feet were planted squarely, his back was straight, his gestures few and controlled. He turned his head slightly to listen to a question, and Kate saw him respond with a sharp shake and could see his mouth move in a "no" before he turned away again for the next question. There was the slightest sag to his shoulders now as they moved with a gesture of his unseen hands. In another few seconds the hat was clapped onto his head, and he turned back to the house with an air of getting back to his job. The reporters lingered until he reached the gate and then began to disperse.

The sag to his shoulders was more pronounced when he appeared on the stone walk. He reached the shelter of the porch and fumbled with belt and buttons until he extracted a large, limp handkerchief, which he proceeded to rub like a towel over face and hands. He shoved it back into its pocket and began to shrug off the wet coat when he saw Kate in her silent corner and grinned.

"I hope to God that's coffee and not some herbal concoction that tastes like dirty straw," he said.

"Coffee, just made, and strong enough to bite back. Want me to get you a cup?"

"No, it's too cold out here to stand around in wet shoes, thanks." Still, he made no immediate move for the door. "How's it going?"

"Nothing yet, if that's what you're asking."

"It's early still."

"Can I ask you something, Al?"

"Of course."

"How much of your method of talking to the media is deliberate?"

"Deliberate? A performance, you mean? Oh, it's all a game. They want the truth, but more than that they want a good story; you want them to shove off, but not completely— they can be useful. And they're not a bad bunch, most of them, just doing their jobs. If you keep them fed, make them feel included, put on a show from time to time, they're not too much trouble. Especially in weather like this. I go out every hour or two and churn out all kinds of exciting nonsense they can work up into a story—keeps them happy. They're having loads of fun with that Cadena woman and her baby. One of them wanted me to tell her that if she could make his deadline there'd be a hundred dollars in it for her."

"What did you say?"

"I told him that she was trying her best. I also said that you'd come out and talk to them in a while. It'll give my shoes a chance to dry out."

"Throwing me to the wolves?"

"Propitiating the gods, Tyler would say."

"How do you feel, really? About the case?"

"It's too early to feel anything, but I don't feel good. And my feet are damned cold. Back to work, Martinelli."

At four thirty-seven the midwife guided little Amanda Samantha Christina Cadena-Panopoulos into the world, and all the honorary aunts, uncles, and cousins downstairs cheered and kissed and clapped one another's backs when the short, indignant yell trickled down to their ears. At four-fifty Kate and Bob Fischer went out to present a grainy photograph of mother and daughter to the waiting reporters (and collect the new mother's hundred-dollar check), and two sets of grandparents saw their newest granddaughter's wet, squashed features on the six o'clock news. At six-thirty the last question was asked of the last resident. At nine-thirty Kate dropped Hawkin at the station and drove on to the pool for twenty minutes' hard swim. At ten-thirty she walked back into the office, clearheaded, and they worked for two hours at sorting out the mountain of papers. At one o'clock Kate finally fell into bed, and at five forty-five the telephone rang.

She hit the receiver, fumbled and dropped it, retrieved it from the floor, and squinted to see the luminous hands of the bedside clock. She had to clear her throat before any intelligible sound would come.

"Yeah."

"Casey, pick up some doughnuts on your way in this morning, would you? I've got the coffee on, but the place wasn't open when I came by."

"Doughnuts."

"Chocolate glazed, if they have them."

"God."

"What?"

"Chocolate glazed doughnuts."

"Yes, or whatever looks good. See you," he said cheerily, and the line went dead.

Kate replaced the telephone with the gentle care of a hangover victim, turned to the single eye that scowled up at her from the next pillow, and pronounced the words again.

"Chocolate. Glazed. Doughnuts."

The eye cringed, closed, and retreated beneath the blankets. Kate made her own toast that morning.

It was a day given over to the computers, those electronic busybodies into whose impersonal clutches fall the bits and pieces of the personal histories of criminal, victim, and Jane Q. Public. Kate's feet echoed in the still quiet hallways, and a thick fug of cigarettes and rancid coffee greeted her when she entered Hawkin's office. She dumped the greasy white bag on the desk next to him, pushed open a window, and went over to inspect the coffeepot. It held a strangely greenish liquid that seemed an inauspicious start to the day, so she started another pot, politely refused the kind offer of a doughnut, and sat at the console. Her mind itself felt not unlike a cold, greasy wad of cooked dough when she looked at the stack of yesterday's papers.

"Where do you want me to begin?" she asked.

"Up to you," he said around a mouthful of crumbs. "Alphabetical, geographical, the pin-prick approach, or you can follow hunches. They're all equally bad."

"In that case I'll proceed with some semblance of logic— start from Tyler's place and work my way up the Road."

"Why not the other way around?"

"From the far end down? Why?"

He shrugged. "Look at the farthest point from civilization to find the biggest misfit?"

Kate looked at him closely, but she couldn't tell if he was joking.

"I'll compromise, five from the top, five from the bottom."

Throughout the long day Kate worked to pull together the information contained in the electronic network on the fifty-seven adults and nineteen (now twenty) minors who lived on Tyler's Road.

Hawkin spent much of the day with the telephone tucked under his chin, and when that failed he read through the assembled reports and printouts with a fierce concentration, made notes, and stared blankly out the window. He disappeared in the early afternoon and came back three hours later looking rested and shaven, and wearing a clean shirt.

At five-thirty Trujillo called in with the statements from three of the residents who had not been at Tyler's and names of the remaining eight. Hawkin shouted at him.

"What the hell have you been doing down there? You should have had all eleven before noon, even if you had to walk up the road to get them! You've got what? Oh, Christ, yes I did hear about it, but I didn't know they'd called you in on it. All right, sorry for shouting. Yes, give them to me now, the rough outlines anyway." For ten minutes Hawkin grunted and scribbled notes; he finally dropped the phone and sat back.

"Half of Trujillo's men are down in San Benito county with that gunman who wants his kids." An irate father with a rifle was holed up in an office building demanding that his ex-wife give him their two sons—the kind of situation that eats up a lot of hours and manpower. "Well, at least it's put off that damn meeting with the FBI and half the cops in northern California. Throw these names into the machine and go home." Hawkin picked up a stack of papers and settled down at his desk with his nineteenth cup of coffee that day. "Go home, Martinelli. We'll go down ourselves tomorrow."

Thursday morning the telephone allowed her to sleep until after six before jerking her from a luxurious dream in which she was sitting on the deck of a cruise ship eating spaghetti and watching a child play with a windmill. The child began suddenly to wail, and it took a long moment for Kate to realize that the wail was the telephone.

"Yes!"

"Martinelli, I need you down here. Ten minutes ago."

"Piss off," she snarled, but he had already hung up.

"I knew we should have gone to bed rather than watching the late show." The muffled voice was not even accompanied by an eye this morning; it was simply an untidy lump in the blankets.

"See you on TV," Kate replied.

"You did look cute."

"Scared stiff."

"So adorable, showing off that baby's picture."

"Shut up."

"What is it, Al? What happened?" she asked as she walked into his office.

"Nothing happened. I'm going home for two hours, and I need you to sit on the phone in case something comes up. If Trujillo calls, we'll be there by noon." He stood up and reached for his jacket.

For that you woke me up and made me run down here? she wanted to say. Why couldn't you sleep ordinary hours? Haven't you heard that telephone calls can be forwarded, for God's sake? But she bit it back, and asked simply, "Don't you ever go home?"

"When I don't have this kind of case, yes."

Kate squashed her own guilt feelings at having gotten six whole hours of sleep and turned resentfully to the console. She worked away for slightly over an hour and a quarter before a series of words came onto the screen that made her back go straight and her heart thump. She looked at the telephone and couldn't help the malicious grin that spread onto her face.

At the fifth ring the telephone was taken off the hook. Long seconds passed before the sound of heavy breath told of the passage up to his ear. His voice was coarse with sleep, but Kate pushed away another twinge of guilt.

"Hawkin here."

"Al? This is Casey. Something's come up I think you should see. Right away." She hung up gently. Revenge was sweet.

She was on the phone when he came in. He had stopped to shave, she noted. She handed him the thick sheaf of computer printout. Out of the corner of her eye she saw him pour a cup of coffee and settle to the continuous pages, eyes moving swiftly. She hung up and turned in her chair.

"Sorry to wake you."

"S'okay. Bunch of misfits, aren't they? Marijuana, LSD, peyote possession, arrest at Diablo Canyon, defacing a public building, army desertion and dishonorable discharge, mental hospital. What a place."

"Very few violent crimes, though. Number fourteen, there, six months as a juvenile for assulting a teacher, and number twenty-seven, who shot up a billboard while under the influence. But it's number fifty-four I called you about; it just came in."

He flipped over the pages until he reached the name of Siobhan Adams, unmarried Caucasian female; he skimmed the first few lines, and then his eyes slowed abruptly. Kate watched his lips move slightly as he read the words. He closed his eyes.

"God in heaven, why didn't we have this twenty-four hours ago?"

"It was one of the names Trujillo gave us last night. There was some confusion over it, and I got the correct name from Tyler's lawyer only an hour ago. Everyone knows her as Vaun, but I drew a blank on that."

"Vaun. Vaun Adams. Detweiler mentioned her. An artist, he said. Maidens in castles and metaphysical trees, no doubt. How do you get Vaun from Siobhan?" He gave it three syllables.

"It's pronounced Zhi-von, an old Irish name. I told Trujillo to have his people stop her if she tries to leave, but not to approach her otherwise. Was that okay?"

"On the nose. Let's get out of here."

He threw the printout onto his desk, and Kate snatched up her gun and her jacket and hurried down the hall after him. The paper lay face up, the lines of impersonal dot-matrix print telling of one Siobhan Adams, age thirty-six, unmarried Caucasian female, arrested at the age of eighteen and charged with the murder by strangulation of six-year-old Jemima Brand. She was convicted, served nine and a half years, and had been paroled seven years before. Her house was less than two miles from where Samantha Donaldson had been found.

7

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Vaun Adams lived in one of the few houses on the Road that looked like a place to live in rather than an experiment or a fantasy, despite the gleam of photovoltaic panels on the roof and its almost unreal air of perfect simplicity. It lay on top of a hill half a mile up from the Road. A footpath wound through redwoods and opened up on a broad acre or two of vegetable beds and fruit trees, surrounded by a high wire fence. Some of the beds had a few straggly lettuce heads, beets, and broccoli growing in them, and one tree showed a handful of premature white dots on its branches, but the rest was neatly mulched over for the winter.

The house looked more at home on the site than the garden did, as if it had grown from the ground under the supervision of the wise trees. Simple, long, wood and glass, its back set actually down into the earth so that its two stories appeared low, it was a structure both distinctive and totally unobtrusive. Kate wondered where Adams had found an architect who did not insist on a splashy signature and wondered, too, if in houses as in clothing the simple and well-made were the most expensive.

There was a face looking down at them from the stretch of upstairs window.

"She's seen us," Hawkin noted.

"She could hardly miss the sound of that truck."

"Looks almost Japanese, doesn't it?"

"The house? It does, now that you mention it. I was thinking it looked deceptively simple."

Hawkin nodded. "Solid. It sure wasn't built by the guy who did the leaky dome or that place with the turrets and gargoyles."

The entrance was tucked under an upstairs deck. A small, mesh-covered pond with a few bright koi swimming in it lay next to the front door. Hawkin reached for the bell rope, but the door opened first.

Christ, she's gorgeous, was Kate's first thought, followed immediately by, She looks like one of those living dead looking blankly into the camera outside Dachau or Buchenwald. Her glossy black curls were slightly too long and tumbled onto her shoulders and around a pair of startling, icy blue eyes that revealed nothing whatsoever of the thoughts behind them. Her cheekbones were high and thin, her skin pale, her mouth a fraction too wide for the rest of the face. A heavy, loose, brown sweater with flecks of color spun into it and a smear of blue paint on one sleeve emphasized the slimness of the body it covered and revealed long hands with short, square nails. She had soft, dark brown corduroy trousers on her long legs, cloth shoes on her feet, and a deep, even voice as she stood back from the door.

"I wondered when you would come for me."

"Miss Adams?" Hawkin, too, seemed taken aback by her appearance and words.

"Yes. Come in."

"You were expecting us, then?"

She shut the door and turned to face him. Her eyes were as calm and as vulnerable as those of a dead woman, but there was a slight smile at the corners of her mouth.

"Come now, Inspector Hawkin. If three dead girls are found within a few miles of a woman who was convicted of murdering a little girl, she'd have to be a considerable fool to expect that the police would ignore her. I've been expecting you for weeks."

"You know my name."

"And Inspector Martinelli's. Tommy Chesler was here last night and told me all about you. I was about to stir up the fire and make myself some coffee, but when I heard you coming I thought I'd better wait to see if you planned on taking me in, 'for questioning,' as they say. I don't like to leave the house with a fire going," she added simply.

"No, go ahead," said Hawkin. "Unless, of course, you're planning on confessing to the murders." Kate thought it a joke in very poor taste, if it was a joke. Vaun Adams did not react, other than smiling the half-smile and turning to lead them through a dark hallway and out into a spacious, high-ceilinged living room.

"That's not too likely. I don't suppose you want any coffee?"

"That would be nice, thank you."

"Breaking bread with a convicted murderess?" She smiled wryly and knelt down to load two split logs into the large, freestanding iron fireplace. A wide-bottomed black kettle sat on the flat top.

"You have paid your dues, Miss Adams."

She paused and studied him from under the hair, a log forgotten in one hand.

" 'Paid my dues.' I haven't heard that phrase in years. Nearly ten years of my life gone as dues for the privilege of rejoining a society that neither wants nor trusts me. Rather high membership fees." Her mildly amused voice might have been discussing a slight inconsistency in the plot of a play.

"High compared with the price paid by Jemima Brand?" Hawkin smiled gently, but his eyes were hard. Vaun Adams looked down at the log in her hand and finished the job, opened the stove vent, stood up, and brushed off her hands.

"No, I would not consider the price high, if it had been I who killed her. But then I realize that nearly all felons claim that they were falsely accused, so I won't bore you with that. This will be a few minutes," she gestured toward the kettle, "and I'm sure you want to ferret about in my things. I give you my permission. I won't even ask you for a warrant. Just don't touch the wet paint on the canvases upstairs, or the charcoal. There are a couple of drawings I haven't sprayed yet." She disappeared through a swinging door, which revealed a glimpse of kitchen sink and cabinetry before it shut. Kate and Hawkin looked at each other and shrugged.

"Do you want to 'ferret'?" Kate asked him.

"Not much point, I shouldn't think. I would like to see the house, though."

The house was well worth looking at, regardless of any evidence it might contain. The room they were in was a space of immense calm and simplicity, open to the rough, beamed ceiling two stories above their heads, its sides made of smooth redwood boards laid vertically, with large, uneven quarry tiles underfoot. One wall, to Kate's left, was glass. Its opposite, behind the free-standing wood stove (now radiating a comfortable antidote to the gray day outside) was an expanse twenty-two feet high entirely of redwood, broken only by the rectangular outline of the kitchen's swinging door and by one wide painting. A couple of thick, subtle Oriental carpets, a cluster of soft chairs and matching sofa, two low tables and a small cabinet were the only furniture, although the house's end wall ahead of them had built-in cabinets running the length of it, ending at a door that led (judging from a glimpse through its window) to a wood pile. Kate walked a few steps into the room and turned around to look up above the doorway through which they had come. To her surprise it appeared that the entire space above the rest of the house was one large, open room, divided from the living room below by a simple, waist-high railing, on the other side of which stood a pair of heavy easels. Various people along Tyler's Road had mentioned that Vaun Adams painted, but Kate had hardly expected to find her studio taking up one third of the floor space of a generously sized house.

As she turned back to Hawkin her eye caught on the painting above the wood stove. It was actually a triptych, three panels depicting a mossy stream bed in which a minimum of brush strokes and a nearly monochromatic palette of grays and greens managed to convey an air of mystery and anticipation. Kate drew it to Hawkin's attention with a dry comment.

"Unicorns and starry maidens it ain't. If that's her work, she's very good."

There were three other rooms on the lower floor. On the right-hand side of the hall as it went to the front door was Vaun's bedroom. A subtly colored patchwork quilt made of hundreds of tiny squares lay on the double bed, its corners knife-sharp. The top of the bedside table held an electric lamp and a clock; a small gray vase with a sprig of dried flowers and grasses sat atop the narrow, chest-high dresser. All else, even the walls, was bare, polished wood, with the exception of one small, very old-looking painting on the wall above the bed, a Virgin and Child. Kate forced herself to open drawers and closets, a thing she always disliked, but inside things were equally neat—not with the recent tidiness of the nervous housekeeper faced with an unwelcome and judgmental guest. Kate was familiar with the rapid neatening of strewn magazines and the quick dusting of obvious surfaces. This was a compulsive order, the obsessive tidiness of a woman who could not go to bed at night knowing there was disorder in the house, lest she be whipped away during the night and other eyes see the evidence of her debauched way of life. Looking at the straight line of shoes on the closet floor, Kate would have bet that Vaun Adams never wore a safety pin in her brassiere. Had she always been this way, or was it only recent? Since December? Kate closed the closet door and went across the hall to the bathroom.

After the austere bedroom, this room seemed positively flamboyant, tiled in warm oranges and browns with a brilliant batik shower curtain and mat in the same colors. The furnishings here were also minimal: two towels and a face cloth, hairbrush, comb, toothbrush, toothpaste, soap, one bottle of shampoo, and nailbrush, all precisely aligned. No water spots or rust stains in the bath tub; no soap smears on the taps or porcelain. The only profligacy was a cupboard startlingly full of medications, both prescription and over-the-counter: vials at the top, three kinds of antibiotics; aspirin, Tylenol, Bufferin, and a codeine-and-Tylenol mix; cough syrups; half a dozen antihistamines with their fluorescent caution stickers (do not operate heavy machinery; do not take with alcohol), a handful of nasal sprays and drops; antacids, both liquid and chewable tablets, and a liquid laxative; nine bottles of assorted vitamins; a snakebite kit; wart removal drops; three small bottles of liquid charcoal and one of syrup of ipecac, for accidental poisoning; and on the lower shelf tubes of antiseptic cream and ointments for sore muscles, for burns, bites, stings, and sunburn, for yeast infections and athlete's foot; and an unspecified cortisone preparation. Nothing illegal; nothing more narcotic than the mild codeine prescription, six months old and less than half gone. No tranquilizers. Kate closed the cupboard door with a smile. That Vaun Adams was a hypochondriac was the most human side of the artist that she'd seen yet.

She opened the doors under the sink and rummaged through the pharmacopoeia there, mostly outdated, raising her eyebrows at a pair of disposable hypodermic syringes, still in their wrappers, each with a glass ampoule taped to it. Kate squinted thoughtfully at the printing on the glass and put them back.

She spent a few minutes writing the names of various doctors and pharmacies in her notebook, closed up the drawers and doors, and went back out into the hallway. A noise came from the room to her left, on the side away from the living room, so she followed that and came upon Hawkin, hands in his pockets jingling the coins, running his eyes over the walls of the combination office and library.

One corner of the room was chewed off by the overhead stairs, and below that was an oddly angled window. It probably gave a brief flood of light in the early morning, but now, the other window being a narrow, chest-high strip the length of the room but barely above the grasses that grew on the hillside cradling the back of the house, the room was inadequately lit for any serious reading. Nonetheless, the walls were solid bookshelves, broken only by the door, the windows, a small oak rolltop desk, and its matching filing cabinet.

Hawkin signaled Kate to close the door, and asked her what she had found.

"Very precise lady, not even any hairs in her comb," she commented. "One area of nerves, though. She's got a small pharmacy in her bathroom, everything from headache to ingrown toenails, with a concentration on sinus and lungs. Nothing hard, nothing illegal. Couple of needles, but they seem to be for allergic reaction to bee stings. How about you?"

"A very precise taste in music," he reflected. "Clearly divided, at any rate. Sing-along stuff, folk music from the sixties and the stuff they put on the radio and call mellow rock—muzak for yuppies—lots of fiddly instrumentals, Vivaldi, some Haydn, all the Mozart piano concertos, both of Glenn Gould's Goldberg recordings, that kind of thing." Kate nodded, catching the drift if not the specifics. "And then music to be overwhelmed by—huge, pounding stuff that doesn't leave you any room to breathe. Four different versions of Verdi's Requium, no less, and three of Mozart's. Great stuff to sublimate depression and keep the mind off of suicide. Three separate shelves, all in alphabetical order. What about the books?"

Wondering uneasily how much of Hawkin's last comments had been rooted in personal experience, Kate turned to the shelves. Here, too, order prevailed: general art history books here, volumes on specific artists (alphabetized) there; psychology there, novels here. The art world took up at least two-thirds of the shelves and represented a massive investment of money. Oversized books with many color plates ran the gamut from Egyptian and primitive to Frankenthaler and de Kooning, with a heavy emphasis on the European masters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Slick, expensive, serious books, not something Kate would have expected to find on Tyler's Road. She leafed through a few of them and found two with writing on the flyleaf: Art in the Making: Rembrandt was signed, "With love from Gerry," and a very worn copy of The Art Spirit by Robert Henri was inscribed, "To my dear niece on her seventeenth birthday, with love from Uncle Red."

Second in number were works on psychology, ranging from college textbooks (two of them familiar to Kate from her own shelves) to popularized pseudopsychology to abstruse academic tomes with multisyllabic Latinate titles that seemed to deal with the more obscure varieties of madness. Running a poor third, and placed on shelves behind the door, was an eclectic gathering of fiction: Doris Lessing and Dorothy L. Sayers, Elie Wiesel and Isak Dinesen, a few Updikes, some Steinbeck, a couple of early Steven Kings. Some of them were old friends, some Kate had never heard of, and she could see no particular method in the selection.

She had now circled the room and stood near Hawkin, who was looking at one of a series of worn legal reference books. She eyed the adjoining shelf, filled with delicate volumes with arty titles—poetry by, apparently, modern women poets, a closed field to Kate.

There was a pile of books on the table in front of one of the room's comfortable chairs, and Kate glanced through those. Books on Titian, Poussin, Bellini, and Michelangelo, and three volumes of Christian symbolism, bristling with strips of paper marking depictions of women and children, some classical, most of them Madonnas with child or Pietas. Under the circumstances, Kate thought, a strange topic to research. She said as much to Hawkin.

He glanced at the books, put the legal volume back on the shelf, and moved to the desk. A search through drawers and pigeonholes revealed nothing of immediate interest, and he moved to the two-drawer wooden filing cabinet beside it. It was unlocked, but before he could do more than run a thumb over the manila folders it contained, there was a gentle rattle of silver in crockery outside the door. He drew back his hand.

"I'm taking this upstairs," came Vaun's voice. "It's warmer up there."

"We'll come back," he said to Kate. "No point in letting the coffee get cold."

They followed her up the stairs to the enormous studio. Even on this gray day, three glass walls and a skylight filled it with light. Around the perimeter and down the middle ran long, high worktables, but the immediate impression was of a large space entirely open to the elements—except for one corner, where a room sat above the downstairs kitchen. Its door was slightly ajar, and Hawkin walked over to peer curiously inside, into a storage room for completed paintings, with built-in slots of various sizes along the outside wall. From the looks of it, she was a busy lady. He closed the door and glanced out the window at the hilltop, which dropped off again just beyond the house into a sharp canyon of oak and scrub, the dominant redwood for some reason keeping its distance. Several easels stood waiting in one corner, and the two at the end of the room, backs to the railing that separated the studio from the living room below, seemed slightly reproachful under their stained canvas drapes.

Vaun had put the tray on a battered table that stood between two grimy armchairs and a paint-splattered sofa. She poured the coffee into three rough mugs.

"There's usually a lot more stuff lying about," she said. "I tend to have several pieces going on at a time, but I've put everything on hold until you're finished with—" She sneezed into a hastily retrieved handkerchief, smiled apologetically. "—with me. Sorry, I'm getting a cold. Honey? I haven't any sugar, I'm afraid."

Hawkin looked resigned. "Just cream, thanks."

"It's goat's milk, this time of year. Inspector Martinelli?"

"Black's fine, thanks," she said hastily.

"I didn't know if you'd be hungry, but I haven't eaten yet. Help yourself."

Hawkin took a thick roll with ham in it and wandered unerringly to the work surface below the window.

"Haven't put quite everything on hold, I see," he said around a mouthful. Kate went to see what had captured his attention.

It was a simple, quick charcoal sketch of the view down the hill from this window a short time earlier, black lines on the thick white paper of a spiral-bound pad. The trees that rose up on either side of the page should have dwarfed into insignificance the two central figures walking up the path, but they did not. They towered above the two, certainly, but at the same time seemed to twist slightly away from them, as if flinching from a source of power and threat, and the final impression was of the two humans looming large and ominous at the end of a tunnel or the nucleus of a whirlpool. The woman was turned slightly toward her companion, saying something. He, however, faced directly ahead, and the quick marks that were Hawkin's eyes seemed to look straight into the eyes of the viewer. Kate leaned forward, fascinated, to see the drawing dissolve into a mere swirl of lines and dots.

Vaun spoke up from the chair behind them.

"There's something slightly wrong with the perspective."

"I don't think so," contradicted Hawkin. "No, I think the artist's perspective is very clear indeed."

"I meant technically."

"So did I." He put down his cup and turned abruptly. "Miss Adams, where were you on Monday afternoon and evening?"

Her smile was crooked, but for the first time it touched her eyes.

"So, the truce is not even to last through the meal. You know, there are still some people on earth who feel that when you have shared bread with another, that person cannot be an enemy. Think what havoc that would wreak on our society. Yes, yes, Inspector Hawkin, I shall answer your question." She put her cup carefully down and leaned forward, studying her long hands.

"When I moved here five years ago, it was chiefly because of the solitude. A person in prison has no privacy, ever. It is… I found it very nearly intolerable. After my house was finished, I put a sign out on the Road asking people to keep away, and I saw no one, not a single human being, for a solid month. I took the sign down eventually, but even now I often go three or four days without meeting another soul.

"Since the second body was found, however, it's been different. It's not just me, of course. The whole timbre of the Road has changed, and everyone seems to go out of his or her way to say hello if you're walking past, or drop by for a chat or to borrow something. It's fear, Inspector; I don't have to tell you that. And I have a special reason to be afraid, don't I? Since that second child was found, I've begun to take my walks along the Road rather than away from it. I call out when I hear someone go by down on the Road. I make fires even when it's not absolutely necessary, so people can see my smoke. At first I didn't realize what I was doing, but when I did, I made it a conscious habit. I didn't know if they'd find another body, but if they did, I wanted to have some sort of alibi. An innocent person doesn't think of alibis, I know, but my innocence was taken from me years ago. As I said before, I'm not a fool.

"On Monday afternoon I was here working, as I usually am. In the morning I sketched in a canvas, and I started painting in the afternoon. I also finished another one I had been working on. They're over there." She waved at the two draped easels.

"May we see them, please, Miss Adams?" Hawkin asked.

"Certainly. It's dusty here, even in winter, so I keep them covered. I also don't want my neighbors to see them." She went over to the right one and folded back the cloth, revealing a canvas covered in a light wash of intense blue with several large areas of color roughly brushed on. The underlying outlines seemed to be of a figure on a chair, with a tree overhead, but the lines were mere suggestions at this point. Still, something vaguely familiar stirred in the back of Kate's mind.

Vaun moved to the larger canvas on the left and carefully rolled the cover up and back. "It's still wet," she commented, and stood away from it.

Kate gasped. A woman with brown hair and a blue dress was holding a naked child to her breast. The child was dead. The woman, the mother, had just realized that her daughter's blue, limp sprawl was final, forever. The finish was exquisite, the background detailed, the texture of hair and fabric palpable, and the overall effect on the viewer was of a knife in the heart.

"But that's—my God, you're Eva Vaughn!"

Vaun turned with a surprised look, the first real emotion that had crossed her face since they had arrived.

"You didn't know?"

"I saw your show in New York last year. Al, you know—"

"Yes, I know who Eva Vaughn is. In fact, I helped out when the painting was stolen in Los Angeles a couple of years ago. It wasn't my case, but I remember the painting."

"I owe you thanks, then, Inspector," said Vaun, one eyebrow arched in amusement at the turn of events. "It no longer belonged to me, of course, but the owner is fond of it."

"And here we thought you were some hippie painter who sold magical unicorns at the flea market," Hawkin mused, and turned to eye the door to the storage room.

"Doesn't it worry you just a bit having them all sitting there?"

Vaun actually laughed, warm and much amused.

"Very few of my paintings are worth what that one in Los Angeles was, particularly if they were stolen, and they're probably safer here with the doors unlocked than in a gallery in New York with burglar alarms. Besides, so far—touch wood—none of my neighbors know that I'm Eva Vaughn when I'm 'out there.' That's the main reason why I keep the paintings under wraps until I send them off," she added, and lowered the covers again. She turned back to face the two detectives. It was an awkward moment, which she herself broke.

"But all of that has little to do with your investigation, doesn't it?" She went back and sat on the couch to pour herself another cup of coffee with steady hands. "In fact, considering the sorts of things Eva Vaughn is known for, it may even make your pointed questions that much more necessary. You were asking about Monday, I believe, three days ago. Amy Dodson came up on her pony just before lunchtime with some bread her mother had baked. Angie usually bakes Mondays and Thursdays, and she always sends me some of whatever she's made. I let her use my hillside for her garden, and she feels she owes me for it." Which explained the incongruity of the pale face and hands with the considerable garden outside the door. "She doesn't owe me, but when it comes to her bread, I don't argue. Have you talked with Amy yet?"

"Not yet, no."

"You'll find her a sensible child, very bright. She's had home schooling, like most of the kids here, since she was seven, and her test scores are high-school level by now. Anyway, she was here a bit before one. I also saw her father later, it must've been almost six, because the light was changing too much to paint any more so I went for a walk along the road. He makes a trip to town most Mondays and he was—" She sneezed again, blew her nose, coughed. "He was just getting back. I stopped him to ask if he could take some canvases into San Francisco for me next week, which he's done half a dozen times."

"Did you see anyone else?"

"Did anyone else see me, you mean. I don't think so. It started to rain, so I cut it short and came back here. Someone else went by a few minutes later, but I was already off the Road so I didn't see who it was. It sounded like Bob Riddle's truck, but I can't be sure."

"What did you do after that?"

"The same thing I do every evening. Stirred up the fire, had a drink, read for a while, ate some soup and the bread. After dinner I usually write and sketch. The sketches were lousy, so I used them to start my fire the next morning. The letters Tommy Chesler took down to Tyler's for me on Tuesday, for Anna to stamp and mail. I had a bath, dried my hair, and went to bed, about ten-thirty. And slept until about five the following morning."

"Alone?"

Her smile was ironic, and acknowledged his peculiar right to intrude on her.

"Yes."

"Every evening?"

There was a pause while she studied him, her smile deepening.

"No."

"Who?"

"I think, Inspector Hawkin, we are nearing the point at which I am going to ask you to put this interrogation on a more formal basis."

"Tyler?"

Kate thought she wouldn't answer, but it came eventually.

"Occasionally."

"Why didn't you come down to Tyler's Tuesday morning?"

She must have been expecting the question, for she answered without hesitating.

"These people are my friends." She weighted the word heavily. "I never had friends before, and I found myself reluctant to have you accuse me and peel apart my life in front of them. No one here knows who I am, other than that I'm Vaun the painter. There's no Eva Vaughn on Tyler's Road, and no felon either. Just 'Vaun'."

"Nobody knows?"

"Tyler knows that I've been in prison; I'm not sure if he knows the reason. I offered to tell him, but he said he didn't want to know. He may have found out since then, but he won't have told anyone else."

"You sound very sure of that."

"He didn't tell you," she pointed out. "Tyler is famous for his stubborn refusal to talk about anyone else. The Road gossips find him enormously frustrating."

"Who are the Road gossips?"

She hesitated for a moment.

"You really should ask someone else about that. I'm not fully a part of the Road society. Angie Dodson could tell you. She isn't what I would call a gossip, but she lives closer to the Road and knows better than I do what goes on."

It sounded a feeble excuse for avoiding an answer, but perhaps to respond to the question would have felt too much like informing for a convicted felon's taste.

To Kate's surprise, Hawkin stood up abruptly.

"That'll be all for the moment, Miss Adams. We'll be back if we need to finish 'ferreting about.' You won't leave the area without informing us, please."

"Of course." She too seemed at a loss. "Will you… that is, I suppose I'll need to leave my work as it is for a while. On hold." Her voice came perilously close to pleading.

Hawkin looked down at her for a long minute and finally relented into something close to sympathy.

"That would probably be for the best, Miss Adams."

Kate watched the deadness creep back into the remarkable ice-blue eyes and was annoyed to feel a twinge of sorrow. She's a suspect, Martinelli, she told herself harshly, and ignored the little voice that protested, But not Eva Vaughn!

Outside the house Hawkin set a fast pace down the slippery path, muttering to himself.

"What did you say?"

"I said, what's the world coming to, drinking coffee with goat's milk and honey, that's what I said. It's the most disgusting thing I've ever heard of."

"It wasn't bad black. And those ham sandwiches were great."

"The sandwiches were good. The coffee was disgusting. Can you run in those shoes?"

"Run?"

"Yes, run. To cover ground in a rapid manner. You're supposed to be the athlete here. Would those shoes do for running, or would you need your Nikes or Adidas or whatever they are?"

She looked down at her feet, which were covered with a pair of relatively soft, low-heeled leather shoes, chosen that morning for walking in the wet hills.

"Sure I could run in them. I wouldn't want to do a marathon, but—"

"How far could you go?"

"Well, I'd hate to go more than ten miles."

"Will they slow you down much?"

"After the first five, yes."

"That's all right, then; it's only four to Tyler's."

"You want me to run to Tyler's Barn?"

"For Christ's sake, Martinelli, wake up. You heard her; she was seen at one and at some time before six. We have to know if she could have made it on foot to Tyler's to pick up a car, driven by car to the Donaldson house in Palo Alto, snatched Samantha Donaldson between three and three-fifteen, and made it back here to see Dodson by six."

"Leaving the body in the car, or carrying it with her?" Hawkin's shriveling look went a long way to explain his ferocious reputation among his colleagues. Kate felt three feet tall.

"In broad daylight?"

"Good," she said gamely. "It saves me from having to carry forty pounds back up the hill with me. Where will I find you?"

"Probably at Tyler's. I'll cheer for you as you go past."

"Thanks. You can buy me a pizza afterwards, to replace the calories."

"And a big glass of goat's milk."

"Come to think of it, I'm busy tonight, very busy. Here, take my jacket and stick it in the truck, would you? I'll drop it in the mud if I try to carry it. And the shoulder holster too, it'll kill me to run in it." She took off the restricting leather harness, retrieved her gun. "I'll take this in my bag. You going to talk to the Dodsons?"

"First on my list. Also, I'll get Trujillo started on the cars, see if we can find who was up here that day, have a chat with Mr. Tommy Chester and maybe another talk with Tyler."

"Have fun." Casey slung the shoulder strap of her heavy bag across her chest, aware that it made her look like an advertisement for bras, and did a few leg stretches before setting the chronometer on her Christmas watch (alarm clock, the time in London, Sydney, and New Delhi, and an unreadable face, just like Dick Tracy), and then set off carefully down the rough and slippery track.

In the house on the hill Vaun Adams heard the old fire wagon cough into life and lumber off. In another minute or two she moved at last. She opened her eyes, took her hand away from her mouth, scrubbed the palms of her hands slowly up and down her trouser legs, and finally stood up, deliberately, as if her body ached all over. Inevitably, she moved to the two easels, touched the smooth handle of a squirrel-hair brush lightly in a gesture of taking bearings, and stood before the nearly finished figure of the agonized mother. The artist's face was without expression, but the tendons in her neck seemed exaggerated, and when her right hand reached out automatically to mix the drying paints on the glass slab, the fingers were unsteady against the handle of the palette knife. She drew back her hand and held it up in front of her face, fingers spread and still trembling. Her eyes studied the hand curiously, examining in minute detail the back of it, then the palm and the softness of the wrist, then the back of it again, the webs, the knuckles, before they looked through the fingers and focused on the painting behind. The hand dropped and as of its own volition, without the eyes looking down, reached out for the tube of cadmium red. She flicked off the cap with her thumb and squeezed a huge dollop out on top of a blue that had taken her half an hour to mix. She dropped the tube and, still without looking, seized a random brush, a large one, and scooped up the blood-colored pigment. She carried it to the face in front of her and stopped, holding it a fraction of an inch from the canvas. Her hand was rock steady now, but the sound of her breathing was suddenly harsh in the room. Thirty seconds, a minute, and abruptly she straightened and put the brush down onto the palette. She scrubbed her palms again down the front of her thighs and glanced at the table next to her, grimaced at the pool of red, and set about carefully to rescue what she could of the laboriously achieved blue tint.

When her face came up again it had changed. Her eyes went to the unfinished woman, and her hand, no longer disconnected but as a part of her, went again to the bundle of brushes and chose one. She rubbed the white bristles into the edge of one of the globules of paint, rose up onto her toes, and reached out for the painting.

8

Contents - Prev/Next

Al Hawkin stood watching until Casey Martinelli's nice firm backside disappeared behind some trees, and then he turned to the wide spot up the Road where Detweiler waited in the muddy wagon. Thank God she's not my type, he thought—no strains there on Hawkin's Rules of Order, Law One: Thou shall not get involved with a female colleague. Two, no, three years ago in Los Angeles he'd been assigned a lady whose long legs and blond curls had been painfully distracting to work next to. He'd finally gone to the man in charge, and a few weeks later, when she was transferred with a promotion, he was freed from Law One and had found her distractions a source of pleasure rather than discomfort. This one, though, would be no problem—no chemistry. Too short, too dark, too well muscled. Wonder if she lifts weights? He climbed up into the car.

"You can take me to the Dodsons now."

"Where'd she go?" asked Detweiler, puzzled.

Hawkin looked at him blandly.

"Downhill. The Dodsons?"

"Just up the Road, about half a mile." He ground the engine into life and coaxed it into the lowest gear, and the vehicle set off phlegmatically up the pitted road. "Great thing, this old gal. Just point her in the right direction and she'll climb right over everything, feels like. Ever see that Star Wars movie with those walking transports? Too unstable, of course, but that's what driving one of these feels like, just plodding along, sure and steady wins the race."

Worse than a taxi driver, thought Hawkin morosely as the man chattered away. That's another thing about Martinelli—she doesn't chatter. A person can think around her. Perhaps she wouldn't be such a burden as he'd originally thought. He pictured her setting off down the Road with her bag strap slung between her breasts, muddy water flying at every step, and wondered how she would get on.

Kate was getting on slowly but not steadily and with increasing annoyance. The Road seemed to be crawling with people, all of whom wanted to know what she was doing, what had happened, where was her car, or, in the case of the various police, if she wanted a ride to Tyler's. She shut off her ticking chronometer three times in the first mile, until finally she just decided to give a cheery wave and keep running. Her shoes were totally inappropriate to the job and would probably be ruined, her pant legs clung up to her knees, and after threatening all day it finally started raining, gently, a mile before the gate. When she hit the final quarter-mile straightaway where the road dropped through the meadow, she stopped abruptly. She had totally forgotten about the press. There must have been thirty cars camped across the Road from Tyler's Barn and even more cameras waiting to capture her bedraggled, sweaty, filthy self on film for all the Bay Area to feast their eyes upon. One of Trujillo's county cars was just edging through the gate. She ducked back around the corner, switched off her timer, and greeted it wetly when it appeared. Trujillo himself was at the wheel, with Tyler beside him. Trujillo wound down the window.

"What happened to the fire wagon?" Tyler asked, echoing the cry that had followed Kate for the last four miles, and from Trujillo came its mate, "Where's Hawkin?"

"Paul, can I talk with you for a minute?" He hadn't spent the morning sloshing around in the mud, she thought in disgust as he joined her beneath a sheltering tree, though with the slick soles on those shoes it's only a matter of time before that nice gray suit ends up in the mud. The thought cheered her considerably, and she smiled sweetly through the drips that ran down her face.

"If you don't have any urgent business up the hill would you mind going back to Tyler's so I can pick up my car? Hawkin's got me doing a timing test, round trip to the Donaldson house, but I really don't want my mother to open her newspaper and see her little girl looking like a mud slide survivor."

"Sure, no problem. We were just checking on a couple of my people, it can wait five minutes more."

"Look, I should tell you, Hawkin's going to want to know every car that was out of Tyler's shed on Monday, and then he's going to have every one of them gone over for traces. If you haven't started on the cars yet, you'd better do so."

"Thanks for the tip." They turned back to the car.

"Hello, Mr. Tyler. No, I'll sit in the back, it's all right. Mr. Tyler, I hope you don't mind turning back to the barn for a minute? I really couldn't face those reporters like this."

"Happy to. How—"

She interrupted firmly. "Why are the press staying behind the fence? I'd have expected to see them crawling all over the hill by now."

"That was Tyler's doing," laughed Trujillo. "He went around nailing up all these signs that say Trespassers Will Be Shot, and told them that it was private property and that everyone who lives here owns a loaded shotgun. When one of the television guys didn't seem to believe him, he gave them a little demonstration—for which he will probably be fined—and then, when he had their attention, said very nicely that if they're well behaved he'll come and talk to them every two hours. So far it's worked."

"Threats, bribes, and a disgustingly wet day. Very clever."

"I've had some practice in crowd control," said Tyler. "Besides, Hawkin authorized some money to come my way, and I've got two of the residents down in the kitchen turning out regular batches of hot soup and brownies."

"And looking photogenic," Trujillo said, grinning.

"They won't charge Hawkin for that. I think I saw a towel back there, if you want to dry your hair or something," he added. "You can put it over your head if you want to hide."

"Don't need to hide if it makes a poor enough picture for them." She toweled her hair with enthusiasm for the next few minutes as Trujillo threaded his way through the questions and cameras and into the privacy of the compound. Kate's little white box stood between someone's silver BMW and an ancient John Deere tractor with half its guts on the ground under a plastic tarpaulin. To the left stretched the roofed-over car storage shed. Kate eyed the vehicles speculatively as she ran a comb through her hair.

"Where is Miss Adams's car?"

Tyler seemed unsurprised at the question, which struck Kate as a bit odd.

"You heard about it, did you? It's the one there, with the blue cover." He pointed to a long, low shroud. "Want to see it?"

"Yes, I would." The rain had let up for the moment, and the damp gravel scrunched underfoot. Tyler peeled back the cover, and there stood a diamond among the hunks of everyday rock: a proud, gleaming maroon Jaguar, at least thirty years old, but in mint condition.

"Would you look at that!" exclaimed Trujillo, and they did.

"You haven't seen it before?" Tyler asked. "It's a beauty, isn't it?"

"Does she let anyone else drive it?" asked Kate.

"Oh, yes, I take it out every week or two. Doesn't do to let a nice car sit, not good for it. She pays me to keep it up, but I always tell her I'd do it for nothing."

"Nobody else, though?"

"No. Well, come to think of it, she let Angie Dodson use it to take Amy in to the doctor's one day when Tony had the truck, but that was, oh, October maybe. Yes, the middle of October, just before the harvest fest. She was scared to drive it, I remember, but I had both of mine apart and it was either that or the old truck, which would've been worse. Of course, I could have let her use someone else's, but I hate to do that without permission. It's asking for problems, with insurance and all that."

"But you could have, you said. Do you have some of the keys for these?" Kate waved her hand at the ranks of bumpers.

"Oh, yes," he said in all innocence. "There's keys for all of them on the board just inside the door. We have to be able to move them, to get at other cars or in case of a fire or something."

Kate met Trujillo's eyes as Tyler turned back to cover the Jag lovingly. She tipped her head toward the car, and he nodded in understanding. The Jag would be the first under scrutiny.

Her own car seemed small and tinny as she fished her dry clothes from the trunk, and the sound it made closing had all the expensive thunk of a child's toy.

"I need to get out of these wet things. Can I use the house?" she asked Tyler.

"Sure, go ahead. You know where the bathroom is. Have a shower if you want; there's a stack of towels in the thing that looks like a garbage can."

As Kate stripped off her clammy clothes she was amused to see that it was a garbage can—a plain, galvanized metal garbage can filled with thick, multicolored towels. A man who sits on a piece of property worth millions, with a leaky faucet and towels in a garbage can. Could he really have been innocently unaware of the drift of her questions about the cars? Or was his open admission that all the keys were in his possession just a bit too blithe? Was Tyler protecting Vaun Adams, his sometime lover, or using her as camouflage? Or did he not know enough to put her together with the murders? She shook her head at all these speculations, pulled on her rumpled sweats, combed her hair again, and went back out into the yard.

She threw her sodden clothes into the trunk of her car, unlocked the driver's door and tossed her weighty handbag onto the passenger seat, and remembered to switch on the chronometer before settling herself comfortably behind the wheel and starting the engine. She ran the windshield a couple of times against the accumulated drops, backed out into the gravel, nodded to the uniformed cop who now stood watch over the cars, and turned out onto the main road going north through the crowd. One of the television vans seemed to be having some problems with the transmitter on its roof. Two men were up working on it, but it didn't seem very likely that their efforts to revive it would succeed. It looked as if it had been swatted sideways by a giant hand. Kate slowed and peered curiously up at it; then she noticed the spray of small dents and lines in the paint, up along the edge of the van. She laughed and accelerated. Tyler's demonstration to the media on privacy rights.

There were three cars parked at the public park where Tyler's Creek met the sea. No, four—one pulled up among the trees where the creek path led towards the state reserve up in the hills. Probably curious citizens wanting to see where the body of Amanda Bloom had been found. If it were summer they'd be running a bus from town.

It was not raining just at the moment, but out over the ocean the clouds were massing, a black, lowering Pacific storm gathering its forces. Kate shivered and turned up the heater. Maybe she'd be lucky and it would come in slowly.

Traffic was light going over the hill into the Bay Area, and an impatient Audi rode her back bumper for half a mile before passing on a blind corner. She stifled the urge to violence and glanced at the time. Had traffic been this light on Monday? Once she'd successfully negotiated the downhill curves and entered the freeway in the direction of Palo Alto, she reached for her car phone and identified herself to the familiar voice of the dispatcher, a tough, middle-aged Japanese woman whom everyone called Marge, for reasons long forgotten, though her name was Yuki.

"Marge, can you ask around concerning traffic conditions over the pass on 92, Monday afternoon? I'm most interested in twelve-thirty to three eastbound, and, say, three to four westbound."

"I can give you instant service on part of that," her voice crackled over the receiver. "There was a spill there just after two-thirty on the downhill side. A lumber truck went over and blocked both lanes. My brother-in-law got caught behind it, for nearly an hour. Do you want me to check further?"

"Very interesting. Yes, I'll check with the highway patrol later, but keep your ears open."

"I always do." Her voice was prim behind the static.

Two-thirty. A very close thing, but if she'd left immediately after Amy, if she'd run fairly fast, if she'd driven just marginally above the speed limit, she could have slipped over the hill before the Road was buried in two-by-fours.

Kate pulled off the freeway toward the Donaldson's exclusive neighborhood and wound up the smooth, narrow road through fragrant bay and live oaks and madronas, and from a rise she saw the garden where Samantha had been playing seventy-two hours before. The area was immediately visible, just for an instant, but quite clearly, before the trees closed in again. The Road dipped back down among oaks and high walls before rising to curve around the Donaldson property and continue on into ever higher reaches of elevation and income. Kate pulled over on the far side of the Donaldson hedge and put her chin on the wheel. Ahead of her lay the heavily treed drive to the neighboring house, where faint marks in the grassy shoulder had been found Tuesday morning, nothing more definite than the hint of a hidden car.

"Why the hell can't we be having a drought this winter?" she said sourly into the silent car. She sat for several minutes, thinking thoughts that were not pleasant about a woman she wanted very much to be innocent. Finally she twisted the key, slammed the car into gear, and headed back to Tyler's Barn.

9

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The rain began again an hour later, with that slow steadiness and determination that makes the natives of the Pacific coast check their supplies of candles and firewood. A good night to be in bed, thought Kate. I wonder if I'm forever doomed to drive into rain as I approach this place.

There were no cars at the creekside park, and the group of vehicles perched near Tyler's Barn had thinned considerably. Two more cars skulked away as she drove up and pulled into the fenced compound. Trujillo's men were busy with the Jaguar and a couple of others, and the corrugated metal roof of the great shed rang with the heavy drops. Trujillo looked up at her approaching headlights, waved in recognition, and then put his head back inside the car. Even in the dim afternoon light his gray suit no longer seemed fresh. She laced on the old running shoes she always carried in the car, zipped on a hooded rain parka, and set off down the main road, ignoring the amazed looks of the two uniforms, and dodging the unenthusiastic reporters with ease.

The man keeping guard beneath the Tyler's Road sign rolled down the window of his marked cruiser.

"Inspector Hawkin was just asking if you'd shown up yet. He's still up there." He looked across the metal gate at the gradually disappearing dirt road.

"Maybe you should call back and tell him I'm on my way up. I should be there in forty minutes or so."

"He said to tell you that if it was raining you didn't have to do it."

"No, I'd better, just to finish it. The surface won't be too wet." But I will, said a protesting voice, I'll be wet and damned cold. Shut up and get on with it, she said, and she did.

The surface was actually better than it had been that morning, but the trees looked very large and dark, and they swayed and creaked gothically in the rising wind. In a minute they swallowed her up, and she jogged steadily uphill on the narrow, rocky road, very much alone, with the huge trees bending and groaning on all sides, the big drops splatting onto her face and clothes, the occasional lighted house, glimpsed through tossing branches, serving only to increase her sense of isolation. It was getting darker, and she ran faster now to shake the eerie shadows and fought off the feeling that someone was behind her by pushing herself physically. Her shoes chuffed rhythmically and she had to concentrate on the road surface to avoid ruts and stones. She was sweating freely now despite the chill drops that worked their way down the neck and through the seams of her parka, and her breath was coming in great gulps as she fought toward the fast-fading point where the pale road disappeared between the dark walls of the woods. She passed the Adams house on the left—not far now.

Without warning the world exploded into light and for a moment Kate, completely disoriented, braced herself for the clap of thunder. Instead she heard a welcome voice shouting angrily.

"Turn that thing away, for Christ's sake, you're blinding her." The light shifted, and through the dazzle in her eyes she was aware of figures, a car, a lighted house beyond. She automatically reached down and switched off her timer, and then stood, hands on knees, gulping in air.

"You all right?" Hawkin's voice again. She bobbed her head, and spoke as best she could.

"Yeah, just wanted, to make it, before dark, couldn't run, by flashlight, could use, a drink, of water, though."

"I'd have thought you had enough on the outside to make you happy, but come on in the house and catch your breath."

Kate ducked into the log cabin after him and accepted a chair and a drink, and as her heart slowed she was grateful for the glow of the wood stove at her side. Angie Dodson was a tiny, thin woman with a thick tumble of dark blond hair held determinedly in place by numerous inadequate hairpins, and she had filled the low room with bright pillows and tapestries and the smell of good food, with a large loom in one corner and a spinning wheel behind a chair. A serious, freckled child of about twelve brought Kate a big cup of hot, oniony soup and a warm, seed-filled roll.

"You're Amy, aren't you? I remember you from the other day."

"Yes. Why did you run up from Tyler's in the rain when you could use a car?"

"Because it's there, I guess. Did you make this soup?"

"I helped Mom."

"Thank you, you may have saved my life with it." Seeing the serious consideration of this, Kate smiled. "It's just a saying, but I do thank you very much for it."

"You're welcome."

"Ready, Martinelli?" Hawkin stood at the door with the jacket she had left with him several lifetimes before.

"Ready. Thank you, Mrs. Dodson, it really hit the spot."

"Please, the name is Angie."

"Good night, Angie," called Hawkin. "I hope your husband makes it home okay."

Kate looked more carefully at the narrow face of the woman who seemed scarcely older than her daughter, and noticed then the tension of worry in her face.

"I expect he'll stay in town with friends, if it's raining too hard. It's happened before." She lifted the bright kerosene lamp and led the way to the door. "Feel free to come tomorrow, if you need a hot drink."

"That's very good of you, Angie," said Hawkin. "We'll try not to bother you too much."

"It's no bother, really it isn't. It—" She stopped, and looked faintly embarrassed and something else. Defiant? "I shouldn't say this, I suppose, considering the reason you're here, but it's actually been a treat, seeing all these new faces. I've had fun."

Yes, thought Hawkin, he could imagine that fun was a rare commodity up here this time of year, in a tiny dark house with no electricity and a child. His face relaxed into a smile, the smile that tended to fluster women like Angie Dodson.

"Fine, then. You keep the kettle on for us."

The wind blew the rain into them as they stepped from the warmth and ran for the shelter of the wagon. Detweiler folded down his spotlight and picked up the portable radio Trujillo had provided. The crackling and whining were bad, but he eventually got the message across that they, the last car, were starting down.

"Sorry about the shouting," he said, and pulled into the road. "There's something wrong with the aerial."

"Can you turn on the heater?" The man must be from Alaska, thought Kate.

"Sorry, it's gone too. There's a blanket back there somewhere. Are you cold?"

"For God's sake, man," Hawkin burst out, "she's soaked through; of course she's cold. Here, Casey, put this around you. Oh, Christ, don't tell me the wipers have gone out again."

"They'll be fine as soon as the engine's warmed up," the driver said desperately.

"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph," said Hawkin in a soft voice. Kate did not think it was a prayer. It was fully dark, and the headlights, which did work, picked out no press cars through the rain at the bottom of the hill. Kate clamped her jaws shut against the shudders of cold that threatened to take possession. The electricity seemed to be out at Tyler's, but lamps shone in several windows. Hawkin was out of the wagon before the brake was set. He reached into the back door, pulled Kate out, steered her with one firm hand into the house and thrust her toward the bathroom. A kerosene lamp burned on the back of the toilet.

"Hot shower," he ordered in a hard voice, and shut the door. A few minutes later Kate, under a stream of blessedly scalding water, heard the door open.

"Don't put those wet things on again," came another order, and the door slammed. She pulled the curtain to one side and saw jeans, sweatshirt, and thick gray socks folded next to the sink. The urge to shudder subsided, the water began to run cool, and she dressed. When she came out of the steam-dripping room she heard a now-familiar voice shouting in monologue.

"—when it ought to be hauling cantaloupes in the Coachella Valley. You get me a decent four-wheel-drive vehicle in here tomorrow or I'm going to have to make some major waves about the lack of backup here for my people. No, I don't want to hear about your problems. I don't care if you have to break into the goddamn Jeep dealership and steal something. I can't have my partner getting pneumonia because you people don't maintain your equipment, and I'm too old and too ill-tempered to walk. Have I made myself sufficiently clear? Good. Have a nice evening," he added maliciously, and hung up. He rapidly wiped the grin from his face when he saw Kate standing in the doorway, but it crept back in twitches. She was grinning too, in her cuffed and belted jeans and the sweatshirt that reached to her thighs. She felt ridiculously pleased at his use of the word "partner."

"Warmer now?" he asked.

"I should ask the same of you," she said mildly, with a glance at the telephone.

"Yes, well, if they think they're all going to hide behind me, they're very much mistaken. You want something to eat before we go?"

"A cup of coffee would be great, but that's all."

"I gave Tyler's lady your thermos. Anna. She said she'd fill it. I'll just tell Trujillo we're leaving—he's staying here again tonight."

They found Trujillo in the dimly lit great hall with his feet up on a table in front of the huge fireplace, talking to Tyler and sitting next to a woman who was apparently not a stranger. He had a glass in one hand and no tie on, and he jerked upright as they entered.

"Christ Jesus, Trujillo, you seem to think this is some kind of holiday arranged for your entertainment. You're on duty here, mister, or had you forgotten? Maybe you think the people of this county pay you for sitting and drinking whiskey while some bastard is out there murdering children? I don't expect you to stay up all night, I told you that. I don't even expect you to sleep alone. I do expect you to stay sober enough to answer the phone if I feel like having a chat at three in the morning." He snatched up the glass and took it over to the fireplace, paused at the sight of the bottle on the mantelpiece, and looked at Kate. "You driving?"

"Sure."

"Not too tired? Good, it'd be a shame to waste this. I'll bring back your glass tomorrow, Tyler, and from now on put the good stuff away or I'll have to charge you with attempted bribery." He took a small sip and rolled it around his tongue. "We'll overlook it tonight, though. Good night, all."

They detoured through the kitchen and retrieved the thermos from Anna.

"Sorry I didn't have anything smaller," she said, smiling at Kate's attire.

"I did wonder if Tyler went in for lavender," replied Kate. "I'll bring them back tomorrow."

"No hurry. Drive carefully. They're predicting gale-force winds by midnight, I heard on the radio before the power went out."

"A cheery thought."

In the car Kate slipped off her sodden shoes, the second pair for the day, and drove in her stocking feet. Hawkin poured her some coffee and slumped back, nursing the glass.

"You like whiskey?" he asked.

"Not especially."

"White wine." From the scorn in his voice he might have said "soda pop."

"Sometimes. I prefer a red. When I drink, it's usually beer."

He was surprised, and said so.

"It has character," she commented. "And if you want the results of the afternoon, I've written it on that pad in the glove compartment. The final figure should be"—she looked at the glowing figures on her wrist—"four hours, twenty-eight minutes door to door. I didn't run very fast going down, but I doubt she could have done it as fast going up. We'll have to ask Dodson if she seemed out of breath at all. Where is he, by the way?"

"He borrowed Tyler's pickup to go to Sacramento to pick up an engine. His truck has a cracked block, and a friend had one that he was going to sell him cheap. Trujillo checked, too. His engine really is shot." He threw the notebook back into the glove compartment and slapped it shut.

"What else turned up today?" she asked.

"One little lock of brown hair in the back of the Jaguar, one child's ring under the seat."

Kate frowned.

"There was no mention of a ring on any of the girls, was there?"

"No, there wasn't. One of Trujillo's men is going to do the rounds with it tomorrow. Parents sometimes forget just what a kid walked out the door wearing. One of them might recognize it. It was too small for an adult."

"You said a lock of hair. Cut off?"

"No, caught in a door handle, a little twist of twenty, thirty hairs. Brown, straight, about six inches long."

The rain sheeted down the windshield, and even on high speed the wipers managed to clear only brief glimpses of the black roadway and the drops that fell and bounced back up in the headlights. When Kate broke the noisy silence, her voice was flat.

"It doesn't look good for Vaun Adams, does it?"

"No, it does not."

"Do you think she did it?"

"We're not allowed to play favorites, Casey."

"I just want to know what you think."

Hawkin took a minute to answer.

"You know, all day I've been thinking about a case I had, oh, fifteen years ago, maybe. This little, quiet mouse of a woman whose kids and husband disappeared. She came in to report that he'd taken them, filled out missing persons forms, we put out their descriptions. His car was found a few days later near a bus stop, so we went back to talk with her. She was just what you'd expect—teary, worried, furious at her husband, but completely rational. She showed us the kids' rooms, and there was this teddy bear, no eyes, one ear chewed off, all the fuzz gone—you know how a toy looks when it's been loved to pieces. Anyway, this teddy bear was sitting there on the table next to the bed, leaning up against the lamp, and it just struck rne that it looked, I don't know, lonely. It stuck in my mind, and later that night I got to thinking about it, and I got to thinking that really there were kind of a lot of clothes in the closets, that he would at least have taken coats or shoes. The next morning we went and got a search warrant, and found them in the basement, buried deep. And she was such a nice, gentle lady, with absolutely no guilt in her eyes."

"But you can't think that Vaun Adams is stupid, and to bring the bodies to her own backyard, as she put it, would be stupid. Suicidal."

"Maybe that's it. She wouldn't be the first psychopath who arranged to be caught. 'Stop me before I do it again,' that sort of thing."

"Do you honestly think so?"

He squinted out the side window, but saw only the reflection of the dashboard lights and his own unhappy face.

"No, I don't. She looked like a badly beaten ex-con who's trying to decide whether or not to stand up on her feet, not like a murderer who's half afraid of being caught and half afraid of not being caught. She didn't look afraid at all, for that matter. Maybe she really is crazy. I dunno, we'll have to find out what Dodson says tomorrow and see the results from the lab and the prints boys. Oh, hell, I shouldn't have had that Scotch on an empty stomach, it's making me all weepy. Next thing you know I'll be telling you about my ex-wife. I'm tired. Do you need me to keep you awake?"

"No, I'm fine," she lied. "Will it disturb you if I listen to the radio?"

"Nothing disturbs me when I'm asleep," he snorted, and soon proved it.

10

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Kate reached for the car radio and pushed various selector buttons until the muttering of voices filled the car. For a long and tiresome drive a severe irritant is called for, and there is nothing, but nothing more irritating than listening to one of those twenty-four-hour talk shows, particularly at night, when the callers are regulars who glory in their moments of authority, commanding the airwaves and the attention of hundreds, even thousands, of ears. The current caller was working himself into a rant about oil drillers and water wells, with brief excursions into the weight of concrete and the encroachment of fill into the Bay. It wasn't until the moderator cut him off that Kate learned the topic for the evening, which was earthquakes, the prediction of and how to prepare for. Floods might be more appropriate, she thought. The little car suddenly slowed and veered as it hit a deep wash of water from a blocked drain. The noisy burst of spray from below and the sharp change of speed half woke Hawkin, who looked around blankly and went back to sleep.

Kate carefully poured herself a cup of coffee from the thermos, barely taking her eyes from the road. She drove with her left hand on the wheel, sipping, listening to the radio with half an ear, enjoying the sensation of being a warm, dry speck pushing through a cold and nasty universe.

After a few miles a pair of headlights came blurring at her, fellow travelers in the storm. She glanced at Hawkin as the lights passed and had etched onto her inner eye the brief, clear image of a younger man, the lines and hardness of the face softened, vulnerable. Innocent.

It was a disturbing view of an already disturbing man. Kate did not want to see the vulnerable side of Al Hawkin, no more than she wanted to be emotionally intimate with any of the people she worked with. She had labored long and hard on the defenses around her life, defenses all the more efficient for being nearly invisible, and did not wish to see them breached now.

It is no easy job, being a police officer. For a woman it is an impossible job, fitting into the masculine world of the station while retaining her identity as a woman. For a woman to be a street cop she must, from the first day in police academy, create a clear picture of what is required of her, and stick to it without wavering: she must be tough but not coarse, friendly but not obsequious, unaggressive but ready without a moment's hesitation to hurl into a violent confrontation. Impossible, but women do it. Kate had done it. She had also pushed and scrambled and sweated the books to work herself into an early promotion off the streets, knowing the resentment and mistrust her single-minded ambition would cause.

Those feelings and the tensions they had created had undoubtedly contributed to the willingness San Jose had shown in giving her to San Francisco, but once there she had made it her business to play down her urge to competitiveness. For once, she would just fit in, as much as her private self would allow. The men and women she worked with found her friendly and easygoing, to a point. Everyone knew that she ran and worked out at the gym, that she liked pasta and baseball and spicy little carnations, that she had an ongoing feud with the plumber. Everyone knew that Casey could be counted on for donations to shower gifts, for trading shifts so you could get to your sister's wedding or your aunt's funeral, for a wicked accuracy with the bat on the departmental team, for being a good cop to have at your side in a tight place. Yet not one of them had been inside her home, knew what she did in her off hours, knew how or with whom she lived. Her intensely private home life she concealed by the very openness of her work life. It was a somewhat schizophrenic way to live, she knew, but she had found that the only way she could continue as a cop was to preserve a place totally apart where she could retreat. No work came home, no colleagues came inside. Most of them didn't even realize that they hadn't been invited.

Hawkin, though. She had a feeling that Al Hawkin's eyes missed very little. Not that he would push her—she'd had to deal with a number of people, men and women, who wanted to be buddies, who felt the presence of a hidden Kate and wanted to pick at it, like fingers on a scab. She could deal with these—it had become almost a game a couple of times—but Al Hawkin was different.

Al Hawkin, she knew by now, was totally involved with whatever case he was on. He would eat, sleep, and drink the case, and be eaten by it, until it ended. Any partner of his who wanted to be more than an assistant would have to follow him at least part of the way down that road. It was something Kate had always resisted, but she felt the threat of it now, radiating from this sleeping man at her side.

The ease with which he plunged into an all-revealing, vulnerable state of unconsciousness was perhaps the most troubling thing of all. Kate herself never slept in the presence of strangers, on a plane, with a half-known man she'd taken to her bed. Exhausting hours later she would invariably get off the plane, out of the bed, red-eyed, unable to let go and sleep until she was by herself.

Except for Lee, of course. With Lee, at home, for the last four years, she had let go entirely, utterly. With Lee, and with no one else, she was absolutely vulnerable, freely open to crushing criticism or heart-filling communion. With Lee. Alone.

How could a person sleep with a stranger watching? Another image came from out of the long, busy day, that of Vaun Adams at the door of her house: the beauty of the fairy-tale princess—blackest hair, palest skin, red lips, ethereal eyes—and the flat expression of a person dragged out from the gates of hell.

That expression—all her expressions, with the exception of that one moment of surprise at their ignorance of her identity—was not a normal reaction to a police questioning. The only people Kate had known who did not respond to the police with nervously exaggerated emotions, of politeness, aggression, humor, or whatever, were old lawyers and young punks convinced of their own invulnerability, and even in the latter there was always a slight air of disdain to give them away. In Vaun Adams, though, there had been no nervous exaggeration whatsoever. Watchful caution, yes, and a vague amusement, but, as Hawkin had said, there had been no fear, which in a woman who had spent over nine years in prison was a very strange thing.

She had seemed, now that Kate thought about it, open, honest, even trusting, amazing as that might be. Childlike in her confidence that the world would not hurt her. Less guarded, in fact, than twelve-year-old Amy Dodson had been.

Yet, this was a murderer who had spent a quarter of her life in prison.

Vaun Adams had claimed that her innocence had been taken from her. Certainly her paintings were not innocent. They were powerful, raw, subtle, moving, beautiful, sordid, pain-filled, and joyous, sometimes all at once, but innocence was not a word that came immediately to mind.

What is innocence, though? Kate wondered. There's the legal definition, but isn't innocence the absence of wickedness, of sin—that old word? "One of the world's innocents." An innocent was someone untouched by the wickedness of the world, whose simplicity was a highly polished surface where the dirt of the ugly world could not cling. (Oh, come now, Martinelli, the Scotch fumes are getting to you!) Nonetheless, she had met one or two of them, who would have been called saints in other times.

Is that what Vaun Adams is, truly: an innocent? A mirror who has seen considerable evil, in herself as well as others, and reflects it back, along with the good, becoming ever brighter in the process? How else to explain the lack of fear, or anger, or joy, or any strong emotion in the eyes of the painter, yet the tumultuous presence of all of them in the canvases she painted?

Can an innocent commit murder?

The muttering radio was forgotten as Kate's mind reached back to a hot afternoon in New York the summer before, and the series of paintings that leapt from the white walls of the gallery. She and Lee stood long in front of the one entitled Strawberry Fields (Forever). It was a single figure of a man, a middle-aged Mexican farm worker, standing in the center of a vast field, row after row of strawberries, radiating endlessly, hypnotically, out from the horizon. He was leaning on a hoe, and the viewer's eyes met his with a shock, for in his face and stance lay a total and uncomplaining acceptance of the miles of grueling work that lay around him and the knowledge that he would never finish, he could never really stop, would never get the dirt from under his thick fingernails or the ache from his back.

Many painters would have left it at that, glad enough to disturb the wealthy elite who would see the work and for a few hours feel ennobled by their guilt. Eva Vaughn, however, had gone one step further. As one studied the farm worker, the huge flat field, the hot blue sky, and came back to his face, gradually the feeling grew that this man was deeply, sublimely happy, in a way that someone with a choice could never be. "Well done, thou good and faithful servant" came to mind, and Kate had left the gallery much shaken. Strawberries had never tasted quite the same ever since.

Afterward she and Lee had gone to a nearly empty coffeehouse, and for an hour they had talked about Eva Vaughn and women in the world of art.

"Why do you think there are so few great women artists?" Kate had mused.

"Didn't you even look at that Germaine Greer book I gave you?" Lee chided. "Yes, I know, anything that doesn't have the word 'forensic' in the title gets pushed to the back. You do remember what the title of this one was, don't you? The Obstacle Race, right. That should tell you what her thesis is. Men start off on a flat track, half the time with the proper shoes, starting blocks, and coaches. Women have to climb and struggle the whole way, mostly against the circular argument that women artists are minor artists, and therefore if a painting is by a woman it is a minor painting. Training of techniques, not just of art but of the craftsmanship that makes a painting last, the apprentice system, patronage—" Lee was launched on a monologue that left Kate far behind, catching the occasional familiar name—Rosa Bonheur, Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Suzanne Valadon—and a flood of others. "There've been any number of extremely competent, even brilliant women artists. Look at Artemesia Gentileschi—an infinitely superior painter than her more famous father. Or Mary Cassatt: some of her stuff is every bit as good as some of the male artists who were—and still are—better known than she was. Maybe if she'd had less of an emphasis on mothers and babies… I don't know. I'm afraid that women have to be ten times as good as men to overcome their early training. Little girls are raised to be cautious and sensible. Even tomboys like you are too busy fighting their upbringing to leave it behind, and it's the complete, passionate absorption in one single thing, like painting, that allows genius to produce. If you have to worry about folding clothes and constipated babies—if you have to worry about having babies at all—you can't concentrate on one important thing. Geniuses of any kind are always impossibly bloody, single-minded bastards, and women have never had that option, not as a class, not until very recently."

"What about Eva Vaughn? Or wouldn't you count her as first rate?"

"Oh, God, yes, especially considering that she's only in her thirties and getting better all the time. I don't know about her, why she doesn't fit the mold, except that maybe her genius is just so exceptionally great that it rules her. Nobody knows much about her. Even that article in Time said that she wouldn't meet with the person who wrote it, although they talked on the phone a couple of times. Remember the rumor that Eva Vaughn was actually a man? That one's still around, by the way. I heard a couple talking about it in the gallery."

"You don't think it's possible, though?"

"There'd be no point in it. The work is so good it makes no difference if it was done by a man or a woman. No, I'm sure she's a woman, a woman who's somehow managed to break away from caution." Lee tapped the photograph of Strawberry Fields that lay on the table, and looked wistful. "I'd love to meet her, to know how she's done it, how she was raised to be that free."

And now Kate knew how it had happened. Eva Vaughn would have been a fine painter any time, any place, but nearly a decade in a tough women's prison, convicted of a crime intolerable even to the other inmates, had flayed her of her caution, had cut her loose from any of the expected possibilities. A normal woman would have gone mad, or retreated into the anonymity of ordinariness, or died. Instead, Vaun Adams, Eva Vaughn, had become empty of herself, had become a pair of all-seeing eyes and a pair of hands that held a brush, and she had channeled the pain and the beauty of life into her canvases. She was a murderer who had strangled a small girl, a child who would now be a woman of twenty-four had she lived. Nothing Vaun could be or do would make up for that, and deep down Kate could never finally forgive her. Painful as it was, she knew that her own work, her own humanity, demanded that she pit herself against the woman who had painted those magnificent visions of the human spirit. It was a bitter thought, as filthy and oppressive as the night outside.

On the outskirts of the city Hawkin woke and reached for the thermos.

"Not letting up any, is it?"

Kate pulled her thoughts back into polite normality with roughly the effort of pulling a boot from deep mud.

"No," she said. "No, if anything it's worse. The wind certainly is, even on this side of the hills."

"Ah, well, it'll blow over soon." He seemed almost cheery, disgustingly so considering the night and the thoughts that had been in possession of Kate's mind.

"Do you always wake up so cheerful after a nap?"

"Always, if it's a nap. Sleep is a fine thing. You should try it sometime." Kate hadn't had a nap since she was five years old.

"Not while I'm driving, thanks."

"You're probably right. What's that line about Brother Sleep?"

"Something from Saint Francis, no doubt."

"No, it's Shelley. 'How wonderful is Death, Death and his brother Sleep.'"

"A comforting thought," she said drily.

"Isn't it? Isn't it just?" He took a swallow of the coffee and made a disgusted noise. "Goddamn goat's milk again. What's that you're listening to?"

She reached over and switched off the mumble of voices.

"A discussion of how to prepare for a catastrophe."

"Appropriate. Drop me at the station, would you? Then go home and get some sleep. You've done well today."

She tried to find the words patronizing, but in the end succumbed to the little glow of warmth they started up in her.

"We aim to please."

"Wish I thought the same of Trujillo. Christ, what a miserable night."

The garage was empty, which gave Kate a moment's pause until she remembered that this was a third Thursday, Lee's night working at the med center. Hell. The automatic door rumbled shut behind her, and she gathered up an armload of debris from the car—sodden clothing, sandwich bags, thermos and two cups, handbag, shoulder holster, jacket. Plodding up the stairs she thought, I have been on duty or reading files for fifty hours out of the last seventy-six, since six o'clock Monday night. I am tired.

With that thought came another, something that had occurred to her as she drove home. She glanced down at the boxes of newspapers and magazines piled at the back of the garage awaiting recycling, and then shook her head firmly and went on. Nope. Not even for Al Hawkin. It would wait. She needed to sit still, think of nothing, eat something. One word of praise from the man was not going to turn her into a fanatic.

At the top of the stairs she unlocked the door, stepped into the house, dropped the armload in an untidy heap on the floor, turned, and walked back down the stairs.

The magazine she was looking for wasn't in the recycling bins, so she turned to the doors under the stairs and began a haphazard search: intuition, past experience had taught her, was the best tool to use in breaking Lee's idiosyncratic filing system.

It took another twenty minutes, about average. She shoved the rest of the journals, magazines, and photocopied abstracts back into place, wrestled the doors shut, and returned to the house.

She tossed the magazine onto the kitchen table and went to investigate the refrigerator, whose contents sat complacent in the knowledge that in her present state they were quite safe. She took out the cheese bin and broke off some knobs of a hard orange cheddar, dumped half a box of crackers into a big bowl with the cheese and a couple of pears, poured some dark, heady Pinot Noir into a stubby French glass, and took the lot back to the table, where she sat with her elbows on either side of the magazine, emptying bowl and glass and reading the article.

It was even longer than she remembered, a fair chunk of the glossy art journal's hundred and fifty pages, and actually comprised separate articles by three different people, two men and a woman. She looked at the three photographs, two of them older and aristocratic faces, one aggressively blue-collar, and glanced through their biographical sketches, filled with vaguely familiar names of galleries, museums, and art schools, before turning to the articles themselves.

The woman, an editor of the journal, had written a very helpful if noncommittal review of the known history of Eva Vaughn, from the first, almost unheard-of one-woman show twelve years before, which had set the art world to talking and had sold out within a week, to the recent New York show that Kate had seen with Lee. Noncommittal was not the word, Kate decided. Frustrated, perhaps. Baffled, even. The woman was certainly torn and had retreated into the safety of facts. That Eva Vaughn was a difficult person to contact, and quite impossible for a mere journalist to meet face-to-face. That her oeuvre of paintings and sketches represented the first real threat to the supremacy of Abstract Expressionism since it had conquered the art world beginning in the forties. That her approach to art, painstaking and painfully traditional, had already begun to make people think about the role of art and about "painterly" paintings (a derogatory description, Kate was surprised and amused to find). That, most amazing of all, it was a woman who had swept in like a Vandal through Rome, a barbarian with power on her side against the civilized art establishment; a woman, an outsider, a source of absolutely maddening frustration.

The introductory article came to an abrupt end, through poor editing or a fear on the part of the author that her objectivity was about to fail her. The other two essays, by the men, were a pro and con, which began side by side before setting off to leapfrog through the advertisements for galleries, liquors, and jewelers. After trying to keep both going at once, Kate gave it up and read the anti-Eva Vaughn first, written by the man who looked like a bricklayer, beginning it at the kitchen table and ending up in the bath.

It was like reading a technical piece in a foreign language: the words looked familiar, but she found it almost impossible to hang on to the train of thought. Individual phrases stood out, though, and the cumulative effect was one of scathing, vituperative condescension. Eva Vaughn's vision was compared with flea-market seascapes, "Wyeth with a social conscience," "Grandma Moses naiveté combined with Rembrandtesque chiaroscuro," whatever that meant. As the writer became more insistent his obscurant terminology fell away like an acquired accent, until he seemed to be holding off Anglo-Saxon monosyllables with an effort.

Miss Vaughn [he wrote] has proven highly popular with the masses, those who grumble that they know what they like, that their five-year-old can do as well, those who like their bodies three-dimensional and their emotions simple. Eva Vaughn has legitimized classical forms for the twentieth-century proletariat. That the forms are empty of anything but nostalgia matters not.

Ouch. The writer went back to another bout of technical language, which Kate skimmed in self-defense, although some passages stood out:

In The Creek Vaughn achieves a level of sensual sentimentality that would render a male painter suspect of pedophilia. Quiet belongs in the pages of a specialist journal of female erotica. The derivative Troll Bridge looks as though Bouguereau had set out to finish Munch's Scream: horror prettied up.

Finally, he concluded:

Miss Vaughn's refusal to see and be seen makes her highly suspect in the world of art, where dialogue and criticism are the only things that save an artist from drowning in her own vision. Instead of learning from her century, she seems determined to turn her back on it, to the extent of an eremitical existence somewhere, apparently, in California, judging from the recurrence of redwood trees, Hispanic farm workers, and unrecon structed flower children gone somewhat to seed. Her motto seems to be 'Eva Vaughn, mystery lady of the brush,' as carefully nurtured an idiosyncrasy as we have seen for a long time, on a par with Dali's moustache and Warhol's collections. The public is beginning to know her by her characteristic absence. Perhaps the walls of certain galleries should follow suit, and recognize Miss Vaughn for the absent, imitative would-be that she is.

Scalpel and bludgeon. Kate wondered if Vaun had seen it, and if so whether she had difficulties picking up her brushes the next day. She took herself and her reading to bed, and tackled the third writer.

The aristocratic gentleman's style was more accessible than the anti's, but his enthusiasm was cautious. It would have been easy, Kate realized, for the editor to have chosen for this section an author whose effusiveness undermined his case but, despite her own reservations, the editor had not done so. His praise was unstinting, but he was sternly prepared to demonstrate the flaws and inadequacies of Miss Vaughn's work.

The names that come to mind [he wrote] are not those of the moderns, not Rauschenberg or Picasso or even Monet, but the noble and formal names of centuries past and styles no longer taught, or taught only as a dead language, for the purpose of translation. For Eva Vaughn has taken an outmoded, classical, dead style, imbued it with the idiom of the twentieth century, and restored it scintillating to life.

Her images are classically simple: a man, a woman, some children, a kitchen. Landscape is background, allegorical in its overtones but secondary to the humans who dominate all her work. The figures are generally unposed, or informally so, and so intimately known as to embarrass the viewer.

Aside from that, it is difficult to reduce the Eva Vaughn style to mere description, even to say that she belongs to one school or another. The lesbian lovers of Quiet are caught in a shaft of light from a window, two fresh bodies pinned into the still, silent moment of a Vermeer, a suspension of movement before life sweeps in again to animate and discomfit. Her farm laborers— Strawberry Fields, Three P.M., and Green Beans—rival Van Gogh for lumpen grittiness. The surface beauty (how seldom does a critic use that word in a review!) of Cos, Asleep could have come from Bouguereau's brush, and the voluptuous pleasure of the woman's sprawl could be an early Renoir, but whence comes the vague sense of unease? Is there menace in the shadow that falls across the bed, or is it merely the drapes? Is that a man's shoe in the corner, or the arm of a chair? Is the scarlet stain a part of the multicolored bed cover, or something more sinister? Is Cas actually asleep? Or does she lie there, murdered in her bed?

This is not an isolated fling of imagination in viewing Eva Vaughn's work, for emotions are her forte, particularly the dark and disconcerting ones. It is no accident that the structure of Troll Bridge echoes Edvard Munch's The Scream, but in this case the androgynous figure is caught in an innocuous, sunny stretch of bridge, with a normal couple approaching along an everyday bit of roadway. The woman/man has obviously been seized by a fit of insanity. Or is there something dark lurking under the bridge, something the couple has yet to see? Or, worse yet, that they are a part of?

Is there any style this painter has not mastered, any field she will not enter? Well, yes. She will have nothing to do with Abstract Expressionism; and she is not a Romantic. Romanticism is emotion for its own sake, and leads nowhere outside the frame that surrounds the canvas. Eva Vaughn fascinates, disconcerts, lays a hand on the hearts and minds of her viewers. That, after all, is what art is meant to do. She employs the light of Vermeer, the vigor of Caravaggio, the massive, sculptural drama of Michelangelo, and the eyes—no one since Rembrandt has painted eyes like this, eyes the depth and breadth and fullness of the human soul, of devastating honesty.

Objections to her art abound, and valid objections they are. She is naive, and she does largely ignore everything art has said over the past century. She is a painter of immense power, yet she is curiously passive. The agony and passion she paints, the menace she evokes, the madness and the sheer impossibility of life belong to others. She sees agony; she paints passion; whether she lives them or not cannot even be guessed.

It is this sense of distance, of noninvolvement, that may keep Eva Vaughn from joining the ranks of the truly great. She is young, true, but inhibitions and formalities have a way of becoming more ingrained with age, not less. A great artist leaves one with no doubt—he (and the pronoun is used advisedly) has borne the sufferings and ecstasies of his subject, himself, alone and without relief. When Eva Vaughn finally decides to paint herself with her pigments, then we shall see if we have here the greatest artist of the post-Picasso age. Even—say it quietly—of the century.

Tired as she was, this man's personal and authoritative analysis of the woman she had met as Vaun Adams kept Kate from sleep, kept her from noticing the storm building outside her window until she closed the magazine, when she suddenly noticed the rattling windows and gushing downspouts. She fell asleep as soon as she heard Lee come in, and her dreams were of strawberries.

11

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Across town Hawkin worked late in his office and eventually had himself driven home. He poured himself a drink and sat in the darkened living room of his rented house, watching the rain slant down in buckets like some B film of a storm at sea. At eleven o'clock the streetlights flickered, dimmed, and strengthened again, and the low hum of the aquarium pumps behind him hesitated, then clicked back on. In San Jose a huge area of the grid went abruptly black, and a thousand newcomers to Silicon Valley cursed and cracked their shins on the furniture as they searched blindly for flashlights and the stubs of Christmas candles. Old-timers just went to bed and told each other that it would be all over in the morning.

The storm center massed from Eureka to Santa Barbara, and the force of it was immense, incomprehensible. At one o'clock a homeless woman in an alleyway off Market Street died of exposure. At one-thirty another seven thousand homes across the Bay were suddenly without power; electric blankets went cold, and seldom-used fireplaces were stuffed with paper and lit. At two o'clock fire crews fought to save a burning house for its shivering owners, winds gusted to nearly a hundred miles per hour, and the bridges across the Bay were shut down. The gale ripped up trees by their roots, threw satellite dishes about like Frisbees, blew out the windows of office buildings. Before the night was out the storm would kill five people in the Bay counties: the woman in the alley; an old man whose heart stopped when a garbage can lid sailed through his bedroom window; a young mother who was standing in the wrong place when the wind plucked the neighbor's badly mounted solar panels from the roof; and two young men who were returning early from a liquid party, swerved to miss a falling branch, and went off the road into a madly swollen river.

At two-thirty a redwood tree died. One of hundreds that went down that night, this was a youngster, barely two centuries old, and its characteristic lack of a taproot made it vulnerable to the combination of near-liquid soil and hard gusts from the Pacific. Six of its cousins already lay across Tyler's Road, but this one fell directly upstream of one of the junctions of road and creek, washed top-first downstream, and inserted itself like a cork into one culvert with its roots blocking the mouth of the second. Watery fingers pried at the road bed.

At three o'clock the pent-up waters lifted the two four-foot-deep, fifteen-foot-long iron drainage pipes like a couple of straws and hurled them downhill, madly gobbling up huge pieces of the road and hillside as it passed. At three-thirty the winds faltered, very slightly. At four-ten the sodden hillside above the spot where Tina Merrill had been found abruptly let go and dumped several hundred thousand tons of mud and rock onto the upper end of Tyler's Road. At four-thirty the storm suddenly gave up and moved on to see what it could do with real mountains. By five o'clock silence descended, broken only by the pervasive sound of running water.

Light seemed to come earlier than usual that morning, as if the sun were anxious to see what its clever child had accomplished during the night. All over Northern California life slowly dug itself out and ventured into the changed world. For hundreds of miles the ground was carpeted with branches and trees, broken glass, tangled wires, drowned birds, billboards, mudslides, roof shingles. Anything and everything that could be lifted and moved by wind or water had been. The world took a shaky breath, grateful birds began to sing, and the sun rose in clear blue skies to give its blessing to this humbling of creation.

At six-thirty Kate jerked awake and wondered why the telephone had not yet rung. Then she came fully awake and laughed to realize that she had come to assume, after only three days, that the day began with a call from Hawkin. She stretched hard like a cat and turned over to kiss the sleep-soft mouth next to her. The phone rang.

"Martinelli," she answered through clenched jaws.

"Look, Trujillo just called to say the Road's out, and it'll be some time before anyone can even walk up it, so I thought we'd spend the morning here, trying to put a few things together."

"Good morning, Inspector Hawkin."

"What? Oh, good morning. Is this too early to call?"

"What time do you get up, anyway?"

"I don't. Get here when you can."

"Seven-thirty." She dropped the receiver down hard onto the base and hoped it hurt his ear.

At seven-fifteen she found him in his office, and at first glance she thought the wind had gotten in during the night. She pushed aside the drift of scraps, set a white paper bag on the corner of the desk, and drew out a whole-wheat croissant. Hawkin looked up from the pages he was pinning on the wall.

"What's that?"

"Breakfast. There's one for you, if you want it."

"Did you bring me a coffee?" He eyed the foamy top of her double cappuccino.

"You have a machine."

"I'm out."

She sighed, and poured some off for him into a chipped white mug with a thick brown glaze in the bottom.

"Al, I should tell you that these are the days when even the lowly secretary takes her boss to court when he expects her to make him coffee."

"Aren't you glad you're not a secretary? No sugar?"

"Aren't you glad it's not goat's milk? No sugar."

She took her roll over to the wall and studied his handiwork. Her original map had been replaced by a contiguous series of large-scale topographical maps, taped together and tacked to the wall. Houses and buildings were drawn in with small blue squares (even the octagonal, circular, and rhom-boidal ones), some of which had red check marks in them. Scraps of paper, mostly pieces of computer printout, but also handwritten notes, a few Xeroxed newspaper clippings, and several photographs, were taped and pinned in clusters, with a line leading from each collection to a blue square. On a number of the papers Kate saw green frames around words or paragraphs.