Bad Men

Chapter Three

Know me, wife.

The dream ended, and now Moloch’s features fell before him like rain. It was as though a great many photographs had been taken and shredded, the figures caught in the different frames intermingled, smiling familiarly while glancing against strangers from other pictures; yet in this downpour of images, this torrent of memories, he was ever the same. There he sat, beside parents unknown, amid siblings now lost and gone. He ran as a boy across sand and through sea; he held a fish on the end of a hook; he cried beside an open fire. This was his history, his past, yet it seemed to encompass not one life but many lives. Some images were sharper than others, some recollections more acute, but they were all linked to him, all part of the great chain of his existence. He was color, and he was sepia. He was black, and he was white. He was of this time, and he was of no time.

He was Moloch, and he was No One.

Moloch awoke, aware that he was being watched. His ear felt raw where it had been touching the cheap material, the pillow once again drenched with his sweat. He thought that he could smell the woman against his face, could touch her skin, could feel the blade tearing through her flesh. He stirred on his bunk but did not rise. Instead, he tried to identify the man watching him through his smell, his breathing, the soft jangle of the equipment on his belt. Images from the dream still ran through his mind, and he was suddenly aware of how aroused he had become, but he forced himself to concentrate on the figure at the other side of the bars. It was good practice. His incarceration had taken the edge off his abilities in so many ways that he welcomed any opportunity to hone them once more. That was the worst of his imprisonment: the monotony, the terrible similarity of each day to the next, so that every man became a seer, a fortune-teller, capable of predicting the wheres and whens of each hour to come, his precise location at any given time, the irrevocable nature of it all threatened only by the occasional outbreaks of sickness and violence.

Every day the wake-up call came at six A.M., heralded by horns and coughing and the flushing of toilets. Two hours later, the doors opened and each man stepped outside onto the cold concrete to await the first count of the day. No words were permitted to be exchanged during any of the day’s six counts. The shower followed (for Moloch took every opportunity offered to clean himself, viewing any lapse in hygiene as the precursor to a greater collapse), and then breakfast, always taken seated at the same plastic chair, the food seemingly designed solely to provide energy without nutrition. Then Moloch would head to the laundry for his day’s work, socializing little with the other men. The noon count came next, then lunch, then more work, followed by an hour in the yard, then dinner, another count, and a retreat to his cell to read, to think. Eight count, then lights out at ten. In the first weeks, Moloch would wake for the late counts, at midnight and four, but no longer. He had received no visitors, apart from his lawyer, for over three years. He made few phone calls and fewer friends. A waiting game was under way and he was prepared to play his part.

Now the game was coming to an end.

Moloch shifted on his mattress, his body once again under his control. Eyes closed, he concentrated on smell and hearing.

Aftershave. Hints of sandalwood.

A small rattle in the throat as the man breathed out. Congestion.

Digestive noises. Coffee on an empty stomach.

Reid.

“Wake up, now,” Reid’s voice said. “It’s your big day.”

Moloch lifted his head and saw the thin man standing at the bars, the brim of his hat perfectly level against his forehead, the creases on his uniform like blades set beneath the cloth. Reid looked away and called for 713 to be opened. Moloch remained where he was for a moment or two more, breathing deeply, then rose from his bunk and ran his hands through his hair.

Moloch knew the date. Some inmates lost track of the days while in jail. Many did so deliberately, for there was nothing guaranteed to faster break the spirit of a man facing twenty years than an urge to count the days until his release. Days in prison passed slowly: they were beads on a long thread, an endless rosary of unanswered prayers.

Moloch was different. He counted the days, kept track of hours, minutes, even seconds when the urge took him. Every moment spent inside was an injury inflicted upon him, and when the time came to return those insults to his person, he wanted to be sure that he did not miss a single one. His count had reached 1,245 days, 7 hours, and-he glanced at his watch-3 minutes spent in the Dismal Creek State Penitentiary, Virginia. His only regret was that the one on whom he desired to revenge himself would not live long enough to enable him to vent his rage to its ultimate degree.

“Stand straight, arms out.”

He did as he was told. Two guards entered, chains dangling from the arms of one. They secured his arms and his feet, the restraints attached in turn to a chain around his chest. The arrangement was known in the system as a “three-piece suit.”

“Don’t I even get to brush my teeth?” he asked.

The guard’s face was expressionless.

“Why? You ain’t going on no date.”

“You don’t know that. I might get lucky.”

Reid seemed almost amused.

“I don’t think so. You ain’t got lucky by now, you ain’t never gonna get lucky.”

“Man’s luck can always change.”

“I never took you for no optimist.”

“You don’t know me.”

“I know enough about you to say that you’re gonna die wearing them prison weeds.”

“Are you my judge and jury?”

“No, but come the time, I’ll be your executioner.”

He stood aside as the guards brought Moloch out.

“Be seeing you, Mr. Reid.”

The older man nodded.

“That’s right. Fact is, I aim to be the last thing you see.”

There was a black Toyota Land Cruiser waiting for him in the prison yard. Standing beside it were two armed investigators from the district attorney’s office. Moloch nodded a good morning to them, but they didn’t respond. Instead, they watched as he was chained to the D ring on the floor of the SUV, then tested the chains and the restraints until they were satisfied that he was fully secured. A wire-mesh screen separated the backseat passenger from those in the front. There were no handles on the inside of the rear doors, and a second wire screen ran from the roof of the Cruiser to the floor of the trunk behind Moloch.

The door slammed shut noisily.

“You take good care of him now,” said one of the guards. “Wouldn’t want him getting bruised or nothing.”

“We’ll look after him,” said one of the investigators, a tall black man named Misters. His partner, Torres, closed the door on Moloch, then climbed into the driver’s seat.

“Settle back,” he said to Moloch. “You got a long ride ahead of you.”

But Moloch was silent now, content, it seemed, to enjoy a brief taste of life outside the prison walls.

Dupree was sipping coffee in the station house. It was technically his day off, but he was passing and…

Well, that was just an excuse. He couldn’t stay away from the place. Most of the other cops knew that, and they didn’t mind.

“Doug Newton,” he said. He was sipping coffee from the market and eating one of the doughnuts that he had bought for the two cops on duty.

Across from him, Ron Berman was tapping a pencil on the desk, alternating each tap between the tip and the eraser end. Dupree found it mildly annoying but decided to say nothing. He liked Berman, and given that some of the other cops had far more irritating habits than tapping a pencil on the desk (for example, Dupree wondered if Phil Tuttle, Berman’s partner on this tour, had ever washed his hands after taking a leak), he was happy enough to let Berman and his pencil be, for the present.

“Doug Newton,” echoed Berman. “I took the call and put it in the log, but frankly, we both had other things to do, and it’s not like it’s the first time he’s made that kind of claim.”

Dupree reached over and took the log from Berman. There it was, in Berman’s neat hand. At 7:30 A.M., almost as soon as Berman and Tuttle had settled in, and while it was still dark on the streets, Doug Newton had called in a report of a little girl in a gray dress tormenting his dying mother.

Again.

“You went out there last time, right?” asked Berman.

“Yeah, I went out. We organized a search. I even checked with Portland and with the state police to see if they’d had any reports of missing girls matching the description Newton gave me. There was nothing.”

The first time, Tuttle had answered the call from the Newton place and, having kind of a short fuse, had warned Doug about wasting police time. Now, just this morning, Doug Newton had called in a third report, except this one was different.

This time, he’d claimed the little girl had tried to climb through the window of his mother’s bedroom. Doug had heard the old woman’s screams, and had come running just in time to see the little girl disappearing into the trees.

Or so he’d said.

“You think he’s going crazy?” asked Berman.

“He lives with his mother and has never married,” replied Dupree.

“Maybe he just needs to get laid.”

“I never took you for a therapist.”

“I’m multiskilled.”

“You think you could multiskill that pencil back into your drawer? It’s like listening to a drummer with the shakes.”

“Sorry,” said Berman. He put the pencil into the drawer, then closed it just in case the temptation to retrieve it proved too great.

“I guess Doug’s maybe a little odd, but I’ve never taken him for crazy,” said Dupree. “He doesn’t have the imagination to make up stuff. He’s only ever been to two states in his life, and I reckon he’s not sure the other forty-eight exist, seeing as how he’s never visited them himself. So either he’s going crazy or a little girl in a gray dress really did try to get into his mother’s bedroom last night.”

Berman thought about this.

“So he’s crazy, then?”

Dupree tossed the log back at him.

“Apparently he’s mad as a coot. I’ll go have a talk with him today. Last thing we need is Doug taking potshots at Girl Scouts selling cookies. Anything else on your mind?”

Berman looked troubled.

“I think Nancy Tooker, down at the diner, may have a thing for me. She gave me extra bacon yesterday. For free.”

“There’s a shortage of eligible men on the island. She’s a desperate woman.”

“She’s a big woman.”

“I’m sure she’d be gentle with you. At the start.”

“Don’t say that. That woman could break me in two.”

“She’s also kind of old for you.”

“She’s seriously old. You think it would make a difference if I told her I was married?”

“You’re not married.”

“I know, but I could get married. It would be worth it to keep her away.”

“My advice is, don’t take anything else from her for free. Tell her it’s against department policy. Otherwise, you’re going to end up paying for that bacon in kind.”

Berman looked as if he was about to upchuck his breakfast.

“Stop, don’t even say things like that.”

It struck him that Dupree was in surprisingly good humor this morning. Berman guessed that it might not be unconnected to Dupree’s slow courtship of the Elliot woman but he decided not to comment upon it, partly out of sensitivity for the big cop’s feelings and partly out of concern for his own personal safety.

“I think you’d make a nice couple,” said Dupree. “I can just see the two of you together. Well, I could see Nancy, anyway. You’d be kind of lost somewhere underneath…”

Berman unclipped his holster.

“Don’t make me shoot you,” he said.

“Save the last bullet for yourself,” said Dupree as he headed out. “It may be your only hope of escape.”

Far to the south, close to the town of Great Bridge, Virginia, a man named Braun walked back to his car carrying two cups of coffee on a cardboard tray, packets of sugar poking out of his breast pocket. He crossed the street, slipped into the passenger seat, and handed one of the coffee cups to his companion, whose name was Dexter. Dexter was black, and kind of ugly. Braun was redheaded, but handsome despite it. He had heard all the redhead jokes. In fact, he’d heard most of them from Dexter.

“Careful,” he said, “it’s hot.”

Dexter looked at the plain white cup in distaste.

“You couldn’t find a Starbucks?”

“They don’t have a Starbucks here.”

“You’re kidding me. There’s a Starbucks everywhere.”

“Not here.”

“Shit.”

Dexter sipped the coffee.

“It’s not bad, but it’s no Starbucks.”

“It’s better than Starbucks, you ask me. Least it tastes like coffee.”

“Yeah, but that’s the thing about Starbucks. It’s coffee, but it doesn’t taste like coffee. It’s not supposed to taste like coffee. It’s supposed to taste like Starbucks.”

“But not coffee?”

“No, not coffee. Coffee you can get anywhere. Starbucks you can get only in Starbucks.”

Braun’s cell phone buzzed. He picked it up and hit the green button.

“Yeah,” he said. He listened for a time, said, “Okay,” then hung up.

“We’re all set,” he told Dexter, but Dexter wasn’t paying attention to him.

“Look at that,” said Dexter, indicating with his chin.

Braun followed the direction of the other man’s gaze. On a corner, a small black kid who might have been in his early teens but looked younger had just exchanged a dime spot with an older kid.

“He looks young,” said Braun.

“You get up close to him, see his eyes, he won’t seem so young. Street’s already worn him down. It’s eating him up from the inside.”

Braun nodded, but said nothing.

“That could have been me,” said Dexter. “Maybe.”

“You sell that shit?”

“Something like it.”

“How’d you get out?”

Dexter shook his head, his eyes losing their glare just momentarily. He saw himself in his brand-new Levi’s-Levi’s then, not those saggy-ass, no-rep jeans that the younger kids wore now, all straps and white stitching-walking across the basketball court, glass crunching beneath the soles of his sneakers. Ex was sitting on a bench, alone, his feet on the seat, his back against the wire of the court, a newspaper in his hands.

“Hey, little man.”

Ex, short for Exorcist, because he loved that movie. Twenty-one, and so secure in himself that he could sit alone on a fall day, reading a newspaper as if he didn’t have a care in the world.

“What you want?”

He was smiling, pretending that he was Dexter’s best buddy, that he hadn’t crippled a twelve-year-old the week before for coming up short, the kid wailing and crying as Ex knelt on his chest and put the gun barrel against the kid’s ankle, that same smile on his face as he pulled the trigger.

The kid’s street name was Blade, on account of his father being called Gillette. It was a good name. Dexter liked it, liked Blade too. They used to look out for each other. Now there was nobody to look out for Dexter, but he would continue to look out for Blade, as best he could.

Ex’s smile was still in place, but any residual warmth it might once have contained had begun to die from the eyes down.

“I said, ‘Hey, little man.’ You got nothing to say back to me?”

Dexter, thirteen years old, looked up at Ex and removed his gloved hands from the pockets of his Lakers jacket. He was unused to the weight of the gun, and he needed both hands to raise it.

Ex stared down the stubby barrel of the Bryco. He opened his mouth to say something, but it was lost in the roar of the gun. Ex toppled backward, his head striking the wire fence of the court as he fell and landed in a heap on the ground, his legs splayed against the back of the bench. Dexter looked down at him. The bullet had hit Ex in the chest, and he was bleeding from the mouth.

“Hey,” he whispered. He looked hurt, as if the young boy had just called him a bad name. “Hey, little man.”

Dexter fired the final shot, then walked away.

“Dexter? You okay?”

Braun nudged Dexter’s arm with an elbow.

“Yeah, I’m here. I’m here, man.”

“We got to go.”

“Yeah, we got to go.”

He took one last look at the kid on the corner-Hey, little man-then started the car and pulled away.

By coincidence, some twenty miles to the north, two men with a similar racial profile were also drinking coffee, except they had found a Starbucks and were drinking grande Americanos from big Starbucks mugs. One of them was Shepherd, the gray-haired man of few vices. His companion was named Tell. He was small and wiry, and he wore his hair in cornrows, like the basketball player Allen Iverson used to wear his, and probably for the same reason: because it made white folks uneasy. Tell was reading a newspaper. Tell was very conscientious about reading the newspaper every day. Unfortunately, that day’s newspaper happened to be a supermarket tabloid, and in Shepherd’s opinion, Tell could have been reading the back of a cornflakes box and been better informed. The gossip sheets weren’t big on analysis, and Shepherd liked to think of himself as an analytical kind of guy.

Two seats down from them, in the otherwise deserted coffee shop, an Arab was talking loudly on his cell phone, tapping his finger on the table before him to emphasize his points. In fact, he was talking so loudly that Shepherd wasn’t even certain that his phone was turned on. The guy behaved like he was trying to shout his message all the way to the Middle East, and was holding the cell phone only out of habit. He’d been talking like this for the better part of ten minutes, and Shepherd could see that Tell was getting pissed. He’d watched him start the same story about some has-been pop star’s face-lift three times already, which was once more than Tell usually needed to take in what he was reading. Truth be told, Shepherd was kind of unhappy about it himself. He didn’t like cell phones. People were rude enough as it was without having another excuse to be bad-mannered.

Tell looked up. “Hey, man,” he said to the Arab. “Can you keep it down?”

The Arab ignored him. This led Shepherd to suspect that the Arab was either very arrogant or very dumb, because Tell didn’t look even remotely like the kind of person you ignored. Tell looked like the kind of person who would remove your spine if you ignored him.

Tell’s face wore a puzzled expression as he leaned in closer to the Arab.

“I said, can you talk a little quieter, please? I’m trying to read my newspaper.”

Shepherd thought Tell was being very polite. It made him nervous.

“Go fuck yourself,” said the Arab.

Tell blinked, then folded his newspaper. Shepherd reached an arm across, holding his friend back.

“Don’t,” he said. Over at the counter, a barista was watching them with interest.

“You hear what that raghead motherfucker said?”

“I heard. Forget it.”

The Arab continued talking, even after he’d finished his coffee with a slurp. Tell stood, and Shepherd followed, blocking his partner’s access to the Arab. Tell bobbed on the balls of his feet for a second or two, then turned and walked out.

“Show’s over,” said Shepherd to the barista.

“I guess.” He sounded a little disappointed.

Tell was already waiting in the van across the street, his fingers tapping a rhythm on the steering wheel. Shepherd got in beside him.

“We going? You know, we got a schedule to keep.”

“No, we ain’t going yet.”

“Fine.”

They waited. Ten minutes later, the Arab emerged. He was still talking on his phone. He climbed into a black SUV, did a U-turn, and headed north.

“I hate SUVs,” said Tell. “They’re a top-heavy cab on a pickup’s chassis, they drive like shit, they’re dangerous, and they’re ecologically unsound.”

Shepherd just sighed.

Tell started the van and began following the SUV. They stayed with the Arab until he turned into an alleyway at the side of a trendy Middle Eastern restaurant. Tell parked, then opened the driver’s door and headed toward the alleyway. Shepherd followed.

“Hey, you prick.”

The Arab turned to see Tell bearing down on him. He tried to hit the alarm button on his car keys, but Tell wrenched them from his hands before he got the chance. He hurled the keys to the ground, tore the Arab’s cell phone from his left hand, and threw it after the keys. Finally, he dragged the Arab around the back of the building, so that they were hidden from the pedestrians on the sidewalk.

“You remember me?” he said. He pushed the Arab against the wall. “I’m Mr. Go-Fuck-Myself. The fuck do you get off talking to me like that? I was polite to you, you fuck. I asked you nice, and what do you do? You disrespect me, you SUV-driving motherfucker.”

He slapped the Arab hard across the face. The Arab’s face contorted with fear. He was fat, with chubby fingers overloaded with gold rings. He was no match for Tell.

“I’m sorry.”

“No, you ain’t sorry,” said Tell. “You’re scared, and that ain’t the same thing. I didn’t come down here after you, you wouldn’t have given me a second thought, and next time you was in Starbucks you’d have shouted your damn head off all over again, disturbing people and giving them a pain in the ass.”

He punched the Arab in the nose and felt it break beneath his fist. The Arab curled up, cupping his damaged nose in his hands.

“So don’t tell me you’re sorry. Look at you. My people came over here in chains. I bet you flew your ass over here business class.”

He hit the Arab hard across the head with the palm of his hand.

“Don’t ever let me see you talking on that phone again, motherfucker. You get one warning, and this is it.”

He began to walk away. Behind him, the Arab leaned against the wall, examined the blood on his fingers, then bent down to retrieve his possessions: his car keys first, then his cell phone. The cell phone made a scraping noise against the concrete as he gathered it up.

Tell stopped. He looked back at the Arab.

“You dumb fuck,” he said.

He walked back, drawing his gun from beneath his jacket. The Arab’s eyes widened. Tell kicked him hard in the belly and he fell to the ground. While Shepherd watched, he placed the gun against the Arab’s head and pulled the trigger. The Arab spasmed, and then his fingers slowly released their grip on the phone.

“I warned you,” said Tell. “I did warn you.”

He put the gun back in his belt and rejoined Shepherd. Shepherd cast a last glance back at the dead Arab, then fell into step beside Tell. He looked at his partner in puzzlement.

“I thought your people were from Albany,” he said.

Leonie and Powell sat in silence outside the courthouse, watching as Moloch was led in by the two investigators from the DA’s office. Leonie wore her hair in an Afro and looked, to Powell, a little like one of those kick-ass niggers from the seventies, Cleopatra Jones and Foxy Brown. Not that Powell would ever have called Leonie a nigger to her face, or even a dyke, although as far as Powell was concerned, she was both. He didn’t doubt for one moment that Leonie would kill him if he uttered either of those words in her presence, and if, by some miracle, he did manage to avoid being killed (and the only way that he could see that happening was if he managed to kill her first), then Dexter would come after him and finish the job. Dexter and Leonie were like brother and sister. Braun seemed to get on okay with her too. Powell wasn’t going to screw around with Dexter and Braun, didn’t matter how many funny stories Braun told, or how much high-fiving and smiling Dexter fit into a day.

Powell leaned back in his seat and ran his fingers through his long hair, losing them in the curls at the back. Powell was the type of guy who would say “nice mullet” and mean it. His hairstyle was trailer trash crossed with eighties glam metal, and he loved it. His face was unnaturally tan, and his teeth were bleached so white that they glowed at night. Powell had B-movie-star looks, the artificial kind that oozed insincerity. He had even gotten some professional shots taken five or six years back. A couple of newspapers had used them during coverage of his trial. Powell had been secretly pleased, although no offers of acting work had followed his eventual release.

“It’s hot,” said Powell.

Leonie said nothing.

He looked over at her, but her eyes were fixed on the courthouse. He knew Leonie hated his guts, but that was kind of why he was with her. He was with Leonie and Tell was with Shepherd because he and Tell were the new guys and they had to be watched closely. It was good practice, nothing more, and Powell didn’t resent it. Powell would rather have been with Shepherd, but Tell was such a prickly motherfucker that there was no way of knowing what he might have said to Leonie if he was stuck with her for a day. Shit, they’d be cleaning what was left of him off the inside of the van for the next month. Compared to Tell, Powell was a regular diplomat.

So Powell kept his mouth closed and waited, amusing himself by imagining Leonie in a variety of poses with white girls, Chinese, Latinos, and Powell himself slap bang in the middle. Man, he thought, if she only knew what I was thinking…

Sharon Macy spent the morning doing laundry, collecting her dry cleaning, and generally catching up on all of the stuff she had let pile up while she was working. She then drove out to Gold’s Gym over at the Maine Mall and did her regular cardiovascular workout, spending so long on the StairMaster that her legs felt like marshmallow when she stepped off, and the machine itself was drenched with her sweat. Afterward, she headed over to the Big Sky Bread Company and was tempted to undo all her good work with a Danish, but instead settled for the soup-and-sandwich deal.

She ate in one of the booths while looking over the southern edition of the Forecaster, the free newspaper that dealt with local news in South Portland, Scarborough, and Cape Elizabeth. A cop in the Cape Elizabeth PD was seeking donations of mannequin heads to display his collection of hats from police departments around the world; the South Portland Red Riots golf team had donated a new bus to the school system; and a pair of men’s gloves had been found on Mountain Road, Falmouth. Macy was still amazed by the fact that someone would take the time to place an ad in the Forecaster in order to return a pair of lost gloves. They were strange people up here: they kept to themselves, preferring to mind their own business and let other folks mind theirs in return, but they were capable of acts of touching generosity when the circumstances called for it. She recalled last year’s first snowstorm, a blizzard that had swept up the coast from just above Boston and blanketed the state as far north as Calais. She had heard sounds in the early morning coming from the parking lot of her apartment, and had looked out to see two complete strangers digging out her car. Not just her car, either, but every car in the lot. They had then shouldered their spades and, identities still unrevealed, had moved on to the car in the next driveway. There was something hugely admirable about such anonymous kindness to strangers.

She skipped to the “Police Beat” page, scanning the names in the list of arrests and summonses: the usual DUIs, thefts by unauthorized taking or transfer, a couple of marijuana collars. She recognized one or two of the names, but there was nothing worth noting. If there had been, she figured that they would have heard about it on the grapevine by now.

Her meal finished, she drove downtown and parked in the public market’s parking garage. She bought some fresh produce from one of the stalls in order to get her parking validated for two hours, then headed up Congress to the Center for Maine History. She walked down the little pathway by the side of the Wadsworth-Longfellow House and entered the reading room, ignoring the sign that invited her to register her name and the reason for her visit in the library’s logbook. The librarian behind the desk was in his late seventies, she figured, but judging from the gleam in his eye as he smiled at her, he was a long way from dead.

“Hi, I’d like to see whatever you have on Dutch Island,” she said.

“Sure,” said the librarian. “May I ask what your interest is in Dutch?”

“I’m a police officer. I’m heading out there soon. I’m just curious to find out a little about it.”

“You’ll be working with Joe Dupree, then.”

“Yes, so I understand.”

“He’s a good man. I knew his father, and he was a good man too.”

He disappeared among the stacks behind the counter, and returned with a manila file. It looked disappointingly thin. The librarian registered her expression.

“I know, but there hasn’t been too much written on Dutch. Fact is, we need a good history of the islands of Casco Bay, period. All we got here are cuttings, and this.” He removed a thin sheaf of typescript pages from the folder, stapled crudely along the spine.

“This was written maybe ten years ago by Larry Amerling. He’s the postmaster out on the island. It’s about the most detailed thing we have, although like as not you’ll find something too in Caldwell’s Islands of Maine and Miller’s Kayaking the Maine Coast.”

He retrieved the books in question for her, then settled back in his chair as Macy found a space at one of the study tables. There were one or two other people doing research in the library, although Macy was the youngest person in the room by almost half a century. She opened the folder, took out Amerling’s A Short History of Dutch Island, and began to read.

Torres and Misters led Moloch back to the Land Cruiser, deliberately keeping up a fast pace, the restraints on Moloch’s legs causing the prisoner to stumble slightly on the final steps.

“You asshole, Moloch,” said Torres.

Moloch tried to maintain his concentration. The grand-jury hearing had been a bore for him. So they had found the body of a woman, and Verso-small, foolish Verso-was prepared to testify that he had helped Willard and Moloch dispose of her in the woods after Moloch had killed her.

SFW: So Fucking What?

As soon as the direction of the prosecutor’s questions had become apparent, Moloch had begun to speak like a handicapped man, talking through his nose, the words barely intelligible.

“Is there something wrong with him?” the judge had asked, but it had been Moloch who provided the answer.

“Sorry, Your Honor,” he’d said, modifying his speech sufficiently for his words to be understood. “But I was kissing your wife good night, and the bitch closed her legs.”

That had been the end of the proceedings.

“You hear me?” repeated Torres. “You’re an asshole.”

“Why am I an asshole?” said Moloch. He didn’t look at the men at either side of him. Neither did he look at the chains on his hands or his feet, so used was he to the shuffling gait their presence necessitated. He would not fall. The investigators would not allow him to fall, not with people watching, but still they kept him moving quickly, depriving him of even the small dignity of walking like a man.

“You know why.”

“Maybe I just felt the urge to jerk that old judge’s chain some.”

“You sure jerked it,” said Torres. “You surely did. And don’t you think it won’t come back on you, because it will. You mark my words. They’ll take your books away, leave you nothing to do but shit, sleep, and jerk off.”

“Then I’ll be thinking of you, except maybe not when I sleep.”

“You fucking asshole, you’re a dead man. You’ll get the juice for this, doesn’t matter how much you mouth off to the judge.”

“Sticks and stones, Mr. Torres, sticks and stones.”

They reached the car, Moloch smiling at last for the cameras, then he was put in back and his chains locked once again to the D ring.

“It’s been fun spending time with you both,” Moloch said. “I appreciated the company.”

“Well,” said Torres, “I can’t say I’m looking forward to the pleasure again.”

“And you, Mr. Misters?” said Moloch, but Misters didn’t respond. “Mr. Misters,” repeated Moloch, savoring the words on his tongue, extending the “s” sounds into long washes of sibilance like water evaporating from the surface of a hot stove. “Wasn’t that kind of the name of some suck-ass, white-bread band in the eighties? ‘Broken Wings,’ that was them, right?”

Misters remained silent.

“Your partner doesn’t say very much, does he?” said Moloch to Torres.

“He’s kind of fussy about who he talks to.”

“Well, maybe he’ll find it in him to say a few words before the journey’s end.”

“You think so?”

“I’m certain. I can be a very interesting conversationalist.”

“I doubt that.”

“We’ll see,” said Moloch. “We’ll see.”

And for the next five miles he hummed the chorus of ‘“Broken Wings,” over and over and over, until Torres broke down and threatened to gag him. Only then, when the young investigator was sufficiently rattled, did Moloch stop.

The surroundings of the library had faded around Macy. She was no longer conscious of the old librarian, the other researchers, or the occasional rattle as the main door opened, the cold air accompanying it. Instead, she was lost in the history of Dutch Island, the history of Sanctuary.

The Native Americans had fought hard to maintain their hold on the islands of Casco Bay. Like modern-day tourists, they summered on the islands, fishing and hunting porpoises and seals, even the occasional whale. Chebeague was their main base, but they used others too, and were resentful of the gradual encroachments of white settlers. The islands were the centers of population in the new colonies: they were easy to defend, safer than the mainland, and offered an abundant source of food from the ocean. Macy noticed that a lot of them, like Dutch Island, had multiple names: Great Chebeague was once Merry Island, then Recompense; Peaks Island was formerly Munjoy’s, Milton’s, and Michael’s, the name changing as the owners changed.

Despite their relative safety, the islands were still frequently attacked in the late seventeenth century. Settlers who were fleeing the atrocities on Harpswell Neck and other islands nearer the coast built a fort on Jewell, on the Outer Ring. In September 1676, a bloody year with attacks on whites at Casco Neck and Back Cove, the families on Jewell were attacked by eight canoes of warriors and were so disturbed by the experience that they retreated to Richmond Island. For the remainder of the year, the natives rampaged along the coast, annihilating every settlement between the Piscataqua and Kennebec Rivers. The settlers dug in, although some gave up and found safer places to live inland. In 1689, the natives raided Peaks Island, the most accessible island from the mainland, and slaughtered many of its inhabitants. One year later, they returned and forced the remaining settlers from the island.

Dutch Island, named for a Dutch sailor named Chris Herschdorfer, who was briefly shipwrecked there toward the end of the seventeenth century, was a different matter. It was farther from the mainland, and the distance made the crossing difficult for the Indians, who had only birch-bark canoes in which to travel. Furthermore, they regarded the island with suspicion, and seemed content to leave it unexplored.

Shortly after the Indian raid on Peaks, Major Benjamin Church, whose soldiers had been present on Peaks during the course of the main attack, led an expedition to the island and found it to be heavily forested, with only a handful of suitable landings for boats. Yet it was to Dutch that a man named Thomas Lunt led a group of settlers in 1691, weary of the running battles he was forced to fight with the natives. In total, thirty settlers joined him in the first two weeks on the island that he renamed Sanctuary, among them survivors of the attacks on Jewell and Peaks, and their numbers continued to increase over the following months. They opted to settle away from the shore, hoping that the higher ground might make them less vulnerable to a surprise attack.

At this point, Amerling’s history of the island became less detailed and more speculative, but it seemed that the behavior of one of the settlers, a man named Buer, grew increasingly unpredictable. He became estranged from his family, spending more and more time alone in the thick forest at the center of the island. He was accused of attempted rape by the wife of one of his fellow settlers, and when her husband and three other men attempted to hunt him down as he tried to flee, he killed one of them with a musket shot and then sought shelter with his wife, begging her to hide him, claiming that he had done nothing wrong. But she, fearful for her own life (for she was as disturbed as anyone by the change in her husband), betrayed him to his accusers. He was chained to a post in a barn, but somehow he escaped from the island, stealing a boat and disappearing to the mainland.

He returned some months later, in the winter of 1693, at the head of a party of armed men and renegade Indians, and led the slaughter of the settlers on Sanctuary, including his own wife. One of the settlers, a woman, survived her wounds long enough to tell of what had occurred. Even now, three hundred years later, Macy found herself wincing at the details. There was rape and torture. Many of the women were assaulted, then bound and thrown alive into a patch of bog, where they drowned. No distinction was made between adults and children.

The search for the killers was led by three hunters from the island who had traveled to the mainland to trade on behalf of the settlement and were therefore absent when the massacre occurred. It was said that they tracked down a number of those involved in the attack and dispensed swift justice upon them. Years later, the son of one of those hunters would be among those who resettled Sanctuary. His name was Jerome Dupree.

Crow had stolen away from the group almost as soon as the canoes touched land, grateful only that he had survived the voyage. He had positioned himself behind the White Leader in the second canoe, his hand upon his knife throughout the journey, hidden beneath a rough, woven cloak. If they tried to take him, he would place his knife upon the throat of the White Leader and hold him hostage until they reached the mainland. He suspected that the White Leader knew what he was planning, for he could see the knowledge in his eyes, and his lieutenant, the man named Barone, remained seated in the bow of the boat with his back to the coast, a musket on his lap as he watched Crow.

From the safety of the woods, Crow saw the White Leader kill the Mi’kmaqs in their sleep. In truth, Crow had been planning to kill them himself. There had long been tension between his people and their own, and it was only the hand of the White Leader, and the protection offered by his guns, that had kept him from slitting their throats before now. Crow would like to have killed the White Leader, and considered remaining close to the camp in the hope of disposing of him, but English soldiers had come, alerted to the presence of the men whom they sought, and a skirmish had commenced. Crow escaped from the woods in the confusion, and when he returned, three of the White Leader’s killers were dead and one was a captive.

The Indian’s plan was to make for the area around the Chandiere River. It was inhospitable territory, but there he believed he would be safe for a time from his own people, and from the English who had placed a price upon his head. Crow longed to regain his place among his tribe, which now dwelt by St.-Castin’s settlement on the Bagaduce River. There, the Frenchman, who had reestablished French control over southwestern Acadia after its occupation by the English, had built a habitation that broke with the traditional model typically adopted by the Europeans. There were no defensive walls around the main dwelling and the storehouse. Instead, protection came from the thirty-two wigwams surrounding the settlement, housing 160 Wabanaki, whom the French termed Etchemin. St.-Castin had even married into the tribe, taking for his bride Pidiwamiska, the daughter of the sachem Madockawando, and sister to Crow. It was his objection to the union, and subsequent revolt against his father’s rule, that had led to Crow’s banishment.

Crow despised the Europeans. He knew that more would come, and St.-Castin’s marriage to his sister represented the beginning of the dilution of the old ways. Already, there was less game to hunt, and great numbers of his people were dying in strange, unfamiliar ways, taken by invisible ailments that had never existed before the coming of the whites. Gluskap, the great creator of the Maine natives, had fled when he sensed the coming of the Europeans, abandoning them to their fate. Crow believed that Gluskap would never return as long as Wabanaki dwelt with the Europeans, giving to them their women and protecting them from their enemies. Through the White Leader, Crow was able to strike back at the hated French and English, but by the time of the raid on Sanctuary, he knew that the uneasy alliance was drawing to an end, and that the hour would come when the White Leader’s musket would be used upon his guide.

So Crow turned his back to the sea, and headed for the wilderness to the west, not knowing that three new names had been added to the list of those who hunted him.

The three hunters, the last living remnants of the settlement on Sanctuary, searched for their prey without rest, and, once found, disposed of them without mercy.

It took them four years.

The names and descriptions of the men whom they sought had been obtained from the English in Portland, who had tortured their captive, a man named Mundy, until he informed on his companions. They were aided in their aims by the reluctance of the perpetrators to leave for long the northeastern territories familiar to them, and in which they had families and allies who might give them succor.

The first they killed in Wells, as he tried to make his way south to establish contact with his brother, who lived near Fort William & Mary. Two died at Winter Harbor, fleeing the Indian raid on the settlement and falling instead to the knives of the hunters. As Queen Anne’s War raged around them, they hanged one at Norridgewock, taken as he and two fellow cutthroats shadowed the Hilton expedition in the hope of stealing supplies. They tracked another north through Acadia, eventually confronting him by the shores of the Northumberland Strait, and as he pleaded for mercy they drowned him in the icy waters.

Of Barone and the man the natives termed the White Leader, they found no trace. At the end of their long hunt, they were weary of bloodshed and revenge, and had made the decision to travel back to the islands when they encountered a small French patrol escorting parties of natives to the Saint Lawrence River, where they hoped to find shelter from the English under French protection. Aiding the French was a guide, his tribal tattoos defaced with hot irons, a man who always stayed apart from the families he was guiding.

It was the Wabanaki killer known as Crow.

The hunters tracked the party beyond the Dead River, where the natives were handed over to the care of more soldiers. After resting for three days, the French soldiers, ten of them in total, prepared to make the journey east once more in order to winter in Acadia, with Crow as their guide.

By now, the hunters were more accomplished killers than the soldiers, and they had no love for the French. One day into their journey, when the soldiers stopped to make camp for the night, they were attacked as they sat around their campfire. Tired, and unprepared for fighting, the first five died in the glow of the flames. Three more were taken in the woods, and two escaped to tell of what had occurred.

The hunters trapped Crow by the banks of the river. He held a knife in one hand, and an ax in the other. His musket, its shot wasted in the confusion of the initial attack, lay at his feet. He watched silently as the three men emerged from the trees, their faces hooded, their bodies draped in furs. They stopped when they were some twenty feet from him, and their leader raised his hands and dropped the hood that hid his features.

“Do you know who I am?” he said.

Crow merely shook his head.

“My name is Dupree. You killed my wife.”

“When?” said Crow.

“Four years ago, on an island called Sanctuary.”

For a moment, Crow did not move. It seemed almost as though the tension in his body dissipated as he realized that the hunt was now over, and that the time to join his ancestors had come at last. Then his hands tightened on his weapons, and he opened his mouth wide as he ran toward his pursuers, his last great scream echoing through the night as the first snows of winter fell upon him.

The muskets roared, and Crow fell backward into the water.

The river carried him away, and his name was never spoken again.

According to Amerling’s history, Buer, the one Crow knew as the “White Leader,” and his lieutenant, Barone, evaded capture. There were those who said that Buer was not his real name, and that a man fitting his description but with the name of Seera was wanted in Massachusetts in connection with the deaths of two women there. In any event, he disappeared after the events on Sanctuary, and was never seen again. Barone also vanished.

Amerling went on to cover the abduction of a woman in 1762, the disappearance of the men who had taken her to Dutch, and the subsequent discovery of one of them buried in the forest. The Dupree name cropped up again and again, and it was one of Joe Dupree’s ancestors who had made the stone cross that still stood amid the sunken remains of the old settlement and the graves of those who had died there. There was no mention of George Sherrin, who was found entangled in tree roots.

It was Amerling’s final paragraph that most intrigued Macy. It read:

To those looking in upon the island from outside, its history may appear bloody and strange. Yet those of us who have lived here for many years, and whose fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers lie buried in the island’s cemetery, have grown used to the strangeness of Dutch Island. Here, paths through the forest disappear in the space of a single week, and new paths take their place, so that a man may one day walk a trail familiar to him, yet find himself directed toward new surroundings by the end of it. We are used to the silences and we are used to the sounds that are native only to this small patch of land. We live in the shadow of its history, and walk by the gift of those who have gone before us.

Macy closed the slim volume and returned to the desk, the names encountered in Amerling’s history still rattling around in her head. Church. Lunt. Buer. Barone.

Barone. Barron.

It was probably just a coincidence, she thought, although it would explain why Barron was such a creep if his unpleasantness was part of a proud family tradition.

“You find what you were looking for?” asked the librarian.

“No,” said Macy. “I was hoping for answers.”

“Maybe you’ll have better luck on the island.”

“Maybe,” she said.

Out on Sanctuary, Joe Dupree was also finding himself short on answers. He had taken a ride out to Doug Newton’s house, as he had promised Berman. Newton and his mother lived near Seal Cove, close to the southernmost tip of the island. Their house was one of the oldest on Sanctuary, and one of the most carefully maintained. Doug had given it a fresh coat of paint the previous spring, so that it seemed to shine amid the trees that surrounded it.

The old woman wasn’t long for this earth. Dupree could see it in her face, could smell it in her room. When she died, the doctors would find some complicated way to explain her demise, but for Joe and Doug, and perhaps for the old woman herself, there was nothing complicated about it. She was just old. She was in her late eighties and her body was losing its final struggle to keep her alive. Her breathing was shallow and rasping, and the skin on her face and hands was almost translucent in its pallor. She was in no pain and there was nothing that a hospital could do for her now, so her son had taken her home to die. Debra Legere, who had some nursing experience, dropped by for four or five hours each day, sometimes a little longer if Doug had some work to do, although he was pretty much retired by now. Dupree figured that there was an arrangement between Debra, who was a widow, and Doug, who had never married, but he wasn’t about to pry into it. In any case, they were both strict Baptists, so there appeared to be a limit to the amount of arranging that they could do.

Dupree stood at the window of the old woman’s room and looked down to the yard below. It was a sheer drop. This side of the house was flat. There was a kitchen below, but since Doug had never found the need to extend it farther, it remained flush with the main wall. The way Dupree saw it, there was just no way that a little girl could reach the topmost window in the house.

“Did she have a stepladder, Doug?” he asked softly.

Doug’s mother had awakened briefly when they entered the room but had now slipped back into her troubled sleep.

Doug seemed to think about bristling, then decided that it wasn’t worth the trouble.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “It’s nothing that I haven’t asked myself: how did she get up here? The answer is that I don’t know. I’m just telling you what I saw.”

“The window was locked?” Dupree tested the sash with his hand. It seemed solid enough.

“As far as I remember. It could be that I didn’t close it properly and the wind might have blown it open, except that there was no wind that night and, anyway, who ever heard of a wind that could blow a heavy sash window upward?”

Dupree stared into the forest. The window faced northeast. He could see the island’s central watchtower from where he stood, and part of the border of sunken trees that marked the boundary of the Site.

“You think I’m crazy?” asked Doug.

Dupree shook his head. He didn’t know what to think, except that it still seemed unlikely that a little girl could magic her way twenty feet off the ground in order to attack an old woman in her bedroom. “You always seemed pretty levelheaded to me,” he said at last. “What can I say? Keep the windows locked, the doors too. You got a gun?”

Doug nodded. “More than one.”

“Well, for crying out loud, don’t use any of them. The last thing I want to do is to have to haul you in for shooting someone.”

Doug said that he would bear it in mind. It wasn’t exactly a promise that he wouldn’t shoot anybody, but it was better than nothing.

Dupree was about to leave the room when a piece of paper, seemingly caught by a draft, rose from a corner by the drapes and then settled again. The policeman leaned down to examine it more closely, and found himself looking at a moth. It was ugly and gray, with yellow markings along its body. Its wings fluttered feebly.

“Doug, can you get me an empty mayo jar, or something with a lid on it?”

The older man found a jelly jar. Dupree scooped the moth from the floor, then refitted the lid carefully. He used his pocketknife to bore a hole in the top, in order to allow the insect some air, although he guessed that it didn’t have long to live.

Holding the jar up to the light from the window, he examined the moth, turning the bottle slowly to look at its wings and its markings. Doug Newton squinted at it, then shook his head.

“I’ve never seen a moth like that before,” he said.

Beside him, Dupree felt an uncomfortable ache spreading across his belly. Suddenly, Doug Newton’s tale of a levitating girl didn’t seem so far-fetched. He swallowed hard.

“I have,” he said.

They were four miles from the prison, following the banks of the river, when they saw the body. The Dismal Creek State Penitentiary lay at the end of an isolated road, with little traffic apart from prison vehicles. Anyone who found himself in trouble on that road was likely to be waiting a long time for help.

“Hell is that?” asked Misters.

“Looks like a woman,” said Torres. “Pull over.”

The woman lay by the side of the road, her legs splayed, her shoulders and head hidden in the long grass that grew by the hard shoulder. Her legs and buttocks were exposed where her skirt had ridden up over them. They pulled up a few feet from her and Torres got out, Misters about to follow until Torres told him to stay back.

“Keep an eye on him,” said Torres.

“He’s going nowhere,” said Misters, but he still remained close to the car and aware of Moloch, who was watching the proceedings with interest.

The woman was not moving, and Torres could see blood on her back. He leaned down and spread the grass that obscured her head.

“Oh sweet-”

He saw the red exposed flesh where her head should have been, then turned his face away in time to catch the slug on the bridge of his nose. He crumpled to the ground as Misters went for his own weapon, but a shadow fell across him and he looked up to see one of his own, a brother, holding a shotgun on him. From the grass at the other side of the road another man emerged, this one younger, with blond hair and a pretty, almost feminine, face. Behind him was a muscular man with short red hair, wearing tight faded jeans and a T-shirt decorated with the Stars and Stripes. The red-headed man took Misters’s gun, then used plastic restraints to tie the investigator’s hands behind his back. Meanwhile, the blond kid knelt by Torres and removed the keys from his belt and the gun from his holster. Then he walked over to the Land Cruiser, opened the door, and released Moloch from his chains.

Moloch stretched as he emerged from the car, then took Torres’s gun from the kid and walked over to where Misters squatted. He raised the gun and pointed at the investigator’s head.

“Now, Mr. Misters, do you have anything to say to me?’

Misters didn’t open his mouth. He looked up at Moloch with mingled fear and disgust.

“I could shoot you,” said Moloch, “shoot you like the boorish dog that you are.”

He aimed the gun.

“Bang,” he said. He tipped the muzzle to his mouth and blew a stream of imaginary smoke from the barrel.

“But I’m not going to shoot you,” he said.

“We taking him with us?” asked Dexter.

“No.”

“If we leave him, he’ll identify us.”

“Really?” asked Moloch.

He stared hard at Misters.

“Oh that my eyes might see and my tongue might speak,” he said. “Of what wonders might I tell.”

He turned to the young white boy.

“Blind him, then cut his tongue out. He never had much use for it anyway.”

They worked quickly, pushing the SUV into the river, the body of Torres and the woman inside it. Misters they left, bleeding and in shock, by the riverbank. The whole operation had taken less than three minutes.

Braun made a call on his cell phone, and seconds later, they were joined by Powell and Leonie, who had been driving the lookout vans positioned two hundred yards at either side of the ambush area, their sides decorated with the removable logo of a nonexistent forestry company so that, if any other car had taken that road before their work was done, they could be held back with a story about a fallen tree. In the event, no other vehicle had troubled them. Then the little convoy, five men and one woman in two vans, headed at speed toward the highway, and the north.

Dexter, Leonie, and Moloch drove in silence for a time, Dexter glancing occasionally in his side mirror. Three cars behind were Braun, Powell, and the boy, and that suited Dexter just fine. The boy Willard gave him the creeps, the beauty and seeming innocence of him all the more unsettling for what lay beneath. Still, Moloch liked him, and he had proved useful in the end. He had found the woman, trawling the side roads, the bars, and cheap motels for almost a week before he’d come across “a suitable candidate,” as he’d described her. Then he had killed her and brought her remains to the meeting place on time.

Dexter was a clever guy, maybe not as clever as he thought he was, but still pretty smart, all things considered. He’d done some reading, and liked books on psychology. Dexter figured that if you were going to be dealing with people, then you should try to find out as much as possible about the general principles behind them. He particularly liked the abnormal stuff because, in his line of work, abnormal was what he dealt with on a day-to-day basis. He knew all about sociopaths and psychopaths and assorted other deviants, and had begun to categorize the freaks he had met according to his diagnosis of their particular abnormality.

But Willard…

Dexter hadn’t found a book that dealt with anything quite like Willard before. Willard was off the scale. In fact, Dexter wasn’t even sure that Willard was entirely human, although that wasn’t the kind of thing that he was about to say out loud in the company of Moloch or anybody else. But sometimes he found Willard staring at him, and when he looked into the kid’s eyes it was like falling into a void. Dexter figured that dying in space might feel something like seeing oneself reflected in Willard’s eyes: there was only nothingness masquerading as blackness. It wasn’t even hostile. It was just blank.

“What are you thinking about?” asked Moloch.

“Stuff.”

“Don’t you go giving too much away now.”

“Like I said, just stuff.”

Beside him, Leonie just stared silently at the passing cars.

“Willard stuff?” said Moloch.

“How’d you know that?”

“I was watching you. I saw you look in the mirror. Your face changed. I can read you like a book, Dex.”

“I don’t like him. I’ve never been anything but straight with you, and I’m telling you the truth of it now. He’s out there.”

“He’s been useful.”

“Yeah.”

“And loyal.”

“To you.”

“That’s all that matters.”

“With respect, man, you been in jail these past three years. Difficult to work with someone who don’t answer to anyone but a man in a prison suit.”

“But you managed it.”

“I got a lot of patience, and the Verso thing was a piece of luck.”

“Yes,” said Moloch. “I take it something is being done about him.”

“As we speak.”

“You should have gotten Willard to do it. He never liked Verso.”

“I never liked him either, but I didn’t dislike the man enough to sic Willard on him. You see what he did to the woman? He cut on her pretty bad.”

“Before or after?”

“I didn’t ask.”

“Then I’m not planning on asking either.”

“Me, I figure before.”

“Is this conversation leading somewhere, Dexter?”

“Take a look at the newspaper. It’s somewhere back there.”

Moloch, seated in the semidarkness at the back of the van, checked among the boxes and drapes until he found the newspaper. Its front-page story detailed the discovery of four bodies in a house south of Broughton.

Four bodies-three male, one female-and two heads-one male, one female-in the refrigerator. One female body, minus a head, remained unaccounted for.

“It’s all over the TV too. Way I figure it, Willard was probably holed up there for a time. You can bet your last nickel that somebody saw him around there and pretty soon his face is going to be plastered right up there beside yours. He’s getting worse.”

In the darkness of the van, Dexter heard Moloch sigh regretfully.

“You’re saying he’s a liability.”

“Damn straight.”

“Then I must be a liability too.”

Dexter glanced back at him.

“You’re the reason we’re here. Willard ain’t.”

It was some minutes before Moloch spoke again from behind Dexter.

“Keep a close eye on him, but do nothing for now.”

Man, thought Dexter, I been keeping a close eye on him since the first time I met him.

Powell was dozing, and there was no conversation between Braun and Willard in the van behind. That suited Braun just fine. Unlike Dexter, the redheaded man didn’t have too much against Willard. He just figured him for another one of Moloch’s crazies, but that didn’t mean he wanted to talk to him more than was absolutely necessary. Of the five people who now accompanied Moloch north, Braun was probably the closest to being a regular guy. Although a killer, he, like Shepherd, did not favor unnecessary violence, and had willingly acceded to their request to watch the road while they disposed of the investigators. Braun was in it for the money: he was a good wheel man, a reliable operator. He stayed calm, even in the worst situations. Every group needed its Braun.

Braun just wanted his share of the cash. He figured that some people were going to get hurt in the process, but that was nothing to do with him. That was down to Moloch. Braun would quite happily have walked away without hurting anyone as long as the money was in his hand, but Leonie and Dexter and Willard and the others needed more than that. They liked a little action. He looked over at Willard, but the boy’s attention was elsewhere, his gaze fixed on the road. Braun didn’t mind the silence, just as he didn’t mind Willard.

Still, he patted the hilt of the knife that lay along the edge of his thigh, and felt a small surge of reassurance.

Braun didn’t mind Willard, but he sure as hell didn’t trust him either.

Braun was smarter than any of them.

Willard stared at the blacktop passing beneath them, and thought of the woman. It had taken her a long time to stop screaming after the man had died. She had tried to start the car, and had almost succeeded before Willard got to the window and broke it with the blade of the machete. When he took the car keys in his fingers and yanked them from the ignition, something faded in the woman’s eyes. It was the death of hope, and though she started pleading then, she knew it was all over.

Willard had shushed her.

“I ain’t going to hurt you,” he had told her. “I promise. Just you calm down now. I ain’t going to hurt you at all.”

The woman was crying, snot and tears dribbling down her chin. She was begging him, the words almost indistinguishable. Willard had shown her the machete then, had allowed her to see him tossing it away.

“Come on now,” he said. “See, you got nothing to be scared about.”

And she had wanted to believe him. She had wanted to believe him so badly that she allowed herself to do so, and she had permitted him to take her hand and help her from the car. He had turned her away from the remains of the man-“You don’t have to see that”-as he led her toward the house, but something about that gaping doorway, and the blackness within, had set her off again. She tried to run and Willard had to tackle her and take her down by holding on to her legs. He let her scream as he hauled her toward the house by the legs, her nails breaking as she tried to get a grip on the dirt. There was nobody to hear her. Willard cast a longing glance over at the machete lying in the grass. It was his favorite. He could always go back and get it later, he thought.

And he had lots of other toys inside.

Shepherd saw the pizza-delivery car first. The Saturn had a big plastic slice strapped to the roof, like a shark fin. Shepherd hoped the guy was making a lot in tips, because the job didn’t come with a whole heap of dignity. He started the van and pulled in alongside the kid as he retrieved the pizza boxes from the insulated bag on the backseat. He heard the back of the van open and pulled his ski mask down over his head. Seconds later, Tell, his face also concealed by a mask, forced the kid into the van at gunpoint. There were no other people in the parking lot of the motel.

“Look, man,” said the kid, “I don’t carry more than ten bucks in change.”

“Take off your jacket,” said Tell.

The kid did as he was told, handing it over to Tell. Shepherd leaned across the bench seats at the front of the van and tapped the kid on the shoulder with his gun.

“You stay there and you keep quiet. My friend is going to deliver your pizza for you. After that, we’re gonna drive away from here. We’ll drop you off along the way. It’s up to you if you walk out, or we dump what’s left of you. Understand?”

The kid nodded.

“You go to college?” asked Shepherd.

The kid nodded again.

“Figures. You’re smart.”

The van door closed, leaving them alone together. Tell, now wearing the kid’s red Pizza Heaven jacket, climbed the stairs to the second floor of the motel and knocked on the door. He pulled the ski mask from his face and waited.

“Who is it?” said a voice.

“Pizza,” said Tell.

He saw a face at the window as the curtain moved, then the door opened. There was a guy in a white shirt and red tie standing before him. Behind him was a tall white man with receding hair and a beer gut.

“What do we owe you?” said the DA’s investigator as Tell reached a hand into the insulated bag.

“For Mr. Verso,” said Tell, “it’s on the house.”

The bottom of the bag exploded and the investigator staggered backward. Tell’s second shot sent him sprawling across the bed. Verso tried to run for the bathroom, but Tell shot him in the back before he got to the door, then stood over him and fired two shots into the back of his head. He fired one more into the man on the bed, then walked swiftly back down to the van. Shepherd started it as soon as Tell reached the door.

“Your mask,” he said.

“Shit.” Tell pulled it back down before he climbed in. Behind him, the pizza-delivery guy sat with his knees drawn up to his chin.

“You okay?” asked Tell.

“Yeah,” said the kid.

“You did good,” said Tell. “You got nothing to worry about. Put this on your head.”

He handed the insulated bag to the kid, who did as he was told. They drove back onto the highway, then pulled over at a deserted rest stop. Tell opened the back door and helped the kid over to one of the wooden picnic benches.

“There’s a phone to your right. I was you, I wouldn’t use it for about another twenty minutes, okay?”

“Okay.”

“You breathing okay under that thing?”

“I’m fine.”

“Good.”

“Mister?” said the kid.

“Yeah.”

“Please don’t kill me.”

As Shepherd had noted, the kid was smart. Tell raised the silenced pistol and pointed it at the insulated bag.

“I won’t,” he said as he pulled the trigger.

They bought hamburgers at a fast-food joint off exit 122, and ate them seated in the back of the van while they waited for Shepherd and Tell to join them. They were avoiding toll booths and were sticking to the speed limits. In the back of the van, Moloch had clipped his hair, shaved his beard, and now wore a pair of blackrimmed glasses. His driver’s license claimed that he was John R. Oster of Lancaster, Ohio.

“How much longer?” Moloch asked.

“Hour, maybe,” said Dexter. “We can rest up then.”

Moloch shook his head. “We move on. They’re already looking for me, and pretty soon my picture will be on every TV station from here to Canada. We need to find her, and find her fast.”

Despite what he said, he wasn’t too concerned yet. He had sometimes spoken of Mexico as his preferred final destination in the event of an escape from custody, because Mexico, following a decision by the Mexican Supreme Court that life sentences breached a constitutional article that stated all men were capable of being rehabilitated, would not extradite Americans facing life sentences. Moloch didn’t believe that for one moment, but he figured that there would be those in the prison population who would recall his comments and who would pass them on. It would not be enough to prevent checks to the north and west as well as to the south, but he hoped that it might force the police to concentrate their efforts on monitoring the southern routes.

He sat back in the van and closed his eyes. He was strong, and he had a purpose. He allowed himself to drift into sleep, and dreamed of a woman.

A woman dying.

Chapter Four

Danny was pleading.

“Mom, just ten more minutes. Five more minutes. Please!”

Marianne peered at him from over the rim of her glasses. Danny was in his pajamas, which was something, but it had taken her an hour to convince him to do even that. He seemed to have grown up so much in the last year, and she was beginning to find him more and more difficult to handle. He was always questioning, always doubting, testing the limits of her authority in every little thing. But that incident with the bird had thrown him, exposing his vulnerability and drawing him back to her for a time, his head pressed against her breasts as he cried over-

Over what? Over the fact that Joe Dupree had been forced to kill the dying bird with his bare hands to put it out of its misery, or because Danny hadn’t been allowed to touch it, to play with it first? Danny sometimes hurt creatures: she had watched him do it, had caught him burning ants with a piece of broken bottle or tormenting cats by flinging stones at them. She supposed that a lot of boys behaved that way, not fully understanding the pain that they were causing. In that, maybe Danny was just being a typical six-year-old. She hoped so. She didn’t like to think that it might be something deeper, something that he had picked up from his father, some faulty gene transmitted from generation to generation that would manifest itself in increasingly vicious ways as he grew older. She did not like to think of her Danny-because he was her Danny, make no mistake about that-becoming such a man.

And he was asking questions now, questions about him, and it bothered her that the lies she was forced to tell Danny caused him pain. Danny seemed to have vague memories of his father, and he cried when she told him that he was dead. Not the first time, curiously, but rather on the second occasion, as if it had taken him the intervening days to absorb the information and to come to terms with what it meant to him and for him.

How did he die?

A car accident.

Where?

In Florida.

Why was he in Florida?

He was working there.

What did he work at?

He sold things.

What things?

Misery. Pain. Fear.

He sold cars.

Is he buried, like the people in the graveyard?

Yes, he’s buried.

Can we visit him?

Someday.

Someday. Just as someday she would be forced to tell him the truth, but not now. There would be time enough for anger and hurt and blame in the years to come. For now, he was her Danny and she would protect him from the past and from the mistakes that his mother had made. She reached out to him and ruffled his hair, but he seemed to take her gesture for one of acquiescence and bounced back to his perch on the couch.

“No, Danny, no more. You go to bed.”

“Mom.”

“No! You go to bed now, Danny Elliot. Don’t make me get up from this seat.”

Danny gave her his most poisonous look, then stomped away. She could hear him all the way up the stairs, and then his bedroom door slammed and his bed protested as he threw the full weight of his tantrum upon it.

She let out a deep breath and removed her glasses. Her hands were trembling. Perhaps it was surprising that Danny was as well adjusted as he was, given the lifestyle that he had been forced to lead. For the first two and a half years they had stayed on the road, never remaining long in any place, crisscrossing the country in an effort to stay ahead of any pursuers. Those years had been hellish. They seemed to coalesce into a constant blur of small towns and unfamiliar cities, like a movie screened slightly out of focus. The early months were the hardest. She would wake to every floorboard squeak, every rustle of trash on the street, every tapping of branches upon the window. Even the sound of the AC clicking on in cheap motel rooms would cause her to wake in a panic.

But the worst times came when car headlights swept across the room in the dead of night and she heard the sound of male voices. Sometimes they would laugh and she would relax a little. It was the quiet ones she feared because she knew that when they came for her, they would do so silently, giving her no time to react, no time to flee.

Finally she and Danny had arrived here, settling in the last place that they would look, for she had spoken so often about the West Coast, about a place with year-round sunshine and beaches for Danny. She had meant it too. It had long been her dream that they would settle at last out there, but it was not to be. She feared the ones who were looking for her (for they were surely looking, even after all this time) so much that the entire West Coast was not big enough to hide her. Instead, she had retreated to cold and to winter darkness, and to a community that would act as an early-warning system for her if they came.

She looked to the refrigerator, where she still had a bottle of unopened wine in case one of her new friends called and offered to curl up in front of the TV for an evening of comedies and talk shows. She so wanted to open it now, to take a single glass, but she needed to keep her head clear. On the kitchen table before her were spread the household accounts, abandoned since the previous night in the hope that a little sleep might make them less forbidding. She wasn’t earning enough from her job at the Casco Bay Market to cover her expenses, and Sam Tucker had already asked her to stay home for the rest of the week, promising to make up the hours within the month. That meant that she would either have to look for another job, possibly in Portland-and that was assuming that she could find a job and someone to baby-sit Danny after school or in the evenings-or she could dip back into the “special fund.” That would necessitate a trip to the mainland, and the mainland always made her nervous. Even the larger banks were a risk: she had already dispersed the funds into accounts in five different banks over three counties-no more than $7,000 in each account-but she was always worried about the IRS or some strange bank inspector of whom nobody had ever heard spotting the connections. Then she would be in real trouble.

And there was the fact that she didn’t like using the money. It was tainted. Wherever possible, she tried to get by on what she earned. Increasingly, that was becoming harder and harder to do. True, there was the knapsack itself, hidden among boxes and spare suitcases in the attic, but she had vowed not to touch that. There was always the chance of succumbing to temptation, of taking out too much and giving Danny and herself some treats, thereby drawing attention to herself. This was a small community, and even though Mainers didn’t go interfering in each other’s business, that didn’t mean that they weren’t curious about that business to begin with. It was the downside of living in such a comparatively isolated community, but a sacrifice worth making.

There was also the fact that the money was their escape fund, should she and Danny ever need to move on again quickly. If she began dipping into it for little things, there was the danger that she would come to take its contents for granted, and the little dips would become big dips, and pretty soon the fund would be gone.

And yet there was so much money in it, so much: nearly $800,000. How bad could it hurt to take a little, to buy a decent television, some new clothes, maybe even the game console that Danny wanted? Such small things from so much…

She forced the temptation away. No, a bank trip was the only option. She folded her glasses and put them back in their case, then began to gather the papers together.

She was almost done when the knock came on the door.

It had been decided that Leonie would knock. Anyone looking out would see an attractive black woman, smiling brightly. She could pose no threat.

Leonie heard footsteps coming toward the door, and a curtain moved aside in the semidarkness. She smiled in an embarrassed way, and raised the map that she held in her hands. Hey, I’m lost, and it’s a cold night. Help me out here. Tell me where I went wrong, huh? She didn’t even glance to her left, where Dexter stood holding a gun by his thigh, Braun behind him, or to her right, where the boy-man Willard waited, unblinking, his left hand shielding the blade of the knife in case a porch light caught it and drew attention to them. Moloch had remained apart, for the time being, with Shepherd, Powell, and Tell.

Seconds passed, followed by the sound of a chain being undone, and a lock being turned.

The door opened.

Joe Dupree stood on Marianne’s doorstep, out of uniform. She had to look up slightly to see his face, his eyes shining brightly amid the shadows that congregated around them.

“Joe? Is there some problem?”

But Dupree merely shook his head. “I was just passing. I brought this for Danny.”

From behind his back he produced a small wooden gull and handed it to her. She took it carefully in her hands and held it up to the light. It seemed almost crudely carved in places, but it was clear that it was not from lack of craft or care. Rather, the primitivism of the carving was designed to capture something of the bird, a reflection of its nature. He had taken great pains, with the head in particular, depicting the beak as slightly open. She could even see a tiny carved tongue in its mouth. The paint was newly dry.

“It’s beautiful,” she said, and she marveled at how the big man’s hands had created something so small and wondrous, for she had difficulty imagining him even holding the knife in his fist. It must have taken him hours to do it, she thought. He killed the bird, then spent hours re-creating it in wood.

“Would you like to come in?”

“I don’t want to disturb you.”

“I’ve finished what I was doing. I was about to open a bottle of wine,” she lied.

He hesitated, and she pressed home her advantage.

“You’re not on duty, right?”

He didn’t need much persuasion, just a little. She recalled again all those months that he had spent circling her, like a small male spider working toward a female, unsure of the safety of approaching, in fear of his life. In this case the physical proportions were reversed, but she still had the power. She had wondered why it was taking him so long to approach her, for she had seen the way he’d looked at her when she’d begun working in the market, the bashfulness with which he spoke in response to her polite remarks. She had the answer almost as soon as she asked herself the question. She knew it was because of how he looked, his consciousness of his own difference, and so it was she who had broken the ice between them, taking the opportunities, when they arose, to talk with him, walking with him along Island Avenue when their paths crossed, attracting nudges and smiles from the locals. She wasn’t sure, even then, that she was interested in the man himself. Instead, it was his timidity that drew her, the fragility of his self-esteem strangely enticing in such a huge figure.

She stepped aside to let him enter and caught the scent of him as he brushed by her: he smelled of wood and sap and saltwater. She breathed it in as discreetly as she could and felt something tug inside her. He was not a conventionally handsome man. His teeth were gapped in places, seemingly too small to create a single wall of enamel in his great mouth. His face was long, but widened at the cheeks and chin. She could see wrinkles around his eyes and mouth, and knew at once that they were the consequence of some pain, perhaps physical, perhaps psychological, and that this man was frequently in distress. She was a little surprised when she began to find him attractive and guessed that it was, at least in part, a combination of his power and size along with the capacity for gentleness and subtlety that had enabled him to carve the bird out of a piece of driftwood; to deal sensitively with Jack the painter and his problems; in fact, to interact with most of the islanders in such a way that they both liked and respected him, even when he was forced to come down on them for some minor infraction. Marianne Elliot had spent so long among the kind of men who used their power to hurt and intimidate that Joe Dupree’s graciousness and humanity naturally appealed to her. She wondered what it might be like to make love to him, and was surprised and embarrassed by the surge of warmth that the fantasy brought. She had not considered her own desires for so long, subsuming them all in order to concentrate on Danny and his wants, and on their combined need for constant vigilance.

Now, as she watched the big policeman gingerly sit down at the kitchen table, the chair too low for him so that his own legs remained at an acute angle, she was conscious of the muscularity of his shoulders, the shape of his chest beneath his shirt, the width of his arms. His hands, twice as large as hers, hovered in the air before him. He cupped them and placed them on the table, then unclasped them and moved them to his thighs. Finally, he folded his arms, jolting the table as he did so and causing a china bowl to tremble gently. He seemed even larger in the confines of the little kitchen, making it appear cluttered even though it was not. She had not seen the inside of his house but was certain that it contained the minimum of furniture, with the barest sprinkling of personal possessions. Anything fragile or valuable would be stored safely away. She felt a great tenderness for the big man, and almost reached out to touch him before she stopped herself and turned instead to the business of the wine. There was a bottle of Two Roads Chardonnay in the fridge, a treat for herself bought in Boston. She had been saving it for a special occasion, until she realized that she had no special occasions worth celebrating.

Marianne was about to open the bottle, by now instinctively used to doing everything for herself, when he asked her if she would like him to take care of it. She handed over the bottle and the corkscrew. The wine looked like a beer bottle in his hand.

He read the label. “Flagstone. I don’t know it.”

“It’s South African.”

“Robert Frost,” he said.

“Sorry?”

“The wine. It’s named after a Robert Frost poem. You know, the one about the two roads diverging in a forest.”

She hadn’t noticed, and felt vaguely embarrassed by her failure to make the connection.

“It’s hard to forget a poem like that on an island covered by trees,” he said, inserting the corkscrew.

“At least you can’t get too lost if you take the wrong road,” she replied. “You just keep going until your feet get wet.”

The plastic cork popped from the bottle. She hadn’t even seen him tense as he drew it out. She placed two glasses on the table and watched him pour.

“People still get lost here,” he said. “Have you been out to the Site?”

“Jack took Danny and me out there, shortly after we arrived. I didn’t like it. It felt…sad.”

“The memory of what happened still lingers there, I think. A couple of times each summer, we get tourists in to the station house complaining that the trails out to it should be more clearly marked because they went astray and had trouble finding the road again. They’re usually the worst ones, the loudmouths in expensive shirts.”

“Maybe they deserve to get lost, then. So why don’t you signpost it better?”

“It was decided, a long time ago, that the people who needed to find it knew how to get to it. It’s not a place for those who don’t respect the dead. It’s not a place for anyone who doesn’t find it sad.”

He handed her a glass and touched it gently with his own.

“Happiness,” he said.

“Happiness,” she said, and he saw hope and sadness in her eyes.

If Marianne was curious about the giant, then he was no less interested in her. He knew little about the woman, except for her name and the fact that she had brought with her enough money to rent her small but comfortable house, yet he had recognized an attraction toward her and thought, however unlikely it might at first appear, that she might feel something for him too. It had taken all of his courage to propose a dinner date, after months of gentle probing, and it had taken a moment or two after she replied for him to realize that she had accepted.

Yet something about her troubled him. No, that wasn’t true. It was not about her, precisely, but to do with some undisclosed element of her life. Joe Dupree had learned to read people well. His father had taught him the importance of doing so, and life on the island, with its exposure to the same faces, the same problems day after day, had enabled him to hone his skills, weighing his first perceptions against the reality of individuals as their characters were inevitably revealed to him. He glanced at the woman’s fingers as she put the cork back in the bottle and replaced it in the fridge. She sat down opposite him, and smiled a little nervously. Her right hand toyed with her ring finger, yet there was no ring upon it.

It was something that he had seen her do a lot, usually when a stranger came into the store or a loud noise startled her. Instinctively, she would touch her ring finger.

It’s the husband, thought Joe.

The husband is the element.

Bill Gaddis was not a happy man. There were a lot of reasons why Bill was unhappy even at the best of times, but now he had a specific reason. He was leaving a fine woman in the sack to answer an insistent knocking at his door, and that made him very unhappy indeed. He might even have been tempted to ignore the knocking, under other circumstances, but around here people had a habit of being good neighbors and the good neighbor at the door might take it into his or her head that, what with the lights being on and no reply coming from the Gaddis house, maybe somebody had had an accident, taken a tumble down some steps or slipped on some water in the kitchen, and nobody wanted to be the one who had to say, “Hell, I was out there just last night, knocking and knocking. If only I’d checked through the windows, or tried the back door, they’d still be alive today.” And Bill didn’t want old Art Bassett or Rene Watterson coming in the back way, hollering and nosing about, expecting to see someone lying on the floor with blood pooling, only to find Bill with his ass in the air and his mind on other things.

He wondered now why they had even decided to settle here. It was Pennsylvania, goddamnit. Pennsylvania. As far as Bill was concerned, the only people who settled here willingly were religious zealots who regarded buttons as sinful, and folks who regarded buttons as sinful were likely to cast a harsh eye on Bill Gaddis’s activities. Compared to those people, Billy Gaddis was virtually the Antichrist. Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, didn’t even figure on most maps, but Bill knew that was why they were here, precisely because you had to look hard to find it.

It had its good points, though. His wife had picked up a job at the Holiday Inn in New Cumberland, just off the turnpike, working the desk a couple of evenings each week. On weekends, she worked a few hours at the Zany Brainy over at the Camp Hill Mall, Saturdays, as though spending time in a children’s store could make up for the fact that she was never going to have any of her own. Two Sundays a month, she worked in the Waldenbooks at the Capital City Mall. The manager there, a guy named Jim Munchel, gave her books to take home and read, and she seemed to get along with the other folks who worked in the store. She told Bill that they were good people. Bill got the feeling that they knew just enough about him to not like him, so he stayed out of their way. A little independence of spirit on his wife’s part was a small price to pay for keeping her out of his hair.

Bill got himself a job driving trucks for a paper company, and they saw just enough of each other to remind themselves why they preferred to see only that much. In the first weeks, Bill would drive over to the Holiday Inn and take a seat in the Elephant & Castle, the English pub attached to the hotel. When she finished her shift, he and his wife would eat there, largely in silence, then return home and sleep at the two farthest extremes of their bed. Eventually, she got herself her own little car, but Bill kept going back to the Elephant & Castle. He’d met a woman there named Jenna, a little older than he was but still good looking, and pretty soon Bill had even more reason to be grateful for the time his wife spent working, and the regularity of her hours. Now someone was knocking on the door, depriving him of some much-needed R &R.

Bill shrugged on a robe, rearranging it to conceal his dying hard-on, and shuffled to the door, swearing as he went. He left the lights out in the hallway and pulled back the curtain at the side window. He didn’t recognize the woman on the step, but she looked fine, maybe even finer than the woman he’d just left, and that was saying something. She had a map in her hands.

Bill swore louder. How hard could it be to get lost with a mall slap bang in front of you? Christ, if Bill stood on his lawn, he could see the mall, clear at the top of Yale Avenue. He took his time looking the woman over, lingering at her breasts. Bill swore once again, this time under his breath and more in admiration than in anger, then opened the door.

He barely had time to register the gun in the woman’s hand before she jammed it into the soft flesh under his chin and forced him against the wall. Behind her came a redheaded man, and after him two others, a real pretty boy and a Richard-Roundtree-after-a-beating motherfucker with a big ’stache, who brushed past Bill and headed straight into the house.

“The f-”

“Shut up,” said the woman. She ran her left hand over Bill’s body, stopping briefly at his groin.

“We disturb something?”

From the bedroom Bill heard a scream, followed by the sound of Jenna being dragged from the bed.

“Just the two of you?” asked the black woman.

Bill nodded hard, then stopped suddenly as he considered the possibility that the action might get his head blown off. The pretty boy stayed by the half-open door while Bill was forced back into the living room. Jenna was already there, a sheet wrapped around her. She was sobbing. Bill made as if to go to her, but the woman stopped him and gestured toward the wall. Bill could only shoot Jenna a look of utter helplessness.

And then he heard the front door closing, and footsteps coming along the hallway. Two people, thought Bill. The pretty boy and-

Moloch entered the living room. “Billy boy!” said Moloch. His eyes flicked toward the woman, then back again. “I see you haven’t changed a bit.”

“Aw, Jesus, no,” said Bill. “Not you.”

Moloch moved closer to him, reached up to Bill’s face, and grasped his hollow cheeks in the fingers of his right hand.

“Now, Billy boy,” said Moloch. “Is that any way to greet your brother-in-law?”

Dupree nodded approvingly.

“The house looks good,” said Joe. “You’ve done a lot with it in the last year.”

He was holding the glass as delicately as he could while she showed him around her home. To Marianne, the glass still looked lost in his grip, with barely enough capacity to offer the policeman a single mouthful. They had paused briefly at her bedroom door and she had felt the tension. It wasn’t a bad feeling. After looking in on Danny, who was fast asleep, they went back downstairs.

“I wanted to put our own stamp on it, and Jack didn’t object. He helped us out some, when he could.”

“He’s a good man. There’s been no more trouble, has there? Like before?”

“You mean drinking? No, none that I’ve seen. Danny likes him a lot.”

“And you?”

“He’s okay, I guess. Lousy painter, though.”

Joe laughed. “He has a distinctive style, I’ll give him that.”

“But he was friendly, right from the start, and I’m grateful to him. It was kind of hard when we got here. People seem a little…suspicious of strangers, I guess.”

“It’s an island community. People here tend to stick pretty close together. You can’t force your way in. You have to wait for them to loosen up, get to know you. Plus, the island’s changed some recently. It’s not quite a suburb of Portland, but it’s getting there, with people commuting to the mainland for work. Then you have rich folks coming in, buying waterfront properties, forcing up prices so that families that have lived here for generations can’t afford to help their kids set up homes. The assessments for waterfront properties out here are based on one sale made last year, and the assessor in that case only went back three months to make his valuation. Lot prices increased one hundred percent because of it, almost overnight. It was all legal, but that didn’t make it right. Island communities are dying. You know, a hundred years ago there were three hundred island communities in Maine. Now there are sixteen, including this one. Islanders feel under siege and that makes them draw closer together in order to survive, so outsiders find it harder to gain a foothold. Each group is wary of the other, and never the twain shall meet.”

He drew a breath. “Sorry, I’m ranting now. The island matters to me. The people here matter to me. All of them,” he added.

She felt the tension again, and luxuriated in it for a moment.

“But working in the store, that’s a good way to start,” he continued. “Folks get to know you, to trust you. After that, it’s just plain sailing.”

Marianne wasn’t sure about that. Some of those who came into the store still limited their conversations with her to “Please” and “Thank you,” and sometimes not even that. The older ones were the worst. They seemed to regard her very presence in their store as a kind of trespass. The younger ones were better. They were happy to see some new blood arriving on the island, and already she’d been hit on a couple of times. She hadn’t responded, though. She didn’t want to be seen as a threat by any of the younger women. She had thought that she could do without the company of a man for a time. To be honest, she’d had her fill of men, and then some, but Joe Dupree was different.

Joe wasn’t like her husband, not by a long shot.

Moloch sat in one of the overstuffed armchairs and sipped a beer.

“Fooling around, Billy boy?” he said. “Out with the old, in with the new?”

Bill had stopped weeping. He’d had to. Moloch had threatened to shoot him if he didn’t.

Bill didn’t reply.

“Where is she?” asked Moloch.

Bill still said nothing.

Moloch swallowed, then winced, as if he had just swallowed a tack.

“Queer beer,” he said. “I haven’t had a beer in more than three years, and this stuff still tastes like shit. I’ll ask you one more time, Bill. Where is your wife?”

“I don’t know,” said Bill.

Moloch looked at Dexter and nodded.

Dexter grinned, then grabbed Jenna’s arm. She was a big woman, verging on plump, with naturally red hair that she had dyed a couple of shades darker. The mascara on her face had run, drawing black smears down her cheeks. As she struggled in Dexter’s grasp her sheet fell away, and she tried to pick it up again even as Dexter pulled her back toward the bedroom. She hung back, using her fingers to try to release his grip on her.

“No-o-o,” she said. “Please don’t.”

She looked to Bill for help, but the only help Bill could offer was to sell out his own wife.

“She works late tonight.” The words came out in a rush. “Down at the mall.” He finished speaking and appeared about ready to retch at what he had just done.

Moloch nodded. “What time does she finish?”

Bill looked at the clock on the mantel.

“About another hour.”

Moloch looked at Dexter, who had paused by the doorway of the bedroom.

“Well?” Moloch said. “What are you waiting for? You have an hour.”

Dexter’s grin widened. He drew Jenna into the bedroom and closed the door softly behind him. Bill tried to move away from the wall, but the black woman’s gun was instantly buried in his cheek.

“I told you,” said Bill. “I told you where she was.”

“And I appreciate that, Billy boy,” said Moloch. “Now you just sit tight.”

“Please,” said Bill. “Don’t let him do anything to her.”

Moloch looked puzzled.

“Why?” he asked. “It’s not as if she’s your wife.”

Joe helped her put the glasses away.

“I have to ask you something,” he said.

She dried her hands.

“Sure.”

“It’s just-” He stopped, seemingly struggling to find the right words. “I have to know about the folks who come to the island. Like I said, it’s a small, close-knit community. Anything happens, then I need to know why it’s happening. You understand?”

“Not really. Do you mean you want to know something about me?”

“Yes.”

“Such as?”

“Danny’s father.”

“Danny’s father is dead. We split up when Danny was little, then his daddy died down in Florida someplace.”

“What was his name?”

She had prepared for this very moment. “His name was Server, Lee Server.”

“You were married?”

“No.”

“When did he die?”

“Fall of ninety-nine. There was a car accident outside Tampa.”

That was true. A man named Lee Server had been killed when his pickup was hit by a delivery truck on the interstate. The newspaper reports had said that he had no surviving relatives. Server had been drinking, and the reports indicated that he had a string of previous DUIs. There weren’t too many people fighting for space by Lee Server’s graveside when they laid him down.

“I had to ask,” said Joe.

“Did you?”

He didn’t reply, but the lines around his eyes and mouth appeared to deepen.

“Look, if you want to back out of tomorrow night, I’ll understand.”

She reached out and touched his arm.

“Just tell me: were you asking with your cop’s hat on, or your prospective date’s hat on?”

He blushed. “A little of both, I guess.”

“Well, now you know. I still want to see you tomorrow. I’ve even taken my best dress out of mothballs.”

He smiled, and she watched him walk to his car before she closed the door behind him. She let out a sigh and leaned back against the door.

Dead.

Her husband was dead.

Maybe if she said it often enough, it might come true.

Bill had curled himself into a ball against the wall, his hands over his ears to block out the noises coming from the bedroom. His eyes were squeezed tightly closed. Only the feel of the gun muzzle against his forehead forced him to open them again. Slowly, he took his hands away from his ears. There was now silence.

It was a small mercy.

“You’re a pitiful man,” said Moloch. “You let another man take your woman, and you don’t even put up a fight. How can you live with yourself?”

Bill spoke. His voice was cracked, and he had to cough before he could complete a coherent sentence.

“You’d have killed me.”

“I’d have respected you. I might even have let you live.” He dangled the prospect of life before Bill, like a bad dog being taunted with the treat destined to be denied it.

“How did you find me?”

“If you’re going to run away, Bill, then you keep your head down and try not to fall into your old ways. But once a bad gambler, always a bad gambler. You took some hits, Bill, and then you found that you couldn’t pay back what you owed. That kind of mistake gets around.”

Bill’s eyes closed again, briefly.

“What are you going to do with me?” he asked.

“Us,” corrected Moloch. “You know, Bill, I’m starting to think that you don’t really care about your wife, or that woman in the bedroom. What is her name, by the way?”

“Jenna,” said Bill.

Moloch seemed puzzled. “She doesn’t look like a Jenna. She’s kind of dirty for a Jenna. Still, if you say so, Bill. I’m not about to doubt your word on it. Now that we’ve rephrased the question to include your lady friend and your wife, we can proceed. I think you know what I want. You give it to me, and maybe we can work something out, you and I.”

“I don’t know where your wife is.”

“Where they are,” said Moloch. “Jesus, Bill, you only think in the singular. It’s a very irritating habit that you may not live long enough to break. She has my son, and my money.”

“She hasn’t been in touch.”

“Willard,” said Moloch.

Willard’s bleak, lazy eyes floated toward the older man.

“Break one of his fingers.”

And Willard did.

Joe Dupree checked in briefly with the station house. All was quiet, according to Tuttle. As soon as Berman returned, he’d turn in for an hour or two, he said, try to get some sleep.

Dupree drove down unmarked roads, for most of the streets on the island were still without names. It took the cops who came over from the mainland a few years to really get to know the island, which was why those who took on island duty tended to stick with it for some time. You had to learn to always get a phone number when anyone called, because people still referred to houses by reference to their neighbors-even if those neighbors no longer lived there, or had died. You figured out landmarks, turnings, forks in the road, and used them as guides.

Dupree returned again to thoughts of Marianne and her past. He had seen something in her eyes as she spoke of Danny’s father. She wasn’t telling him the truth, at least not the full truth. She had told him that she had not been married to Danny’s father, but he had watched as her hand seemed to drift unconsciously toward her ring finger. She had caught herself in time and tugged at one of her earrings instead, and Dupree had given no indication that he had noticed the gesture. So she didn’t want to talk about her husband with a policeman, even one with whom she had a date the following evening. Big deal. After all, she hardly knew him, and he had sensed her fear: fear both of her husband and of the implications of any disclosure that she might make about him. He was tempted to run a check on this Server guy, but decided against it. He wanted their date tomorrow to be untainted by his professional instincts. Perhaps, if they made this thing between them work, she would tell him everything in her own time.

Dexter came out of the room just as Bill stopped screaming.

“I’m glad you did that now, and not earlier,” he told Moloch. “You might have put me off my game.”

Bill was crying again. His face was pale with shock.

“You okay, Bill?” asked Moloch. He sounded genuinely concerned. “Nod if you’re okay, because when you’ve recovered, Willard can move on to the next finger. Unless, of course, you think you might have something more to tell us?”

Bill was trembling. He looked up and saw the clock on the mantel over Moloch’s left shoulder.

“Aw, shit,” he said. His eyes flicked toward the half-open bedroom door. He could see Jenna’s shadow moving against the wall as she tried to dress herself. Moloch watched him with amusement.

“You worried about her coming back, maybe finding out about your little piece on the side? Answer me, Bill. I want to hear your voice. It’s impolite to nod. You nod at me again, or make me wait longer than two seconds for an answer, and I’ll have Willard here break something you have only one of.”

“Yes,” croaked Bill. “I’m worried about her finding out.”

“A more self-aware man might have realized by now that he had bigger problems to face than his wife discovering his affair. You are a remarkable man, Bill, in your capacity to blind yourself to the obvious. Now, where is my family?”

“I told you, she hasn’t been in touch, not with me.”

“Ah, now we’re making progress. If she hasn’t been talking to you-and I’ve got to be honest here, Bill, I’d prefer not to be talking to you either, so I can understand her point of view-then she has been talking to her sister, right?”

“Yes.”

“But you’re such a piece of shit, Bill, that even your own wife won’t tell you where her sister is.”

“She doesn’t tell me anything.”

“But you must know how they communicate?”

“Phone, I guess.”

“Where are your phone records?”

“In the cabinet by the TV. There’s a file. But she never uses the house phone. I’ve looked.”

“Does she receive mail?”

“Yes.”

“Where does she keep it?”

“In a locked box in the bottom drawer of her nightstand.”

Moloch nodded at Willard, and the boy went into the bedroom to search for the box.

As he left the room, car headlights brightened the hallway, briefly illuminating their faces and casting fleeting shadows across the room. Leonie pressed the gun against Bill’s teeth, forcing him to open his mouth, then shoved the barrel inside.

“Suck it,” she whispered. “I see your lips move from it and I’ll pull the trigger.”

From the bedroom came the sound of sudden movement: Jenna was trying to make for the window to raise the alarm, Moloch guessed. Willard was too quick for her, and the movement ceased. Moloch heard the car door closing; footsteps on the path; the placing of the key in the lock; the door opening, then shutting again; the approach of the woman.

She stepped into the living room. She was older than he remembered her as being, but then it had been more than five years since they had last met. In the interim, Moloch had been betrayed and they had run, scattering themselves to the four winds, inventing new lives for themselves. Even with Moloch behind bars, they remained fearful of reprisals.

Patricia had long, lush hair like her younger sister’s, but there was more gray in it. She wasn’t as pretty, either, and had always looked kind of worn down, but that was probably a consequence of being married to an asshole like Bill. Moloch, who didn’t care much either way, still wondered why she had stayed with him. Maybe, after all the fear, she needed someone even semireliable to stand beside her.

Patricia took in her husband, huddled on the floor, the woman’s gun in his mouth; Dexter, his shirt still untucked; Braun, an open magazine on his lap.

And Moloch, smiling at her from an armchair.

“Hi, honey,” he said. “I’m home.”

All was quiet. Even Bill had stopped sobbing and now simply cradled his damaged hand as he watched his wife. She stood before Moloch, her head cast down. Her left cheek was red from the first slap, and her upper lip was split.

“Look at me,” he said.

She did not move and he struck her again. It was a light slap, but the humiliation of it was greater than if he had propelled her across the room with the force of the blow. She felt the tears roll down her cheeks and hated herself for showing weakness before him.

“I’ll let you live,” said Moloch. “If you help me, I’ll let you and Bill live. Someone will stay here with you, just to make sure you don’t do anything stupid, but you will be allowed to live. I won’t kill her. I just want my money. I don’t even want the boy. Do you understand?”

Her mouth turned down at the edges as she tried to keep herself from sobbing aloud. She found herself looking at her husband. She wanted him to stand by her, to be strong for her, stronger than he had ever been. She wanted him to defy Moloch, to defy the woman with the gun, to follow her even unto death. Yet he had never shown that strength before. He had always failed her, and she believed that even now, when she needed him most, he would fail her again.

Moloch knew that too. He was watching what passed between them, taking it in. There might be something there he could use, if only-

Willard came out of the bedroom. There was blood on his hands and shirt. A spray of red had drawn a line across his features, bisecting his face. Life was gradually seeping back into his eyes. He was like a man waking from a dream, a dream in which he had torn apart a woman whose name he had barely registered, and whose face he could no longer remember.

Bill screamed the name of the dead woman in the bedroom, and his wife knew at last that all she had suspected and feared was true.

“No, Bill,” was all that she said.

And something happened then. They looked at each other and there was a moment of deep understanding between them, this betrayed woman and her pathetic husband, whose weaknesses had led these men to their door.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry for it all. Tell him nothing.”

Bill smiled, and although there was a touch of madness to it, it was, in its way, an extraordinary thing, like a bloom in a wasteland, and in the midst of her hurt and fear, she found it in her to smile back at him with more love and warmth than she thought she would ever again feel for him. Everything was about to be taken from them, or what little they had left, but for these final moments they would stand together at last.

She turned and stared Moloch in the eye.

“How could I live if I sold out my sister and my nephew to you?” she whispered.

Moloch’s shoulders sagged. “Dexter,” he said, “make her tell us what she knows.”

Dexter’s face brightened. He started to walk across the room, and for an instant, Leonie glanced at him. It was Bill’s opportunity, and he took it. He struck out with his uninjured hand and caught Leonie on the right cheekbone, close to the eye. She stumbled back and he reached for the gun, striking her again with his elbow. The gun came free.

Across the room, Braun was already reaching for his weapon. Willard still looked dazed, but was trying to remove his own gun from his belt. The gun in Bill’s hand panned across the room, making for Moloch. Moloch grabbed Patricia and pulled her in front of him, using her as a shield.

From the corner of his eye, Bill registered the guns in the hands of the two men, Willard frozen in place, Leonie rising to her knees, still swaying from the impact of the blows, the voices shouting at him.

He looked to his wife, and there came that smile again, and Bill loved her.

He fired the gun, and a red wound opened at his wife’s breast. For an instant, all was noise.

Then silence.

They said nothing. Bill lay dead against the wall. Shepherd and Tell were at the door, drawn by the commotion. Patricia Gaddis was still alive. Moloch leaned over her where she lay.

“Tell me,” he said. “Tell me.”

He touched his finger to the wound in her breast, and she jerked like a fish on a line.

“Tell me and I’ll make it stop.”

She spit blood at him and started to tremble. He gripped her shoulders as she began to die.

“I’ll find her,” he promised. “I’ll find them both.”

But she was already gone.

Moloch stood, walked over to Willard, and punched him hard in the face. Willard stumbled back and Moloch hit him again, driving him to his knees.

“Don’t you ever do that again,” said Moloch. “Don’t you ever lay a hand on anyone unless I give you permission to do so first. I will tell you what I want from you, and you will do it. From now on, you breathe because I allow you to breathe.”

Willard mumbled something.

“What did you say?”

Willard took his hands away from his ruined nose.

“I found it,” said Willard. “I found the box.”

The letters were postmarked Portland, Maine. Patricia should not have held on to them-her sister had warned her against it-but it was all that she had of her, and she treasured every word. Sometimes she would sit alone in the bedroom and try to catch a hint of her little sister, some trace of her perfume. Even when the scent of her had faded entirely, Patricia believed that she could still detect some faint remnant, for the memory of her sister would never leave her.

“It’s not a big city, but she still won’t be easy to find,” said Dexter. They were already leaving the scene, departing Camp Hill. Initially, Moloch wasn’t sure if the gunshots had been registered by the neighbors, for nobody was on a step or in a yard when they left the house, but minutes later they heard sirens. They had ditched the van that had been parked at the back of the house as a precaution, but the risk had been worth it.

“And she won’t be using her own name,” Dexter continued.

Moloch raised a hand to silence him.

She won’t be using her own name.

If she was using an alias, she would need identification, and she could not have assembled that material for herself. She must have approached someone, someone who she believed would not betray her. Moloch went through the names in his head, exploring all of the possibilities, until at last he came to the one he sought.

Meyer.

Karen Meyer.

She would have asked a woman.

They headed for Philly, where they took rooms at a pair of motels off the interstate. Dexter and Braun ate at a Denny’s, then brought back food for the others. Both Willard and Leonie had injuries that might have attracted attention, and Moloch could not risk having his face seen. Shepherd and Tell watched TV in their room. A reporter was talking about the rebuilding of Afghanistan.

“Man, we bombed those bastards back to the Stone Age,” said Tell.

From what Shepherd could see of their houses, these people weren’t far from the Stone Age to begin with. All things considered, it was a short but eventful trip for most of them. Still, Shepherd figured that they’d asked for it.

“Eye for an eye,” said Tell.

“It’s the way of the world,” Shepherd agreed.

As usual, Dexter and Braun shared a room. Braun read a book while Dexter watched a DVD on his portable player.

“What are you watching?” asked Braun.

“The Wild Bunch.”

“Uh-huh. What else you got?”

“Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The Thing. The Shootist.”

Braun put his book down for a moment.

“You always watch movies where the leading men are doomed to die at the end?”

Dexter looked over at Braun.

“They seemed…appropriate.”

Braun held his gaze.

“Yeah,” he said. “Whatever.”

He returned to his book. He was reading Thucydides’s history of the Peloponnesian War. Braun believed in knowing about the past, particularly the past as it pertained to the military, having been an army man himself at one point. The Athenians were about to send out their great fleet, loaded with archers, slingers, and cavalry, to take Sicily, against the advice of the more prudent voices among them. Braun didn’t know the intricacies of what was to occur, which was why he had taken up the book to begin with, but he remembered enough of his military history to know that the Athenian empire was sailing toward its ruin.

Moloch lay on the bed in his room and channel-surfed until he came to a news bulletin and saw the Land Cruiser being pulled from the river and the shrouded bodies being carried to the waiting ambulance. A picture of Misters appeared on the screen. He still had his eyes and his tongue when the photograph was taken. The cops were looking for eyewitnesses to the incident. They were also making casts of the tire tracks from the vans. It would not take them long to make the connection between the killings in Philadelphia and the escape. Moloch calculated that they had twenty-four, maybe forty-eight hours to do what needed to be done before the net began to spread farther north.

It would be enough.

Chapter Five

Strange now, or so it seemed, but Marianne had once liked his name. He called himself Edward; not Ted or Ed or Eddie. Edward. It had a kind of patrician ring to it. It was formal, no nonsense.

But she had never liked his second name and had not understood its provenance until it was too late. It was only when she learned more about his ways and began to pick away at his facade that she came to realize the nature of the man with whom she was involved. She had once read a newspaper article about a sculptress who worked with stone and who claimed that the piece she was creating was already present within the medium, so that her task was simply to remove the excess material that was obscuring what lay beneath. Later, Marianne would liken herself to that sculptress, gradually coming to see that what lay concealed under her husband’s exterior was something infinitely more complex and more frightening than she had ever imagined; and so it was that she began to fear his name when at last she commenced her search for clues about the man she had married and the secret things that he did.

It had so many forms, so many derivations: Moloch, Malik, Melech, Molech. It could be found in Ammonite traditions, in Canaanite and Semite. Moloch: the ancient sun god; the bringer of plagues; the god of wealth to the Canaanites. Moloch: the prince of the Land of Tears; Milton’s Molech, besmeared with the blood of human sacrifice. The Israelites surrendered their firstborn to him, burning them in fire. Solomon was reputed to have built a temple to him near the entrance to Gehenna, the gates of hell.

Moloch. What kind of man was called by such a name?

And yet, in the beginning, he had been sweet to her. When you lived in Biloxi, Mississippi, where the permanently moored casinos drew the worst kinds, the ones who couldn’t afford to go to Florida or Vegas, or who didn’t care what their surroundings looked like as long as there was a table, a card shoe, and maybe a cocktail waitress who might be persuaded to offer comfort for a fifty-dollar chip, then any man who didn’t try to grab your ass was practically an ambassador for his sex.

And Moloch was different. She was working on the Biloxi Black Beauty, an imitation showboat painted-despite its name-so many shades of pink that it made one’s teeth hurt just to look at it. The cocktail waitresses were forced to wear white corsets, like nineteenth-century hookers cleaning up after a john, and bunched skirts that, one hundred years before, would have revealed no more than a flash of shin but were now so high that the lower curves of their buttocks were on permanent display, the ruffles of the skirts like stage curtains that had been raised to reveal the main act. In theory, the men weren’t supposed to touch them anywhere other than on the back or the arm. In reality, the tips were better if you didn’t stick too closely to the letter of the law and allowed them to indulge themselves just a little. If they got too frisky, it was enough to nod at the security guards who dotted the casino in their green blazers, as omnipresent as the artificial potted palms, although the palms were probably more likely to develop as individuals than the Beauty’s Deputy Dawgs. They would lean over, one at either side of the drunk (because they were always drunks, the ones who behaved in that way), scooping up his chips and his drink even as he was quickly hustled away from the table, talking to him all the while, calm and quiet, but keeping him moving for, being a drunk, he would find it hard to argue, walk, and keep an eye on his remaining chips all at the same time.

Then he would be gone, his departure ignored by the dealer, and eventually someone else would move to take his place at the table. It didn’t pay to complain too often, though. There were a lot of girls ready and willing to take your place if you got a reputation as a troublemaker or as a woman who couldn’t handle a little attention from the men happily throwing away their savings for a couple of complimentary, watered-down bourbons.

Marianne had been born into a family in the town of Tunica, in the cotton country of northwestern Mississippi, close to the Arkansas border. She was raised almost within sight of Sugar Ditch, where slave descendants had lived beside open sewers a couple of blocks from Main Street. Her father ran a little diner on Magnolia Street, but Tunica was so poor it could barely support this meager enterprise. The bank took over the diner and covered its windows with wooden boards. Her father fell apart, and his family fell apart along with him. He grew depressed, then violent. On the day after he struck Marianne so hard across the head that she was deaf in one ear for a week, her mother packed up their things and moved her two daughters to Biloxi, where her own sister lived. They existed close to penury, but Marianne’s mother could squeeze a nickel until the buffalo shat, and her daughters received schooling and, eventually, found places of their own. Later, she and her husband were reconciled, and he came to live with his wife and her sister for the last three years of his life, a pathetic man destroyed by bad luck, poor judgment, and an inability to stop drinking before the bottle ran dry. He was buried back in Tunica, and two years later his wife was buried alongside him, but by then Tunica had changed. Casinos had brought wealth to what had once been merely a staging post on the way to better things. There was now a carillon clock that played hymns on the hour in a little park downtown, free garbage pickup, even street signs (for in Marianne’s youth Tunica could not afford to extend to visitors the luxury of a formal indicator of their whereabouts, a situation of which the late Harry Rylance would undoubtedly have disapproved). Marianne had been considering moving back there to escape Biloxi, for there would be work in Tunica’s casinos and the quality of life was considerably better there than on Marianne’s stretch of the Gulf Coast, until she met Edward Moloch.

The nature of her father’s disintegration, and the sights that greeted her each evening in the casinos, had made her wary and intolerant of those who drank even moderately, but Moloch didn’t drink liquor. She asked him for an order as soon as he sat down and placed his chips carefully upon the table, but he refused the offer of a cocktail and instead tipped her a ten for every soda she brought him. He played seven-card high-low stud quietly, declaring high and low more frequently than any other player, and at least tying each way three times out of five. His clean white shirt was open at the neck beneath a black linen jacket without a single crease. He was a big man for his height, with broad shoulders tapering to a slim waist, and strong thighs. His hair was dark, with no trace of gray, and his face was very thin, with vertical creases running down from each cheekbone and ending on the same level as his mouth, like old wounds that had healed. His eyes were blue-green, with long, dark lashes. Marianne wouldn’t have called him handsome, exactly, but he had a charisma about him. He smelled good too. He wore the kind of aftershave that made women pause as they passed him, so that it slipped in under their defenses. And he came out ahead, not so far as to draw attention to himself, but sufficiently above the average for the house to breathe a light sigh of relief when he surrendered his chair. Due in no small part to his generosity, Marianne finished her shift that night with $200 in bills tucked into her purse. It almost made up for the drunks and the maulers.

When her shift finished, she decided to walk home in order to stretch her legs and allow for a little time to herself. Marianne was an attractive woman, and had learned to play it up on the casino floor but to tone it down for the streets, so she drew few glances as she headed toward Lameuse Boulevard and Old Biloxi.

The guy came at her from an alleyway beside a boarded-up diner. Even in the brief time that she had to see his face before his left hand closed around her mouth and his right around her throat, she knew him. He’d been thrown out earlier for slipping his hand between her legs, working at her painfully with his fingers, and she hadn’t been able to get away from him, so firm was his grip. Even the dumb-ass security guys had seen how shaken she was, with her mouth pressed so tightly closed that her lips were almost white. She was asked by the pit boss if she wanted to press charges, but she shook her head. That would be the end of her time at the Biloxi Black Beauty, and she would have trouble getting work anywhere else too once it came out that she’d asked for the cops to be called and the casino’s name appeared in the police blotter, maybe in the local rags too. No, there would be no charges. When she returned to the tables, the man in the black linen jacket with the soda in front of him said nothing to her, but she was certain that he had witnessed all that had occurred.

Now here was the mauler again, some bruising to his cheek where maybe his mouth had gotten him into a little more trouble than he’d anticipated with casino security, his blond hair matted with sweat, his tan suit wrinkled and torn at the left shoulder. He shifted his grip, pulling her backward into the darkness, whispering in her ear as he did.

“Huh, bitch? Huh, remember me, you fucking bitch?” Over and over. Bitch. Bitch. Bitch.

The alley was L-shaped, an alcove to the right hidden entirely from the street ahead. He spun her around almost gracefully when they reached it and sent her sprawling over a pile of black garbage sacks. Something sharp bit into her thigh. She opened her mouth to scream and he showed her the knife.

“Scream, bitch, and I’ll cut you bad. I’ll cut you so fucking bad. Take them jeans down, now, y’hear?”

He was fumbling at his own trousers as he spoke, trying to release himself from his pants. He moved forward and made a pass at her with the knife, the blade whistling by the tip of her nose.

“You hear me, bitch?” He leaned toward her and she could see the spittle on his chin. “You take them off!”

Now she was crying and she hated herself for crying, even as she worked at the button on her jeans, hating the way it parted from the hole so easily, hating that this thing was going to happen to her at the hands of this man.

Hating, hating, hating.

There was a click, and the guy stopped moving. His eyes moved slowly to his right, his head remaining still, as though he hoped that his eyeballs would continue their passage, rotating through his hair so that he could see the man behind him, the man with a gun now pressed into the back of his head.

The man in the white shirt and the creaseless linen jacket.

“Drop the knife,” he said.

The knife fell to the ground, bouncing once on the tip of its blade before coming to rest in the trash.

“Walk to the wall.”

Her attacker did as he was told. She caught the sharp whiff of ammonia as he passed close to her, and knew that he had wet himself with fear.

And she was pleased.

“Kneel,” said the man with the gun.

The guy didn’t move, so the gunman stepped back and raked the barrel of the gun across the back of his head. Her attacker stumbled forward, then fell to his knees.

“Keep your hands pressed against the wall.”

The man with the gun turned to her.

“You okay?” he asked.

She nodded. She could feel something sour bubbling at the back of her throat. She swallowed it down. He helped her to rise to her feet.

“Go to the end of the alley. Wait for me there.”

She went without question. The would-be rapist remained facing the wall, but she could hear him sobbing. At the end of the alleyway, she bent over against the wall, put her palms on her knees, and leaned down. She sucked great breaths of stale air into her lungs, tasting polluted water and grease. Her whole body was shaking and her legs felt weak. Without the wall to support her, she felt certain that she would have collapsed. Passersby glanced at her but no one expressed any concern. This was a fun town, and people didn’t want their fun spoiled by a sick woman.

Her rescuer-for that was how she already thought of him-followed her a minute or two later. In the interim she heard sounds, like a wet towel slapping against a hard surface. As he walked toward her, he was adjusting the leg of his pants.

“Come on.”

“What did you do to him?”

“Hit him some.”

“We should call the police.”

“Why?” He seemed genuinely curious.

“He may try to do it again.”

“He won’t do it again. You call the cops, you do it only because you need to, because it makes you feel happier. Believe me, he won’t try anything like that again. Now, you want to call them?”

He paused beside her. She thought of the interview she would have to endure, the questions asked at the casino, the face of her boss as he told her that she wouldn’t have to come in Monday, wouldn’t have to come back ever, sorry, you know how it is.

“No,” she said. “Let’s go.”

He walked with her for a block or two, then hailed a cab. He dropped her off at the door of her apartment, but declined her invitation to come up.

“Maybe I’ll see you again?” he said.

She wrote her number on the back of a store receipt and handed it to him.

“Sure, I’d like that. I didn’t get your name?”

“My name is Edward.”

“Thank you, Edward.”

Once she was safely inside, the cab pulled away from the curb. She closed the door, leaned against it, and at last allowed herself to cry.

The guy’s name was Otis Barger. Moloch read it out loud from his driver’s license. Otis was from Anniston, Alabama.

“You’re a long way from home, Otis.”

Barger didn’t answer. He couldn’t answer. His hands and feet were bound with wire taken from the trunk of Moloch’s car, and there was tape over his mouth. One eye was swollen shut, and there was blood on his cheek. His right foot was curled inward at an unnatural angle, broken by the heel of Moloch’s boot to ensure that he didn’t try to crawl away while Moloch took the woman back to her apartment. He was lying on the garbage bags where, only twenty minutes earlier, Marianne had lain as he prepared to rape her.

Moloch drew a photograph from Barger’s wallet. It showed a dark-haired woman-not pretty, not ugly-and a smiling, dark-haired boy.

“Your wife and child?”

Barger nodded.

“You still together?”

Again, Barger nodded.

“She deserves better. I’ve never met her, but that woman would have to be hell’s own whore to deserve you. You think she’ll miss you when you’re gone?”

This time Barger didn’t nod, but his eyes grew wide.

Moloch kicked at the wounded ankle and Barger screamed behind his gag.

“I asked you a question. You think she’ll miss you?”

Barger nodded for the third time. Moloch raised the leg of his pants and drew the pistol from the ankle holster. He looked around, kicking at the garbage until he found a discarded chair cushion. He walked to where Barger lay, then squatted down beside him.

“I don’t believe you,” he said. “What was it you called that lady you tried to rape? Bitch? That was what you called her, wasn’t it?”

He slapped Barger hard across the head.

“Wasn’t it?”

Barger nodded for the fourth, and final, time.

“Well,” said Moloch. “She’s my bitch now.”

Then he placed the cushion against Barger’s head, pushed the muzzle of the gun into the fabric, and pulled the trigger.

Marianne knew nothing of this, although, as the years went by, she thought often of that night and wondered what had become of the man in the alley. Moloch would say only that he had beaten him and told him to get out of town. Since he was never seen in Biloxi again, she assumed that was the truth.

Except-

Except that during their years together, most of them spent in a little house in Danville, Virginia, she had grown increasingly fearful of this man: of his mood swings, of his intelligence, of his capacity for cruelty to her. He knew where to hit her so that it hurt most and bruised least. He knew places on her body where the mere pressure of his fingers was enough to make her scream. There was money, for he always had money, but he gave her only enough to feed their little family of three, for a son had been born to them during that terrible second year. She was required to produce receipts for everything, and every penny had to be accounted for, just as every moment of her day had to be described and justified.

It had begun almost as soon as they were married. It seemed to her that the marriage license was all that he wanted. He had wooed her, made promises to her, provided them with a house to live in. She had given up the job in Biloxi two weeks before the wedding, and he had told her not to take on anything else for a time, that they would travel, try to see a little of this great country. They had a short honeymoon in Mexico, blighted by bad weather and Moloch’s moods, but the proposed road trip never materialized. She quickly learned not to mention it, for at best he would mutter and tell her that he was too busy, while at other times he would hold her face, beginning with a caress but gradually increasing his grip until his thumb and forefinger forced her mouth open, and just when the pain began to bring tears to her eyes he would kiss her and release her.

“Another time,” he would say. “Another time.” And she did not know if he was referring to the trip, or to some promised treat for himself.

The first time he hurt her badly was when he came home from a “business meeting” in Tennessee, less than a year into their marriage. She told him that she had found a job for herself in a bookstore. It was only two afternoons each week, and all day Saturday, but it would get her out of the house. You see-

“I don’t want you working,” he said.

“But I need to work,” she replied. “I’m kind of bored.”

“With me?”

The lines in his face deepened, so that she almost expected to glimpse his teeth working through the holes in his cheeks.

“No, not with you. That’s not what I meant.”

“So what did you mean? You say you’re bored, a man’s going to take that to mean something. I don’t do it for you anymore? You want somebody else? Maybe you’ve found somebody else already, is why you want a job, so you’ll have an excuse to leave the house.”

“No, it’s not that. It’s not that at all.”

He was talking as if he was jealous, but there was no real hurt in his words. He was playing a role, and even in her fear she could see that, but it made it harder for her to argue with him when she didn’t understand why he was so annoyed. She reached for him and said, “Come on, honey, it’s not like that. You’re being-”

She didn’t even see him move. One moment they were talking and she was extending her hand toward him, the next her face was pressed against the wall and her arm was being wrenched behind her back. She felt his breath close to her ear.

“I’m being what? Tell me. You think you know me? You don’t. Maybe I should teach you a little about me.”

His left hand and the weight of his body held her in place while his right hand slipped beneath her sweater and found her skin. His fingers began moving on her, exploring.

And then the pain began: in her stomach, in her kidneys, in her groin. Her mouth opened in a silent cry, the agony increasing, turning from yellow to red to black, and the last words she heard were: “Are you learning now?”

She regained consciousness with him moving on top of her as she lay on the kitchen floor. One month later, she found out she was pregnant. Even now, years later, it still hurt her to think that Danny, her wonderful, beautiful Danny, could have resulted from that night. Perhaps it was the price she had to pay to be given him. If so, then she had continued to pay the price for a long time after, and sometimes, when their infant son cried just a little too much, she would see the light appear in Moloch’s eyes and she would run to the boy and quiet him, nearly suffocating him against her.

The child had been a mistake. Moloch wanted no children, and had talked of an abortion, but in the end he had relented. She felt that he did so because he believed it would tie her more closely to him, even as he told her that they were now a family, and would always be a family.

He did not hate her. He loved her. He would tell her that, even as he was hurting her.

I love you.

But if you ever try to leave me, I’ll kill you.

His mistake was to underestimate her. Men had always underestimated her: her father, her uncle (drunk at Thanksgiving, stealing kisses from his niece in the quiet of the kitchen, his mouth open, his hands reaching and touching while she maneuvered herself away, trying to placate him without offending him so that she would not put her family’s tenuous status in his house at risk), the men for whom she worked or with whom she slept. It suited her. Where she grew up, men feared and hated women whom they suspected were smarter or stronger than they were. It was better to keep your head down, to smile dumbly. It gave you more room to move, when you needed it.

And so she began listening to snatches of telephone conversations, and using her little car, with its small allowance of gas, to track her husband. She picked up receipts for nonexistent purchases, just a few here and there, for Moloch had become distracted and no longer checked every item in the kitchen and bathroom. She looked for three-for-two offers, for buy-one, get-one-frees, then squirreled away the freebies for use later. It took her the better part of a year but, slowly, she began to accumulate a little money.

There were places that were out of bounds to her-the shed, the attic-but now she began to take chances even in those places. In a fit of daring that left her sleepless for days, she called in a locksmith, explaining to him that she’d lost the keys to the garden shed and the attic and that her husband would be furious when he found out.

Then she began to explore.

First, she marked the location of everything in the shed on a piece of paper and made sure always to return each item to its spot on the plan. The attic was more difficult, seemingly littered with trash and old clothes, but still she made a drawing there too.

In the shed she found nothing at first but a gun wrapped in oilcloth and hidden in a box of nails and screws. It took her two more searches-including one during the course of which Moloch had returned home and she had been forced to keep her hands thrust firmly in her pockets for fear that he would see the dirt and rust upon them-to find the hole in one of the boards on the floor. It looked like a flaw in the wood, an absent knot, but when she lifted it she discovered the bag.

She did not have time to count all of the money that it contained, but she reckoned it was close to $900,000, all in twenties and fifties. She put the board back, then returned to the shed twice more to check that she had left no sign of her presence.

In the attic there were items of jewelry, some old, others quite new. She found a small stack of bearer bonds, worth maybe $50,000 in total. She discovered bank account details in the names of unknown men and women, and credit card records carefully noted, even down to the three-digit security number to be found on the backs of the cards.

And she came across a woman’s driver’s license in the name of Carol-Anne Brenner, a name that caused a buried memory to resonate softly. The next day, while shopping, she stopped at the Internet café at the mall and entered the name Carol-Anne Brenner on a search engine. She came up with a doctor, an athlete, a candidate for beatification.

And a murder victim.

Carol-Anne Brenner, a widow, fifty-three. Killed in her home in Pensacola, Alabama, three months earlier. The motive, according to the police, was robbery. They were searching for a man in connection with the crime. There was a photofit picture with the report. It showed a young man with blond hair, very pretty rather than handsome, she thought. Police believed that Carol-Anne Brenner might have been having an affair with the young man and that he had wheedled his way into her affections in order to rob her. They had no name for him. Brenner’s accounts had been emptied in the days prior to the discovery of her body, and all of her jewelry was missing.

The next day, during her attic search, she found more items of jewelry, and purses, empty, and photographs of women, sometimes alone, sometimes with their families. She also found four drivers’ licenses and two passports, each with her husband’s photograph upon it but each in a different name. The drivers’ licenses were tied together with an elastic band, while the passports were in a separate brown envelope. There was a telephone number written on the outside flap.

Marianne remembered the envelope being delivered. A woman had brought it, a woman with short, dark hair and a vaguely mannish stride. She had looked at Marianne with pity and, perhaps, a little interest. The envelope had been sealed then, and Moloch had been furious at the fact that Marianne had been entrusted with it, until he confirmed that the seal was intact.

Marianne had memorized the number.

Two days later, she called it.

The woman’s name was Karen Meyer, and she met Marianne at the mall, Danny sleeping beside them in his stroller. Marianne didn’t know why she was trusting her, but she had felt something that day when the woman called with the envelope. And for what she needed, Marianne had nowhere else to turn.

“Why did you call me?” asked Meyer.

“I need your help.”

“I can’t help you.”

“Please.”

Meyer looked around, checking faces. “I mean it. I can’t. Your husband will hurt me. He’ll hurt all of us. You, of all people, must know what he’s like.”

“I know. I mean, I don’t know. I don’t know what he is anymore.”

Karen shrugged.

“Well, I know what he is. That’s why I can’t help you.”

Marianne felt the tears begin to roll down her cheeks. She was desperate.

“I have money.”

“Not enough.”

Karen got up to leave.

“No, please.”

Marianne stretched out her hand to restrain her. It locked on her wrist. Karen stopped and looked down at the younger woman’s hand.

Marianne swallowed, but kept her eyes on Karen’s face. She released her grip, then slipped her hand into the other woman’s palm. Tentatively, she touched her gently with her fingers. For a moment, she thought that she felt Karen’s hand tremble, until it was suddenly pulled away.

“Don’t call me again,” said Karen. “You do and I swear I’ll tell him.”

Marianne didn’t watch her leave. Instead, fearful and humiliated, she hid her face in her hands until Karen was gone.

Karen came to the house three days later. Marianne answered the door to find her there, ten minutes after Moloch had left for the day.

“You said you had money.”

“Yes, I can pay you.”

“What do you need?”

“New identities for Danny and me, and maybe for my sister and her husband as well.”

“It’ll cost you fifty thousand dollars, and I’m nailing you to the wall at that price.”

Marianne smiled despite herself, and after a second’s pause, Karen smiled back.

“Yeah, well,” she said. “I’m being up front about it. You’re being charged above the going rate, but I need to cover myself. If he finds out, I’m going to have to run. You understand that?”

Marianne nodded.

“I’ll want half now, half later.”

Marianne shook her head. “I can’t do that.”

“What do you mean? You said you had money.”

“I do, but I can’t touch it until just before I leave.”

Karen stared at her.

“It’s his money, isn’t it?”

Marianne nodded.

“Shit.”

“There’s more than enough to cover what you ask. I promise you, you’ll have it as soon as I’m ready to leave.”

“I need something now.”

“I don’t have half, or anything close to it.”

“What can you give me?”

“Two hundred.”

“Two hundred?”

Karen slumped against the wall and said nothing for at least a minute.

“Give it to me,” she said at last.

Marianne went upstairs and retrieved the roll of bills from the only safe place she could find in which to keep it: the very center of a carton of tampons. It was a peculiarity of Moloch’s. He would not even sleep beside her when she had her period. She handed the roll of ones and fives to Karen.

“Do you want to count it?”

Karen weighed the roll of bills in her hand.

“I figure this is everything that you’ve hidden away, right?”

Marianne nodded, then said: “Well, I kept fifty back. That’s all.”

“Then that’ll be enough, for now.”

She moved to go.

“How long will it take?”

“They’ll be ready in two weeks. You can pick them up when you’re leaving, and I’ll take the rest of my money then.”

“Okay.”

Marianne opened the door. As she did so, the older woman reached out and brushed her cheek. Marianne didn’t flinch.

“You’d have done it too, wouldn’t you?” said Karen softly.

“Yes.”

Karen smiled.

“You need to work on your seduction technique,” she said.

“I’ve never had to use it before, under those circumstances.”

“I guess your heart just wasn’t in it.”

“I guess not.”

Karen shook her head sadly, walked to her car, and drove away.

Marianne never understood why Moloch had kept the licenses, the purses, the little personal items from the women. She suspected that they were souvenirs, or a means of recalling the women from whom they had come, a kind of aide-mémoire. Or perhaps it was simply vanity.

Moloch had never told her what he did for a living, exactly. He was, when she asked in those first days, a “businessman,” an “independent consultant,” a “salesman,” a “facilitator.” Marianne believed that the women, and what had happened to them, were only part of what he was. Now, when she read of raids on stores or banks, and saw her husband’s cash reserve increase; when she heard of a businessman being killed in his car for his briefcase, the contents later revealed to be $150,000 in under-the-counter earnings, and an amount just under that was briefly added to the bag in the shed; when a young woman disappeared in Altoona, the daughter of a moderately wealthy businessman, and her body was found in a ditch after the ransom was paid, she thought of Moloch. She thought of Moloch as she fingered the money; she thought of Moloch as she smelled the burnt powder in the gun among the nails; and she thought of Moloch as she spied the hardened dirt in the treads of his boots, carefully picking it away and placing it in a Ziploc bag that she bound tightly and squeezed into a tampon inserter.

In those last days, she became aware of an increase in the pitch of his activities. There were more calls to the home phone, the phone that she was not allowed to answer. There were more frequent, and longer, absences. The mileage on his car climbed steadily in increments of two hundred miles. He grew yet more distracted, now barely glancing at the receipts from the market and failing even to check the total spent against her allowance for the week.

There were three things that Marianne had learned about Moloch’s final operation, through careful listening and the maps and notes that he had locked away in the attic. The first was that it would take place in Cumberland, far to the north of the state and close to the borders of both Maryland and Pennsylvania. The second was that it would involve a bank.

The third was that it would take place on the last Thursday of the month.

She made her plans carefully. She called Karen from a pay phone and told her the exact time at which she would arrive to pick up the material. She contacted her sister, who lived only a few miles away, yet from whom she had become virtually estranged because of Moloch’s paranoia, and told her of her plan, and of the possibility that she and her sorry-ass husband might have to leave the state at some point in the future, but with money in their pockets. Surprisingly, Patricia seemed unconcerned by the prospect of uprooting herself. Bill had recently been let go from a plant job and she saw it as a chance for them both to start over again.

Marianne prepared three changes of clothing for Danny and herself, using what little cash she had left to buy them each a new set of clothes cheaply at Marshalls: no-name jeans, plain T-shirts, cotton sweaters from beneath the yellow, black, and red REDUCED sign. These she placed at the bottom of their respective piles of clothing, although she need not have worried, Moloch becoming ever more withdrawn as the day of the operation approached. This was to be his big score, she sensed.

What she could not have known was that Moloch’s recent actions were merely one of a number of scams and crimes that he had put into operation over the years, and that there were other men involved, committing insurance frauds, drug rip-offs, minor bank raids in small dusty towns.

Murders.

And these were only the enterprises that produced a profit, for Moloch had his hobbies too. He had more in common with the would-be rapist Otis Barger than might once have seemed possible, except he picked his targets more carefully, from the ranks of whores and addicts and lost souls, and there was never a risk of them talking, because when he was finished with them, he disposed of their remains in forests and mountain bogs. Moloch’s peculiarity-one, if the truth be known, of many-was his disinclination to have vaginal sex with his victims.

After all, he did not wish to be unfaithful to his wife.

Yet even if she had known all of this at the time, had recognized the unsuspected depths of her husband’s degeneracy, Marianne would still have acted as she did, independently and without making a formal approach to the authorities. She would still have contacted Karen. She would still have set in motion her escape.

She would still have told the police of the details of the bank job.

She called them shortly after she had retrieved the cash from the hollow beneath the shed floor and placed it in the trunk of her car, alongside the two small bags that represented all of the possessions she was prepared to take with her. She planned to drive to the rendezvous point, meet Karen, then head on to the bus station and abandon her car there. From there, she would pay cash for two tickets to three different destinations, each bought at a separate window. She would travel on to only one of them, New York, and there she would buy three more tickets to three different cities, and again head to only one of them. It seemed like a good plan.

She strapped her son into the baby seat, then drove to the mall and parked by the pay phone. She lifted the boy out and carried him, still sleeping, to the phone. From there she dialed the dispatcher at the Cumberland PD and asked to be put through to Detective Cesar Aponte. She had read his name in a newspaper one week earlier, when he was quoted during an investigation into a domestic assault case that had left a woman fighting for her life. If he was not on duty, she had three other names, all taken from the newspapers.

There was a pause, then a man’s voice came on the line. “Detective Aponte speaking.”

She took a breath, and began:

“There will be a bank robbery today at four P.M. at a First United in Cumberland. The man leading the robbery is named Edward Moloch. He lives at…”

Using RACAL, the call was traced back to the pay phone at the mall. By the time the local cruiser arrived, Marianne was gone, and nobody could recall what the woman who had made the call looked like. The only thing that the old woman behind the counter at the Beanie Baby Boutique could remember was that she had an infant boy asleep on her shoulder. Stuck behind the pay phone was an envelope, just as Marianne had told them there would be. It contained Moloch’s various false IDs and some, but not all, of the material from the attic relating to what she believed were his past crimes. Most of it remained in the house.

By then, Marianne had arrived at the meeting place, a disused gas station half a mile outside town. She was five minutes late. There was no sign of Karen’s car, and for a moment she panicked, fearing that she had been abandoned. Then Karen appeared from the back of the lot, waving her around. She drove and parked beside a beat-up Oldsmobile.

She got out of the car and saw that Karen had a manila envelope in her hand.

“You’ve got it? You’ve got it all?”

“You’ve got my money?”

Marianne popped the trunk. The black knapsack she had taken was zippered closed. When she opened it, dead presidents blinked in the bright sunlight. Ten of the sealed bundles had been opened, then rebound. Marianne handed them to Karen.

“Fifty thousand. I counted it this morning.”

“I trust you.”

She handed over the envelope. Marianne slit it with her thumbnail.

“Don’t you trust me?”

“If I didn’t trust you, do you think I’d be opening the trunk in front of you?”

“I guess not.”

She examined the passport, the driver’s license, the card bearing her social security number. She was now Marianne Elliot instead of Marian Moloch. Her son’s name, according to his new birth certificate, was Daniel. Where his father’s name should have been, the word “Unknown” had been written.

“You’ve left me with my own first name, almost.”

“You’ve never done this before. The first thing that will give you away is your failure to answer to your new name. It will arouse suspicion and attract attention to you. Marianne is close enough to your given name for you to avoid that problem.”

“And Danny’s father?” She had asked Karen to give her son the name Daniel. It was the name that she had always wanted for him, but Moloch had given him his own name, Edward. Now he was Daniel. In her mind, he had always been Daniel.

“You get asked, his name was Lee Server, and he’s dead. In there is an obituary for Server. It will tell you all you need to know about him.”

Marianne nodded. She found a set of documents and IDs for both Patricia and Bill, the photos a little old because they were the only ones she had at hand when Karen had agreed to help her. Once again, they had been left with their own first names.

“I should ask you for more money,” said Karen. “I had to pay off some people. The paper trail goes right back, even down to death certificates for your father and mother. There’s a typewritten sheet of paper in that envelope. Memorize the details on it, then burn it. It’s your new family, except you’ll never get to know them now. You’re an only child. Your parents are dead. It’s all very sad.”

Marianne stuffed the material back into the envelope.

“Thank you.”

“How the hell did you ever get involved with this guy?” asked Karen suddenly.

“A man tried to rape me,” she replied. “He saved me.”

There was a pause.

“Did he?” Karen asked sadly.

“I trusted him. He was…strong.” She started back toward her car.

“I gave him those names, the ones on the papers that you found in the attic,” said Karen.

Marianne stopped.

“What do you mean?”

“I created them, all but one. He came to me and I did it.”

“Who is he? Who is he really?”

“I don’t know. The only name that I didn’t give him is the one he used with you. Moloch was how I knew him, right from the beginning. I guess he likes that name a lot.”

She tossed a set of car keys to Marianne.

“This is your car now. Registration is in the glove compartment. It’s clean.”

“I’ll give you more money.”

“Didn’t cost me much. I’d kept it hidden away in case I ever had to run. I guess your need’s greater than mine right now.”

Karen helped her move the bags into the trunk of the new car, then shifted the baby seat to the Oldsmobile while Marianne carried Danny. He was awake now, and had begun to cry.

“You’d better get going,” said Karen.

Marianne strapped the still-howling child in, then stood at the driver’s door.

“I-”

“I know.”

Then, without even knowing why, Marianne walked quickly up to the older woman and kissed her tenderly on the mouth, then hugged her. After a moment, Karen responded, hugging her tightly in return.

“Good luck,” she whispered.

“And to you.”

Then Marianne got in the car and drove away.

There were three First Uniteds in Cumberland, and each was monitored after Marianne’s warning. It was not her fault that the information she had given was wrong. Cumberland was merely the base: the bank itself was in Fort Ashby, ten miles south. It was taken just as the doors were being locked for the day. Nobody was killed, although the security guard was pistol-whipped and would never fully recover from his injuries. The silent alarm was not set off until the robbers-five of them-had left the bank. By the time the police could react, the thieves were gone.

Moloch got back to his house shortly before daybreak. The street was quiet. He made one full circuit of the block, then parked at the end of the driveway and entered the house. He walked straight to the back door, passed through the garden in darkness, and unlocked the shed door.

He saw the space where the board should have been, and the empty hollow where his money once lay, and then there were flashlight beams, and shouted orders, and dogs barking.

And as he emerged blinking into the phalanx of armed men, he thought:

Bitch. I’ll kill you for this.