A Grave Talent

"Why?"

"Why what?" Hawkin grunted, trimming a length of paper and pinning it up to the wall.

"Why all this fuss? I've got all of it in the computer, if you want to retrieve it."

"I hate computers," he said absently. "Glorified filing cabinets that are always locking themselves up just when you need them. Computers don't think, they just suck up information and tyrannize the people using them into thinking the way they do: yes, no; A, B. It's limiting, and it's no way to catch a murderer."

"Is that—" Kate bit her tongue.

"Speak, Martinelli."

"Well, you have to admit it's unusual for someone to make lieutenant and then willingly take another job that means a reduction in rank. I was just wondering if being allergic to computers had something to do with it."

"It had nothing to do with it, Martinelli, and don't be so damned superior. My mistrust of computers isn't a phobia, it's common sense. I am in the vanguard of a new age, the post-computer age, when our race turns from the worship of silicon idols and recognizes anew the superiority of the human brain. As for the other," he said, stabbing up a note in green ink, "I dumped the job because I was too damned good at it. There was no challenge. Now, if you're not going to help me with this you can go buy some coffee."

"What are the red check marks?" she asked, peering at his wall collage.

"When I'm satisfied that we have relatively complete information on each person in the house, no large gaps, I put a check."

"And the green looks like it marks evidence." She was looking here at the first name attached to the farthest-left blue square, which was Tyler's. His pieces of paper included a note of two years' residence in the same town as Amanda Bloom's mother and the fact that Anna grew up less than ten miles from Samantha Donaldson's neighborhood. Both of those facts were marked in green ink, along with the word keys, circled in green, and the note Jag—hairs, similarly colored.

As the morning wore on, the leaves of paper on the wall multiplied and fluttered like aspen leaves whenever the door opened. The red checks gradually progressed in from both ends, a few green marks were added, and Kate's back began to ache. The telephone rang steadily throughout the morning with names to add, alibis checked, information received. Shortly after noon Kate picked it up to hear Trujillo's indistinct voice.

"That you, Casey? Sorry this line is so bad. It's actually down across the road, but it still works, if I can keep the press from driving over it too much. I wanted to tell you that I've been up the Road to the washout, and we probably won't be able to bridge it until tomorrow at the earliest. They're working on it from both sides, but the water in the creek is still pretty hairy. What's that? I couldn't hear you."

"I said," she shouted, "what about from the upper side, through the reserve?"

"Even worse, apparently. There's a lot of big trees gone down, and a major slide across the Road. Sounds like an ungodly mess. Look, this line is getting pretty bad. If you want to reach me you'll need to use the radio. I'll call you in a couple of hours. Ciao."

Ciao? she thought, looking at the phone. The man's up to his nicely tailored behind in mud and reporters, and he still manages to be trendy?

"That Trujillo?" Hawkin had been running his hands through his hair while he stood staring at his map, and he looked very rumpled.

"None other. The Road's out until at least tomorrow."

"Thought it would be. Christ, what a mess. At least there aren't any brown-haired six-year-old girls living on the Road, or I'd have to have somebody go in and haul her out." By the way he said her, Kate knew he meant Vaun Adams. "Let's take a break, I'm seeing contour lines in front of my eyes. Time for lunch."

Lunch was two beers and a hamburger for Hawkin, one beer and a chicken salad for Kate. After that it was back to the computer screen and the wall, and standing and thinking and half waiting for the telephone call, which finally came at two-forty. Kate took it, listened for a minute, and then interrupted.

"Hang on just a sec. Al? I think you should hear this." She waited until he picked up the other extension. "Go ahead, start again."

The words tumbled out over the telephone in a rush, as if the speaker did not want to stop and consider too closely what he was saying.

"Jim Marsh. Trujillo sent me to try and track down the owner of that ring we found in the Jaguar yesterday, and I think I've got it. I'm sorry it took me so long, but the roads are pretty bad all over. I started with the Donaldsons, but nobody there or at her school recognized it, and the same story with the Blooms. I went to the Merrill house, then to the child's school, and her teacher, who was just leaving, said she thought it might belong to the girl who was Tina's best friend. She gave me the address, and the child's mother said it looked like one her daughter had been given for her birthday last November, but she thought the kid had lost it. So we talked to the girl—she was scared, thought I was going to arrest her I guess—and she finally told me that she'd given it to Tina on her last day in school. Tina told her that it was a magic ring and that she was going to use it to fly to Never-Never-land—their teacher had been reading them Peter Pan, you see—and this kid was convinced that's where Tina was, in Neverland. She wanted—" His voice broke, and Kate realized how young he sounded. "She wanted to know when Tina was coming back. If you talk to Trujillo tell him I'm home getting drunk." The line went dead, and Kate slowly hung up, watching Hawkin do an imitation of a stone.

"That's it, then." He hung up his receiver.

"Are you going to have Trujillo pick her up?"

"No, damn it, I'm not. If she hasn't made a run for it by now, she's not going to, and I want to see her face when she hears about the ring."

"If you go like that, you'll ruin a nice suit," Kate noted mildly.

"Hell, you're right. We'll have to go by my place on the way. What about you?"

"Al, the last few days have turned me back into a Girl Scout, always prepared. I have a bag in the car."

12

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Tyler's Creek runs year-round. Ten months out of the year it is a tidy, attractive, well-behaved little stream where salamanders creep and damselflies skip. On a lazy August afternoon, when the kids laugh and haul rocks for a dam and the deepest pools are barely waist-high to an adult, it is very difficult to visualize the process by which that snarl of tree roots ten feet up the bank came to be wedged there or to imagine the force that caused the convenient sunning spot of a flat granite boulder to come to rest half a mile downstream from the nearest granite outcropping. Moss turns sere and brown, tadpoles become frogs, water bugs dimple the surface on a hot August afternoon.

Kate stood well back from the gaping edge of Tyler's Creek and realized that living in San Francisco, with the occasional power outage and blocked storm drain, did not fully prepare one for this. The image that had come to mind with the phrase "the road is out" combined a deeper degree of rutting, a lot of mud, and a bit of a gap across which some boards could be put; certainly nothing like this.

Tyler's Creek was a ravening, greasy gray monstrosity, thirty feet of grasping, hungry, primal power. It thundered like Niagara, pulling bits of the hillside, roadway, and vegetation into itself with its strong greedy fingers and eying its human audience hungrily. Kate swallowed, mute, as a piece of the opposite bank the size of a small car suddenly broke away and slithered down into the muddy torrent. A good-sized tree came washing around the turn, its naked roots twelve feet across. The waters rammed the roots into the soil. They stuck for a long moment before the bank gave and tossed the tree back into the center of the flood, where it whirled around crosswise in a fast, ponderous spin before being caught on a cluster of boulders, snapping instantly with a crack that momentarily silenced the constant roar, and folded itself in a streamlined fashion for the flume to run it to sea. All in barely thirty seconds.

She turned to Hawkin and raised her voice.

"We'll never get across that, not for days."

He shook his head, thin-lipped, his eyes on the boiling, white-capped demon that was Tyler's Creek.

"Any chance of a chopper?" she asked.

"Not until these gusts die down."

"Which won't be until after dark, if then. Al, I want to go around, find a place to cross."

"No, Casey, we'll just have to wait until they can rig a sling across."

"Tomorrow? Look, we've got an hour and a half of light, maybe more, and I can cover a lot of ground in that time. The creek isn't that long, according to the map. Let me try it. Please?"

He looked at her, at the waters, at the small group of people who stood well back from the opposite bank. His eyes traveled back to her, to Mark Detweiler and Tyler where they stood talking, and on to Tommy Chesler, who sat on a rock and watched the waves go past like a kid at a space movie.

"Tyler?" He had to shout, but the man looked up and limped over to them.

"Inspector Martinelli is thinking of taking a walk upstream to visit a friend on the other side. Is that practical?"

Tyler looked astonished, then even more so.

"You mean—?"

"I mean we should have someone over there to keep an eye on things. Can she get over there before dark?"

"It'd be a near thing, but it wouldn't be the first time someone's gone around—this section's been washed out before. There's even a sort of a bridge about a mile up, if it hasn't gone. It's hard to find, though," he said doubtfully.

"Could someone go with her, as far as the bridge?"

"I know where it is, but I'm not the fastest thing on two feet. Mark might, or, no, what about Tommy? He knows these hills better than anybody."

"Tommy Chesler?"

"Yes. I'm sure he'd jump at the chance to help."

"Casey?"

"Fine with me. I'll need a flashlight and a walkie-talkie. And a plastic bag if they're not waterproof."

The flashlight was waterproof and clipped onto her belt. The radio was not, and went into a pocket of her jacket, inside a doubled-over garbage bag from one of the cars. She settled her gun under her arm, zipped up the front of the jacket, and turned to Tommy, who was looking self-important and a bit nervous at his assignment.

"Let's go, Tommy."

A light hand touched her shoulder, and Al murmured into her ear.

"You don't have to put her under arrest unless you think it's best. Just keep an eye on her. And, Casey? Watch yourself."

"Thanks, I'll try. I'll give you a buzz on the radio from her house."

It was nearly impossible to make any kind of speed, but they tried. Kate was faster than Tommy, but he knew where to put his feet, which leaves were most slippery, what branches most likely to drench a passerby. Kate went down three times in the first half mile, once gouging her thigh badly on the exposed end of a broken branch. Tommy led, Kate scrambling in his wake, along the ridge of the hills over Tyler's Creek. Once when Kate looked up, she caught sight of a house on the opposite ridge, a mile off, that looked like that of Vaun Adams. She peered through the wet trees, trying to see if there was any movement, and her foot hit a slick smear of leaf-covered clay that threw her ten feet down the hill to fetch up hard against a tree trunk. She lay on her back for a moment, eyes closed, chest heaving, until the stab of the flashlight into her spine forced her to sit up. Tommy stood looking down at her, a worried expression on his young face.

"You okay, Inspector Martinelli?"

"Oh great… and to think… some people… do this… for fun."

"You're bleeding, Inspector Martinelli."

"Not much… Call me… Casey."

She accepted his hand to be pulled back onto her feet, clapped him on the back, and gestured that he should lead on.

What are you trying to prove, Martinelli? she berated herself. Trying to prove they didn't make a mistake, choosing you for the wrong reasons; watch that slippery bit, that's better, you're learning. Wonder if the damn bridge is there, what'll we do if it isn't? I don't much care for the idea of coming back this way by flashlight, but if the other choice is sitting under a tree with Tommy Chesler until morning, well, I hope the bridge is there. How could she have done it? How could she have done it, my God, with talent like that—could she have thrown it away, of course she could if she's crazy, that's what it all comes down to, doesn't it? All artists are a bit crazy, but no, please God no, don't make me have to arrest That One for strangling little girls. Oh come on, Martinelli, isn't that what you're fighting your way across this goddamn hillside for the privilege of doing, hurrying to arrest her because of a ring and an alibi that isn't, and what—oh Christ, nearly lost it that time, pay attention, Martinelli, a broken leg won't do anyone any good. Damn it, my leg hurts, probably get a fine infection in it, please God hold the sun up for a while, I can't get across that vicious bastard of a creek— "creek"? ha!—in the dark, how much farther, couldn't be too much, we've been going downhill for a long time, and it sounds loud now, there's Tommy, can we stop for two minutes, for one, just one…

They could, and did, but though the rest allowed them to catch their breath, it also allowed Kate's bangs, bruises, and cuts to catch up with her and make her all too aware of how wet and muddy she was. She forced herself to her feet.

"How much farther to the bridge?"

Tommy looked in the direction of the roar and seemed to be counting.

"Not far. If it's there. The water's going down, but whooee! it was higher this morning than I've ever seen it."

Wild thoughts of Tarzan swings from the redwoods flashed through Kate's mind, and a knot began to form in her stomach.

"Are you sure, Inspector—Casey, that you don't want to do something about your leg?"

"Let's get across first." The leg hurt, and the muscle quivered when she first stood up, but it would hold. They set off down the slippery hill toward the noise.

The bridge, such as it was, was there. Barely.

Kate and Tommy stood between two sturdy trees, the water lapping at their toes. Before them lay fifteen feet of fast, dangerous, dirty water, and three logs, twenty feet long and ten to twelve inches thick, that bobbled and fretted in the wash of water spilling over them.

Tommy squatted down onto his boots, a slow, calculating look on his face. Kate felt nearly paralyzed, the knot in her stomach reaching now from bowels to throat, and thought that really she'd better turn back fast, before the light was gone completely, because she couldn't think of a single thing in her training that mentioned how to avoid being swept away into the clutches of several million tons of water and rock. It was a long way from learning how to get a knife from a wacko junkie, and all in all she'd rather face a wacko junkie than this—two junkies, armed with guns even—and really the bridge could hardly be said to be "in," now could it? And Christ, she hadn't even brought a rope to do a Tarzan swing. There'd be no failure in turning back now, no cowardice; even a man would say that pile of floating sticks was no bridge, certainly not passable…

She tore her eyes away from the creek and looked at Tommy, his face calm, deliberate, still calculating slowly.

"Is it passable?" she asked. Her voice, she was pleased to note, was steady, though shouting helped.

He pursed his lips and seemed to come to a decision. He straightened and shouted back at her.

"I think so. There used to be four logs, but if those three haven't gone, they probably won't now."

Probably.

Probably was very little protection against that hungry-looking water. Probably was no help at all if the extra joggling of her weight caused a log to slip out from its wedged mooring and toss her gaily into the torrent that—

She pushed the thought into a closed room, shut the door hard, and set her mind to the job.

"Thanks, Tommy, I couldn't have found it without your help. I won't have any problems finding the Road—"

"Oh, no, I'm not going to leave you now," he said, and before she could grab him, he was into the muddy water. The three logs settled obediently under his weight, bound together somehow, and although his feet disappeared under the water, he walked surely across and up onto the other side and turned in the loose tangle of branches to wait for her.

Kate took a step into the water and stopped as a chilling little thought bubbled up into her mind. Tommy Chester is a suspect, said the little singsong voice. Tommy is not completely right between the ears, said the voice, and Tommy found the first body, and, yes, it made him sick but what if he himself did put it there, and what if he's waiting to give those logs a nudge when you're out on them? She looked across at the darkening hillside, less than twenty feet away. Was that a shadow across his face, or was he smirking at her?

She took another step into the icy water, and another, until the toes of her shoes hit the rough end of one of the logs, and she looked up at Tommy, who stood, waiting, in the water at the other end. Half consciously she lowered the zipper of her jacket, and she stepped onto the logs.

It actually was a bridge—uneven and very wet, but it was thirty inches wide, and the logs did hold together as a unit.

Tommy didn't move, and she took another step, and another, and now she could feel the water tug at her feet, and she walked with bent knees, her arms outstretched. Tommy didn't move, and she took three more steps into the grasping torrent, and three more, and she was four feet from the far end when her shoes betrayed her and she went down.

Her right arm caught around the top log, and she clung desperately as the full force of the water sucked her body into the middle of the stream and pulled. Her muscles fought to get one leg up, around the logs, to sit up, and she might have made it, might have won, but for the shifting of her body on the tenuous balance of the wood in the water. She felt the whole bridge shift violently and cried out, tried to scramble to the bank, so close, and a wave slapped her face as the bridge became a raft, and she flung her left hand hopelessly toward solid ground, and it connected with flesh, a hard, warm human hand that gripped her wrist like a vise and held her gasping and blind in the water as the logs scraped and slithered across her body, struck her hip a glancing blow and began their brief journey to the sea.

She was buried in water, but the hand was still there, one solid reality in the tumbling, shocking, cold universe. She worked her other hand up to the bony wrist above her and clung. Something touched her side, and again, and then a third time, and she realized that she was among the tangle of branches that dragged into the water and that the rush of the stream was slightly less powerful here. She got her face to the surface, gulped a wet breath and coughed violently, but managed to catch a glimpse of the bare branches that surrounded her. The grip on her wrist held, though it must be costing him a lot to hang on, she knew, and she raised her head again to look for a branch big enough to take her weight. There were none this far out, but she forced her free hand to let go of his wrist, slowly, and plunged her arm up into the tangle, pulling herself deeper into the thicket, and then her legs found a submerged purchase and, half lying on her back, she shoved and pulled and scrabbled up and out of the current, which seemed to gibber its disappointment as she cleared the branches and collapsed on the bank beyond, coughing and retching.

It was some time before she could speak. ,

"You can let go of my wrist now, Tommy."

"I can't."

She turned her head and looked at him where he lay, arms fully outstretched between the anchoring tree and her hand, his feet in the water, a distressed look on his face. She started to giggle, then, in relief and the dregs of terror and the absurdity of their position.

"Well, you'll have to, damn it, or my hand will fall off."

He started laughing too, then, and the two drenched and filthy creatures lay guffawing helplessly on the edge of the mindless creek, until Kate finally crawled to her knees and pried his grip, finger by finger, from her wrist. She rubbed her hand to bring back the circulation and watched Tommy slowly flex the abused muscles of his arms and chest and try to move his hands.

"You're going to be damn sore tomorrow, Tommy."

He thought for a moment. "Not as sore as you'd be if I'd let you go."

"No," she agreed, and started to laugh again until sensation came back to her fingers. She staggered to her feet, moved away from the water, and sat down on a log to begin the necessary process of removing several gallons of water from shoes and clothing. The weakness in her hands was terrible, and she concentrated on squeezing out the sodden jacket until she looked up to see Tommy seriously pouring about a quart of water from a boot, and she started laughing again, weakly, until she needed to go behind the bushes, but the thought of peeling off her wet, clinging trousers was too much for her, so she just lay back and laughed until the tears came, and then the telephone rang.

It was the walkie-talkie, crackling and muffled by the water-sogged heap of cloth and its plastic covering. It squawked angrily for quite some time before Kate uncovered and unwrapped it.

"Good evening, Al, at least I assume this is Al—who else would call at such a totally inconvenient time? Remind me to tell you sometime what I think of your telephone calls, Al. What can I do for you? Over."

His voice came blasting tinnily out from the machine.

"Thank God you're all right, are you all right, and what about Chesler? Tyler saw what he said looked like the bridge wash by a minute ago. Over."

"It was the bridge. We're both wet but thanks to Tommy unhurt, just bangs and a mild case of hysterics, but if I sit here and chat with you we'll both freeze to death, so I think I'll sign off if it's all the same to you." And she did so.

All four feet squished as they walked, but despite the wind the effort of movement kept the cold from becoming seriously threatening, and the path back to the Road was both shorter and less strenuous than it had been on the other side. It was nearly full dark when they reached the deserted road.

"Where are we now, Tommy?"

"About a half a mile up from the washout."

"Then it's about a mile to the Dodsons?"

"Is that where we're going?"

"No, you're going home. It shouldn't take you more than ten minutes and it's not that dark. I'm going on up."

Tommy stood for a long minute, his face screwed up with the effort of thought. Then he shook his head and turned decisively uphill.

"I suppose you can threaten me with your gun, or handcuff me to a tree, but short of that you won't get rid of me. Tyler told me to guide you, and that's what I'm going to do. Sorry, Casey, you're stuck with me." She saw his teeth flash white in the dark and heard him move off. She fell in beside him and undipped the flashlight from her belt.

"All right, and thank you, Tommy. I'll take you, but on one condition: you have to promise me that if I tell you to do something, you'll do it, immediately, no questions. Even if you think I'm in danger. You've saved my life once tonight, but remember, I'm a cop, and it's what I'm paid to do. Promise me? No hesitations?"

"Okay. We're going to the Dodsons', then?"

"No, we're not. We're going to see Vaun Adams."

Something in her voice stopped him dead. She kept walking.

"Vaunie? But you don't… you can't think… Vaun? But, she's…"

"I think it would be best if you went home, Tommy, I really do."

"But you're not going to arrest her? She couldn't have killed those girls, she couldn't have."

"Tommy, do you know anything you haven't told us about?"

"No, but—"

"She couldn't have done it because you like her, is that it?"

"Yes, but—"

"I like her too, Tommy, but there's a lot of things we've found that make us want to ask her some more questions, to see what she knows."

Euphemisms for the truth, but Tommy was just simple enough to half believe them and trust in her official status. His agitation lessened, though he remained dissatisfied. At the foot of Vaun's hill he looked up to where a soft glow illuminated the windows of the big room.

"I'll go up, but I won't go in."

"You can go now, if you want. You've been a tremendous help, Tommy. I can't even begin to thank you."

"No, I'll take you to the door." Tommy had accepted the responsibility and was no more about to abandon her than he would have left Tina Merrill, although just then he'd have been hard put to decide which task was the more unpleasant.

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Kate pulled at the bell rope and listened as the deep, gonglike sound reverberated through the still house and died away. She heard no vibrations of walking (or running) feet, no sound of response. She tried the door, and was surprised to find it locked. Apprehension stirred in her. She pushed past Tommy and moved around the front of the house to the big expanse of windows. She could see the back of the sofa, the wood stove with a low fire flickering in its glass front and a squat black pot on top, a single electric light shining above the sofa, a low glossy cabinet with its door slightly ajar and a nearly empty bottle on top. No glass.

Moving faster now, Kate continued around, tried the side door, found it locked, and moved up around the house past the woodpile to the back, where the house dug itself into the hillside. Narrow windows, below knee level, were all that appeared of the lower story. A shaft of light from the swinging door that joined the kitchen and living room, propped open now, angled across the kitchen table, set with one plate, one bowl, silver. She went down on her knees, trying to see into the living room from this side.

"What's wrong, Casey? Isn't she—"

"Oh, God, oh God, I knew it," Kate moaned, and tugged impotently at the window frame. The damn woman would choose tonight to start locking her doors!

"What's the matter?"

"Damn it all, man, get out of my way," she swore and pushed him aside, ran back to the neat stack of firewood next to the side door, and snatched up a sturdy branch. At the window she ordered Tommy back out of the way, yanked off her jacket and held it up across her face, and slammed the piece of wood into the window. She ran the branch hard along all four edges, and shards of glass exploded onto the tile floor, the chairs, and the potted plants with a violent sound that shocked the night. Kate swept the splinters from the ledge with the stick, threw her jacket across the bottom of the frame, scooped the flashlight up from the ground and thrust it at Tommy, and rolled herself into the room.

"You stay there," she ordered, and crunched rapidly across the glass into the living room.

Vaun Adams lay neatly tucked up on the sofa that faced the fireplace, her face slack, one hand limp over the edge of the pillows. A small, stubby glass and a paperback novel lay on the floor beneath the hand. The tumbled black curls gleamed even in the dull lamplight, and her face was the pallor of death.

But alive, still alive, though her heart was slow and erratic.

"Tommy!" Kate yelled, "I need the nurse. Go find her, fast."

"You mean Terry Allen? Yes, I think she's up here today, though she usually works—"

"Go!" she screamed, and he took off, the flashlight skit tering its beam across the ground as he ran heavily past the windows. Kate found a bowl in the kitchen and got to work on Vaun. It took an agonizingly long time before Vaun roused enough to vomit, and she sank immediately back into her deadly lethargy. Kate left her lying on her side and retrieved the walkie-talkie. Her back twinged, for some reason, as well as her thigh. She ignored them.

"Hawkin, Hawkin, c'mon Al, I need you."

"Hawkin here, Casey, what's up?"

"Vaun Adams has taken some kind of overdose. I emptied her out, but I need medical support right now. Tommy's gone to get the nurse, but this lady needs a hospital. Is there any chance of getting a medicopter in?"

"The wind's died down a lot. If you can get a lighted clear area, they should do it. Any chance of that?"

"I can't leave her now, but when Tommy gets back we'll do something. This may be him now, gotta go."

If anything Vaun looked worse, her breathing slow and rasping. The bob and swirl of lights coming up the hill had caught Kate's eye, and she went to open the front door to Angie and Amy Dodson and a hairy man whom she took to be the absent Tony, returned from Sacramento. She spoke quickly.

"Vaun's sick. She needs a doctor. There's a medical helicopter that'll be here in twenty minutes, but they need a big, flat, clear area with lights around it to land in. Can you do it?"

Angie recovered first.

"The pony's field, that's the best place. We'll make bonfires at the four corners. Would that do it?"

"Ideal, but hurry."

Angie pulled Amy away, and Tony followed, slower. Her rapid voice came to Kate's ears. "You take Matilda and ride as fast as you can to the Newborns and to Bobby's place. Get them up here, tell them to bring some kerosene…"

Kate stirred up the fire and watched Vaun's chest rise slowly, struggling against whatever it was in her bloodstream. No sign of pills in the basin—they must have been dissolved in something. The whiskey? The woman's pale face turned slowly bluer, her breath more ragged. Kate laid two fingers against Vaun's carotid artery and picked up the walkie-talkie with the other hand.

"Al? Look, I'm not going to be able to respond for a while. I'm going to have to start CPR in a minute. She's losing it."

"Seven minutes, Casey. Are the lights going?"

"I just saw the first one start, Al. There she goes. Martinelli out."

The walkie-talkie crashed to the floor. Kate pulled Vaun onto the carpet and started the rhythmic breathing and heartbeat. Fifteen heartbeats, two quick breaths; fifteen heartbeats, two quick breaths. In two minutes Terry Allen came running in with a small bag in her hand, out of breath, and dropped next to Kate to take over the chest compression. Kate turned gratefully to the easier breathing assist, and the two women worked in silence until they felt the distant, subaudible thud of the helicopter beneath the gentle crackle from the stove and their own sounds. It came closer, and when it was directly overhead they felt the pounding of it take over their rhythm, and still they worked, until finally the uniformed paramedics clattered in with what seemed like a crowd of escorts and onlookers. One of them kneeled next to Terry and took over, the other gently pulled Kate to one side and set to work with tanks and masks. Kate knelt there, dully overcome by their competence, aware of Terry stretching her arms and clenching her hands a few times. She walked over to Kate and put a hand on her shoulder.

"Come and sit down until they can look at your cuts."

Confused, Kate looked down at her thigh, which was still oozing red through her trousers, and her arm, which had stopped bleeding.

"They're not that bad." She just wanted to sleep, for a week.

"No, I suppose you could go on leaking all over everything until you collapsed, if you like."

"It's just a gash," she protested.

"I mean the ones on your back, or hadn't you noticed that there's blood clear down your leg?"

Kate reached back with her hand, and drew it back red. She felt suddenly weak.

"No, I hadn't. It must've been from the window. Can't you do something? Just put a butterfly bandage on it or something?"

"That really should be seen by a doctor," the nurse hedged, in a tone of voice that said she often had done things of the sort without a doctor's supervision.

"I sure as hell am not going to report you to the AMA, and these two are too busy to notice. Just do something to keep it from getting any worse."

She allowed Terry to push her onto a stool, where she sat, vaguely aware of a male voice ordering the room cleared, of Terry preparing a hypodermic with novocaine, of scissors on cloth and the needle prick and spreading patches of numbness on her back, of the sure hands and the tug of stitches. All the time, though, she was fully aware only of the body on the floor, the pale chest with its small breasts and blue veins beneath the strong dark hands of the medical technicians who fought hard, impersonally, for her life. At one point she heard a distant voice that she realized had been hers.

"You're working on another Cezanne," she told them, "a female Renoir." The less occupied of the pair glanced up at her curiously. "That's Eva Vaughn."

It obviously meant nothing to him, but the other one glanced up, startled, to meet her eyes for an instant. The wide mouth remained slack, the eyes stayed rolled up under the pale lids. Behind her Terry stitched and clipped and bandaged, and disappeared for a few minutes before returning with a soft flannel shirt, slightly too long in the sleeves. She fumbled with the unfamiliar apparatus of the shoulder holster, and eased it off Kate along with the shreds of her shirt, then gently dressed Kate again. Kate never took her eyes off of Vaun.

The hand that had painted Strawberry Fields lay forgotten on the floor like a crushed flower. Kate sat and stared at the slightly curled fingers, the short fingernail edged with blue paint, and knew that she had not been fast enough. When one of the men sat back on his heels, she closed her eyes at the words to come.

"We have a heartbeat."

It took a second to sink home. Kate's eyes flared open to see the man's expression, of faint hope and satisfaction.

"She's not—she'll make it?"

"Her heart's beating. There's no telling yet what damage there's been, or when she'll breathe, but the heart's going. Let's get her on the stretcher," he said to his partner, and to Kate, "You'd better come too, you're not looking too hot."

"No."

"Casey, you need to see a doctor," Terry protested.

"No. I'm staying here until I'm relieved."

"Your choice." The paramedic shrugged. "She'll be at the General in town." He secured a blanket and the straps around Vaun. She looked white now, not blue. Terry fretted around Kate until the man suggested that if she would carry some equipment it would save them a trip back up. Kate followed them to the door and stood watching the men navigate their burden down the hillside to the helicopter, whose spotlights overcame the dim remains of the bonfires. She closed Vaun's front door and turned the key. How long would it be before the anesthetic wore off? she wondered. Better take a look at the place now, while I can still move.

Kate walked like an automaton through each of the downstairs rooms, checking windows, comparing the rooms with what she had seen the day before. Upstairs the studio looked much as it had, tidy, on hold but for the two brooding easels. The slab of glass that the artist used as a palette had moved and grown a smear of brilliant orange-red, and there was a large, white-bristled brush she didn't remember seeing. The figure on the undraped canvas had evolved into a woman, unidentifiable as yet. The spiral-bound drawing pad which Hawkin had left on the top of the cabinet under the south window was now on the long table. When Kate lifted the cover, the only drawing was the quick charcoal sketch of her and Hawkin coming up the hill, the tall trees still seeming to flinch away from the ominous challenge of Hawkin's gaze. She touched it lightly, and found that it had been sprayed with fixative. In the spiral binding there was an edge of perforated paper behind the drawing. Vaun had done at least one other, and torn it out—or, she corrected herself, it had been torn out. No point in looking in the fireplace for it now. She straightened, wincing, and went to check the studio windows, which had sliding metal frames. Each one was firmly caught in its latch until the second to last one next to the storage room, which flew open unexpectedly at her tug and caused her to curse with the awakened pain from a hundred sites down her back and legs and arm and—. She stood still for a long moment until the worst of it had passed, then let out her breath in a hiss and turned back to the window. She wished for her flashlight as she examined the frame and the track, slid the window shut again, pulled at it tentatively. It had latched. She looked more closely at the windowsill and picked up a tiny sliver that lay there, pursed her lips in thought, put it back down where she had found it, and went downstairs to the walkie-talkie. She swore again as she tried to bend down to where it had been kicked, just under the edge of the sofa, but gave that motion up quickly and settled for a sort of sit-and-slump to the floor. The casing looked a bit squashed; she wondered if it still worked.

"Al? Anyone home?"

"Hawkin here."

"They're taking her now. They managed to get her heart started again."

"Thank God. Are you going with them?"

"No, I'm staying here."

"Tommy Chesler was down at the washout a few minutes ago. He said you'd been hurt."

"Scrapes and cuts, that's all."

"Go with the helicopter, Casey, somebody should stay with her."

The shots were definitely wearing off, and a wave of weakness and pain and heavy exhaustion washed over her.

"Oh, Christ, Al, she's not about to take off on us, not for a long time. Damn it, she may be a vegetable the rest of her life."

"I want you out of there."

"No."

"Why the hell not, Martinelli?"

His anger sparked her own, and the truth tumbled out of her.

"I don't know why not, Al. I have a bad feeling about this, but I hurt and I've lost some blood and I know my brain isn't functioning properly. I can't think straight, but there's something here that smells rotten, and if I stay here I'll be able to see it more clearly in the morning. It's too late to argue, Al, they've already left, and I'm going to sleep for a few hours. And if you call me on this damn thing before seven tomorrow morning I will not be held responsible for your eardrums."

It was very comfortable, leaning against the sofa in front of the fire, but the upholstery and the carpet were spattered with her own blood and stank sourly of vomit and Kate couldn't bear to think of sleeping there, or on Vaun's bed for that matter. She walked across the carpet on her knees to load a few logs into the stove, crawled upright against the armchair, and stumbled upstairs again. The studio sofa was so stained and battered already, a bit of blood and dirt would pass unnoticed. She eased herself down face first, with the walkie-talkie and the probably useless gun close at hand, and fell gratefully into darkness.

The crunch of shoes on glass brought her awake some hours later. She reached for her gun, but the sudden movement of her back muscles lit the flames of the two deep cuts and the thirty-odd needle punctures from the stitches, to say nothing of the bruises. She must have made a noise, because the feet stopped.

"Casey?"

"Al? Is that you? I'm upstairs."

It was ridiculous, but without adrenaline she could only inch off the couch like an old rheumatic cripple. The anesthetic had most emphatically worn off, and the burn of the glass cuts added to the torn thigh, gouged arm, scraped hip, and several square feet of bruises made her stand very still and wish she could get by with just moving her eyes.

Even in the dim lamplight she must have been a sight. Hawkin stopped abruptly.

"God in heaven, what happened to you?"

"Just a nice hike in the woods, Al. Hey, don't look like that. It's mostly mud and bruises. They'll scare children for a few days but won't bother me by tomorrow. Really. I'm just stiff."

"Nearly a stiff, by the looks of it. Let me see your back."

"Al, I'm fine."

"That's an order, Martinelli."

She started to shrug, thought better of it, and turned to let the dim lamp shine on her back. He lifted the long tail of Vaun's shirt, peeled back the tape, looked and gently touched one or two spots, and let it fall.

"No internal bleeding? No ribs gone?"

"None. I wouldn't even have the cuts if I had taken more care with the window."

"You were in a hurry."

"I was. Any news of her?"

"The same."

"How did you get here?"

"Helicopter."

"I didn't—" She stopped. "I guess I did hear it, but I thought I was dreaming. You could have left it until morning."

"And if the wind comes up again? You'd be here for days. Show me what made you want to stick around."

"A lot of little things. No note, though of course not all suicides leave one. No pills—whatever she took was dissolved. The whiskey bottle looks like it was wiped clean. There's about an inch in the bottom for the lab to check. She also set the table for dinner and had a pot of some kind of stew on top of the stove, which got pretty scorched before Terry Allen pulled it off. The book she was reading did not strike me as the sort of thing I personally would want to have as my last conscious awareness, while it would be ideal as a way of taking the mind off an unpleasant day. Light and undemanding. Her painting's not finished, but she worked on it during the day. Then there was this, in the only window that was not securely latched, though it was closed."

Hawkin picked up the sliver of wood and took it to the light.

"Shaped with a knife," he commented.

"It looked like it."

He turned the sliver around thoughtfully between thumb and fingers, and studied her face. She was obviously fighting a losing battle to keep fatigue and pain at bay, but there remained a stubborn set to her mouth and defiance in her eyes. She was tough, this one.

"You don't want to think she's guilty, do you, Casey?"

"What I want has very little to do with it at this point," she said stiffly.

"I wouldn't say that."

"Al—"

"But you're right, of course. It does smell wrong." He turned away, ignoring the astonished relief that flooded into her face, and spoke into the walkie-talkie.

"Trujillo?"

"Trujillo here."

"I'll be leaving your man here tonight, if you'll tell his wife. Also, I need you to get through to my people and tell them I want Thompson and his crew down here first thing tomorrow, and that it has to be Thompson. I'll be leaving here in a little while with Casey. I'll see you at the hospital in the morning. Got that?"

"All clear. How's Casey?"

"She looks like hell and no doubt feels worse, but she'll live. Hawkin out."

Hawkin retrieved Kate's equipment and found a wool blanket in Vaun's bedroom to wrap around her shoulders. They left the warmly dressed sheriff's deputy on guard and walked slowly down toward the glare of lights in back of the Dodson house. Movement helped sore muscles not to stiffen, Kate told herself fiercely, a number of times.

"Several questions come to mind, do they not?" Hawkin mused. "If this is not a suicide attempt, and I think we can safely rule out accident, who would want her dead, and why?"

"Someone here, on the Road."

"Who knew her habit of a drink before dinner, assuming the lab finds something in the bottle, and who had access to the bottle since last night. I suppose he planned on planting a suicide note and clearing up anomalies like the pot on the stove when he came back. Or she. Or maybe he just wanted to make sure it worked. Maybe he realized that a drug is an uncertain means of killing someone."

"It must be related to the other murders."

"Two unrelated murderers in one small area is unlikely, I agree. Revenge? Fear? Or somebody who knew the woman's past decided to use it to explain her suicide, just taking advantage of an unrelated situation, like he took advantage of the storm, which would have delayed anyone finding her until it was far too late, had it not been for a stubborn policewoman. Woman murderer commits remorseful suicide, case closed."

"And if the killings didn't stop?" It was hard to think against the jolting pain of walking on uneven ground, but Kate tried.

"Ah, there's the prize question, which leads us into a very… interesting possibility. A whole different ball game." His voice was distant, but when Kate stumbled on the rough track in the bobbing flashlight beam, his free hand was there on her elbow, steadying her.

"You sure you're okay walking? I can get a stretcher."

"No, I'm fine, just tired."

"You realize, of course," he continued as if the interruption had not occurred, "that one possibility, a small one, I admit, but worthy of consideration, is that Vaun Adams has been the target of all this, that those three little girls gave their lives to set her up for suicide."

"Oh, come on, Al, that's…"

"Farfetched? Yes. The work of a madman? That too."

Kate began to shiver. "But why? Why would someone hate her so much? Why not just bang her over the head on one of her walks and make it look like an accident?"

"You find who, I'll tell you why. Or vice versa. I agree it's a crazy idea, but it does fit better than the theory of Vaun Adams as a psychopath wanting to be caught."

They had come up to the Dodson cabin now, the helicopter just beyond. Eight or nine residents stood in an uncertain group near a pile of brush and wood.

"Good evening, Angie," Hawkin greeted her, "and Miss Amy. Thank you for your help this evening."

"Is Vaun going to be all right?"

"I don't know. If anything comes through I'll send word by Trujillo. I'm glad your husband made it back before the road went out. Is he here?"

"He and Tommy went up the Road to let people know what's happening. Everyone will have heard the helicopters."

"Right. Look, Angie, tell him to go down to the washout tomorrow and give someone his statement. If the wind stays down we'll be around here, but he and old Peterson and a couple of others are missing from the records."

"I'll tell him."

"Thanks. 'Night, everyone, you can let the fires go out. Maybe you should leave Matilda in her stall tonight, though. We'd hate to land on her head in the morning."

The cold and the pain and the loss of blood had Kate trembling by the time they reached the copter, and Hawkin and one of the paramedics had to help her climb in. The man wrapped her in more blankets, strapped her in with Hawkin at her side, closed the door, took his own seat. She had seen his face before. Why was thinking becoming so laborious? His face, bent over Vaun's still body with the mask. What was wrong there, what was so terribly stupid? The copter lifted off, Hawkin leaned into her, and she knew what it was.

"Al, these two paramedics? They know. Who she is, I mean. I said something to them—"

"It's all right. They told me what happened, and I had a talk with them. They understand, and they won't blab. You done good, kid. Have a rest now."

Her body hurt all over, but in her mind the words brought relief, sweet relief. She leaned against Hawkin's broad shoulder and surrendered to the darkness.

TWO

THE PAST

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The past is but the beginning of a beginning.

—H. G. Wells, The Discovery of the Future

It was all so long ago, so closely encompassed and complete;

so cut off as by swords from the bitter years that lay between…

And afterwards, the stark shadow of the gallows

had fallen between her and that sun-drenched quadrangle of grey and green.

But now—?

—Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night

14

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California spent the weekend at the task, familiar to her assorted generations, of digging herself out from under mounds of debris and rubble. The whine of chain saws filled the air; the scrape and slop of shovels moving mud, the taps and bangs of hammers replacing shingles and panes of glass were heard in every corner. There was a belated run on candles and purified water, "for next time." The repair trucks from the gas and electric company and the telephone companies and the cable television companies pushed gradually farther out from the centers into the hills, and deep-freezes hummed back to life, telephones rang, televisions brought pictures of the other storm victims. Power at Tyler's Barn was reestablished on Monday, and the first thing Tyler's lady Anna did was to put Vivaldi's Gloria on the stereo and blast the joyous chorus up into the hills, startling the pale horses. She found the house exceedingly dreary without lights and refrigeration, and had it not been for all the extra residents who needed feeding she would have escaped the close surveillance and the noise and tension with all the others who were now visiting friends and family.

The Sunday papers all ran full-page photographic spreads of the storm, freak incidents and bizarre incongruities next to close-ups of mud-smeared faces caught in attitudes of fear or exhaustion or agonized relief. The events on Tyler's Road rated a small paragraph, and Kate wondered how long it would be before some enterprising reporter discovered that the unconscious woman being treated for a drug overdose was also an artist whose last show had brought well over a million dollars in sales.

Tyler's Road reemerged in its entirety over the next few days, as Tyler, with Hawkin glaring over his shoulder, arranged for an unprecedented amount of huge machinery to invade the bucolic hills and lay two larger culvert pipes and scrape the mudslide from the Road's upper end. Kate spent two days lying uncomfortably on her side, reading a ridiculously thick stack of files and trying to urge her back and leg to heal. Al Hawkin spent sixteen hours a day on the case—up at Vaun's house, meeting with the representatives of three counties, the FBI, and the press, talking to three sets of parents, staring out of various windows—and began to show it.

And in her hospital bed, Vaun Adams slept on.

On the Monday following Thursday night's storm, Kate's little white car turned off the street and stopped in front of a garage door that was sternly marked No Parking. Kate got laboriously out of her car, left it blocking the driveway, and climbed the steps to Hawkin's bell. The door opened an instant after she took her finger from the little lighted circle, and Hawkin stood there with his venerable briefcase, shaven, in a clean, open-necked shirt, with dark circles under his eyes.

"Morning, Casey, you look nice. I'd forgotten you had legs."

"Come on, Al, it's not even a week since you saw me in a skirt."

"Ah, yes, shiny-clean Miss Martinelli wondering if Alonzo Hawkin would bite. God, only a week?"

"Seven days."

"How're you feeling?"

"Fine. A bit stiff, but that's because I haven't been able to run or swim since Friday."

"Sure."

"Really. The leg cut is healing cleanly, and one of the ones on my back has reached the itching stage already."

"And the other one?"

"It's deeper," she admitted, "and the middle of it bleeds if I jump around much, but it's coming along."

"You okay for driving? What does the doctor say?"

"The doctor says I'm not to do racing sprints in the pool or lift weights. A nice quiet drive and some nice calm interviews are no problem."

"All right, but if you want me to drive, just say the word."

"I will."

Hawkin removed his jacket, opened the back door of the car, tossed the objects already on the seat to one side, and threw the jacket in.

"That's for you," commented Kate, cautiously folding herself into the front.

"Thank you very much, but I don't think your coat will fit me."

"The pillow, the pillow. I get tired of hearing your head thump on the door every time the car moves."

"All the comforts."

To Kate's surprise, though, he didn't immediately curl up to sleep. As she dodged her way across town to the freeway he was reviewing the files from the case at his feet. He did not read the pages so much as glance at each one, as if to remind himself of the contents.

The worst of the morning commute was over, and the traffic moved smoothly across the Bay Bridge. On the east end, however, the inevitable snarl was compounded by a spill—a garbage bag filled with crushed aluminum cans that had fallen from the back of a pickup truck. Cars crawled past the trivial barrier of flattened metallic bits and then immediately accelerated to the speed limit once past it. Kate shook her head at the mysterious ways of automobile drivers and turned to Hawkin with a comment.

He was asleep, heavily unconscious of the freeway, the fluttering papers sprawled across his lap, the hard door's jamb against his head, the glasses crooked on his nose. He looked like he could sleep for a week, thought Kate, exasperated. With one hand on the wheel and both eyes on the cars ahead she gritted her teeth and stretched gingerly back for the pillow, which she inserted between skull and metal. She then reached over and drew the file from under his limp hand and pushed it, closed, between the seats. Three or four pages had slipped down onto the floor, and she retrieved those too. She took her eyes from the road for an instant to aim the loose sheets between the file's covers, and as she did she recognized what he had been reviewing: the transcript of Vaun Adam's testimony during her murder trial.

Kate knew those pages well. Some of it she could recite from memory. All day Sunday she had spent collating the myriad fragments into a coherent whole, working toward a portrait of the woman who lay unconscious in a hospital room a hundred miles to the south. The portrait, though voluminous, was oddly dissatisfying, incomplete. She could only hope that by the end of the day it would be less so.

Vaun Adams had been thirteen when she lost both her parents in an accident. She had, even by that early age, a history of considerable talent and considerable mental instability, and to be thrown into orphanhood at the inevitably tumultuous age of puberty was a shock she apparently never completely overcame. She was sent to live with her aunt and uncle. Her mother's half brother was a stolid farmer with two children, a large mortgage, and now a problem niece. Eventually Vaun settled into a state of equilibrium there, although she never really fit in, never made any close friends. Until her last year of high school.

A few months before her eighteenth birthday Vaun began to go around with a young man who had come back to finish his degree after a two-year absence from school. Andy Lewis was something of an enigma at school, and rumors grew up around him. The most popular was that he had been in the Army, slaughtering small brown people, having lied about his age to enlist. Needless to say, the army had never heard of Andrew C. Lewis, though the records from the draft board showed that he had been issued a deferment on the grounds of chronic back pain, an injury that did not keep him from the high school football team.

This mysterious, slightly sinister figure came to school a grown man among children, a blooded killer (or so rumor had it) among the sheep, at a time when across the country students wore peace pins and burned their draft cards—or at least talked about it. While the other seniors experimented with hair down to their collars and the occasional marijuana cigarette to complement their illicit beer, Andy Lewis looked down on their thrills as childish, and, it was later discovered, patronizingly allowed these lesser mortals to accrue merit and sophistication by purchasing their recreational drugs through him.

He came to school in September. In October he discovered Vaun, a withdrawn, friendless, virginal outsider. By Christmas vacation they were, in the eyes of the school, "going together," despite (or perhaps because of) strenuous opposition from her aunt and uncle. Some time in December Vaun first tried LSD. During that winter her schoolwork, which had been solid B's with a few A's and C's, fell to near failure. She began acting even stranger than usual. In mid-March she dropped a second dose of LSD and launched herself straight into an eight-hour screaming frenzy which ended under hospital restraints and was followed, according to her own testimony during the trial, by weeks of gradually diminishing flashbacks and disorientation. Only her uncle's standing in the community prevented her arrest for possession of an illegal substance. She refused to say who had given it to her.

Then suddenly in early May, just before her eighteenth birthday, things changed again. Homework assignments began to come back complete and correct, and absences dropped off. She started joining the family again at meal times, trimmed her hair, and stopped seeing Andy Lewis. For her birthday she asked her aunt for a trip to San Francisco, and the two of them spent the day in museums and galleries and stayed the night at the Saint Francis. Her aunt later testified that Vaun had seemed happy, somehow slightly shy, but relaxed for the first time in months.

Two weeks later Vaun Adams was arrested for the murder of a six-year-old girl whom she was baby-sitting. She was accused of strangling Jemima Louise Brand (known to all as Jemma), removing Jemma's clothes, and then casually going into the next room to work on a painting of the child's naked, dead body transposed onto a hillside. The jury saw the painting, heard the testimony, and after five hours' deliberation found her guilty. She was sent to prison.

A little more than three years into her sentence Vaun was discovered by her psychiatrist. More than that: she was saved by him. Dr. Gerry Bruckner was called in when Vaun went into a catatonic state during a spell in solitary confinement, where she had been put during an outbreak of prison unrest. He succeeded in prying her out of it, gave her the art materials her soul craved, recognized the stunning power of her work, and sent several pieces to a friend in New York who owned a gallery. Under the name Eva Vaughn she was an overnight success.

After serving nine years and three months, she was released. She spent a year of parole near Gerry Bruckner, then a year traveling in Europe and the United States. She met Tyler two and a half years after she was released from prison, and six months later she was building her house on Tyler's Road. That was five years ago, and she had lived there ever since, aside from occasional trips to New York, where she kept an apartment.

Such was the outline of the life of Vaun Adams, built up from the stack of papers, nearly a foot thick, that sat on Kate's desk at home. From birth certificate to passport to Friday night's hospital admission forms, the papers included prison reports, psychiatric evaluations, pale copies of copies of letters, signed statements, the trial transcript, photographs, pathologists' reports, and hundreds of mind-numbing pages, each presenting in microscopic detail a segment of the life of Vaun Adams.

And yet, when Kate should have felt that she knew this woman better than her own sister, better than Hawkin, better than Lee even, she simply could not connect these segments into a whole; she simply could not match the avalanche of words with the woman in the brown corduroy trousers who had served her a ham sandwich, who had sketched in a few lines the threat in a pair of approaching police investigators, and who had lain blue and still under Kate's hands and lips. Kate's mind could not make the most tenuous of links between the woman and the girl she had been.

Even the trial itself seemed disjointed and incomplete and left some very perplexing questions unanswered. Why had Andy Lewis been allowed back into school, rather than pursuing the more normal course of enrolling in the local junior college for a high school certificate? Why was his role in the trial so perfunctory? Neither the prosecuting attorney nor Vaun's court-appointed defender had pressed him, but had on the contrary treated him with wary respect. He had a solid alibi for the night, playing cards with no fewer than eight friends, but he had apparently graduated and was allowed to go free, without prosecution for the drugs he had almost certainly supplied to Vaun. Why? And where had he gone after the trial? He had disappeared with only the sparsest of a trail left behind: driver's license renewal two years later, one job in California and one in Alaska on his Social Security records, then—nothing. Ten years ago Andrew Lewis had disappeared, completely.

Hawkin slept like a dead man for the next three hours, until Kate pulled into a gas station in the small town nearest the Jameson farm. She told the pimply young man who came out what she wanted and walked around the back of the station to the door marked Ladies. When she came out the car was empty. She paid the attendant and fished two cups and the thermos from the back seat. Hawkin reappeared in his jacket and a tie. The circles under his eyes had lightened several shades, she noticed, and his walk had a spring to it. She handed him a cup.

"Oh, good," he said. "Chamomile tea with goat's milk and honey."

"Sorry, all out, you'll have to settle for Ethiopian mocha. Sugar's in the glove compartment."

He raised an eyebrow at that but said nothing aside from an appreciative sigh after the first swallow. Three miles down the road he drained the cup and placed it in the back seat.

"A good sleep and a cup of fine coffee always takes ten years off of me. Your housemate make the coffee again?"

"This morning I made it. Lee buys it from this crazy little hundred-and-fifty-year-old Chinese woman who cooks it up in a two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old coffee roaster. It's a great honor to be taken on as one of her trusted customers. The turnoff is up here somewhere," she added. "Could you check the map, Al? It's in the glove compartment."

Although he was fairly certain that she had been looking at the hand-drawn map back at the gas station, Hawkin obediently fished it out and read off the landmarks. If she didn't want to talk about her home life—and her reticence was well known to her colleagues—it was her business. He suspected that few of the others had even been given the man's name.

15

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The house was slightly more ornate than Kate had anticipated, a bit larger, its landscaping somewhat more elaborate than what she imagined commonplace for a farmhouse. From meeting Vaun's aunt at the hospital and having seen the amount of money that was transferred monthly from Vaun's account, she had expected it to be well maintained, and indeed it was: bright white rail fencing that stretched out into the distance, three nicely blending colors of paint that brought out the house's gingerbread details, a flawless acre or so of lawn encircled by wide flower beds and at the moment edged by several hundred tentative daffodils, slightly flattened by the recent rains. A small pond sparkled through the bare branches of a curve of trees. Kate switched off the engine, and she and Hawkin got out to sounds of rural life: quacks and honks from the pond, the rumble of distant machinery, the sharp snarl of a far-off chain saw, then the evocative, nostalgic screak of a screen door, followed by a familiar voice.

"You didn't have any trouble finding us, then?" said Vaun's aunt, in what sounded to Kate like a common greeting. She turned and smiled at the grandmotherly figure and was struck, as she had been at the hospital in the small hours of Saturday, by how precisely the woman fit the image of a farm wife, with graying hair, round figure, full cheeks, and calm brown eyes.

"Not at all, Mrs. Jameson. Your directions were clear, even to a city girl."

"Good. You're looking considerably better. How is your back?"

"Doing very well, thanks."

"I must say I hadn't expected to see you up and around so soon, after how you looked the other day."

Kate grinned. "We old San Franciscans are made tough."

"So I see. I didn't get a chance to thank you, then."

"Not necessary."

"Not for you, perhaps. I have a feeling that your job is thankless often enough, that's no reason for me to add to it. Would you like some coffee? I was just about to put it on." She moved easily from the honest gratitude into the role of hostess, and Kate shifted with her.

"Thank you, that would be nice."

Hawkin had stood oblivious to the exchange, looking out over the distant fields. Turning back from the top of the porch steps, Kate could see a red tractor making its way through a green field, pulling after itself an unrolling ribbon of rich brown.

"You have a beautiful place here," she offered.

Rebecca Jameson looked faintly surprised, and half turned to survey her vista with the new eyes of a stranger. A small, worried frown came between her eyebrows at the sight of the tractor, and she shook her head slightly and turned back to Kate with a smile.

"It is beautiful, isn't it? A person forgets to look at it, somehow, when she's so wrapped up in day-to-day things." She looked again, as if to fix the memory of it in her mind, and then she led Kate and Hawkin through the screen door, which slapped shut behind them, across the throw rugs and gleaming wood floor of the hallway, and back into the big, warm kitchen. A cat slept on a chair in the sun, a clock ticked on the wall, faint smells of breakfast bacon hung in the air, and a man's voice came in monologue from somewhere in the house. The farm wife took a brightly enameled electric coffee percolator and ran water into it, filled its basket with grounds from a green can, and plugged it in. She reached for cups, and paused.

"Did you have breakfast?"

"We did, thank you," Kate replied firmly. Hawkin was still silent, exploring the view from the window, the whatnots on a shelf, a display of trophies and ribbons, the cat on the window seat.

"Then you won't want more than something to go with the coffee for the moment. We'll eat at one," she added. "You wanted to talk with Ned and Joanna too—they'll come then. Meanwhile you've got me and Red to talk to. Red's my husband," she explained unnecessarily, and came to the table with a large bowl of thick oatmeal-and-raisin cookies that instantly transported Kate back into childhood, when she'd lived next door to the neighborhood grandmother. "Did you see her this morning?" she asked abruptly. Hawkin put a small gold baseball trophy back on its shelf.

"Your niece? No, not since last night," he said.

"I talked to the hospital an hour ago. They said there was no change. 'No change.' " She chewed at her upper lip, staring down at the bowl. Kate looked for something to say, but Mrs. Jameson just shook her head and tried to smile. "I think Red's off the phone now. I'll just go get him."

The percolator chuffed and gurgled, Hawkin prowled around, and Kate ate a cookie. Voices from upstairs grew closer, followed by the hum of machinery and then the whisper of tires on the wood floor. Mrs. Jameson came back into the room, followed by her husband.

Red Jameson had once been a big man, and even now his wide shoulders filled the chair, his back was straight, his big hands powerful. Only his legs were small, wasted, and inert on the footrests. His thinning hair hinted at the shade that had given him the obligatory nickname, and though his skin had probably not been pale and freckled since babyhood, it remained finely textured under the weathering, like well-cured deerskin. He was younger than Kate had expected, in his middle fifties. The only heavy lines in his face were those next to his mouth, and they spoke not of age but of an intimate familiarity with pain.

"Red, this is Miss Martinelli, and Alonzo Hawkin."

Jameson's handshake was gentle for such a large man, though the skin was hard with callus. His eyes looked over Kate, then met Hawkin's.

"Becky tells me you've come about my niece," he said. His voice was low and pleasant, and Kate had a brief image of him reading aloud to a group of children. "Are you investigating the murders of those three little girls, or Vaun's… what Vaun tried to do to herself?"

The words were too direct for his wife, who moved off abruptly toward the kitchen. Hawkin met his gaze and gave him an equally blunt answer.

"At present we are working under the assumption that they are related, Mr. Jameson."

The man nodded, and allowed himself to be distracted by his wife putting the pot of coffee and a jug of cream on the table. They sat down at a round pine table set with gingham placemats. Hawkin pulled out the chair next to Kate's and lowered himself into it, fussed with the coffee, refused a cookie, and waited for the social necessities to subside. When they did he continued with his thought.

"For lack of an alternative, as I said, we are forced to assume that what appears to be a suicide attempt on the part of your niece is related to the deaths of Tina Merrill, Amanda Bloom, and Samantha Donaldson. I am convinced that the relationship is there, although I am far from certain about its nature. There are too many uncertainties, most of which have their roots here, in your niece's past."

Red Jameson's blue eyes narrowed at Hawkin's careful choice of words. The inevitable suspicion and mistrust of police investigators he must have had was put aside as he opened his mouth to speak, glanced at his wife, and looked back at an imperturbable Hawkin.

"Are you—what sort of a 'relationship' are you talking about?" he asked cautiously.

"Mr. Jameson, we are beginning to think that she did not try to kill herself."

Kate watched as a series of emotions borne on a wind blew through the room, settling first on the husband's face, then on the wife's, to be replaced by another on his. First puzzlement, as the words sank in, then speculation as he and then she reviewed Hawkin's words and realized that he had not been suggesting an accident, then an instant of relief before the thud of fear hit, and two pinched faces stared at Hawkin, tight with apprehension and battered by the brief storm that had just passed through. The husband found his voice first.

"You think somebody… But who?"

"Yes, Mr. Jameson, I think there's a strong possibility that someone tried to kill Vaun. I don't know who yet— whoever it was is a very clever person. And before you ask, there's a guard on her at all times, and the hospital is exaggerating her condition to anyone who asks. As far as anyone else knows, she's on the edge of dying. You may see it in the papers. It's not true. It's just a way of protecting her."

"You think someone would try again?" Mrs. Jameson sounded appalled.

"If it was an attempt at murder, it was no spur-of-the-moment thing. It was carefully planned, and yes, that sort of person would indeed try again."

"But why?"

It was a cry of pain, and Hawkin responded by allowing his own frustration and exhaustion to show through.

"I don't know, Mrs. Jameson. Not yet. I do intend to find out. With your help."

The room rippled with the effect of his last phrase. Red Jameson sat slowly up in his chair, shoulders straightening, chin up. His wife grabbed at the idea as if it were a life ring in a stormy sea, and Hawkin her rescuer, about to tell her what to do. Five minutes earlier they had both been closed, wary, and would have parted with information grudgingly, if at all. Now they saw Hawkin and Kate as their champions in the cause and would withhold nothing.

Kate reached for her coffee and swallowed deeply to hide her face. Pray God these two would never know how thin was the evidence supporting Hawkin's declaration: a sliver of wood, the lack of pills, a pot of stew. Pray God they would not have to be faced with a future Hawkin who had withdrawn from the confident opinion that had just won their support, an opinion that she knew he only half held, but which was very, very useful in opening up this vital source of information. Manipulating people without an outright lie was never easy, but Hawkin was a clever man. The coffee tasted suddenly sour, but she drank it all.

"How can we help?" the hostess asked eagerly.

"Just tell us about her," Hawkin said simply. "What was she like as a child, how did she change as an adolescent, her friends, her painting. Anything that comes to mind."

"You should see her studio, then—the shed where she painted," she offered. "And I have photograph albums, if you like? Is that what you want?"

"Exactly right. However, I'm also hoping to see one or two of her teachers at the high school this afternoon, which leaves us short of time. Casey, why don't you go have a look at the studio with Mr. Jameson while Mrs. Jameson and I go through the albums."

Kate was mildly surprised at his division of labor, and Mrs. Jameson began to protest that the ground was too muddy, but her husband growled at her and she subsided. Kate held the kitchen door for him as he pulled on a billed cap with "Samuels Feed n' Seed" stitched on the front. He rolled down the ramp onto the concrete path that wound around the house and spidered off in various directions, pointing his chair towards the older, wooden barn. Kate walked beside him in the clear spring sun.

16

Contents - Prev/Next

The small shed had three steps leading up to it, and Kate had to push the chair up the rough boards that had been nailed down as a ramp. She felt a sharp pain in her back as the stitches pulled, and she cursed silently, hoping that the double gauze pads she'd had Lee tape on that morning would absorb the blood.

It was an unlikely place to have nurtured such a talent, she thought as she followed Jameson through the narrow door: white paint on coarse plank walls and ceiling, a bare bulb on a wire, ancient linoleum with odd tacked-down seams, salvaged from somewhere else; a narrow metal-framed bed in one corner, once painted dark green but chipped now, still laid with a lumpy mattress with blue ticking and loose buttons, three blankets folded neatly at the foot.

Three things made it the home of an artist. One was the massive storage cabinet that almost hid the south wall, a cruder version of the storeroom in Vaun's house on Tyler's Road. This one was built of various thicknesses and qualities of plywood, painted white, and its two tiers of slotted racks still held a number of paintings. Then on the opposite wall the rough planks had been cut away for three large, metal-framed sliding windows that opened up the shed and made it a place of clear, even light. They were almost identical with the window from which Kate had taken a sliver of redwood three days before. Below the expanse of windows lay the third and unmistakable sign of this structure's most recent life: a midden of drops, dribbles, and smears that obscured the faded linoleum entirely near the windows and trailed off to a thinner layer of footsteps and drops as it reached the middle of the room. Jameson saw her looking at the motley surface.

"Becky wanted to clean it up, but I told her not to bother. We've left it like it was. We don't need the space, not really, and I think Vaun likes to see it when she comes. She sleeps here sometimes, though we kept her old room for her in the house. Becky comes in every month or so to make sure the mice aren't moving in, and she does a quick dust and a mop once or twice a year. Silly, I suppose, not to use the space, but somehow we couldn't bring ourselves to clear it out after—when Vaun left, and after a while it just got to be habit. Silly, I guess," he repeated, but he didn't sound embarrassed by this tangible evidence of sentimentality, and his face was relaxed in the silent air that smelled faintly of ancient paint (or was that imagination?) and of the sun-soaked farmyard breeze that moved through the open door behind them. Kate realized that a comment was not necessary.

"Did you put these windows in for her?" she asked.

"I helped her. She paid for them herself—her first sale, it was. She was sixteen. She used to paint some of the kids in school, and one time she did a really nice one of the daughter of the fellow who owns the lumberyard in town. A few weeks later she started asking me if she could have some of the money from her parents' insurance settlement to make this shed more usable for painting in—Becky wasn't too happy about Vaun's getting all that on the floor of her bedroom, as you can imagine." He gestured at the floor and chuckled. "I hated to see her eat into the money, even for that, so I said why didn't she take the painting over to Ed—Ed Parker, his name is—and see if he'd trade it for some glass. She liked that picture, but she liked the idea of windows even more, so she thought about it for a couple of days and then wrapped the picture up in one of Becky's old tablecloths and went down to see him. She came back two hours later, riding proud in his delivery truck with those three windows. She helped me put them in, and when we finished, she looked at them for the longest time and went over and slid them open and shut a few times, and then she just stood there with her back to me and said 'thank you,' real quiet. My own daughter would have hugged me or jumped up and down, but Vaunie was always different. It was okay, though. It was enough, that 'thank you.' She really meant it. Not just putting in the glass for her, but everything attached to those windows." A lost past echoed in his voice, gone.

"She hasn't changed much, has she?" mused Kate, thinking of her own experience of the woman's understated intensity.

"She hasn't changed at all. A little bit quieter, but everything she's been through has only made her more of herself. The only time she's been at all different was when she was hanging around with that Andy Lewis."

"What happened to him, do you know?" Kate asked it in as offhanded a manner as possible and was not prepared for the violence of his response.

"Don't know, don't care. He was a slimy little bastard, pardon my French, and I told him that if I caught him on my land I'd empty a load of buckshot into him."

"When was that?"

"The week Vaun was sent to prison. I saw him in town, standing around with some of the kids who used to kiss his—who used to look up to him. His father died when Andy was small, I think, and his mother was a weak little woman who never said no to him, so I guess it's not surprising he turned out the way he did. He went away not too long after that, I remember. Took all the money he could find in the house and disappeared. Broke his mother's heart, wouldn't you know? She died the next year."

"He gave Vaun drugs, didn't he? Marijuana, LSD? Why was he never prosecuted for that?"

Jameson sat staring out the window. The red tractor had come into sight, still far off, the black-brown trail unfurling in its wake. He muttered something under his breath.

"I beg your pardon?"

"I said, It's too wet. I told Ned this morning he'd just make a mess of it, but off he went."

Kate, bewildered, followed his gaze for a clue, and then realized that Ned was the son, and he must be referring to a disagreement over the wetness of the soil. She waited for a long moment while they both watched the tractor pull (struggle?) up a rise and then disappear down the far side.

"Mr. Jameson…"

"Yes, I heard your question, Miss Martinelli. He wasn't prosecuted because there was no evidence, and nobody would squeal on him. They were all either in love with him or scared to death of him, and the sheriff couldn't get anything on him. Yes, I think he gave her drugs. I know that for the five months she was hanging around with him, from December to the end of April, she was not herself." He circled abruptly away from the window wall to the stored paintings and without hesitation pulled out one from near the right side, set it upright, and fished out another, smaller one from a few slots down. He set it to the left of the first and pushed his chair around next to Kate.

"The one on the left is dated October; the one on the right is from the following March, when she was still involved with him. She always dated her paintings when she finished them, on the back. Still does, I think."

The smaller painting was a deceptively simple study of a girl, almost a young woman, sitting with her back against a tree trunk, one knee up, a gaudy paperback in one hand. She was dressed in shorts and a white cotton shirt. Her right hand was absently fiddling with a lock of her light brown hair, and her eyes were both on the book and far away. Simple, unassuming, intimately personal, it was the work of a mature artist.

The larger one was still technically superb for the work of such a young painter. Its subject was another young woman, this one seated at a mirror, grimacing open-mouthed as she applied a wand of makeup to her eye. She wore a tight, sleeveless knit shirt, and a bra strap peeked from the edge of it. The colors of the palette were harder, the brush work slightly coarser, but it was a finished painting that many artists would have been proud of. The difference appeared when the two were put side by side.

The earlier painting was a gently humorous glimpse of a girl on the edge of womanhood, a look at the potential, the choices, the dreams that lay before her. Her back slumped with the unself-conscious grace of a child into the curve of the tree, and though her legs were brown and a Band-Aid could be glimpsed on one shin, their positioning was somehow deliberate, an experiment with seduction. The indication of as yet unnoticed breasts lay under the fabric of her grubby T-shirt. In different hands, adult ones, male ones, it would have edged into nostalgia, cuteness, even verged on pornography. This painting, however, was too utterly honest, and could only have been made by someone who was painting a self-portrait, though the face was not her own.

The larger one was the vision of another set of eyes altogether. Where the first girl was growing into her womanhood, this one was grabbing it by the handful. The nubs on her chest pushed against the too-snug shirt; the viewer suspected padding. Too much makeup, inexpertly applied, served not to enhance her womanliness but rather to underscore her denial of what she was, and her carefully disarranged hair brought to mind snarls and tangles rather than evoking a bedroom scene. It was graceless, hard, a nonetheless powerful statement of political and sexual rebellion. The first painting revealed the complexity of a life from within, a loving, accepting vision of an individual and the stage she was passing through. It was not particularly profound, but very human. The second painting called harsh judgment on a life from without, a sarcastic condemnation of someone who was trying to be something she was not. The first was confident, sure, and open; the second angry, pitiless, and completely without empathy for the human being depicted.

"I see what you mean," she said drily. "You'd say, then, that these two are representative of her state of mind at those two times?" She sounded like a prosecuting attorney, she thought, annoyed. Still, it was risky to place too much emphasis on two paintings, and after all, didn't every teenager go through that period of scornful rebellion? True, few had the ability to express the state so eloquently, but the talent and the temperament that had produced the March painting did not necessarily depend on chemicals to see the vision. Her own eyes were not sufficiently trained in either art or psychology for her to feel confident in judging the potential imbalance in that later painting, but the madness in it seemed more anger than psychosis. She wished Lee were here to advise her.

"Representative?" Jameson was saying thoughtfully. "You mean was all of her stuff like that," he pointed at the larger one, "during those months? I guess so. She didn't do all that much then—started a lot and then scraped them off the canvas, mostly. There's only that and a couple others."

"Any unfinished ones?"

"Vaun never left anything unfinished. If she didn't like it she'd scrape it off or throw the canvas into the incinerator, but once she was satisfied she'd put her name on it and never touch it again." He paused, thinking, and Kate held still, though she ached to sit on the bed.

"It was like her eyes changed during that time. Not how they looked, though that too, but it was like there was someone else behind them. She was always kind of strange, the way she'd look at you. Put a lot of people off, especially when she was small. You ever had your portrait painted, or drawn?"

"Once, yes."

"Well, you know how it feels to have someone staring at you, while you're sitting there frozen, and then they get up and look at your nose for a while, like it's some troublesome piece of machinery they're trying to figure out, and then they go back to the easel, and a few minutes later they're standing over you staring at your eye, but they're only seeing the shape and the color of it, and you're not there at all, not looking out of that eye, you're just buried underneath the cornea and the iris or whatever, wondering where to look and feeling like a damned fool?"

Kate burst out laughing, and went to sit on the edge of the bed. It was surprisingly firm.

"Vaunie was a bit like that all the time. You always had the feeling that at least part of her was studying your face and the wrinkles in your skin and the hair that came out of the end of your nose and the way your mouth moved when you made words, and it was very off-putting sometimes. I'm sure it was one of the reasons she had so few friends. But at times it was even more than that, and it would seem like she was still studying your face and your hands and the way you walked, and you'd feel self-conscious, and then you'd begin to get the feeling that she was also looking through your eyes right into your brain, that she was studying the way you looked on the inside too. Not physically, though she could do that too. I remember one night she sat with her sketchbook and drew the bones of my hand, and then she attached the muscles to the bones, and then the skin, and ended up with my hand, perfect—it was eerie. But I mean that she seemed to be memorizing the inner things that make a person work as well as the outer way he looks, and how the two come together, like the bones and the muscles and the skin. There were times, even when she was little, when you'd catch her studying you so seriously and you'd wonder if she knew about how a barn full of hay made you feel, or how it felt to be in bed with your wife, or how deep-down angry the thought of your wife's old beau made you. Not even if she knew, but how she could know those things. Like you were being taken apart, a little impersonally but with respect, and affection. Does that make any sense at all?" he asked somewhat desperately.

"Oh, yes," she said emphatically. He seemed encouraged, and went on.

"Well, that was how Vaun was. Odd, but I never worried too much about her. I mean, anyone who could see people like that," he gestured at the small painting, "she might get hurt herself, but she'd never deliberately hurt another person. I didn't think it so clearly at the time, but I've spent a lot of time mulling it over since then, and I can put it into words now, but it was how I thought then.

"And then around Christmas she began to change. Christmas is a big thing with us, and we always have a lot of relatives and noise and fun. Vaun was always quiet, but she seemed to enjoy it, the excitement of the little kids and all. She did a couple of nice paintings about Christmas, in earlier years. But that year—I remember it like it was yesterday—it was such a shock. We were sitting around in the morning with the presents and the wrapping strewn around, Ned helping a cousin set up his train, the girls with a new tea set, and I looked over at Vaun and she was just sitting like a statue, looking at everyone, so cold, it made my guts turn to ice. Not scornful, like teenagers do—it was different. I've had two teenagers of my own, and I taught wood shop in the junior high for years, so I know all about scornful looks. This was something else altogether. Cold, and far away, like she was taking notes on the habits of human beings for a bunch of Martians. It scared the hell out of me, and it put the whole day off balance, for everyone.

"I saw that look a lot over the next few months, and I didn't know what to do about it. I'd get angry with her, and she'd just look at me. I told her she couldn't have Lewis over any more, and she just said, 'Okay,' and looked at me like I was an interesting kind of insect. I couldn't take her out of school—it was her last semester—and I couldn't force Lewis to stay away from her just because I didn't like the way she looked at me, could I? I should have done something, but I was very busy, we didn't have enough money, and I thought she'd go away to college in the fall, and I couldn't imagine that he would follow her. I should have done something, but I couldn't think what to do, couldn't threaten or bribe her. She had no close friends I could turn to, and I couldn't—God forgive me, I just couldn't reach her."

His voice broke, and he suddenly whirled the chair around and sat staring out the window, his jaws working tightly. In the silence Kate heard a faint sound from outside the door, but no one appeared. In a minute he resumed, his voice calm to the point of dullness.

"I don't believe now that there was anything I could have done. She had to work it out herself, whatever she was doing with him, but I tell you it was like sunshine breaking through when Vaunie began to reappear in April. I'm not a religious man, but Becky went down to church and prayed her thanks, and I knew how she felt. I wanted to sing the first time I saw funny little Vaunie looking out at me again, curious and half smiling and not cold any more. We had three or four weeks of her, before she was arrested."

"Do you think she killed Jemima Brand?" The bald question made him wince, but he turned the chair's wheels to meet her eyes and did not hesitate.

"I did then. I was sure she had. Nothing would have surprised me out of that other Vaun, not even, I had to admit, murder. She just wasn't anyone I knew, and when they said she'd had a flashback of the LSD and done that, I could believe it. I'd seen her in the hospital, when she was going crazy and attacking the nurses and trying to hurt herself. Vaun said she couldn't remember anything but painting that night the child was killed, but she agreed that she must have done it. I was convinced she had."

"And now?"

"Now, I don't know. I've had a lot of time to read and think in the last ten years, since my accident, and I have to admit, I'm no longer so sure of it. If I'd felt then the way I do now, I'd have fought for her a lot harder than I did. It would have meant losing the farm—we nearly did, anyway—but I would have done it, no matter what evidence they had. But that was eighteen years ago, and I was a different man. I have regrets, but I can't change what happened."

"Do you blame her state of mind during those months on the drugs she was taking?"

"No, I blame Andy Lewis. I'm no expert on how the human mind works, or the brain itself, for that matter, but smoking marijuana, and even taking that other poison, doesn't turn a person like Vaun into what she was. It was Lewis. He had control of her, somehow, like some filthy virus that infected everything she did. He was such a big man, claimed to have killed men in Vietnam, you know? He probably spent the time mugging old ladies in Los Angeles. God knows why, but Vaun was susceptible to him. I know he was good-looking and he chose her out of the whole school and she was no longer a leftover but the big man's girl, but it was more than that. Something in him latched onto her and wouldn't let go. Hypnotized her, if that doesn't sound too melodramatic. I think she was breaking free, but whether or not she killed Jemma, and if she did whether it was the chemical in her brain or his hold over her that made her do it, I do not know. I wish to God I did."

Jameson had come to an end, and he stopped and let the silence settle over them. Kate felt drained, and the thought of rousing herself for the next set of questions raised by this extraordinary interview made her residual aches, which were considerably greater than she'd let on to Hawkin, take possession of her will. There were more questions to be asked, but she needed a pause, and Jameson seemed content.

There was a sound of stirring outside, followed by the hollow thump of feet on the wooden steps next to the ramp, and the shed darkened. Kate looked up to see Hawkin outlined dramatically in the light that came streaming in the door, and Vaun's charcoal sketch flashed vividly into her mind.

"Mrs. Jameson asked me to check and see if everything was all right, and to say that lunch would be in half an hour." His eyes took in the room, paused to consider Kate's face, smiled at the metal windows, and went to the pair of paintings resting on the floor. He stepped forward to look at them, and the room brightened.

"Interesting," he said after a few minutes. "I take it that the larger one was done during the time she was with Andrew Lewis?"

"In March," Kate confirmed. "The other one is from the previous October."

"Yes, very interesting," he repeated, his eyes flicking from one to the other. "Do you mind if I take a look at these other ones, Mr. Jameson?"

"Of course not, help yourself. Just so they go back into the same slots. Vaun has them in order."

"Right, we'll keep track of them. I'll put these two out of the way," and he laid them on the bed next to Kate. "No, don't get up, Casey. I just want to have a peep. I spent part of the day yesterday looking at the ones in her studio." And the rest of the day recovering, he added to himself. He walked over to the far end and slid the first of the canvases from its berth. He checked the back before he set it up against the wall, and stepped back.

"Done four months after her parents died. She was thirteen."

The order was chronological, the cumulative effect shattering, an intense, intimate portrait of the artist as a very young woman. There were a few paintings of animals and two landscapes, but most of the forty-odd canvases were Vaun's vision of her neighbors and her family. Three images of a younger, whole Red Jameson jumped out at them, and two of his wife. Jameson kept up a commentary, identifying each figure and most of the locations. Finally there were two canvases left. Hawkin pulled them out together and stood them next to each other.

They formed a pair like the two on the bed behind Kate, though not so striking. The earlier one here, dated early November, was of a young, ginger-haired boy-man of about fourteen, identified by Jameson as his son Ned, Vaun's cousin. He was splitting logs with his shirt off, and she had caught an expression half embarrassed, half proud, on his young face. The second of the pair, dated February, was of a slightly older boy. He was dressed in jeans and an army jacket, and was sprawled back on a bench with an utterly expressionless face. It was a disturbing painting, with that utter blankness, and Kate found herself trying to put some emotion into it—insolence, contempt, disgust—anything human to fill it in.

"That's Timothy Bauer, lived down the road. He was one of Lewis's followers. He died a couple years later, higher'n a kite on something and ran his car off the levee into the canal."

"No paintings of Lewis, then?" asked Hawkin.

"Isn't there one?" Jameson sounded very surprised, and wheeled himself forward to look. "There isn't, is there? Used to be one. Vaun must have taken it," he said doubtfully. Hawkin shot a glance at Kate, who felt her tiredness abruptly leave her.

"Was it in here, Mr. Jameson?" asked Hawkin, sounding only slightly curious.

"Yes, between the one you took out and the one over there. I know, because I used to look at these sometimes, and I used to avoid that slot—I didn't like to see his sleazy face. Maybe Vaun didn't either and finally burned it." He sounded as if he found that a more likely possibility than his niece wanting it. Hawkin knelt down to replace the two he had removed and looked closely at the adjoining two slots. The odd bits of carpet that lined the bottom of the case were indented wherever a painting had rested over the years. The pile was notched clearly in the slot from which he had taken the young man and in the one where the young woman putting on her makeup had rested. Between them was a gap, one of several in the storage wall, and an indentation showed that a canvas had indeed rested here, although a thin layer of dust had had time to drift across the matted pile.

"Pity it's not here, said Hawkin easily. "I'd have liked to see his face, and how she saw it."

"You didn't see it in her studio, then?" asked Jameson.

"Do you remember what it looked like?"

"I sure do. He was sitting in a turned-around chair, his arms along the back of it, his chin on his forearms. Shirtless. He had a tattoo, I remember, on his upper arm, a snake or something. He looked sweaty, and when I first saw it all I could think was, Thank God he put his pants back on before she painted it."

"It had sexual overtones, then?"

"Yes. I don't know why, something in his face, I guess. It was awful. But it wasn't there, then? In her house?"

"I may have missed it; there's a lot of paintings. When did you see it last?"

"Years. It's years since I actually looked at it—like I told you, I didn't like to see him. I think it was here last summer, but I couldn't swear to it."

"No problem—just curiosity. Mr. Jameson, I'd like to borrow a few of these paintings, if I may."

"Which ones?"

"The two final ones, and two or three of the earlier ones. I'd be interested in having someone more knowledgeable than myself look at them and tell me about her state of mind when they were done. It could be very helpful," he added.

"Oh, well, sure, if it'd help you. You'll have to be careful of them."

"We will. I'll get them back to you as soon as I can," he said. He retrieved the last pair, rested them next to the first pair that Jameson had shown Kate, and then went back and unerringly pulled out the second one of Jameson, squinting into the sun from the seat of a tractor. He put it next to the other four, and Jameson turned away, looking slightly embarrassed.

"Write him out a receipt of some kind, would you, Casey?" he asked, but she already had her notebook in her hand. As she finished, a thought occurred to her.

"Mr. Jameson, that painting of the lumberman's daughter? And any others people around here might have—does anyone know what it is they have? An early Eva Vaughn would be a pretty valuable thing, I would have thought."

"Nobody but the family knows. We don't talk about her. She wanted it that way."

Kate could well imagine that. This family's ability to keep their mouths closed was probably the only thing that had stood between Eva Vaughn and a massive influx of vultures, disguised as reporters, onto the dirt of Tyler's Road.

Hawkin moved towards the paintings, but Jameson stopped him.

"Leave them here," he ordered. "You can bring your car over for them later. If we make Becky hold lunch for us, she won't be happy." He turned to the door and then drifted the wheels to a halt against his callused palms. Something else was on his mind. "It's not good," he said finally. "I don't like not knowing just how she is. I want you to have them tell us the truth. You can do that."

Hawkin took out a small notebook and pen, wrote a few words, and then handed the sheet to Jameson.

"This doctor can tell you whatever you want. I'll let him know you'll be calling."

"Thank you." He folded the sheet carefully and buttoned it into a shirt pocket. He took a last look at the studio and shook his head. "I often wonder what Vaun would have been like if she didn't have this… 'gift.' Curse is more like it. It's made her life hell; it tortured her mother. God forgive me, I can't help but think it was also at the back of Jemma's death and now these three—" He stopped, took a long and shaky breath, exhaled carefully, took off his cap and ran a hand across his hair, and put control back on along with the hat. "I remember an essay she wrote once in high school, an English assignment. Becky still has it somewhere. They were supposed to write on a word, any word, to research it and say what it meant to them, that kind of thing. Vaun chose the word talent. She started out talking about a talent as a kind of Roman coin and then went on to say that money was a form of energy, neither good nor bad in itself, just energy. 'It's how the talent is spent that makes the difference,' that's how the paper ended. Clever, it was, better than most of her schoolwork. But sad. At that time, she thought she was in charge. She never has been. Her talent has eaten her up, from the time she was a bitty little girl. She can never be normal, never be free and happy, not while this 'gift' has her. I think she knows it, too, now. I'm sure she does. It's a terrible thing to say, but I wasn't all that surprised when I heard she'd tried to kill herself. She's a sad girl, is my Vaunie. Not just sad, I don't mean to say that, but she has very few dreams left. All she has is her 'gift' and the world she paints. All she has is her eyes and her hands, and if one of them fails, that will be the end of her."

He turned his head and looked straight up at Kate, and she was shocked to see tears brimming into his tough eyes. "I love Vaun like a daughter, and this talent of hers is not a happy thing. I wouldn't wish it on an enemy." He blinked, gave the paintings a final glance, and yanked hard at his wheels, disappearing down the ramp at a heart-stopping speed. He was halfway to the house before Kate and Hawkin caught up with him.

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The house smelled of onions and hot cheese and nutmeg. Kate excused herself and ducked into the small bathroom just inside the back door. She was relieved to find that the blood had only reached as far as the lining of her jacket. She took off her blouse, pulled off the soaked bandages, and replaced them with two sterile pads and a plastic-backed six-inch square, held down with lengths of tape. It was awkward, but she got it on. She sponged off her blouse, one chosen that morning for the dark colors and all-over pattern, dried it with toilet paper, and got dressed again. Wrapping the gory evidence in more toilet paper, she thrust it into the waste basket, used the toilet, washed her hands, opened the door, and nearly collided with a tall man with red hair whom she had last seen as a boy on canvas, splitting wood.

His arrogant blue eyes probed lazily over her body from hair to ankles before rising slowly to her own eyes. She felt herself stiffen and blocked it immediately, but she could never do much about the impersonal smile that came to her lips when this happened, the civilized version of the raised-hackle snarl.

"Well, well," he said. "I must say that when Mom told me a police lady was coming today, I didn't expect someone like you. I'm Ned Jameson, and I'll shake your hand when I'm a bit cleaner."

"Casey Martinelli. Isn't the ground a bit wet for turning today?" she asked innocently, and she was unprofessionally gratified to see a flush of anger start up, before he decided that it was the simple question of a female nonfarmer.

"A bit. Not too bad." He turned to put the black rubber boots he carried onto a sheet of newspaper near the door, and she glanced at his clothes. Mud from knee to hips and fingertip to shoulders was probably not normal. She turned away to conceal her smile.

The cat had disappeared from the window seat, Kate noticed, replaced by Hawkin, who was seriously discussing a multicolored, much-jutting Lego construction with a small brown-haired boy in patched jeans, while a toddler with a head of the most stunning red curls Kate had ever seen sat glued to Hawkin's other side, her little round body twisted forward to watch their faces as she followed the conversation with serious concentration.

Kate exchanged an amused look with Red Jameson and moved to one side to let pass a slim woman with darker red curls and a heavy casserole in her hands. She plunked the pot on the table, wiped her hands unnecessarily on her apron, and held out her hand to Kate.

"Joanna Olsen. The two monsters are mine, Teddy and Marta. My neighbor was going to watch them for me but one of hers is coming down with something, so we'll just have to shout over them."

"They'll be fine, Joanna," said her mother's voice from behind Kate. "Let's sit down now, Miss Martinelli there, and Alonzo, you can sit there."

"It's Casey, Mrs. Jameson."

"Then I'm Becky. What's wrong, Teddy? Oh, all right, you can move your chair next to him. Where's Ned?"

"Upstairs changing. He was kind of muddy."

"I told him…" began his father.

"Now, Red, we know you told him not to, but he was anxious to do something and he's gone next week, so he had to try. You'd have done the same thing when you were thirty. We won't wait for him, though. Some salad, Casey?" Her voice was almost sharp and she thrust the bowl to her guest in an emphatic change of topic. "I hope you like tomatoes. Ned grows them year-round in his greenhouse."

Lunch was a full farmhouse meal, a hot dish of chicken and herbed rice, hot mixed vegetables and a salad, two kinds of bread rolls, three jams, and bottled spiced peaches for dessert. Kate ate more than she usually ate in an entire day, and when after the meal Joanna carried a heavy-lidded Marta off upstairs, she wished she could join the child, thumb in mouth and all.

Ned Jameson had come in halfway through the meal and dug into the food with great concentration, answering direct questions without looking up from his plate. The conversation eddied around him, his sister juggling admonitions to her offspring with tales of her cousin Vaun, of whom she was obviously very fond and very proud. Red and Becky Jameson contributed, and even Teddy piped up.

"Auntie Vaun is teaching me to paint. She said that if I like it I can have my own paints maybe for Christmas. She painted a picture of me. I had to sit very still, and she gave me a Lego space cruiser to put together so I'd sit still enough, but Matty's too little to do that, so she just makes drawings of her."

"I've seen that painting," said Hawkin. "It looks just like you."

"Was that in her studio?" asked Kate.

"When I was there yesterday," he said, nodding.

"Did you see Auntie Vaun?" Teddy asked quickly. "She's sick, isn't she? Is she going to be all right?"

Spoons around the table stopped in midair. Ned Jameson's jaws went still as he awaited Hawkin's pronouncement, oddly intent.

"You like your Auntie Vaun, don't you?" Hawkin asked the child.

"I love her," he said simply. "And she loves me."

"I could see that in the painting. I hope she'll be okay. I'm not a doctor, but some good doctors are taking care of her."

"She's in the hospital."

"I know. I've seen her."

"I can't visit her, I'm too young," he said, disgusted.

"Maybe you could make her a drawing, so she knows you were thinking about her." It was the suggestion of an experienced father, Kate realized, and wondered why she always forgot that side of him.

The child tipped his head, thinking.

"She likes my drawings. May I be excused, Mommy, so I can make a picture for her?"

"You don't want the rest of your peaches? Okay, you come up with me and we'll find your crayons."

Becky Jameson brought in coffee and began to clear the dishes, refusing any help. Kate and Hawkin were left alone with Red and his son, who had not yet spoken to each other. Hawkin stirred sugar into his cup and opened a polite topic of conversation.

"You grow hothouse tomatoes, Ned?"

"Not commercially, it's too expensive, but it's nice to have a few of the summer vegetables in winter."

"What do you do, then?"

"Farm this place, some experimental stuff I'm doing with the local organic farmers' organization. Fruit mostly, but the last year or so I've been growing those tiny vegetables that fancy restaurants like. Inch-long carrots, beets the size of marbles, that kind of thing. I don't think they have much flavor, myself, but people buy 'em, so I grow 'em."

"Can you make a living out of that? You hear a lot about farms closing down these days."

Kate wondered where Hawkin's sudden interest in agriculture came from, or was going to. Ned seemed reluctant to answer.

"Oh, yes. Well, not a great living. Farmers don't drive Rolls Royces, but the bills get paid. Course, a lot of us have other jobs, too, just to help out, during the slack times."

"What do you do? Your other job?"

"I make deliveries." Red was looking oddly at his son.

"Truck driving, then? Long distance?"

"Sometimes."

"Yes, I think your mother mentioned that you were going away next week. Must be hard on your wife."

"Oh, she doesn't mind; it doesn't happen that often." Here Red interrupted with a snort, and when his son shot him a look of barely controlled rage, Kate realized what Hawkin was after, though she was not at all sure how he had known it was there.

"It doesn't," he insisted. "And the money's damn good."

Teddy came back into the room, crayons and paper in hand, and climbed into the chair next to Hawkin, who helped him clear a place for the pad, automatically placing a half-full glass of milk to one side without taking his interested gaze from the young man across the table.

"The money's not the reason—" began Red, but Hawkin seemed not to hear him and talked over his words.

"I've always been fascinated by those big rigs—an eighteen wheeler, is it? A refrigerator truck?"

"Usually. It's owned by the local co-op of organic farmers. Three of us have licenses, so we take turns with deliveries. Usually the truck's only half full, so we fill up with stuff for the other growers." The young man spoke easily, but he seemed to be warmer than the room's temperature would account for.

"Mostly California?"

"Yeah, some Oregon."

"And Nevada, and Utah, and Texas," broke in his father. "It's a crazy thing to mix with trying to grow crops."

Several things happened at once. Ned shoved his chair back with a crash just as his mother entered, and the oblivious Teddy reached for a crayon just as Hawkin put his own arm out to place his napkin on the table. The anger from one end of the table and the maternal consternation from the doorway were both drowned by a child's horrified shriek as the contents of the glass shot across the drawing, over the edge of the table and all over the front of the young artist. Only Kate, seated directly across from them, saw that it was Hawkin's hand rather than Teddy's arm that had propelled the glass, and by the time it had been cleared and wiped and the child taken upstairs for dry clothes, the air had cleared.

Hawkin accepted another cup of coffee and sat back, meeting Ned's wary glances with the same benign, almost drowsy look Kate had seen him wear in Tyler's upstairs room, just before the coup de grace.

"Tell me, Ned," he said in the same conversational tone he had started with. "Do you think your cousin killed those little girls?"

Ned froze, but with what emotion Kate could not tell. When he spoke he looked slightly ill, nothing more.

"It looks like it, doesn't it? She killed one already, and she's always been a little crazy."

"Ned!" his mother said, horrified.

"Well, it's true, you know it's true, even if you won't say so. Sure she could have killed those girls. Who else would be doing it? Why ask me, anyway?"

"I've already asked your parents about her. I wondered what you had to say. After all, you must have been fairly close as children."

"Vaun was never close to anyone besides herself."

"Not even Andy Lewis?"

"She used Andy and dumped him." He stood up again, this time more gently but with greater finality, and deposited his napkin in his place. "Look, I have work to do this afternoon. If you're through questioning me maybe you'll let me get back to work."

Hawkin smiled up at him, and the smile held the younger man like shackles.

"I wasn't 'questioning' you, Ned," he said gently. "Just talking. If I wanted to question you, you would know you were being questioned. It's been nice talking with you, Ned. Hope to see you again."

He stood up and held his hand out in front of the man, and waited. Ned reached out with reluctance, clasped it briefly, and without another word crashed out through the back door.

Becky Jameson shook her head.

"He's so funny about Vaun. They used to be such good friends, when they were kids, but they had a falling out about something, and before they could patch it up she got involved with Andy Lewis, and then, well, there was never a chance. Sad, really."

"What did you say their age difference was?" asked Hawkin.

"He's three and a half years younger than Vaun, and Joanna's three and a half years younger than he is."

"Kids are funny," he said, as if to himself. "I have two, both in college now, and they're just starting to talk to each other civilly again. Maybe if Vaun comes out of this okay, they'll start to work it out again."

"Maybe," she agreed, "though if anything it's been getting worse lately. They had some kind of a fight about a year ago, but neither of them would say what it was about. The last time she was here, he wouldn't come over until she'd left."

Hawkin shook his head in sympathy.

"Kids are funny," he repeated. He finished his coffee and stood up again. "We must go. I told the principal we'd be there at two-thirty."

"You know how to get there?"

"Yes, no problem. Thank you for lunch, Becky. Good to meet you, Red. I'll be in touch, and feel free to call if I can help with anything."

Mrs. Jameson followed them to the studio and helped them load the canvases into the back of the car. She gave Hawkin an old curtain to cover them and stood watching as they drove off. She looked small, and tired.

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"That's one angry young man," commented Kate a few minutes later.

"Isn't he though? Look, pull up at that wide spot. I need to think for a minute."

He got out and went to lean against a neat white fence. A single black cow lay ruminating, and watched him watch her. Kate joined them.

"What did Jameson tell you before I came in?" he asked.

She told him about the installation of the windows, Red Jameson's feelings about Andrew Lewis, what he had told her about the changes in his niece from December to April, the uncertainty he felt concerning her guilt.

"Yes, I heard from then on. Interesting about the missing picture, isn't it?"

"It wasn't in her studio, then?"

"It was not. Even more interesting is the fact that last November the Jamesons had a break-in. A few valuables missing, some money, and assorted odds and ends—including one of the photograph albums. Not the family one, but one in Vaun's room."

"You're saying that someone has made sure we have no pictures of Andrew Lewis?"

"Odd coincidence, isn't it?"

"Could be," she said doubtfully. "What made you go after Ned like you did?"

"I wanted to confirm a suspicion I got from talking with his mother. Ned was fourteen when Vaun took up with Lewis, remember, a boy proud of his new muscles, with a not unattractive young woman living close enough to be always there, but far enough away—both emotionally, and physically often away in her studio—to take away the taint of incest. She was never a sister, after all."

"Becky Jameson told you this?"

"Of course not. If she even thought of such a thing she'd clam up immediately. Just my cynical mind, putting two and two together and getting eight."

"And they had another confrontation, of some kind, last year."

"I wish someone had overheard it." He flipped his cigarette over the fence. "When we get to the school I want you to find yourself a nice quiet office and track down that farmers' co-op. We need to know if any of his trips coincided with the three dates or with the other night's attempt on Vaun."

"You sound decided, then, that it was not a suicide attempt."

"Oh, no. No proof, of course, but nobody who can fill a studio with what I saw yesterday could lie down in front of a fire with a bad novel and a Mickey Finn to commit suicide. It's wishy-washy and uncertain, which she is not. Besides, she'd never endanger her life's work by leaving a pot of beans on the fire. No, it wasn't suicide."

"Does Ned Jameson strike you as being clever enough to do all this elaborate business? And I just can't see a farmer with another job on the side having the time to plan it out and kidnap and murder three children and put their bodies so they'd point to her, and then find her when she's most vulnerable, just when she's cut off by the storm, and somehow get to her and stage a suicide—I'm sorry, Al, but the whole thing seems ridiculous. It would have to be the work of a totally fixated person who has all the time in the world and is within reach of her even when the road's out."

"One of her neighbors, in fact."

"But who?"

"That's why I want a picture of Andy Lewis."

"So you're not looking at Ned Jameson?" She tried not to sound petulant, but her back was hurting.

"Of course we're looking at him. We can't very well leave a loose end like that dangling, not with his attitude and motive."

"The fact that she turned him down nearly twenty years ago? That's a motive?"

"That, plus the fact that his father obviously worships her, and the fact that he got trapped into marriage two months after he graduated from high school by a woman who pretended to be pregnant but who has since proven to be infertile."

"Becky Jameson said that?"

"She said, and I quote, 'Yes, it's such a pity they've never had any children, though she had a miscarriage two months after they were married.' "

"Two plus two…"

"Sounds like eight to me. But I think the thing that galls Ned the most is the money. They live off Eva Vaughn. She keeps the roofs over their heads and the bank paid, and to know that and yet to accept each month's subsidy, from a woman who probably laughed at his overtures—well, it wouldn't be too surprising if he were to wish her dead and have her estate come to them."

"Assuming her will is written that way."

"It is. There was a copy of it in her desk."

"But you still see him as a loose end rather than a prime suspect."

"I do. Don't you? Yes. Why?"

"All the reasons I just gave you."

"And…?"

"And… personal reactions to the man, which I don't think are valid reasons."

"Why not? You have to be wary of personal reactions, but that doesn't mean ignore them."

"Well, all right. It's the way he looked at me. A few years ago I began to realize that every time I met a man who looked me over like I was a piece of prime breeding stock, and he the blue-ribbon bull, he would turn out to be the same kind of person—an empty-headed incompetent who was so taken with his own sense of magnificence that he couldn't see that the only prick he had was between his ears. If you'll pardon my French, as Red Jameson would say. Ned is just too stupid not only to pull this off but to see Vaun as any kind of a threat. In fact, I'd doubt he's very troubled by the money. You would be, but he very probably thinks it's his due."

"You got all that from a look?"

"From a lot of looks over the years, Al."

He started to laugh, and as before it changed him into someone she could begin to like a great deal.

"Casey, I think I'm going to like working with you," he chuckled, and as he moved to the car he reached out and slapped her shoulder with a large hand, and then his face collapsed at her reaction.

"Oh, God, I'm sorry, I forgot. Are you okay?"

It took her a minute to catch her breath.

"Oh, yeah," she finally gasped, "just great. I always stand around with watering eyes, gritting my teeth. Makes me look tough."

At the high school the final bell had just rung, and Kate steered toward the visitor's parking against a surge of yellow buses, overladen cars, and clusters of long-legged students with the bodies of adults and the clamor of second-graders. Nothing like a high school to make a person feel short, clumsy, staid, and totally conspicuous. It seemed to affect Hawkin the same way.

"I never feel so much a cop as when I come to a high school," he muttered.

"Flat feet and a truncheon," Kate agreed.

"Just the facts, ma'am." He raised his voice. "Pardon me, ladies, can you tell me where I'd find the principal's office?"

The answer came as multiple giggles and a flurry of vague waves as the collective of females fluttered away. At the next junction he directed the same question to a group of males, and got vague thumb gestures and deeper guffaws, and the same mass sideways movement. He was drawing breath for a third inquiry when Kate nudged him and pointed to a sign saying Office. They pushed slowly inside to the desk.

The harassed secretary gradually realized that Hawkin was not a student and turned her stubby nose and small eyes in their direction. Her piercing voice cut across the din and caused it to slip several notches as the student bodies took note of the nature of these two intruders.

"Are you Detective Hawking? Mr. Zawalski said that you and Officer Martini would be here and that he'd be back in ten minutes if you'd like to wait in his office."

The waters parted and the two of them moved meekly under the speculative eyes and the beginning of whispers into the inner sanctum marked Principal. A burst of voices was set off by the closing of the door, and Kate grinned at Hawkin.

"Well, Detective Hawking, what do you bet there's a scramble for lockers and many flushings of toilets in about two minutes?"

"Sorry for the janitor tomorrow when they're all backed up."

The office was large and cluttered, the lair of a proponent of hearty camaraderie and school spirit. Plaques and group photographs of bulky young men in shoulder pads, cheerful young men in baseball hats, and unnaturally tall young men in basketball shorts crowded every inch of wall space. Bookshelves held trophies, a dusty, much autographed football on a stand, a shelf and a half of multicolored and multisized yearbooks, and several generations of the school mascot, a bear. On the wall behind the door was a yellowed list of scholarship students, three years old. Three small photos of a women's basketball team huddled together in the corner.

Hawkin moved directly to the bookshelves, pulled out an old yearbook, and took it to the cluttered table. After flipping through it for a moment he opened it flat at the formal portraits of the senior class.

The third photograph was of Vaun. To her left smirked a pair of sun-bleached twins named Aaronson; to her right another blond face looked out, a chubby boy with the euphonic name of Alexander Alarzo. Framed by the blond, tan, smiling faces, Vaun's hair seemed immensely dark and her startling eyes were a luminous near-white on the page. The photographer had caught the hint of amusement in her still face, and she looked an exotic creature set down inexplicably amongst the oblivious natives. Down the page the pattern of black and white rectangles of near-adults was broken by a famous, or perhaps infamous, picture of Richard Nixon gesturing a V-for-victory sign. Beneath that picture it said, "Marie Cabrera," and under that, "Escaped our Camera."

An uncomfortable premonition stirred in Kate. Hawkin turned the page. Marcia Givens to Richard Larson. One more page, and again the presidential visage grinned up at them. "Andrew Lewis. Escaped our Camera."

"Damnation." Hawk slammed the book shut.

On cue, the door opened, and the flustered pink face looked in. The upturned little nose twitched.

"Would either of you like a cup of coffee?" She spoke in a more normal voice, the masses in the outer office having miraculously departed. (To their lockers? wondered Kate. Surely not all of them!)

"Not right now, thanks," said Hawkin. "Maybe later. We do need a telephone, though. Is there a direct outside line, one that doesn't have any other extensions?"

"Oh!" The pink face got pinker, and she sidled into the room and planted her solid backside against the closed door. She looked so like some television caricature of a blue-rinsed lady thrilled at the chance to assist a professional sleuth that Kate had to bite down a giggle. The secretary spoke in a whisper that could be heard in the hallway.

"Oh, yes, Mr. Zawalski has a private outside line, right in his phone. You just punch the last button, number nine, on the bottom, and he's the only one that has access to it. I mean, his phone is the only one. I mean, it's perfectly private."

She grew so pink during this speech that Kate began to worry that something internal was about to burst, and was relieved when Hawkin gravely thanked the woman and gently pushed her out the door, closing it firmly behind her.

"You go ahead," he said to Kate. "When Zawalski shows up I'll have him take me to see the art teacher and then head for the playing fields."

"I don't see a phone book."

"Start with Trujillo, then. I'll get you one."

Kate sat at the large desk and began punching numbers. She heard Hawkin's jovial voice calling, "Hey, beautiful—" before the door cut it off. She had barely finished giving the code of her billing number when he reappeared, laughing, giggles spilling through the door behind him, and tossed the thin book onto the desk. "So long, schweetheart." He sneered, and disappeared.

She shook her head. What an odd man was Alonzo Hawkin.

She met Hawkin on his way back to the office, walking with a man who looked more like a retired accountant than the force behind that massive display of homage to physical prowess. This little white crow of a man hopped along next to Hawkin (who looked, she realized, as if he had played football at one time) bobbing his head and flapping his hands energetically. His birdlike quality extended even to his handshake, feathery skin over frail bones, and he fluttered on to the office while Hawkin and Kate spoke quietly.

"Trujillo says there's no change, but she's stabilized enough that they're talking about taking her off the machines tomorrow. The lab results are in—it was chloral hydrate in the whiskey. Your classic Mickey Finn, plenty to put her to sleep after one drink, and she had two large ones, on a totally empty stomach. The stomach contents also show remnants of some kind of cold pills, which may have contributed to it. The doctor Trujillo talked to says the reaction was 'unexpectedly profound,' but not unheard of. Funny she didn't taste it."

"You ever had Laphroaig whiskey?"

"Isn't that what Tyler was drinking?"

"And Vaun Adams. It would mask the taste of pretty much anything. What else did you find?"

"I reached the co-op, but the woman who keeps track of their delivery schedule is off for the day, though the man I talked to thought she might stop in again at five. I didn't tell him what I wanted, only that it was urgent. Did you have any luck?"

"The art teacher is a sixty-two-year-old lady with thick black shoes and a white bun who remembers Vaun Adams well, tried to encourage her to paint more watercolors and still lifes, and thinks it's a pity Vaun never made a name for herself in the art world after she got out of prison, she seemed such a talented child. The coach is new, never heard of Andy Lewis. Zawalski's only been here twelve years. He's going to check Lewis's records to see who his teachers were."

In the office they found the principal fluttering, the pink-faced secretary giggling, and neither of them proceeding with any efficiency. Kate wondered in despair how long this was going to take. It involved a trip into the back room and a search through a cabinet, but eventually the secretary came up with the right year's microfiches clutched in her hands and led them all to the reader. Zawalski fussed with the various switches and knobs until Kate finally commandeered the chair, slipped the proper sheet under its glass plate, and whizzed the transcripts across the screen until she zeroed in on Lewis, Andrew C. No photograph in these transcripts. The grades listed were unexceptional: in addition to the required senior courses of English 4 (for which he had received the grade of C), History 3 (C), and a foreign language (Spanish, a B + ), he had taken wood shop (C + ), Art 1 (C - ), and a study hall. He had also been on the football team, but a search on the walls of Zawalski's office had already proven fruitless.

Two of his teachers had moved, two had retired, and the English teacher had died in a plane crash three years ago. The coach had also retired, but lived nearby and came to all the games, to contribute his expertise to the efforts of the current coach. The secretary, whose name most horribly turned out to be Piggott, found the telephone numbers of the retired coach and teachers, and got from the district offices the last addresses of the two who had moved. Kate went back to the telephone. Ten minutes later she hung up with the information that of the local people one teacher had died, one was recovering from a stroke and could not be disturbed until at the earliest next week, and the coach would be delighted to see them any time that afternoon, and what would they drink?

Hawkin stood up.

"I'll go see him. You see what you can scrape up here, about Vaun and Lewis. You might glance at Ned Jameson's records too, out of curiosity. But first, why don't you call, what's his name, the police chief here? Webster?"

"Walker."

"Right. See if he remembers anything funny about Lewis. I know he was never arrested, but there might have been rumors. Follow your nose. 'Ferret about,' in fact. I'll see you in an hour or so."

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To Hawkin's surprise the principal seemed eager to go along, so the two of them drove off to a very solid hour of football talk, home brewed beer that tasted of plastic, and a heavy-handed determination on the part of Hawkin to fight the tide and keep the talk on Andrew Lewis.

At first wizened little Coach Shapiro could remember no Andrew Lewis, eighteen years before.

"There was a Tommy Lewis, ten years ago."

"That would be his cousin. Andy Lewis was only here for one year. You might remember him because he was older than most of your kids, came back after a couple years to finish his degree."

"We had two or three of those—wait a minute. Lewis. Yes, oh yes, Lewis, good arm, fast on his feet, but not much of a team player, wanted to stick out too much. Had to bench him a couple of times. He'd insist on trying for an impossible run instead of making a pass. Quit before the end of the season, I think."

"That sounds like him."

"There was something else, too. What was it? Never had any problem with my memory before I retired," he complained. "Now it's like running in mud. There was something he was involved in, later, some kind of trouble. Ah, got it! That girl. It was that girl, the one who killed the little Brand child and went to prison. She was Lewis's girlfriend for a while, wasn't she? Is that why you're here? It was a long time ago. Wait a minute. Where did you say you were from?"

"San Francisco," Hawkin admitted, and the coach was on it in a flash.

"Those little girls they've been finding in the mountains? Is that why you're here? You think she's done it again, and you're trying to find her through Lewis? You're wasting your time, I'd say. He's been gone for a long time."

"Yes, Mr. Shapiro, I know that." He neither confirmed nor denied the man's assumption, but retreated into a convenient, if true, formula. "We have some questions we'd like to ask Mr. Lewis; we think he can help us clear up a case we're working on. One of the problems we're having at the moment is that we don't know what he looks like, other than vague descriptions. We're trying to find a photograph of him. Would you by any chance have one?"

The old man burst into cackles, slapped his knee, and pushed himself to his feet. He gestured for Hawkin to follow him and shuffled into the next room, which had once been designed as a bedroom but was now what might be called a study, or a storage room, or a segment of primordial chaos. Filing cabinets with overflowing, unclosable drawers sat on top of dressers and chests; storage shelves, floor to ceiling, towered along the walls, in front of the window, as an island in the middle of the room. Every flat surface was laden with precarious, bulging cartons and grocery bags filled with papers, books, ribbons, trophies, and just plain debris.

"Memorabilia of forty years' teaching and coaching. Always told myself that when I retired I'd spend happy days sorting it out, but somehow I never seern to find time for it. Can't think where to begin, for one thing. My wife wouldn't even come in here, terrified something would fall on her. I used to bring a chair in here to have a smoke. Damn fool of a doctor told my wife I had to give them up, but she'd never come in here." He surveyed the incredible room with the complacent pride of a grandfather, and Hawkin's blood ran cold at the thought of what an errant spark could do. "Anyway, to answer your question, there's probably a picture of your Andy Lewis in here somewhere, but God alone knows where."

He led them back into his living room, which seemed in retrospect a paragon of tidiness and order. Hawkin drew a deep breath and prepared to spend a chunk of taxpayers' money.

"Mr. Shapiro, if I arranged some help for you, would you be willing to go through your… memorabilia… and see if you can find any photographs of Andrew Lewis?"

Chief Walker listened, screamed, and agreed to send a man the next day. Hawkin suggested three or four additional sorters—unemployed housewives?—and some muscular teenagers to carry and load. Walker screamed again, and Hawkin spoke the soothing words of financial responsibility and reminded him not so gently of the murdered children, to say nothing of the fire hazard. They parted, if not friends, at least colleagues.

Shapiro seemed thrilled with the arrangement, and they left him a-babbling of a show at the local historical society and pulling at Zawalski's coattails for a display of his prizes at the high school's next homecoming game.

Hawkin rode back to the school brooding darkly over the possibility of a conspiracy that reached back eighteen years, and the very absurdity of it put him into a foul mood. Kate, on the other hand, was positively bubbling over with news and had some color in her face for the first time that day.

"Al, you'll never guess what I found out."

"Oh, Christ, Martinelli, let's not play guessing games, huh?"

Her face went blank and her chin went up, and Hawkin kicked himself for a clumsy fool.

"Yes, sir. Would you like to hear the results of my—"

"Casey, stop. I'm sorry, I've been drinking bad beer, thinking bad thoughts, and I need a toilet. I'll be back in a minute, and we'll start again." He went out, and a while later there was a dim rumor of rushing water and he came back.

"Okay, now, what have you come up with?"

She eyed him cautiously, but retreated from formality.

"Walker couldn't find anything, but the town Lewis came here from is about sixty miles north of here, and Walker knows the man who was sheriff at the time. He's retired, but he still lives there. I phoned around and finally tracked him down at his daughter's house, and I explained who I was and asked him if there was a possibility that the name Andrew Lewis meant anything to him. He didn't answer at first, so I started to explain that it would have been twenty years ago and he had no record so he'd probably never even been arrested as a juvenile, but he cut me off and said in this very quiet voice that there was no need, he remembered Andrew Lewis very well, what did I want to know? I left it general, that we were looking for him for information he might have concerning a murder, but he cut me off again, and said—shall I read it to you? I got most of it." She held up her notebook, and at his nod went on.

"He said, 'I wondered how long it would take before he got caught with something.' I started to say that we were only trying to find him, but he said, 'I knew twenty-five years ago that Andy Lewis was rotten, and I knew eighteen years ago that he had something to do with that little girl's death."

"What?" said Hawkin, incredulous.

"That's what he said."

"You mean he thinks Lewis did it?"

"He didn't say that. He was very careful not to. Just that Lewis was involved in some way. Shall I read the rest of this?"

Hawkin ran a hand through his hair, took out his cigarettes, and nodded for her to continue.

"I asked him if maybe he could explain that statement. He asked me if I had a few minutes, and I assured him that I had all the time in the world."

Kate looked back at her notes, remembering that at this point in their conversation the retired sheriff had excused himself and laid down the receiver. She had heard footsteps going across a room, followed by an unintelligible mumble, and a door closing to shut out the sounds of children. Footsteps again, the scrape of a chair, and then his voice had come again. She found her place on the page.

" 'First of all,' he said, 'I want you to know that I'm not the kind of person who sees bogeymen in the woodwork and criminal psychoses in every kid who cracks somebody over the head. I'm sure that anyone who's ever worked with me would tell you the same thing that's on my first academy evaluation: I don't have a lot of imagination, and I tend to give everyone the benefit of the doubt.' He sounded like that, too," Kate added. "Slow and thoughtful.

" 'Andy Lewis and his mother moved here when he was nine. It's a small town, and I live here, so I'd always hear when people came in or out, you know? Well, a couple of weeks later I had a phone call from the sheriff where they used to live, down near Fresno, a guy I'd met a couple of times. He told me, just casually you understand, that if people started reporting dead pets, I should keep an eye on the Lewis kid. Yeah, I know, I thought it sounded kind of crazy too, and I told him so, and he kind of laughed and agreed with me, and that was the end of it.

" 'Then about four or five months later an old lady found her poodle strangled. She'd thrown some kids out of her yard the week before. Four months later a cat and its kittens were found strangled, two days after their owner had shouted to a gang of kids to leave them alone. That time I remembered the phone call. Andy Lewis was in the gang, he had scratches on his arms, but what kid doesn't? And his mother said he'd been home all night. About two or three times a year, after that, somebody would make Andy Lewis mad, and one morning they'd find their dog or cat dead or their bird cage opened. No sign of a break-in, but in the country people are careless about locking doors and windows. I even began checking for fingerprints, on the collars and stuff, but nothing. Never anything I could prove, and never a valuable animal or livestock, but it made me nervous, especially the way he wasn't in a hurry about it. Nothing pointed to him, there was always a gap between the insult, if that's how he saw it, and the revenge. If it hadn't been for the phone call, I don't know how long it would have taken me to put it together. As I said, it made me nervous. And when I found that he didn't go bragging to his friends, well, that made me very nervous.

" 'He was cool, he was patient, and he was smart. Except for once, once that I caught him, I should say. You'll understand when I say that by the time he was a teenager I was getting more than a bit concerned about him and keeping my ears flapping and my eyes open for anything concerned with Andy Lewis. That's why I was onto him so fast when he finally stepped out of line. Only once did he just let fly without planning, and that was the end of him in this town. Tell me, have you met him?'

"I said I didn't know if I had or not and explained about the pictures.

" 'Well,' he said, 'Andy Lewis was a charmer. He'd have made a great con man. He was a con man, come to think of it, only not for money, not directly. He wanted power over other people, always moved with a group of worshippers to admire him. When he was sixteen the local preacher's daughter caught his eye, a pretty, overly protected little thing, very bright.

" 'He got her pregnant. She was fourteen, almost fifteen. She wanted him to marry her, some dream she had, but when he pushed her off she started talking about turning him in for statutory rape. He blew up, beat her so badly she nearly died, lost the baby of course and half her teeth, ruptured her insides so she couldn't have any more children. And, you know, damned if she didn't refuse to press charges against him. Partly she was scared to, but she was more than half convinced that he really loved her and hadn't meant to do it.

" 'I did something then I've never done before or since and I'll only admit to it now because I'm an old man and my deputy's dead. I took my deputy out, and we picked up the Lewis kid, and we took him out to the quarry and beat the shit out of him. Still makes me sick to think about it, the two of us and this sixteen-year-old kid, but I knew it was the only way he'd listen to me. I didn't hurt him, nowhere near what he'd done to the girl, but when I finished I told him I wanted him gone, never to set foot in my county again, or next time I wouldn't stop. The next morning he was gone. A few months later his mother moved to the town you're in now to be with her sister. The next I heard of Lewis was three, four years later, when his name came up in connection with the Adams girl. I have no idea where he was during those years. He was supposed to have been in the army, but I find it hard to imagine.

" 'Anyway, the other thing you should know is that he always had to be in control of any situation, any group. The only time he faded into the background was when something was about to happen. Now, as I understand it, the Adams girl was a brilliant artist. The whole school knew her, knew that she was going somewhere, a very large and exotic fish plunked down temporarily in their little pond. She doesn't seem to have been aware of how others looked at her, but when Lewis walked into that school—God knows why or how he did—he saw immediately that she was one of the power points of the school and he set out to take her over. And, as I said, he was a charmer.

" 'For a few months he rode around on her shoulders, making everybody think that he was dangling her, rather than she carrying him. And then she wised up. From what she said at the trial, she decided he was getting in the way of her painting, so she told him to leave and went back to her brushes. He couldn't have that—not only the rejection, but the public humiliation. She didn't bother to hide it, and apparently some of the other students saw what had happened and laughed at him.

" 'A month later the child given into her care was found dead. Strangled. With no sign of a break-in. Apparently by a girl who had just made Andy Lewis angry. And I knew that Andy Lewis was a kid with a thirst for revenge, the ability to be patient and quiet," and bright enough to keep his temper under control, most of the time.

" 'I did what I could. I went to the police there. I put it all in front of them, and they tried, but none of us could find the smallest chink in his armor. A week or two after the trial ended I went to talk with him. I guess I thought that I could threaten him into not doing anything else by letting him know that we were all watching him. He laughed at me. Laughed right in my face, and turned his back on me and walked away. I went home and I thought about it, and I realized that I had two choices: I could shoot him like I would a dog with rabies, or I could sit tight and wait until he stepped into someone else's hands and see what I could do.

" There was really no choice in the matter. I couldn't shoot him. I never even seriously considered it, although I knew that I might very well save innocent lives if I did. So I sat and waited, and I've been waiting eighteen years. I know who you are, and I know why you're calling, and all I can say is, if there's anything an old, retired sheriff with a bad conscience can do to help, I'm yours.'

"I told him that he'd been more help than I could have dreamed of and that the only thing we were missing was the photograph. He said that he'd try to think of someone who might have one, and if we had no luck he'd be more than happy to come down and try to make an ID. I thanked him and said we'd be in touch."

Hawkin had sat and listened quietly to her narration, his face growing more strained with every sentence. He now took a cigarette out of its soft package, tapped the end of it squarely on the principal's desk, twice, put it to his mouth, lit it precisely with one match, shook the match out and put it carefully into the ashtray he'd found in a drawer, his movements those of a technician defusing a bomb.

"Classic," he commented, then, "damn, damn, damn. How many other people have made Andy Lewis angry over the last eighteen years? Get a hold of Trujillo—"

"I talked with him again after the sheriff's news and told him to increase the guard on the road as much as he could and stop every male of about thirty-five to forty who wanted to leave."

"Good."

"I take it the coach didn't have a photo?"

"If he does, it'll take days to unearth. Eighteen years ago Lewis was a bit over five ten, one seventy-five, brown hair and eyes, no marks but a tattoo on his upper left arm, something snaky."

"Except for the tattoo it'd fit half the men on Tyler's Road. Maybe more than half."

"Christ, what I'd give for a fingerprint or a fuzzy picture."

"I just may be able to oblige you," she said with ill-concealed glee. "Andy Lewis had a driver's license."

"Hot damn, you don't mean we're going to get a break with this?"

"Trujillo tracked it down. They'll send the photo to the office. I wouldn't count on much, though. DMV photos aren't exactly the greatest."

"I won't cancel the search through the Shapiro archives, then."

"The what?"

"Never mind. Anything else?"

"Not much. There's nothing of interest about Ned Jameson. Average grades, some trouble as a kid but nothing nasty, just paint on walls and a shoplifting charge when he was fifteen. I was just going to try the co-op again when you came in."

"Your ear must be falling off," he said by way of praise. "Do you have their address? Let's go by and play nasty cops. I need to growl at somebody. Call Trujillo once more and let him know where we're going. Tell him I'll call him from home tonight, and have him start inquiries on the Road for a man with a tattoo."

Hawkin did not growl at the blushing Mrs. Piggott, nor at Mr. Zawalski, who fluttered them to the car. He did not even growl when the trio of hippie farmers at the co-op produced a hand-scribbled list of drivers that seemed to put Ned in the clear for at least two of the killings. It was not until the new-age farmers responded to his query about restaurants with the name of a vegetarian health-food place that he finally exploded, cursed tofu, beans, and goat's milk violently, and only subsided when, cowering, they threw him the name of an Italian place that they vowed had no tofu, ferns, or posters of Venice on the walls and was responsible in its choice of veal calves.

It wasn't a bad dinner. They parked immediately outside the windows so as to keep an eye and ear on the car. Hawkin talked about his childhood in the San Fernando Valley and about his kids, and asked nothing in return. Neither of them drank wine; both of them ate meat. The zabaglione was followed by thick demitasse cups of espresso romano.

Outside the restaurant it was almost dark, the air cool. Hawkin stood and lit a cigarette.

"Look, Al, I don't mind if you smoke in the car."

"It's a filthy habit," he said.

Kate was anxious to go while the coffee still surged in her veins, but Hawkin seemed in no hurry. He took his time and snuffed the end out thoroughly in the planter box.

"You look tired, Casey. Do you want me to drive?"

"It's all right. I don't mind driving."

"I'm quite competent behind the wheel. I got in the habit of letting my partner drive some years ago, and as you know I catch up on my sleep, but I am perfectly able to get us home in one piece."

"Really, Al, I'm fine."

He looked at her, then shrugged and walked toward the car. She unlocked the passenger door, and held the key in her hand. The exhaustion rolled up like waves and beat against the wall of her determination. Why do this? She knew she could make it home. Hawkin knew she could. So what was the point?

She handed him the keys.

"You drive for a while, please, Al."

Where some men might have shown triumph, Hawkin's eyes held only approval and warmth. He nodded, took the keys, and drove with easy concentration towards the freeway.

20

Contents - Prev/Next

Kate drowsed as the white lights sailed past and the red ones blurred and swam into each other. The car was warm and smelled of coffee and, not unpleasantly, of tobacco. She punched up the pillow and settled her head back into it.

"You awake?" said Hawkin softly, without taking his eyes from the road.

"Yes."

"Can I ask you something?"

"You can try," she said, rousing herself slightly.

"Are you a lesbian?"

Kate examined her reaction to the question. Nothing. Mild surprise perhaps, which was very interesting. "Are you asking as a cop, as a man, or as a friend?" she wondered.

"Mmm. Let's say, as a friend."

"Al, as a friend, I hope you won't be offended if I say that I don't think we know each other well enough for you to ask me that question. Try it again in a couple of months." She settled back and closed her eyes.

"And as a man?"

"You didn't ask me as a man."

"And if I had?"

"If you had, my answer would have been somewhat different."

Neither of them mentioned the third possibility.

"A couple of months, huh?"

"Maybe more. Maybe less if we have another case like this."

"God forbid!"

"Not offended?"

"Of course not."

Hawkin drove in silence for several miles, thinking. He was not all that concerned with her answer to his question and had asked it only because he thought it might be necessary to provide an opening for her to talk about herself. She had not chosen to take the opening, but it hardly mattered. The initial move away from the strictly professional had been made, and that was what he had been after.

The road cleared at a well-lit junction of sweeping concrete roadways, and he looked over at his partner. She was asleep, her full lips curled in some secret amusement. The precise nature of the joke, if joke it was, he could not know, but it made her look very young and wise, and made his own mouth curl into a smile as well. Kate slept for an hour and took the wheel to drive across the lighted bridge into the city. She waited in the car while Hawkin went up to get the DMV photo from the office, and when he came out onto the street she could see from his face that it was even worse than she had anticipated.

"The picture's bad?" she asked as he climbed in.

"In a very good light you can see that he has two eyes, a nose, a mouth, and brownish hair. Do you know where Susan Chin lives?"

"Our artist? No."

He gave her an address.

Susan came to the door of her small apartment. She had obviously been in bed when Hawkin called and did not invite them in. She squinted at the photograph and looked at him dubiously.

"You did say it wasn't very good, but this is ridiculous."

"Can you do it?"

"You want me to use this to make a series of sketches, one of which might remind somebody on that Road of one of their neighbors? To extrapolate out from it, intuitively?"

"Exactly. Can you do it?"

"Haven't the faintest," she said cheerfully. "Well, it's an interesting problem. Makes a change from computer-generated IdentiKit drawings."

"Good luck."

They left the young artist standing in her doorway peering at the photo in the light of the bulb over her door. Kate dropped Hawkin off at his house and drove home.

The garage door rattled down behind her. She leaned forward and turned off the ignition, and felt the strength that had kept her moving throughout the long day ebb away into the silent garage. She sat at the wheel and thought about the motions of moving her right arm down to push the button and disengage her seat belt and moving her left arm down to pull the door handle and drawing first her left foot and then her right out and onto the concrete floor and standing up, but somehow sitting and breathing were about all she could manage at the moment.

The sound of a door opening, feet on a wooden staircase, slight scuffs on the slab floor, the click and pull of the car door coming open, Lee's voice, dark and restful.

"Sweet Kate, you look all done in."

"Hello, love. God, it's nice to sit still."

"I started a hot bath when I heard you come in, and the oil's warming for a massage."

"You will kill me with pleasure."

"I do hope not."

A light finger brushed the back of Kate's neck, and then the scuffs and steps retreated upstairs. In a minute Kate followed.

There was a bath that was almost too hot for comfort, and a large mug of something that tasted of chicken and celery, and thick warm towels, and then strong fingers probing at locked muscles and easing the tension from neck and back and legs until Kate lay groaning with the sweet agony of it, and when she was totally limp and the hands had moved on to wide, firm, integrating sweeps, she spoke, halfway to sleep.

"Hawkin asked me tonight if I was a lesbian."

The sweeping hands checked only slightly.

"And what did you say?"

Odd, thought Kate muzzily, how hands can be amused when a voice isn't.

"I told him to ask me again when we knew each other better."

This time Lee laughed outright, and then the towel began to wipe the last of the oil from Kate's skin.

"How utterly un-Californian of you, Kate."

"Wasn't it?"

The hands finished and soft sheets and warm blankets were pulled up to Kate's neck.

"I have some work to do. Give me a shout if you need anything. Now, go to sleep."

"I'll work at it."

Kate's breathing slowed and thickened, and a few minutes later the bed shifted and then the room clicked into darkness. Lee's soft curls formed a halo against the hall light, and she closed the door gently and went downstairs, an expression of fond exasperation on her face.

Several miles away Alonzo Hawkin lay on the sofa in his living room, a glass balanced on his stomach, his eyes on the large, delicate fish that performed their glides and pirouettes for his amusement, his mind on the events and the texture of the day. He was, for once, satisfied.

It was almost magical the way one day's work could on occasion, on very rare occasion, transform a case entirely and bring its whole setting and landscape into focus. That morning—yesterday morning, now—he had walked down the stairs with a huge sheaf of unrelated papers and more questions than he could begin to even ask, and Andrew C. Lewis was just one name in a hundred others. Sixteen hours later he had trudged back up those stairs, bone weary, with two things: a name and a direction. His weariness he bore like a badge of accomplishment, and he felt himself a fortunate man. A break.

The police artist Susan Chin was not the only one he had disturbed that night. First was Chief Walker, from whom he had asked two things: the whereabouts of Andy Lewis's aunt and her family, and further information concerning the reliability of Lewis's alibi the night of the murder eighteen years ago. Hawkin would have preferred to do that himself, but as it was not strictly his case, it would be hard to justify another couple of days up there. Next week, maybe, but not now.

Then he reported in. The man listened, concealed three yawns, grunted approval, and went back to bed.

Then the hospital: no change. Hawkin heard the first prickle of worry in the back of the doctor's voice, but as there was nothing he could do in that department, he pushed the thoughts away and called Trujillo.

That young man sounded older than he had a week before. He confirmed that a guard was now installed next to Vaun's bed instead of in the corridor, with orders not to step outside the door, and not even to close the bathroom door when he needed to use the room's toilet. She was not to be out of his sight.

Trujillo was disappointed that the photo was bad, though not surprised, and agreed to set Susan's drawings up in the main room to guarantee the most contact.

He then told Hawkin that he was not sure how much longer he could keep control. The Road's uneasiness was nearly to the breaking point. He'd had to let two families with children leave during the day (one of the men was black, the other in his late fifties) to take refuge with suburban friends, and the efficient bush telegraph had spread the news clear up to old Peterson's place that Vaun's near death was not being treated as a suicide. Trujillo had spent the day going up and down the Road—Tyler had been forced to suspend the anticar rule—reassuring people and reminding them to inquire first before they let fly with buckshot or bullet. The bedrooms at Tyler's were full tonight with nervous residents (peasants come to the castle during a siege, thought Hawkin with amusement, right down Tyler's alley), and he, Trujillo, would be staying there too. Sharp-nosed newsmen were back to camping outside, and it was only a matter of time…

There had been no immediate response that afternoon to the tattoo inquiry, although only a couple of dozen people had been asked. Hawkin told him in all honesty that he was doing a fine job. The younger man responded to the confidence in Hawkin's voice, and after a few minutes Hawkin told him to go to bed.

After that he went and took a long, mindless shower, wrapped his stocky body in his favorite soft and threadbare kimono, and settled down with a glass.

The time with the Jamesons had proven a gold mine. He now had Vaun Adams; he could now see her walking the halls of that unremarkable high school, an extraordinary teenager with an aura of untouchability and genius to keep the world at bay. And her short liaison with clever, nasty, sophisticated Andy Lewis—even that was not as completely unlikely as it had first seemed.

But what to do about the maddening shadow figure of Andrew C. Lewis? Hawkin's eyes were caught by the enthusiastic rooting of the eel-like loach in the gravel, and his mind wandered into a side track. What, he mused, does that C stand for? Charles? Clifford? Coleoptera? The father's name on the transcript had been Edward, or Edmund… He caught himself angrily and dragged his wayward thoughts back to the problem at hand. Lewis was on Tyler's Road; Hawkin knew it in his very bones. If he had not made a break for it by now, he wouldn't, not until he knew for certain that Vaun was not about to die. Perhaps not even then, if he felt sure enough that he had covered his tracks. Andy Lewis was not a man to panic blindly. How best to find him? And, once found, how to tie him to the wispy bits of circumstance, how to weave his involvement into a fabric strong enough to hold up in court? How to spin a sliver of wood, a hypothetical tattoo, and a deliberate concealment of identity into a rope strong enough to hang a man? Best would be if Lewis could be forced into an incriminating bolt—that would help to solve both problems at once. Hawkin lay there considering and discarding options and ideas, building up a plan around the geography and the psychological makeup of his prey and the people he had to work with.

The level in his glass went down very slowly, but eventually it was dry, and he sat up.

Twenty-four hours, he thought. If nothing's happened in twenty-four hours—no photograph has appeared, no description has clicked—I'll bring down the retired sheriff and Coach Shapiro and anyone else I can find and drive them up and down Tyler's Road in Trujillo's shiny new wagon until one of them says, "Say, wait a minute…" Tomorrow night I'll decide whether or not to turn Tyler's Road inside out. The thought of that possibility gave him a moment of pleasurable anticipation, seventy-four long-haired adults and twenty minors dragged in and printed and grilled until something gave under the pressure.

(I wonder what that C stands for? he thought in irritation.)

Yes, something will happen. If not tomorrow (today!) then Wednesday for certain. As for Monday, he could end it content that he had done all he could.

He put his glass on the table, said good night to the fish, and went to bed.

He was not to know until the sun rose that succumbing to the day's all-too-rare glow of satisfaction had been a mistake.

Two hours to the south a woman with black curls lay in a hospital bed, her hands tucked neatly beneath the crispcov ers, her remarkable ice-blue eyes staring, unblinking, up into the dim room. The hour was very late, or very early, but a disturbance down the hall and the rapid departure of a much-attended gurney had brought her eyes open some minutes before. One could not say that she was awake, exactly; only that her eyes were currently open, where before they had been closed.

The room's machinery had been edged back from the bed, save for the tall pole with the intravenous drip and the rolling cart with the monitor, whose wires were connected to little round sensors taped onto the woman's chest. The tracery of the heartbeat was slow but regular, and the cart would be removed later that day.

The woman did not know that, though. There was considerable debate over what she did, or would, know. The bruised puffiness of her mouth had subsided, the marks of her resurrection were fading, but Vaun Adams had given no sign of anything other than a mere physical presence. The words "brain damage" and "oxygen deprivation" had slid into the room and been carried away again, but they waited just outside her door and would return.

The room was lit solely by the corner reading lamp that sent its beam across the guard's paperback novel and laid a stretched circle of light along the wall and across a corner of Vaun's bed. She gazed passively up at the reflection of her face in a bit of polished metal overhead, distorted but familiar. One tiny part of Vaun saw it and recognized it, but that part was disconnected from her now, in abeyance, hiding.

The brain of the woman who had been Vaun Adams and Eva Vaughn was not physically damaged, not badly at any rate. Her mind, however, and her spirit—those had been severely wounded. The spark of being that was Vaun Adams, the spark that had flamed into being as Eva Vaughn, lay smothered beneath a burden that had finally proven intolerable. Vaun was covered by a blanket of despair, a thick, gray blanket that was crushing her, stifling her will to move and create and live, a thick gray blanket that said, "Enough."

Enough.

Enough was the ruling principle that governed what there was left of this life. Enough. I can no more. Since I was two years old I have fought for the right to be what I am, and I can fight no longer. I yield. I give up. I can no more. Enough.

I choose to die.

The blue eyes were still open when a nurse came in ten minutes later to check the drip. Vaun's ears registered sound waves, and some dim hidden part of her automatically deciphered them as words, but they did not connect, did not penetrate the thick gray blanket. The nurse leaned over her eyes, and behind the white shoulder appeared the face of a man above a dark uniform. More sounds came, a few squawks and a rumble, and the male face withdrew.

The nurse addressed Vaun with professional cheeriness, though even the guard could hear the uneasiness in her voice. Vaun was a problem, a VIP who was in an unclear state of either arrest or protection, or both. She was also, to all appearances, a vegetable. This mysterious black-haired woman with the unseeing, crystalline eyes gave a number of people the creeps, and the night nurse was one of them. She left after servicing the body in the bed, and eventually the eyes drifted shut again.

In the dark hills between Vaun Adams's hospital bed and the city where two detectives slept, a shadow moved onto Tyler's Road. The man who had been Andy Lewis closed the door on its oiled hinges and slipped silently away from the house he had thought of as home these last years. He felt no regret at leaving the woman who slept behind him in the bed he had built from a single oak tree, and only slight regret at leaving the child in the room his hands had made. There was no room for any feeling other than the white-hot, piercing-cold, all-consuming rage that trembled and bubbled throughout his body like dry ice furious in a bucket of water. In his mind's eye the leaves scorched and blackened overhead, small animals dropped down dead with his passing, the road cringed from his boots—and Vaun Adams woke screaming from her hospital bed to feel the approach of his terrible hate.

None of these things happened, of course. The muted beep of Vaun's monitor kept its hypnotic rhythm, small night animals rustled leaves, a dog barked once, the breeze from the ocean stirred the fragrant needles.

By dawn he had crossed the mud slide's remnants, avoided the guards posted at the upper end of Tyler's Road, and entered the adjoining state park. At eight a neatly dressed man with a mustache, carrying a thick briefcase, caught a ride with a computer programmer who worked over the hill. The driver's daughter was with him in the front seat, going to spend the day with her grandmother. The child was six years old and had shiny brown hair and one loose front tooth, which she delighted in wiggling precariously with her tongue. The man who had been Andy Lewis smiled at her with his charming smile, chatted easily with her about kindergarten and with her father about computers and the problems of remote automobile breakdowns, and thanked them both when they got to San Jose. By noon he was in Berkeley, completely invisible.

Long before that—shortly after he left the park, in fact— Angie Dodson woke to find that her husband was gone.

21

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Angie's pounding echoed through the house and roused the sleepers, Trujillo among them. He wrapped himself in a borrowed bathrobe and walked yawning down to the kitchen. Angie's face was tight with worry despite her deliberately casual words, and Trujillo was far from sleepy as he unobtrusively left the room and sprinted for the upstairs telephone.

Hawkin cursed viciously, Kate cursed with less imagination and opened her back again, and two hours later they burst into Tyler's kitchen.

"Where's Angie?"

The huddled group all busied themselves with their cups or studied their hangnails. Blond-braided Anna told them that she was upstairs with Trujillo. Hawkin took the stairs two at a time, Kate on his heels, and when they got to Tyler's door he threw the door back without knocking.

Angie Dodson looked up from where she sat crouched in front of the fire. She had passed through tears and now looked old and beaten and utterly without hope. Hawkin walked over to her and put his arms around her, and she clung to him and began to moan in a breathless, high-pitched animal noise. Trujillo turned to look out the window. Tyler smiled sickly at Kate and lurched through the door, muttering something about coffee. Kate studied the watercolors and gradually she realized that Angie's moans had resolved themselves into a monotonously repeating phrase.

"She was my friend. She was my friend. She was my friend."

"You mean Vaun," said Hawkin in a gentler voice than Kate would have thought possible.

"Yes. She was my friend. She was—"

"Where's Amy?"

That got to her. She took a deep and shaky breath and sat up. Hawkin's arms fell away, but he sat close to her and bent his head to her.

"She's with the Newborns. I told Rob to watch her every minute, and not let her go off anywhere, not even with—Oh God…" She collapsed again. "She was my friend, and they say he killed her. Is it true? You must tell me."

"She isn't dead, Angie."

"She might as well be. Did he do it?"

"Does the man you know as Tony have a tattoo on his arm?"

His non sequitur caught her full attention.

"What?"

"A tattoo," he repeated. "Does Tony have a tattoo?"

"How did you know?" She straightened and blew her nose. "He never let anyone see it; he was embarrassed by it. He'd had it put on when he was real young. Not even Amy knew he had it. He always wore a T-shirt, even when he went swimming."

"What was it?"

"A dragon."

"A dragon? Not a snake?"

"No, it was one of those long, skinny dragons. I suppose it looked a bit like a snake, but it had little legs. It was on his left arm, up high. I only saw it clearly two or three times myself. He'd usually only take his shirt off in the dark. What does his tattoo have to do with it?"

So he told her. Tyler came in with a tray of coffee, and Hawkin broke off until he had gone; then he resumed and told her all, or nearly all.

"So you see, Angie, at this point the only positive identification we have is that tattoo."

"He always was funny about having his picture taken, I know. Even at our wedding." She giggled softly and sighed, dazed with the impossibility of what her life had become in a few short hours.

"Angie, I have to ask you some questions now."

"I won't testify against him," she threw out at him. "I'll talk to you, but I won't testify against him."

(Andy… he was a real charmer… she wouldn't press charges…)

"Just talk to me, then. Tell me how you met."

They had met at one of the Road's yearly Medieval Faires, three years ago come June. He had come as a visitor, not in costume, and though he had bought his ticket from her early in the morning, it was not until afternoon that he had reappeared and made her teach him the steps to a pavane, and they'd danced and drunk and laughed on into the evening, and on the Sunday he'd been back first thing and spent the whole day with her and with Amy, and that night he'd gone up the Road with them and slept on her couch. Two weeks later he moved his few belongings into the small house, and in November they married. Not a church ceremony, but one they wrote, and Tyler conducted. It wasn't a legal marriage, because Angie's husband had neither divorced her nor been in touch since he deserted her, but it had not mattered.

"What is he like, Tony? With you and Amy?"

"Very good with Amy. I don't think he'd ever been around kids much, before he moved in with us, but he was a good father to her. Quiet, polite. Private, but not like he was hiding anything. A gentleman, I guess."

"Always?"

"With Amy, yes. And almost always with me. He… he has a temper. Had. He never hit me, I don't mean that, but once he got really mad at me—for something small, too, I was just teasing him about a stupid mistake he'd made when he was building the addition onto the cabin. He didn't like it."

"What did he do, Angie?"

"He chopped up my loom." Her face remembered frightened bewilderment as she studied her clasped hands. "He got really quiet, and his eyes… He went out to the woodshed and got the big ax and came back with it and chopped my loom up into little pieces, and then he hauled it off and burned it. Afterwards he was sorry, he kissed me, and the next day we went to Berkeley and he bought me another one, a better one, too, an eight harness I'd been wanting for a long time. We never talked about it again, but, well, I never teased him again."

"And with the other people on the Road? How did he get along with them?"

"Really well, with most of them. As far as I know he never lost his temper with anyone else, not that I heard of. He's never been tremendous buddies with anyone, he likes to keep to himself, but when he's in the mood he can be a lot of fun. Anyway, he was approved for residency in the October meeting, so obviously everyone thought they could get along with him." Her tone was defensive, as if wondering why her friends had not protected her against her choice. "They all like him. He seems to get along best with Tommy Chesler," she added.

"What about Vaun? How did he act toward her? Did she vote for him?"

"I don't remember anyone not voting for him—wait a minute, she wasn't here, I think. It was the Harvest Meeting, and she wasn't here, she had to go to New York, I think it was. How did he act toward her?" she repeated. She chewed on her lip and fixed her shiny eyes on a part of the carpet, and sobbed a small laugh.

"I thought he was jealous of her. She was my friend, before he came here. My old man took off about six months before she came, you see, and then she built her house, and we were neighbors, and she admired my needlework and weaving and helped me with the colors and the designs and—she was my friend, you know? And I thought he was jealous, though he never said anything. I thought it was funny, cute in a way, that he'd be jealous, but I didn't want to bother him, so mostly I'd see her when he was away, or when I was up working in the garden. She let me use her sunny hillside for vegetables, you know, so we could use our open space for the ponies. Tony was never nasty about her, he'd just quietly go out the back if she came to the house, or look away if we met her on the Road. Nothing obvious or rude, you understand. I thought he was just being nice to me, not wanting to break up my friendship with her, but if what Paul says is true, if he is this Andy Lewis, then I suppose he wanted to avoid being recognized by her." Her voice dragged to a halt, and her face looked drawn and haggard.

"But he transported some paintings for her."

"Yes, four or five times. She knew he had a truck, and she asked him once about a year and a half ago when Tyler's was broken down and she was desperate to get them off to some show."

"Did he pack them up for her, too?"

"No, Vaun had Tommy Chesler help her. They built these big crates, one for each painting, and Tommy'd help Tony load them. A couple of times Tommy went with him to the airport, but Tommy doesn't much like cities."

"Did Vaun go?"

"No."

"Tell me about when Tony was away. Did he go regularly? What was he doing? Do you know where he went?"

"Earning money, doing odd jobs in town or over the hill. Never anything regular, just a day here and there or overnight. Never more than four days in a row. It worked out to about two or three days a week, I suppose, just to keep us in spending money. It wasn't regular. Sometimes his friends would leave a message with Tyler telling him there'd be work on a certain day, other times he'd just go."

"Do you know the names of any of those friends?"

"There was a Tim who left messages sometimes, and another guy in San Jose named Carl, but I don't remember ever hearing their last names. Tyler or Anna might know."

"I'll ask them. You can't think of anywhere he might go, any favorite places?"

"San Jose, I guess. We went there, once. He took me to a bar. I don't like bars, but he thought I might enjoy it. It had a funny name, like a joke. Gold something. Gold girl? No, that's right, Golden Grill. Stupid pun. On one wall they have an enormous painting of a naked blond woman tied to a barbecue. Disgusting, really." She suddenly noticed the identical expression on the faces of her three listeners, the sort of expression an Olympic archer makes when he hits the bull's-eye in the final round. "Did that help any?"

"My dear Angie, you have given us much food for thought, almost as nourishing as your onion soup. I thank you, profoundly."

The matchbook found near the body of Samantha Donaldson had come from a bar in San Jose called the Golden Grill.

Angie could tell them little more. She did not know what he'd been wearing, how much money he had, or whether or not he'd taken a gun, but she said he was a good shot with both rifle and pistol. A quick check showed his truck in the shed and no other vehicles missing. Hawkin sent Trujillo up with Angie to try to find out what her husband had taken with him, and told him to have the nurse, Terry Allen, stay with Angie for a while and then to go and pick what brains he could find in Tommy Chesler's head for any possible leads. Tyler he sent out front, requesting that he obfuscate matters as much as possible in the eyes of the media while Hawkin and Kate made their escape.

The uniformed policewoman in Vaun's room was tall and formidable and blocked the doorway most effectively until she was satisfied with their credentials. She left them alone in the room.

It was the first time Kate had seen Vaun since early Saturday. Her face was slack, her lips were slightly parted, her skin was almost as white as her pillow but for the red mouth and the dark smudges under her eyes. The intense contrasts of white and black and red gave her the aloof, other-worldly beauty of a geisha. Kate would have thought her dead but for the monitor.

Hawkin grunted and left after a minute, but Kate lingered. She was struck with the irrational wish to see Vaun's hands, but they were under the covers and she hesitated to touch her. Finally she left, and the policewoman returned to the room.

Dr. Tanaka's office held five people. Hawkin stood at the window looking down at the entrance parking lot. Kate sat with a notebook. Dr. Tanaka himself wore a neat blue suit and spoke with great precision. The other two doctors wore white jackets over their clothing, and the woman, whose name was Gardner, had a stethoscope in her pocket, an obvious sign of low status, Kate thought in amusement. Hawkin turned back to the room.

"So, to put it in English," he said, "it's too early to know what's going on."

"That is an oversimplification, but in essence, true. Her symptoms and her brain waves are neither those of a coma nor of catatonia, but they have characteristics of both. Until we know more, all we can do is continue to support the bodily functions."

"Then, Dr. Tanaka, I do not envy you and your hospital the next few days. The press has arrived."

An undignified scramble for the window ensued, the telephone rang, and Hawkin stalked off with Kate close behind. He sent her off to warn Vaun's guard and call in the hospital security for reinforcements while he went to close himself in with a telephone. Within hours the world would know that Eva Vaughn lay in this small hospital. He no longer had any time to wait. When Kate returned he handed her a slip of paper.

"You will meet this plane tonight."

"He's coming, then? Dr. Bruckner?"

"I gave him no choice. You go home now and sleep for a few hours. It's going to be a long night."

22

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The plane from Chicago was late. Kate spent the time in an all-night cafeteria at San Francisco International's north terminal, drinking bad coffee and fighting her way into an introduction to the theory of art that she had taken from Lee's shelves at midnight. At two o'clock she went for a walk through the other-worldly halls, and found herself in a display of the work of local artists. She long contemplated two pieces, one a battered briefcase that was actually made out of clay, the other a massive and highly realistic section of adobe wall formed entirely out of styrofoam and leather. She finally decided that any intended symbolism was beyond her ability to decipher, thrust the book into her shoulder bag, and retreated into the cafeteria for more coffee (Was it actually made of hot stewed twigs? Was the artificial creamer formed entirely of styrofoam?) and the evening paper. Eva Vaughn was on the front page, and Kate tortured herself by reading every word.

The plane touched down at 3:15, and a few minutes later Kate planted herself firmly in the flow of dazed passengers, watching for the self-described "little fellow with a brown briefcase." (Presumably made of actual leather.) A likely candidate appeared, and she spoke vaguely in the direction of the short, foreign-looking man with the gray goatee, spotless white shirt, and bow tie.

"Dr. Bruckner?"

But it was the surprisingly young-looking man next to him who stopped in front of her and held out his hand.

"Yes I know I don't look like a psychiatrist," he said rapidly, "and yes I know you didn't expect me to be so young, but then if you're 'one of our inspectors name of Martinelli' I wasn't expecting you either, so we're even."

He had an unidentifiably eastern nasal voice and a crooked grin, and his hair was too long and he needed a shave, and he was indeed a little man, barely taller than Kate, and she laughed and took his hand, which surprised her with the calluses of a laborer.

"Casey Martinelli, and Al may have forgotten to tell you I was a she or he may have been aiming at the truly liberated attitude of not noticing or he may have had some obscure reason of his own. At any rate, I'm glad to meet you, and thank you for coming."

"I would have come tomorrow even if you people hadn't called, as soon as I read the morning paper. No, no luggage, just this. I hope you haven't been up all night to meet me."

"Oh, no, I set my alarm clock for midnight. That's my car, over there." She had to scurry to keep up with him, for despite the bulky case he bounced off the balls of his feet in an energetic stride. She pegged him for a handball player.

"Do the police always park under No Parking signs?" he asked curiously as she reached past him to unlock his door.

"Only when we know that the person on duty won't have it towed. Inconvenient, that. Do you want your case in the back? No? Okay."

Kate buckled herself in and settled down for a nice fast drive on a nearly deserted freeway. As they passed the Bufano statue, Bruckner stretched until his joints cracked and then slumped down in the seat with a little sigh of pleasure.

"Hard flight?" she asked.

"Flying is the pits. A surefire way to produce long-term symptoms of hostility towards humankind. Particularly its younger generation," he said sourly.

"I take it you didn't get much sleep. Well, there's no need to make conversation now, if you want to close your eyes."

"I'll sleep later. First of all, cards on the table. Your Inspector Hawkin said that Vaun is no longer under suspicion of committing those murders. Is that true, or did he just want to manipulate me into coming out to treat her? It's difficult to tell, over the telephone."

"Wouldn't you have come in either case?"

"No." Kate glanced over at him. "I said I would have come out, but only to see her and her family. I'm not going to bring Vaun back to life just for you people to lock her up. If that's the choice, you can let me out now and I'll make my own arrangements."

"I thought you were her friend. They say she'll die if she's left like this."

"That's her choice. She'd die anyway, if she was imprisoned again. It would be deliberate cruelty, and I'll have nothing to do with it. Vaun isn't my client, my patient. She's a beloved friend, and I refuse to interfere in her life that way merely for the convenience of the police."

Kate, hardened cop that she was, found it difficult not to be shocked. She cleared her throat.

"Yes. Well, you don't need to worry, it's obvious now that she's a victim, not a perpetrator." She gave him a synopsis of the last few days, ending with what they knew of Andy Lewis/Tony Dodson. He made no comment for several miles.

"Yes," he said finally. "I know about Andy. We worked on that for a long time, Vaun and I."

"What—" she began, then realized that he would undoubtedly refuse to talk about Vaun's revelations during therapy, and changed it to, "Is all this possible? I mean, it seems such an unlikely scenario, even to us—some lunatic who goes to such elaborate lengths to make life hell for a woman he resents, then tries to kill her, and all without giving himself away."

"Oh yes, it's quite possible. And, from what I know of Andy Lewis, through Vaun, you're probably looking at the right man."

"I wish I could understand it." Kate heard the plaintive undertone in her voice and hastened to modify it. "I mean, I've been a cop for six years now, and God knows I've seen what people can do to each other. But this one, it makes even a torture-murder look straightforward. I just can't get a handle on it, can't imagine his motives."

"The mind of someone like Andy Lewis is not finally comprehensible to a normal, sane human being. You can trace patterns, even analyze the labyrinth enough to plot its development, but motives and sequences are very slippery things, even at the best of times."

"But if he's so abnormal, why didn't we see him earlier?"

"Because he's very good at keeping up the front. When you track him down you'll probably find all kinds of criminal, even pathological, behavior, but until you pry up the lid, all will look normal. Actually, I would venture a theory that had it not been for Vaun, it would have remained at that. He would never have taken to murdering children, or not for many years at any rate."

"You mean Vaun set him off?"

"Triggered him, yes. She must never suspect this, by the way."

"No. Oh, God no. You don't mean she did anything deliberately, I take it."

"As innocent as one chemical reacting with another. No, that's not a good analogy, because in a reaction both chemicals are changed, and in this case Vaun remains Vaun. Vaun doesn't need to do anything deliberately to change people's lives. Perhaps a better image is that of a black hole, one of those things the astronomers love to speculate about, so massive they influence the motions of everything around them in space, so immensely powerful that even light particles can't escape, so that they cannot even be seen except by inference, by reading the erratic movements of nearby planets and stars. Vaun passes by, utterly tied up with her own inner workings, and people begin to wobble. Tommy Chesler makes adult friends for the first time in his life. John Tyler gets serious. Angie Dodson looks at her hobbies and sees a mature art form. Andy Lewis is nudged from criminality to pathology. A psychiatrist in Chicago tears his thinning hair out and finds himself practicing a style of psychotherapy unknown to modern science, and damned if it doesn't work. God only knows what effect she's having on a couple of unsuspecting homicide detectives from the big city," he laughed. "And none of it deliberate. Vaun is as passive and as powerful as a force of nature. Her only deliberate actions are on canvas, and even then she would insist that there's no choice, only the recognition of what's needed next. Someday Vaun may be forced into action. I can't imagine what would do it—certainly not a threat to herself; perhaps to protect someone she loved—but I can imagine that the results would be spectacular. Or perhaps catastrophic."

Bruckner talked with the enthusiasm of a man finally permitted to speak about something that has long fascinated him, and Kate was not certain what was required of her in the role of coenthusiast.

"You sound like you've given this a great deal of thought." She settled for a cheap therapist's tell-me-more noise. He caught her uncertainty and laughed happily.

"Said she, dubiously. Yes, Vaun is the sort of person one tends to think about. My wife wants me to work up a paper on the 'triggering personality' concept, but I can't see that it would do much good. After all, you can't very well treat the innocent trigger, even if the explosive personality blames him, or her. And it's hardly a new idea, after all. Do you know Othello?"

"Er___"

"Iago is a nasty, sly, traitorous character, but even he needs his self-respect. To justify to himself the enormity of his own evil, he blames his victim Cassio for it, saying, 'He hath a daily beauty in his life that makes me ugly.' Count on it, when you find Andy, he'll blame Vaun."

"He's proving a slippery character to find."

"If you're patient, he'll come to you. Not turn himself in, I don't mean that, but he'll come. He won't be able to help himself, not now. It's gone too far. However. Enough of Andy Lewis and black holes, and chemical reactions. Metaphors and analogies are the curse of cheap psychotherapy. Tell me about Vaun. How she is."

"Vaun? No change, they say, over and over."

"I don't want that 'they' way. I know what 'they' say, endlessly. How do you think she looks?" he pressed.

"I don't know how she looks. She's unconscious. She looks like someone who got run over by an overdose, is how she looks. I'm no doctor."

"Good, I don't want a doctor's eyes, I want your eyes. In one word, don't stop to think about it, how does she look?"

"Dead. Dead is how she looks. I'm sorry, you're her friend, but you did ask."

"Yes, I did, didn't I?" He sighed. "All right, tell me about her. What kind of room do they have her in? Who comes in contact with her, and how do they touch her? And what do they smell like?" He spoke as if unaware of the lunacy of his words, and Kate looked closely to see if he was serious before she began hesitantly to answer him. He made short notes by the light of the glove compartment in a small notebook that he pulled from his jacket pocket, and asked more questions. Then, abruptly, he flipped the glove compartment shut and leaned back.

"Right, that'll do for now. I'll need a few things—any chance of getting someone started on them at this hour?"

Kate reached for the car phone, got the hospital exchange, asked for the extension of the room Hawkin had said he would be using. He answered on the second ring.

"Hawkin."

"Sorry to wake you Al, but Dr. Bruckner has a list of things he's going to need, and it might save some time if he has them there when we get in."

"Go ahead."

She handed the instrument to her passenger, who first asked about Vaun; listened; asked about her pulse rate; told Hawkin not to bother, it wasn't that important; and asked if he had a pen. He read from his notebook: a cassette player; some roses, any color so long as they had a smell; a bristle hairbrush; some dark orange velvet; a patchwork quilt—perhaps one made by Angie Dodson?—a large pad of artist's watercolor paper; a can of turpentine; Vaun's most recent painting; and finally, complete privacy and quiet in Vaun's wing.

"That means no voices in the hall, no rattling trays, no televisions, telephones, or clacking heels. Yes, I know they'll raise holy hell, but get it done. Yes, that's all for the moment. The orange velvet may have to wait until the shops open—I'll need a couple of yards. Right, see you soon."

A smile played across Kate's lips at the thought of Hawkin following this younger man's emphatic orders and sending out for patchwork quilts and velvet at five o'clock in the morning. Bruckner's matter-of-factness was daunting—did he not consider that extraordinary list just the least bit odd? She glanced over and saw that he was studying his hands, lost in thought, slightly ill-looking in the green dashboard lights.