A Grave Talent

"Do you mind my asking what you have in mind?" she asked him. His head came up and his teeth gleamed white at her.

"My dear Watson, can you not deduce my purpose from my requirements?"

"Sensory stimulation of some kind, but some of the things seem a bit—arcane."

"Eye of newt and wing of bat," he cackled, and continued in a more normal voice. "All those things have strong personal associations for Vaun. Some of them I know from working with her in the prison—I know some of the passwords that worked before."

"So you wouldn't ask for these things for just anyone in Vaun's state?"

"Oh, God, no," he laughed. "What I'm going to do for Vaun bears very little resemblance to any sort of proper psychiatric treatment, even my more experimental approach. That's one of the reasons I insisted on complete privacy—the good Dr. Tanaka would be shocked out of his shoes by my irresponsibility. I go as a friend, masquerading as a doctor. And you are not to repeat that to anyone."

"But what—I'm sorry, you probably get tired of explaining yourself to amateurs."

"That's quite all right. You want to know what I'm going to do to make her notice those things, right?"

"She is unconscious, after all."

"Ah, but there you get into the amazing subtlety of the human mind. I suppose I ought to qualify all this by saying that I am working under the assumption that Vaun's current state is analogous to the state she was in when I first met her. Until I see her I can't know for certain, but her symptoms and vital signs are nearly identical. How much psychological theory do you know?"

"I took some classes in psychology at the university. I don't know if you'd call it theory, it was more nuts-and-bolts stuff. Rats and such."

"Well, then I hope you'll assume that what I'm going to tell you is generally accepted among my colleagues, instead of being on the outer fringes of experimentally verifiable hypotheses. I'm not going to tell you otherwise, because I'm right, and it is the truth."

His voice was archly self-mocking with an undertone of dead seriousness, and Kate smiled.

"Another question: Have you ever spent much time around a small baby?"

"A baby?" Kate was surprised. "Not really. I have a nephew and I've changed his diapers, but not much more."

"Then you may not have seen the way a very small baby can choose to block out the world when the stimuli become oppressive. Newborns in a hospital nursery, for example, can sleep despite the most appalling noise, not because, as some people insist, they're too undeveloped to hear it, but because the noise and the light and the cold, dry air and their hunger for their mothers and the strangeness of it all just overloads the circuits and the switches blow, and the whole system shuts down. That is not a technical explanation, by the way," he added with pious precision. "Severely traumatized or neglected children do the same thing sometimes, to an extreme. Even if their bodies are strong and healthy, they'll just curl up in a corner and die, unless something interrupts the process." Kate nodded with feeling, as the memory of a tiny blond girl from her first week as a policewoman came to her, a child dead not of malnutrition or abuse but from the starvation of human contact. "That is what Vaun is doing. She is not, strictly speaking, comatose. She is closer to the state we label catatonia, although normally—if 'normal' is not a contradiction in terms—catatonia is a temporary state into which a schizophrenic person retreats and comes out again within hours or, at the most, days. Normally.

"Vaun, however, is not schizophrenic. She is an immensely sensitive artist who spends a good part of every day flaying herself and laying her lifeblood out on canvas for the world to gawk at. She maintains in her life the most tenuous of equilibriums, balanced between the world's pain and her own self-preservation, for the sake of the vision and the power she can find there, and only there, hanging on the very edge of the precipice.

"Since December she has felt herself slipping. When the first body was discovered her past suddenly rose up to haunt her. The second one nearly drove her from Tyler's Road. The only thing that kept her there was sheer willpower. I have never known a person with as powerful, as one-track, as unshakable a will as Vaun's. She has carried through under loads that would crush most of us flat, but now that will has turned itself toward death. It's killing her. The growing fear of the last months, followed by the trauma of the overdose, has knocked her off her tightrope, and all her power is now taking her away from the world, away from pain, into peace.

"I nearly lost her fifteen years ago. I was volunteering some time at the prison when I first saw her. She was completely withdrawn, curled fetally when they brought her out of the solitary cell. I waited in all my confident textbook knowledge for her to emerge, and a day passed, and two days, and four, and suddenly I realized that in spite of the IV her signs were weakening and she was slipping away. I worked my guts out for days, then, trying to find a way to get in, a key, some way to intervene in her chosen path. It was her paintings, of course, that made me do it. I'd go home and I wouldn't be able to sleep thinking of her paintings and of what I could do to restore them to the world. I learned more in my first two weeks with her than I had in all of my student days, and in fact my life since then has been largely an exploration of what she taught me. In my ignorance I nearly lost her, and God damn it, I'm not going to lose her now."

He was silent for a long moment, then laughed quietly.

"Have I answered your question?"

"Sensory stimulation."

"Of a highly specific, personalized variety. Do you know, it was only four or five years ago that I discovered why the smell of roses caused such a powerful reaction in her. She had come out to visit us—my wife and me—during the summer, and I found her in the garden one afternoon, tears streaming down her face, sobbing and laughing and shaking her head. She was sitting next to a couple of rosebushes my wife had planted, and she remembered: there was a faint smell of roses in the prison's solitary-confinement cells. Some quirk of the ventilation system brought it in from the warden's garden. For most people roses would be no more than a pleasant smell. For her the fragrance was the outside world, air and sun, while she lay curling up into a fetal ball choosing to die. We are nearly there, I think? To the hospital?"

"Twenty minutes."

"If you don't mind, I'll spend the time putting my thoughts together. I need to clear my mind before I see her."

"Certainly."

Kate called Hawkin and reported their progress, and drove into early dawn with a much-removed Bruckner, past the few stubborn press vehicles, their occupants distracted by a conveniently timed emergence by Trujillo, and up to the laundry entrance. Hawkin met them, and they wound their way through the silent, antiseptic halls to the wing that housed Vaun. The guard slipped out past them as they entered the room. Bruckner walked slowly up to the high bed and stood looking down at the sleeping woman. After a long minute he sighed, almost a groan, and with great gentleness put out two fingers to lift a lock of hair from Vaun's pale forehead, tucking it back with the others.

"My little sweetheart," he whispered. "What have they done to you?"

23

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Kate collapsed for several hours in an adjoining room, and woke to find that the painting of the agonized woman, the intricate patchwork quilt from Vaun's bed, and a length of burnt-orange velvet had been delivered during the morning to the hallway outside Vaun's door. The guard sat next to them and rose when she saw Kate. Low music came from inside the room.

"Morning, Lucy. It is still morning, isn't it?"

"Barely. You want some coffee?"

"I'll get some in a minute. Anything happening?"

"Just this stuff arrived. Inspector Hawkin said nobody but you could go in, and the shrink hasn't been out, so I just left them here."

"Have you heard from him? Hawkin, I mean? Or Trujillo?"

"No, I've just been sitting here listening to golden oldies coming through the door and wishing I hadn't drunk so much coffee this morning."

"You haven't had a break? You go ahead, I'll stay here until you get back."

When the woman returned, Kate went for coffee and a stale roll, retrieved some clothes from her car, had a shower, and returned just as Lucy was going off duty. Her replacement was a massive Hispanic man whose movements were slow, except for those of his eyes. Kate introduced himself and made sure he knew that he was not to enter the room if he could possibly avoid it, and then very quietly. She then let herself in with only a faint click.

The first thing she noticed was the bright drawing taped to the wall above the light. Teddy's effort, no doubt. Paul McCartney was singing about blackbirds. The bed's inhabitant lay as before, limp and remote. Her hair had been heavily brushed. The perfume from the roses on the bedside table rose above the pervasive medicinal smell of a hospital room, two dozen incongruously perfect scarlet blooms hacked off and stuck into an institutional mayonnaise jar with patches of the label still clinging. Next to the jar were several items that Bruckner must have brought with him: a flat box of jumbo-sized crayons, the kind designed for pudgy little hands, a package of Conte crayons, and one of charcoal sticks. Kate wondered if he was planning on some kind of sleep-drawing with the unconscious woman and wished she could be witness to it.

Bruckner was sitting on the edge of the bed, bent forward in close scrutiny of Vaun's right hand, which lay curled up on her chest. He looked around when Kate came in, winced, stood up slowly, and eased his back. He was wearing a drooping bud in the lapel of his corduroy jacket. His hair stood on end, his five o'clock shadow was verging on an early beard, and when he came over to Kate he brought the mustiness of stale sweat. They both kept their voices very low.

"How is it going?" she asked him.

"Too early yet to know. Hawkin said you'd be able to help me today?"

"I haven't heard any different. What do you want me to do?"

"Relieve me for a couple of hours. I've got to shave, and I should talk to Tanaka and go through her records so I look professional."

"There's a shower in number seventeen," she suggested.

"I am looking forward to using it." He dug a crumpled shirt and a zip bag from his briefcase, and handed Kate two cassettes. "Put these on next, and brush her hair. Don't talk to her, and try to keep out of her line of sight. And watch her."

So for two hours Kate listened to half-remembered songs by Judy Collins and Bob Dylan and Joan Baez and Simon and Garfunkel, and brushed firmly until the black curls lay flat against the head and pillow, and held her breath at several imagined movements and once at a faint noise that she decided must have come from the tape player. At the end of the hypnotic time, she was startled at the careless shock of the door being thrown open and Bruckner carrying in the canvas. He propped it on a chair against the wall facing the bed, and as she looked at it Kate realized that it had no signature. Bruckner came back with the glowing velvet and the quilt, and closed the door. She got up from the bed and went to whisper that there was no change, but his eyes swept over Vaun and the monitor that he had reattached to her, and grinned.

"Oh, yes there is. Look at her color, and her pulse rate."

Kate looked more closely, but could see no variation in the skin. The luminous numbers on the monitor had read between 55 and 58 before, and now read 59, hardly a noteworthy increase, she thought. It blinked to 60, then back to 59, and stayed there.

"No movement, though?"

"I thought a couple of times, but it's kind of like staring at a spot on a blank wall: It starts to jump after a while."

He nodded, tossed the velvet on the chair, and shook out the quilt to spread over the bed. He picked up Vaun's loose right hand and something fell out onto the folds of the bed, a small black something that brought an intake of breath and a look of slow, intense satisfaction to his face. He turned the flaccid hand over, plucked something from the furled fingers, and laid the hand down again on the bed, patting it affectionately. He walked around the bed to Kate and held out his hand. On his palm lay two short lengths of a charcoal stick. Kate picked them up and looked curiously at him.

"She broke it," he explained. "She felt it, knew what it was, and tightened up on it enough to snap it."

"And that makes you happy."

"That makes me very happy indeed. I'll need you again in two or three hours. Will you be here?"

"All day and tonight, so far as I know. Shall I come back in two hours?"

"Make it three. If I want you before that I'll ask Cesar or whoever's on duty to find you."

So Kate waited. She ate an overcooked lunch in the hospital cafeteria, ducked a reporter by diving into the kitchen and emerging from the back door in a white coat, talked to Hawkin when he called from San Jose, found someone to remove the stitches from the healed cuts in her back, and felt generally useless. In two hours and fifty minutes she went back to the room, and Bruckner told her what to do. She thought he was crazy, but she did it: she stood next to the unconscious woman (did her face seem less waxen?) telling her in slow, emphatic tones the outline of their investigation. She dwelt on Angie's concern for Vaun but not on her need for comfort; she told of Tony Dodson/Andy Lewis and his assumed guilt, though she did not say that he was missing; and finally she stressed that the police were aware and satisfied that Vaun was a victim, not a suspect, as much a victim as Tina Merrill, Amanda Bloom, and Samantha Donaldson. Then she went away, and fidgeted, and talked on the telephone to Lee and to Hawkin, and slept fitfully in a hospital bed on the other side of the wall from Vaun's.

The next morning Vaun's pulse rate was 62, and she had broken another charcoal stick and a Conte crayon.

It was a dreadful day, that Thursday. Bruckner called her in twice to repeat her story to the senseless figure on the bed and then sent her away. She couldn't go home, because he wanted her close and Hawkin had turned her over to him. She couldn't leave the hospital without trailing a conglomeration of loud people with flashbulbs and microphones. Tanaka and his assistants began to stop by and stare at the door with pointed questions, which they all knew she couldn't answer. Hawkin and Trujillo disappeared to direct the hunt for Andy Lewis. She felt closed in, forgotten, pushed to one side, bloated from the cafeteria food and the lack of exercise, and altogether gloomy about the future of the case and about her future as a detective.

At ten o'clock that night Vaun's pulse rate was 63. She had not moved. There was now a thick orange crayon in her hand. Her picture rose up at the foot of her bed, arrogant, demanding, unfinished. Bruckner subsisted on coffee and looked drawn, nearly as pale as his patient. His voice was hoarse. Kate went to bed to the whisper of music through the wall, and woke to silence. It was dark outside.

Vaun's guard paced up and down in the hallway, nervously fingering the clasp on his holster and eyeing the door, so dead silent after all these many hours. Kate met his glance, hesitated, and reached for the door handle.

The magnificent painting, what was left of it, leaned drunkenly against the wall. The canvas was sliced in two places, and the soft paint remained only in chunks and smears; the image had disappeared. A palette knife gleamed on the floor, its edges clotted darkly. Kate took two rapid steps inside, and the bed came into view.

The wires from the monitor lay in a tangle on the floor. The machine had been turned off. The tape player sat in silence on top of it. The IV bag dripped patiently into its tube and onto a growing puddle on the linoleum. Gerry Bruckner lay asleep on the bed, in socks and jeans and shirtsleeves, his right arm under the head of Vaun Adams, his left arm around her shoulders. She lay almost invisible, turned toward him under the patchwork quilt that covered the hospital blankets, her curls buried against his chest, completely within the circle of his arms. Rose petals covered the small table and spilled onto the floor, and their final perfume mixed with the fumes of turpentine and filled the room, driving out any smell of illness. Kate padded silently in and turned off the IV, and closed the door carefully behind her when she left. She stood in the hall feeling the stupid grin on her face.

"Is everything okay?" asked the anxious guard.

"I think it will be, but look, nobody is to go in there. If the nurse wants to change the IV drip, tell her it's been disconnected, she doesn't need to do anything. Nobody is to go in," she repeated, "not Tanaka, not the head of the hospital, not the President himself. Nobody. If you need me, have me beeped."

She went off humming to wake Hawkin with the first good news in many days.

Bruckner looked empty, Kate thought. It was late morning, and he had come out to talk with her and Hawkin. The psychiatrist slumped into the armchair, head lolling against the back, hands limp over the chair's arms, only his eyes moving. He looked like someone recovering from a long fever, pale, exhausted, and very grateful. His athletic bounce was gone, and he was speaking to Hawkin in a slow voice several tones lower than normal.

"I should have been back today. I can stretch it to Sunday, but I have to be there at nine o'clock Monday morning. I haven't told her yet, because she's in such a fragile state, but we must decide very soon who's going to take my place."

"Tanaka? Or one of his people?" asked Hawkin.

"It doesn't need to be a doctor. In fact, from her point of view it might be better if it weren't. She needs a friend, to protect her until she can grow some skin back."

"Someone from Tyler's Road?"

"She has three friends there: Angie Dodson, Tommy Chesler, and Tyler. I can't see Tommy coping, somehow. Angie would be ideal, but I don't know how she's dealing with her husband's role in it, and we don't want a weepy, guilt-ridden woman near Vaun. Tyler—I don't know. An ex-lover might be uncomfortable, and he's got too much on his hands as it is."

"You have somebody in mind?"

"What about Casey?"

Hawkin did not seem in the least surprised, but Kate jumped up from her chair and stared at the two men.

"No!"

"C'mon, Casey," Hawkin reassured. "She's going to need a bodyguard anyway until we get our hands on Lewis. You've done that kind of work before. You've been on this case from the beginning, and though normally you'd be too high a rank for straight guard work, she's an important lady and Lewis is without a doubt still after her."

"Al, this could drag on for weeks. Months!"

"I don't think so. If it does we'll make other arrangements. I want you to do this, Casey. I could order you," he pointed out. She saw nothing in his face but the decision, and she sighed.

"All right, then, two weeks. I'll babysit her for two weeks, that's all."

"That'll get us started anyway."

"Not here, though," said Bruckner firmly.

"No, not here," Hawkin reassured him. "Someplace quiet and safe."

"Good."

"When will she be able to talk to us? We have to get a statement from her."

"She's asleep now. I think she'll sleep for some time. Tonight, maybe? She'll eat and the nurse wants to bathe her, so about eight? But it'll have to be short."

"Twenty minutes okay?"

"That should be fine." Bruckner closed his eyes for a moment, took a deep breath, and pushed himself to his feet. "Now for the good Dr. Tanaka and writing up what I did with Vaun so that it doesn't sound like absolute quackery." He laid his hand lightly on Kate's shoulder as he went by. "Thank you, Casey."

When they were alone Hawkin went to stand by the window and light a cigarette. He smoked it and looked out between the blinds, and Kate pushed herself deeper into her chair and watched him warily.

"I've become very suspicious of your cigarettes, Al," she said finally. "I told you I'd babysit her. What else do you want?"

He turned around, surprised, and looked down at the thing in his hand, smiled sheepishly, and went across to the chair opposite Kate.

"The problem is what to do next. We can't very well send Vaun home and trust that Lewis will go away and play elsewhere. I can't very well go to the captain and say, 'Well, awfully sorry we don't have your man, but I sincerely doubt he'll try anything like it again, for a while anyway.' We're stuck unless we can track him down or flush him out."

"You want to use Vaun for bait," Kate said flatly.

"You have any other ideas?"

"She's in no shape for it, mentally or physically. Bruckner would have a fit."

"He won't know. She's a big girl, it's her decision. In ten days she'll be on her feet and Lewis will be relaxing, convinced he's shaken us, and starting to sniff out ways to get back at her."

"You're so sure about him?"

"Yes." Hard, flat certainty.

"All right, you're the boss. So what is it you're going to try and wheedle out of me?"

"You live on Russian Hill, don't you?"

The room was suddenly very cold, and a hand was at her throat.

"Al, no."

"You don't? I could have sworn—"

"Yes, I live there, but no. It's not my house, you can't ask it of me."

"A quiet, residential area with private houses, trees, dead-end streets. Looks vulnerable, but the sort of place you can plaster with eyes and ears—"

"No."

"Casey—"

"It is not my house, Al. No."

"Where, then? My place? One bedroom, bald and open, a busy street, neighbors three feet away on both sides."

"A hotel."

"Oh, well, hey, how about putting her in the county jail, with a string of crumbs leading to her and a piece of twine tied to the door to slam it shut behind him? For Christ's sake, Casey, he's not stupid. Anything unnatural and he'll sit tight and wait for six months, a year. He's capable of it. It's got to be natural, as natural as having her go to the home of a friendly police officer to recuperate and be half-heartedly watched over, because the police don't really think he'll try again."

"How would he find her? I'm not exactly listed in the phone book."

"A judicious press leak, perhaps?"

"Oh, God, Al!" There was real pain in her voice, and he relented.

"Not your address, just a couple of vague hints."

"Al, no, please don't ask me to do this."

Hawkin did not answer. He looked at the precarious ash on his cigarette and reached for the decorative ashtray on the table. He concentrated on the ash for a moment longer, took a final draw on the stub, and proceeded to grind it out methodically, like an apothecary working a mortar and pestle. His face was without expression, and when he spoke it was in the manner of a recitation of facts.

"You are right, the house does not belong to you. The house you live in is owned by one Leonora Cooper, Ph.D., a practicing psychotherapist who specializes in art and artists, particularly among members of the gay community. She was at Cal the same time you were. You have rented a room in her house for the last twenty-one months. That is all I need to know about your home life." His hard blue eyes came up and drilled into her wide brown ones. "All I need to know," he repeated, "unless and until your home life begins to interfere with your work. Is that understood, Martinelli?"

"Understood, sir," she said. Her voice was even, but he was beginning to know her well enough to see the effort of control in her jaws and hands.

"Good. This is not an order, I have no right to do that, but I would like you to ask your housemate Lee if she would be willing to move into a hotel for a couple of weeks, at our expense, of course, to give this a try."

"She won't go."

"You'll ask?"

"All right, God damn it, yes, I'll ask. But she won't go."

She wouldn't. Kate knew without thinking that there was no way Lee would go while the painter of Strawberry Fields was under her roof.

She also knew that Hawkin was right, that the best trap for Lewis was one that looked like no trap. She looked up at him, and caught on his face the same expression she'd seen in the parking lot outside the restaurant—approval, sympathy, and an odd element of pride. It was gone in an instant, and he stood up.

"The last few days have put you behind, so I told Trujillo he was to be available for you today. He'll bring you up to date, not that there's that much to tell. I'm going up to Tyler's Road to have a chat with Tommy and a look 'round at Angie's but I'll be back by six. Feel like going to dinner? My treat. I'll even drive."

"Sounds great," she lied. Her appetite had been ground out by the hospital air, and she doubted she would feel like eating.

"Trujillo recommended a place."

She made an effort.

"Tofu enchiladas?"

The flash of his grin made the effort worthwhile.

"A first rate Italian place, he swears. I was hoping for some edible veal. Six o'clock, then? To be back by eight?"

"I'll be ready."

He walked to the door and paused with his hand on the knob.

"Thank you, Casey." He pulled the door open, and the sounds of the hospital drifted in.

"Al?" He looked back at her. "My friends call me Kate."

24

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Shortly before six Hawkin reappeared and swept Kate out by one of the lesser exits. He was in a strangely ebullient mood and hummed some vaguely familiar tune that she thought might be Bach or Beethoven, whom she tended to confuse, and ground the gears in Trujillo's sports car. They were seated in a quiet corner, draped with napkins the size of small tablecloths, and presented with three-foot-tall menus, a wine list the thickness of a novel, and a waiter who identified himself as Phil, who for the next three minutes proceeded to rattle off the day's specialties before he vanished into the gloom. Hawkin looked at Kate, and his lips twitched.

"Did you get that, Martinelli?"

"Something about pasta, and fish, I think."

"Right, I'll have the veal parmigiana."

The antipasto was good and they were hungry, Kate to her surprise, Hawkin because he loved to eat. The salad was served before the entree (chilled forks, a pepper grinder the length of Phil's arm), and Kate could stand it no longer.

"All right, Al, give. You've been clucking like a mother hen. What's up? You haven't found Lewis—you'd have told me that."

"No, not yet. But I've got the last pieces of the puzzle now. It's a nice, smooth picture, and I'm very glad to have that much."

"Your talk with Tommy Chesler this afternoon? It was successful?"

"The talk, plus a bit of honest-to-God, old-fashioned, snooping-about type detecting. I found a copy of this— behind a hidden panel, can you believe it?—in some shelves in Lewis's cabin. Angie's cabin."

"This" was an issue of Time magazine from the previous summer. The copy Hawkin laid on the table was stamped with the name of the local library, and had a date-due card clipped inside the cover. The other was undoubtedly in the police lab.

"Look at page seventy-two," he said, and stretched across to steal the candles from two neighboring tables so she could see.

It was the article on Eva Vaughn, the mysterious genius of the brush (as a caption read). The left-hand page showed three of her paintings, all from the New York show. The right-hand page held Strawberry Fields and the beginning of the article, which continued on page seventy-four with a discussion of the revival of art as psychological revelation and social criticism. A jazzy three-color bar graph, the bars represented by stylized brushes, illustrated the phenomenal rise in prices brought by works of living artists.

Hawkin reached across and flipped the page back to the beginning, then tapped one of the three reproductions, which showed two very small, grubby, naked children squatting on a dirt road, heads together, studying something on the ground between them. One of them looked vaguely familiar, and after a moment Kate realized it was Flower Underwood's little hellion who had dismantled pens and sprayed her with milk while she had tried to interview the mother.

"Tommy Chesler helped her crate this one up last June. In August this article came out, but Tommy didn't see it until October, up in Tyler's room. He stole the magazine—took me twenty minutes to convince him I wasn't going to arrest him—and kept it in his shack next to his bed. Three or four weeks later—he wasn't sure about the date, but it was before Thanksgiving and after the first rain, which for your information was from the twelfth to the fifteenth of November—his buddy Dodson saw it lying there, and Tommy, who was just bursting to tell somebody about his role in getting that picture into Time, told him all."

"And within two weeks the Jamesons were burgled and Tina Merrill was dead."

"Yes, indeed. He can move fast when he wants, but then we knew that already, didn't we? So you see the nice clear portrait of a two-bit punk who can't stand it when someone gets the better of him. As a child he kills dogs and cats when he's angry with the owners, and he ends up with getting the preacher's only daughter pregnant and then beating her up. He goes away for two years, I think to Mexico—his only decent grades when he went back to school were in Spanish—learning God knows what tricks and having himself tattooed along the way.

"For some reason, boredom probably, he decides to go back to Mama for a while and puts himself into a small-town high school to strut around. Where he meets Vaun. Little Vaunie, who falls for his charm and his recreational poisons until she decides she's had enough and three weeks later very mysteriously murders a child she's fond of."

"I wouldn't want to have to go to the D.A. with only that in my hand," Kate said unhappily, and saw the last of the day's ebullience fade from Hawkin's face.

"Couldn't you just see it in court? 'So, Inspector Hawkin, you would have the jury believe that Andrew Lewis let himself in through the back door of a house, strangled a strange child, undressed her, and arranged her body to look like it did in a painting, all to get back at the child's babysitter who had hurt his pride?' "

"But you think that's what happened."

He was saved from the immediate need to answer by the arrival of Phil with their entrees. The waiter arranged their plates and hovered over them until Hawkin glared at him and he slunk off, hurt. They each had taken several hungry mouthfuls before Hawkin answered her question, obliquely.

"I came across a study recently. It said that as many as a half a percent of all suspects charged with violent crimes are wrongly convicted. I can't believe that, but even if you reduce it by a factor of one hundred, that still leaves eight or ten every year.

"And you think Vaun Adams is one of those."

He sighed. "I'm afraid I do."

Both of them concentrated on the food for a while, although their pleasure was dulled. It was hard not to take a failure of the judicial system as a personal failure.

"So," Kate prompted.

"So Vaun goes through a mockery of a trial, is sent to prison, gets out, travels, ends up on Tyler's Road. He may have known she was here, or he may have come across her at the 'Faire' entirely by accident, but however it happened he found her there three years ago, and when she didn't recognize him because of the beard and the years and the hell she'd been through, he decided to stick around.

"It took him a few hours, but he found Angie that day, a simple, abandoned woman with a small child. She was charmed—God, I'm beginning to hate that word! And in no time at all there he was, living next door, unrecognized, to a woman he'd sent to prison. The one thing that strikes me as odd is that he stuck around Vaun for two years without doing much of anything, other than going off every few days to do some kind of work in the Bay Area. Probably something illegal."

"Tyler's Road would be very inconvenient, but plenty far enough from San Jose to make him feel safe."

"Maybe. At any rate, he plays this little game, living half a mile away, transporting her paintings—already crated—for her, but keeping away from her so her artist's eyes don't see who's under the beard. Until November, when all-trusting Tommy Chesler tells him that he helped box up the painting shown on page 72 of Time magazine, and Lewis realizes that little Vaunie isn't just making a few dollars out of her canvases, she's an internationally recognized artist whose paintings bring in five and six figures. It may have been the money that got to him, and the thought that if eighteen years before he'd played his cards right, he would now be in charge of that income. Maybe it was just the sheer effrontery of the woman, to become such a stunning success despite his efforts to crush her. Either way, his knack for a clever revenge comes into play, and he works out a way of first driving her around the bend, then destroying her reputation, and finally killing her, making it look like suicide."

Kate pulled the magazine back beside her plate, and with her left hand began to turn over its pages. She remembered it now. This article, like the one she had waded through in the glossy art magazine, was also bipartisan, divided into a pro and con. A reflection, no doubt, of the ambiguous attitude of the art world at large toward Eva Vaughn. A few phrases caught her eye, the names of Vermeer and Rembrandt again, and Berthe Morisot.

She glanced at the final paragraphs. The pro writer ended with:

In the thirteenth century the painter Cimabue happened across a young and untrained peasant boy sitting by the road drawing remarkable sheep on a stone. The child's name was Giotto. He went on to surpass his master, and it was his reworking of Gothic forms to include drama and human emotions that paved the way for the Renaissance and changed the face of European art forever. Now in the late twentieth century we have, appropriately enough, a woman, Eva Vaughn, coming to bring form and formalism back to abstract emotionalism. She has brought craft and the human heart back, in forms we thought to be drained empty, and even the most jaded are forced to see classical Realism with new eyes. Giotto's revolution came at the right time. It remains to be seen whether the vessel refilled by Ms. Vaughn can contain her.

On the other hand:

It is impossible to deny the sheer raw talent in these pictures. It is, however, a pity that such power has not been turned to saying something new, instead of a cautious, deliberate reworking of threadbare forms. Paul Klee once said that the more horrific the world, the more abstract its art. If we may apply that theory to the individual, when faced with the style of Eva Vaughn, one can only assume that the artist has led a very sheltered life indeed.

"Sheltered," Kate snorted.

"Ironic, isn't it? The rest of the article wasn't bad, but to end by quoting a man who obviously has no sense of history, and cap it off with a logical fallacy—I wonder if the writer'll be embarrassed when this thing breaks."

"It will break, won't it? It'll all be in print before the week is out."

"Bound to be. No more coffee, thanks." This last was to the waiter, who returned bearing a discreet little tray with two chocolate mints and the bill. It had been an unimaginative menu but a satisfying dinner, and after his preliminary burst of eloquence Phil had left them alone. Hawkin peeled several crushed bills apart and dropped them in the neighborhood of the tray, and looked at his watch.

"Quarter to eight. Hope she's awake. I'd like to sleep in my own bed tonight."

Vaun was drowsing on her pillows after the effort of a meal and bath, but her eyes snapped open when the two detectives walked in. Gerry Bruckner was sitting at the small corner table hunched over a neat stack of typescript with a pen in his hand. A fresh vase of roses, pink and yellow, glowed on the table next to him.

Kate was stunned at the change in the woman. She had been beautiful before, but now she was alive. The muscles of her gaunt face did not move as she watched them come toward her, glancing at Hawkin and then studying, absorbing, Kate; but her eyes, her startling blue eyes, brimmed over with life, filled to overflowing with vitality and awareness and the beauty of being alive.

"Thank you," she said to Kate. Her voice was husky but clear, and the force of the life behind those eyes made Kate want to turn away even as they held her and made her smile foolishly in response. There was nothing to be said to that, and eventually—in ten minutes? ten seconds?—Vaun released her and turned her gaze at Hawkin, who withstood it little better than Kate had.

Gerry Bruckner broke it, finally, when he came up to the bed and adjusted her pillows and rested his hand lightly on her head. She smiled at him, lovingly, and Hawkin cleared his throat.

"Are you feeling up to giving us a statement now, Miss Adams?"

"Of course," she said. Kate took out her notebook and dutifully recorded the details of what had very nearly been the last day of Vaun Adams's life.

There was nothing there. Yes, she had noticed a peculiar taste in the whiskey, but then she'd felt as if she was coming down with a cold, and that always made things taste odd. And yes, the heavy-duty antihistamines she'd taken had probably compounded the effects of drug and whiskey. No, she did not take chloral hydrate. She was a hypochondriac, sure, but drew the line at sleeping pills. No, she'd seen nothing out of place when she returned from her walk. No, she had not realized that Tony Dodson was Andy Lewis, but yes, she supposed it was possible, and that could account for the frisson of apprehension she occasionally experienced when coming on him unawares. She would have to think about it. No, she had not noticed that the painting of the young Andy Lewis had disappeared, but it had been in her studio at Uncle Red's farm in August, she was certain of that. No, she had done nothing very out of the ordinary that Friday, deliberately so, that being the only way to keep the fear at bay. The storm had helped distract her, and she spent the afternoon clearing up some branches, talking to various neighbors about their damage. Yes, she had seen Angie, but not Tony. And finally, yes, she had talked it over with Gerry, and though she did not wish to, she was willing to cooperate by being, in her words, the goat tethered out for the tiger. She looked to be on the verge of saying something else but changed her mind as the whole situation seemed suddenly to be more than she could deal with and exhaustion flooded in.

They left, with Bruckner speaking soothing words and stroking her clean hair, and drove home and slept in their own beds that night. Neither of them, incidentally, slept alone.

25

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Kate had first set eyes on Leonora Cooper nine years before in a vast lecture hall at the University of California, Berkeley. Kate was nineteen, beginning her sophomore year, closed into this inadequately ventilated space with several hundred other budding psychologists on a drowsy October afternoon, the fourth lecture of the term. A new figure walked up to the lectern, a tall, slim young woman with an unruly mop of yellow hair, awkward knees, and an air of quiet confidence as she stood beneath the cynical gaze of nearly a thousand eyes, eyes that had long since learned to view T.A.'s with misgiving.

This one, however, was something different. For two hours she held those hundreds of sleepy freshmen and sophomores—made them laugh, respond, made them like her. She even made them learn something. She was less than five years from them in age—three years older than Kate— but she possessed a maturity and scope of vision most of them would never know. She took three more lectures during the quarter, and each time it was the same: the back rows of sleepers sat up, newspapers were put away, the constant undercurrent of whispers and coughs died down. Her passion for the workings of the human mind ruled them.

In the winter quarter Kate arranged to be in the section led by Lee Cooper, by the simple expedient of bribing the graduate student who was responsible for assigning students to T.A.' s. It was the best ten dollars Kate had ever spent.

The first week of the spring quarter came, a quarter in which Kate had no psychology course, and on a brilliant April morning she tapped on the door of the tiny cubicle that was Lee's office and asked if her former instructor would like to join her for a picnic up above campus. She would, and they did, and by June they were friends.

During Kate's junior year their friendship deepened, and for the first time in her life Kate found herself telling someone about her problems, her questions, her life. In the course of the year Kate had three tumultuous relationships with men, and Lee listened as the affairs first blossomed, and then became rocky, and finally fell apart in rage and pain. In the miserable cold of a wet January, Kate's kid sister was killed by a drunk driver, and when Kate returned after the funeral, stunned and unseeing, Lee talked gently and fed her tea and toast and walked with her to lectures.

Kate's senior year was also Lee's last year in her Ph.D. program. They were both extremely busy, Kate sweating her finals and Lee writing her dissertation. Over the Christmas break Kate told her family that she had decided to join the police force and spent the next days devising snappy answers to the questions repeated by person after person. Why do you want to be a cop? To see if I can clean up some of the dirt in the world. But isn't it dangerous? No more so than driving on a rainy January afternoon. At the end of it she escaped to Berkeley and went to tell Lee she'd made her decision. Lee simply nodded and said she thought it a good idea, and what did Kate think of the Bergman film down on University Avenue tonight?

During those last months the relationship between the two women developed some odd areas of tension and restraint, though Kate was not sure why. She thought it might be that the end was near, when the sheltered world of the university would throw them in separate directions, and they were preparing themselves for the wrench. Kate also had a relatively stable relationship with a man and for the first time began to think about living together, even marriage. She wondered occasionally about Lee, who had a hundred friends for every one of Kate's, who hugged and touched men and women alike, but who never, as far as Kate knew, had a lover. She even asked Lee about it once, late one candle-lit night, but Lee had smiled easily, shrugged, and said that she was just too busy.

Graduation was in June. The following day Kate was in her room in the house she shared with five others, putting her last bits and pieces into cardboard boxes, when a single tap came on the closed door. She opened it, and there stood Lee, hair wilder than ever, shirt wrinkled, face tight, her pupils dilated hugely.

"Lee! Or should I say, Dr. Cooper? I'm glad you came by. I was going to hunt you down later to say good-bye. Sit down. Are you okay? You want some coffee or something? There's still pans and food in the kitchen. Sit down."

"No, I won't. I'm leaving tonight for New York. I decided to take that residency."

"Oh. Two years." Kate looked dumbly at the book in her hand, and she turned to arrange it with great precision inside a box of others. "I'm happy for you. I thought—I admit I was hoping you'd take the job in Palo Alto." Her hands felt cold and sweaty, and she wiped them along the sides of her jeans, then straightened and turned back to Lee. "So. I guess it's good-bye."

Lee's green eyes were nearly black and seemed only inches from Kate's. "I hope not," she said finally, and then, shockingly, she took a step towards Kate, seized Kate's head between her hands, and kissed her hard, full on the lips. When she loosed her hands, Kate jerked back a step as if she'd been held by an electrical current, and Lee turned and disappeared rapidly in a clatter of feet on the uncarpeted stairs and a slam of the front door. Kate made no move to follow her but stood for several minutes staring blindly at the open door before mechanically reaching for the remainder of her undergraduate life and packing it away into its boxes.

The stable relationship died a bitter death, and Lee was not there. Kate did not write to her about it but answered Lee's letters briefly. She graduated from the academy, made her first arrests, began painfully to construct the essential armor of distance that looks like callous indifference but which enables the cop to preserve a humanity in the face of dead bodies and abused children and the bestial inhumanity of greed.

The only problem was that the armor began to prove more and more difficult to shed. She slept with a number of men but found it difficult to rouse much interest in the proceedings unless they'd both been drinking and edged into argument. At odd moments, in bed before sleep, on patrol, doing paperwork, she would taste Lee's mouth on hers, and it never failed to bring a brief spasm of ache and a flood of repugnance. She took to running long miles that fall, and it helped. She settled in for the long haul.

Thirty months after graduation two things happened to tumble Kate from the tenuous security she had built. The first was a letter from Lee. The second was the night when she nearly murdered a man.

The letter arrived a few days before Christmas, just before Kate left for night shift. It was Lee's first letter in months. Kate looked at the familiar scrawl and the New York cancellation, and put it unopened on the table next to the front door. It was still there when she came in early the next morning, and there waiting when she woke up at noon. She made coffee and sat in her bathrobe at the tiny table in her incongruously cheery kitchen and pulled it open. In its entirety, it read:

My dear Kate,

New York was going nowhere. The people in Palo Alto offered again and I accepted. I start immediately, on the 23rd. I won't call you, but if you could bear it, I would be grateful if you would allow me to make you a picnic lunch.

Lee

It gave her new address and a telephone number, and Kate reread it until the sour stench of boiling coffee brought her to her senses. She dumped the coffee out into the sink and started again, and pushed the memory of Lee's last sentence away as she left for work. She did not call, and the letter sat in a drawer, waiting.

It waited until the middle of January. Kate was in a patrol car, her partner driving, just after midnight on a night of cold drizzle, in one of the nastier parts of town. A faint tinkle of breaking glass sent the car accelerating forward into the next block. Two young men sprinted away from the store window pursued by the skidding patrol car, around the block and down an alley. Her partner slammed on the brakes and Kate was out in an instant, shouting for them to stop. One of them slowed and threw his hands up, but the other whirled around with a glinting black ugly thing in his hand that flashed and shot out a window far overhead, and in the same movement he let the gun go skittering across the filthy concrete and his hands went up and he began to shriek not to shoot, not to shoot, not to shoot. Kate lay sprawled with her sights on his chest and her finger aching, needing, lusting to put just that much more pressure on the bit of metal underneath it, and it took all her will to block the rush of desire to end it all, as if she herself were the target rather than this blubbering, shaking boy whose cheap leather jacket filled her vision. It was not until her partner had the cuffs on the kid that the wave began to subside, and as she lowered her suddenly heavy gun she felt herself began to shake, shamefully, uncontrollably. A cup of scalding coffee at the station didn't help, and her partner, an older man she'd worked with before, and liked, told her to go home early.

A hot bath turned her skin scarlet, but not until she finished the second big gin (a drink she hated, but it was the only alcohol in the house—one of her men had left it) did the shakes turn to occasional shivers. She did not sleep, though. Every time she closed her eyes she saw the dark leather disintegrate in an explosion of blood, so she turned the heat up high and wrapped herself in a blanket, and watched the late/early movies and the farm reports and the morning news with the sound off, and at a more reasonable hour, slightly drunk, called Lee. She answered at the third ring.

"Cooper." When Kate did not respond, Lee's voice sharpened. "Hello? This is Doctor Cooper's office."

"Lee?"

"Yes, this is Lee Cooper."

"Lee, this is Kate." There was no response, so she added, "Kate Martinelli."

"You don't have to tell me your last name; there's only one Kate. You did get my letter, then. I rather hoped I hadn't mailed it. I was… not myself… when I wrote it."

"Can I come and see you?" Kate said abruptly.

"I would like very much to see you, Kate. When?"

"Now?"

"Now? I was just on my way out the door."

"You're leaving for work?"

"This is my office number. I'm on my way to the hospital to see a client. I'll be there most of the morning."

"Can't it wait?" Kate bit back her desperation. "I mean…"

"I can't put it off till tomorrow. He's dying and may not be there tomorrow. I can be back by eleven o'clock."

"Give me the address." Lee did so, and Kate wrote it down. "See you at eleven, then."

"I'm—. Thank you for calling."

"I love you, Lee."

The silence at the other end was so complete that eventually Kate thought Lee had hung up, and she said in a question, "Lee?"

"Yes. Eleven o'clock. Good-bye, Kate." Then the line did go dead.

And that was it. When Kate walked through the door of Lee's ridiculously oversized office, and Lee looked across the desk at her with hope and fear and doubt jostling one another in her green eyes, all of Kate's prepared speeches fled from her, all her own doubts and demands dropped away, and the two strong, competent professional women stared hopelessly at each other across the room, mouths empty and hands fluttering in aborted little gestures, until Lee rose from her leather chair and picked her way around the large desk as if she were walking a balance beam. She stopped in front of Kate, and Kate took the final step, and they folded into each other's arms like two storm-ravaged sailors coming blessedly into home port.

Completely, profoundly, body and mind and spirit, Kate fell into love with Lee Cooper—or rather, acknowledged the love that she had so long denied. She was amazed at the ease of the thing, almost like, she thought one day driving home to Lee, getting to the end of a puzzle and finding you'd been given the wrong pieces and then finding the right ones, and it all falls smoothly, naturally into place. With Lee it was, from the first day, so very natural, so right, skipping all the stages of flirting and the fawning erotic tension of new couples and moving easily into the feel of a long-established, successful marriage.

Life, too, seemed to slip into a remarkably smooth patch, in that way things have sometimes of imitating internal states. Kate transferred sideways into a niche in San Jose, worked her way up the ladder, attended classes, passed exams, shooting hard for promotion into the investigative division. Lee began to make a name for herself; flew to conferences and workshops, with increasing frequency as a guest speaker; discovered in herself the ability to work with terminal patients which, in combination with her training and interest in the arts, steered her straight into the gay community's epidemic. It was emotionally grueling work, and at least once a month Lee let herself into their apartment with swollen eyes and smeared makeup. But it was needed work, and she could do it.

Then two years ago Lee's mother died. Kate had never met her, and so far as she knew Lee had not seen or talked with the old woman since being thrown out in disgrace at the age of eighteen. Mrs. Cooper did not approve of lesbians. It came therefore as a considerable surprise to everyone when her will revealed that she not only had never actually disinherited her daughter but had gone so far as to leave her the house she had lived in for thirty years, a house, moreover, that was not only valuable in and of itself but was located on perhaps the most desirable acres in San Francisco. Russian Hill overlooks the financial district, the port of San Francisco (the tourist port, not the heavy cargo area), the two bridges, and the sweep of the Bay around the eastern tip of the peninsula. Cable car bells drift up from three sides, fog horns from the fourth. North Beach and Chinatown are an easy walk (downhill, at any rate) and Fisherman's Wharf a slightly longer one. The view alone was worth a million dollars. Real estate agents had fought for the listing, and Lee's future was tinted a nice shade of rose.

"Don't you want to see the place before it goes on the market?" Lee asked Kate one Saturday morning in April.

"Lee, I don't want anything to do with your mother or her house. She was an awful woman; she treated you like a dog that piddled on the carpets. I think you deserve every penny you can get out of her estate, but I don't want any more personal contact with her than the dollars in your bank account."

"She's gone from the house. Completely gone, with the last of her furniture. I think, just as a building, you really should see it. It's an amazing place. There's only a handful like it in the city. It was built by Willis Polk just before the turn of the century. In another fifty years they'll want to make it into a museum. Come with me. Please?"

It was obviously important to Lee, so Kate packed away her feelings of indignation and went with her, and that afternoon she fell in love for a second time. It was a strong house, solid and honest, not overpowering in the way showy architects strive for but as a capable and supporting friend is strong. Lee showed her through the house, reviewing all the work that needed to be done, bemoaning its state of disrepair, and gradually falling silent, so that when they both drifted across the stripped and bare living room to stand at the panoramic window, no words had been said for about five minutes. Finally Kate tore her eyes from the view and concentrated on the mockingbird perched in the neighbor's large tree.

"Damn it, Lee, you did this deliberately. We couldn't possibly afford to live here. Why did you bring me here?"

"My income would cover the taxes and insurance," she said mildly.

"And we'd eat off mine? That's a lot of beans and rice, honey."

"We can change our minds any time. There'll always be a market for this kind of house."

"And move where? How the hell could you live in an apartment after living here? Be like eating cat food when you were used to caviar."

"But you'll do it? You don't mind if we try?"

"It's completely crazy," said Kate despairingly, and Lee kissed her.

It was crazy, and it was hard—hour upon hour of back-breaking, unfamiliar, filthy labor with hammer and crowbar, Skil saw and belt sander; making heartbreaking mistakes, learning new skills, working long hours of overtime to pay for this mad venture; tedious commutes for Kate, who could not shift jobs as easily as Lee; fights over bills and burst pipes.

The one great blessing, disguised though it was at first, was that it left them neither time nor money for a social life, and the cloud that had threatened from the horizon, that in fact had blackened the skies and thrown several ominous drops on them, had retreated somewhat, become an uneasily ignored factor in their lives.

Kate would not come out. She told Lee the very first day, in Lee's office in Palo Alto, and Lee, flushed and alive with the incomprehensible return to life of a dream that had begun to degenerate into mere fantasy, and believing that in this, too, Kate would change her mind, acquiesced. She had Kate; she would not risk losing her by insisting that they go public. Time would bring it.

Time had not. What had begun as a mild irritation had grown to an open sore, threatening to infect the entire relationship. The month before Lee's mother died it had flared up when Lee invited two of her colleagues home for dinner and over coffee had casually revealed that she and Kate were not just housemates. The guests left an hour later. Kate turned on Lee in a fury.

"How dare you! You promised me, you gave me your word that you wouldn't say anything about us to anybody. You probably brag about it at the clinic, 'how I overcame my lover's scruples.' Lee, how could you!"

"Oh, Kate, this isn't 1950, for God's sake. It's not even 1970. Your coming out might be a five-minute wonder in a very small circle, but that's all."

"No, Lee, that's not all, not by a long shot. We move in different worlds, you and I, and I can't take the risk. I'm a cop, Lee. A woman cop. If we came out, how long do you suppose it'd be before the papers managed to let slip the juicy tidbit that Officer K. C. Martinelli is one of the leather brigade? How long before the looks and remarks start, before I start drawing all the real hard-core shit jobs, before I'm on a call and someone refuses to deal with me because I'm that lez in the department and I might have AIDS? How long before some mama flips out when I try to ask her daughter some questions about the bastard that's raped her, because mama doesn't want that dyke cop feeling up her daughter?"

"You're being ridiculous, Kate. Paranoid. Look, if this were Saudi Arabia, or Texas, or L.A. even, I could understand, but here, in the Bay Area? Now? It's not news that there are gays in the department. Nobody gives a damn."

"I give a damn," Kate shouted. "It's none of their goddamn business if I'm straight or bent or twisted in a circle."

"You're ashamed of it. You've always felt it shameful, but Kate, you've got to face it, or it'll tear you to—"

"I'm not ashamed of it!" Kate bellowed furiously, and then abruptly, without warning, her fury deflated, and she looked at her lover in a despair that came from the depths of her fatigue. "I'm not ashamed," she said quietly. "It's just too precious, Lee, to allow strangers to poke their fingers into it. Yes, I'd love to go to your club with you, go to the coffeehouses, kiss you in public, but I just can't risk it. You tell me that my refusal to breathe the fresh air is stifling us both, but I know, as sure as I'm sitting here, that coming out would be the end of it. I'm not strong enough, Lee. I'm just not strong enough."

Lee let it go that night, angry at herself for handling the confrontation so badly. It was out in the open now, though, and Lee knew that Kate's refusal fully to accept herself chipped at the foundations of their relationship and cut them off from the very community where they might find strength. She could not let it lie, and two days later, on a Friday night before two days off for them both, she approached the problem again, Kate was ready for her, and blew up.

The battle lasted until Sunday night, when Kate packed a bag and left the house, saying that she had to sleep or she would be dangerous on duty. She stayed away all week. Lee went through the motions of therapy with her clients for two days, and halfway through Wednesday realized that it was impossible. She went home to think.

It took her three days before she could see the truth, three days and nights before she was sure of her facts and could analyze the situation as she would a case. By Saturday night she had to admit it: Kate's mania for privacy, her phobia of self-revelation, would have to be the basic premise of any future life together.

Subject's job, she told herself as if dictating a case history, Subject's job is one which brings Subject into constant proximity with the worst in humanity: pimps who sell children as prostitutes; men who sell drugs to melt brains; large and angry men with various weapons; drunks who stink and vomit on their rescuers; bodies dead a week in August, smelling so awful the wagon men wait outside. Subject puts her body and her mind on the line daily, in exchange for which she is allowed to be a part of one of the most powerful brotherhoods there is, men and a few women who are united in the inhuman demands made on them, a secret society in which superiority is recognized and rewarded, where the bickering and back-biting inherent in any family structure does not weaken the mystique that—give it credit—had sustained Subject for two years until she had been brought up short by the ugly, inevitable end product of distancing herself from the rest of humanity. It is the most public and visible of jobs, with the most stringently demanding code for its members. Is it not understandable that Subject refuses to risk an action that threatens to leave her without support, leave her outside the fraternity? Further, is it not understandable that Subject, to avoid being completely consumed by the demands of her job and the unwritten demands of her brothers and sisters on the force (a telling appellation), guards her true self, her private life, with such ferocity?

So. If Kate remains a cop, she will continue to guard herself, by giving herself a nickname, by not socializing with other cops, by keeping her home life a hermetically sealed secret. The question was, then, could Lee survive in a vacuum?

Another day alone, and she had decided that living with Kate was worth the suffocation. It might not always be, and Kate would change, given time, but for now, it would have to do.

She telephoned Kate at her hotel, they had a brief conversation, and Kate was home in forty minutes. Patiently, Lee set out to change Kate. Stubbornly, Kate would be moved a fraction of a pace at a time. The house came to them then, took up all their time and most of their energy, and despite the shakiness of that one cornerstone in their lives, a strength grew in them, supported them, drew them on.

They were happy. Against all odds, two troubled people had found their place and worked hard to preserve it.

They had never had an overnight guest before. Kate's job, the more vulnerable, had never intruded before. Outsiders had never entered the heart of the home. And now, they were being invaded.

THREE

THE CITY

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At birth our death is sealed, and our end is consequent

—Marcus Manilus, Astronomies

Nobody ever notices postmen somehow . . ; yet they have passions

like other men, and even carry large bags

where a small corpse can be stowed quite easily.

—G. K. Chesterton, "The Invisible Man"

26

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At five minutes before four o'clock Monday morning Kate's car reached the top of Russian Hill and rounded the last corner before home. With considerable relief she poked her finger at the button for the garage door opener and saw the light spill into the darkness as the door rose slowly to accept them. Her passenger's eyes flew open with the sharp turn and the abrupt drop from street level, and when the door had rumbled shut she slowly sat up and looked around in the sudden, still silence.

"Home." Kate smiled at her. "You wait here for a minute." Kate got out and did a quick check of the garage—in the storage closet, in the back of Lee's sleek almost-new convertible, under the stairs. She then slid home the bolt on the garage door and went to open Vaun's side.

"We'll get you settled and I'll come back for your things."

"I can carry one," Vaun protested.

"Best not." Kate, hands empty, led the way up the stairs. She punched the code into the alarm panel at the top, opened the lock with her key, and reached up immediately to still the little bell the door set to ringing as it opened. She bolted the door behind them, flipped the inside alarm switch back on, and turned to Vaun.

"I'll introduce you to the alarm system tomorrow. Can I get you anything to eat or drink?"

"I'd like a glass of water."

Kate led her down the short hallway to the kitchen. Lights were on all over the house, as she'd told Lee to leave them, and she went across and filled a glass with spring water and added two ice cubes before she realized that Vaun was not behind her. She walked rapidly into the living room and found Vaun with the curtains pushed back, the magical sweep of the north Bay spread out in front of her. The night was clear, and every point of light from Sausalito to Berkeley sparkled. Alcatraz looked like a child's toy at their feet, but Kate pulled the curtains together in Vaun's face.

"Please don't stand in front of a window with the inside lights on. It makes me nervous. Here's your water." Vaun looked like a startled deer, and Kate knew she had been overreacting. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to snap at you, but it's one of the rules of the game. After I've checked the doors and windows we can turn off the lights, if you like, and you can look to your heart's content. You've got the same view upstairs," she added, "and higher up, though there are fewer windows."

Vaun said nothing, just nodded, and drank thirstily.

"I'll give you a quick tour so you'll know what kind of place you're sleeping in, and then take you up. Okay? This, as you can see, is the living room. If you get the urge there's a television set and VCR behind those cabinet doors." The room was the full width of the house, more than fifty feet, with high walls of virgin redwood and natural hessian and a magnificent expanse of oak floor inset with a complex geometrical border of cherry, birch, and teak. It was divided informally by a hodgepodge of mismatched furniture, a beautiful rosewood dining table with a dozen odd chairs at one end, pale sofas and chairs at the other, two inexpensive Tibetan carpets in rose and light blue and white, a number of large and healthy plants, and an enormous metal sculptural form bristling with a hundred delicate pointed bowls, each one supported by a tiny, perfect human figure. Vaun went over to it and eyed it curiously, and Kate laughed.

"That's one of Lee's treasures. It's a sort of oil-lamp candelabra, from South India. Each of the bowls is filled with oil and has a wick stuck into it."

"Do you use it?"

"We lit it once, but either we had the wrong kind of oil or else it needs to be outside, because it smoked to high heaven and covered everything with black smuts."

"And we slipped on patches of oil for a week afterwards," came a voice from behind them. Lee stood in the doorway, wearing a long, thick white terrycloth bathrobe, her hands deep in the pockets. The tangle of her hair spoke of the pillow, and an angry red smudge on the bridge of her nose snowed that she'd fallen asleep with her reading glasses on again.

"I'm sorry we woke you, Lee," Kate said, and made introductions.

"You didn't wake me," she said, and looked at Vaun to add, "I'm often up early."

"Lee, would you finish giving her the five-cent tour while I run her things upstairs?"

"Glad to."

Kate followed Lee's easy monologue with her mind while working the alarms, stilling the bell, and carrying the bags up from the garage to the recently furnished guest room. She then checked every window and door, every closet, and (feeling slightly foolish) under every bed, before joining the two in Lee's consulting rooms.

The suite of rooms where Lee saw her clients shared a front door with the rest of the house, but was entered by a door immediately inside the main entrance. The rooms were self-contained, with a toilet and even a small refrigerator and hot plate.

The first room was a large, informal artist's studio-cum-study, with a desk and two armchairs in one corner and an old sofa and some overstuffed chairs in another. Three easels, a high work table, a sink, and storage cupboards took up the rest of the room. In the cupboards were paper, canvas boards, watercolors, acrylics and oils, big tubs of clay, glazes, dozens of brushes, and myriad other supplies that might be called for by a client putting shape to an image from the depths of his or her mind. It was a comfortable, purposeful space, but the next room, the smaller sand-tray room, was Lee's pride and joy. Kate followed the sound of voices back into it.

She had not been in the room in two weeks, and she was struck anew at the enchantment of the place. Three solid walls of narrow shelves held hundreds, thousands of tiny figurines. There were ballerinas and sorcerers, kings and swans and rock stars, horses, dragons, bats, trees, and snakes. One long shelf held two entire armies, one tin with knights and horses, the other modern khaki. Tea sets, tiaras, and teddy bears, the walls for a castle and a gingerbread dollhouse and a suburban tract house, thumb-sized street signs, creatures mythical and pedestrian, men, women, children, babies, a tiny iconic crucifix and an ancient carved fertility goddess, a porcelain bathtub, cars, planes, a horse-drawn plow and a perfect, one-inch-long pair of snowshoes. There were even the makings for a flood and a volcanic eruption at hand, when destruction was called for. Vaun was standing next to the taller of the two sand-tray tables, drifting her hand absently through the silken white sand and concentrating on Lee's words.

"—exactly right. That's why I start nonartists out in the other room, and ask them to try the paints or a collage or a sculpture. But of course, an artist is used to forming things into a visual expression, and it's not as likely to be therapeutic as the sand trays are. Here, where all the objects are already available, not waiting for manipulation, the unconscious is freed from aesthetic decisions and judgments and can just get on with telling its story through the choice and arrangement of figures and objects. The statement the final arrangement on the tray makes can be very revealing."

"Revealing to you?"

"Both to me and to the client. When they have finished, I usually come in and ask questions and comment, and I often leave it up for a while to study it, though I do have a couple of clients who do one by themselves and then put it away unless they have a question. If I know the person well enough to be sure he can handle it, I encourage it. It's all therapy."

"Speaking of which," Kate interrupted gently, "do you think this is the best treatment for someone just released from a hospital bed?"

Vaun did look tired, despite the short sleep she had had in the car, and followed Kate meekly up the stairs, past Lee's room on the left and Kate's on the right, to the large airy room at the end of the hallway, the one with no nearby trees, no sturdy drainpipes, no balcony, and windows that framed an incomparable view of the world. Lee had put roses on the dresser, delicate, tightly furled buds of a silvery lavender color.

"Bathroom," said Kate, opening a door and shutting it. "Television," doing the same with a cabinet. "Alarm button," handing Vaun a looped cord on which hung a small black square with an indented button. "It's not waterproof, but other than in the bath wear it every minute or keep it nearby. Push it and I'll be here in ten seconds. That's my room there, if you need anything during the night. Lee's is on the other side. If you want a book, the door at the other end is what we grandly call the library."

"Does Lee really get up at this time, or was she being polite?"

"Lee keeps even weirder hours than I do. A couple of weeks ago she spent several nights at the hospital until about this time, but when she goes to bed at a normal hour, she gets up early, yes. She doesn't sleep much. Don't worry about Lee, don't worry about me. You are welcome here." To her own surprise, she realized that she meant it.

"Thank you, Casey."

"Kate. Call me Kate, please?"

"Yes. Thank you, Kate. Good night."

"Keep the button near you, and don't open the windows until I rig a way to override the alarm. And turn off the lights if you open the curtains. Please."

Vaun looked suddenly fragile, and she sat on the bed. "Oh, Casey. Kate. Really, I don't think I can go through with it. Let me go home and—"

"Oh, God. Gerry Bruckner said you'd feel like this. Please, Vaun, just turn off your brain for a few hours. You're tired and unwell and easily discouraged, that's all. Tomorrow the sun will shine. Even in San Francisco. Yes?" Lee would have reached out and touched Vaun, to soothe them both, but Kate did not.

"All right, yes, you're right. Al Hawkin is coming?"

"For lunch. Good night."

"Thank you, Kate. Good night."

Kate slept lightly, every fiber aware of the woman who slept down the hall. She woke several times, at the short rattle of a cup in the kitchen, a door opening, once a short cry of words, Vaun's dreaming voice. The doorbell woke her finally, and she lifted her head to listen to Lee's footsteps as she went to answer it. The clock by the bed said it was ten forty-two. Hawkin's voice came up the stairs, and she relaxed, lay back and stretched hard, and in a minute got up to put on her clothes and go down to greet him.

The burr of the coffee grinder pulled her down the hallway, and she found Hawkin ensconced at the little table eyeing Lee's back with an expression of uncertainty and slight distaste. Lee was wearing one of her typical eclectic outfits, in this case baggy, paint-encrusted trousers made of Guatemalan cloth, a long-sleeved blouse of smoky plum raw silk, the sleeves rolled up, a pair of moccasins Kate had bought her in the Berkeley days from a Telegraph Avenue vendor, a starched white apron Lee's grandmother had made, and a pencil holding back the knot in her hair. Nothing to inspire distaste. Perhaps the pencil?

At her entrance Hawkin's face was immediately amiable and workmanlike.

"Morning, Kate. No problems last night?" She had been given an escort to the door and had talked to Hawkin after Vaun went to bed, so he meant after that.

"Good morning, Al, Lee. You mean this morning, not last night. No. no problems."

There had been on Saturday, though, and perhaps that was the source of the look of distaste. Hawkin had come to the house to meet Lee and explain to her why she should leave, and Lee listened attentively and then, when he had finished, told him in the politest of terms that he was a damned fool if he thought she would, and why on earth should the official police assume total responsibility for a human resource like Vaun? The two of them had circled each other warily for the better part of an hour, two fencers testing each other's psychic foil in feints and flurries, never quite committing themselves to outright combat.

Suddenly Hawkin had stood up and gone out the front door. After a minute a car trunk slammed and he came back in with a familiar armload: Mrs. Jameson's old curtain wrapped around Vaun's paintings. He undid the parcel on the dining table, set them up along the wall, and with a sweep of his hand turned to Lee.

"So. You're an expert. You tell me what sort of a person painted these."

Lee's eyes were filled with the wonder of them, and with an air of tossing her sword into the corner she went over to the paintings and knelt down and touched them. She studied Red Jameson and his sweating son and the innocent temptress and the painful young/old girl in the mirror and the slouching young man. After a long time she stood back and ran her fingers through her hair. Her eyes on the canvases, she spoke absently.

"What was it you wanted to know?"

"I want to know what kind of person did these."

"A woman with the eyes of a witch and the hands of an angel." She was talking to herself, and Hawkin gave a bark of derisive laughter.

"Is that what they're teaching in the psych department at Cal these days? Don't burden me with so much technical jargon, please, Dr. Cooper."

Lee flushed in anger, and swung around to face him.

"What particular aspect of the artist's personality interests you? An analysis of the change in her sexual state over the time these cover? The degree of psychosis exhibited? Perhaps a Freudian statement regarding her relationship with her parents?"

"I want to know if she could have committed murder."

"Anyone can commit murder, given a strong enough motivation. You should know that."

They glared at each other, and a faint smell as of burning hair reached Kate's nostrils. Hawkin spoke again, precisely, through clenched teeth.

"In your professional opinion, Doctor Cooper, could the person who did these paintings have committed the coldblooded murder of a child, under the possible influence of a flashback from a previous dose of LSD?"

Lee pulled her eyes back to the row of images and seemed to draw up a barrier as she collected her thoughts, eyes narrowed.

"In my professional opinion, no. I am not an expert diagnostician, but I would have thought that this woman would be more likely to commit a devastating murder of someone's self-image on canvas than she would an actual, physical murder, particularly of an innocent. As for the LSD, it's an unpredictable drug, especially the street kind, but I have participated in sessions of LSD therapy and studied its long-term effects, and I'd say that kind of violent 'flashback' would be extremely unlikely. But as I say, I'm no expert. I could give you some names, if you like, of people to see."

"Who would you suggest?"

She reeled off half a dozen names. "Those are Bay Area people, of course. There's a man in Los Angeles—"

"No, that'll do. I've seen all of them except for Kohlberg. She's in France." He started to gather the paintings together and wrap them in Becky Jameson's old curtain. Lee watched, and handed him the last one reluctantly.

"What did the experts say?" Kate asked.

"Pretty much the same thing." He tucked the thick bundle under his arm, paused, then shook his head in frustration, and left.

Kate had felt a sudden rush of exhaustion when he had gone, but Lee had seemed in great good spirits, and burst into snatches of song at odd moments during the rest of the day.

She was in the same aggressively cheerful mood now, Kate could tell, from the line of her back and the rapid, dramatic sweeps of the knife on the cutting board. She was using her self-assurance as a weapon, and Hawkin could only sit sourly and wait for his chance. He turned deliberately to Kate, fished a manila envelope from inside his jacket, and handed it to her.

She pressed open the metal wings and slid four glossy black-and-white photographs and three drawings out onto the tablecloth. Hawkin reached over and arranged them in two lines like some arcane variety of solitaire. She picked up the first photograph and looked closely at the young face, its mouth open in a shout. It had obviously been cropped from a group action shot, with a shoulder across one corner and a leg in the foreground wearing tight white leggings and a cleated shoe.

"Coach Shapiro's?" she asked.

"Finally. The photographer did a good job on those."

She concentrated on the other three prints, which showed the same face touched up first to show middle age, then with a moustache added, and finally with a full beard. She puzzled over this last one.

"It doesn't look quite right," she said finally. "I only saw him for a minute, but the nose was different, and the shape of the eyebrows."

"Well done, considering the circumstances. Angie and Tyler agree with you. Susan took the photograph and worked it into the drawing she did last week, and came up with those," he said, pointing. Susan Chin had also done a good job. The drawing with the beard was the man Kate had seen at Vaun's house ten days before. Susan had then removed the beard and left the moustache, using the jawbones of the high school picture, and finally shaven him clean.

"That's him. He must have had a nose job, and something done to his eyebrows."

"We also know who Tony Dodson is. Or was."

"It's not just a false ID then?" She was surprised.

"Apparently not. There was a man named Anthony Dodson who worked with Lewis, and even resembled him quite a bit: same hair color, eyes, height, only fifteen or twenty pounds heavier. Lewis went north after high school, spent some time in Seattle, then got a job in Alaska on the pipeline. He met Dodson there, they became friends, spent several weekends in Anchorage. After a few months the two of them went off for a week in Seattle and didn't show up for work again. Lewis wrote a letter to say they'd both got jobs in New Orleans, they were sick of the cold, that their clothes and equipment should be given away, so long. Nothing more is heard of Andy Lewis—nothing—but Tony Dodson, who was from Montana originally, gets a driver's license in Nevada two months later."

"And the photo?"

"Is the same man who went to high school as Andy Lewis, given that the photograph on the license is lousy, he's ten years older and has had facial surgery."

Food began to move from stove to table to plates— avocado and mushroom omelet and hot buttery toast and orange juice fresh from the machine on the sink and mugs of thick coffee. Kate took a mouthful of the hot liquid and swirled it around her teeth, feeling the distinctive bite of the Yemen Mocha. She raised a mental eyebrow at this but didn't comment. Lee would not like it pointed out that a special effort was being made at this meal.

The cook sat down with a cup but no plate and picked up the original photograph. Several hundred calories later Kate looked over at her.

"You're not eating?"

"I had something a while ago. I thought I'd wait and keep Vaun company."

"That picture bothers you," Kate noted. Hawkin glanced up sharply and then looked more closely at Lee, whose face revealed nothing other than a slight curiosity.

"It does. I was just wondering if it would bother me if I didn't know who it was. It reminds me of someone I knew when I was in New York. Not one of my clients, though I'd seen him around the clinic. One day he told his therapist that he'd been beating up drunks, just for the fun of it, and one of them had died. She was really upset after he left, but managed to finish out the day. That night he waited for her and followed her home and killed her. He later said he'd decided it was unwise to have told her, but she'd already reported him to the police, and they were waiting for him when he got home. He didn't actually look anything like this," she waved the picture. "Maybe around the eyes." She gazed at it for another long moment, then with a slight shudder put it away from her. When she looked up it was directly into Hawkin's eyes, no swordplay now.

"As a therapist I am required to deny the possibility of such a thing as innate evil. There are reasons why people become twisted. As a human being, however, I recognize its presence. This man Lewis must be stopped. I believe that my being here might help you catch him. If I see that I am in the way, I will leave. Immediately."

It was not put as an offer, a compromise, but Hawkin chose to take it as such. The two women waited as he finished his toast, placed his fork and knife across his plate, took a swallow of coffee. When he spoke it was to Kate.

"All right. I am still very unhappy about having a civilian involved, and if I thought for a minute there was a chance Lewis would get into the house, I'd scrap it now. Yes, it will look more normal to have Lee in the house. Yes, Lee will help with Vaun, and yes, it will, in theory, free up your eyes to have Lee looking after Vaun. I have to trust you on that, that you won't be distracted by Lee. And I have to trust you," he jabbed a finger at Lee, "to watch for that, and get out fast if she's looking out for you instead of Vaun. I don't like trusting too many people at once, but if we go with this it'll be your show," back to Kate, "and your judgment. If you decide to put your friend here at risk, knowing Lewis, then we'll go ahead with it. If not, or if I'm not satisfied with the safeguards, we make other arrangements. Agreed?"

Kate took a deep breath, and committed herself.

"Agreed."

"Fine. We start with this." He took an object from his pocket similar to the button that Kate had given Vaun, and slapped it onto the table in front of Lee. "You will wear this at all times. You push it, and across the street we know something's wrong. If you take it off, I pull Vaun out of the house."

Lee smiled sweetly at him and stood her ground.

"I rather doubt you'd have any legal basis for moving her around the countryside if she preferred to stay with me, but I shall be happy to cooperate with any reasonable request."

Kate busied herself with more coffee while Hawkin glowered and Lee smiled like a steel rose. Finally his lips twitched.

"Dr. Cooper. It would bring me considerable reassurance as to the safety of all in this house if I knew that you were carrying that alarm button with you at all hours of the day and night."

"I do understand, Inspector Hawkin, and I will be most happy to comply. More coffee?"

"Your coffee, my dear young lady, has been one of the few bright spots of the last two weeks, but I think I'll have to refuse a fourth cup and make an appearance at work. I thank you also for breakfast."

He stood up, and Kate followed him to the door.

"Al, I think Vaun was wanting to see you."

"I have to be in San Jose ten minutes ago. I'll stop back this evening."

"Come for dinner."

"Oh, no, I—"

"Please."

"All right, I'd enjoy that. If the traffic's bad it'll be after seven."

"I'll plan for eight. I should warn you, you won't get food like you just had. I'm a lousy cook." He smiled. "Will you see the Donaldsons?"

"I'm afraid so." He sighed. "How many different ways are there to say, 'Trust me, we're working on it,' when she wants to know everything that's going on? I can't blame her, but it doesn't make things any easier."

"Glad it's you and not me," she said frankly, and did the alarm business to let him out. Neither of them looked at the house across and two down, whose upper floor was temporarily occupied by various men and machines. She watched him climb into his car, closed the door, and went to talk to Lee about dinner. As she had expected, Lee insisted on cooking.

That evening Vaun's photograph was on the front page of the paper. Some enterprising amateur with a powerful lens had caught her staring longingly out of her hospital window, looking for all the world like a prisoner in a cell. It was a very clear picture.

Over hot-and-sour soup, beef in black bean sauce, snow peas with shiitake mushrooms, and fried rice, they hammered out the plans for the next few days. Or rather, Hawkin and Kate hammered, Lee commented and made suggestions, and Vaun picked at her food. She kept glancing at the folded newspaper on the side table, with the expression of a person fingering a bruise.

In the end, sitting in front of the fire, they decided that it would have to be Saturday. By then Vaun would be more rested, physically and mentally, Lewis would be feeling safe and anxious to resume, and besides, it would make the Sunday papers.

"I've made preliminary arrangements with a man on the News staff, who's willing to go along with it in exchange for an exclusive and an interview with you," he said to Vaun, who winced. "It will, I'm afraid, mean more photographs, and your privacy all shot to hell. I'm sorry."

"After this afternoon's paper, there's not going to be much of it left anyway. It's a miracle I've managed to get away with it as long as I have."

"We may find Lewis before that, remember. Every cop in California has seen his picture by now." His offer of encouragement sounded thin, and Vaun shook her head.

"No, now be honest, Alonzo Hawkin. If you picked him up tonight, what could you possibly charge him with? I'm no expert, but it sounds to me like you have nothing at all that you could take to a jury. Isn't that right?"

"Vaun, that isn't really our responsibility."

"Of course it isn't, but there isn't much point in arresting somebody if you then have to let him go for lack of any evidence. Don't worry, I do understand what I am to do. There's no point in putting out bait if the tiger doesn't come far enough to make his intent clear, isn't that it? I shall sit and wait for him to come for me, don't worry," she repeated, but none of the other three liked what was in her face, and in each of them a special gnaw of concern started up.

"I want your promise…" Hawkin began, and Vaun laughed, a bleak, brittle sound.

"No, I'm not about to 'do something foolish,' as they say. I will cooperate, I will do what you tell me to do. Four lovely little human beings have lost their lives on account of me, on account of this gift of mine. It must come to an end."

There was a cold, dead undertone in her words. Lee started to speak, and stopped. Hawkin cleared his throat.

"So, we're agreed. On Saturday morning you set off for some public place like Golden Gate Park or Fisherman's Wharf, accompanied by these two and a number of other plainclothes along the way. The three of you are photographed by our pet reporter and his cameraman, and you will appear the following morning on the front page of the Sunday paper. We'll give it three or four days, and if he hasn't appeared by then, we'll do it again. You think you'll be up to it? Vaun?"

She pulled herself back from some distant and unpleasant place and focused on Hawkin.

"Yes, yes, whatever you want. I'm sorry, I was just thinking of those three sets of parents. I wonder if they can bring themselves to read the papers anymore. I wonder what impression my smiling face eating a crab cocktail at Fisherman's Wharf will make on them. I would like to speak with them, when this is all over."

"I think it would do them a lot of good," said Lee. "But it might be very hard on you."

"What does that matter, now?"

"Well," Hawkin broke in, "first there's the minor matter of getting this all over. I suggest that a good night's sleep might help. 'Night, all, and thank you, Lee, for yet another ambrosial feast. Are you wearing your button?"

"I am." She pulled it up from inside her shirt, and dropped it back down.

"Good." He caught himself. "Thank you." He touched Vaun's shoulder lightly in passing, though she seemed not to notice or indeed to notice that he was leaving. Kate stood when he left but allowed Lee to run him through the alarms and waited for the thoughts beneath the black curls to surface. It took several minutes, and Lee was standing in the doorway behind Vaun, also waiting, before Vaun finally spoke.

"You saw that last painting I did, didn't you, Kate?"

"The one with the woman and the child?"

"Yes. You saw it in the studio that day. Gerry had someone bring it to the hospital." Its terrible beauty had been gouged and shredded beyond recognition, and Hawkin had personally seen it put into the hospital incinerator. "That was Mrs. Brand, Jemma's mother. Her face stayed with me for eighteen years, how she looked that night when she realized Jemma was dead. I started to dream about her again, last December, and I finally had to paint her. It was one of the most… difficult paintings I ever did," she said with a terrible calm. "Possibly one of the best. And now it's gone."

"Perhaps—" Kate stopped. She heard the thoughtless insult of what she was about to say but plunged on regardless. "Perhaps you'll do the painting again, one day."

"Oh, no," Vaun looked up at them, with the gentle acceptance of finality in her face. "I said it must come to an end, and it shall. I will not paint again."

27

Contents - Prev/Next

It was a terrifying week. Vaun drifted through the house like a lost soul, her hands in her pockets. She slept a great deal during the day, although her light was often on in the night. She watched the television, sitting down to whatever channel it was tuned to, game shows, old movies, British dramas indiscriminately, and would get up and wander off upstairs at times that made it obvious that she was completely unaware of the machinations of the plot. Only a cartoon would hold her interest until it was broken by a commercial.

She did not go into Lee's therapy rooms.

She ate automatically what was put on her plate, took part in conversations when she was addressed directly, seemed relaxed and good-humored about the necessary inconveniences. She even made a shy joke about being held prisoner for her own good.

Lee recognized it as one of the stages her terminally ill patients would go through on the way to the grave, and she grieved and she understood and she fought it with all her determination and skill, to absolutely no effect.

To Kate it was like watching an intelligent wild thing calmly gnaw off a trapped foot.

On Tuesday John Tyler came to the house. Kate was not quite sure how he had talked Hawkin into it, but he came in an unmarked SFPD car in the afternoon, still in ironed jeans and soft shoes but with a linen jacket as his nod to the formality of the city. No tie. His attitude too was more formal, and he drank a cup of coffee with the three women before following Vaun up the stairs to her room. They remained there all afternoon, their voices an occasional rhythm overhead, and when Tyler came down at dusk he was alone. He came to the door of the kitchen where Kate and Lee were talking as Lee stirred a pot. Lee saw him first.

"John, would you like some dinner? Just soup, almost ready."

"I have to go soon. I told Anna I'd be home."

"A glass of wine first?"

"That would be nice, thanks." Kate got up and poured them each a glass.

"I'm glad you came," Lee said. "She's feeling lost, and far from home."

"I don't think that's anything new for Vaun," he said mildly. "She feels far from home in her own house. Vaun is one of the saddest ladies I know, and where she is or who's with her doesn't make much difference."

"Oh, surely not. She has friends."

"Vaun has friends, but as far as I know the only one to really touch her has been Gerry Bruckner, and he's too central to her to be called a mere 'friend.' "

"I met Gerry. I'd like to meet Angie, too. How is she?"

"Angie is the same, only more so. This latest has not helped her self-esteem any, as you can imagine. 'A woman with worn hands and a hopeful heart,' Anna called her in one of her more poetic moods. And she teams up with a woman whose hands are now still and whose heart is without hope. Somebody better kill that bastard," he spat out. "I'd do it myself, I think, given the chance."

"You knew, didn't you?" Kate asked suddenly. "That Vaun was imprisoned for murdering a child?"

"Um. Well, yes, in fact, I did."

"And you allowed her to move in."

"I didn't think she'd done it. No, that's not strong enough: I knew she couldn't have done it."

"And in December, when Tina Merrill was found? Weren't you just the least bit worried that you knew who had killed her, and after her the others?"

"No. I should have told you, that first day you came, but I couldn't bring myself to cause her grief for nothing. And I knew she had not done it. And I was right."

But not about Tony Dodson, Kate thought, and did not say.

"You mustn't tell the press, or anyone else for that matter, that she is completely innocent. Not yet." She tried to sound stern.

"I don't talk about it at all. I find that's usually best."

He stayed another twenty minutes, and left in the police car.

It was, for the women in the house, a truly terrifying week.

Knowing that she was far from the center of action made the week even harder for Kate. It was given out, when anyone asked, that her injuries were keeping her away from duty but in truth she would have preferred to bleed to death rather than miss this part of the case.

For it was now that the solid groundwork for an eventual prosecution was being laid, the jigsaw answers to all the questions locked into a tight, smooth picture for the District Attorney. Who? Andrew C. Lewis, alias Tony Dodson. What? Murder, of a peculiarly cold-blooded and thus inexplicable sort, murder not as an end, but as a means of building an elaborate and creative revenge. When? Could he be placed, by witnesses or evidence, near the relevant sites at the right times? Where? Now that was a good one. Where was Lewis on the days in question? Where did he go when he went 'to work'? Where were the clothes and lunchbags and backpacks of the three girls? And most important, where was Lewis now? And finally, how? How did he get to the children, how did he spirit them away, how did he avoid attracting attention?

For all that week Kate had to live with the knowledge that the case was being investigated without her, and that knowledge made it hard to stay cheerful and calm and alert. Vaun drifted; Lee went out to clients in the hospitals or the hospices; Kate fretted and phoned for updates a dozen times a day; and Hawkin and Trujillo set out to get some answers.

For the past week Trujillo, ill-shaven, dressed in grimy black pants, hideous shoes with pointed toes, and a leather jacket that he had come to loathe, sat at the bar of the Golden Grill beneath the glowing skin of the woman on the barbecue and drank himself into an irritated ulcer. He got to know the regulars, he got to know that several of the regulars who were friends with the man they knew as "Tony Andrews" had been very scarce recently, and finally he got to know a flabby, pasty-looking kid with acne who appeared for the first time on Tuesday afternoon and who knew "Tony" well enough to have seen where he lived when he was in town.

The flabby kid knew little more than that. He was a hanger-on and had not actually been to "Tony's" apartment but had only seen him come out of the place one morning, climb into his truck, and drive off. Trujillo invited the kid out of the bar, found the apartment house, and contacted Hawkin, and before too long they moved in with a large, heavily armed escort and a search warrant in Hawkin's jacket pocket.

The apartment was empty. The resident manager produced a key and let them into Andy Lewis's third persona.

It was a large apartment, furnished in tasteless luxury, up to and including a vast round bed with satin sheets and a well-stocked, padded leather wet bar in the living room. The prints of Andy Lewis/Tony Dodson/Tony Andrews were all over. Two other prints brought up the names of men with records for narcotics dealing. There was a canister of high-grade marijuana in the closet, a tin of hashish on a shelf, about fifty thousand dollars' worth of heroin tightly packaged for the street in colorful balloons, and all the attendant paraphernalia. Later the lab was to find considerable cocaine dust in the carpets and furniture. There was one loaded shotgun in the coat closet near the door, a second one in the bedroom closet, and two loose forty-five-caliber bullets and traces of gun oil in the drawer of the bedside table.

The clothes in the bedroom's oversized walk-in closet were clothes of two different men, though they were all the same size and all had the same dark hairs and black-brown beard hairs in them. To the left everything was arranged on wooden hangers: silk shirts, wool suits that made Trujillo whistle, a neatly filled stack of shallow shelves holding handmade Italian shoes. The clothing verged on the flashy, and Hawkin reflected that some of them must have looked a bit incongruous on a man with long hair and a full beard. On the right hung his Tyler's Road clothes: old work jeans, worn flannel shirts, and denims, all on metal hangers with the paper of dry cleaners on them. An odd assortment of scuffed and grease-impregnated boots and tennis shoes lay in a tumble on the floor underneath.

There was also a painting.

It protruded slightly from behind the shoe shelves, and the frayed canvas at its back edges caught Hawkin's eye. He pushed past Trujillo (who was still dressed as a bar rat and was fingering lapels enviously) and drew the canvas out to carry it into the light. At the window he turned it around, and there was Andy Lewis, just as Red Jameson had described him, half naked, slightly sweaty, a small sardonic smile on his lips, the narrow back of the chair thrusting up like some phallic structure under his chin, the dragon coiled on his upper arm.

Hawkin's tired blue eyes traveled over the glossy surface, searching for the painting's depths, and because he was looking for them, he found them. Most of Vaun's better paintings had something behind the surface image, a hidden meaning that emerged only for the patient eye, and this was one of her very best. Red had not studied this one, Hawkin mused, had been too put off by the obvious surface meaning, or he would not have worried about his niece.

It was a caricature. Skillful, amazingly subtle for a teen-aged artist, but it was a caricature. At first view it was the portrait of a young man with whom the artist was both in love and in lust. Gradually, however, the slight exaggerations asserted themselves, and soon Hawkin knew that she was not painting how she felt looking at Andy Lewis but rather how Andy Lewis imagined women in general felt looking at him. It was dated April.

Trujillo heard him laugh and emerged from the closet to come and look over his shoulder. He made an appreciative noise in his throat.

"Wish some lady would see me that way," he commented.

"Do you?" Hawkin asked. A bustle in the hallway outside indicated the arrival of the prints and photograph crew, and he handed Trujillo the painting. "I want you to study this closely for a few minutes, and then tell me what you think. Be careful of it," he added. "It's worth more than you make in a year."

Ten minutes later he came back and found a confused and troubled Trujillo sitting in a chair staring at the image of the young Lewis. He looked up at Hawkin.

"But, it's… it's cruel, isn't it? She's laughing at him. Making fun of him."

Even Trujillo had seen it, then, given time and a hint. How long had it taken Andy Lewis to see the derision in it? Had it taken him, perhaps, until the month after it was painted? Had Vaun told him what she had really painted, when she broke up with him? Had Jemima Louise died because of this painting? And, indirectly, Tina Merrill and Amanda Bloom and Samantha Donaldson, and very nearly Vaun herself?

Suddenly Lee Cooper's words came back to him: Vaun was "more likely to commit a devastating murder of someone's self-image on canvas…" This painting was her weapon, the victim as yet quite unaware that the murderous blow had been struck. Hawkin could see that anyone knowing Lewis, and truly seeing this portrait, would never take the man seriously again. It spoke volumes about Lewis's methods that he had not killed Vaun outright when he first realized what she had done. To Lewis, mere death was not sufficient revenge: hell must come first.

The apartment and its surroundings yielded no other immediately satisfying piece of evidence. The telephone answering machine gave out one succinct message: a man's bass voice said, "Tony? This is Dan. We could use a hand if you're free." There was no way of telling when the message had been left, but the state of the refrigerator indicated it had been some days since anyone had been in residence, and as the day wore on the neighbors interviewed confirmed that the last anyone had seen of him was before the big storm.

There were no papers, no address books or scribbled telephone numbers, no letters in the mailbox addressed to anyone other than Occupant. The neighbors could describe only a few of his numerous guests, and the only vehicle any of them had seen him with was the old pickup currently sitting in Tyler's metal shed.

That evening, Wednesday, Hawkin and Trujillo returned to the apartment house to catch the residents who had not been in during the day. It was tedious work, with little added to their meager store of information, until they rang the bell of number fifty-two. It was after nine o'clock, but the door was answered by a child of about ten or eleven with glossy black hair and a mouth full of braces, dressed in fuchsia-colored thermal pants and an oversized Minnie Mouse T-shirt. She peered at them gravely beneath the chain.

"Good evening, miss," said Hawkin. "I wonder if I might speak to your mother or father?"

"I do not know how I would produce my father," she said with considerable precision and an air of suffering fools, "but my mother may be available. May I tell her who's calling?"

Hawkin identified himself and Trujillo to the child, who looked unimpressed. She started to open her mouth when she was interrupted by a woman's voice from behind her.

"Who is it, Jules?"

The child stepped around so Hawkin could see her profile, which in another eight or ten years would be devastating.

"They claim," she said, "to be policemen. I was about to ask them for some identification."

"That is a very sensible idea, miss," said Hawkin firmly in an effort to retain some sort of control. He pulled his ID out of his pocket for the forty-seventh time that day and flipped it open for the benefit of the eyes, on two levels now, that peered through the gap. The door shut, the chain rattled, and the door opened again to reveal the paradigm on which the future devastatrix was modeled.

Ten pounds of gleaming blue-black hair balanced precariously on top of an oval face with brown in its genes and, intriguingly, golden-green eyes surrounded by eyelids that had been shaped somewhere in Asia. Damp tendrils curled gently around the collar of an ancient bathrobe like one that Hawkin's grandfather used to wear, of a particularly gruesome shade of purple, mercifully faded. She had bare feet and heavy horn-rim glasses of the sort Gary Grant might have removed to reveal a secretary of hitherto unseen beauty, and Hawkin was very glad that he was standing in front of Trujillo because he knew that his own face would reveal nothing, despite his immediate and intense awareness that beneath the robe, the rest of her was every bit as bare as her feet. Trujillo might take a moment to regain control of his face.

"Good evening, Ms. Cameron," he said coolly. "Sorry to bother you. We're trying to find some information on one of your neighbors, and wonder if you might be able to help us?"

"Certainly. Come in." She stood back and waved them into a room so utterly ordinary it might have come from a catalog of motel furniture, onto which had been strewn a solid layer of books, covering every flat surface—heavy books with dark leather bindings and titles in gold, gothic letters, in a number of languages. She gathered a few together to clear the second pair of the quartet of metal and vinyl chairs at the Formica table, then stacked the tomes onto the table and sat looking over them. She was not a short woman but looked small beneath the hair, within the robe, and behind the books.

"I'm afraid I won't be able to help much," she said. She had a sweet, low voice, and not so much an accent as a careful precision and rhythm to her speech. "We've only been here since January, and I'm so rarely home, I haven't had a chance to get to know my neighbors."

A voice came from the sofa, accompanied by one foot waving in the air. Hawkin had all but forgotten the younger generation of this incredible race of genius-goddesses.

"My mother was recently appointed to the chair of medieval German literature at the university," said the voice, and then volunteered, "I am going to practice criminal law." Hawkin blanched at the thought of such a defense lawyer and hoped he would be retired before she came on the scene. Her head appeared over the back of the chintz. "Which neighbor?"

"Mr. Tony Andrews, in number thirty-four." He dragged his attention back to the mother. "He's been missing for some days, and his family is beginning to worry."

The daughter snorted derisively.

"So they sent two high-ranking officers out to look for a missing person?"

"Jules," her mother began.

"Oh Mother, the police don't do things that way, and besides, I've seen them both on the news. They're working on that case of the little girls and the artist."

The mother turned a look on Hawkin that made him feel like a student who had been caught in a bit of plagiarism.

"Is this true?" she asked.

"We do work on more than one case at once, sometimes," Hawkin said, trying for sternness, but it sounded weak even to his own ears. He pulled himself together. "Mr. Andrews. Do you know him?"

"No, I don't think—"

"Yes, Mother, we met him last month, don't you remember? The day you were giving a paper in San Francisco and couldn't get the car started."

"Oh, yes, him. I had forgotten his name. Nice man."

"He was not," said Jules sternly.

"Well, I thought—"

"Pardon me, miss," interrupted Trujillo. "Why did you think he was not nice?"

For a moment the child was at an obviously uncharacteristic loss for words. She quickly mustered her forces, but her answer was given with a chin raised in half-defiant embarrassment.

"I don't have a reason, not really. Nothing concrete, I mean. It was simply an impression. I did not like the way he looked at my mother. It was," she paused to choose a word. "It was speculative, without the earthy immediacy with which most men react to her."

(Earthy immediacy? thought Hawkin, uncomfortably aware of the earthiness of his own first reaction to the woman. Where does this kid come from?)

"Jules!" her mother scolded. "You sound like a bad romance novel."

"I thought it was a good phrase," her daughter protested.

"It is inappropriate."

"But accurate." Accuracy was obviously the ultimate consideration in Jules Cameron's life and, judging by the capitulation of her mother, it was a family trait.

"Was that the only reason?" Hawkin interjected, before the conversation deteriorated into semantics. "The way he looked at your mother?"

"I also found his physical appearance, his untrimmed beard and dirty hands, didn't go with the clothes he was wearing. They seemed almost to belong to a different man entirely, although they fit him well. He helped us with the car," she concluded, as if to a panel of jurors, "but he was not a nice man."

"I see," said Hawkin, trying to. He spoke halfway between the two women. (Women?) "Did he say anything to you, about where he was going, friends, anything like that?" To his relief the mother picked up the story.

"He saw I was having trouble with the car. Jules and I were looking into the motor trying to find a loose wire or something obvious when he walked by and saw us. He rummaged around for a few minutes—"

"It was the alternator lead, as I told her," Jules put in.

"—although I said he mustn't get his suit dirty. He said not to worry, he was a mechanic and it would only take a minute, and it did—he got it going right away."

"He told you he was a mechanic?" asked Hawkin.

"That's what he said. I offered to pay him, but he laughed, a nice laugh—"

"It wasn't," growled the sofa.

"—and said I should keep my money and buy my little girl a doll."

(Ah.)

"Can you believe it?" exclaimed the insulted party. "Can anyone be so sexist and archaic in this day and age?"

Trujillo was looking from fond mother to indignant daughter with a stunned expression, his mouth gaping slightly.

"Did you see how he left? His car?" Hawkin asked.

"No. Did you, Jules?"

"Yes. There was a man waiting for him on the street, in a red Grand Prix. I remember thinking the name of the car was funny because he so obviously considered himself a big prize."

"Beg your pardon, Miss?" said Trujillo, who was trying to write all this down. She looked at him pityingly.

"Grand Prix. A pun?" She sighed. "Grand Prix is French for 'big prize'."

"Oh. Right."

"It must've been his car, too, because the other man moved over into the passenger seat to let him drive."

"I don't suppose you noticed the license plate number," said Hawkin, knowing that if she had, she'd have given it to them right off.

She looked abashed. "I knew you would ask me that. No, I didn't. All I remember is that it wasn't personalized—I did look for that, I remember—and that it was fairly new."

"Was that the only time you saw him?"

"Yes," said Jules.

"No," said her mother, and looked at her daughter apologetically. "I saw him a couple of weeks ago. It must have been a Tuesday night, because I was coming in from my late class. He was just going out as I came in, so I said hello and thanked him again. He said he was glad to help. That was all."

"Which Tuesday was this?"

"Not last week. The week before, a couple of days before the storm."

The day after Samantha Donaldson was killed. Hawkin stared for a long minute at a book spine with a title he couldn't begin to pronounce, and thought. And thought. When he finally looked up the woman was looking amused.

"Sorry," he said.

"I do it all the time." She smiled, and his middle-aged heart turned over, and he wanted to stay seated at this horrid plastic table forever.

"What was he wearing?" It was nearly a random question.

"Something old, blue jeans and a dark jacket over a work shirt of some kind. Plaid, I think. Red plaid. It looked better on him than the suit did. More appropriate."

"How did he seem to you?"

"Cheerful. Excited, almost. He looked tired as well, though."

"Do you think he killed that little girl?" breathed Jules, looking curious and doubtful and more than a bit scared. Hawkin turned from her to her mother, who just looked scared. He took out his card and wrote a number on it.

"Ms. Cameron, if you, or your daughter, see the man Andrews at any time, do not allow yourself to be alone with him, and call this number as soon as you can. He may no longer have a beard." He showed them the drawings. "I would also appreciate it if you would not talk with your friends or neighbors about this conversation, not for a few days. It could jeopardize the investigation and put people in danger." He fixed Jules with a hard eye, and she put her chin up.

"I don't gossip," she said with dignity.

"I didn't think you would," he said, and stood up to go. At the door he stopped and looked down at the child and thought of poor, confused Amy up on Tyler's Road.

"So you want to go into law?" he asked.

"It's one option," she agreed.

"Would you like to see a trial some day, meet the judge, talk to the lawyers?"

"I would, very much." From the gleam in her eye he might have been offering Disneyland.

"When this case is over, if I can work a free day, we'll see what we can do."

Trujillo stared at him as if he were crazy; Jules looked at him as if he were God; Jules's mother looked him over as if he were a distinct possibility.

In the elevator Trujillo watched the numbers change with great concentration, and they had stepped out of the box and onto the ground floor before he could no longer contain himself.

"Did you really have to ask the kid to go to court with you? I mean, God, the mother, and it's probably the only way to get to her, through the kid, but still. Can you imagine her cross-examining you?" The thought was one to give him nightmares, obviously.

"I thought she was cute."

Trujillo looked incredulous. "Cute like a cobra, you mean."

"Not so bad. And look at it this way, I may convert her to aiming for the D.A.'s office. We could use a few of those on our side, don't you think?"

Trujillo just shook his head and muttered something under his breath. It sounded like "earthy immediacy."

Hawkin let him conduct the last three interviews of the evening, which were short, uninformative, and extraordinarily dull.

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Thursday involved sending people out to trudge through every garage, gas station, and body shop in that part of San Jose, with no luck. Friday they widened their search, with little hope, but within the hour one of the San Jose men found the garage. Hawkin and Trujillo were there in twenty minutes.

It was a big, sprawling work shed filled with men and cars and noise. The owner, Dan Whittier, was a giant with a huge belly and no hips, whose greasy black trousers threatened to descend with every step. He recognized "Tony Andrews" from the drawing, a guy who came in occasionally to help when they were rushed. First met him about a year ago, at a bar. Yes, it might have been the Golden Grill; he went in there sometimes. No, he didn't think anyone introduced them, just got to talking. No, he hadn't seen him for a couple of weeks. Yes, he'd tried to reach him, left a message on the answering machine like usual, but he never showed up. It had happened before; no problem, the work got done eventually. The number? Yeah, it was here, next to the phone.

It was the number of the apartment.

Trujillo asked a few more questions until it was obvious that to this man, Tony was a nice guy, an adequate mechanic who helped out occasionally in exchange for being able to use the facilities during off hours to work on his own cars. Offhand, nobody could remember any of his cars except in the vaguest of terms—a pickup, a red Grand Prix, a couple of old Dodges—but no paperwork had been kept on any of them.

Frustrated, they left, and looked back, and then came the little break that was to earn Trujillo his promotion. Among the many cars, trucks, and vans sitting inside the chain-link fence of the storage yard were two U.S. Government mail-delivery vehicles, the boxy white ones used for streetside delivery. Trujillo walked around the unmarked car to the driver's side and then paused and looked thoughtfully back over the car roof toward the storage yard.

"Have you ever noticed," he said slowly, "how people don't remember seeing things like mail vans? They're nearly invisible."

Hawkin stared at him, then stared at the two innocent white delivery trucks, and was one step ahead of him when they went back through Dan Whittier's door.

Dan Whittier was surprised and a bit annoyed at seeing them again, and followed them back into his office. Yes, they had Post Office vehicles here from time to time. Not regularly, just when the government's regular mechanics were swamped. Oh, yes, those they kept close records of. What dates were they interested in? Trujillo gave him the three dates. The first one would be from last year's books, Whittier told them, which weren't here now, but the second and third dates were very clear: yes, there was a mail van in during both those times, had come in two working days before in both cases, and yes, Andrews had worked on them, and yes, Andrews had taken them out for road tests, and come to think of it the last time, yes, he had been gone a long time, four or five hours, something wrong with the fuses, and yes, Trujillo was welcome to the license numbers if it would allow Dan to get back to his cars.

Several telephone calls later a police team laid claim to the two vehicles. The one that had been into the shop back in January had since been thoroughly cleaned; the one that had been in on the day Samantha Donaldson had disappeared had not been and gave forth several very nice latent prints of Andrew Lewis, from places one would not normally expect an engine mechanic to lay his hand, places where a man might brace himself, say, when lifting an awkward weight from the back. More materially there were several hairs, which proved later to make as close to a match with hairs from Samantha Donaldson's head as modern forensic science could judge, and finally a small snag of blue knitting wool that was microscopically identical to the remainder of the ball in the knitting basket of Samantha's grandmother.

The postal van, the apartment, the Lewis/Dodson/Andrews tie, the rough partial print on Samantha's neck—Hawkin had a case that was air-tight.

All he lacked was Lewis himself.

Lee's dinner that Friday was the closest she ever came to failure, and it first amazed and then amused Kate to see Lee bothered out of all proportion. Kate didn't show her feelings, though, and dutifully protested as the tight-lipped cook scraped the fallen souffle into the garbage and reassured her that carrot soup, chewy multigrain rolls, a cold marinated vegetable salad, and raspberry-walnut torte were quite enough to keep them from starvation. Normally Lee would have shrugged and served the souffle flat, but it seemed as if the uneasy peace between Lee and Al Hawkin allowed for no sign of weakness.

However, several glasses of an excellent Pinot Noir smoothed things over, and by the end of the meal even Lee had relaxed. She shooed them off to the fireplace with a tray of coffee while she did a preliminary cleanup, and Kate put some sticks together and produced a merry blaze that added to the gemütlichkeit.

Hawkin sat with Vaun at opposite ends of the long linen-covered sofa and propped his feet up on a stool with the attitude of a man resting from a heavy burden. He perched his cup and saucer on his stomach and closed his eyes. Vaun pulled one leg up under her and considered him, head tipped to one side. Kate drank her coffee and wondered what the artist's eyes were seeing, the effects of late hours and human ugliness that his job had carved into his face, the bone sheathed in muscle, the skull beneath the skin. She looked from him to her, and abruptly, disconcertingly, she knew that Vaun was looking at this man Hawkin not as an artist, but as a woman, with interest. The thought so surprised her that she put her cup down with a rattle and broke the tableau. Hawkin opened his eyes and looked at her, and she had the uncomfortable feeling that he had followed her thoughts, impossible as it might be. Vaun uncurled to lean forward and fill her cup from the carafe on the table, and paused to look questioningly at Hawkin, who held out his cup to her. She poured, looked the same question at Kate, who shook her head, and they all settled back as Lee came in and took the chair between Vaun and Kate.

Twenty minutes of light conversation followed, Hawkin's entertaining story of a rock star and his current and equally famous lady friend who found themselves tumbling out the front door of the poshest hotel in town, stark naked and screaming obscenities to the amusement of passersby and the horror of the management. Hawkin told a good story. Even Vaun laughed and showed a faint flush of color in her cheeks, though whether it was from the wine or from Hawkin's story, or from his presence, Kate could not be sure.

As the laughter of his audience faded, before there could be any anticipation of what he was going to say, Hawkin put down his cup and turned to Vaun.

"It's decision time," he said, and before they could tense up, continued, "let me go over what we've got, first," and he told them of the week's findings. Kate had heard it before and had passed on abridged versions, but Hawkin laid it out in a clear series of interrelated steps, ending with Dan Whittier's garage. He waited for a moment to let it all settle in and then sat forward, elbows on knees, and studied his palms and interlinked fingers as he continued.

"When we made this plan for a publicized outing, we had almost nothing on Lewis, and the purpose of drawing him to Vaun was as much to incriminate him as it was actually to lay hands on him. That situation has changed. It will take several days for the full lab results, but I think that mail truck will provide enough evidence to nail him.

"How, then, do we take him? He could be in Mexico, but I don't think so. I think he's in the Bay Area. If we took the place apart, plastered the newspapers and the notice boards with the drawings, we'd probably find him. I'd like to do it that way. There's a very good chance we'd have him in two or three days."

"And the other chance?" Vaun smiled, but he was not looking at her.

"The other chance is that we miss him or that he's already out of the area and will go to ground when he hears there's a manhunt out for him. Which leaves you in an extremely difficult position." Now he looked at her, with a sad, lopsided smile. Kate had told him that Vaun intended to paint no more, and it had hurt him, she knew him well enough now to see, although he had said nothing. "You could probably afford to hire a bodyguard, but I don't imagine you'd care for that much, not for any length of time."

"No."

"Now, I wouldn't normally ask someone else's advice on this kind of thing, but in this case I need your cooperation, and I want to know how you feel about it. Do we continue with the idea of a trap, or do we drop it and hunt him down?"

Vaun did not hesitate.

"I would like to go on with it."

"Somehow I thought you would." He grinned at her, then became brisk. "Right, tomorrow you three go out and wander around, pose for a couple of pictures and answer some questions from our pet reporter, come back here in the afternoon. Meanwhile, Trujillo or one of his people will bring that gorgeous car of yours up from Tyler's and leave it down the street with its cover on. Sunday there's a nice article and photograph of Vaun, and in the article two pointer arrows for Lewis to follow: first, that you're staying in the Russian Hill area with a couple of friends, and second, that you'll be meeting with reporters at an unspecified place on Tuesday morning. That will give Lewis two options, either to wander around the neighborhood with several hundred others, all of whom hope to catch a glimpse of you, until he recognizes the shape of your car, or to call the paper to find out where you'll be meeting with the reporters on Tuesday morning. We'll set up a trace on any such call, and if we don't get lucky, we'll wait for him to show his head Tuesday morning. If none of the three brings him to us, on Wednesday we'll go after him. What's wrong?"

"Nothing's wrong," said Vaun, "it sounds fine. It's just… it's so difficult to tie all this together with Andy."

"He's a bastard, Vaun," said Hawkin in a hard voice. "He's a monster inside a man's body, a creature who thinks nothing of strangling cats and dogs and little girls and sending other people to prison and into madness, so long as he has his revenge."

"Oh, God, I know, I know. You have to stop him—we have to stop him. You have to remember, though, he was my first lover, and to a part of me he'll always be that. For heaven's sake, Al, don't look so worried. I won't go all sentimental on you. I'll do what needs doing."

"Are you sure? It's not too late to back out."

"I am sure."

He studied her face for some hint of the future, and sighed.

"All right. I just need a word from you to get the machinery moving. Where do you want to go tomorrow?"

Lee cleared her throat. "There's a lovely show of Postimpressionists at the Legion of Honor, if you haven't seen it," she suggested. "Or some gorgeous Tibetan sculptures at—"

Vaun set her cup down with a crack and stood up, thrust her hands into her pockets, moved over to stand at the gap in the curtain and peer with one eye out at the city spilling down at her feet.

"I couldn't do that," she said lightly. "I could never look a Cezanne in the face again if I performed this farce in his presence. No, some place that can't be spoiled." She turned to face them, an odd expression around her gaunt eyes and mouth, an expression that in another, less invariably serious face might have been read as deadpan humor. She met Hawkin's eyes and jerked her head slightly to indicate the curtain behind her.

"I think, if you don't mind, I would like to go to Alcatraz."

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After Hawkin left they dispersed upstairs, each to her separate room. Kate stripped and put on her warm robe, and went to run herself a long, hot bath. She had not slept well in many days, partly because of the omnipresent responsibility down the hall, but mostly because she did not like to sleep alone. She was tired, and edgy, and unhappy because she was not in top form and tomorrow would need her full attention. She ran the bath very hot, soaked until it cooled, and then half drained and filled it again with hot water until she felt rather boiled. She then took a rough washcloth and methodically scrubbed every reachable inch, and shampooed her hair three times, and shaved her legs. She then turned the shower to almost straight hot, and when her skin was numb with the heat she flipped it to cold and screamed silently for a count of ten. She turned it off and leaned against the tiles in relief for a moment before reaching for her towel.

She dried her hair, did her nails, cut her toenails, brushed and flossed her teeth, put on her bathrobe again, and went down the dim, carpeted hallway to her room. The heat and the water had emptied her, and she felt hollow, and more at peace than she had for many days. She could sleep now.

At the end of the hall a flickering light showed under Vaun's door, and the low mutter of the television. Kate stopped outside Lee's closed door and saw from the blue-white light under its edge that the reading light was on. She heard the sound of a page turning, and a minute later the tap tap tap of a pencil on the oversized artist's board that Lee used as a desk in bed, and a grumble as she complained to the author about whatever article she was reading. Kate smiled, reached out for the doorknob, and then slowly let her hand fall away.

In her own room she exchanged the robe for an oversized T-shirt and a pair of soft running shorts, in case of nocturnal emergencies, and crawled into her bed. Sleep came to her quickly and pulled her down into a place that was thick and black and heavy and dreamless.

Hours later a small sound broke sleep's hold on her and she struggled up from the depths, automatically fumbling for the gun on the table next to her as the door whispered open across the carpeting. She had the sights trained on the gap before she was yet awake, and Lee's outline stepped into them.

"Oh, Christ, hon," Kate blurted out. "Don't do that to me." She put the gun carefully on the table and sat up. "What's wrong?" she whispered.

"Nothing's wrong." The door closed and Lee moved surely through the dark room. "Move over."

"Lee, what are you doing? We agreed—"

"I didn't agree, you told me, and now I've decided you were wrong. Move over."

"Look, sweetheart, Vaun's just down the hallway and I promised Al—"

"You and Al didn't talk about our sleeping arrangements, and Vaun couldn't give a damn."

"But what if she—"

"If she comes in during the night she'll figure we're sleeping together. I don't think there's much that can surprise that lady."

"Aren't you going to let me finish a sen—"

"No. Shut up."

Kate shut up and moved over, and during the time that followed she made a considerable effort to maintain an awareness of the world outside the door, but there were moments when she would not have heard Andy Lewis come through the house if he'd been wearing cleated boots and sleigh bells.

Some time later Kate lay limp and purring, and spoke into Lee's shoulder.

"What was all that hostility about?"

"What hostility?" Lee said drowsily.

" 'What hostility?' I like that. And what have you done with your beeper?"

"On the table next to your damned gun. And I wasn't hostile, I was healthily sublimating my hostility into a libidinous outburst. If you'd been Jack Zuckerman I would have been hostile."

"I'm glad I'm not Jack Zuckerman. I'm always glad I'm not Jack Zuckerman. Who is Jack Zuckerman?"

"He wrote an attack in the Psychotherapeutic Journal on that article I did for them last month. A brilliant piece of writing. His, I mean. Nasty, snide, but slippery, nothing to respond to. Leaves the reader with the distinct impression that Lee Cooper is a well-meaning amateur who would be better off leaving people's heads to the big boys like himself who know what they're doing."

"Remind me to thank him for giving you some hostility to sublimate."

"Oh, he'd like that. He has a special place in his heart for me, because he knows that his ex-wife told me all the more sordid details of their relationship when she was working herself up to leave him, and he hates knowing that I know. He also thinks that I convinced her to make the break."

"Did you?" Kate was not interested, but she enjoyed lying on Lee's shoulder and listening to her talk.

"Of course not. I didn't have to. Look," she said abruptly, "what are we going to do about Vaun?"

"Well, I was sort of hoping to help keep her from getting killed," said Kate mildly.

"Yes, but after that?" Kate smiled to herself at Lee's casual dismissal of obstacles and wished she were as sure of the outcome as Lee seemed to be.

"All right, I'll go for it. What are we going to do about Vaun?"

"I'll have to talk with Gerry Bruckner again, see if he's come up with anything." Lee was lying staring up at the gray square of ceiling, and had her arm been free she would have been tapping her teeth with a pencil eraser. "Maybe she should go to him for a while."

"If she wants to," Kate added, even more mildly. Lee laughed.

"I'm doing a Hawkin, aren't I? Go here, go there, do this. I do know one thing that might help her, and that would be if you would allow her to be your friend instead of doing your armadillo routine."

"My what?"

"Don't get all huffy, you know what I mean. Two people in the last couple of weeks have held out a hand to you in friendship, and with both of them you pretend not to see it and curl into a well-armored ball. First Hawkin, and now Vaun. Both of them would be good friends for you."

"I thought you didn't like Hawkin," said Kate, sidestepping.

"Like doesn't enter into it. I respect him. I trust him."

"Really?" That surprised Kate.

"Oh, yes. He may be hard on you, but he won't hurt you. But I do think that if you allowed Vaun to make you her friend, it would do her a lot of good. Probably more good than anything Gerry Bruckner or I could do for her. Professionally, anyway."

"All right. When the next few days are over, I promise to be less armadilloish. Armadilloid? Can I go back to sleep now? It's been lovely, but unlike some people in the room I don't function well on four hours a night."

"Shall I stay?"

"Yes. Yes." Kate molded herself up against Lee, but it was like trying to relax beside a quivering spring.

"What's wrong, sweet Lee? Jack the Sugarman?"

"Partly that, yes. He's right, you know."

"No."

"Yes, he is. I was overreaching myself in that article, trying to say something about theory without the foundations to hold it steady. Since I came back from New York I've been concentrating on therapy, on helping people keep their lives together. I don't regret it—it's important work, and I've learned so much."

"But."

"Yes. 'But.' I told you that I've been having nightmares about being eaten. I don't know how much longer I can go on without giving some attention to myself. What I've learned is too one-sided. I have to take it and work with it, test it, build on it, or else make up my mind to dump it and stick to straight day-to-day therapy. That's what Jack was saying, in his own sweet way, and he's right."

"You want to leave San Francisco?"

"Not without you. Never without you. And not perma nently. A year, maybe. Gerry Bruckner invited me to his place for a couple of months; then I'd like to spend three or four months in New York, maybe six months in Zurich."

"I'd have to quit my job."

"A leave of absence?" Lee suggested. "But look, love, this is a lousy time to bring it up, and I'm sorry. We'll talk about it another day. Go to sleep."

"You said it was partly that. What else?"

"Nothing specific, just nerves. What the next few days are going to bring."

So, Kate thought, she's not so casual and confident after all.

"I think you should go away for a few days, until it's finished."

"I won't do that. You know I won't leave. It's just that waiting and uncertainty are difficult."

"Are you scared?"

Lee did not answer.

"It isn't right that you should be in this. You don't have the training or the background for it. I'm going to tell Hawkin to move Vaun out of here."

"No! No, Kate, you can't do that; you must not. Yes, I'm frightened, but not for myself. Why would Andy Lewis want to hurt me? No, it's you. I'm often frightened for you, you know, when you're off at night or when you go all silent about a case and I know it's coming to a head. It's the cop's wife syndrome, that's all. I worry about you, but you must not change the way you do your job because of me. Please?"

"I still think you should go away for the next few days, until it's over."

"Not just yet. Vaun needs me. I'll be okay. But, you be careful, promise me that."

"Dear heart, with all the people who will be watching the house, we're safer than we would be driving to San Jose."

"Promise me."

Kate wondered at the urgency in Lee's voice, and relented.

"I promise. When this is over I'm going to make them give me a week off and you can have someone else see your clients, and we'll go somewhere. Baja? Go lie on the beach for a week and drink margaritas? And listen to some overweight mariachi band singing about doves?"

"And play with the parrot fish and get sunburned. Yes, I'd like that. I love you, Kate. Thank you."

"For what?"

"For bribing that Todd kid to get into my teaching section at Cal. For calling me one nasty gray morning in Palo Alto. For loving me."

They lay together in the dark, Lee's hand on Kate's hair, smoothing it gently. She felt Kate relax, and heard her breathing slow, until finally Kate gave a twitch and slipped back into sleep.

Two hours later Kate was awakened again, by a small noise and a change in Lee. It was still as black dark as the city ever is.

"What—?"

"Shh!" Lee hissed, and Kate heard then the sound of a door closing and the nearly inaudible but somehow distinctive movement of Vaun coming down the hall and going down the stairs.

"What time is it?" Kate whispered.

"Just after four."

"I'd better go see what she wants," said Kate. She started to throw off the covers, but Lee stopped her.

"Let her go. If she needs something she'll ask, but give her a bit of rein. I'll get up in a while and make myself a cup of tea, if she wants to talk. Go back to sleep."

Kate got up and put her T-shirt and shorts back on and went down the hall to the toilet. The hall light was on downstairs, but no sound came up. Well, she couldn't get out without Kate's knowing it, and Lee was right to say she shouldn't hound the poor woman's steps. Maybe she wanted to watch a video. Kate went back to bed and eventually to sleep. Lee got up a while later, made herself tea, and took it into the living room. There was no sign of Vaun, which meant she was in the therapy rooms.

At six-thirty Lee was still curled up on the sofa, with a journal and a cup of coffee now, when she heard Vaun come out of the rooms, go into the kitchen and pour herself some coffee, and then start up the stairs. Lee looked up from her reading.

"Do you want to talk about it?" she called softly.

The footsteps stopped, and after a long minute they turned and Vaun came to the door.

"Good morning, Lee. No, I don't think so. There's no need, really." She looked as if she hadn't slept in days, but calm. "I left it there. You can put it away, if you like." She had done a sand tray, then.

"Do you want me to put it away before anyone else sees it?"

"It doesn't matter."

"You're dreading today, aren't you?" Lee asked, careful to keep any sympathy out of her voice.

"Wouldn't you?" Vaun's voice was also matter-of-fact.

"You won't be alone."

Vaun smiled, a slow and affectionate smile.

"There is that, yes. It makes it almost bearable." She looked at the half-empty cup in her hand. I'll go have a shower, I think. A bracing shower might help." She drained the cup and went to put it in the sink, then came back to look at Lee.

"You're very good, you know. I've met a lot of therapists, and other than Gerry Bruckner, you're the best I've met at getting down to business."

Lee was surprised and didn't know quite how to respond. Vaun nodded anyway, as if she had, and went up to shower.

At seven o'clock Lee went up the stairs with two fresh cups of coffee. Kate was awake, her eyes puffed with sleep. Lee put one of the mugs on the table for her and sat on the edge of the bed.

"I'm glad you didn't try to shoot me again this morning."

"I heard you coming. Last night you were sneaking." She wrapped her body around Lee, reached for the coffee, and sighed contentedly. "Al Hawkin was right. You can make coffee like nobody else I know."

"Vaun did a sand tray this morning. That's where she was going when she got up."

"Did she now?" Kate glanced at the closed door and lowered her voice. "Can you tell me about it?"

"She said she didn't mind. It was odd. Sad. Powerful. Extraordinarily lonely. You know how most people use the sand as the foundation for the story, a stage setting built up into hills or valleys or abstract lines and shapes—something to set off the figures and hold them upright? Well, in hers the sand was the main character. She used the larger tray, dampened the sand and smoothed it into a perfect round bowl all the way up to the top edge, nearly exposing the wood on the bottom. It looked like a circular wave about to collapse in on itself, or an animal trap, or some kind of carnivorous earth formation. This perfect wide sweep of sand mounting up on all sides, and in the middle, the exact middle, the small stub of an orange crayon."

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Alcatraz is a rock. It is a bare, ugly, pale, oversized rock dropped down into the water off the San Francisco peninsula like an inadequate dot atop an upside-down exclamation mark. Had the rock been closer to the mouth of the Golden Gate it would have been dynamited as a hazard to shipping, or perhaps been used as the foothold for another bridge, a very different bridge from the dramatic orange spiderweb so beloved of tourists.

However, the rock was not actually a hazard. It was too small, too barren, too far from the mainland to be useful, yet too large, too close, too tantalizing to ignore. It was—it is—a jutting, bald pile, where seagulls nest and a foghorn groans, that commands an incomparable view of one of the world's few beautiful cities and the sweep of bay and hills into which it has been set.

So they built a prison there.

As a place to torment the most incorrigible of men, its choice was brilliant: ugly walls, no privileges, nothing to do but think of the surrounding barrier of water and the unreachable beauty and renowned freedom of "Frisco." It took its first military prisoner in 1861; it transferred its last federal one in 1963; it sat vacant; it was taken over by Indian rights activists, who shivered nobly in the fog and burned down some buildings. When they left, the parks department took over, and it is now, until such a day as it is made into a gambling resort or amusement park, a place of crumbling walls and tourists with earphones following the prerecorded tour through the cell blocks, their faces preoccupied as they contemplate the room where Al Capone ate his corn flakes; the closet where Robert Stroud, the Birdman of Leavenworth, lived; and the scorches and holes in the cement walls where the great escape attempt failed.

Vaun's day out was choreographed with minute attention to detail. At no time would there be fewer than three plainclothes watchers on hand. The goal was to show Vaun in public, to the reporter Tom Grimes and to any of his colleagues who might show up, and then to spirit her away. If all went according to plan, by tomorrow noon Andy Lewis would know that Vaun was well, was free to take a day sightseeing with friends, was in San Francisco, and planned on talking to reporters on Tuesday.

Lee drove, to leave Kate's hands and eyes free, and a couple of motorcycles followed them discreetly all the way. She pulled into a parking spot on the street that a moment before had been blocked off by orange traffic cones. Kate put money in the meter and then opened Vaun's door. Lee came around and, with Vaun between them, they strolled casually to the ticket booth. A young couple with their arms around each other fell in behind, their eyes hidden behind black sunglasses, and gave a close semblance of romantic interest as they eyed the other boarding passengers.

Lee led, as prearranged, through the cabin and up to the top deck, which had benches and open sides. The intertwined couple stayed below, but after a minute an interracial one appeared up the stairs. The hard-looking black man in the slick leathers and impenetrable sunglasses and the harder-looking pale blond woman, also poured into leathers, attracted glances, but nobody would look at them long enough to remember their faces, and apart, in normal clothes, they would be unrecognizable. As he turned to sit down, Bob Fischer eased the twin mirrors down his nose with a long forefinger, winked at Kate, and pushed them back into place before sitting and taking possession of nearly seven feet of bench with his outstretched arms. The blond woman, who was the only person in the department to make Kate feel tall, was an expert in one of the more obscure varieties of martial arts. She looked like an anorectic heroin addict.

It was a glorious day, San Francisco at her spring finest. The smattering of off-season tourists along Fisherman's Wharf looked stunned at their fortune, having expected fog or rain, but the rains were nearly over for the year, and fog is a summer resident. The sky was intensely blue and clear, with an occasional crisp white cloud to cast a shadow across water and buildings for contrast. A fresh breeze raised white-caps, but the sun warmed the bones even on the top deck. Berkeley looked about ten feet away, Mt. Tamalpais was at her most maternal, and a sprinkling of triangular sails studded the blue waters where Northern California's more successful computer wizards and drug importers took a day at play.

Kate casually appraised their fellow passengers while Lee nattered on to Vaun about a boat trip she'd taken as a child. Kate had always envied Lee her ability to enjoy life even when the future held something unpleasant, whether the threat was the oral defense of her dissertation or the approaching death of one of her clients. Today Lee's pleasure in the day and the outing and the company was if anything sharpened by her awareness of the incongruity of the reason for the trip, and her pleasure was contagious. At least, Vaun seemed to be finding it so, and Kate made an effort to relax physically so as not to disturb the two of them. Nobody had recognized Vaun yet, and if someone hadn't done so by the time the group broke up on the island, it would be up to Bob Fischer to plant the suggestion in the mind of some passenger bound for shore. Meanwhile, she would do all she could to encourage Vaun to enjoy her moment of fresh air and freedom. God knew she'd had few enough of them lately, and would have no more for some time.

Lee was now telling Vaun about the Native American occupation of the island, a year and a half at the end of the sixties. Kate listened with half an ear. The boat was cast off and began to reverse out of the pier, and as it cleared and started its turn, a small movement near the ticket booth caught her eye. Half a dozen permed and rinsed tourist types were staring up at them, one woman's outflung arm pointing at Vaun, whose tipped head and intently listening face were full in the sun. The boat pulled away from the mooring, and Kate glanced to see if Bob had noticed. He nodded at her over a blond head. She sat back and sighed. Poor Vaun. Her public would soon alert the media. The day had begun.

They would have perhaps an hour on Alcatraz before anyone caught up with them, and Kate decided not to tell Vaun. She dug an extra pair of sunglasses out of her purse and gave them to Vaun, who put them on absently.

They disembarked, heard the ranger's lecture, bought postcards, and set off up the hill, the two couples at their heels. Through the tunnel, past the rusting, glass-enclosed guard tower, they zigzagged along beside the long-empty homes of the guards and their families, the anonymous chapel, the burnt shell of the warden's house. A handful of spring flowers waved among sparse weeds, the few hardy survivers of some gardener's suburban dream. Dirt had been transported from the mainland in the last century, back when Alcatraz was a cannon-ringed garrison defending the entrance to the goldfields. The soil was laboriously brought in with an eye to absorbing the explosive power of incoming cannonballs; what remains now grows spindly weeds.

At the island's peak they entered the prison itself, and the cold dampness of it shut off the sun behind them, although it occasionally worked its way in through dirty, high windows. They wandered along the rows of cells, into the barbershop and out to the exercise yard. It was like being inside an immense concrete and steel machine that had been turned off but not yet completely dismantled. Only a few of the more extraneous decorations had been stripped away, with the essential prison unaffected. If this were a volcano, Kate thought, looking up into the tiers of cells and walkways, it would be classified as dormant rather than extinct. It felt distant, but watchful. She wondered how it was affecting Vaun, and whether the ex-inmate might hesitate at coming too close to the cells, but she did not. She even walked into one and ran her fingertips over the walls, where for thirty years the cell's occupants had leaned against the concrete and worn it smooth with their rough shirts. She would not, however, go near the dark, solid holes of the solitary confinement cells.

Finally they stood in the mess hall, where the last day's breakfast menu was still mounted on the wall for the tourists to photograph. Long windows on either side let in the light, and from one side stretched out the view of San Francisco that tantalized and taunted. Lee and Vaun stood there, heads together, Lee talking still, Vaun absorbing and reflecting Lee's vivacity.

"—fed them a bit too much, kept them a bit too warm, gave them very little exercise, and of course no visitors, no privacy, either physical or mental, no goal, no change in the routine. It turned men who were accustomed to action and power into soggy cabbages. They thrived at other prisons, but this place broke them. Look at Al Capone, for ex—"

Lee's voice was cut off by a sharp, nasal exclamation from the doorway.

"There she is, I told you, it's Eva Vaughn!"

Kate had seen her coming and moved in front of the two women, who whirled around at the voice. Bob Fischer and his partner stood apart on the other side of the room, looking mildly interested at the disturbance. Kate took Vaun's arm and propelled her firmly out past the group of chattering gawkers. The central figure, the woman Kate had seen at the pier, raised her voice and turned to follow but was pulled to a sudden and unexpected halt by her elbow, upon which a very large and utterly immovable hand was laid. Her face looked up, and up, into the smiling teeth and invisible eyes of Bob Fischer.

"Pardon me, ma'am, I couldn't help overhearing, but could you tell me please who you thought that was?"

His words were faultlessly polite; his stance and dress were definitely, well, big; and the thumb and forefinger grasping her arm were like a clamp. She looked into her own face staring down from his glasses, and quailed.

"I, well, Eva Vaughn, the painter, you know, down on that Road, the little girls——" Her voice drifted off as she realized that her quarry was rapidly getting away from her. She plucked at his fingers with nervous little jabs and looked desperately over her shoulder. Her husband hugged his big video camera bag to his chest and began to protest weakly. The other three ladies and two men in the group faded back a step or two and eyed each other as their leader explained valiantly about artists and pictures and maybe an autograph, for her granddaughter, who was such a clever little artist herself, you know?

After several minutes of this Bob bared his teeth hugely and loosed his clamp.

"Oh, yeah, I see, the artist, she was in the paper, I remember. You remember, Lily, down on that Road where they kept finding them little girls?"

The pale woman nodded and dropped her purse, and by the time the last errant lipstick had been rounded up by the gallant gentleman from Schenectady, Kate had called ahead on her walkie-talkie to have the boat held for them and had taken two precipitous shortcuts across the Road. The pursuers never had a chance.

Kate hustled her two charges aboard, followed closely by the other "couple" who had dawdled behind Bob and the pale "Lily" during the morning, and by a solitary older Japanese man who had been sitting on a bench at the landing with a booklet on the history of San Francisco until Kate had spoken into her radio. Kate shoved Vaun into a corner seat as the door swung shut behind them. Ropes were cast off, the engines began to work, and they were well away by the time the cluster of art lovers burst from the tunnel and slowed to a disappointed walk. She smiled grimly and turned to the man with the history booklet.

"Hello, Inspector Kitagawa. Is Tom Grimes waiting for us, then?"

"Oh, indeed, with about five hundred others."

"What!"

"Word got out," he said laconically.

"We won't be able to land, then."

"It's all right, half the department is there, too. Hawkin has a car there; he wants you to take your ladies right into it. If we let her stop to talk there'll be a riot, so he's arranged to meet Grimes later. Somebody'll take care of your car, if you'll give me the keys."

She unhooked Lee's ignition key from her ring, gave it to him, and stood up.

"I'd better go talk to the captain or the pilot or whatever he is and let him know what's going on."

"He knows."

Half of San Francisco knew, it appeared. Every tourist from Ghirardelli Square to Pier 39 must have heard, and added their numbers to the professional voyeurs. An alarmingly narrow line had been cleared by the uniformed police, a gauntlet of lenses and microphones to be run. Kate looked at Vaun to see how she was taking it and saw the same face she had met all those days ago: achingly beautiful, pale as death, and without the slightest expression or hint of life within. Vaun's hand reached up and removed the sunglasses, folded them, handed them to Kate. Even without them there was no sign of her thoughts about the chaos before them.

"Are you going to be okay?" Kate asked her.

"Probably never again," she replied calmly.

The boat bumped into the berth. Ropes were made fast, the door opened, and the gangway stretched out towards the crowd, and Vaun stepped out to meet her fate.

She walked slowly through the mayhem of shouted questions and outthrust microphones and the swell of clicking and whirring cameras, looking only at the equipment-laden belt of the chunky policeman who led their small procession through the crowd. She seemed completely oblivious to the uproar, looked only like a woman preoccupied with a minor personal problem, and allowed herself to be guided to the waiting police car and pushed in. Hawkin was there, and while Lee and Kate got in on either side of Vaun in the back seat he raised a bored and authoritative voice to inform the assembled media of their opportunity Tuesday to ask all the questions they might want, but not until then, sorry, no more comments, and with that he climbed into the front next to the driver and off they drove.

The driver spent the next few minutes shaking off several pursuing cars and vans while Kate gave Hawkin an account of the trip onto Alcatraz, Vaun stared unseeing through the front window, and Lee touched Vaun's hand lightly and watched her. The driver was good, and in ten minutes they were on the freeway going south, free of followers.

They drove for twenty minutes to a huge, anonymous motel three hundred yards from the freeway, went directly to room 1046, and ordered a room service lunch. Vaun asked for tea. The food arrived, and on its heels came Tom Grimes and his photographer.

"You weren't followed?" Hawkin asked him at the door.

"I wasn't followed, Al, don't bust a gusset. Is she here?"

"You can have fifteen minutes," Hawkin growled, and let him in.

Hawkin and Kate stood and munched; Lee picked at a sandwich and watched over Vaun like a mother dog with a litter of one; the cameraman squinted over his cigarette and filled the anonymous room with equipment and harsh white light. Grimes set a small tape recorder on the table in front of Vaun, who sat at the center of it all in a plastic chair, feet together, hands in her lap, as calm as a royal personage on her way to the block. She answered his questions as if she were reading them from a page; she was impersonal, noncommittal, but honest.

She told him that yes, she was Eva Vaughn, and also Siobhan Adams, that yes, she was the Siobhan Adams who had been convicted of murder, and no, she had not committed these recent murders, had in fact nearly been murdered herself. Who did them, then, and why was she involved? She could not comment on that question, not until the police investigation had been completed. Grimes had not expected an answer, and he went on. How long had she been living on Tyler's Road? Almost five years. No, her neighbors had not known who she was, either as artist or as murderess. Yes, she painted there. Yes, some of them appeared in her paintings.

On and on, human interest questions for the most part, as Grimes could fill in the rest for himself. Through it all Vaun maintained an air of polite disinterest, until nearly the end. Hawkin had just stuck his head out the door to signal the driver that they were nearly ready, and the photographer was packing up his lenses and paraphernalia.

"A last question, Miss Vaughn," said Grimes, casting about in desperation for a quote with some zing to it. "I'm curious about your name change. Did you have any reason for choosing the name Eva Vaughn?"

This unexpected question caught Vaun's attention, and for the first time she seemed to look at him.

"Adam and Eve were the same person, weren't they? Two halves of a whole. It wasn't really a name change at all."

"Are you a religious person, then?" Grimes tried not to sound surprised, as if Vaun was about to declare herself a born-again believer, and at that she fixed the full gaze of her remarkable eyes upon him and smiled gently.

"Not church-religious, no. But a person who has been through what I have is not apt to find such thoughts… without interest."

The camera flashed a final time, and in three minutes they were back on the freeway, going north. The driver went off on the second exit, drove east for a few miles, and joined the other northbound freeway. Hawkin nodded and eased his neck. No followers.

Kate leaned forward in her seat, and Hawkin half twisted to talk with her.

"There were television people in that lot at the pier," she noted. "How much do you suppose they'll put on tonight?"

"They're sure to have something. Saturdays are always slow."

"Anyway, Lee and I will stay inside from now on, as there's sure to be people wandering up and down the street. Hopefully it'll be a couple of days before one of the neighbors squeals on us. Lee has to go out tomorrow afternoon to see one of her clients at the hospice, and she has two people coming to the house, one tonight and one Monday night, that she really doesn't want to put off. The rest she's cancelled. Is that okay?"

"Let the guys across the street know exactly who they are and when they're coming, so they don't get nervous. There's no point in locking yourselves off entirely, so long as—" He stopped with a look of astonishment, and Kate jerked around to look at Vaun.

She had broken, at last. Her eyes were shut and her mouth open in a little mewling o, and she was trembling. Her hands came up to cover her face, and she twisted toward Lee, who held out her arms, and Vaun went blindly into them and curled up as best she could, with her head in Lee's lap, and with Lee's arms and upper body bent fiercely around her. She huddled there all the way home, and Lee rocked her and murmured to her. The others sat silent with their thoughts.

Vaun spent the rest of the afternoon upstairs. Lee cooked, making croissants from scratch and an elaborate salade niçoise with fourteen separate marinated ingredients that took her several hours and filled the kitchen with pans, and might have been iceberg lettuce with bottled dressing for all any of them tasted it. Kate prowled the house until her nerves were jangling, and finally disappeared into the basement to pedal the exercise bicycle for an hour. She came up dripping and had a glass of wine, showered and had another glass, and watched the local news, including the amateur videotape of the backs of three blurred women, after which she felt like having several more glasses but did not.

When the news was over Lee went upstairs with a glass of whiskey, which she made Vaun drink, and then came back and set out the dinner, which they all picked at. Finally she took the food away and went to make coffee. Kate and Vaun cleared the table, but to Kate's surprise Vaun, instead of retreating upstairs, went to sit on the sofa. Kate obligingly laid and lit a fire and wondered if Vaun just wanted company. She fetched the coffee tray and poured them each a cup.

"Do you feel like a game of chess, or checkers? Backgammon?" she offered.

"No, thanks. I'd like to tell you something, you and Lee. Something about myself."

The hum and swish of the dishwasher started up in the kitchen, and Lee came in for her coffee. Vaun rattled her cup onto the table and got up to make a silent circuit of the room, touching things. When she got back to the sofa she folded herself up into it and simply started talking. For the next two and a half hours she talked and talked, as if she had prepared it all in advance, as if she never intended to stop.

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"I cannot remember a time when my hands were not making a drawing," Vaun started. "My very earliest memory is of a birthday party, when I was two—I have a photograph that my aunt sent me four or five years ago, and it has the date on it. One of my presents was a box of those thick children's crayons and a big pad of paper. I remember vividly the sensation of pulling open the top of the box, and there was this beguiling row of eight perfect, smooth, brightly colored truncated cones, lying snugly in the cardboard. They had the most exciting smell I'd ever known. I took one out of the box—the orange one—and I made this slow, curving line on the pad. There were all these other presents sitting piled around me, but I wouldn't even look at them, I was so fascinated with the way the crayon tip made this sharp line and the flat bottom made a cobwebby wide rough line, and how I could make a heavy line of brighter orange when I pushed hard, and the way it looked when I scribbled it over and over in one place. I can still see it, my fat little hand clenched around that magical orange stick, and the thrill of it, the incredible excitement of watching those lines appear on that clean, white paper.

"My poor mother, she must have looked back on that day with loathing. Everything she hated, everything she feared, there it was, welling up in her sweet, curly-haired, two-year-old daughter."

Vaun smiled crookedly and leaned forward to refill her cup. She put down the pot and poured a dollop of cream into the black liquid, where it billowed up thickly to the surface. She watched intently the color change, her mind far away.

"My mother was born in Paris, just after the First World War. Her father considered himself an artist, but he had absolutely no talent, other than for latching on to real artists and drinking their wine. He and my grandmother weren't married, but she put up with him until the winter of 1925, when my mother, who was about six, nearly died of pneumonia from living in an unheated attic. Grandmother decided to emigrate to California, so when he was out at a weekend party in the country she gathered up all the presents he'd been given, or helped himself to, including several respectable canvases, sold them, and bought passage for herself and my mother to New York. It took five years to work her way to San Francisco, but they made it eventually. She married when my mother was twelve, and had two more children, Red and another daughter who died young, but she never let up on her first child and drilled into her the unrelenting image of an artist as someone who steals, drinks, and is willing to allow his own daughter to die of neglect in his self-absorption.

"In due course my mother married a man who was as far from the art world as she could get. He was an accountant. He rarely drank, his parents lived in the same house they'd bought when they were first married, and he hadn't been inside an art gallery or museum since high school. Utterly stable, unimaginative, twelve years older than my mother, completely devoted to her, and, I think, somewhat awed by her sharp mind and beauty. A good man, and if he wasn't exactly what my mother needed, he was certainly what she wanted. The snapshots he took of her in those early years show a happy woman. Until my second birthday. They didn't have any other children, though as far as I know there was no physical problem. And I never had another big birthday party—she was probably afraid of having someone give me a set of paints or something.

"Of course, at the time I knew nothing of her background, why she so furiously hated my obsession with drawing. I was probably too young, even if she'd tried to tell me, but she never did try. It was only recently, about five years ago, that I finally pieced it together."

"And how did you feel about it?" Lee asked curiously.

"Vastly relieved. When I was young I thought it was my fault, and that my inability to control myself led to their deaths. Later I put it onto her, and it seemed to me that she was a sick, jealous woman. After I dug out the truth and learned about her parents, I felt a tremendous relief. It wasn't my fault, it wasn't even her fault. It was inevitable, perhaps; certainly acceptable.

"I wonder too if her phobia didn't drive me more deeply into it. It would have been there anyway, but perhaps a more gentle, natural talent. As it was, her continual attempts to distract me, find other interests, pull me away from my crayons and pencils served only to make me more completely single-minded. I wasn't interested in toys; I didn't want to play with other kids; I just wanted to draw. Before I was four, the lower half of the house walls were a disaster, and nobody could put down a piece of paper or a pen without my making off with it. I can remember having a screaming tantrum one day when she tried to get me past the crayons in the grocery store. It must have been one unending nightmare.

"When I started going to nursery school, at about four, at first the teachers were overjoyed with this little kid who could do the most amazingly mature drawings. After a few weeks, though, they got very tired of fighting to drag me out into the playground, or sit and listen to a story, or do all the things normal, well-balanced kids do. That's when I started going to a psychiatrist.

"I must have gone through a dozen of them in the next couple of years. The earlier ones were mostly women, and looking back I think that at first they all figured that I just needed a firm hand and an understanding ear. When that made no difference they'd begin to suggest that perhaps they should be treating Mother instead, and soon I'd go off to another one.

"When I was about five, maybe six, they began to be men, rather than women, and older, and more serious. I remember asking my mother once why some of them had framed pictures on their walls that had only writing on them, and she explained about diplomas and the like.

"Finally, when I was seven, we met Dr. Hofstetter. He had a whole wall of framed diplomas and letters in his waiting room, and I was intrigued with the pattern of the black frames against the white paper and the beige wall. Four of them had red seals, beautiful symmetrical sunbursts that leapt out from the wall, the color of blood.

"I spent several months with Dr. Hofstetter, talking about what I liked to draw and looking at books, and finally he must have decided that radical therapy was needed, because one afternoon my father took me out to a movie—it was the beginning of summer vacation—and when we came home there was not a single writing instrument in the entire house. No crayons; no paint; no pens, pencils, or chalk. I was furious. They had to use tranquilizers to get me to sleep that night. The next morning I poured my porridge onto the table and drew in it, so my mother started to feed me by spoon. If I went outside I'd use a stick in the dirt, so I stayed in. I made patterns with soap on the bathroom tiles, so I wasn't allowed to bathe myself.

"I stood it for five days. I just couldn't understand why they were doing it to me. It was like being told not to breathe. I felt like I was going to explode, and finally on the sixth day I wouldn't get out of bed, wouldn't eat or drink, and wet myself. Mother bundled me off to the shrink, who tried to explain that it was for my own good. I just sat there, staring straight ahead, not really hearing his voice, and finally he gave up and led me out to the waiting room while he and my mother went into his office. I could hear their voices, hers very upset, and his receptionist in the next room typing and making telephone calls while I sat there in the stuffed chair and looked at the pattern of the frames on his wall, and the red sunbursts.

"As I sat there, alone in the world with those seals, they began to bother me. They were wrongly arranged, out of balance, and the more I studied them, my mother's voice rising and falling in the background, the more they bothered me. It needed another spot of red, just up there, on the upper right, above the sofa, and I reached in the pocket of my coat for my crayons, but of course they weren't there, and I thought of going in and finding something in the secretary's desk, but I knew she would stop me, and there was that unbalanced arrangement of red seals waiting for me to do something about it, and I had to do something—I couldn't stand it, sitting there with those lopsided marks dragging at the wall—so I did the only thing I could think of, which was to stand up on the sofa and bite my finger, and use that."

She paused in the deathly silence and looked down at her hand, and rubbed her thumb across the pale scar that curved across the pad of her right index finger.

"That was the end of psychiatrists for a long time. My father came into my room that night, with a paper bag. He sat on the side of my bed and he opened the bag and took out one of those giant boxes of sixty-four crayons, with silver and gold and copper, and a real artist's pad, thick, textured paper. He put them on my bedside table and he crumpled the bag into a twist and he started talking to me. He told me that artists needed wide experience to do their art properly, that anyone who never looked up from the paper soon had nothing to draw. Therefore he would make a deal with me. I could draw and paint for one half hour before school in the morning, for two hours in the afternoon, and for one hour after dinner if I would agree to pay attention in class, play outside at recess time, read, and do my homework. If I agreed to this, and if I stuck to it, I could begin to have lessons on the weekends. He was a very wise man, but he was not very well and was totally intimidated by my mother most of the time. His compromise stuck, and that was how I lived for the next six years, until they were killed."

Vaun looked at the flickering fire for a long moment and shook her head.

"My poor mother," she said again. "If she had lived… But I would be a different person, not Eva Vaughn at all. They died when I was thirteen, in a stupid boating accident—the man at the helm was just drunk enough to make a mistake. I went to live with Red and Becky, my mother's normal half-brother and his normal wife and two nice, normal kids, aged nine and eleven. They were totally unprepared for someone like me dropping into their life—smack into puberty, terrified at losing my security, and filled with anger at my parents and a guilt that I couldn't express, awkward and ugly physically, and saddled with this all-consuming obsession that nobody could understand and I couldn't even begin to talk about. I moved three hundred miles away to a small farming town, into a school with overworked teachers, kids who'd never even known an adult artist before, much less a weird kid their own age—and, of course, no more weekend lessons.

"They tried, my aunt and uncle, they really did, but they didn't even know where to begin. I bullied them into giving me a shed to paint in, and before long I just lived out there. I tried, too, when I thought about it. I took over a number of jobs around the place to make myself less of a burden. When I was sixteen I began to babysit around the community, to earn money for my supplies. I built a box to hold my paints and small canvases, and I was happy to cover a kitchen table with newspapers and work until the parents got home.

"For about six months I was happy, really happy. I had money for paint, my aunt and uncle had decided hands off until I was old enough to leave, school was easy enough to be undemanding, and the local librarian was very good at finding me books on art theory and reproductions to study. At seventeen I began to think about going to college. My grades were decent, there was a small settlement left from my parents' death to get me started, and I was putting together a portfolio that I thought was not too bad. With my uncle's approval I sent in applications to three universities.

"It was an exciting time. I was in my last year of what I thought of as exile, and I could see that my work was good, that I had a future waiting for me. These were the early seventies, and even in rural areas the times were exhilarating. Then in December of my senior year two things happened: I slept with a young man, a couple of years older than I was, and he introduced me to drugs. Andy Lewis. It was part of the whole package, you know. If you looked like 'one of those hippies,' it meant you did drugs, so I did. For six months I did, mostly grass, but twice LSD. The first time was in December.

"The acid was interesting. It changed the way I saw colors and intensified the vibrations of different colors, the glow everything gives off. Not only while I was under the influence but for a couple of weeks until it faded back to normality. And in the middle of March when Andy offered me another tab, I took it.

"It was bad. I don't know why it was so different from the first time, but I just went insane. A little while after I swallowed the stuff I was sitting and looking down at my hands. There was a faint smear of red paint on my finger, near the scar, and as I watched it suddenly started smoldering and bubbling and eating into my finger and exposing the bone, which turned into a white bristle brush—" She broke off and looked up sheepishly. "There's no need to go over all the bizarre details, but in the end what happened was that my fingers turned into brushes and when I looked at one of the guys there—not Andy, I don't remember him being there, it was one of the kids who used to hang around—I saw paint pumping through his body, pulsing, every color, brilliant and iridescent. I was trying to get at the paint in his throat when the police arrived, and after I attempted to throttle several other people, they hauled me off to the hospital and filled me with some kind of heavy-duty tranquilizers. It was a lot of excitement for our little town, as you might imagine.

"By the next morning I was okay—sick and covered with bruises, but my fingers were flesh and blood again. They let me go home later, and the following day I was carrying a pan full of hot soup across the kitchen and felt my fingers turn to wood and dropped the pan. I had half a dozen relapses— sometimes I'd see paint pulsing in one of my cousins—but gradually it tapered off in frequency and intensity. I swore I'd never touch anything again, and bit by bit my family began to relax.

"In the first week of May I received a letter from one of the universities, the one I badly wanted to go to, saying that if I wished to send some samples from my portfolio I would be considered for a freshman scholarship in the fall. I went through the stuff I'd been doing, and somehow it didn't look as good as I'd thought it had. The next day I laid it all out, and I was appalled. I'd done nothing but crap since January. There was not one piece that wasn't sloppy and careless, and what was worse, it was all false, pretentious, shallow. Typical druggie stuff. I flushed the various leaves and tablets down the toilet and that afternoon told Andy to take a jump and got to work.

"As I said, that was early May. Just before my eighteenth birthday." She paused and wiped the palms of her hands on her knees. "Could I have a drink? Yes, that would be fine. Thank you.

"Early May. In mid-May Mrs. Brand called and asked me to babysit. She was a neighbor I'd worked for before. Some of my regulars didn't ask me much that spring—word gets around in a small town, and I wasn't exactly discreet. Well, this was their anniversary, and I think my aunt reassured her that I was okay. I needed the money, so I took my paint box and went along at about eight o'clock.

"They had two kids, a boy of fifteen, who had some kind of a play rehearsal at school that night, so he couldn't babysit, and yes, a little brown-haired girl, aged six. Jemima, but we all called her Jemma. She was in bed when I got there, but I went in to let her know I was there, and when I checked again at eight-thirty she was asleep.

"The son came in a bit before ten, had something to eat, and flirted a little, or tried to, but I was deeply into this piece that was going so well, the first solid, honest thing in a long time. I nodded my head a few times until he took the hint and went off to bed. The parents got home a few minutes before midnight, and I started packing away my box. When the mother went in to check on the kids, the girl was dead. Lying on the floor. Strangled. Naked."

Vaun looked curiously at her hands, which were trembling. "I haven't told anyone this story in fifteen years.

"I just stood there in the corner of the kitchen for the next hour, totally stunned. The doctor and police came, then more police, detectives, and then somebody thought to look at my painting.

"Have you ever had a leech on you? No? It's the most desperately revolting feeling, to find this horrible, slimy, slow-moving thing attached to your skin, sucking away at you. That's exactly how the policemen looked at me after seeing the canvas. I saw that look a lot in the next few months.

"That painting convicted me. Oh, there were a lot of other things, of course, from my history of psychiatric treatment to my use of LSD and what I'd done in March, which came out early on. But the painting clinched it. If I'd had a decent lawyer I might have tried to plead insanity, but as it was, the painting stood there for all to see, evidence that I was a coldhearted and ruthless murderer, a mad, artistic, murdering cuckoo in their nest.

"You see, what I'd been working on was a picture of Jemma as I'd actually seen her the week before. I had been out walking, thinking about what I wanted to do for the scholarship portfolio, when Jemma appeared. She didn't see me. She'd obviously been down in the pond catching pollywogs, which she wasn't supposed to do, and had her dress and underpants off so she wouldn't get mud on them, and she looked so amazing, like some pale wood sprite, totally at ease with her nakedness. She spotted a butterfly and dropped her clothes to go racing up the hill after it, and at the top of the hill the new green grass was so soft looking, you could just see her decide to roll in it. I knew I'd have to tell her that she mustn't do that any more, for her own protection, but for a few minutes I just enjoyed the sight of this nature child. At the end of it she just lay there, all alone in the universe, head back in the grass, looking at the clouds, and I knew I had my main piece for the portfolio. The colors were perfect, the position technically challenging, and there was this subtle innocent exuberance that I knew I could capture. And I did. It was a good, solid painting, one of the best I'd ever done, and it sent me to prison for ten years because she was found in exactly that position, arms sprawled, head back, and naked.

"I know now that the whole trial was a farce. There wasn't enough money for a proper lawyer, so I had a public defender, who was a total incompetent, but what did I know? I couldn't imagine those twelve people would actually believe the prosecuter's accusations, they seemed so utterly absurd. Once when he was going on and on about Timothy Leary and the hippie movement being anti-Church and the painting being a crucifixion scene because Jemma's father was a deacon in the local church, I actually laughed, it was so ridiculous. That was a big mistake, I realized later, but by then the verdict was in.

"The first few months in prison were pretty hellish, but after that things calmed down. They let me paint for a few hours every day, and my aunt sent endless supplies of pastels and Conte crayons and paper. I learned to walk very quietly around certain inmates, and I made a lot of flattering drawings. That was my first taste of prostitution." Her smile was gentle, and ugly.

"I had been in for just short of three years when there was a riot at some low-security prison in the Midwest, and all of a sudden the press was full of stories about how prisoners were being coddled instead of punished, and the law-and-order people grabbed onto us. Our prison had a reputation of being more humane than some, which I suppose was why I was sent there, because of my age. Some newspaper decided to run an expose of the place, as an example, and the powers-that-be were forced to crack down on us. I learned all that afterwards. The first thing I knew about it was when my painting privileges were taken away. Two days later there was a sweep through the cells and all my supplies disappeared. It was like when I was seven, only now I had no parents who I knew, underneath the confusion, loved me. Now I had nothing.

"And you know the funny thing? The relief was tremendous. I had carried the burden of this gift since I was two years old, and it had ruined my whole world. Now it was all over, it had been taken away from me, and I had no control any more, none whatsoever. I felt as if I were floating, and I could let go. So I did. At first they thought I was, as they called it, 'being difficult,' instigating a hunger strike I suppose, and they slapped me into solitary confinement. When they came to get me out, I was catatonic.

"The rest of it you've seen in my records, I'm sure. I used to wonder what would have happened to me if Gerry Bruckner hadn't decided to volunteer one afternoon a week at the prison, or if he'd been an ignoramus about art, or if the prison's warden and governing board had been less cooperative. What if, what if… So many opportunities for that little game in a life like mine, aren't there? What if he hadn't thought to put a crayon in my hand, and what if two years later he hadn't had a good friend with a gallery in New York, and what if the pieces hadn't sold so well, and what if he hadn't been willing to fight for me…

"I owe him my life. I dedicated the show to him, last year, the one you saw." She drained the glass, her third, and set it carefully on the table. "He is the only person I've ever fully, wholeheartedly loved. And I've never even slept with him." She smiled at Kate, a crooked smile that touched her eyes. "Except, I suppose, that night at the hospital last week. God, I'm so tired. Will I ever feel rested again? And now I'm half drunk as well. I think I'll take my dreary self off to bed before I begin to weep crocodile tears on this nice sofa."

"May I ask you something?" Kate interrupted.

"Only one thing? Must be something of a record for a detective, only one question."

"Two somethings, then, but one of them I have no business asking, and you're welcome to tell me that."

"All right."

"Why didn't you make an appeal?"

"I—I didn't think there'd be much point. The jury was only out for a few hours before they returned the verdict, and the lawyer—"

"Come on," Kate chided. "You're far from stupid, and you certainly had plenty of time to think about it. Why didn't you appeal?"

Vaun sighed and looked faintly embarrassed.

"Because by then I wasn't sure that I hadn't done it. I only took acid twice, but it's strange stuff, like stirring your brains with a spoon. Even after the first time I had half a dozen flashbacks. Like hiccoughs of the brain. Things would shift, somehow, and go unreal for a few seconds, or minutes. And the second time, after I'd tried to strangle two or three people… Well, even during the trial I began to wonder if maybe I actually had done it while I was having a flashback or hiccough or whatever you want to call it, and it scared me. The whole thing scared me, the thought of having to go through all those leech-looks all over again. I crawled into prison and pulled it around me like a shell, and I found that it wasn't as awful as I'd thought it would be. When my uncle came to visit me he offered to begin an appeal, but I could see what it would do to him, and I think he was relieved when I told him that I couldn't see much point. It was easier to forget it, to just get on and deal with what was in front of me. That sounds so feeble now, so stupid, but—in some ways I was a very young eighteen."

Kate looked dubious, Lee waited, and Vaun fiddled with a small seashell from the table while something struggled to push its way to the surface. She opened her mouth, changed her mind, started again, and the third time got it out.

"And I… There was also the fact that I was guilty, if not of killing Jemma then of enough other things to make me feel that prison was the place for me. I know," she said, though Lee had not actually spoken, "Gerry and I spent a lot of time on free-floating guilt complexes. At the time, though, it seemed… appropriate, that I should be locked away from society." She put down the shell and seemed to push the subject away. "What was your other question?"

"You don't have to tell me—"

"I didn't have to tell you the other one either."

"True. And I'm glad to see that your ego has recovered." She grinned at Vaun, who grinned back. "It's curiosity. Why Andy Lewis? What did you see in him?"

"A lot of things. He was very attractive, sexy, dark and dangerous, aloof. He exuded an aura of secret power. And he was an outsider, but by choice, rather than being left out. That was a feeling I craved, that self-assurance. Together we could look down on everyone else. I felt chosen, powerful, unafraid—even pretty, for those few months. With Andy, the whole mess of my life made a kind of sense."

"But it didn't last."

"No, it didn't last. I couldn't paint, with Andy. There was no room for it around him, I couldn't pull away from him far enough to paint. It was tearing me apart, and when I realized that my work was becoming crap because of it, I had to choose, and I chose my brushes."

"What did he do when you told him?"

"That was frightening. It was a Saturday, and Red and Becky had taken the kids to town. I was in my studio trying to sketch in a canvas when he came by. I was preoccupied with what I was doing and disturbed by my realization that I had five months of garbage to make up for, and so I was abrupt with him—I just told him I couldn't go on, it was over, and went on sketching. When I turned around a minute later, he was still sitting on the bed, but he was so angry, so furious, it stunned me. His eyes… And he seemed to fill the whole room. I thought—I knew—that he was going to get up and come over and hit me, beat me up, but I couldn't move. I just waited for I don't know how long, and then all of a sudden his face changed and he started to smile, and it was like the smile he had when he was going to take me to bed but different— horrible, cruel. And he stood up, and I knew he was going to kill me, and he came over to me and he kissed me, with his teeth, and he said, 'If that's the way you want it, babe,' and he went out and got on his motorcycle and roared off. And every time I saw him after that he smiled that same way, like some brutish little boy pulling wings off a fly."

"How long before you began to think he'd had something to do with Jemma Brand's death?"

"I wondered, even during the trial, because of a look he gave me the first day—a satisfied, 'I told you so' kind of look.

But I decided it had to be my imagination. I couldn't believe Andy would do something so, so—pathological. He was very good to me; he could be gentle when he wanted. How could I imagine him doing such a thing? I still find it difficult." Sagging now with fatigue she looked at Kate. "Have I answered your questions?"

"Yes, thank you," said Kate, and she thought, which still leaves a hundred others, but not tonight.

Vaun rose like an old woman, and stood studying them.

"It occurs to me that I haven't thanked you for all that you've done for me. Not that any thanks could be adequate."

"It has been a great joy," said Lee simply.

"I agree," said Kate. "I'll be sorry when it's over, though I won't be sorry when it ends." She listened to her words, and scratched her head. "I think I need some coffee. Want some?"

"No thanks," said Vaun. "I just want to crawl into bed."

"Lee?"

"Yes, thanks. Make a whole pot, why don't you. Jon, my client, will probably want a cup. Maybe I should turn on the lights in the front rooms—he'll be here in a few minutes." She moved off down the hallway and Kate turned toward the kitchen. Vaun started up the stairs, and then stopped and turned back to follow Kate.

"All that talking," she explained as she reached for a glass. "I'm thirsty." She scooped some ice cubes into the glass, the bottle of spring water gurgled, and she drank gratefully.

Kate measured the beans into the grinder and switched it on just as the doorbell sounded. She turned off the grinder.

"I'll get it," Lee called. She sounded distracted, and Kate wondered how closely she would listen to the problems of Jon Samson, né Schwartz. Kate turned back to the coffee, and a sudden anxiety struck her. She moved quickly past Vaun towards the door.

"Don't forget to—" she started to warn Lee, but she was too late, and it was too late, for when she reached the hall Lee's hand had already released the bolt, and in the slow motion of horror Kate saw the door explode inward, sending Lee staggering back against the wall, and the figure that stepped in looked for an instant like Lee's client with his snug trousers and neatly clipped moustache, but it was not Jon Samson, it was Andy Lewis, Andy Lewis with a .45 automatic in his right hand, Andy Lewis with the eyes and stance of a pit bull zeroing in on his victim, Andy Lewis looking past Kate to where Vaun stood waiting.