Dark Rivers of the Heart

ONE

With the woman on his mind and a deep uneasiness in his heart, Spencer Grant drove through the glistening night, searching for the red door. The vigilant dog sat silently beside him. Rain ticked on the roof of the truck.

Without thunder or lightning, without wind, the storm had come in from the Pacific at the end of a somber February twilight. More than a drizzle but less than a downpour, it sluiced all the energy out of the city. Los Angeles and environs became a metropolis without sharp edges, urgency, or spirit. Buildings blurred into one another, traffic flowed sluggishly, and streets deliquesced into gray mists.

In Santa Monica, with the beaches and the black ocean to his right, Spencer stopped at a traffic light.

Rocky, a mixed breed not quite as large as a Labrador, studied the road ahead with interest. When they were in the truck — a Ford Explorer — Rocky sometimes peered out the side windows at the passing scene, though he was more interested in what lay before them.

Even when he was riding in the cargo area behind the front seats, the mutt rarely glanced out the rear window. He was skittish about watching the scenery recede. Maybe the motion made him dizzy in a way that oncoming scenery did not.

Or perhaps Rocky associated the dwindling highway behind them with the past. He had good reason not to dwell on the past.

So did Spencer.

Waiting for the traffic signal, he raised one hand to his face. He had a habit of meditatively stroking his scar when troubled, as another man might finger a strand of worry beads. The feel of it soothed him, perhaps because it was a reminder that he’d survived the worst terror he would ever know, that life could have no more surprises dark enough to destroy him.

The scar defined Spencer. He was a damaged man.

Pale, slightly glossy, extending from his right ear to his chin, the mark varied between one quarter and one half an inch in width. Extremes of cold and heat bleached it whiter than usual. In wintry air, though the thin ribbon of connective tissue contained no nerve endings, it felt like a hot wire laid on his face. In summer sun, the scar was cold.

The traffic signal changed from red to green.

The dog stretched his furry head forward in anticipation.

Spencer drove slowly southward along the dark coast, both hands on the wheel again. He nervously searched for the red door on the eastern side of the street, among the many shops and restaurants.

Though no longer touching the fault line in his face, he remained conscious of it. He was never unaware that he was branded. If he smiled or frowned, he would feel the scar cinching one half of his countenance. If he laughed, his amusement would be tempered by the tension in that inelastic tissue.

The metronomic windshield wipers timed the rhythm of the rain.

Spencer’s mouth was dry, but the palms of his hands were damp. The tightness in his chest arose as much from anxiety as from the pleasant anticipation of seeing Valerie again.

He was of half a mind to go home. The new hope he harbored was surely the emotional equivalent of fool’s gold. He was alone, and he was always going to be alone, except for Rocky. He was ashamed of this fresh glimmer of optimism, of the naivete it revealed, the secret need, the quiet desperation. But he kept driving.

Rocky couldn’t know what they were searching for, but he chuffed softly when the red landmark appeared. No doubt he was responding to a subtle change in Spencer’s mood at the sight of the door.

The cocktail lounge was between a Thai restaurant with steam-streaked windows and an empty storefront that had once been an art gallery. The windows of the gallery were boarded over, and squares of travertine were missing from the once elegant facade, as if the enterprise had not merely failed but been bombed out of business. Through the silver rain, a downfall of light at the lounge entrance revealed the red door that he remembered from the previous night.

Spencer hadn’t been able to recall the name of the place. That lapse of memory now seemed willful, considering the scarlet neon above the entrance: THE RED DOOR. A humorless laugh escaped him.

After haunting so many barrooms over the years, he had ceased to notice enough differences, one from another, to be able to attach names to them. In scores of towns, those countless taverns were, in their essence, the same church confessional; sitting on a barstool instead of kneeling on a prie-dieu, he murmured the same admissions to strangers who were not priests and could not give him absolution.

His confessors were drunkards, spiritual guides as lost as he was. They could never tell him the appropriate penance he must do to find peace. Discussing the meaning of life, they were incoherent.

Unlike those strangers to whom he often quietly revealed his soul, Spencer had never been drunk. Inebriation was as dreadful for him to contemplate as was suicide. To be drunk was to relinquish control. Intolerable. Control was the only thing he had.

At the end of the block, Spencer turned left and parked on the secondary street.

He went to bars not to drink but to avoid being alone — and to tell his story to someone who would not remember it in the morning. He often nursed a beer or two through a long evening. Later, in his bedroom, after staring toward the hidden heavens, he would finally close his eyes only when the patterns of shadows on the ceiling inevitably reminded him of things he preferred to forget.

When he switched off the engine, the rain drummed louder than before — a cold sound, as chilling as the voices of dead children that sometimes called to him with wordless urgency in his worst dreams.

The yellowish glow of a nearby streetlamp bathed the interior of the truck, so Rocky was clearly visible. His large and expressive eyes solemnly regarded Spencer.

“Maybe this is a bad idea,” Spencer said.

The dog craned his head forward to lick his master’s right hand, which was still clenched around the wheel. He seemed to be saying that Spencer should relax and just do what he had come there to do.

As Spencer moved his hand to pet the mutt, Rocky bowed his head, not to make the backs of his ears or his neck more accessible to stroking fingers, but to indicate that he was subservient and harmless.

“How long have we been together?” Spencer asked the dog.

Rocky kept his head down, huddling warily but not actually trembling under his master’s gentle hand.

“Almost two years,” Spencer said, answering his own question. “Two years of kindness, long walks, chasing Frisbees on the beach, regular meals…and still sometimes you think I’m going to hit you.”

Rocky remained in a humble posture on the passenger seat.

Spencer slipped one hand under the dog’s chin, forced his head up. After briefly trying to pull away, Rocky ceased all resistance.

When they were eye-to-eye, Spencer said, “Do you trust me?”

The dog self-consciously looked away, down and to the left.

Spencer shook the mutt gently by the muzzle, commanding his attention again. “We keep our heads up, okay? Always proud, okay? Confident. Keep our heads up, look people in the eye. You got that?”

Rocky slipped his tongue between his half-clenched teeth and licked the fingers with which Spencer was gripping his muzzle.

“I’ll interpret that as ‘yes.’” He let go of the dog. “This cocktail lounge isn’t a place I can take you. No offense.”

In certain taverns, though Rocky was not a guide dog, he could lie at Spencer’s feet, even sit on a stool, and no one would object to the violation of health laws. Usually a dog was the least of the infractions for which the joint would be cited if a city inspector happened to visit. The Red Door, however, still had pretensions to class, and Rocky wouldn’t be welcome.

Spencer got out of the truck, slammed the door. He engaged the locks and security system with the remote control on his key chain.

He could not count on Rocky to protect the Explorer. This was one dog who would never scare off a determined car thief — unless the would-be thief suffered an extreme phobic aversion to having his hand licked.

After sprinting through the cold rain to the shelter of an awning that skirted the corner building, Spencer paused to look back.

Having moved onto the driver’s seat, the dog stared out, nose pressed to the side window, one ear pricked, one ear drooping. His breath was fogging the glass, but he wasn’t barking. Rocky never barked. He just stared, waited. He was seventy pounds of pure love and patience.

Spencer turned away from the truck and the side street, rounded the corner, and hunched his shoulders against the chilly air.

Judging by the liquid sounds of the night, the coast and all the works of civilization that stood upon it might have been merely ramparts of ice melting into the black Pacific maw. Rain drizzled off the awning, gurgled in gutters, and splashed beneath the tires of passing cars. At the threshold of audibility, more sensed than heard, the ceaseless rumble of surf announced the steady erosion of beaches and bluffs.

As Spencer was passing the boarded-up art gallery, someone spoke from the shadows in the deeply recessed entrance. The voice was as dry as the night was damp, hoarse and grating: “I know what you are.”

Halting, Spencer squinted into the gloom. A man sat in the entryway, legs splayed, back against the gallery door. Unwashed and unbarbered, he seemed less a man than a heap of black rags saturated with so much organic filth that malignant life had arisen in it by spontaneous generation.

“I know what you are,” the vagrant repeated softly but clearly.

A miasma of body odor and urine and the fumes of cheap wine rose out of the doorway.

The number of shambling, drug-addicted, psychotic denizens of the streets had increased steadily since the late seventies, when most of the mentally ill had been freed from sanitariums in the name of civil liberties and compassion. They roamed America’s cities, championed by politicians but untended, an army of the living dead.

The penetrating whisper was as desiccated and eerie as the voice of a reanimated mummy. “I know what you are.”

The prudent response was to keep moving.

The paleness of the vagrant’s face, above the beard and below the tangled hair, became dimly visible in the gloom. His sunken eyes were as bottomless as abandoned wells. “I know what you are.”

“Nobody knows,” Spencer said.

Sliding the fingertips of his right hand along his scar, he walked past the shuttered gallery and the ruined man.

“Nobody knows,” whispered the vagrant. Perhaps his commentary on passersby, which at first had seemed eerily perceptive, even portentous, was nothing more than mindless repetition of the last thing he had heard from the most recent scornful citizen to reply to him. “Nobody knows.”

Spencer stopped in front of the cocktail lounge. Was he making a dreadful mistake? He hesitated with his hand on the red door.

Once more the hobo spoke from the shadows. Through the sizzle of the rain, his admonition now had the haunting quality of a static-shredded voice on the radio, speaking from a distant station in some far corner of the world. “Nobody knows….”

Spencer opened the red door and went inside.

On a Wednesday night, no host was at the reservations podium in the vestibule. Maybe there wasn’t a front man on Fridays and Saturdays, either. The joint wasn’t exactly jumping.

The warm air was stale and filigreed with blue cigarette smoke. In the far left corner of the rectangular main room, a piano player under a spotlight worked through a spiritless rendition of “Tangerine.”

Decorated in black and gray and polished steel, with mirrored walls, with Art Deco fixtures that cast overlapping rings of moody sapphire-blue light on the ceiling, the lounge once had recaptured a lost age with style. Now the upholstery was scuffed, the mirrors streaked. The steel was dull under a residue of old smoke.

Most tables were empty. A few older couples sat near the piano.

Spencer went to the bar, which was to the right, and settled on the stool at the end, as far from the musician as he could get.

The bartender had thinning hair, a sallow complexion, and watery gray eyes. His practiced politeness and pale smile couldn’t conceal his boredom. He functioned with robotic efficiency and detachment, discouraging conversation by never making eye contact.

Two fiftyish men in suits sat farther along the bar, each alone, each frowning at his drink. Their shirt collars were unbuttoned, ties askew. They looked dazed, glum, as if they were advertising-agency executives who had been pink-slipped ten years ago but still got up every morning and dressed for success because they didn’t know what else to do; maybe they came to The Red Door because it had been where they’d unwound after work, in the days when they’d still had hope.

The only waitress serving the tables was strikingly beautiful, half Vietnamese and half black. She wore the costume that she — and Valerie — had worn the previous evening: black heels, short black skirt, short-sleeved black sweater. Valerie had called her Rosie.

After fifteen minutes, Spencer stopped Rosie when she passed nearby with a tray of drinks. “Is Valerie working tonight?”

“Supposed to be,” she said.

He was relieved. Valerie hadn’t lied. He had thought perhaps she’d misled him, as a gentle way of brushing him off.

“I’m kinda worried about her,” Rosie said.

“Why’s that?”

“Well, the shift started an hour ago.” Her gaze kept straying to his scar. “She hasn’t called in.”

“She’s not often late?”

“Val? Not her. She’s organized.”

“How long has she worked here?”

“About two months. She…” The woman shifted her gaze from the scar to his eyes. “Are you a friend of hers or something?”

“I was here last night. This same stool. Things were slow, so Valerie and I talked awhile.”

“Yeah, I remember you,” Rosie said, and it was obvious that she couldn’t understand why Valerie had spent time with him.

He didn’t look like any woman’s dream man. He wore running shoes, jeans, a work shirt, and a denim jacket purchased at Kmart — essentially the same outfit that he’d worn on his first visit. No jewelry. His watch was a Timex. And the scar, of course. Always the scar.

“Called her place,” Rosie said. “No answer. I’m worried.”

“An hour late, that’s not so much. Could’ve had a flat tire.”

“In this city,” Rosie said, her face hardening with anger that aged her ten years in an instant, “she could’ve been gang-raped, stabbed by some twelve-year-old punk wrecked on crack, maybe even shot dead by a carjacker in her own driveway.”

“You’re a real optimist, huh?”

“I watch the news.”

She carried the drinks to a table at which sat two older couples whose expressions were more sour than celebratory. Having missed the new Puritanism that had captured many Californians, they were puffing furiously on cigarettes. They appeared to be afraid that the recent total ban on smoking in restaurants might be extended tonight to barrooms and homes, and that each cigarette might be their last.

While the piano player clinked through “The Last Time I Saw Paris,” Spencer took two small sips of beer.

Judging by the palpable melancholy of the patrons in the bar, it might actually have been June 1940, with German tanks rolling down the Champs-Élysées, and with omens of doom blazing in the night sky.

A few minutes later, the waitress approached Spencer again. “I guess I sounded a little paranoid,” she said.

“Not at all. I watch the news too.”

“It’s just that Valerie is so…”

“Special,” Spencer said, finishing her thought so accurately that she stared at him with a mixture of surprise and vague alarm, as if she suspected that he had actually read her mind.

“Yeah. Special. You can know her only a week, and…well, you want her to be happy. You want good things to happen to her.”

It doesn’t take a week, Spencer thought. One evening.

Rosie said, “Maybe because there’s this hurt in her. She’s been hurt a lot.”

“How?” he asked. “Who?”

She shrugged. “It’s nothing I know, nothing she ever said. You just feel it about her.”

He also had sensed a vulnerability in Valerie.

“But she’s tough too,” Rosie said. “Gee, I don’t know why I’m so jumpy about this. It’s not like I’m her big sister. Anyway, everyone’s got a right to be late now and then.”

The waitress turned away, and Spencer sipped his warm beer.

The piano player launched into “It Was a Very Good Year,” which Spencer disliked even when Sinatra sang it, though he was a Sinatra fan. He knew the song was intended to be reflective in tone, even mildly pensive; however, it seemed terribly sad to him, not the sweet wistfulness of an older man reminiscing about the women he had loved, but the grim ballad of someone at the bitter end of his days, looking back on a barren life devoid of deep relationships.

He supposed that his interpretation of the lyrics was an expression of his fear that decades hence, when his own life burned out, he would fade away in loneliness and remorse.

He checked his watch. Valerie was now an hour and a half late.

The waitress’s uneasiness had infected him. An insistent image rose in his mind’s eye: Valerie’s face, half concealed by a spill of dark hair and a delicate scrollwork of blood, one cheek pressed against the floor, eyes wide and unblinking. He knew his concern was irrational. She was merely late for work. There was nothing ominous about that. Yet, minute by minute, his apprehension deepened.

He put his unfinished beer on the bar, got off the stool, and walked through the blue light to the red door and into the chilly night, where the sound of marching armies was only the rain beating on the canvas awnings.

As he passed the art gallery doorway, he heard the shadow-wrapped vagrant weeping softly. He paused, affected.

Between strangled sounds of grief, the half-seen stranger whispered the last thing Spencer had said to him earlier: “Nobody knows…nobody knows….” That short declaration evidently had acquired a personal and profound meaning for him, because he spoke the two words not in the tone in which Spencer had spoken but with quiet, intense anguish. “Nobody knows.”

Though Spencer knew that he was a fool for funding the wretch’s further self-destruction, he fished a crisp ten-dollar bill from his wallet. He leaned into the gloomy entryway, into the fetid stink that the hobo exuded, and held out the money. “Here, take this.”

The hand that rose to the offering was either clad in a dark glove or exceedingly filthy; it was barely discernible in the shadows. As the bill was plucked out of Spencer’s fingers, the vagrant keened thinly: “Nobody…nobody….”

“You’ll be all right,” Spencer said sympathetically. “It’s only life. We all get through it.”

“It’s only life, we all get through it,” the vagrant whispered.

Plagued once more by the mental image of Valerie’s dead face, Spencer hurried to the corner, into the rain, to the Explorer.

Through the side window, Rocky watched him approaching. As Spencer opened the door, the dog retreated to the passenger seat.

Spencer got in the truck and pulled the door shut, bringing with him the smell of damp denim and the ozone odor of the storm. “You miss me, killer?”

Rocky shifted his weight from side to side a couple of times, and he tried to wag his tail even while sitting on it.

As he started the engine, Spencer said, “You’ll be pleased to hear that I didn’t make an ass of myself in there.”

The dog sneezed.

“But only because she didn’t show up.”

The dog cocked his head curiously.

Putting the car in gear, popping the hand brake, Spencer said, “So instead of quitting and going home while I’m ahead of the game, what do you think I’m going to do now? Hmmm?”

Apparently the dog didn’t have a clue.

“I’m going to poke in where it’s none of my business, give myself a second chance to screw up. Tell me straight, pal, do you think I’ve lost my mind?”

Rocky merely panted.

Pulling the truck away from the curb, Spencer said, “Yeah, you’re right. I’m a basket case.”

He headed directly for Valerie’s house. She lived ten minutes from the bar.

The previous night, he had waited with Rocky in the Explorer, outside The Red Door, until two o’clock in the morning, and had followed Valerie when she drove home shortly after closing time. Because of his surveillance training, he knew how to tail a subject discreetly. He was confident that she hadn’t spotted him.

He was not equally confident, however, about his ability to explain to her — or to himself—why he had followed her. After one evening of conversation with her, periodically interrupted by her attention to the few customers in the nearly deserted lounge, Spencer was overcome by the desire to know everything about her. Everything.

In fact, it was more than a desire. It was a need, and he was compelled to satisfy it.

Although his intentions were innocent, he was mildly ashamed of his budding obsession. The night before, he had sat in the Explorer, across the street from her house, staring at her lighted windows; all were covered with translucent drapes, and on one occasion her shadow played briefly across the folds of cloth, like a spirit glimpsed in candlelight at a séance. Shortly before three-thirty in the morning, the last light went out. While Rocky lay curled in sleep on the backseat, Spencer had remained on watch another hour, gazing at the dark house, wondering what books Valerie read, what she enjoyed doing on her days off, what her parents were like, where she had lived as a child, what she dreamed about when she was contented, and what shape her nightmares took when she was disturbed.

Now, less than twenty-four hours later, he headed to her place again, with a fine-grain anxiety abrading his nerves. She was late for work. Just late. His excessive concern told him more than he cared to know about the inappropriate intensity of his interest in this woman.

Traffic thinned as he drove farther from Ocean Avenue into residential neighborhoods. The languorous, liquid glimmer of wet blacktop fostered a false impression of movement, as if every street might be a lazy river easing toward its own far delta.

Valerie Keene lived in a quiet neighborhood of stucco and clapboard bungalows built in the late forties. Those two- and three-bedroom homes offered more charm than space: trellised front porches, from which hung great capes of bougainvillea; decorative shutters flanking windows; interestingly scalloped or molded or carved fascia boards under the eaves; fanciful rooflines; deeply recessed dormers.

Because Spencer didn’t want to draw attention to himself, he drove past the woman’s place without slowing. He glanced casually to the right, toward her dark bungalow on the south side of the block. Rocky mimicked him, but the dog seemed to find nothing more alarming about the house than did his master.

At the end of the block, Spencer turned right and drove south. The next few streets to the right were cul-de-sacs. He passed them by. He didn’t want to park on a dead-end street. That was a trap. At the next main avenue, he hung a right again and parked at the curb in a neighborhood similar to the one in which Valerie lived. He turned off the thumping windshield wipers but not the engine.

He still hoped that he might regain his senses, put the truck in gear, and go home.

Rocky looked at him expectantly. One ear up. One ear down.

“I’m not in control,” Spencer said, as much to himself as to the curious dog. “And I don’t know why.”

Rain sluiced down the windshield. Through the film of rippling water, the streetlights shimmered.

He sighed and switched off the engine.

When he’d left home, he’d forgotten an umbrella. The short dash to and from The Red Door had left him slightly damp, but the longer walk back to Valerie’s house would leave him soaked.

He was not sure why he hadn’t parked in front of her place. Training, perhaps. Instinct. Paranoia. Maybe all three.

Leaning past Rocky and enduring a warm, affectionate tongue in his ear, Spencer retrieved a flashlight from the glove compartment and tucked it in a pocket of his jacket.

“Anybody messes with the truck,” he said to the dog, “you rip the bastard’s guts out.”

As Rocky yawned, Spencer got out of the Explorer. He locked it with the remote control as he walked away and turned north at the corner. He didn’t bother running. Regardless of his pace, he would be soaked before he reached the bungalow.

The north-south street was lined with jacarandas. They would have provided little cover even when fully dressed with leaves and cascades of purple blossoms. Now, in winter, the branches were bare.

Spencer was sodden by the time he reached Valerie’s street, where the jacarandas gave way to huge Indian laurels. The aggressive roots of the trees had cracked and canted the sidewalk; however, the canopy of branches and generous foliage held back the cold rain.

The big trees also prevented most of the yellowish light of the sodium-vapor streetlamps from reaching even the front lawns of the properties along that cloistered avenue. The trees and shrubs around the houses also were mature; some were overgrown. If any residents were looking out windows, they would most likely be unable to see him through the screen of greenery, on the deeply shadowed sidewalk.

As he walked, he scanned the vehicles parked along the street. As far as he could tell, no one was sitting in any of them.

A Mayflower moving van was parked across the street from Valerie’s bungalow. That was convenient for Spencer, because the large truck blocked those neighbors’ view. No men were working at the van; the move-in or move-out must be scheduled for the morning.

Spencer followed the front walkway and climbed three steps to the porch. The trellises at both ends supported not bougainvillea but night-blooming jasmine. Though it wasn’t at its seasonal peak, the jasmine sweetened the air with its singular fragrance.

The shadows on the porch were deep. He doubted that he could even be seen from the street.

In the gloom, he had to feel along the door frame to find the button. He could hear the doorbell ringing softly inside the house.

He waited. No lights came on.

The flesh creped on the back of his neck, and he sensed that he was being watched.

Two windows flanked the front door and looked onto the porch. As far as he could discern, the dimly visible folds of the draperies on the other side of the glass were without any gaps through which an observer could have been studying him.

He looked back at the street. Sodium-yellow light transformed the downpour into glittering skeins of molten gold. At the far curb, the moving van stood half in shadows, half in the glow of the streetlamps. A late-model Honda and an older Pontiac were parked at the nearer curb. No pedestrians. No passing traffic. The night was silent except for the incessant rataplan of the rain.

He rang the bell once more.

The crawling feeling on the nape of his neck didn’t subside. He put a hand back there, half convinced that he would find a spider negotiating his rain-slick skin. No spider.

As he turned to the street again, he thought that he saw furtive movement from the corner of his eye, near the back of the Mayflower van. He stared for half a minute, but nothing moved in the windless night except torrents of golden rain falling to the pavement as straight as if they were, in fact, heavy droplets of precious metal.

He knew why he was jumpy. He didn’t belong here. Guilt was twisting his nerves.

Facing the door again, he slipped his wallet out of his right hip pocket and removed his MasterCard.

Though he could not have admitted it to himself until now, he would have been disappointed if he had found lights on and Valerie at home. He was concerned about her, but he doubted that she was lying, either injured or dead, in her darkened house. He was not psychic: The image of her bloodstained face, which he’d conjured in his mind’s eye, was only an excuse to make the trip here from The Red Door.

His need to know everything about Valerie was perilously close to an adolescent longing. At the moment, his judgment was not sound.

He frightened himself. But he couldn’t turn back.

By inserting the MasterCard between the door and jamb, he could pop the spring latch. He assumed there would be a deadbolt as well, because Santa Monica was as crime-ridden as any town in or around Los Angeles, but maybe he would get lucky.

He was luckier than he hoped: The front door was unlocked. Even the spring latch wasn’t fully engaged. When he twisted the knob, the door clicked open.

Surprised, stricken by another tremor of guilt, he glanced back at the street again. The Indian laurels. The moving van. The cars. The rain, rain, rain.

He went inside. He closed the door and stood with his back against it, dripping on the carpet, shivering.

At first the room in front of him was unrelievedly black. After a while, his vision adjusted enough for him to make out a drapery-covered window — and then a second and a third — illuminated only by the faint gray ambient light of the night beyond.

For all that he could see, the blackness before him might have harbored a crowd, but he knew that he was alone. The house felt not merely unoccupied but deserted, abandoned.

Spencer took the flashlight from his jacket pocket. He hooded the beam with his left hand to ensure, as much as possible, that it would not be noticed by anyone outside.

The beam revealed an unfurnished living room, barren from wall to wall. The carpet was milk-chocolate brown. The unlined draperies were beige. The two-bulb light fixture in the ceiling could probably be operated by one of the three switches beside the front door, but he didn’t try them.

His soaked athletic shoes and socks squished as he crossed the living room. He stepped through an archway into a small and equally empty dining room.

Spencer thought of the Mayflower van across the street, but he didn’t believe that Valerie’s belongings were in it or that she had moved out of the bungalow since four-thirty the previous morning, when he’d left his watch post in front of her house and returned to his own bed. Instead, he suspected that she had never actually moved in. The carpet was not marked by the pressure lines and foot indentations of furniture; no tables, chairs, cabinets, credenzas, or floor lamps had stood on it recently. If Valerie had lived in the bungalow during the two months that she had worked at The Red Door, she evidently hadn’t furnished it and hadn’t intended to call it home for any great length of time.

To the left of the dining room, through an archway half the size of the first, he found a small kitchen with knotty pine cabinets and red Formica countertops. Unavoidably, he left wet shoe prints on the gray tile floor.

Stacked beside the two-basin sink were a single dinner plate, a bread plate, a soup bowl, a saucer, and a cup — all clean and ready for use. One drinking glass stood with the dinnerware. Next to the glass lay a dinner fork, a knife, and a spoon, which were also clean.

He shifted the flashlight in his right hand, splaying a couple of fingers across the lens to partly suppress the beam, thus freeing his left hand to touch the drinking glass. He traced the rim with his fingertips. Even if the glass had been washed since Valerie had taken a drink from it, her lips had once touched the rim.

He had never kissed her. Perhaps he never would.

That thought embarrassed him, made him feel foolish, and forced him to consider, yet again, the impropriety of his obsession with this woman. He didn’t belong here. He was trespassing not merely in her home but in her life. Until now, he had lived an honest life, if not always with undeviating respect for the law. Upon entering her house, however, he had crossed a sharp line that had scaled away his innocence, and what he had lost couldn’t be regained.

Nevertheless, he did not leave the bungalow.

When he opened kitchen drawers and cabinets, he found them empty except for a combination bottle-and-can opener. The woman owned no plates or utensils other than those stacked beside the sink.

Most of the shelves in the narrow pantry were bare. Her stock of food was limited to three cans of peaches, two cans of pears, two cans of pineapple rings, one box of a sugar substitute in small blue packets, two boxes of cereal, and a jar of instant coffee.

The refrigerator was nearly empty, but the freezer compartment was well stocked with gourmet microwave dinners.

By the refrigerator was a door with a mullioned window. The four panes were covered by a yellow curtain, which he pushed aside far enough to see a side porch and a dark yard hammered by rain.

He allowed the curtain to fall back into place. He wasn’t interested in the outside world, only in the interior spaces where Valerie had breathed the air, taken her meals, and slept.

As Spencer left the kitchen, the rubber soles of his shoes squeaked on the wet tiles. Shadows retreated before him and huddled in the corners while darkness crowded his back again.

He could not stop shivering. The damp chill in the house was as penetrating as that of the February air outside. The heat must have been off all day, which meant that Valerie had left early.

On his cold face, the scar burned.

A closed door was centered in the back wall of the dining room. He opened it and discovered a narrow hallway that led about fifteen feet to the left and fifteen to the right. Directly across the hall, another door stood half open; beyond, he glimpsed a white tile floor and a bathroom sink.

As he was about to enter the hall, he heard sounds other than the monotonous and hollow drumming of the rain on the roof. A thump and a soft scrape.

He immediately switched off the flashlight. The darkness was as perfect as that in any carnival fun house just before flickering strobe lights revealed a leering, mechanical corpse.

At first the sounds had seemed stealthy, as if a prowler outside had slipped on the wet grass and bumped against the house. However, the longer Spencer listened, the more he became convinced that the source of noise might have been distant rather than nearby, and that he might have heard nothing more than a car door slamming shut, out on the street or in a neighbor’s driveway.

He switched on the flashlight and continued his search in the bathroom. A bath towel, a hand towel, and a washcloth hung on the rack. A half-used bar of Ivory lay in the plastic soap dish, but the medicine cabinet was empty.

To the right of the bathroom was a small bedroom, as unfurnished as the rest of the house. The closet was empty.

The second bedroom, to the left of the bath, was larger than the first, and it was obviously where she had slept. An inflated air mattress lay on the floor. Atop the mattress were a tangle of sheets, a single wool blanket, and a pillow. The bifold closet doors stood open, revealing wire hangers dangling from an unpainted wooden pole.

Although the rest of the bungalow was unadorned by artwork or decoration, something was fixed to the center of the longest wall in that bedroom. Spencer approached it, directed the light at it, and saw a full-color, closeup photograph of a cockroach. It seemed to be a page from a book, perhaps an entomology text, because the caption under the photograph was in dry academic English. In closeup, the roach was about six inches long. It had been fixed to the wall with a single large nail that had been driven through the center of the beetle’s carapace. On the floor, directly below the photograph, lay the hammer with which the spike had been pounded into the plaster.

The photograph had not been decoration. Surely, no one would hang a picture of a cockroach with the intention of beautifying a bedroom. Furthermore, the use of a nail — rather than pushpins or staples or Scotch tape — implied that the person wielding the hammer had done so in considerable anger.

Clearly, the roach was meant to be a symbol for something else.

Spencer wondered uneasily if Valerie had nailed it there. That seemed unlikely. The woman with whom he’d talked the previous evening at The Red Door had seemed uncommonly gentle, kind, and all but incapable of serious anger.

If not Valerie — who?

As Spencer moved the flashlight beam across the glossy paper, the roach’s carapace glistened as if wet. The shadows of his fingers, which half blocked the lens, created the illusion that the beetle’s spindly legs and antennae jittered briefly.

Sometimes, serial killers left behind signatures at the scenes of their crimes to identify their work. In Spencer’s experience, that could be anything from a specific playing card, to a Satanic symbol carved in some part of the victim’s anatomy, to a single word or a line of poetry scrawled in blood upon a wall. The nailed photo had the feeling of such a signature, although it was stranger than anything he had seen or about which he had read in the hundreds of case studies with which he was familiar.

A faint nausea rippled through him. He had encountered no signs of violence in the house, but he had not yet looked in the attached single-car garage. Perhaps he would find Valerie on that cold slab of concrete, as he had seen her earlier in his mind’s eye: lying with one side of her face pressed to the floor, unblinking eyes open wide, a scrollwork of blood obscuring some of her features.

He knew that he was jumping to conclusions. These days, the average American routinely lived in anticipation of sudden, mindless violence, but Spencer was more sensitized to the dark possibilities of modern life than were most people. He had endured pain and terror that had marked him in many ways, and his tendency now was to expect savagery as surely as sunrises and sunsets.

As he turned away from the photograph of the roach, wondering if he dared to investigate the garage, the bedroom window shattered inward, and a small black object hurtled through the draperies. At a glimpse, tumbling and airborne, it resembled a grenade.

Reflexively, he switched off the flashlight even as broken glass was still falling. In the gloom, the grenade thumped softly against the carpet.

Before Spencer could turn away, he was hit by the explosion. No flash of light accompanied it, only ear-shattering sound — and hard shrapnel snapping into him from his shins to his forehead. He cried out. Fell. Twisted. Writhed. Pain in his legs, hands, face. His torso was protected by his denim jacket. But his hands, God, his hands. He wrung his burning hands. Hot pain. Pure torment. How many fingers lost, bones shattered? Jesus, Jesus, his hands were spastic with pain yet half numb, so he couldn’t assess the damage.

The worst of it was the fiery agony in his forehead, cheeks, the left corner of his mouth. Excruciating. Desperate to quell the pain, he pressed his hands to his face. He was afraid of what he would find, of the damage he would feel, but his hands throbbed so fiercely that his sense of touch wasn’t trustworthy.

How many new scars if he survived — how many pale and puckered cicatricial welts or red keloid monstrosities from hairline to chin?

Get out, get away, find help.

He kicked-crawled-clawed-twitched like a wounded crab through the darkness. Disoriented and terrified, he nevertheless scrambled in the right direction, across a floor now littered with what seemed to be small marbles, into the bedroom doorway. He clambered to his feet.

He figured he was caught in a gang war over disputed turf. Los Angeles in the nineties was more violent than Chicago during Prohibition. Modern youth gangs were more savage and better armed than the Mafia, pumped up with drugs and their own brand of racism, as cold-blooded and merciless as snakes.

Gasping for breath, feeling blindly with aching hands, he stumbled into the hall. Pain coruscated through his legs, weakening him and testing his balance. Staying on his feet was as difficult as it would have been in a revolving fun-house barrel.

Windows shattered in other rooms, followed by a few muffled explosions. The hallway was windowless, so he wasn’t hit again.

In spite of his confusion and fear, Spencer realized he didn’t smell blood. Didn’t taste it. In fact, he wasn’t bleeding.

Suddenly he understood what was happening. Not a gang war. The shrapnel hadn’t cut him, so it wasn’t actually shrapnel. Not marbles, either, littering the floor. Hard rubber pellets. From a sting grenade. Only law-enforcement agencies had sting grenades. He had used them himself. Seconds ago a SWAT team of some kind must have initiated an assault on the bungalow, launching the grenades to disable any occupants.

The moving van had no doubt been covert transport for the assault force. The movement he had seen at the back of it, out of the corner of his eye, hadn’t been imaginary after all.

He should have been relieved. The assault was an action of the local police, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the FBI, or another law-enforcement organization. Apparently he had stumbled into one of their operations. He knew the drill. If he dropped to the floor, facedown, arms extended over his head, hands spread to prove they were empty, he would be fine; he wouldn’t be shot; they would handcuff him, question him, but they wouldn’t harm him further.

Except that he had a big problem: He didn’t belong in that bungalow. He was a trespasser. From their point of view, he might even be a burglar. To them, his explanation for being there would seem lame at best. Hell, they would think it was crazy. He didn’t really understand it himself — why he was so stricken with Valerie, why he had needed to know about her, why he had been bold enough and stupid enough to enter her house.

He didn’t drop to the floor. On wobbly legs, he staggered through the tunnel-black hall, sliding one hand along the wall.

The woman was mixed up in something illegal, and at first the authorities would think that he was involved as well. He would be taken into custody, detained for questioning, maybe even booked on suspicion of aiding and abetting Valerie in whatever she had done.

They would find out who he was.

The news media would dredge up his past. His face would be on television, in newspapers and magazines. He had lived many years in blessed anonymity, his new name unknown, his appearance altered by time, no longer recognizable. But his privacy was about to be stolen. He would be center ring at the circus again, harassed by reporters, whispered about every time he went out in public.

No. Intolerable. He couldn’t go through that again. He would rather die.

They were cops of some kind, and he was innocent of any serious offense; but they were not on his side right now. Without meaning to destroy him, they would do so simply by exposing him to the press.

More shattering glass. Two explosions.

The officers on the SWAT team were taking no chances, as if they thought they were up against people crazed on PCP or something worse.

Spencer had reached the midpoint of the hall, where he stood between two doorways. A dim grayness beyond the right-hand door: the dining room. On his left: the bathroom.

He stepped into the bathroom, closed the door, hoping to buy time to think.

The stinging in his face, hands, and legs was slowly subsiding. Rapidly, repeatedly, he clenched his hands, then relaxed them, trying to improve the circulation and work off the numbness.

From the far end of the house came a wood-splintering crash, hard enough to make the walls shudder. It was probably the front door slamming open or going down.

Another crash. The kitchen door.

They were in the house.

They were coming.

No time to think. He had to move, relying on instinct and on military training that was, he hoped, at least as extensive as that of the men who were hunting him.

In the back wall of the cramped room, above the bathtub, the blackness was broken by a rectangle of faint gray light. He stepped into the tub and, with both hands, quickly explored the frame of that small window. He wasn’t convinced that it was big enough to provide a way out, but it was the only possible route of escape.

If it had been fixed or jalousied, he would have been trapped. Fortunately, it was a single pane that opened inward from the top on a heavy-duty piano hinge. Collapsible elbow braces on both sides clicked softly when fully extended, locking the window open.

He expected the faint squeak of the hinge and the click of the braces to elicit a shout from someone outside. But the unrelenting drone of the rain screened what sounds he made. No alarm was raised.

Spencer gripped the window ledge and levered himself into the opening. Cold rain spattered his face. The humid air was heavy with the fecund smells of saturated earth, jasmine, and grass.

The backyard was a tapestry of gloom, woven exclusively from shades of black and graveyard grays, washed by rain that blurred its details. At least one man — more likely two — from the SWAT team had to be covering the rear of the house. However, though Spencer’s vision was keen, he could not force any of the interwoven shadows to resolve into a human form.

For a moment his upper body seemed wider than the frame, but he hunched his shoulders, twisted, wriggled, and scraped through the opening. The ground was a short drop from the window. He rolled once on the wet grass and then lay flat on his stomach, head raised, surveying the night, still unable to spot any adversaries.

In the planting beds and along the property line, the shrubbery was overgrown. Several old fig trees, long untrimmed, were mighty towers of foliage.

Glimpsed between the branches of those mammoth ficuses, the heavens were not black. The lights of the sprawling metropolis reflected off the bellies of the eastbound storm clouds, painting the vault of the night with deep and sour yellows that, toward the oceanic west, faded into charcoal gray.

Though familiar to Spencer, the unnatural color of the city sky filled him with a surprising and superstitious dread, for it seemed to be a malevolent firmament under which men were meant to die — and to the sight of which they might wake in Hell. It was a mystery how the yard could remain unlit under that sulfurous glow, yet he could have sworn that it grew blacker the longer he squinted at it.

The stinging in his legs subsided. His hands still ached but not disablingly, and the burning in his face was less intense than it had been.

Inside the dark house, an automatic weapon stuttered briefly, spitting out several rounds. One of the cops must be trigger-happy, shooting at shadows or ghosts. Curious. Hair-trigger nerves were uncommon among special-forces officers.

Spencer scuttled across the sodden grass to the shelter of a nearby triple-trunk ficus. Rising to his feet, with his back against the bark, he surveyed the lawn, the shrubs, and the line of trees along the rear property wall, half convinced he should make a break for it, but also half convinced that he would be spotted and brought down if he stepped into the open.

Flexing his hands to work off the pain, he considered climbing into the web of wood above him and hiding in the higher bowers. Useless, of course. They would find him in the tree, because they would not admit to his escape until they had searched every shadow and cloak of greenery, both high and low.

In the bungalow: voices, a door slamming, not even a pretense of stealth and caution any longer, not after the precipitous gunfire. Still no lights.

Time was running out.

Arrest, revelation, the glare of videocam lights, reporters shouting questions. Intolerable.

He silently cursed himself for being so indecisive.

Rain rattled the leaves above.

Newspaper stories, magazine spreads, the hateful past alive again, the gaping stares of thoughtless strangers to whom he would be the walking, breathing equivalent of a spectacular train wreck.

His booming heart counted cadence for the ever quickening march of his fear.

He could not move. Paralyzed.

Paralysis served him well, however, when a man dressed in black crept past the tree, holding a weapon that resembled an Uzi. Though he was no more than two strides from Spencer, the guy was focused on the house, ready if his quarry crashed through a window into the night, unaware that the very fugitive he sought was within reach. Then the man saw the open window at the bathroom, and he froze.

Spencer was moving before his target began to turn. Anyone with SWAT-team training — whether local cop or federal agent — would not go down easily. The only chance of taking the guy quickly and quietly was to hit him hard while he was in the grip of surprise.

Spencer rammed his right knee into the cop’s crotch, putting everything he had behind it, trying to lift the guy off the ground.

Some special-forces officers wore jockstraps with aluminum cups on every enter-and-subdue operation, as surely as they wore bullet-resistant Kevlar body jackets or vests. This one was unprotected. He exhaled explosively, a sound that wouldn’t have carried ten feet in the rainy night.

Even as Spencer was driving his knee upward, he seized the automatic weapon with both hands, wrenching it violently clockwise. It twisted out of the other man’s grasp before he could convulsively squeeze off a burst of warning fire.

The gunman fell backward on the wet grass. Spencer dropped atop him, carried forward by momentum.

Though the cop tried to cry out, the agony of that intimate blow had robbed him of his voice. He couldn’t even inhale.

Spencer could have slammed the weapon — a compact submachine gun, judging by the feel of it — into his adversary’s throat, crushing his windpipe, asphyxiating him on his own blood. A blow to the face would have shattered the nose and driven splinters of bone into the brain.

But he didn’t want to kill or seriously injure anyone. He just needed time to get the hell out of there. He hammered the gun against the cop’s temple, half checking the blow but knocking the poor bastard unconscious.

The guy was wearing night-vision goggles. The SWAT team was conducting a night stalk with full technological assistance, which was why no lights had come on in the house. They had the vision of cats, and Spencer was the mouse.

He rolled onto the grass, rose into a crouch, clutching the submachine gun in both hands. It was an Uzi: He recognized the shape and heft of it. He swept the muzzle left and right, anticipating the charge of another adversary. No one came at him.

Perhaps five seconds had passed since the man in black had crept past the ficus tree.

Spencer sprinted across the lawn, away from the bungalow, into flowers and shrubs. Greenery lashed his legs. Woody azaleas poked his calves, snagged his jeans.

He dropped the Uzi. He wasn’t going to shoot at anyone. Even if it meant being taken into custody and exposed to the news media, he would surrender rather than use the gun.

He waded through the shrubs, between two trees, past a eugenia with phosphorescent white blossoms, and reached the property wall.

He was as good as gone. If they spotted him now, they wouldn’t shoot him in the back. They’d shout a warning, identify themselves, order him to freeze, and come after him, but they wouldn’t shoot.

The stucco-sheathed, concrete-block wall was six feet high, capped with bull-nose bricks that were slippery with rain. He got a grip, pulled himself up, scrabbling at the stucco with the toes of his athletic shoes.

As he slid onto the top of the wall, belly against the cold bricks, and drew up his legs, gunfire erupted behind him. Bullets smacked into the concrete blocks, so close that chips of stucco sprayed his face.

Nobody shouted a goddamned warning.

He rolled off the wall into the neighboring property, and automatic weapons chattered again — a longer burst than before.

Submachine guns in a residential neighborhood. Craziness. What the hell kind of cops were these?

He fell into a tangle of rosebushes. It was winter; the roses had been pruned; even in the colder months, however, the California climate was sufficiently mild to encourage some growth, and thorny trailers snared his clothes, pricked his skin.

Voices, flat and strange, muffled by the static of the rain, came from beyond the wall: “This way, back here, come on!”

Spencer sprang to his feet and flailed through the rose brambles. A spiny trailer scraped the unscarred side of his face and curled around his head as if intent on fitting him with a crown, and he broke free only at the cost of punctured hands.

He was in the backyard of another house. Lights in some of the ground-floor rooms. A face at a rain-jeweled window. A young girl. Spencer had the terrible feeling that he’d be putting her in mortal jeopardy if he didn’t get out of there before his pursuers arrived.

After negotiating a maze of yards, block walls, wrought iron fences, cul-de-sacs, and service alleys, never sure if he had lost his pursuers or if they were, in fact, at his heels, Spencer found the street on which he had parked the Explorer. He ran to it and jerked on the door.

Locked, of course.

He fumbled in his pockets for the keys. Couldn’t find them. He hoped to God he hadn’t lost them along the way.

Rocky was watching him through the driver’s window. Apparently he found Spencer’s frantic search amusing. He was grinning.

Spencer glanced back along the rain-swept street. Deserted.

One more pocket. Yes. He pressed the deactivating button on the key chain. The security system issued an electronic bleat, the locks popped open, and he clambered into the truck.

As he tried to start the engine, the keys slipped through his wet fingers and fell to the floor.

“Damn!”

Reacting to his master’s fear, no longer amused, Rocky huddled timidly in the corner formed by the passenger seat and the door. He made a thin, interrogatory sound of concern.

Though Spencer’s hands tingled from the rubber pellets that had stung them, they were no longer numb. Yet he fumbled after the keys for what seemed an age.

Maybe it was best to lie on the seats, out of sight, and keep Rocky below window level. Wait for the cops to come…and go. If they arrived just as he was pulling away from the curb, they would suspect he was the one who had been in Valerie’s house, and they would stop him one way or another.

On the other hand, he had stumbled into a major operation with a lot of manpower. They weren’t going to give up easily. While he was hiding in the truck, they might cordon off the area and initiate a house-to-house search. They would also inspect parked cars as best they could, peering in windows; he would be pinned by a flashlight beam, trapped in his own vehicle.

The engine started with a roar.

He popped the hand brake, shifted gears, and pulled away from the curb, switching on windshield wipers and headlights as he went. He had parked near the corner, so he hung a U-turn.

He glanced at the rearview mirror, the side mirror. No armed men in black uniforms.

A couple of cars sped through the intersection, heading south on the other avenue. Plumes of spray fanned behind them.

Without even pausing at the stop sign, Spencer turned right and entered the southbound flow of traffic, away from Valerie’s neighborhood. He resisted the urge to tramp the accelerator into the floorboards. He couldn’t risk being stopped for speeding.

“What the hell?” he asked shakily.

The dog replied with a soft whine.

“What’s she done, why’re they after her?”

Water trickled down his brow into his eyes. He was soaked. He shook his head, and a spray of cold water flew from his hair, spattering the dashboard, the upholstery, and the dog.

Rocky flinched.

Spencer turned up the heater.

He drove five blocks and made two changes of direction before he began to feel safe.

“Who is she? What the hell has she done?”

Rocky had adopted his master’s change of mood. He no longer huddled in the corner. Having resumed his vigilant posture in the center of his seat, he was wary but not fearful. He divided his attention between the storm-drenched city ahead and Spencer, favoring the former with guarded anticipation and the latter with a cocked-head expression of puzzlement.

“Jesus, what was I doing there anyway?” Spencer wondered aloud.

Though bathed in hot air from the dashboard vents, he continued to shiver. Part of his chill had nothing to do with being rain-soaked, and no quantity of heat could dispel it.

“Didn’t belong there, shouldn’t have gone. Do you have a clue what I was doing in that place, pal? Hmmmm? Because I sure as hell don’t. That was stupid.”

He reduced speed to negotiate a flooded intersection, where an armada of trash was adrift on the dirty water.

His face felt hot. He glanced at Rocky.

He had just lied to the dog.

Long ago he had sworn never to lie to himself. He kept that oath only somewhat more faithfully than the average drunkard kept his New Year’s Eve resolution never to allow demon rum to touch his lips again. In fact, he probably indulged in less self-delusion and self-deception than most people did, but he could not claim, with a straight face, that he invariably told himself the truth. Or even that he invariably wanted to hear it. What it came down to was that he tried always to be truthful with himself, but he often accepted a half-truth and a wink instead of the real thing — and he could live comfortably with whatever omission the wink implied.

But he never lied to the dog.

Never.

Theirs was the only entirely honest relationship that Spencer had ever known; therefore, it was special to him. No. More than merely special. Sacred.

Rocky, with his hugely expressive eyes and guileless heart, with his body language and his soul-revealing tail, was incapable of deceit. If he’d been able to talk, he would have been perfectly ingenuous because he was a perfect innocent. Lying to the dog was worse than lying to a small child. Hell, he wouldn’t have felt as bad if he had lied to God, because God unquestionably expected less of him than did poor Rocky.

Never lie to the dog.

“Okay,” he said, braking for a red traffic light, “so I know why I went to her house. I know what I was looking for.”

Rocky regarded him with interest.

“You want me to say it, huh?”

The dog waited.

“That’s important to you, is it — for me to say it?”

The dog chuffed, licked his chops, cocked his head.

“All right. I went to her house because—”

The dog stared.

“—because she’s a very nice-looking woman.”

The rain drummed. The windshield wipers thumped.

“Okay, she’s pretty but she’s not gorgeous. It isn’t her looks. There’s just…something about her. She’s special.”

The idling engine rumbled.

Spencer sighed and said, “Okay, I’ll be straight this time. Right to the heart of it, huh? No more dancing around the edges. I went to her house because—”

Rocky stared.

“—because I wanted to find a life.”

The dog looked away from him, toward the street ahead, evidently satisfied with that final explanation.

Spencer thought about what he had revealed to himself by being honest with Rocky. I wanted to find a life.

He didn’t know whether to laugh at himself or weep. In the end, he did neither. He just moved on, which was what he’d been doing for at least the past sixteen years.

The traffic light turned green.

With Rocky looking ahead, only ahead, Spencer drove home through the streaming night, through the loneliness of the vast city, under a strangely mottled sky that was as yellow as a rancid egg yolk, as gray as crematorium ashes, and fearfully black along one far horizon.

TWO

At nine o’clock, after the fiasco in Santa Monica, eastbound on the freeway, returning to his hotel in Westwood, Roy Miro noticed a Cadillac stopped on the shoulder of the highway. Serpents of red light from its emergency flashers wriggled across his rain-streaked windshield. The rear tire on the driver’s side was flat.

A woman sat behind the steering wheel, evidently waiting for help. She appeared to be the only person in the car.

The thought of a woman alone in such circumstances, in any part of greater Los Angeles, worried Roy. These days, the City of Angels wasn’t the easygoing place it had once been — and the hope of actually finding anyone living even an approximation of an angelic existence was slim indeed. Devils, yes: Those were relatively easy to locate.

He stopped on the shoulder ahead of the Cadillac.

The downpour was heavier than it had been earlier. A wind had sailed in from the ocean. Silvery sheets of rain, billowing like the transparent canvases of a ghost ship, flapped through the darkness.

He plucked his floppy-brimmed vinyl hat off the passenger seat and squashed it down on his head. As always in bad weather, he was wearing a raincoat and galoshes. In spite of his precautionary dress, he was going to get soaked, but he couldn’t in good conscience drive on as if he’d never seen the stranded motorist.

As Roy walked back to the Cadillac, the passing traffic cast an all but continuous spray of filthy water across his legs, pasting his pants to his skin. Well, the suit needed to be dry-cleaned anyway.

When he reached the car, the woman did not put down her window. Staring warily at him through the glass, she reflexively checked the door locks to be sure they were engaged.

He wasn’t offended by her suspicion. She was merely wise to the ways of the city and understandably skeptical of his intentions.

He raised his voice to be heard through the closed window: “You need some help?”

She held up a cellular phone. “Called a service station. They said they’ll send somebody.”

Roy glanced toward the oncoming traffic in the eastbound lanes. “How long have they kept you waiting?”

After a hesitation, she said exasperatedly, “Forever.”

“I’ll change the tire. You don’t have to get out or give me your keys. This car — I’ve driven one like it. There’s a trunk-release knob. Just pop it, so I can get the jack and the spare.”

“You could get hurt,” she said.

The narrow shoulder offered little safety margin, and the fast-moving traffic was unnervingly close. “I’ve got flares,” he said.

Turning away before she could object, Roy hurried to his own car and retrieved all six flares from the roadside-emergency kit in the trunk. He strung them out along the freeway for fifty yards behind the Cadillac, closing off most of the nearest traffic lane.

If a drunk driver barreled out of the night, of course, no precautions would be sufficient. And these days it seemed that sober motorists were outnumbered by those who were high on booze or drugs.

It was an age plagued by social irresponsibility — which was why Roy tried to be a good Samaritan whenever an opportunity arose. If everyone lit just one little candle, what a bright world it would be: He really believed in that.

The woman had released the trunk lock. The lid was ajar.

Roy Miro was happier than he had been all day. Battered by wind and rain, splashed by the passing traffic, he labored with a smile. The more hardship involved, the more rewarding the good deed. As he struggled with a tight lug nut, the wrench slipped and he skinned one knuckle; instead of cursing, he began to whistle while he worked.

When the job was done, the woman lowered the window two inches, so he didn’t have to shout. “You’re all set,” he said.

Sheepishly, she began to apologize for having been so wary of him, but he interrupted to assure her that he understood.

She reminded Roy of his mother, which made him feel even better about helping her. She was attractive, in her early fifties, perhaps twenty years older than Roy, with auburn hair and blue eyes. His mother had been a brunette with hazel eyes, but this woman and his mother had in common an aura of gentleness and refinement.

“This is my husband’s business card,” she said, passing it through the gap in the window. “He’s an accountant. If you need any advice along those lines, no charge.”

“I haven’t done all that much,” Roy said, accepting the card.

“These days, running into someone like you, it’s a miracle. I’d have called Sam instead of that damn service station, but he’s working late at a client’s. Seems we work around the clock these days.”

“This recession,” Roy sympathized.

“Isn’t it ever going to end?” she wondered, rummaging in her purse for something more.

He cupped the business card in his hand to protect it from the rain, turning it so the red glow of the nearest flare illuminated the print. The husband had an office in Century City, where rents were high; no wonder the poor guy was working late to remain afloat.

“And here’s my card,” the woman said, extracting it from her purse and passing it to him.

Penelope Bettonfield. Interior Designer. 213-555-6868.

She said, “I work out of my home. Used to have an office, but this dreadful recession…” She sighed and smiled up at him through the partly open window. “Anyway, if I can ever be of help…”

He fished one of his own cards from his wallet and passed it in to her. She thanked him again, closed her window, and drove away.

Roy walked back along the highway, clearing the flares off the pavement so they would not continue to obstruct traffic.

In his car once more, heading for his hotel in Westwood, he was exhilarated to have lit his one little candle for the day. Sometimes he wondered if there was any hope for modern society, if it was going to spiral down into a hell of hatred and crime and greed — but then he encountered someone like Penelope Bettonfield, with her sweet smile and her aura of gentleness and refinement, and he found it possible to be hopeful again. She was a caring person who would repay his kindness to her by being kind to someone else.

In spite of Mrs. Bettonfield, Roy’s fine mood didn’t last. By the time he left the freeway for Wilshire Boulevard and drove into Westwood, a sadness had crept over him.

He saw signs of social devolution everywhere. Spray-painted graffiti defaced the retaining walls of the freeway exit ramp and obscured the directions on a couple of traffic signs, in an area of the city previously spared such dreary vandalism. A homeless man, pushing a shopping cart full of pathetic possessions, trudged through the rain, his face expressionless, as if he were a zombie shuffling along the aisles of a Kmart in Hell.

At a stoplight, in the lane beside Roy, a car full of fierce-looking young men — skinheads, each with one glittering earring — glared at him malevolently, perhaps trying to decide if he looked like a Jew. They mouthed obscenities with care, to be sure he could read their lips.

He passed a movie theater where the films were all swill of one kind or another. Extravaganzas of violence. Seamy tales of raw sex. Films from big studios, with famous stars, but swill nonetheless.

Gradually, his impression of his encounter with Mrs. Bettonfield changed. He remembered what she’d said about the recession, about the long hours that she and her husband were working, about the poor economy that had forced her to close her design office and run her faltering business from her home. She was such a nice lady. He was saddened to think that she had financial worries. Like all of them, she was a victim of the system, trapped in a society that was awash in drugs and guns but that was bereft of compassion and commitment to high ideals. She deserved better.

By the time he reached his hotel, the Westwood Marquis, Roy was in no mood to go to his room, order a late dinner from room service, and turn in for the night — which was what he’d been planning to do. He drove past the place, kept going to Sunset Boulevard, turned left, and just cruised in circles for a while.

Eventually he parked at the curb two blocks from UCLA, but he didn’t switch off the engine. He clambered across the gearshift into the passenger seat, where the steering wheel would not interfere with his work.

His cellular phone was fully charged. He unplugged it from the cigarette lighter.

From the backseat, he retrieved an attaché case. He opened it on his lap, revealing a compact computer with a built-in modem. He plugged it into the cigarette lighter and switched it on. The display screen lit. The basic menu appeared, from which he made a selection.

He married the cellular phone to the modem, and then called the direct-access number that would link his terminal with the dual Cray supercomputers in the home office. In seconds, the connection was made, and the familiar security litany began with three words that appeared on his screen: WHO GOES THERE?

He typed his name: ROY MIRO.

YOUR IDENTIFICATION NUMBER?

Roy provided it.

YOUR PERSONAL CODE PHRASE?

POOH, he typed, which he had chosen as his code because it was the name of his favorite fictional character of all time, the honey-seeking and unfailingly good-natured bear.

RIGHT THUMBPRINT PLEASE.

A two-inch-square white box appeared in the upper-right quadrant of the blue screen. He pressed his thumb in the indicated space and waited while sensors in the monitor modeled the whorls in his skin by directing microbursts of intense light at them and then contrasting the comparative shadowiness of the troughs to the marginally more reflective ridges. After a minute, a soft beep indicated that the scanning was completed. When he lifted his thumb, a detailed black-line image of his print filled the center of the white box. After an additional thirty seconds, the print vanished from the screen; it had been digitized, transmitted by phone to the home-office computer, electronically compared to his print on file, and approved.

Roy had access to considerably more sophisticated technology than the average hacker with a few thousand dollars and the address of the nearest Computer City store. Neither the electronics in his attaché case nor the software that had been installed in the machine could be purchased by the general public.

A message appeared on the display: ACCESS TO MAMA IS GRANTED.

Mama was the name of the home-office computer. Three thousand miles away on the East Coast, all her programs were now available for Roy’s use, through his cellular phone. A long menu appeared on the screen before him. He scrolled through, found a program titled LOCATE, and selected it.

He typed in a telephone number and requested the street address at which it was located.

While he waited for Mama to access phone company records and trace the listing, Roy studied the storm-lashed street. At that moment, no pedestrians or moving cars were in sight. Some houses were dark, and the lights of the others were dimmed by the seemingly eternal torrents of rain. He could almost believe that a strange, silent apocalypse had transpired, eliminating all human life on earth while leaving the works of civilization untouched.

A real apocalypse was coming, he supposed. Sooner than later, a great war: nation against nation or race against race, religions clashing violently or ideology battling ideology. Humanity was drawn to turmoil and self-destruction as inevitably as the earth was drawn to complete its annual revolution of the sun.

His sadness deepened.

Under the telephone number on the video display, the correct name appeared. The address, however, was listed as unpublished by request of the customer.

Roy instructed the home-office computer to access and search the phone company’s electronically stored installation and billing records to find the address. Such an invasion of private-sector data was illegal, of course, without a court order, but Mama was exceedingly discreet. Because all the computer systems in the national telephone network were already in Mama’s directory of previously violated entities, she was able to enter any of them virtually instantaneously, explore at will, retrieve whatever was requested, and disengage without leaving the slightest trace that she had been there; Mama was a ghost in their machines.

In seconds, a Beverly Hills address appeared on the screen.

He cleared the screen and then asked Mama for a street map of Beverly Hills. She supplied it after a brief hesitation. Seen in its entirety, it was too compressed to be read.

Roy typed in the address that he’d been given. The computer filled the screen with the quadrant that was of interest to him, and then with a quarter of that quadrant. The house was only a couple of blocks south of Wilshire Boulevard, in the less prestigious “flats” of Beverly Hills, and easy to find.

He typed POOH OUT, which disengaged his portable terminal from Mama in her cool, dry bunker in Virginia.

The large brick house — which was painted white, with hunter-green shutters — stood behind a white picket fence. The front lawn featured two enormous bare-limbed sycamores.

Lights were on inside, but only at the back of the house and only on the first floor.

Standing at the front door, sheltered from the rain by a deep portico supported on tall white columns, Roy could hear music inside: a Beatles number, “When I’m Sixty-four.” He was thirty-three; the Beatles were before his time, but he liked their music because much of it embodied an endearing compassion.

Softly humming along with the lads from Liverpool, Roy slipped a credit card between the door and the jamb. He worked it upward until it forced open the first — and least formidable — of the two locks. He wedged the card in place to hold the simple spring latch out of the niche in the striker plate.

To open the heavy-duty deadbolt, he needed a more sophisticated tool than a credit card: a Lockaid lock-release gun, sold only to law-enforcement agencies. He slipped the thin pick of the gun into the key channel, under the pin tumblers, and pulled the trigger. The flat steel spring in the Lockaid caused the pick to jump upward and to lodge some of the pins at the shear line. He had to pull the trigger half a dozen times to fully disengage the lock.

The snapping of hammer against spring and the clicking of pick against pin tumblers were not thunderous sounds, by any measure, but he was grateful for the cover provided by the music. “When I’m Sixty-four” ended as he opened the door. Before his credit card could fall, he caught it, froze, and waited for the next song. To the opening bars of “Lovely Rita,” he stepped across the threshold.

He put the lock-release gun on the floor, to the right of the entrance. Quietly, he closed the door behind him.

The foyer welcomed him with gloom. He stood with his back against the door, letting his eyes adjust to the shadows.

When he was confident that he would not blindly knock over any furniture, he proceeded from room to room, toward the light at the back of the house.

He regretted that his clothes were so saturated and his galoshes so dirty. He was probably making a mess of the carpet.

She was in the kitchen, at the sink, washing a head of lettuce, her back to the swinging door through which he entered. Judging by the vegetables on the cutting board, she was preparing a salad.

Easing the door shut behind him, hoping to avoid startling her, he debated whether or not to announce himself. He wanted her to know that it was a concerned friend who had come to comfort her, not a stranger with sick motives.

She turned off the running water and placed the lettuce in a plastic colander to drain. Wiping her hands on a dish towel, turning away from the sink, she finally discovered him as “Lovely Rita” drew to an end.

Mrs. Bettonfield looked surprised but not, in the first instant, afraid — which was, he knew, a tribute to his appealing, soft-featured face. He was slightly pudgy, with dimples, and had skin so beardless that it was almost as smooth as a boy’s. With his twinkling blue eyes and warm smile, he would make a convincing Santa Claus in another thirty years. He believed that his kindheartedness and his genuine love of people were also apparent, because strangers usually warmed to him more quickly than a merry face alone could explain.

While Roy still was able to believe that her wide-eyed surprise would fade into a smile of welcome rather than a grimace of fear, he raised the Beretta 93-R and shot her twice in the chest. A silencer was screwed to the barrel; both rounds made only soft popping sounds.

Penelope Bettonfield dropped to the floor and lay motionless on her side, with her hands still entangled in the dish towel. Her eyes were open, staring across the floor at his wet, dirty galoshes.

The Beatles began “Good Morning, Good Morning.” It must be the Sgt. Pepper album.

He crossed the kitchen, put the pistol on the counter, and crouched beside Mrs. Bettonfield. He pulled off one of his supple leather gloves and placed his fingertips to her throat, searching for a pulse in her carotid artery. She was dead.

One of the two rounds was so perfectly placed that it must have pierced her heart. Consequently, with circulation halted in an instant, she had not bled much.

Her death had been a graceful escape: quick and clean, painless and without fear.

He pulled on his right glove again, then rubbed gently at her neck where he had touched it. Gloved, he had no concern that his fingerprints might be lifted off the body by laser technology.

Precautions must be taken. Not every judge and juror would be able to grasp the purity of his motives.

He closed the lid over her left eye and held it in place for a minute or so, to be sure that it would stay shut.

“Sleep, dear lady,” he said with a mixture of affection and regret, as he also closed the lid over her right eye. “No more worrying about finances, no more working late, no more stress and strife. You were too good for this world.”

It was both a sad and a joyous moment. Sad, because her beauty and elegance no longer brightened the world; nevermore would her smile lift anyone’s spirits; her courtesy and consideration would no longer counter the tides of barbarity washing over this troubled society. Joyous, because she would never again be afraid, spill tears, know grief, feel pain.

“Good Morning, Good Morning” gave way to the marvelously bouncy, syncopated reprise of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” which was better than the first rendition of the song at the start of the album and which seemed a suitably upbeat celebration of Mrs. Bettonfield’s passage to a better world.

Roy pulled out one of the chairs from the kitchen table, sat, and removed his galoshes. He rolled up the damp and muddy legs of his trousers as well, determined to cause no more mess.

The reprise of the album theme song was short, and by the time he got to his feet again, “A Day in the Life” had begun. That was a singularly melancholy piece, too somber to be in sync with the moment. He had to shut it off before it depressed him. He was a sensitive man, more vulnerable than most to the emotional effects of music, poetry, fine paintings, fiction, and the other arts.

He found the central music system in a long wall of beautifully crafted mahogany cabinets in the study. He stopped the music and searched two drawers that were filled with compact discs. Still in the mood for the Beatles, he selected A Hard Day’s Night because none of the songs on that album were downbeat.

Singing along to the title track, Roy returned to the kitchen, where he lifted Mrs. Bettonfield off the floor. She was more petite than she had seemed when he’d been talking with her through the car window. She weighed no more than a hundred and five pounds, with slender wrists, a swan neck, and delicate features. Roy was deeply touched by the woman’s fragility, and he bore her in his arms with more than mere care and respect, almost with reverence.

Nudging light switches with his shoulder, he carried Penelope Bettonfield to the front of the house, upstairs, along the hallway, checking door by door until he found the master bedroom. There, he placed her gently on a chaise lounge.

He folded back the quilted bedspread and then the bedclothes, revealing the bottom sheet. He plumped the pillows, which were in Egyptian-cotton shams trimmed with cut-work lace as lovely as any he had ever seen.

He took off Mrs. Bettonfield’s shoes and put them in her closet. Her feet were as small as those of a girl.

Leaving her fully dressed, he carried Penelope to the bed and put her down on her back, with her head elevated on two pillows. He left the spread folded at the bottom of the bed, but he drew the blanket cover, blanket, and top sheet over her breasts. Her arms remained free.

With a brush that he found in the master bathroom, he smoothed her hair. The Beatles were singing “If I Fell” when he began to groom her, but they were well into “I’m Happy Just to Dance with You” by the time her lustrous auburn locks were perfectly arranged around her lovely face.

After switching on the bronze floor lamp that stood beside the chaise lounge, he turned off the harsher ceiling light. Soft shadows fell across the recumbent woman, like the enfolding wings of angels who had come to carry her away from this vale of tears and into a higher land of eternal peace.

He went to the Louis XVI vanity, removed its matching chair, and put it beside the bed. He sat next to Mrs. Bettonfield, stripped off his gloves, and took one of her hands in both of his. Her flesh was cooling but still somewhat warm.

He couldn’t linger for long. There was much yet to do and not a lot of time in which to do it. Nevertheless, he wanted to spend a few minutes of quality time with Mrs. Bettonfield.

While the Beatles sang “And I Love Her” and “Tell Me Why,” Roy Miro tenderly held his late friend’s hand and took a moment to appreciate the exquisite furniture, the paintings, the art objects, the warm color scheme, and the array of fabrics in different but wonderfully complementary patterns and textures.

“It’s so very unfair that you had to close your shop,” he told Penelope. “You were a fine interior designer. You really were, dear lady. You really were.”

The Beatles sang.

Rain beat upon the windows.

Roy’s heart swelled with emotion.

THREE

Rocky recognized the route home. Periodically, as they passed one landmark or another, he chuffed softly with pleasure.

Spencer lived in a part of Malibu that was without glamour but that had its own wild beauty.

All the forty-room Mediterranean and French mansions, the ultra-modern cliff-side dwellings of tinted glass and redwood and steel, the Cape Cod cottages as large as ocean liners, the twenty-thousand-square-foot Southwest adobes with authentic lodgepole ceilings and authentic twenty-seat personal screening rooms with THX sound, were on the beaches, on the bluffs above the beaches — and inland of the Pacific Coast Highway, on hills with a view of the sea.

Spencer’s place was east of any home that Architectural Digest would choose to photograph, halfway up an unfashionable and sparsely populated canyon. The two-lane blacktop was textured by patches atop patches and by numerous cracks courtesy of the earthquakes that regularly quivered through the entire coast. A pipe-and-chain-link gate, between a pair of mammoth eucalyptuses, marked the entrance to his two-hundred-yard-long gravel driveway.

Wired to the gate was a rusted sign with fading red letters: DANGER / ATTACK DOG. He had fixed it there when he first purchased the place, long before Rocky had come to live with him. There had been no dog then, let alone one trained to kill. The sign was an empty threat, but effective. No one ever bothered him in his retreat.

The gate was not electrically operated. He had to get out in the rain to unlock it and to relock it after he’d driven through.

With only one bedroom, a living room, and a large kitchen, the structure at the end of the driveway was not a house, really, but a cabin. The cedar-clad exterior, perched on a stone foundation to foil termites, weathered to a lustrous silver gray, might have appeared shabby to an unappreciative eye; to Spencer it was beautiful and full of character in the wash of the Explorer’s headlights.

The cabin was sheltered — surrounded, shrouded, encased—by a eucalyptus grove. The trees were red gums, safe from the Australian beetles that had been devouring California blue gums for more than a decade. They had not been topped since Spencer had bought the place.

Beyond the grove, brush and scrub oak covered the canyon floor and the steep slopes to the ridges. Summer through autumn, leached of moisture by dry Santa Ana winds, the hills and the ravines became tinder. Twice in eight years, firefighters had ordered Spencer to evacuate, when blazes in neighboring canyons might have swept down on him as mercilessly as judgment day. Wind-driven flames could move at express-train speeds. One night they might overwhelm him in his sleep. But the beauty and privacy of the canyon justified the risk.

At various times in his life, he had fought hard to stay alive, but he was not afraid to die. Sometimes he even embraced the thought of going to sleep and never waking. When fears of fire troubled him, he worried not about himself but about Rocky.

That Wednesday night in February, the burning season was months away. Every tree and bush and blade of wild grass dripped rain and seemed as if it would be forever impervious to fire.

The house was cold. It could be heated by a big river-rock fireplace in the living room, but each room also had its own in-wall electric heater. Spencer preferred the dancing light, the crackle, and the smell of a log fire, but he switched on the heaters because he was in a hurry.

After changing from his damp clothes into a comfortable gray jogging suit and athletic socks, he brewed a pot of coffee. For Rocky, he set out a bowl of orange juice.

The mutt had many peculiarities besides a taste for orange juice. For one thing, though he enjoyed going for walks during the day, he had none of a dog’s usual frisky interest in the nocturnal world, preferring to keep at least a window between himself and the night; if he had to go outside after sunset, he stayed close to Spencer and regarded the darkness with suspicion. Then there was Paul Simon. Rocky was indifferent to most music, but Simon’s voice enchanted him; if Spencer put on a Simon album, especially Graceland, Rocky would sit in front of the speakers, staring intently, or pace the floor in lazy, looping patterns — off the beat, lost in reverie — to “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes” or “You Can Call Me Al.” Not a doggy thing to do. Less doggy still was his bashfulness about bodily functions, for he wouldn’t make his toilet if watched; Spencer had to turn his back before Rocky would get down to business.

Sometimes Spencer thought that the dog, having suffered a hard life until two years ago and having had little reason to find joy in a canine’s place in the world, wanted to be a human being.

That was a big mistake. People were more likely to live a dog’s life, in the negative sense of the phrase, than were most dogs.

“Greater self-awareness,” he’d told Rocky on a night when sleep wouldn’t come, “doesn’t make a species any happier, pal. If it did, we’d have fewer psychiatrists and barrooms than you dogs have — and it’s not that way, is it?”

Now, as Rocky lapped at the juice in the bowl on the kitchen floor, Spencer carried a mug of coffee to the expansive L-shaped desk in one corner of the living room. Two computers with large hard-disk capacities, a full-color laser printer, and other pieces of equipment were arrayed from one end of the work surface to the other.

That corner of the living room was his office, though he had not held a real job in ten months. Since leaving the Los Angeles Police Department — where, during his last two years, he’d been on assignment to the California Multi-Agency Task Force on Computer Crime — he had spent several hours a day on-line with his own computers.

Sometimes he researched subjects of interest to him, through Prodigy and GEnie. More often, however, he explored ways to gain unapproved access to private and government computers that were protected by sophisticated security programs.

Once entry was achieved, he was engaged in illegal activity. He never destroyed any company’s or agency’s files, never inserted false data. Still, he was guilty of trespassing in private domains.

He could live with that.

He was not seeking material rewards. His compensation was knowledge — and the occasional satisfaction of righting a wrong.

Like the Beckwatt case.

The previous December, when a serial child molester — Henry Beckwatt — was to be released from prison after serving less than five years, the California State Parole Board had refused, in the interest of prisoners’ rights, to divulge the name of the community in which he would be residing during the term of his parole. Because Beckwatt had beaten some of his victims and expressed no remorse, his pending release raised anxiety levels in parents statewide.

Taking great pains to cover his tracks, Spencer had first gained entry to the Los Angeles Police Department’s computers, stepped from there to the state attorney general’s system in Sacramento, and from there into the parole board’s computer, where he finessed the address to which Beckwatt would be paroled. Anonymous tips to a few reporters forced the parole board to delay action until a secret new placement could be worked out. During the following five weeks, Spencer exposed three more addresses for Beckwatt, shortly after each was arranged.

Although officials had been in a frenzy to uncover an imagined snitch within the parole system, no one had wondered, at least not publicly, if the leak had been from their electronic-data files, sprung by a clever hacker. Finally admitting defeat, they paroled Beckwatt to an empty caretaker’s house on the grounds of San Quentin.

In a couple of years, when his period of post-prison supervision ended, Beckwatt would be free to prowl again, and he would surely destroy more children psychologically if not physically. For the time being, however, he was unable to settle into a lair in the middle of a neighborhood of unsuspecting innocents.

If Spencer could have discovered a way to access God’s computer, he would have tampered with Henry Beckwatt’s destiny by giving him an immediate and mortal stroke or by walking him into the path of a runaway truck. He wouldn’t have hesitated to ensure the justice that modern society, in its Freudian confusion and moral paralysis, found difficult to impose.

He was not a hero, not a scarred and computer-wielding cousin of Batman, not out to save the world. Mostly, he sailed cyberspace — that eerie dimension of energy and information within computers and computer networks — simply because it fascinated him as much as Tahiti and far Tortuga fascinated some people, enticed him in the way that the moon and Mars enticed the men and women who became astronauts.

Perhaps the most appealing aspect of that other dimension was the potential for exploration and discovery that it offered—without direct human interaction. When Spencer avoided computer bulletin boards and other user-to-user conversations, cyberspace was an uninhabited universe, created by human beings yet strangely devoid of them. He wandered through vast structures of data, which were infinitely more grand than the pyramids of Egypt, the ruins of ancient Rome, or the rococo hives of the world’s great cities — yet saw no human face, heard no human voice. He was Columbus without shipmates, Magellan walking alone across electronic highways and through metropolises of data as unpopulated as ghost towns in the Nevada wastelands.

Now, he sat before one of his computers, switched it on, and sipped coffee while it went through its start-up procedures. These included the Norton AntiVirus program, to be sure that none of his files had been contaminated by a destructive bug during his previous venture into the national data webs. The machine was uninfected.

The first telephone number that he entered was for a service offering twenty-four-hour-a-day stock market quotations. In seconds, the connection was made, and a greeting appeared on his computer screen: WELCOME TO WORLDWIDE STOCK MARKET INFORMATION, INC.

Using his subscriber ID, Spencer requested information about Japanese stocks. Simultaneously he activated a parallel program that he had designed himself and that searched the open phone line for the subtle electronic signature of a listening device. Worldwide Stock Market Information was a legitimate data service, and no police agency had reason to eavesdrop on its lines; therefore, evidence of a tap would indicate that his own telephone was being monitored.

Rocky padded in from the kitchen and rubbed his head against Spencer’s leg. The mutt couldn’t have finished his orange juice so quickly. He was evidently more lonely than thirsty.

Keeping his attention on the video display, waiting for an alarm or an all-clear, Spencer reached down with one hand and gently scratched behind the dog’s ears.

Nothing he had done as a hacker could have drawn the attention of the authorities, but caution was advisable. In recent years, the National Security Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and other organizations had established computer-crime divisions, all of which zealously prosecuted offenders.

Sometimes they were almost criminally zealous. Like every overstaffed government agency, each computer-crime project was eager to justify its ever increasing budget. Every year a greater number of arrests and convictions was required to support the contention that electronic theft and vandalism were escalating at a frightening rate. Consequently, from time to time, hackers who had stolen nothing and who had wrought no destruction were brought to trial on flimsy charges. They weren’t prosecuted with any intention that, by their example, they would deter crime; their convictions were sought merely to create the statistics that ensured higher funding for the project.

Some of them were sent to prison.

Sacrifices on the altars of bureaucracy.

Martyrs to the cyberspace underground.

Spencer was determined never to become one of them.

As the rain rattled against the cabin roof and the wind stirred a whispery chorus of lamenting ghosts from the eucalyptus grove, he waited, with his gaze fixed on the upper-right corner of the video screen. In red letters, a single word appeared: CLEAR.

No taps were in operation.

After logging off Worldwide Stock Market, he dialed the main computer of the California Multi-Agency Task Force on Computer Crime. He entered that system by a deeply concealed back door that he had inserted prior to resigning as second in command of the unit.

Because he was accepted at the system-manager level (the highest security clearance), all functions were available to him. He could use the task force’s computer as long as he wanted, for whatever purpose he wished, and his presence wouldn’t be observed or recorded.

He had no interest in their files. He used their computer only as a jumping-off point into the Los Angeles Police Department system, to which they had direct access. The irony of employing a computer-crime unit’s hardware and software to commit even a minor computer crime was appealing.

It was also dangerous.

Nearly everything that was fun, of course, was also a little dangerous: riding roller coasters, skydiving, gambling, sex.

From the LAPD system, he entered the California Department of Motor Vehicles computer in Sacramento. He got such a kick from making those leaps that he felt almost as though he had traveled physically, teleporting from his canyon in Malibu to Los Angeles to Sacramento, in the manner of a character in a science fiction novel.

Rocky jumped onto his hind legs, planted his forepaws on the edge of the desk, and peered at the computer screen.

“You wouldn’t enjoy this,” Spencer said.

Rocky looked at him and issued a short, soft whine.

“I’m sure you’d get a lot more pleasure from chewing on that new rawhide bone I got you.”

Peering at the screen again, Rocky inquisitively cocked his furry head.

“Or I could put on some Paul Simon for you.”

Another whine. Longer and louder than before.

Sighing, Spencer pulled another chair next to his own. “All right. When a fella has a bad case of the lonelies, I guess chewing on a rawhide bone just isn’t as good as having a little company. Never works for me, anyway.”

Rocky hopped into the chair, panting and grinning.

Together, they went voyaging in cyberspace, plunging illegally into the galaxy of DMV records, searching for Valerie Keene.

They found her in seconds. Spencer had hoped for an address different from the one he already knew, but he was disappointed. She was listed at the bungalow in Santa Monica, where he had discovered unfurnished rooms and the photo of a cockroach nailed to one wall.

According to the data that scrolled up the screen, she had a Class C license, without restrictions. It would expire in a little less than four years. She had applied for the license and taken a written test in early December, two months ago.

Her middle name was Ann.

She was twenty-nine. Spencer had guessed twenty-five.

Her driving record was free of violations.

In the event that she was gravely injured and her own life could not be saved, she had authorized the donation of her vital organs.

Otherwise, the DMV offered little information about her:

That bureaucratic thumbnail description wouldn’t be of much help when Spencer needed to describe her to someone. It was insufficient to conjure an image that included the things that truly distinguished her: the direct and clear-eyed stare, the slightly lopsided smile, the dimple in her right cheek, the delicate line of her jaw.

Since last year, with federal funding from the National Crime and Terrorism Prevention Act, the California DMV had been digitizing and electronically storing photographs and thumbprints of new and renewing drivers. Eventually, there would be mug shots and prints on file for every resident with a driver’s license, though the vast majority had never been accused of a crime, let alone convicted.

Spencer considered this the first step toward a national ID card, an internal passport of the type that had been required in the communist states before they had collapsed, and he was opposed to it on principle. In this instance, however, his principles didn’t prevent him from calling up the photo from Valerie’s license.

The screen flickered, and she appeared. Smiling.

The banshee eucalyptuses whisper-wailed complaints of eternity’s indifference, and the rain drummed, drummed.

Spencer realized that he was holding his breath. He exhaled.

Peripherally, he was aware of Rocky staring at him curiously, then at the screen, then at him again.

He picked up the mug and sipped some black coffee. His hand was shaking.

Valerie had known that authorities of one kind or another were hunting her, and she had known that they were getting close — because she had vacated her bungalow only hours before they’d come for her. If she was innocent, why would she settle for the unstable and fear-filled life of a fugitive?

Putting the mug aside and his fingers to the keyboard, he asked for a hard copy of the photo on the screen.

The laser printer hummed. A single sheet of white paper slid out of the machine.

Valerie. Smiling.

In Santa Monica, no one had called for surrender before the assault on the bungalow had begun. When the attackers burst inside, there had been no warning shouts of Police! Yet Spencer was certain that those men had been officers of one law-enforcement agency or another because of their uniformlike dress, night-vision goggles, weaponry, and military methodology.

Valerie. Smiling.

That soft-voiced woman with whom Spencer had talked last night at The Red Door had seemed gentle and honest, less capable of deceit than were most people. First thing, she had looked boldly at his scar and had asked about it, not with pity welling in her eyes, not with an edge of morbid curiosity in her voice, but in the same way that she might have asked where he’d bought the shirt he’d been wearing. Most people studied the scar surreptitiously and managed to speak of it, if at all, only when they realized that he was aware of their intense curiosity. Valerie’s frankness had been refreshing. When he’d told her only that he’d been in an accident when he was a child, Valerie had sensed that he either didn’t want or wasn’t able to talk about it, and she had dropped the subject as if it mattered no more than his hairstyle. Thereafter, he never caught her gaze straying to the pallid brand on his face; more important, he never had the feeling that she was struggling not to look. She found other things about him more interesting than that pale welt from ear to chin.

Valerie. In black and white.

He could not believe that this woman was capable of committing a major crime, and certainly not one so heinous that a SWAT team would come after her in utmost silence, with submachine guns and every high-tech advantage.

She might be traveling with someone dangerous.

Spencer doubted that. He reviewed the few clues: one set of dinnerware, one drinking glass, one set of stainless steel flatware, an air mattress adequate for one but too small for two.

Yet the possibility remained: She might not be alone, and the person with her might rate the extreme caution of the SWAT team.

The photo, printed from the computer screen, was too dark to do her justice. Spencer directed the laser printer to produce another, just a shade lighter than the first.

That printout was better, and he asked for five more copies.

Until he held her likeness in his hands, Spencer had not been consciously aware that he was going to follow Valerie Keene wherever she had gone, find her, and help her. Regardless of what she might have done, even if she was guilty of a crime, regardless of the cost to himself, whether or not she could ever care for him, Spencer was going to stand with this woman against whatever darkness she faced.

As he realized the deeper implications of the commitment that he was making, a chill of wonder shivered him, for until that moment he had thought of himself as a thoroughly modern man who believed in no one and nothing, neither in God Almighty nor in himself.

Softly, touched by awe and unable fully to understand his own motivations, he said, “I’ll be damned.”

The dog sneezed.

FOUR

By the time the Beatles were singing “I’ll Cry Instead,” Roy Miro detected a cooling in the dead woman’s hand that began to seep into his own flesh.

He let go of her and put on his gloves. He wiped her hands with one corner of the top sheet to smear any oils from his own skin that might have left the patterns of his fingertips.

Filled with conflicting emotions — grief at the death of a good woman, joy at her release from a world of pain and disappointment — he went downstairs to the kitchen. He wanted to be in a position to hear the automatic garage door when Penelope’s husband came home.

A few spots of blood had congealed on the tile floor. Roy used paper towels and a spray bottle of Fantastik, which he found in the cabinet under the kitchen sink, to clean away the mess.

After he wiped up the dirty prints of his galoshes as well, he noticed that the stainless steel sink wasn’t as well kept as it could have been, and he scrubbed until it was spotless.

The window in the microwave was smeared. It sparkled when he was done with it.

By the time the Beatles were halfway through “I’ll Be Back” and Roy had wiped down the front of the Sub-Zero refrigerator, the garage door rumbled upward. He threw the used paper towels into the trash compactor, put away the Fantastik, and retrieved the Beretta that he had left on the counter after delivering Penelope from her suffering.

The kitchen and garage were separated only by a small laundry room. He turned to that closed door.

The rumble of the car engine echoed off the garage walls as Sam Bettonfield drove inside. The engine cut off. The big door clattered and creaked as it rolled down behind the car.

Home from the accountant wars at last. Weary of working late, crunching numbers. Weary of paying high office rents in Century City, trying to stay afloat in a system that valued money more than people.

In the garage, a car door slammed.

Burned out from the stress of life in a city that was riddled with injustice and at war with itself, Sam would be looking forward to a drink, a kiss from Penelope, a late dinner, perhaps an hour of television. Those simple pleasures and eight hours of restful sleep constituted the poor man’s only respite from his greedy and demanding clients — and his sleep was likely to be tormented by bad dreams.

Roy had something better to offer. Blessed escape.

The sound of a key in the lock between the garage and the house, the clack of the deadbolt, a door opening: Sam entered the laundry.

Roy raised the Beretta as the inner door opened.

Wearing a raincoat, carrying a briefcase, Sam stepped into the kitchen. He was a balding man with quick dark eyes. He looked startled but sounded at ease. “You must have the wrong house.”

Eyes misting with tears, Roy said, “I know what you’re going through,” and he squeezed off three quick shots.

Sam was not a large man, perhaps fifty pounds heavier than his wife. Nevertheless, getting him upstairs to the bedroom, wrestling him out of his raincoat, pulling off his shoes, and hoisting him into bed was not easy. When the task had been accomplished, Roy felt good about himself because he knew that he had done the right thing by placing Sam and Penelope together and in dignified circumstances.

He pulled the bedclothes over Sam’s chest. The top sheet was trimmed with cut-work lace to match the pillow shams, so the dead couple appeared to be dressed in fancy surplices of the sort that angels might wear.

The Beatles had stopped singing a while ago. Outside, the soft and somber sound of the rain was as cold as the city that received it — as relentless as the passage of time and the fading of all light.

Though he had done a caring thing, and though there was joy in the end of these people’s suffering, Roy was sad. It was a strangely sweet sadness, and the tears that it wrung from him were cleansing.

Eventually he went downstairs to clean up the few drops of Sam’s blood that spotted the kitchen floor. He found the vacuum cleaner in the big closet under the stairs, and he swept away the dirt that he had tracked on the carpet when he’d first come into the house.

In Penelope’s purse, he searched for the business card that he had given her. The name on it was phony, but he retrieved it anyway.

Finally, using the telephone in the study, he dialed 911.

When a policewoman answered, Roy said, “It’s very sad here. It’s very sad. Someone should come right away.”

He did not return the handset to the cradle, but put it down on the desk, leaving the line open. The Bettonfields’ address should have appeared on a computer screen in front of the policewoman who had answered the call, but Roy didn’t want to take a chance that Sam and Penelope might be there for hours or even days before they were found. They were good people and did not deserve the indignity of being discovered stiff, gray, and reeking of decomposition.

He carried his galoshes and shoes to the front door, where he quickly put them on again. He remembered to pick up the lock-release gun from the foyer floor.

He walked through the rain to his car and drove away from there.

According to his watch, the time was twenty minutes past ten. Although it was three hours later on the East Coast, Roy was sure that his contact in Virginia would be waiting.

At the first red traffic light, he popped open the attaché case on the passenger seat. He plugged in the computer, which was still married to the cellular phone; he didn’t separate the devices because he needed both. With a few quick keystrokes, he set up the cellular unit to respond to preprogrammed vocal instructions and to function as a speakerphone, which freed both his hands for driving.

As the traffic light turned green, he crossed the intersection and made the long-distance call by saying, “Please connect,” and then reciting the number in Virginia.

After the second ring, the familiar voice of Thomas Summerton came down the line, recognizable by a single word, as smooth and as southern as pecan butter. “Hello?”

Roy said, “May I speak to Jerry, please?”

“Sorry, wrong number.” Summerton hung up.

Roy terminated the resultant dial tone by saying: “Please disconnect now.”

In ten minutes, Summerton would call back from a secure phone, and they could speak freely without fear of being recorded.

Roy drove past the glitzy shops on Rodeo Drive to Santa Monica Boulevard, and then west into residential streets. Large, expensive houses stood among huge trees, palaces of privilege that he found offensive.

When the phone rang, he didn’t reach for the keypad but said, “Please accept call.”

The connection was made with an audible click.

“Please scramble now,” Roy said.

The computer beeped to indicate that everything he said would be rendered unintelligible to anyone between him and Summerton. As it was transmitted, their speech would be broken into small pieces of sound and rearranged by a randomlike control factor. Both phones were synchronized with the same control factor, so the meaningless streams of transmitted sound would be reassembled into intelligible speech when received.

“I’ve seen the early report on Santa Monica,” Summerton said.

“According to neighbors, she was there this morning. But she must’ve skipped by the time we set up surveillance this afternoon.”

“What tipped her off?”

“I swear she has a sixth sense about us.” Roy turned west on Sunset Boulevard, joining the heavy flow of traffic that gilded the wet pavement with headlight beams. “You heard about the man who showed up?”

“And got away.”

“We weren’t sloppy.”

“So he was just lucky?”

“No. Worse than that. He knew what he was doing.”

“You saying he’s somebody with a history?”

“Yeah.”

“Local, state, or federal history?”

“He took out a team member, neat as you please.”

“So he’s had a few lessons beyond the local level.”

Roy turned right off Sunset Boulevard onto a less traveled street, where mansions were hidden behind walls, high hedges, and wind-tossed trees. “If we’re able to chase him down, what’s our priority with him?”

Summerton considered for a moment before he spoke. “Find out who he is, who he’s working for.”

“Then detain him?”

“No. Too much is at stake. Make him disappear.”

The serpentine streets wound through the wooded hills, among secluded estates, overhung by dripping branches, through blind turn after blind turn.

Roy said, “Does this change our priority with the woman?”

“No. Whack her on sight. Anything else happening at your end?”

Roy thought of Mr. and Mrs. Bettonfield, but he didn’t mention them. The extreme kindness he had extended to them had nothing to do with his job, and Summerton would not understand.

Instead, Roy said, “She left something for us.”

Summerton said nothing, perhaps because he intuited what the woman had left.

Roy said, “A photo of a cockroach, nailed to the wall.”

“Whack her hard,” Summerton said, and he hung up.

As Roy followed a long curve under drooping magnolia boughs, past a wrought-iron fence beyond which a replica of Tara stood spotlighted in the rain-swept darkness, he said, “Cease scrambling.”

The computer beeped to indicate compliance.

“Please connect,” he said, and recited the telephone number that would bring him into Mama’s arms.

The video display flickered. When Roy glanced at the screen, he saw the opening question: WHO GOES THERE?

Though the phone would react to vocal commands, Mama would not; therefore, Roy pulled off the narrow road and stopped in a driveway, before a pair of nine-foot-high wrought-iron gates, to type in his responses to the security interrogation. After the transmission of his thumbprint, he was granted access to Mama in Virginia.

From her basic menu, he chose FIELD OFFICES. From that submenu, he chose LOS ANGELES, and he was thereby connected to the largest of Mama’s babies on the West Coast.

He went through a few menus in the Los Angeles computer until he arrived at the files of the photo-analysis department. The file that interested him was currently in play, as he knew it would be, and he tapped in to observe.

The screen of his portable computer went to black and white, and then it filled with a photograph of a man’s head from the neck up. His face was half turned away from the camera, dappled with shadows, blurred by a curtain of rain.

Roy was disappointed. He had hoped for a clearer picture.

This was dismayingly like an impressionist painting: in general, recognizable; in specific, mysterious.

Earlier in the evening, in Santa Monica, the surveillance team had taken photographs of the stranger who had gone into the bungalow minutes prior to the SWAT team assault. The night, the heavy rain, and the overgrown trees that prevented the streetlamps from casting much light on the sidewalk — all conspired to make it difficult to get a clear look at the man. Furthermore, they had not been expecting him, had thought that he was only an ordinary pedestrian who would pass by, and had been unpleasantly surprised when he’d turned in at the woman’s house. Consequently, they had gotten precious few shots, none of quality, and none that revealed the full face of the mystery man, though the camera had been equipped with a telephoto lens.

The best of the photographs already had been scanned into the local-office computer, where it was being processed by an enhancement program. The computer would attempt to identify rain distortion and eliminate it. Then it would gradually lighten all areas of the shot uniformly, until it was able to identify biological structures in the deepest shadows that fell across the face; employing its extensive knowledge of human skull formation — with an enormous catalogue of the variations that occurred between the sexes, among the races, and among age groups — the computer would interpret the structures it glimpsed and develop them on a best-guess basis.

The process was laborious even at the lightning speed with which the program operated. Any photograph could ultimately be broken down into tiny dots of light and shadow called pixels: puzzle pieces that were identically shaped but varied subtly in texture and shading. Every one of the hundreds of thousands of pixels in this photograph had to be analyzed, to decipher not merely what it represented but what its undistorted relationship was to each of the many pixels surrounding it, which meant that the computer had to make hundreds of millions of comparisons and decisions in order to clarify the image.

Even then, there was no guarantee that the face finally rising from the murk would be an entirely accurate depiction of the man who had been photographed. Any analysis of this kind was as much an art — or guesswork — as it was a reliable technological process. Roy had seen instances in which a computer-enhanced portrait was as off the mark as any amateur artist’s paint-by-the-numbers canvas of the Arc de Triomphe or of Manhattan at twilight. However, the face that they eventually got from the computer most likely would be so close to the man’s true appearance as to be an exact likeness.

Now, as the computer made decisions and adjusted thousands of pixels, the image on the video display rippled from left to right. Still disappointing. Although changes had occurred, their effect was imperceptible. Roy was unable to see how the man’s face was any different from what it had been before the adjustment.

For the next several hours, the image on the screen would ripple every six to ten seconds. The cumulative effect could be appreciated only by checking it at widely spaced intervals.

Roy backed out of the driveway, leaving the computer plugged in and the VDT angled toward him.

For a while he chased his headlights up and down hills, around blind turns, searching for a way out of the folded darkness, where the tree-filtered lights of cloistered mansions hinted at mysterious lives of wealth and power beyond his understanding.

From time to time, he glanced at the computer screen. The rippling face. Half averted. Shadowy and strange.

When at last he found Sunset Boulevard again and then the lower streets of Westwood, not far from his hotel, he was relieved to be back among people who were more like himself than those who lived in the monied hills. In the lower lands, the citizens knew suffering and uncertainty; they were people whose lives he could affect for the better, people to whom he could bring a measure of justice and mercy — one way or another.

The face on the computer screen was still that of a phantom, amorphous and possibly malignant. The face of chaos.

The stranger was a man who, like the fugitive woman, stood in the way of order, stability, and justice. He might be evil or merely troubled and confused. In the end, it didn’t matter which.

“I’ll give you peace,” Roy Miro promised, glancing at the slowly mutating face on the video display terminal. “I’ll find you and give you peace.”

FIVE

While hooves of rain beat across the roof, while the troll-deep voice of the wind grumbled at the windows, and while the dog lay curled and dozing on the adjacent chair, Spencer used his computer expertise to try to build a file on Valerie Keene.

According to the records of the Department of Motor Vehicles, the driver’s license for which she’d applied had been her first, not a renewal, and to get it, she had supplied a Social Security card as proof of identity. The DMV had verified that her name and number were indeed paired in the Social Security Administration’s files.

That gave Spencer four indices with which to locate her in other databases where she was likely to appear: name, date of birth, driver’s license number, and Social Security number. Learning more about her should be a snap.

Last year, with much patience and cunning, he’d made a game of getting into all the major nationwide credit-reporting agencies — like TRW — which were among the most secure of all systems. Now, he wormed into the largest of those apples again, seeking Valerie Ann Keene.

Their files included forty-two women by that name, fifty-nine when the surname was spelled either “Keene” or “Keane,” and sixty-four when a third spelling—“Keen”—was added. Spencer entered her Social Security number, expecting to winnow away sixty-three of the sixty-four, but none had the same number as that in the DMV records.

Frowning at the screen, he entered Valerie’s birthday and asked the system to locate her with that. One of the sixty-four Valeries was born on the same day of the same month as the woman whom he was hunting — but twenty years earlier.

With the dog snoring beside him, he entered the driver’s license number and waited while the system cross-checked the Valeries. Of those who were licensed drivers, five were in California, but none had a number that matched hers. Another dead end.

Convinced that mistakes must have been made in the data entries, Spencer examined the file for each of the five California Valeries, looking for a driver’s license or date of birth that was one number different from the information he had gotten out of the DMV. He was sure he would discover that a data-entry clerk had typed a six when a nine was required or had transposed two numbers.

Nothing. No mistakes. And judging by the information in each file, none of those women could possibly be the right Valerie.

Incredibly, the Valerie Ann Keene who had recently worked at The Red Door was absent from credit-agency files, utterly without a credit history. That was possible only if she had never purchased anything on time payments, had never possessed a credit card of any kind, had never opened a checking or savings account, and had never been the subject of a background check by an employer or landlord.

To be twenty-nine years old without acquiring a credit history in modem America, she would have to have been a Gypsy or a jobless vagrant most of her life, at least since she’d been a teenager. Manifestly she had not been any such thing.

Okay. Think. The raid on her bungalow meant one kind of police agency or another was after her. So she must be a wanted felon with a criminal record.

Spencer returned along electronic freeways to the Los Angeles Police Department computer, through which he searched city, county, and state court records to see if anyone by the name of Valerie Ann Keene had ever been convicted of a crime or had an outstanding arrest warrant in those jurisdictions.

The city system flashed NEGATIVE on the video screen.

NO FILE, reported the county.

NOT FOUND, said the state.

Nothing, nada, zero, zip.

Using the LAPD’s electronic information-sharing arrangement with the FBI, he accessed the Washington-based Justice Department files of people convicted of federal offenses. She wasn’t included in those, either.

In addition to its famous ten-most-wanted list, the FBI was, at any given time, seeking hundreds of other people related to criminal investigations — either suspects or potential witnesses. Spencer inquired if her name appeared on any of those lists, but it did not.

She was a woman without a past.

Yet something that she’d done had made her a wanted woman. Desperately wanted.

Spencer did not get to bed until ten minutes past one o’clock in the morning.

Although he was exhausted, and although the rhythm of the rain should have served as a sedative, he couldn’t sleep. He lay on his back, staring alternately at the shadowy ceiling and at the thrashing foliage of the trees beyond the window, listening to the meaningless monologue of the blustery wind.

At first he could think of nothing but the woman. The look of her. Those eyes. That voice. That smile. The mystery.

In time, however, his thoughts drifted to the past, as they did too often, too easily. For him, reminiscence was a highway with one destination: that certain summer night when he was fourteen, when a dark world became darker, when everything he knew was proved false, when hope died and a dread of destiny became his constant companion, when he awakened to the cry of a persistent owl whose single inquiry thereafter became the central question of his own life.

Rocky, who was usually so well attuned to his master’s moods, was still restlessly pacing; he seemed to be unaware that Spencer was sinking into the quiet anguish of stubborn memory and that he needed company. The dog didn’t respond to his name when called.

In the gloom, Rocky padded restlessly back and forth between the open bedroom door (where he stood on the threshold and listened to the storm that huffed in the fireplace chimney) and the bedroom window (where he put his forepaws upon the sill and stared out at the rampage of the wind through the eucalyptus grove). Although he neither whined nor grumbled, he had about him an air of anxiety, as if the bad weather had blown an unwanted memory out of his own past, leaving him bedeviled and unable to regain the peace he had known while dozing on the chair in the living room.

“Here, boy,” Spencer said softly. “Come here.”

Unheeding, the dog padded to the door, a shadow among shadows.

Tuesday evening, Spencer had gone to The Red Door to talk about a night in July, sixteen years past. Instead, he met Valerie Keene and, to his surprise, talked of other things. That distant July, however, still haunted him.

“Rocky, come here.” Spencer patted the mattress.

A minute or so of further encouragement finally brought the dog onto the bed. Rocky lay with his head on Spencer’s chest, shivering at first but quickly soothed by his master’s hand. One ear up, one ear down, he was attentive to the story that he’d heard on countless nights like this, when he was the entire audience, and on nights when he accompanied Spencer into barrooms, where drinks were bought for strangers who would listen in an alcoholic haze.

“I was fourteen,” Spencer began. “It was the middle of July, and the night was warm, humid. I was asleep under just one sheet, with my bedroom window open so the air could circulate. I remember…I was dreaming about my mother, who’d been dead more than six years by then, but I can’t remember anything that happened in the dream, only the warmth of it, the contentment, the comfort of being with her…and maybe the music of her laughter. She had a wonderful laugh. But it was another sound that woke me, not because it was loud but because it was recurring — so hollow and strange. I sat up in bed, confused, half drugged with sleep, but not frightened at all. I heard someone asking ‘Who?’ again and again. There would be a pause, silence, but then it would repeat as before: ‘Who, who, who?’ Of course, as I came all the way awake, I realized it was an owl perched on the roof, just above my open window.”

Spencer was again drawn to that distant July night, like an asteroid captured by the greater gravity of the earth and doomed to a declining orbit that would end in impact.

…it’s an owl perched on the roof, just above my open window, calling out in the night for whatever reason owls call out.

In the humid dark, I get up from my bed and go to the bathroom, expecting the hooting to stop when the hungry owl takes wing and goes hunting for mice again. But even after I return to bed, he seems to be content on the roof and pleased by his one-word, one-note song.

Finally, I go to the open window and quietly slide up the double-hung screen, trying not to startle him into flight. But when I lean outside, turning my head to look up, half expecting to see his talons hooked over the shingles and curled in toward the eaves, another and far different cry arises before I can say “Shoo” or the owl can ask “Who.” This new sound is thin and bleak, a fragile wail of terror from a far place in the summer night. I look out toward the barn, which stands two hundred yards behind the house, toward the moonlit fields beyond the barn, toward the wooded hills beyond the fields. The cry comes again, shorter this time, but even more pathetic and therefore more piercing.

Having lived in the country since the day I was born, I know that nature is one great killing ground, governed by the cruelest of all laws — the law of natural selection — and ruled by the ruthless. Many nights, I’ve heard the eerie, quavery yawling of coyote packs chasing prey and celebrating slaughter. The triumphant shriek of a mountain lion after it has torn the life out of a rabbit sometimes echoes out of the highlands, a sound which makes it easy to believe that Hell is real and that the damned have flung open the gates.

This cry that catches my attention as I lean out the window — and that silences the owl on the roof — comes not from a predator but from prey. It’s the voice of something weak, vulnerable. The forests and fields are filled with timid and meek creatures, which live only to perish violently, which do so every hour of every day without surcease, whose terror may actually be noticed by a god who knows of every sparrow’s fall but seems unmoved.

Suddenly the night is profoundly quiet, uncannily still, as if the distant bleat of fear was, in fact, the sound of creation’s engines grinding to a halt. The stars are hard points of light that have stopped twinkling, and the moon might well be painted on canvas. The landscape — trees, shrubs, summer flowers, fields, hills, and far mountains — appears to be nothing but crystalized shadows in various dark hues, as brittle as ice. The air must still be warm, but I am nonetheless frigid.

I quietly close the window, turn away from it, and move toward the bed again. I feel heavy-eyed, wearier than I’ve ever been.

But then I realize that I’m in a strange state of denial, that my weariness is less physical than psychological, that I desire sleep more than I really need it. Sleep is an escape. From fear. I’m shaking but not because I’m cold. The air is as warm as it was earlier. I’m shaking with fear.

Fear of what? I can’t quite identify the source of my anxiety.

I know that the thing I heard was no ordinary wild cry. It reverberates in my mind, an icy sound that recalls something I’ve heard once before, although I can’t remember what, when, where. The longer the forlorn wail echoes in my memory, the faster my heart beats.

I desperately want to lie down, forget the cry, the night, the owl and his question, but I know I can’t sleep.

I’m wearing only briefs, so I quickly pull on a pair of jeans. Now that I’m committed to act, denial and sleep have no attraction for me. In fact, I’m in the grip of an urgency at least as strange as the previous denial. Bare-chested and barefoot, I’m drawn out of my bedroom by intense curiosity, by the sense of post-midnight adventure that all boys share — and by a terrible truth, which I don’t yet know that I know.

Beyond my door, the house is cool, because my room is the only one not air-conditioned. For several summers, I’ve closed the vents against that chill flow because I prefer the benefits of fresh air even on a humid July night…and because, for some years, I’ve been unable to sleep with the hiss and hum that the icy air makes as it rushes through the ductwork and seethes through the vanes in the vent grille. I’ve long been afraid that this incessant if subtle noise will mask some other sound in the night that I must hear in order to survive. I have no idea what that other sound would be. It’s a groundless and childish fear, and I’m embarrassed by it. Yet it dictates my sleeping habits.

The upstairs hallway is silvered with moonlight, which streams through a pair of skylights. Here and there along both walls, the polished-pine floor glimmers softly. Down the middle of the hall is an intricately patterned Persian runner, in which the curved and curled and undulant shapes absorb the radiance of the full moon and glow dimly with it: Hundreds of pale, luminous coelenterate forms seem to be not immediately under my feet but well below me, as if I am not on a carpet but am walking Christlike on the surface of a tidepool while gazing down at the mysterious denizens at the bottom.

I pass my father’s room. The door is closed.

I reach the head of the stairs, where I hesitate.

The house is silent.

I descend the stairs, quaking, rubbing my bare arms with my hands, wondering at my inexplicable fear. Perhaps even at that moment, I dimly realize that I am going down to a place from which I’ll never again quite be able to ascend….

With the dog as his confessor, Spencer spun his story all the way through that long-ago night, to the hidden door, to the secret place, to the beating heart of the nightmare. As he recounted the experience, step by barefoot step, his voice faded to a whisper.

When he finished, he was in a temporary state of grace that would burn away with the coming of the dawn, but it was even sweeter for being so tenuous and brief. Purged, he was at last able to close his eyes and know that dreamless sleep would come to him.

In the morning he would begin to search for the woman.

He had the uneasy feeling that he was walking into a living hell to rival the one that he had so often described to the patient dog. He could do nothing else. Only one acceptable road lay ahead of him, and he was compelled to follow it.

Now sleep.

Rain washed the world, and its susurration was the sound of absolution — though some stains could never be permanently removed.

SIX

In the morning, Spencer had a few tiny bruises and red marks on his face and hands, from the sting-grenade pellets. Compared with his scar, they would draw no comments.

For breakfast, he had English muffins and coffee at his desk in the living room while he hacked into the county tax collector’s computer. He discovered that the bungalow in Santa Monica, where Valerie had been living until the previous day, was owned by the Louis and Mae Lee Family Trust. Property tax bills were mailed in care of something called China Dream, in West Hollywood.

Out of curiosity, he requested a list of other properties — if any — owned by that trust. There were fourteen: five more homes in Santa Monica; a pair of eight-unit apartment buildings in Westwood; three single-family homes in Bel Air; and four adjacent commercial buildings in West Hollywood, including the address for China Dream.

Louis and Mae Lee had done all right for themselves.

After switching off the computer, Spencer stared at the blank screen and finished his coffee. It was bitter. He drank it anyway.

By ten o’clock, he and Rocky were heading south on the Pacific Coast Highway. Traffic passed him at every opportunity, because he obeyed the speed limit.

The storm had moved east during the night, taking every cloud with it. The morning sun was white, and in its hard light, the westward-tilting shadows had edges as sharp as steel blades. The Pacific was bottle green and slate gray.

Spencer tuned the radio to an all-news station. He hoped to hear a story about the SWAT-team raid the night before and to learn who had been in charge of it and why Valerie was wanted.

The news reader informed him that taxes were going up again. The economy was slipping deeper into recession. The government was further restricting gun ownership and television violence. Robbery, rape, and homicide rates were at all-time highs. The Chinese were accusing us of possessing “orbiting laser death rays,” and we were accusing them of the same. Some people believed that the world would end in fire; others said ice; both were testifying before Congress on behalf of competing legislative agendas designed to save the world.

When he found himself listening to a story about a dog show that was being picketed by protesters who were demanding an end to selective breeding and to the “exploitation of animal beauty in an exhibitionistic performance no less repugnant than the degrading of young women in topless bars,” Spencer knew that there would be no report of the incident at the bungalow in Santa Monica. Surely a SWAT-team operation would rate higher on any reporter’s agenda than unseemly displays of canine comeliness.

Either the media had found nothing newsworthy in an assault on a private home by cops with machine guns — or the agency conducting the operation had done a first-rate job of misdirecting the press. They had turned what should have been a public spectacle into what amounted to a covert action.

He switched off the radio and entered the Santa Monica Freeway. East by northeast, in the lower hills, the China Dream awaited them.

To Rocky, he said, “What’s your opinion of this dog-show thing?”

Rocky looked at him curiously.

“You’re a dog, after all. You must have an opinion. These are your people being exploited.”

Either he was a dog of extreme circumspection when it came to discussing current affairs or he was just a carefree, culturally disengaged mutt with no positions on the weightiest social issues of his time and species.

“I would hate to think,” Spencer said, “that you are a dropout, resigned to the status of a lumpen mammal, unconcerned about being exploited, all fur and no fury.”

Rocky peered forward at the highway again.

“Aren’t you outraged that purebred females are forbidden to have sex with mongrels like you, forced to submit only to purebred males? Just to make puppies destined for the degradation of showrings?”

The mutt’s tail thumped against the passenger door.

“Good dog.” Spencer held the steering wheel with his left hand and petted Rocky with his right. The dog submitted with pleasure. Thump-thump went the tail. “A good, accepting dog. You don’t even think it’s strange that your master talks to himself.”

They exited the freeway at Robertson Boulevard and drove toward the fabled hills.

After the night of rain and wind, the sprawling metropolis was as free of smog as the seacoast from which they had traveled. The palms, ficuses, magnolias, and early-blooming bottlebrush trees with red flowers were so green and gleaming that they appeared to have been hand-polished, leaf by leaf, frond by frond. The streets were washed clean, the glass walls of the tall buildings sparkled in the sunshine, birds wheeled across the piercingly blue sky, and it was easy to be deceived into believing that all was right with the world.

Thursday morning, while other agents used the assets of several law-enforcement organizations to search for the nine-year-old Pontiac that was registered to Valerie Keene, Roy Miro personally took charge of the effort to identify the man who had nearly been captured in the previous night’s operation. From his Westwood hotel, he drove into the heart of Los Angeles, to the agency’s California headquarters.

Downtown, the volume of office space occupied by city, county, state, and federal governments was rivaled only by the space occupied by banks. At lunchtime the conversation in the restaurants was more often than not about money — massive, raw slabs of money — whether the diners were from the political or the financial community.

In this opulent wallow, the agency owned a handsome ten-story building on a desirable street near city hall. Bankers, politicians, bureaucrats, and wine-swilling derelicts shared the sidewalks with mutual respect — except for those regrettable occasions when one of them suddenly snapped, screamed incoherent deprecations, and savagely stabbed one of his fellow Angelenos. The wielder of the knife (or gun or blunt instrument) frequently suffered delusions of persecution by extraterrestrials or the CIA and was more likely to be a derelict than a banker, or a politician, or a bureaucrat.

Just six months ago, however, a middle-aged banker had gone on a killing spree with two 9mm pistols. The incident had traumatized the entire society of downtown vagrants and had made them more wary of the unpredictable “suits” who shared the streets with them.

The agency’s building — clad in limestone, with acres of bronze windows as dark as any movie star’s sunglasses — did not bear the agency’s name. The people with whom Roy worked weren’t glory seekers; they preferred to function in obscurity. Besides, the agency that employed them did not officially exist, was funded by the clandestine redirection of money from other bureaus that were under the control of the Justice Department, and actually had no name itself.

Over the main entrance, the street address gleamed in polished copper numbers. Under the numbers were four names and one ampersand, also in copper: CARVER, GUNMANN, GARROTE & HEMLOCK.

A passerby, if he wondered about the building’s occupant, might think it was a partnership of attorneys or accountants. If he made inquiries of the uniformed guard in the lobby, he would be told that the firm was an “international property-management company.”

Roy drove down a ramp to the underground parking facility. At the bottom of the ramp, the way was barred by a sturdy steel gate.

He gained admittance neither by plucking a time-stamped ticket from an automatic dispenser nor by identifying himself to a guard in a booth. Instead, he stared directly into the lens of a high-definition video camera that was mounted on a post two feet from the side window of his car and waited to be recognized.

The image of his face was transmitted to a windowless room in the basement. There, Roy knew, a guard at a display terminal watched as the computer dropped everything out of the image except the eyes, enlarged them without compromising the high resolution, scanned the striation and vessel patterns of the retinas, compared them with on-file retinal patterns, and acknowledged Roy as one of the select.

The guard then pushed a button to raise the gate.

The entire procedure could have been accomplished without the guard — if not for one contingency against which precautions had to be taken. An operative bent on penetrating the agency might have killed Roy, cut out his eyes, and held them up to the camera to be scanned. While the computer conceivably could have been deceived, a guard surely would have noticed this messy ruse.

It was unlikely that anyone would go to such extremes to breach the agency’s security. But not impossible. These days, sociopaths of singular viciousness were loose in the land.

Roy drove into the subterranean garage. By the time he parked and got out of the car, the steel gate had clattered shut again. The dangers of Los Angeles, of democracy run amok, were locked out.

His footsteps echoed off the concrete walls and the low ceiling, and he knew that the guard in the basement room could hear them too. The garage was under audio as well as video surveillance.

Access to the high-security elevator was achieved by pressing his right thumb to the glass face of a print scanner. A camera above the lift doors gazed down at him, so the distant guard could prevent anyone from entering merely by placing a severed thumb to the glass.

No matter how smart machines eventually became, human beings would always be needed. Sometimes that thought encouraged Roy. Sometimes it depressed him, though he wasn’t sure why.

He rode the elevator to the fourth floor, which was shared by Document Analysis, Substance Analysis, and Photo Analysis.

In the Photo Analysis computer lab, two young men and a middle-aged woman were working at arcane tasks. They all smiled and said good morning, because Roy had one of those faces that encouraged smiles and familiarity.

Melissa Wicklun, their chief photo analyst in Los Angeles, was sitting at the desk in her office, which was in a corner of the lab. The office had no windows to the outside but featured two glass walls through which she could watch her subordinates in the larger room.

When Roy knocked on the glass door, she looked up from a file that she was reading. “Come in.”

Melissa, a blonde in her early thirties, was at the same time an elf and a succubus. Her green eyes were large and guileless — yet simultaneously smoky, mysterious. Her nose was pert — but her mouth was sensuous, the essence of all erotic orifices. She had large breasts, a slim waist, and long legs — but she chose to conceal those attributes in loose white blouses, white lab coats, and baggy chinos. In her scuffed Nikes, her feet were no doubt so feminine and delicate that Roy would have been delighted to spend hours kissing them.

He had never made a pass at her, because she was reserved and businesslike — and because he suspected that she was a lesbian. He had nothing against lesbians. Live and let live. At the same time, however, he was loath to reveal his interest only to be rejected.

Melissa said crisply, “Good morning, Roy.”

“How have you been? Good heavens, you know that I haven’t been in L.A., haven’t seen you since—”

“I was just examining the file.” Straight to business. She was never interested in small talk. “We have a finished enhancement.”

When Melissa was talking, Roy was never able to decide whether to look at her eyes or her mouth. Her gaze was direct, with a challenge that he found appealing. But her lips were so deliciously ripe.

She pushed a photograph across the desk.

Roy looked away from her lips.

The picture was a drastically improved, full-color version of the shot that he had seen on his attaché case computer terminal the night before: a man’s head from the neck up, in profile. Shadows still dappled the face, but they were lighter and less obscuring than they had been. The blurring screen of rain had been removed entirely.

“It’s a fine piece of work,” Roy said. “But it still doesn’t give us a good enough look at him to make an identification.”

“On the contrary, it tells us a lot about him,” Melissa said. “He’s between twenty-eight and thirty-two.”

“How do you figure?”

“Computer projection based on an analysis of lines radiating from the corner of his eye, percentage of gray in his hair, and the apparent degree of firmness of facial muscles and throat skin.”

“That’s projecting quite a lot from such few—”

“Not at all,” she interrupted. “The system makes analytic projections operating from a ten-megabyte database of biological information, and I’d pretty much bet the house on what it says.”

He was thrilled by the way her supple lips formed the words “ten-megabyte database of biological information.” Her mouth was better than her eyes. Perfect. He cleared his throat. “Well—”

“Brown hair, brown eyes.”

Roy frowned. “The hair, okay. But you can’t see his eyes here.”

Rising from her chair, Melissa took the photograph out of his hand and put it on the desk. With a pencil, she pointed to the beginning curve of the man’s eyeball as viewed from the side. “He’s not looking at the camera, so if you or I examined the photo under a microscope, we still wouldn’t be able to see enough of the iris to determine color. But even from an oblique perspective like this, the computer can detect a few pixels of color.”

“So he has brown eyes.”

“Dark brown.” She put down the pencil and stood with her left hand fisted on her hip, as delicate as a flower and as resolute as an army general. “Absolutely dark brown.”

Roy liked her unshakable self-confidence, the brisk certitude with which she spoke. And that mouth.

“Based on the computer’s analysis of his physical relationship to measurable objects in the photograph, he’s five feet eleven inches tall.” She clipped her words, so the facts came out of her with the staccato energy of bullets from a submachine gun. “He weighs one hundred and sixty-five, give or take five pounds. He’s Caucasian, clean-shaven, in good physical shape, recently had a haircut.”

“Anything else?”

From the file folder, Melissa removed another photograph. “This is him. From the front, straight on. His full face.”

Roy looked up from the new photo, surprised. “I didn’t know we got a shot like this.”

“We didn’t,” she said, studying the portrait with evident pride. “This isn’t an actual photograph. It’s a projection of what the guy ought to look like, based on what the computer can determine of his bone structure and fat-deposit patterns from the partial profile.”

“It can do that?”

“It’s a recent innovation in the program.”

“Reliable?”

“Considering the view the computer had to work with in this case,” she assured Roy, “there’s a ninety-four-percent probability that this face will precisely match the real face in any ninety of one hundred reference details.”

“I guess that’s better than a police artist’s sketch,” he said.

“Much better.” After a beat, she said, “Is something wrong?”

Roy realized that she had shifted her gaze from the computer portrait to him — and that he was staring at her mouth.

“Uh,” he said, looking down at the full portrait of the mystery man, “I was wondering…what’s this line across his right cheek?”

“A scar.”

“Really? You’re sure? From the ear to the point of the chin?”

“A major scar,” she said, opening a desk drawer. “Cicatricial welt — mostly smooth tissue, crimped here and there along the edges.”

Roy referred to the original profile shot and saw that a portion of the scar was there, although he had not correctly identified it. “I thought it was just a line of light between shadows, light from the streetlamp, falling across his cheek.”

“No.”

“It couldn’t be that?”

“No. A scar,” Melissa said firmly, and she took a Kleenex from a box in the open drawer.

“This is great. Makes for an easier ID. This guy seems to’ve had special-forces training, either military or paramilitary, and with a scar like this — it’s a good bet he was wounded while on duty. Badly wounded. Maybe badly enough that he was discharged or retired on psychological if not physical disability.”

“Police and military organizations keep records forever.”

“Exactly. We’ll have him in seventy-two hours. Hell, forty-eight.” Roy looked up from the portrait. “Thanks, Melissa.”

She was wiping her mouth with the Kleenex. She didn’t have to be concerned about smearing her lipstick, because she wasn’t wearing any. She didn’t need lipstick. It couldn’t improve her.

Roy was fascinated by the way in which her full and pliant lips compressed so tenderly under the soft Kleenex.

He realized that he was staring and that again she was aware of it. His gaze drifted up to her eyes.

Melissa blushed faintly, looked away from him, and threw the crumpled Kleenex in the waste can.

“May I keep this copy?” he asked, indicating the full-face computer-generated portrait.

Withdrawing a manila envelope from beneath the file folder on the desk, handing it to him, she said, “I’ve put five prints in here, plus two diskettes that contain the portrait.”

“Thanks, Melissa.”

“Sure.”

The warm pink blush was still on her cheeks.

Roy felt that he had penetrated her cool, businesslike veneer for the first time since he’d known her, and that he was in touch, however tenuously, with the inner Melissa, with the exquisitely sensuous self that she usually strove to conceal. He wondered if he should ask her for a date.

Turning his head, he looked through the glass walls at the workers in the computer lab, certain that they must be aware of the erotic tension in their boss’s office. All three seemed to be absorbed in their work.

When Roy turned to Melissa Wicklun again, prepared to ask her to dinner, she was surreptitiously wiping at one corner of her mouth with a fingertip. She tried to cover by spreading her hand across her mouth and faking a cough.

With dismay, Roy realized that the woman had misinterpreted his salacious stare. Apparently she thought that his attention had been drawn to her mouth by a smear or crumb of food left over, perhaps, from a mid-morning doughnut.

She had been oblivious of his lust. If she was a lesbian, she must have assumed that Roy knew as much and would have no interest in her. If she wasn’t a lesbian, perhaps she simply couldn’t imagine being attracted — or being an object of desire — to a man with round cheeks, a soft chin, and ten extra pounds on his waist. He had met with that prejudice before: looksism. Many women, brainwashed by a consumer culture that sold the wrong values, were interested only in men like those who appeared in advertisements for Marlboro or Calvin Klein. They could not understand that a man with the merry face of a favorite uncle might be kinder, wiser, more compassionate, and a better lover than a hunk who spent too much time at the gym. How sad to think that Melissa might be that shallow. How very sad.

“Can I help you with anything else?” she asked.

“No, this is fine. This is a lot. We’ll nail him with this.”

She nodded.

“I have to get down to the print lab, see if they got anything off that flashlight or bathroom window.”

“Yes, of course,” she said awkwardly.

He indulged in one last look at her perfect mouth, sighed, and said, “See you later.”

After he had stepped out of her office, closed the door behind him, and crossed two-thirds of the long computer lab, he looked back, half hoping that she would be staring wistfully after him. Instead, she was sitting at her desk again, holding a compact in one hand, examining her mouth in that small mirror.

China Dream was a West Hollywood restaurant in a quaint three-story brick building, in an area of trendy shops. Spencer parked a block away, left Rocky in the truck again, and walked back.

The air was pleasantly warm. The breeze was refreshing. It was one of those days when the struggles of life seemed worth waging.

The restaurant was not yet open for lunch. Nevertheless, the door was unlocked, and he went inside.

The China Dream indulged in none of the decor common to many Chinese restaurants: no dragons or foo dogs, no brass ideograms on the walls. It was starkly modern, pearl gray and black, with white linen on the thirty to forty tables. The only Chinese art object was a life-size, carved-wood statue of a gentle-faced, robed woman holding what appeared to be an inverted bottle or a gourd; it was standing just inside the door.

Two Asian men in their twenties were arranging flatware and wineglasses. A third man, Asian but a decade older than his coworkers, was rapidly folding white cloth napkins into fanciful, peaked shapes. His hands were as dexterous as those of a magician. All three men wore black shoes, black slacks, white shirts, and black ties.

Smiling, the oldest approached Spencer. “Sorry, sir. We don’t open for lunch until eleven-thirty.”

He had a mellow voice and only a faint accent.

“I’m here to see Louis Lee, if I may,” Spencer said.

“Do you have an appointment, sir?”

“No, I’m afraid not.”

“Can you please tell me what you wish to discuss with him?”

“A tenant who lives in one of his rental properties.”

The man nodded. “May I assume this would be Ms. Valerie Keene?”

The soft voice, smile, and unfailing politeness combined to project an image of humility, which was like a veil that made it more difficult to see, until now, that the napkin folder was also quite intelligent and observant.

“Yes,” Spencer said. “My name’s Spencer Grant. I’m a…I’m a friend of Valerie’s. I’m worried about her.”

From a pocket of his trousers, the man withdrew an object about the size — but less than the thickness — of a deck of cards. It was hinged at one end; unfolded, it proved to be the smallest cellular telephone that Spencer had ever seen.

Aware of Spencer’s interest, the man said, “Made in Korea.”

“Very James Bond.”

“Mr. Lee has just begun to import them.”

“I thought he was a restaurateur.”

“Yes, sir. But he is many things.” The napkin folder pushed a single button, waited while the seven-digit programmed number was transmitted, and then surprised Spencer again by speaking in neither English nor Chinese, but in French, to the person on the other end.

Collapsing the phone and tucking it into his pocket, the napkin folder said, “Mr. Lee will see you, sir. This way, please.”

Spencer followed him among the tables, to the right rear corner of the front room, through a swinging door with a round window in the center, into clouds of appetizing aromas: garlic, onions, ginger, hot peanut oil, mushroom soup, roasting duck, almond essence.

The immense and spotlessly clean kitchen was filled with ovens, cooktops, griddles, huge woks, deep fryers, warming tables, sinks, chopping blocks. Sparkling white ceramic tile and stainless steel dominated. At least a dozen chefs and cooks and assistants, dressed in white from head to foot, were busy at a variety of culinary tasks.

The operation was as organized and precise as the mechanism in an elaborate Swiss clock with twirling ballerina dolls, marching toy soldiers, prancing wooden horses. Reliably tick-tick-ticking along.

Spencer trailed his escort through another swinging door, into a corridor, past storage rooms and staff rest rooms, to an elevator. He expected to go up. In silence, they went down one floor. When the doors opened, the escort motioned for Spencer to exit first.

The basement was not dank and dreary. They were in a mahogany-paneled lounge with handsome teak chairs upholstered in teal fabric.

The receptionist at the teak and polished-steel desk was a man: Asian, totally bald, six feet tall, with broad shoulders and a thick neck. He was typing furiously at a computer keyboard. When he turned from the keyboard and smiled, his gray suit jacket stretched tautly across a concealed handgun in a shoulder holster.

He said, “Good morning,” and Spencer replied in kind.

“Can we go in?” asked the napkin folder.

The bald man nodded. “Everything’s fine.”

As the escort led Spencer to an inner door, an electrically operated deadbolt clacked open, triggered by the receptionist.

Behind them, the bald man began to type again. His fingers raced across the keys. If he could use a gun as well as he could type, he would be a deadly adversary.

Beyond the lounge, they followed a white corridor with a gray vinyl-tile floor. It served windowless offices on both sides. Most of the doors were open, and Spencer saw men and women — many but not all of them Asian — working at desks, filing cabinets, and computers just like office workers in the real world.

The door at the end of the hall led into Louis Lee’s office, which was another surprise. Travertine floor. A beautiful Persian carpet: mostly grays, lavender, and greens. Tapestry-covered walls. Early-nineteenth-century French furniture, with elaborate marquetry and ormolu. Leather-bound books in cases with glass doors. The large room was warmly but not brightly lighted by Tiffany floor and table lamps, some with stained-glass and some with blown-glass shades, and Spencer was sure that none was a reproduction.

“Mr. Lee, this is Mr. Grant,” said the escort.

The man who came out from behind the ornate desk was five feet seven, slender, in his fifties. His thick jet-black hair had begun to turn gray at the temples. He wore black wingtips, dark blue trousers with suspenders, a white shirt, a bow tie with small red polka dots against a blue background, and horn-rimmed glasses.

“Welcome, Mr. Grant.” He had a musical accent as European as it was Chinese. His hand was small, but his grip was firm.

“Thank you for seeing me,” Spencer said, feeling as disoriented as he might have felt if he had followed Alice’s white rabbit into this windowless, Tiffany-illumined hole.

Lee’s eyes were anthracite black. They fixed Spencer with a stare that penetrated him almost as effectively as a scalpel.

The escort and erstwhile napkin folder stood to one side of the door, his hands clasped behind him. He had not grown, but he now seemed as much of a bodyguard as the huge, bald receptionist.

Louis Lee invited Spencer to one of a pair of armchairs that faced each other across a low table. A nearby Tiffany floor lamp cast blue, green, and scarlet light.

Lee took the chair opposite Spencer and sat very erect. With his spectacles, bow tie, and suspenders, and with the backdrop of books, he might have been a professor of literature in the study of his home, near the campus of Yale or another Ivy League university.

His manner was reserved but friendly. “So you are a friend of Ms. Keene’s? Perhaps you went to high school together? College?”

“No, sir. I haven’t known her that long. I met her where she works. I’m a recent…friend. But I do care about her and…well, I’m concerned that something’s happened to her.”

“What do you think might have happened to her?”

“I don’t know. But I’m sure you’re aware of the SWAT-team raid on your house last night, the bungalow she was renting from you.”

Lee was silent for a moment. Then: “Yes, the authorities came to my own home last evening, after the raid, to ask about her.”

“Mr. Lee, these authorities…who were they?”

“Three men. They claimed to be with the FBI.”

“Claimed?”

“They showed me credentials, but they were lying.”

Frowning, Spencer said, “How can you be sure of that?”

“In my life, I’ve had considerable experience of deceit and treachery,” Lee said. He didn’t seem either angry or bitter. “I’ve developed a good nose for it.”

Spencer wondered if that was as much a warning as it was an explanation. Whichever the case, he knew that he was not in the presence of an ordinary businessman. “If they weren’t actually government agents—”

“Oh, I’m sure they were government agents. However, I believe the FBI credentials were simply a convenience.”

“Yes, but if they were with another bureau, why not flash their real ID?”

Lee shrugged. “Rogue agents, operating without the authority of their bureau, hoping to confiscate a cache of drug profits for their own benefit, would have reason to mislead with false ID.”

Spencer knew that such things had happened. “But I don’t…I can’t believe that Valerie is involved with drug peddling.”

“I’m sure she isn’t. If I’d thought so, I wouldn’t have rented to her. Those people are scum — corrupting children, ruining lives. Besides, although Ms. Keene paid her rent in cash, she wasn’t rolling in money. And she worked at a full-time job.”

“So if these weren’t, let’s say, rogue Drug Enforcement Administration operatives looking to line their own pockets with cocaine profits, and if they weren’t actually with the FBI — who were they?”

Louis Lee shifted slightly in his chair, still sitting erect but tilting his head in such a way that reflections of the stained glass Tiffany lamp painted both lenses of his spectacles and obscured his eyes. “Sometimes a government — or a bureau within a government — becomes frustrated when it has to play by the rules. With oceans of tax money washing around, with bookkeeping systems that would be laughable in any private enterprise, it’s easy for some government officials to fund covert organizations to achieve results that can’t be achieved through legal means.”

“Mr. Lee, do you read a lot of espionage novels?”

Louis Lee smiled thinly. “They’re not of interest to me.”

“Excuse me, sir, but this sounds a little paranoid.”

“It’s only experience speaking.”

“Then your life’s been even more interesting than I’d guess from appearances.”

“Yes,” Lee said, but didn’t elaborate. After a pause, with his eyes still hidden by the patterns of reflected color that glimmered in his eyeglasses, he continued: “The larger a government, the more likely it is to be riddled with such covert organizations — some small but some not. We have a very big government, Mr. Grant.”

“Yes, but—”

“Direct and indirect taxes require the average citizen to work from January until the middle of July to pay for that government. Then working men and women begin to labor for themselves.”

“I’ve heard that figure too.”

“When government grows so large, it also grows arrogant.”

Louis Lee did not seem to be a fanatic. No anger or bitterness strained his voice. In fact, although he chose to surround himself with highly ornamented French furniture, he had a calm air of Zen simplicity and a distinctly Asian resignation to the ways of the world. He seemed more of a pragmatist than a crusader.

“Ms. Keene’s enemies, Mr. Grant, are my enemies too.”

“And mine.”

“However, I don’t intend to make a target of myself — as you are doing. Last night, I didn’t express my doubt about their credentials when they presented themselves as FBI agents. That would not have been prudent. I was unhelpful, yes, but cooperatively unhelpful — if you know what I mean.”

Spencer sighed and slumped in his chair.

Leaning forward with his hands on his knees, his intense black eyes becoming visible again as the reflections of the lamp moved off his glasses, Lee said, “You were the man in her house last night.”

Spencer was surprised again. “How do you know anyone was there?”

“They were asking about a man she might have been living with. Your height, weight. What were you doing there, if I may ask?”

“She was late for work. I was worried about her. I went to her place to see if anything was wrong.”

“You work at The Red Door too?”

“No. I was waiting there for her.” That was all he chose to say. The rest was too complicated — and embarrassing. “What can you tell me about Valerie that might help me locate her?”

“Nothing, really.”

“I only want to help her, Mr. Lee.”

“I believe you.”

“Well, sir, then why not cooperate with me? What was on her renter’s application? Previous residence, previous jobs, credit references — anything like that would be helpful.”

The businessman leaned back, moving his small hands from his knees to the arms of his chair. “There was no renter’s application.”

“With as many properties as you have, sir, I’m sure whoever manages them must use applications.”

Louis Lee raised his eyebrows, which was a theatrical expression for such a placid man. “You’ve done some research on me. Very good. Well, in Ms. Keene’s case, there was no application, because she was recommended by someone at The Red Door who’s also a tenant of mine.”

Spencer thought of the beautiful waitress who appeared to be half Vietnamese and half black. “Would that be Rosie?”

“It would.”

“She was friends with Valerie?”

“She is. I met Ms. Keene and approved of her. She impressed me as a reliable person. That’s all I needed to know about her.”

Spencer said, “I’ve got to speak to Rosie.”

“No doubt she’ll be working again this evening.”

“I need to talk to her before this evening. Partly because of this conversation with you, Mr. Lee, I have the distinct feeling that I’m being hunted and that time may be running out.”

“I think that’s an accurate assessment.”

“Then I’ll need her last name, sir, and her address.”

Louis Lee was silent for so long that Spencer grew nervous. Finally: “Mr. Grant, I was born in China. When I was a child, we fled the Communists and emigrated to Hanoi, Vietnam, which was then controlled by the French. We lost everything — but that was better than being among the tens of millions liquidated by Chairman Mao.”

Although Spencer was unsure what the businessman’s personal history might have to do with his own problems, he knew there would be a connection and that it would soon become apparent. Louis Lee was Chinese but not inscrutable. Indeed, he was as direct, in his way, as was any rural New Englander.

“Chinese in Vietnam were oppressed. Life was hard. But the French promised to protect us from the Communists. They failed. When Vietnam was partitioned in nineteen fifty-four, I was still a young boy. Again we fled, to South Vietnam — and lost everything.”

“I see.”

“No. You begin to perceive. But you don’t yet see. Within a year, civil war began. In nineteen fifty-nine, my younger sister was killed in the street by sniper fire. Three years later, one week after John Kennedy promised that the United States would ensure our freedom, my father was killed by a terrorist bomb on a Saigon bus.”

Lee closed his eyes and folded his hands in his lap. He almost seemed to be meditating rather than remembering.

Spencer waited.

“By late April, nineteen seventy-five, when Saigon fell, I was thirty, with four children, my wife Mae. My mother was still alive, and one of my three brothers, two of his children. Ten of us. After six months of terror, my mother, brother, one of my nieces, and one of my sons were dead. I failed to save them. The remaining six of us…we joined thirty-two others in an attempt to escape by sea.”

“Boat people,” Spencer said respectfully, for in his own way he knew what it meant to be cut off from one’s past, adrift and afraid, struggling daily to survive.

Eyes still closed, speaking as serenely as if recounting the details of a walk in the country, Lee said: “In bad weather, pirates tried to board our vessel. Vietcong gunboat. Same as pirates. They would have killed the men, raped and killed the women, stolen our meager possessions. Eighteen of our thirty-eight perished attempting to repel them. One was my son. Ten years old. Shot. I could do nothing. The rest of us were saved because the weather grew so bad, so quickly — the gunboat withdrew to save itself. The storm separated us from the pirates. Two people were washed overboard in high waves. Leaving eighteen. When good weather returned, our boat was damaged, no engine or sails, no radio, far out on the South China Sea.”

Spencer could no longer bear to look at the placid man. But he was incapable of looking away.

“We were adrift six days in fierce heat. No fresh water. Little food. One woman and four children died before we crossed a sea-lane and were rescued by a U.S. Navy ship. One of the children who died of thirst was my daughter. I couldn’t save her. I wasn’t able to save anyone. Of the ten in my family who survived the fall of Saigon, four remained to be pulled from that boat. My wife, my remaining daughter — who was then my only child — one of my nieces. And me.”

“I’m sorry,” Spencer said, and those words were so inadequate that he wished he hadn’t spoken them.

Louis Lee opened his eyes. “Nine other people were rescued from that disintegrating boat, more than twenty years ago. As I did, they took American first names, and today all nine are partners with me in the restaurant, other businesses. I consider them my family also. We’re a nation unto ourselves, Mr. Grant. I am an American because I believe in America’s ideals. I love this country, its people. I do not love its government. I can’t love what I can’t trust, and I will never trust a government again, anywhere. That disturbs you?”

“Yes. It’s understandable. But depressing.”

“As individuals, as families, as neighbors, as members of one community,” Lee said, “people of all races and political views are usually decent, kind, compassionate. But in large corporations or governments, when great power accumulates in their hands, some become monsters even with good intentions. I can’t be loyal to monsters. But I will be loyal to my family, my neighbors, my community.”

“Fair enough, I guess.”

“Rosie, the waitress at The Red Door, was not one of the people on that boat with us. Her mother was Vietnamese, however, and her father was an American who died over there, so she is a member of my community.”

Spencer had been so mesmerized by Louis Lee’s story that he had forgotten the request that had triggered those grisly recollections. He wanted to talk to Rosie as soon as possible. He needed her last name and address.

“Rosie must not be any more involved in this than she is now,” Lee said. “She’s told these phony FBI men that she knows little about Ms. Keene, and I don’t want you to drag her deeper into this.”

“I only want to ask her a few questions.”

“If the wrong people saw you with her and identified you as the man at the house last night, they’d think Rosie was more than just a friend at work to Ms. Keene — though that is, in fact, all she was.”

“I’ll be discreet, Mr. Lee.”

“Yes. That is the only choice I’m giving you.”

A door opened softly, and Spencer turned in his armchair to see the napkin folder, his polite escort from the front door of the restaurant, returning to the room. He hadn’t heard the man leave.

“She remembers him. It’s arranged,” the escort told Louis Lee, as he approached Spencer and handed him a piece of notepaper.

“At one o’clock,” Louis Lee said, “Rosie will meet you at that address. It’s not her apartment — in case her place is being watched.”

The swiftness with which a meeting had been arranged, without a word between Lee and the other man, seemed magical to Spencer.

“She will not be followed,” Lee said, getting up from his chair. “Make sure that you are not followed, either.”

Also rising, Spencer said, “Mr. Lee, you and your family…”

“Yes?”

“Impressive.”

Louis Lee bowed slightly from the waist. Then, turning away and walking to his desk, he said, “One more thing, Mr. Grant.”

When Lee opened a desk drawer, Spencer had the crazy feeling that this soft-spoken, mild-looking, professorial gentleman was going to withdraw a silencer-equipped gun and shoot him dead. Paranoia was like an injection of amphetamines administered directly to his heart.

Lee came up with what appeared to be a jade medallion on a gold chain. “I sometimes give one of these to people who seem to need it.”

Half afraid that the two men would hear his heart thundering, Spencer joined Lee at the desk and accepted the gift.

It was two inches in diameter. Carved on one side was the head of a dragon. On the other side was an equally stylized pheasant.

“This looks too expensive to—”

“It’s only soapstone. Pheasants and dragons, Mr. Grant. You need their power. Pheasants and dragons. Prosperity and long life.”

Dangling the medallion from its chain, Spencer said, “A charm?”

“Effective,” Lee said. “Did you see the Quan Yin when you came in the restaurant?”

“Excuse me?”

“The wooden statue, by the front door?”

“Yes, I did. The woman with the gentle face.”

“A spirit resides in her and prevents enemies from crossing my threshold.” Lee was as solemn as when he’d recounted his escape from Vietnam. “She is especially good at barring envious people, and envy is second only to self-pity as the most dangerous of all emotions.”

“After a life like yours, you can believe in this?”

“We must believe in something, Mr. Grant.”

They shook hands.

Carrying the notepaper and the medallion, Spencer followed the escort out of the room.

In the elevator, recalling the brief exchange between the escort and the bald man when they had first entered the reception lounge, Spencer said, “I was scanned for weapons on the way down, wasn’t I?”

The escort seemed amused by the question but didn’t answer.

A minute later, at the front door, Spencer paused to study the Quan Yin. “He really thinks she works, keeps out his enemies?”

“If he thinks so, then she must,” said the escort. “Mr. Lee is a great man.”

Spencer looked at him. “You were in the boat?”

“I was only eight. My mother was the woman who died of thirst the day before we were rescued.”

“He says he saved no one.”

“He saved us all,” the escort said, and he opened the door.

On the sidewalk in front of the restaurant, half blinded by the harsh sunlight, jarred by the noise of the passing traffic and a jet overhead, Spencer felt as if he had awakened suddenly from a dream. Or had just plunged into one.

During the entire time he’d been in the restaurant and the rooms beneath it, no one had looked at his scar.

He turned and gazed through the glass door of the restaurant.

The man whose mother had died of thirst on the South China Sea now stood among the tables again, folding white cloth napkins into fanciful, peaked shapes.

The print lab, where David Davis and a young male assistant were waiting for Roy Miro, was one of four rooms occupied by Fingerprint Analysis. Image-processing computers, high-definition monitors, and more exotic pieces of equipment were provided in generous quantity.

Davis was preparing to develop latent fingerprints on the bathroom window that had been carefully removed from the Santa Monica bungalow. It lay on the marble top of a lab bench — the entire frame, with the glass intact and the corroded brass piano hinge attached.

“This one’s important,” Roy warned as he approached them.

“Of course, yes, every case is important,” Davis said.

“This one’s more important. And urgent.”

Roy disliked Davis, not merely because the man had an annoying name, but because he was exhaustingly enthusiastic. Tall, thin, storklike, with wiry blond hair, David Davis never merely walked anywhere but bustled, scurried, sprinted. Instead of just turning, he always seemed to spin. He never pointed at anything but thrust a finger at it. To Roy Miro, who avoided extremes of appearance and of public behavior, Davis was embarrassingly theatrical.

The assistant — known to Roy only as Wertz — was a pale creature who wore his lab coat as if it were the cassock of a humble novice in a seminary. When he wasn’t rushing off to fetch something for Davis, he orbited his boss with fidgety reverence. He made Roy sick.

“The flashlight gave us nothing,” David Davis said, flamboyantly whirling one hand to indicate a big zero. “Zero! Not even a partial. Crap. A piece of crap—that flashlight! No smooth surface on it. Brushed steel, ribbed steel, checked steel, but no smooth steel.”

“Too bad,” Roy said.

“Too bad?” Davis said, eyes widening as if Roy had responded to news of the Pope’s assassination with a shrug and a chuckle. “It’s as if the damned thing was designed for burglars and thugs — the official Mafia flashlight, for God’s sake.”

Wertz mumbled an affirmative, “For God’s sake.”

“So let’s do the window,” Roy said impatiently.

“Yes, we have big hopes for the window,” Davis said, his head bobbing up and down like that of a parrot listening to reggae music. “Lacquer. Painted with multiple coats of mustard-yellow lacquer to resist the steam from the shower, you see. Smooth.” Davis beamed at the small window that lay on the marble lab bench. “If there’s anything on it, we’ll fume it up.”

“The quicker the better,” Roy stressed.

In one corner of the room, under a ventilation hood, stood an empty ten-gallon fish tank. Wearing surgical gloves, handling the window by the edges, Wertz conveyed it to the tank. A smaller object would have been suspended on wires, with spring-loaded clips. The window was too heavy and cumbersome for that, so Wertz stood it in the tank, at an angle, against one of the glass walls. It just fit.

Davis put three cotton balls in a petri dish and placed the dish in the bottom of the tank. He used a pipette to transfer a few drops of liquid cyanoacrylate methyl ester to the cotton. With a second pipette, he applied a similar quantity of sodium hydroxide solution.

Immediately, a cloud of cyanoacrylate fumes billowed through the fish tank, up toward the ventilation hood.

Latent prints, left by small amounts of skin oils and sweat and dirt, were generally invisible to the naked eye until developed with one of several substances: powders, iodine, silver nitrate solution, ninhydrin solution — or cyanoacrylate fumes, which often achieved the best results on nonporous materials like glass, metal, plastic, and hard lacquers. The fumes readily condensed into resin on any surface but more heavily on the oils of which latent prints were formed.

The process could take as little as thirty minutes. If they left the window in the tank more than sixty minutes, so much resin might be deposited that print details would be lost. Davis settled on forty minutes and left Wertz to watch over the fuming.

Those were forty cruel minutes for Roy, because David Davis, a techno geek without equal, insisted on demonstrating some new, state-of-the-art lab equipment. With much gesticulating and exclaiming, his eyes as beady and bright as those of a bird, the technician dwelt on every mechanical detail at excruciating length.

By the time Wertz announced that the window was out of the fish tank, Roy was exhausted from being attentive to Davis. Wistfully, he recalled the Bettonfields’ bedroom the night before: holding lovely Penelope’s hand, listening to the Beatles. He’d been so relaxed.

The dead were often better company than the living.

Wertz led them to the photography table, on which lay the bathroom window. A Polaroid CU-5 was fixed to a rack over the table, lens downward, to take closeups of any prints that might be found.

The side of the window that was facing up had been on the inside of the bungalow, and the mystery man must have touched it when he escaped. The outside, of course, had been washed with rain.

Although a black background would have been ideal, the mustard-yellow lacquer should have been sufficiently dark to contrast with a friction-ridge pattern of white cyanoacrylate deposits. A close examination revealed nothing on either the frame or the glass itself.

Wertz switched off the overhead fluorescent panels, leaving the lab dark except for what little daylight leaked around the closed Levolor blinds. His pale face seemed vaguely phosphorescent in the murk, like the flesh of a creature that lived in a deep-sea trench.

“A little oblique light will make something pop up,” Davis said.

A halogen lamp, with a cone-shaped shade and a flexible metal cable for a neck, hung on a wall bracket nearby. Davis unhooked it, switched it on, and slowly moved it around the bathroom window, aiming the focused light at severe angles across the frame.

“Nothing,” Roy said impatiently.

“Let’s try the glass,” Davis said, angling light from first one direction then another, studying the pane as he’d studied the frame.

Nothing.

“Magnetic powder,” Davis said. “That’s the ticket.”

Wertz flicked on the fluorescent lights. He went to a supply cabinet and returned with a jar of magnetic powder and a magnetic applicator called a Magna-Brush, which Roy had seen used before.

Streamers of black powder flowed in rays from the applicator and stuck where there were traces of grease or oil, but loose grains were drawn back by the magnetized brush. The advantage of the magnetized over other fingerprint powders was that it did not leave the suspect surface coated with excess material.

Wertz covered every inch of the frame and pane. No prints.

“Okay, all right, fine, so be it!” Davis exclaimed, rubbing his long-fingered hands together, bobbing his head, happily rising to the challenge. “Shoot, we’re not stumped yet. Damned if we are! This is what makes the job fun.”

“If it’s easy, it’s for assholes,” Wertz said with a grin, obviously repeating one of their favorite aphorisms.

“Exactly!” Davis said. “Right you are, young master Wertz. And we are not just any assholes.”

The challenge seemed to have made them dangerously giddy.

Roy looked pointedly at his wristwatch.

While Wertz put away the Magna-Brush and jar of powder, David Davis pulled on a pair of latex gloves and carefully transferred the window to an adjoining room that was smaller than the main lab. He stood it in a metal sink and snatched one of two plastic laboratory wash bottles that stood on the counter, with which he washed down the lacquered frame and glass. “Methanol solution of rhodamine 6G,” Davis explained, as though Roy would know what that was or as if he might even keep it in his refrigerator at home.

Wertz came in just then and said, “I used to know a Rhodamine, lived in apartment 6G, just across the hall.”

“This smell like her?” Davis asked.

“She was more pungent,” Wertz said, and he laughed with Davis.

Nerd humor. Roy found it tedious, not funny. He supposed he should be relieved about that.

Trading the first wash bottle for the second, David Davis said, “Straight methanol. Washes away excess rhodamine.”

“Rhodamine always went to excess, and you couldn’t wash her away for weeks,” said Wertz, and they laughed again.

Sometimes Roy hated his job.

Wertz powered up a water-cooled argon ion laser generator that stood along one wall. He fiddled with the controls.

Davis carried the window to the laser-examination table.

Satisfied that the machine was ready, Wertz distributed laser goggles. Davis switched off the fluorescents. The only light was the pale wedge that came through the door from the adjoining lab.

Putting on his goggles, Roy crowded close to the table with the two technicians.

Davis switched on the laser. As the eerie beam of light played across the bottom of the window frame, a print appeared almost at once, limed in rhodamine: strange, luminescent whorls.

“There’s the sonofabitch!” Davis said.

“Could be anybody’s print,” Roy said. “We’ll see.”

Wertz said, “That one looks like a thumb.”

The light moved on. More prints magically glowed around the handle and the latch hasp in the center of the bottom member of the frame. A cluster: some partial, some smeared, some whole and clear.

“If I was a betting man,” Davis said, “I’d wager a bundle that the window had been cleaned recently, wiped with a cloth, which gives us a pristine field. I’d bet all these prints belong to the same person, were laid down at the same time, by your man last night. They were harder to detect than usual because there wasn’t much oil on his fingertips.”

“Yeah, that’s right, he’d just been walking in the rain,” Wertz said excitedly.

Davis said, “And maybe he dried his hands on something when he entered the house.”

“There aren’t any oil glands in the underside of the hand,” Wertz felt obliged to tell Roy. “Fingertips get oily from touching the face, the hair, other parts of the body. Human beings seem to be incessantly touching themselves.”

“Hey, now,” Davis said in a mock-stern voice, “none of that here, young master Wertz.”

They both laughed.

The goggles pinched the bridge of Roy’s nose. They were giving him a headache.

Under the lambent light of the laser, another print appeared.

Even Mother Teresa on powerful methamphetamines would have been stricken by depression in the company of David Davis and the Wertz thing. Nevertheless, Roy felt his spirits rise with the appearance of each new luminous print.

The mystery man would not be a mystery much longer.

SEVEN

The day was mild, though not warm enough for sunbathing. At Venice Beach, however, Spencer saw six well-tanned young women in bikinis and two guys in flowered Hawaiian swim trunks, all lying on big towels and soaking up the rays, goose-pimpled but game.

Two muscular, barefoot men in shorts had set up a volleyball net in the sand. They were playing an energetic game, with much leaping, whooping, and grunting. On the paved promenade, a few people glided along on roller skates and Rollerblades, some in swimwear and some not. A bearded man, wearing jeans and a black T-shirt, was flying a red kite with a long tail of red ribbons.

Everyone was too old for high school, old enough so they should have been at work on a Thursday afternoon. Spencer wondered how many were victims of the latest recession and how many were just perpetual adolescents who scammed a living from parents or society. California had long been home to a sizable community of the latter and, with its economic policies, had recently created the former in hordes to rival the affluent legions that it had spawned in previous decades.

On a grassy area adjacent to the sand, Rosie was sitting on a concrete-and-redwood bench, with her back to the matching picnic table. The feathery shadows of an enormous palm tree caressed her.

In white sandals, white slacks, and a purple blouse, she was even more exotic and strikingly beautiful than she had been in the moody Deco lighting at The Red Door. The blood of her Vietnamese mother and that of her African-American father were both visible in her features, yet she didn’t call to mind either of the ethnic heritages that she embodied. Instead, she seemed to be the exquisite Eve of a new race: a perfect, innocent woman made for a new Eden.

The peace of the innocent didn’t fill her, however. She looked tense and hostile as she stared out to sea, no less so when she turned and saw Spencer approaching. But then she smiled broadly when she saw Rocky. “What a cutie!” She leaned forward on the bench and made come-to-me motions with her hands. “Here, baby. Here, cutie.”

Rocky had been happily padding along, tail wagging, taking in the beach scene — but he froze when confronted by the reaching, cooing beauty on the bench. His tail slipped between his legs, fell still. He tensed and prepared to spring away if she moved toward him.

“What’s his name?” Rosie asked.

“Rocky. He’s shy.” Spencer sat on the other end of the bench.

“Come here, Rocky,” she coaxed. “Come here, you sweet thing.”

Rocky cocked his head and studied her warily.

“What’s wrong, cutie? Don’t you want to be cuddled and petted?”

Rocky whined. He dropped low on his front paws and wiggled his rear end, though he couldn’t bring himself to wag his tail. Indeed, he wanted to be cuddled. He just didn’t quite trust her.

“The more you come on to him,” Spencer advised, “the more he’ll withdraw. Ignore him, and there’s a chance he’ll decide you’re okay.”

When Rosie stopped coaxing and sat up straight again, Rocky was frightened by the sudden movement. He scrambled backward a few feet and studied her more warily than before.

“Has he always been this shy?” Rosie asked.

“Since I’ve known him. He’s four or five years old, but I’ve only had him for two. Saw one of those little spots the newspaper runs every Friday for the animal shelter. Nobody would adopt him, so they were going to have to put him to sleep.”

“He’s so cute. Anyone would adopt him.”

“He was a lot worse then.”

“You can’t mean he’d bite anyone. Not this sweetie.”

“No. Never tried to bite. He was too beaten down for that. He whined and trembled anytime you tried to approach him. When you touched him, he just sort of curled into a ball, closed his eyes, and whimpered, shivering like crazy, as if it hurt to be touched.”

“Abused?” she said grimly.

“Yeah. Normally, the people at the pound wouldn’t have featured him in the paper. He wasn’t a good prospect for adoption. They told me — when a dog’s as emotionally crippled as he was, it’s usually best not even to try to place him, just put him to sleep.”

Still watching the dog as he watched her, Rosie asked, “What happened to him?”

“I didn’t ask. Didn’t want to know. There are too many things in life I wish I’d never learned…’cause now I can’t forget.”

The woman looked away from the dog and met Spencer’s eyes.

He said, “Ignorance isn’t bliss, but sometimes…”

“…ignorance makes it possible for us to sleep at night,” she finished.

She was in her late twenties, perhaps thirty. She had been well out of infancy when bombs and gunfire shattered the Asian days, when Saigon fell, when conquering soldiers seized the spoils of war in drunken celebration, when the reeducation camps opened. Maybe as old as eight or nine. Pretty even then: silky black hair, enormous eyes. And far too old for the memories of those terrors ever to fade, as did the forgotten pain of birth and the night fears of the crib.

Last evening at The Red Door, when Rosie had said that Valerie Keene’s past was full of suffering, she hadn’t merely been guessing or expressing an intuition. She had meant that she’d seen a torment in Valerie that was akin to her own pain.

Spencer looked away from her and stared at the combers that broke gently on the shore. They cast an ever changing lacework of foam across the sand.

“Anyway,” he said, “if you ignore Rocky, he might come around. Probably not. But he might.”

He shifted his gaze to the red kite. It bobbed and darted on rising thermals, high in the blue sky.

“Why do you want to help Val?” she asked finally.

“Because she’s in trouble. And like you said yourself last night, she’s special.”

“You like her.”

“Yes. No. Well, not in the way you mean.”

“In what way, then?” Rosie asked.

Spencer couldn’t explain what he couldn’t understand.

He looked down from the red kite but not at the woman. Rocky was creeping past the far end of the bench, watching Rosie intently as she studiously ignored him. The dog was keeping well out of her reach in case she suddenly turned and snatched at him.

“Why do you want to help her?” Rosie pressed.

The dog was close enough to hear him.

Never lie to the dog.

As he had admitted in the truck last night, Spencer said, “Because I want to find a life.”

“And you think you can find it by helping her?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“I don’t know.”

The dog crept out of sight, circling the bench behind them.

Rosie said, “You think she’s part of this life you’re looking for. But what if she isn’t?”

He stared at the roller skaters on the promenade. They were gliding away from him, as if they were gossamer people blown by the wind, gliding, gliding away.

At last he said, “Then I’ll be no worse off than I am now.”

“And her?”

“I don’t want anything from her that she doesn’t want to give.”

After a silence, she said, “You’re a strange one, Spencer.”

“I know.”

“Very strange. Are you also special?”

“Me? No.”

“Special like Valerie?”

“No.”

“She deserves special.”

“I’m not.”

He heard stealthy sounds behind them, and he knew the dog was squirming on its belly, under the bench on the other side of the picnic table, under the table itself, trying to get closer to the woman, the better to detect and ponder her scent.

“She did talk to you quite a while Tuesday night,” Rosie said.

He said nothing, letting her make up her mind about him.

“And I saw…a couple of times…you made her laugh.”

He waited.

“Okay,” Rosie said, “since Mr. Lee called, I’ve been trying to remember anything Val said that might help you find her. But there’s not much. We liked each other right off, we got close pretty quickly. But mostly we just talked about work, about movies and books, about stuff in the news and things now, not about things in the past.”

“Where’d she live before she moved to Santa Monica?”

“She never said.”

“You didn’t ask? You think it might’ve been somewhere around Los Angeles?”

“No. She wasn’t familiar with the city.”

“She ever mention where she was born, where she grew up?”

“I don’t know why, but I think it was back east somewhere.”

“She ever tell you anything about her mom and dad, about having any brothers or sisters?”

“No. But when anyone was talking about family, she’d get this sadness in her eyes. I think maybe…her folks are all dead.”

He looked at Rosie. “You didn’t ask her about them?”

“No. It’s just a feeling.”

“Was she ever married?”

“Maybe. I didn’t ask.”

“For a friend, there’s a lot you didn’t ask.”

Rosie nodded. “Because I knew she couldn’t tell me the truth. I don’t have that many close friends, Mr. Grant, so I didn’t want to spoil our relationship by putting her in a position where she’d have to lie to me.”

Spencer put his right hand to his face. In the warm air, the scar felt icy under his fingertips.

The bearded man slowly reeled in the kite. That big red diamond blazed against the sky. Its tail of ribbons fluttered like flames.

“So,” Spencer said, “you sensed she was running from something?”

“I figured it might be a bad husband, you know, who beat her.”

“Do wives regularly run away, start their lives over from scratch, because of a bad husband, instead of just divorcing him?”

“They do in the movies,” she said. “If he’s violent enough.”

Rocky had slipped out from under the table. He appeared at Spencer’s side, having fully circled them. His tail was no longer between his legs, but he wasn’t wagging it, either. He watched Rosie intently as he continued to slink around to the front of the table.

Pretending to be unaware of the dog, Rosie said, “I don’t know if it helps…but from little things she said, I think she knows Las Vegas. She’s been there more than once, maybe a lot of times.”

“Could she have lived there?”

Rosie shrugged. “She liked games. She’s good at games. Scrabble, checkers, Monopoly…And sometimes we played cards — five-hundred rummy or two-hand pinochle. You should see her shuffle and deal out cards. She can really make them fly through her hands.”

“You think she picked that up in Vegas?”

She shrugged again.

Rocky sat on the grass in front of Rosie and stared at her with obvious yearning, but he remained ten feet away, safely out of reach.

“He’s decided he can’t trust me,” she said.

“Nothing personal,” Spencer assured her, getting to his feet.

“Maybe he knows.”

“Knows what?”

“Animals know things,” she said solemnly. “They can see into a person. They see the stains.”

“All Rocky sees is a beautiful lady who wants to cuddle him, and he’s going crazy because there’s nothing to fear but fear itself.”

As if he understood his master, Rocky whined pathetically.

“He sees the stains,” she said softly. “He knows.”

“All I see,” Spencer said, “is a lovely woman on a sunny day.”

“A person does terrible things to survive.”

“That’s true of everyone,” he said, though he sensed that she was talking to herself more than to him. “Old stains, long faded.”

“Never entirely.” She seemed no longer to be staring at the dog but at something on the far side of an invisible bridge of time.

Though he was reluctant to leave her in that suddenly strange mood, Spencer could think of nothing more to say.

Where the white sand met the grass, the bearded man cranked the reel in his hands and appeared to be fishing the heavens. The blood-red kite gradually descended, its tail snapping like a whip of fire.

Finally Spencer thanked Rosie for talking with him. She wished him luck, and he walked away with Rocky.

The dog repeatedly stopped to glance back at the woman on the bench, then scurried to catch up with Spencer. When they had covered fifty yards and were halfway to the parking lot, Rocky issued a short yelp of decision and bolted back to the picnic table.

Spencer turned to watch.

In the last few feet, the mutt lost courage. He skidded nearly to a halt and approached her with his head lowered timidly, with much shivering and tail wagging.

Rosie slipped off the bench onto the grass, and pulled Rocky into her arms. Her sweet, clean laughter trilled across the park.

“Good dog,” Spencer said quietly.

The muscular volleyball players took a break from their game to get a couple of cans of Pepsi out of a Styrofoam cooler.

Having reeled his kite all the way to the earth, the bearded man headed for the parking lot by a route that brought him past Spencer. He looked like a mad prophet: untrimmed; unwashed; with deeply set, wild blue eyes; a beaky nose; pale lips; broken, yellow teeth. On his black T-shirt, in red letters, were five words: ANOTHER BEAUTIFUL DAY IN HELL. He cast a fierce glance at Spencer, clutched his kite as if he thought every blackguard in creation wanted nothing more than to steal it, and stalked out of the park.

Spencer realized he had put a hand over his scar when the man had glanced at him. He lowered it.

Rosie was standing a few steps in front of the picnic table now, shooing Rocky away, apparently admonishing him not to keep his master waiting. She was beyond the reach of the palm shadows, in sunlight.

As the dog reluctantly left his new friend and trotted toward his master, Spencer was once again aware of the woman’s exceptional beauty, which was far greater than Valerie’s. And if it was the role of savior and healer that he yearned to fill, this woman most likely needed him more than the one he sought. Yet he was drawn to Valerie, not to Rosie, for reasons he could not explain — except to accuse himself of obsession, of being swept away by the fathomless currents of his subconscious, regardless of where they might take him.

The dog reached him, panting and grinning.

Rosie raised one hand over her head and waved good-bye.

Spencer waved too.

Maybe his search for Valerie Keene wasn’t merely an obsession. He had the uncanny feeling that he was the kite and that she was the reel. Some strange power — call it destiny — turned the crank, wound the line around the spool, drawing him inexorably toward her, and he had no choice in the matter whatsoever.

While the sea rolled in from faraway China and lapped at the beach, while the sunshine traveled ninety-three million miles through airless space to caress the golden bodies of the young women in their bikinis, Spencer and Rocky walked back to the truck.

With Roy Miro trailing after him at a more sedate pace, David Davis rushed into the main data processing room with the photographs of the two best prints on the bathroom window. He took them to Nella Shire, at one of the workstations. “One is clearly a thumb, clearly, no question,” Davis told her. “The other might be an index finger.”

Shire was about forty-five, with a face as sharp as that of a fox, frizzy orange hair, and green fingernail polish. Her half-walled cubicle was decorated with three photographs clipped from bodybuilding magazines: hugely pumped-up men in bikini briefs.

Noticing the musclemen, Davis frowned and said, “Ms. Shire, I’ve told you this is unacceptable. You must remove these pinups.”

“The human body is art.”

Davis was red-faced. “You know this can be construed as sexual harassment in the workplace.”

“Yeah?” She took the fingerprint photos from him. “By who?”

“By any male worker in this room, that’s by whom.”

“None of the men working here looks like these hunks. Until one of them does, nobody has anything to worry about from me.”

Davis tore one of the clippings from the cubicle wall, then another. “The last thing I need is a notation on my management record, saying I allowed harassment in my division.”

Although Roy believed in the law of which Nella Shire was in violation, he was aware of the irony of Davis worrying about his management record being soiled by a tolerance-of-harassment entry. After all, the nameless agency for which they worked was an illegal organization, answering to no elected official; therefore, every act of Davis’s working day was in violation of one law or another.

Of course, like nearly all of the agency’s personnel, Davis didn’t know that he was an instrument of a conspiracy. He received his paycheck from the Department of Justice and thought he was on their records as an employee. He had signed a secrecy oath, but he believed that he was part of a legal — if potentially controversial — offensive against organized crime and international terrorism.

As Davis tore the third pinup off the cubicle walls and wadded it in his fist, Nella Shire said, “Maybe you hate those pictures so much because they turn you on, which is something you can’t accept about yourself. Did you ever think of that?” She glanced at the fingerprint photos. “So what do you want me to do with these?”

Roy saw that David Davis had to struggle not to answer with the first thing that came to his mind.

Instead, Davis said, “We need to know whose prints these are. Go through Mama, get on-line with the FBI’s Automated Identification Division. Start with the Latent Descriptor Index.”

The Federal Bureau of Investigation had one hundred ninety million fingerprints on file. Though its newest computer could make thousands of comparisons a minute, a lot of time could be expended if it had to shuffle through its entire vast storehouse of prints.

With the help of clever software called the Latent Descriptor Index, the field of search could be drastically reduced and results achieved quickly. If they had been seeking suspects in a series of killings, they would have listed the prime characteristics of the crimes — the sex and age of each victim, the methods of murder, any similarities in the conditions of the corpses, the locations at which the bodies had been found — and the index would have compared those facts to the modus operandi of known offenders, eventually producing a list of suspects and their fingerprints. Then a few hundred — or even just a few — comparisons might be necessary instead of millions.

Nella Shire turned to her computer and said, “So give me the telltales, and I’ll create a three-oh-two.”

“We aren’t seeking a known criminal,” Davis said.

Roy said, “We think our man was in special forces, or maybe he had special-weapons-and-tactics training.”

“Those guys are all hardbodies, for sure,” Shire said, eliciting a scowl from David Davis. “Army, navy, marines, or air force?”

“We don’t know,” Roy said. “Maybe he was never in the service. Could have been with a state or local police department. Could have been a Bureau agent, as far as we know, or DEA or ATF.”

“The way this works,” Shire said impatiently, “is, I need to put in telltales that limit the field.”

A hundred million of the prints in the Bureau’s system were in criminal-history files, which left ninety million that covered federal employees, military personnel, intelligence services, state and local law-enforcement officers, and registered aliens. If they knew that their mystery man was, say, an ex-marine, they wouldn’t have to search most of those ninety million files.

Roy opened the envelope that Melissa Wicklun had given him a short while ago, in Photo Analysis. He took out one of the computer-projected portraits of the man they were hunting. On the back of it was the data that the photo-analysis software had deduced from the rain-veiled profile of the man at the bungalow the previous night.

“Male, Caucasian, twenty-eight to thirty-two,” Roy said.

Nella Shire typed swiftly. A list appeared on the screen.

“Five feet eleven inches tall,” Roy continued. “One hundred and sixty-five pounds, give or take five. Brown hair, brown eyes.”

He turned the photo over to stare at the full-face portrait, and David Davis bent down to look as well. “Severe facial scarring,” Roy said. “Right side. Beginning at the ear, terminating near the chin.”

“Was that sustained on duty?” David wondered.

“Probably. So a conditional telltale might be an honorable early discharge or even a service disability.”

“Whether he was discharged or disabled,” Davis said excitedly, “you can bet he was required to undergo psychological counseling. A scar like this — it’s a terrible blow to self-esteem. Terrible.”

Nella Shire swiveled in her chair, snatched the portrait out of Roy’s hand, and looked at it. “I don’t know…I think it makes him look sexy. Dangerous and sexy.”

Ignoring her, Davis said, “The government’s very concerned about self-esteem these days. A lack of self-esteem is the root of crime and social unrest. You can’t hold up a bank or mug an old lady unless you first think you’re nothing but a lowlife thief.”

“Yeah?” Nella Shire said, returning the portrait to Roy. “Well, I’ve known a thousand jerks who thought they were God’s best work.”

Davis said firmly, “Make psychological counseling a telltale.”

She added that item to her list. “Anything else?”

“That’s all,” Roy said. “How long is this going to take?”

Shire read through the list on the screen. “Hard to say. No more than eight or ten hours. Maybe less. Maybe a lot less. Could be, in an hour or two, I’ll have his name, address, phone number, and be able to tell you which side of his pants he hangs on.”

David Davis, still clutching a fistful of crumpled musclemen and worried about his management record, appeared offended by her remark.

Roy was merely intrigued. “Really? Maybe only an hour or two?”

“Why would I be jerking your chain?” she asked impatiently.

“Then I’ll hang around. We need this guy real bad.”

“He’s almost yours,” Nella Shire promised as she set to work.

At three o’clock they had a late lunch on the back porch while the long shadows of eucalyptuses crept up the canyon in the yellowing light of the westering sun. Sitting in a rocking chair, Spencer ate a ham-and-cheese sandwich and drank a bottle of beer. After polishing off a bowl of Purina, Rocky used his grin, his best sad-eyed look, his most pathetic whine, his wagging tail, and a master thespian’s store of tricks to cadge bits of the sandwich.

“Laurence Olivier had nothing on you,” Spencer told him.

When the sandwich was gone, Rocky padded down the porch steps and started across the backyard toward the nearest cluster of wild brush, characteristically seeking privacy for his toilet.

“Wait, wait, wait,” Spencer said, and the dog stopped to look at him. “You’ll come back with your coat full of burrs, and it’ll take me an hour to comb them all out. I don’t have time for that.”

He got up from the rocking chair, turned his back to the dog, and stared at the cabin wall while he finished the last of the beer.

When Rocky returned, they went inside, leaving the tree shadows to grow unwatched.

While the dog napped on the sofa, Spencer sat at the computer and began his search for Valerie Keene. From that bungalow in Santa Monica, she could have gone anywhere in the world, and he would have been as well advised to start looking in far Borneo as in nearby Ventura. Therefore, he could only go backward, into the past.

He had a single clue: Vegas. Cards. She can really make them fly through her hands.

Her familiarity with Vegas and her facility with cards might mean that she had lived there and earned her living as a dealer.

By his usual route, Spencer hacked into the main LAPD computer. From there he springboarded into an interstate police data-sharing network, which he had often used before, and bounced across borders into the computer of the Clark County Sheriff’s Department in Nevada, which had jurisdiction over the city of Las Vegas.

On the sofa, the snoring dog pumped his legs, chasing rabbits in his sleep. In Rocky’s case, the rabbits were probably chasing him.

After exploring the sheriff’s computer for a while and finding his way into — among other things — the department’s personnel records, Spencer finally discovered a file labeled NEV CODES. He was pretty sure he knew what it was, and he wanted in.

NEV CODES was specially protected. To use it, he required an access number. Incredibly, in many police agencies, that would be either an officer’s badge number or, in the case of office workers, an employee ID number — all obtainable from personnel records, which were not well guarded. He had already collected a few badge numbers in case he needed them. Now he used one, and NEV CODES opened to him.

It was a list of numerical codes with which he could access the computer-stored data of any government agency in the state of Nevada. In a wink he followed the cyberspace highway from Las Vegas to the Nevada Gaming Commission in Carson City, the capital.

The commission licensed all casinos in the state and enforced the laws and regulations that governed them. Anyone who wished to invest — or serve as an executive — in the gaming industry was required to submit to a background investigation and to be proved free of ties to known criminals. In the 1970s, a strengthened commission squeezed out most of the mobsters and Mafia front men who had founded Nevada’s biggest industry, in favor of companies like Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Hilton Hotels.

It was logical to suppose that other casino employees below management level — from pit bosses to cocktail waitresses — underwent similar although less exhaustive background checks and were issued ID cards. Spencer explored menus and directories, and in another twenty minutes, he found the records that he needed.

The data related to casino-employee work permits was divided into three primary files: Expired, Current, Pending. Because Valerie had been working at The Red Door in Santa Monica for two months, Spencer accessed the Expired list first.

In his rambles through cyberspace, he had seen few files so extensively cross-referenced as this one — and those others had been related to grave national defense matters. The system allowed him to search for a subject in the Expired category by means of twenty-two indices ranging from eye color to most recent place of employment.

He typed VALERIE ANN KEENE.

In a few seconds the system replied: UNKNOWN.

He shifted to the file labeled Current and typed in her name.

UNKNOWN.

Spencer tried the Pending file with the same result. Valerie Ann Keene was unknown to the Nevada gaming authorities.

For a moment he stared at the screen, despondent because his only clue had proved to be a dead end. Then he realized that a woman on the run was unlikely to use the same name everywhere she went and thereby make herself easy to track. If Valerie had lived and worked in Vegas, her name almost surely had been different then.

To find her in the file, Spencer would have to be clever.

While waiting for Nella Shire to find the scarred man, Roy Miro was in terrible danger of being dragooned into hours of sociable conversation with David Davis. He would almost rather have eaten a cyanide-laced muffin and washed it down with a big, frosty beaker of carbolic acid than spend any more time with the fingerprint maven.

Claiming not to have slept the night before, when in fact he had slept the innocent sleep of a saint after the priceless gift he had given to Penelope Bettonfield and her husband, Roy charmed Davis into offering the use of his office. “I insist, I really do, I will listen to no argument, none!” Davis said with considerable gesturing and bobbing of his head. “I’ve got a couch in there. You can stretch out on it, you won’t be inconveniencing me. I’ve got plenty of lab work to do. I don’t need to be at my desk today.”

Roy didn’t expect to sleep. In the cool dimness of the office, with the California sun banished by the tightly closed Levolors, he thought he would lie on his back, stare at the ceiling, visualize the nexus of his spiritual being — where his soul connected with the mysterious power that ruled the cosmos — and meditate on the meaning of existence. He pursued deeper self-awareness every day. He was a seeker, and the search for enlightenment was endlessly exciting to him. Strangely, however, he fell asleep.

He dreamed of a perfect world. There was no greed or envy or despair, because everyone was identical to everyone else. There was a single sex, and human beings reproduced by discreet parthenogenesis in the privacy of their bathrooms — though not often. The only skin color was a pale and slightly radiant blue. Everyone was beautiful in an androgynous way. No one was dumb, but no one was too smart, either. Everyone wore the same clothes and lived in houses that all looked alike. Every Friday evening, there was a planetwide bingo game, which everyone won, and on Saturdays—

Wertz woke him, and Roy was paralyzed by terror because he confused the dream and reality. Gazing up into the slug-pale, moon-round face of Davis’s assistant, which was revealed by a desk lamp, Roy thought that he himself, along with everyone else in the world, looked exactly like Wertz. He tried to scream but couldn’t find his voice.

Then Wertz spoke, bringing Roy fully awake: “Mrs. Shire’s found him. The scarred man. She’s found him.”

Alternately yawning and grimacing at the sour taste in his mouth, Roy followed Wertz to the data processing room. David Davis and Nella Shire were standing at her workstation, each with a sheaf of papers. In the fluorescent glare, Roy squinted with discomfort, then with interest, as Davis passed to him, page by page, computer printouts on which both he and Nella Shire commented excitedly.

“His name’s Spencer Grant,” Davis said. “No middle name. At eighteen, out of high school, he joined the army.”

“High IQ, equally high motivation,” Mrs. Shire said. “He applied for special-forces training. Army Rangers.”

“He left the army after six years,” Davis said, passing another printout to Roy, “used his service benefits to go to UCLA.”

Scanning the latest page, Roy said, “Majored in criminology.”

“Minored in criminal psychology,” said Davis. “Went to school year-round, kept a heavy class load, got a degree in three years.”

“Young man in a hurry,” Wertz said, apparently so they would remember that he was part of the team and would not, accidentally, step on him and crush him like a bug.

As Davis handed Roy another page, Nella Shire said, “Then he applied to the L.A. Police Academy. Graduated at the top of his class.”

“One day, after less than a year on the street,” Davis said, “he walked into the middle of a carjacking in progress. Two armed men. They saw him coming, tried to take the woman motorist hostage.”

“He killed them both,” Shire said. “The woman wasn’t scratched.”

“Grant get crucified?”

“No. Everyone felt these were righteous shootings.”

Glancing at another page that Davis handed to him, Roy said, “According to this, he was transferred off the street.”

“Grant has computer skills and high aptitude,” Davis said, “so they put him on a computer-crime task force. Strictly desk work.”

Roy frowned. “Why? Was he traumatized by the shootings?”

“Some of them can’t handle it,” Wertz said knowingly. “They don’t have the right stuff, don’t have the stomach for it, they just come apart.”

“According to the records from his mandatory therapy sessions,” Nella Shire said, “he wasn’t traumatized. He handled it well. He asked for the transfer, but not because he was traumatized.”

“Probably in denial,” Wertz said, “being macho, too ashamed of his weakness to admit to it.”

“Whatever the reason,” Davis said, “he asked for the transfer. Then, ten months ago, after putting in twenty-one months with the task force, he just up and resigned from the LAPD altogether.”

“Where’s he working now?” Roy asked.

“We don’t know that, but we do know where he lives,” David Davis said, producing another printout with a dramatic flourish.

Staring at the address, Roy said, “You’re sure this is our man?”

Shire shuffled her own sheaf of papers. She produced a high-resolution printout of a Los Angeles Police Department personnel fingerprint ID sheet while Davis provided the photos of the prints they had lifted from the frame of the bathroom window.

Davis said, “If you know how to make comparisons, you’ll see the computer’s right when it says they’re a perfect match. Perfect. This is our guy. No doubt about it, none.”

Handing another printout to Roy, Nella Shire said, “This is his most recent photo ID from the police records.”

Full-face and in profile, Grant bore an uncanny resemblance to the computer-projected portrait that had been given to Roy by Melissa Wicklun in Photo Analysis.

“Is this a recent photo?” Roy asked.

“The most recent the LAPD has on file,” Shire said.

“Taken a long time after the carjacking incident?”

“That would have been two and a half years ago. Yeah, I’m sure this picture is a lot more recent than that. Why?”

“The scar looks fully healed,” Roy noted.

“Oh,” Davis said, “he didn’t get the scar in that shootout, no, not then. He’s had it a long time, a very long time, had it when he entered the army. It’s from a childhood injury.”

Roy looked up from the picture. “What injury?”

Davis shrugged his angular shoulders, and his long arms flapped against his white lab coat. “We don’t know. None of the records tell us about it. They just list it as his most prominent identifying feature. ‘Cicatricial scar from right ear to point of chin, result of childhood injury.’ That’s all.”

“He looks like Igor,” Wertz said with a snicker.

“I think he’s sexy,” Nella Shire disagreed.

“Igor,” Wertz insisted.

Roy turned to him. “Igor who?”

“Igor. You remember — from those old Frankenstein movies, Dr. Frankenstein’s sidekick. Igor. The grisly old hunchback with the twisted neck.”

“I don’t care for that kind of entertainment,” Roy said. “It glorifies violence and deformity. It’s sick.” Studying the photo, Roy wondered how young Spencer Grant had been when he’d suffered such a grievous wound. Just a boy, apparently. “The poor kid,” he said. “The poor, poor kid. What quality of life could he have had with a face as damaged as that? What psychological burdens does he carry?”

Frowning, Wertz said, “I thought this was a bad guy, mixed up in terrorism somehow?”

“Even bad guys,” Roy said patiently, “deserve compassion. This man has suffered. You can see that. I need to get my hands on him, yes, and be sure that society’s safe from him — but he still deserves to be treated with compassion, with as much mercy as possible.”

Davis and Wertz stared uncomprehendingly.

But Nella Shire said, “You’re a nice man, Roy.”

Roy shrugged.

“No,” she said, “you really are. It makes me feel good to know there are men like you in law enforcement.”

The heat of a blush rose in Roy’s face. “Well, thank you, that’s very kind, but there’s nothing special about me.”

Because Nella was clearly not a lesbian, even though she was as much as fifteen years older than he, Roy wished that at least one feature about her was as attractive as Melissa Wicklun’s exquisite mouth. But her hair was too frizzy and too orange. Her eyes were too cold a blue, her nose and chin too pointed, her lips too severe. Her body was reasonably well proportioned but not exceptional in any regard.

“Well,” Roy said with a sigh, “I’d better pay a visit to this Mr. Grant, ask him what he was doing in Santa Monica last night.”

Sitting at the computer in his Malibu cabin but prowling deep into the Nevada Gaming Commission in Carson City, Spencer searched the file of current casino-worker permits by asking to be given the names of all card dealers who were female, between the ages of twenty-eight and thirty, five feet four inches tall, one hundred ten to one hundred twenty pounds, with brown hair and brown eyes. Those were sufficient parameters to result in a comparatively small number of candidates — just fourteen. He directed the computer to print the list of names in alphabetical order.

He started at the top of the printout and summoned the file on Janet Francine Arbonhall. The first page of the electronic dossier that appeared on the screen featured her basic physical description, the date on which her work permit had been approved, and a full-face photograph. She looked nothing like Valerie, so Spencer exited her file without reading it.

He called up another file: Theresa Elisabeth Dunbury. Not her.

Bianca Marie Haguerro. Not her, either.

Corrine Sense Huddleston. No.

Laura Linsey Langston. No.

Rachael Sarah Marks. Nothing like Valerie.

Jacqueline Ethel Mung. Seven down and seven to go.

Hannah May Rainey.

On the screen, Valerie Ann Keene appeared, her hair different from the way she had worn it at The Red Door, lovely but unsmiling.

Spencer ordered a complete printout of Hannah May Rainey’s file, which was only three pages long. He read it end to end while the woman continued to stare at him from the computer.

Under the Rainey name, she had worked for over four months of the previous year as a blackjack dealer in the casino of the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas. Her last day on the job had been November 26, not quite two and a half months ago, and according to the casino manager’s report to the commission, she had quit without notice.

They — whoever “they” might be — must have tracked her down on the twenty-sixth of November, and she must have eluded them as they were reaching out for her, just as she eluded them in Santa Monica.

In a corner of the parking garage beneath the agency’s building in downtown Los Angeles, Roy Miro had a final word with the three agents who would accompany him to Spencer Grant’s house and take the man into custody. Because their agency did not officially exist, the word “custody” was being stretched beyond its usual definition; “kidnapping” was a more accurate description of their intentions.

Roy had no problem with either term. Morality was relative, and nothing done in the service of correct ideals could be a crime.

They were all carrying Drug Enforcement Administration credentials, so Grant would believe that he was being taken to a federal facility to be questioned — and that upon arrival there, he would be permitted to call an attorney. Actually, he was more likely to see the Lord God Almighty on a golden airborne throne than anyone with a law degree.

Using whatever methods might be necessary to obtain truthful answers, they would question him about his relationship with the woman and her current whereabouts. When they had what they needed — or were convinced that they had squeezed out of him all that he knew — they would dispose of him.

Roy would conduct the disposal himself, releasing the poor scarred devil from the misery of this troubled world.

The first of the other three agents, Cal Dormon, wore white slacks and a white shirt with the logo of a pizza parlor stitched on the breast. He would be driving a small white van with a matching logo, which was one of many magnetic-mat signs that could be attached to the vehicle to change its character, depending on what was needed for any particular operation.

Alfonse Johnson was dressed in work shoes, khaki slacks, and a denim jacket. Mike Vecchio wore sweats and a pair of Nikes.

Roy was the only one of them in a suit. Because he had napped fully clothed on Davis’s couch, however, he didn’t fit the stereotype of a neat and well-pressed federal agent.

“All right, this isn’t like last night,” Roy said. They had all been part of the SWAT team in Santa Monica. “We need to talk to this guy.”

The previous night, if any of them had seen the woman, he would have cut her down instantly. For the benefit of any local police who might have shown up, a weapon would have been planted in her hand: a Desert Eagle.50 Magnum, such a powerful handgun that a shot from it would leave an exit wound as large as a man’s fist, a piece obviously meant solely for killing people. The story would have been that the agent had gunned her down in self-defense.

“But we can’t let him slip away,” Roy continued. “And he’s a boy with schooling, as well trained as any of you, so he might not just hold out his hands for the bracelets. If you can’t make him behave and he looks to be gone, then shoot his legs out from under him. Chop him up good if you have to. He isn’t going to need to walk again anyway. Just don’t get carried away — okay? Remember, we absolutely must talk to him.”

Spencer had obtained all the information of interest to him that was contained in the files of the Nevada Gaming Commission. He retreated along the cyberspace highways as far as the Los Angeles Police Department computer.

From there he linked with the Santa Monica Police Department and examined its file of cases initiated within the past twenty-four hours. No case could be referenced either by the name Valerie Ann Keene or by the street address of the bungalow that she had been renting.

He exited the case files and checked call reports for Wednesday night, because it was possible that SMPD officers had answered a call related to the fracas at the bungalow but had not given the incident a case number. This time, he found the address.

The last of the officer’s notations indicated why no case number had been assigned: ATF OP IN PROG. FED ASSERTED. Which meant: Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms operation in progress; federal jurisdiction asserted.

The local cops had been frozen out.

On the nearby couch, Rocky exploded from sleep with a shrill yelp, fell to the floor, scrambled to his feet, started to chase his tail, then whipped his head left and right in confusion, searching for whatever threat had pursued him out of his dream.

“Just a nightmare,” Spencer assured the dog.

Rocky looked at him doubtfully and whined.

“What was it this time — a giant prehistoric cat?”

The mutt padded quickly across the room and jumped up to plant his forepaws on a windowsill. He stared out at the driveway and the surrounding woods.

The short February day was drawing toward a colorful twilight. The undersides of the eucalyptuses’ oval leaves, which were usually silver, now reflected the golden light that poured through gaps in the foliage; they glimmered in a faint breeze, so it appeared as if the trees had been hung with ornaments for the Christmas season that was now more than a month past.

Rocky whined worriedly again.

“A pterodactyl cat?” Spencer suggested. “Huge wings and giant fangs and a purr loud enough to crack stone?”

Not amused, the dog dropped from the window and hurried into the kitchen. He was always like this when he woke abruptly from a bad dream. He would circle the house, from window to window, convinced that the enemy in the land of dreams was every bit as dangerous to him in the real world.

Spencer looked at the computer screen again.

ATF OP IN PROG. FED ASSERTED.

Something was wrong.

If the SWAT team that hit the bungalow the previous night had been composed of agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, why had the men who showed up at Louis Lee’s home in Bel Air been carrying FBI credentials? The former bureau was under the control of the United States Secretary of the Treasury, while the latter was ultimately answerable to the Attorney General — though changes in that structure were being contemplated. The different organizations sometimes cooperated in operations of mutual interest; however, considering the usual intensity of interagency rivalry and suspicion, both would have had representatives present at the questioning of Louis Lee or of anyone else from whom a lead might have been developed.

Grumbling to himself as if he were the White Rabbit running late for tea with the Mad Hatter, Rocky scampered out of the kitchen and hurried through the open door to the bedroom.

ATF OP IN PROG.

Something wrong…

The FBI was by far the more powerful of the two bureaus, and if it was interested enough to be on the scene, it would never agree to surrender all jurisdiction entirely to the ATF. In fact, there was legislation being written in Congress, at the request of the White House, to fold the ATF into the FBI. The cop’s note in the SMPD call report should have read: FBI/ ATF OP IN PROG.

Brooding about all that, Spencer retreated from Santa Monica to the LAPD, floated there a moment as he tried to decide if he was finished, then backed into the task-force computer, closing doors as he went, neatly cleaning up any traces of his invasion.

Rocky bolted out of the bedroom, past Spencer, to the living room window once more.

Home again, Spencer shut down his computer. He got up from the desk and went to the window to stand beside Rocky.

The tip of the dog’s black nose was against the glass. One ear up, one down.

“What do you dream about?” Spencer wondered.

Rocky whimpered softly, his attention fixed on the deep purple shadows and the golden glimmerings of the twilit eucalyptus grove.

“Fanciful monsters, things that could never be?” Spencer asked. “Or just…the past?”

The dog was shivering.

Spencer put one hand on the nape of Rocky’s neck and stroked him gently.

The dog glanced up, then immediately returned his attention to the eucalyptuses, perhaps because a great darkness was descending slowly over the shrinking twilight. Rocky had always been afraid of the night.

EIGHT

The fading light congealed into a luminous red scum across the western sky. The crimson sun was reflected by every microscopic particle of pollution and water vapor in the air, so it seemed as though the city lay under a thin mist of blood.

Cal Dormon retrieved a large pizza box from the back of the white van and walked toward the house.

Roy Miro was on the other side of the street from the van, having entered the block from the opposite direction. He got out of his car and quietly closed the door.

By now, Johnson and Vecchio would have made their way to the back of the house by neighboring properties.

Roy started across the street.

Dormon was halfway along the front walk. He didn’t have a pizza in the box, but a Desert Eagle.44 Magnum pistol equipped with a heavy-duty sound suppressor. The uniform and the prop were solely to allay suspicion if Spencer Grant happened to glance out a window just as Dormon was approaching the house.

Roy reached the back of the white van.

Dormon was at the front stoop.

Putting one hand across his mouth as if to muffle a cough, Roy spoke into the transmitter microphone that was clipped to his shirt cuff. “Count five and go,” he whispered to the men at the back of the house.

At the front door, Cal Dormon didn’t bother to ring the bell or knock. He tried the knob. The lock must have been engaged, because he opened the pizza box, let it fall to the ground, and brought up the powerful Israeli pistol.

Roy picked up his pace, no longer casual.

In spite of its high-quality silencer, the.44 emitted a hard thud each time it was fired. The sound wasn’t like gunfire, but it was loud enough to draw the attention of passersby if there had been any. The gun was, after all, a door-buster: Three quick rounds tore the hell out of the jamb and striker plate. Even if the deadbolt remained intact, the notch in which it had been seated was not a notch anymore; it was just a bristle of splinters.

Dormon went inside, with Roy behind him, and a guy in stocking feet was coming up from a blue vinyl Barcalounger, a can of beer in one hand, wearing faded jeans and a T-shirt, saying “Jesus Christ,” looking terrified and bewildered because the last bits of wood and brass from the door had just hit the living room carpet around him. Dormon drove him backward into the chair again, hard enough to knock the breath out of him, and the can of beer tumbled to the floor, rolled across the carpet, spewing gouts of foam.

The guy wasn’t Spencer Grant.

Holding his silencer-fitted Beretta in both hands, Roy quickly crossed the living room, went through an archway into a dining room, and then through an open door into a kitchen.

A blonde of about thirty was facedown on the kitchen floor, her head turned toward Roy, her left arm extended as she tried to recover a butcher knife that had been knocked out of her hand and that was an inch or two beyond her reach. She couldn’t move toward it, because Vecchio had a knee in the small of her back and the muzzle of his pistol against her neck, just behind her left ear.

“You bastard, you bastard, you bastard,” the woman squealed. Her shrill words were neither loud nor clear, because her face was jammed against the linoleum. And she couldn’t draw much breath with Vecchio’s knee in her back.

“Easy, lady, easy,” Vecchio said. “Be still, damn it!”

Alfonse Johnson was one step inside the back door, which must have been unlocked because they hadn’t needed to break it down. Johnson was covering the only other person in the room: a little girl, perhaps five, who stood with her back pressed into a corner, wide-eyed and pale, too frightened yet to cry.

The air smelled of hot tomato sauce and onions. On the cutting board were sliced green peppers. The woman had been making dinner.

“Come on,” Roy said to Johnson.

Together, they searched the rest of the house, moving fast. The element of surprise was gone, but momentum was still on their side. Hall closet. Bathroom. Girl’s bedroom: teddy bears and dolls, the closet door standing open, nobody there. Another small room: a sewing machine, a half-finished green dress on a dressmaker’s dummy, closet packed full, no place for anyone to hide. Then the master bedroom, closet, closet, bathroom: nobody.

Johnson said, “Unless that’s him in a blond wig on the kitchen floor…”

Roy returned to the living room, where the guy in the lounge chair was tilted as far back as he could go, staring into the bore of the.44 while Cal Dormon screamed in his face, spraying him with spittle: “One more time. You hear me, asshole? I’m asking just one more time — where is he?”

“I told you,” the guy said, “Jesus, nobody’s here but us.”

“Where’s Grant?” Dormon insisted.

The man was shaking as if the Barcalounger was equipped with a vibrating massage unit. “I don’t know him, I swear, never heard of him. So will you just, will you just please, will you point that cannon somewhere else?”

Roy was saddened that it was so often necessary to deny people their dignity in order to get them to cooperate. He left Johnson in the living room with Dormon and returned to the kitchen.

The woman was still flat on the floor, with Vecchio’s knee in her back, but she was no longer trying to reach the butcher knife. She wasn’t calling him a bastard anymore, either. Fury having given way to fear, she was begging him not to hurt her little girl.

The child was in the corner, sucking on her thumb. Tears tracked down her cheeks, but she made no sound.

Roy picked up the butcher knife and put it on the counter, out of the woman’s reach.

She rolled one eye to look up at him. “Don’t hurt my baby.”

“We aren’t going to hurt anyone,” Roy said.

He went to the little girl, crouched beside her, and said in his softest voice, “Are you scared, honey?”

She turned her eyes from her mother to Roy.

“Of course, you’re scared, aren’t you?” he said.

With her thumb stuck in her mouth, sucking fiercely, she nodded.

“Well, there’s no reason to be scared of me. I’d never hurt a fly. Not even if it buzzed and buzzed around my face and danced in my ears and went skiing down my nose.”

The child stared solemnly at him through tears.

Roy said, “When a mosquito lands on me and tries to take a bite, do I swat him? Noooooo. I lay out a tiny napkin for him, a teeny tiny little knife and fork, and I say, ‘No one in this world should go hungry. Dinner’s on me, Mr. Mosquito.’”

The tears seemed to be clearing from her eyes.

“I remember one time,” Roy told her, “when this elephant was on his way to a supermarket to buy peanuts. He was in ever so great a hurry, and he just ran my car off the road. Most people, they would have followed that elephant to the market and punched him right on the tender tip of his trunk. But did I do that? Noooooo. ‘When an elephant is out of peanuts,’ I told myself, ‘he just can’t be held responsible for his actions.’ However, I must admit I drove to that market after him and let the air out of the tires on his bicycle, but that was not done in anger. I only wanted to keep him off the road until he’d had time to eat some peanuts and calm down.”

She was an adorable child. He wished he could see her smile.

“Now,” he said, “do you really think I’d hurt anyone?”

The girl shook her head: no.

“Then give me your hand, honey,” Roy said.

She let him take her left hand, the one without a wet thumb, and he led her across the kitchen.

Vecchio released the mother. The woman scrambled to her knees and, weeping, embraced the child.

Letting go of the girl’s hand and crouching again, touched by the mother’s tears, Roy said, “I’m sorry. I abhor violence, I really do. But we thought a dangerous man was here, and we couldn’t very well just knock and ask him to come out and play. You understand?”

The woman’s lower lip quivered. “I…I don’t know. Who are you, what do you want?”

“What’s your name?”

“Mary. Mary Z-Zelinsky.”

“Your husband’s name?”

“Peter.”

Mary Zelinsky had a lovely nose. The bridge was a perfect wedge, all the lines straight and true. Such delicate nostrils. A septum that seemed crafted of finest porcelain. He didn’t think he had ever seen a nose quite as wonderful before.

Smiling, he said, “Well, Mary, we need to know where he is.”

“Who?” the woman asked.

“I’m sure you know who. Spencer Grant, of course.”

“I don’t know him.”

Just as she answered him, he looked up from her nose into her eyes, and he saw no deception there.

“I’ve never heard of him,” she said.

To Vecchio, Roy said, “Turn the gas off under that tomato sauce. I’m afraid it’s going to burn.”

“I swear I’ve never heard of him,” the woman insisted.

Roy was inclined to believe her. Helen of Troy could not have had a nose any finer than Mary Zelinsky’s. Of course, indirectly, Helen of Troy had been responsible for the deaths of thousands, and many others had suffered because of her, so beauty was no guarantee of innocence. And in the tens of centuries since the time of Helen, human beings had become masters at the concealment of evil, so even the most guileless-looking creatures sometimes proved to be depraved.

Roy had to be sure, so he said, “If I feel you’re lying to me—”

“I’m not lying,” Mary said tremulously.

He held up one hand to silence her, and he continued where he had been interrupted:

“—I might take this precious girl to her room, undress her—”

The woman closed her eyes tightly, in horror, as if she could block out the scene that he was so delicately describing for her.

“—and there, among the teddy bears and dolls, I could teach her some grown-up games.”

The woman’s nostrils flared with terror. Hers really was an exquisite nose.

“Now, Mary, look me in the eyes,” he said, “and tell me again if you know a man named Spencer Grant.”

She opened her eyes and met his gaze.

They were face-to-face.

He put one hand on the child’s head, stroked her hair, smiled.

Mary Zelinsky clutched her daughter with pitiful desperation. “I swear to God I never heard of him. I don’t know him. I don’t understand what’s happening here.”

“I believe you,” he said. “Rest easy, Mary. I believe you, dear lady. I’m sorry it was necessary to resort to such crudity.”

Though the tone of his voice was tender and apologetic, a tide of rage washed through Roy. His fury was directed at Grant, who had somehow hoodwinked them, not at this woman or her daughter or her hapless husband in the Barcalounger.

Although Roy strove to repress his anger, the woman must have glimpsed it in his eyes, which were ordinarily of such a kindly aspect, for she flinched from him.

At the stove, where he had turned off the gas under the sauce and under a pot of boiling water as well, Vecchio said, “He doesn’t live here anymore.”

“I don’t think he ever did,” Roy said tightly.

Spencer took two suitcases from the closet, considered them, put the smaller of the two aside, and opened the larger bag on his bed. He selected enough clothes for a week. He didn’t own a suit, a white shirt, or even one necktie. In his closet hung half a dozen pairs of blue jeans, half a dozen pairs of tan chinos, khaki shirts, and denim shirts. In the top drawer of the highboy, he kept four warm sweaters — two blue, two green — and he packed one of each.

While Spencer filled the suitcase, Rocky paced from room to room, standing worried sentry duty at every window he could reach. The poor mutt was having a hard time shaking off the nightmare.

Leaving his men to watch over the Zelinsky family, Roy stepped out of the house and crossed the street toward his car.

The twilight had darkened from red to deep purple. The streetlamps had come on. The air was still, and for a moment the silence was almost as deep as if he had been in a country field.

They were lucky that the Zelinskys’ neighbors had not heard anything to arouse suspicion.

On the other hand, no lights showed in the houses flanking the Zelinsky place. Many families in that pleasant middle-class neighborhood were probably able to maintain their standard of living only if both husband and wife held full-time jobs. In fact, in this precarious economy, with take-home pay declining, many were holding on by their fingernails even with two breadwinners. Now, at the height of the rush hour, two-thirds of the homes on both sides of the street were dark, untenanted; their owners were battling freeway traffic, picking up their kids at sitters and day schools that they could not easily afford, and struggling to get home to enjoy a few hours of peace before climbing back on the treadmill in the morning.

Sometimes Roy was so sensitive to the plight of the average person that he was brought to tears.

Right now, however, he could not allow himself to surrender to the empathy that came so easily to him. He had to find Spencer Grant.

In the car, after starting the engine and slipping into the passenger seat, he plugged in the attaché case computer. He married the cellular telephone to it.

He called Mama and asked her to find a phone number for Spencer Grant, in the greater L.A. area, and from the center of her web in Virginia, she began the search. He hoped to get an address for Grant from the phone company, as he had gotten one for the Bettonfields.

David Davis and Nella Shire would have left the downtown office for the day, so he couldn’t call there to rail at them. In any case, the problem wasn’t their fault, though he would have liked to place the blame on Davis — and on Wertz, whose first name was probably Igor.

In a few minutes, Mama reported that no one named Spencer Grant possessed a telephone, listed or unlisted, in the Los Angeles area.

Roy didn’t believe it. He fully trusted Mama. The problem wasn’t with her. She was as faultless as his own dear, departed mother had been. But Grant was clever. Too damned clever.

Roy asked Mama to search telephone-company billing records for the same name. Grant might have been listed under a pseudonym, but before providing service, the phone company had surely required the signature of a real person with a good credit history.

As Mama worked, Roy watched a car cruise past and pull into a driveway a few houses farther along the street.

Night ruled the city. To the far edge of the western horizon, twilight had abdicated; no trace of its royal-purple light remained.

The display screen flashed dimly, and Roy looked down at the computer on his lap. According to Mama, Spencer Grant’s name did not appear in telephone billing records, either.

First, the guy had gone back into his employment files in the LAPD computer and inserted the Zelinsky address, evidently chosen at random, in place of his own. And now, although he still lived in the L.A. area and almost certainly had a telephone, he had expunged his name from the records of whichever company — Pacific Bell or GTE — provided his local service.

Grant seemed to be trying to make himself invisible.

“Who the hell is this guy?” Roy wondered aloud.

Because of what Nella Shire had found, Roy had been convinced that he knew the man he was seeking. Now he suddenly felt that he didn’t know Spencer Grant at all, not in any fundamental sense. He knew only generalities, superficialities — but it was in the details where his damnation might lie.

What had Grant been doing at the bungalow in Santa Monica? How was he involved with the woman? What did he know?

Getting answers to those questions was of increasing urgency.

Two more cars disappeared into garages at different houses.

Roy sensed that his chances of finding Grant were diminishing with the passage of time.

Feverishly, he considered his options, and then went through Mama to penetrate the computer at the California Department of Motor Vehicles in Sacramento. In moments, a picture of Grant was on his display screen, one taken by the DMV specifically for a new driver’s license. All vital statistics were provided. And a street address.

“All right,” Roy said softly, as if to speak loudly would be to undo this bit of good luck.

He ordered and received three printouts of the data on the screen, exited the DMV, said good-bye to Mama, switched off the computer, and went back across the street to the Zelinsky house.

Mary, Peter, and the daughter sat on the living room sofa. They were pale, silent, holding hands. They looked like three ghosts in a celestial waiting room, anticipating the imminent arrival of their judgment documents, more than half expecting to be served with one-way tickets to Hell.

Dormon, Johnson, and Vecchio stood guard, heavily armed and expressionless. Without comment, Roy gave them printouts of the new address for Grant that he had gotten from the DMV.

With a few questions, he established that both Mary and Peter Zelinsky were out of work and on unemployment compensation. That was why they were at home, about to have dinner, when most neighbors were still in schools of steel fish on the concrete seas of the freeway system. They had been searching the want ads in the Los Angeles Times every day, applying for new jobs at numerous companies, and worrying so unrelentingly about the future that the explosive arrival of Dormon, Johnson, Vecchio, and Roy had seemed, on some level, not surprising but a natural progression of their ongoing catastrophe.

Roy was prepared to flash his Drug Enforcement Administration ID and to use every technique of intimidation in his repertoire to reduce the Zelinsky family to total submission and to ensure that they never filed a complaint, either with the local police or with the federal government. However, they were obviously already so cowed by the economic turmoil that had taken their jobs — and by city life in general — that Roy did not need to provide even phony identification.

They would be grateful to escape from this encounter with their lives. They would meekly repair their front door, clean up the mess, and probably conclude that they had been terrorized by drug dealers who had burst into the wrong house in search of a hated competitor.

No one filed complaints against drug dealers. Drug dealers in modern America were akin to a force of nature. It made as much sense — and was far safer — to file an angry complaint about a hurricane, a tornado, a lightning storm.

Adopting the imperious manner of a cocaine king, Roy warned them: “Unless you want to see what it’s like having your brains blown out, better sit still for ten minutes after we leave. Zelinsky, you have a watch. You think you can count off ten minutes?”

“Yes, sir,” Peter Zelinsky said.

Mary would not look at Roy. She kept her head down. He could not see much of her splendid nose.

“You know I’m serious?” Roy asked the husband, and was answered with a nod. “Are you going to be a good boy?”

“We don’t want any trouble.”

“I’m glad to hear that.”

The reflexive meekness of these people was a sorry comment on the brutalization of American society. It depressed Roy.

On the other hand, their pliability made his job a hell of a lot easier than it otherwise might have been.

He followed Dormon, Johnson, and Vecchio outside, and he was the last to drive away. He glanced repeatedly at the house, but no faces appeared at the door or at any of the windows.

A disaster had been narrowly averted.

Roy, who prided himself on his generally even temper, could not remember being as angry with anyone in a long time as he was with Spencer Grant. He couldn’t wait to get his hands on the guy.

Spencer packed a canvas satchel with several cans of dog food, a box of biscuit treats, a new rawhide bone, Rocky’s water and food bowls, and a rubber toy that looked convincingly like a cheeseburger in a sesame-seed bun. He stood the satchel beside his own suitcase, near the front door.

The dog was still checking the windows from time to time, but not as obsessively as before. For the most part, he had overcome the nameless terror that propelled him out of his dream. Now his fear was of a more mundane and quieter variety: the anxiety that always possessed him when he sensed that they were about to do something out of their daily routine, a wariness of change. He padded after Spencer to see if any alarming actions were being taken, returned repeatedly to the suitcase to sniff it, and visited his favorite corners of the house to sigh over them as though he suspected that he might never have the chance to enjoy their comforts again.

Spencer removed a laptop computer from a storage shelf above his desk and put it beside the satchel and suitcase. He’d purchased it in September, so he could develop his own programs while sitting on the porch, enjoying the fresh air and the soothing susurration of autumn breezes stirring the eucalyptus grove. Now it would keep him wired into the great American info network during his travels.

He returned to his desk and switched on the larger computer. He made floppy-disk copies of some of the programs he had designed, including the one that could detect the faint electronic signature of an eavesdropper on a phone line being used for a computer-to-computer dialogue. Another would warn him if, while he was hacking, someone began hunting him down with sophisticated trace-back technology.

Rocky was at a window again, alternately grumbling and whining softly at the night.

At the west end of the San Fernando Valley, Roy drove into hills and across canyons. He was not yet beyond the web of interlocking cities, but there were pockets of primordial blackness between the clustered lights of the suburban blaze.

This time, he would proceed with more caution than he had shown previously. If the address from the DMV proved to be the home of another family who, like the Zelinskys, had never heard of Spencer Grant, Roy preferred to find that out before he smashed down their door, terrorized them with guns, ruined the spaghetti sauce that was on the stove, and risked being shot by an irate homeowner who perhaps also happened to be a heavily armed fanatic of one kind or another.

In this age of impending social chaos, breaking into a private home — whether behind the authority of a genuine badge or not — was a riskier business than it had once been. The residents might be anything from child-molesting worshipers of Satan to cohabiting serial killers with cannibalistic tendencies, refrigerators full of body parts, and eating utensils prettily hand-carved out of human bones. On the cusp of the millennium, some damned strange people were loose out there in fun-house America.

Following a two-lane road into a dark hollow that was threaded with gossamer fog, Roy began to suspect he wouldn’t be confronted with an ordinary suburban house or with the simple question of whether or not it was occupied by Spencer Grant. Something else awaited him.

The blacktop became one lane of loose gravel, flanked by sickly palms that had not been trimmed in years and that sported long ruffs of dead fronds. At last it came to a gate in a chain-link fence.

The phony pizza-shop truck was already there; its red taillights were refracted by the thin mist. Roy checked his rearview mirror and saw headlights a hundred yards behind him: Johnson and Vecchio.

He walked to the gate. Cal Dormon was waiting for him.

Beyond the chain-link, in the headlight-silvered fog, strange machines moved rhythmically, in counterpoint to one another, like giant prehistoric birds bobbing for worms in the soil. Wellhead pumps. It was a producing oil field, of which many were scattered throughout southern California.

Johnson and Vecchio joined Roy and Dormon at the gate.

“Oil wells,” Vecchio said.

“Goddamned oil wells,” Johnson said.

“Just a bunch of goddamned oil wells,” Vecchio said.

At Roy’s direction, Dormon went to the van to get flashlights and a bolt cutter. It was not just a fake pizza-delivery truck, but a well-equipped support unit with all the tools and electronic gear that might be needed in a field operation.

“We going in there?” Vecchio asked. “Why?”

“There might be a caretaker’s cottage,” Roy said. “Grant might be an on-site caretaker, living here.”

Roy sensed that they were as anxious as he to avoid being made fools of twice in one evening. Nevertheless, they knew, as he did, that Grant had likely inserted a phony address in his DMV records and that the chance of finding him in the oil field was between slim and nil.

After Dormon snapped the gate chain, they followed the gravel lane, using their flashlights to probe between the seesawing pumps. In places, the previous night’s torrential rain had washed away the gravel, leaving mud. By the time they looped through the creaking-squeaking-clicking machinery and returned to the gate, without finding a caretaker, Roy had ruined his new shoes.

In silence, they cleaned off their shoes as best they could by shuffling their feet in the wild grass beside the lane.

While the others waited to be told what to do next, Roy returned to his car. He intended to link with Mama and find another address for Spencer snake-humping-crap-eating-piece-of-human-garbage Grant.

He was angry, which wasn’t good. Anger inhibited clear thinking. No problem had ever been solved in a rage.

He breathed deeply, inhaling both air and tranquility. With each exhalation, he expelled his tension. He visualized tranquility as a pale-peach vapor; he saw tension, however, as a bile-green mist that seethed from his nostrils in twin plumes.

From a book of Tibetan wisdom, he had learned this meditative technique of managing his emotions. Maybe it was a Chinese book. Or Indian. He wasn’t sure. He had explored many Eastern philosophies in his endless search for deeper self-awareness and transcendence.

When he got in the car, his pager was beeping. He unclipped it from the sun visor. In the message window he saw the name Kleck and a telephone number in the 714 area code.

John Kleck was leading the search for the nine-year-old Pontiac registered to “Valerie Keene.” If she’d followed her usual pattern, the car had been abandoned in a parking lot or along a city street.

When Roy called the number on the pager, the answering voice was unmistakably Kleck’s. He was in his twenties, thin and gangly, with a huge Adam’s apple and a face resembling that of a trout, but his voice was deep, mellifluous, and impressive.

“It’s me,” Roy said. “Where are you?”

The words rolled off Kleck’s tongue with sonorous splendor: “John Wayne Airport, down in Orange County.” The search had begun in L.A. but had been widening all day. “The Pontiac’s here, in one of the long-term parking garages. We’re collecting the names of the airline ticket agents working yesterday afternoon and evening. We’ve got photographs of her. Someone may remember selling her a ticket.”

“Follow through, but it’s a dead end. She’s too smart to dump the car where she made her next connection. It’s misdirection. She knows we can’t be sure, so we’ll have to waste time checking it out.”

“We’re also trying to talk to all the cabdrivers who worked the airport during that time. Maybe she didn’t fly out but took a taxi.”

“Better carry it one step further. She might have walked from the airport to one of the hotels around there. See if any doormen, parking valets, or bellmen remember her asking for a cab.”

“Will do,” Kleck said. “She’s not going to get far this time, Roy. We’re going to stay right on her ass.”

Roy might have been reassured by Kleck’s confidence and by the rich timbre of his voice — if he hadn’t known that Kleck looked like a fish trying to swallow a cantaloupe. “Later.” He hung up.

He married the phone to the attaché case computer, started the car, and linked with Mama in Virginia. He gave her a daunting task, even considering her considerable talents and connections: Search for Spencer Grant in the computerized records of water and power companies, gas companies, tax collectors’ offices; in fact, search the electronic files of every state, county, regional, and city agency, as well as those of any company regulated by any public agency in Ventura, Kern, Los Angeles, Orange, San Diego, Riverside, and San Bernardino Counties; furthermore, access customer records of every banking institution in California — their checking, savings, loan, and credit-card accounts; on a national level, search Social Security Administration and Internal Revenue Service files beginning with California and working eastward state by state.

Finally, after indicating that he would call in the morning for the results of Mama’s investigation, he closed the electronic door in Virginia. He switched off his computer.

The fog was growing thicker and the air chillier by the minute. The three men were still waiting for him by the gate, shivering.

“We might as well wrap it up for tonight,” Roy told them. “Get a fresh start in the morning.”

They looked relieved. Who knew where Grant might send them next?

Roy slapped their backs and gave them cheerful encouragement as they returned to their vehicles. He wanted them to feel good about themselves. Everyone had a right to feel good about himself.

In his car, reversing along the gravel to the two-lane blacktop, Roy breathed deeply, slowly. In with the pale-peach vapor of blessed tranquility. Out with the bile-green mist of anger, tension, stress. Peach in. Green out. Peach in.

He was still furious.

Because they had eaten a late lunch, Spencer drove across a long stretch of barren Mojave, all the way to Barstow, before pulling off Interstate 15 and stopping for dinner. At the drive-through window of a McDonald’s, he ordered a Big Mac, fries, and a small vanilla milkshake for himself. Rather than fuss with the cans of dog food in the canvas satchel, he also ordered two hamburgers and a large water for Rocky — then relented and ordered a second vanilla shake.

He parked at the rear of the well-lighted restaurant lot, left the engine running to keep the Explorer warm, and sat in the cargo area to eat, with his back against the front seat and legs stretched out in front of him. Rocky licked his chops in anticipation as the paper bags were opened and the truck filled with wonderful aromas. Spencer had folded down the rear seats before leaving Malibu, so even with the suitcase and other gear, he and the dog had plenty of room.

He opened Rocky’s burgers and put them on their wrappers. By the time Spencer had extracted his own Big Mac from its container and had taken a single bite, Rocky had wolfed down the meat patties that he’d been given and most of one bun, which was all the bread he wanted. He gazed yearningly at Spencer’s sandwich, and he whined.

“Mine,” Spencer said.

Rocky whined again. Not a frightened whine. Not a whine of pain. It was a whine that said oh-look-at-poor-cute-me-and-realize-how-much-I’d-like-that-hamburger-and-cheese-and-special-sauce-and-maybe-even-the-pickles.

“Do you understand the meaning of mine?”

Rocky looked at the bag of french fries in Spencer’s lap.

“Mine.”

The dog looked dubious.

“Yours,” Spencer said, pointing to the uneaten hamburger bun.

Rocky sorrowfully regarded the dry bun — then the juicy Big Mac.

After taking another bite and washing it down with some vanilla milkshake, Spencer checked his watch. “We’ll gas up and be back on the interstate by nine o’clock. It’s about a hundred and sixty miles to Las Vegas. Even without pushing hard, we can make it by midnight.”

Rocky was fixated on the french fries again.

Spencer relented and dropped four of them onto one of the burger wrappers. “You ever been to Vegas?” he asked.

The four fries had vanished. Rocky stared longingly at the others that bristled from the bag in his master’s lap.

“It’s a tough town. And I’ve got a bad feeling that things are going to get nasty for us real fast once we get there.”

Spencer finished his sandwich, fries, and milkshake, sharing no more of anything in spite of the mutt’s reproachful expression. He gathered up the paper debris and put it in one of the bags.

“I want to make this clear to you, pal. Whoever’s after her — they’re damned powerful. Dangerous. Trigger-happy, on edge — the way they shot at shadows last night. Must be a lot at stake for them.”

Spencer took the lid off the second vanilla milkshake, and the dog cocked his head with interest.

“See what I saved for you? Now, aren’t you ashamed for thinking bad thoughts about me when I wouldn’t give you more fries?”

Spencer held the container so Rocky wouldn’t tip it over.

The dog attacked the milkshake with the fastest tongue west of Kansas City, consuming it in a frenzy of lapping, and in seconds his snout went deep into the cup in quest of the swiftly vanishing treat.

“If they had that house under observation last night, maybe they have a photograph of me.”

Withdrawing from the cup, Rocky stared curiously at Spencer. The mutt’s snout was smeared with milkshake.

“You have disgusting table manners.”

Rocky stuck his snout back in the cup, and the Explorer was filled with the slurping noises of canine gluttony.

“If they have a photo, they’ll find me eventually. And trying to get a lead on Valerie by going back into her past, I’m liable to blunder across a tripwire and call attention to myself.”

The cup was empty, and Rocky was no longer interested in it. With an amazing extended rotation of his tongue, he licked most of the mess off his snout.

“Whoever she’s up against, I’m the world’s biggest fool to think I can handle them. I know that. I’m acutely aware of that. But here I am, on my way to Vegas, just the same.”

Rocky hacked. Milkshake residue was cloying in his throat.

Spencer opened the cup of water and held it while the dog drank.

“What I’m doing, getting involved like this…it’s not really fair to you. I’m aware of that too.”

Rocky wanted no more water. His entire muzzle was dripping.

After capping the cup again, Spencer put it in the bag of trash. He picked up a handful of paper napkins and took Rocky by the collar.

“Come here, slob.”

Rocky patiently allowed his snout and chin to be blotted dry.

Eye-to-eye with the dog, Spencer said, “You’re the best friend I have. Do you know that? Of course, you know. I’m the best friend you have too. And if I get myself killed — who’ll take care of you?”

The dog solemnly met Spencer’s gaze, as if aware that the issue at hand was important.

“Don’t tell me you can take care of yourself. You’re better than when I took you in — but you’re not self-sufficient yet. You probably never will be.”

The dog chuffed as if to disagree, but they both knew the truth.

“If anything happens to me, I think you’ll come apart. Revert. Be like you were in the pound. And who else will ever give you the time and attention you’ll need to come back again? Hmmm? Nobody.”

He let go of the collar.

“So I want you to know I’m not as good a friend to you as I ought to be. I want to have a chance with this woman. I want to find out if she’s special enough to care about…about someone like me. I’m willing to risk my life to find that out…but I shouldn’t be willing to risk yours too.”

Never lie to the dog.

“I don’t have it in me to be as faithful a friend as you can be. I’m just a human being, after all. Look deep enough inside any of us, you’ll find a selfish bastard.”

Rocky wagged his tail.

“Stop that. Are you trying to make me feel even worse?”

With his tail swishing furiously back and forth, Rocky clambered into Spencer’s lap to be petted.

Spencer sighed. “Well, I’ll just have to avoid getting killed.”

Never lie to the dog.

“Though I think the odds are against me,” he added.

In the suburban maze of the valley once more, Roy Miro cruised through a series of commercial districts, unsure where one community ended and the next began. He was still angry but also on the edge of a depression. With increasing desperation, he sought a convenience store, where he could expect to find a full array of newspaper-vending machines. He needed a special newspaper.

Interestingly, in two widely separated neighborhoods, he passed what he was certain were two sophisticated surveillance operations.

The first was being conducted out of a tricked-up van with an extended wheelbase and chrome-plated wire wheels. The side of the vehicle had been decorated with an airbrush mural of palm trees, waves breaking on a beach, and a red sunset. Two surfboards were strapped to the luggage rack on the roof. To the uninitiated, it might appear to belong to a surf Gypsy who’d won the lottery.

The clues to the van’s real purpose were apparent to Roy. All glass on the vehicle, including the windshield, was heavily tinted, but two large windows on the side, around which the mural wrapped, were so black that they had to be two-way mirrors disguised with a layer of tinted film on the exterior, making it impossible to see inside, but providing agents in the van — and their video cameras — a clear view of the world beyond. Four spotlights were side by side on the roof, above the windshield; none was lit, but each bulb was seated in a cone-shaped fixture, like a small megaphone, which might have been a reflector that focused the beam forward — although, in fact, it was no such thing. One cone would be the antenna for a microwave transceiver linked to computers inside the van, allowing high volumes of encoded data to be received and sent from — or to — more than one communicant at a time. The remaining three cones were collection dishes for directional microphones.

One unlit spotlight was turned not toward the front of the van, as it should have been and as the other three were, but toward a busy sandwich shop — Submarine Dive — across the street. The agents were recording the jumble of conversations among the eight or ten people socializing on the sidewalk in front of the place. Later, a computer would analyze the host of voices: It would isolate each speaker, identify him with a number, associate one number to another based on word flow and inflection, delete most background noise such as traffic and wind, and record each conversation as a separate track.

The second surveillance operation was a mile from the first, on a cross street. It was being run out of a van disguised as a commercial vehicle that supposedly belonged to a glass-and-mirror company called Jerry’s Glass Magic. Two-way mirrors were featured boldly on the side, incorporated into the fictitious company’s logo.

Roy was always gladdened to see surveillance teams, especially super — high-tech units, because they were likely to be federal rather than local. Their discreet presence indicated that somebody cared about social stability and peace in the streets.

When he saw them, he usually felt safer — and less alone.

Tonight, however, his spirits were not lifted. Tonight, he was caught in a whirlpool of negative emotions. Tonight, he could not find solace in the surveillance teams, in the good work he was doing for Thomas Summerton, or in anything else that this world had to offer.

He needed to locate his center, open the door in his soul, and stand face-to-face with the cosmic.

Before he spotted a 7-Eleven or any other convenience store, Roy saw a post office, which had what he needed. In front of it were ten or twelve battered newspaper-vending machines.

He parked at a red curb, left the car, and checked the machines. He wasn’t interested in the Times or the Daily News. What he required could be found only in the alternative press. Most such publications sold sex: focusing on swinging singles, mate-swapping couples, gays — or on adult entertainment and services. He ignored the salacious tabloids. Sex would never suffice when the soul sought transcendence.

Many large cities supported a weekly New Age newspaper that reported on natural foods, holistic healing, and spiritual matters ranging from reincarnation therapy to spirit channeling.

Los Angeles had three.

Roy bought them all and returned to the car.

By the dim glow of the ceiling light, he flipped through each publication, scanning only the space ads and classifieds. Gurus, swamis, psychics, Tarot-card readers, acupuncturists, herbalists to movie stars, channelers, aura interpreters, palm readers, chaos-theory dice counselors, past-life guides, high-colonic therapists, and other specialists offered their services in heartening numbers.

Roy lived in Washington, D.C., but his work took him all over the country. He had visited all the sacred places where the land, like a giant battery, accumulated vast stores of spiritual energy: Santa Fe, Taos, Woodstock, Key West, Spirit Lake, Meteor Crater, and others. He’d had moving experiences in those hallowed confluences of cosmic energy — yet he had long suspected that Los Angeles was an undiscovered nexus as powerful as any. Now, the sheer plenitude of consciousness-raising guides in the ads strengthened his suspicion.

From the myriad choices, Roy selected The Place Of The Way in Burbank. He was intrigued that they had capitalized every word in the name of their establishment, instead of using lowercase for the preposition and second article. They offered numerous methods for “seeking the self and finding the eye of the universal storm,” not from a shabby storefront but “from the peaceful sphere of our home.” He also liked the proprietors’ names — and that they were thoughtful enough to identify themselves in their ad: Guinevere and Chester.

He checked his watch. Past nine o’clock.

Still parked illegally in front of the post office, he called the number in the ad. A man answered: “This is Chester at The Place Of The Way. How may I assist you?”

Roy apologized for calling at that hour, since The Place Of The Way was located in their home, but he explained that he was slipping into a spiritual void and needed to find firm ground as quickly as possible. He was grateful to be assured that Chester and Guinevere fulfilled their mission at all hours. After he received directions, he estimated that he could be at their door by ten o’clock.

He arrived at nine-fifty.

The attractive two-story Spanish house had a tile roof and deep-set leaded windows. In the artful landscape lighting, lush palms and Australian tree ferns threw mysterious shadows against pale-yellow stucco walls.

When Roy rang the bell, he noticed an alarm-company sticker on the window next to the door. A moment later, Chester spoke to him from an intercom box. “Who’s there, please?”

Roy was only mildly surprised that an enlightened couple like this, in touch with their psychic talents, found it necessary to take security precautions. Such was the sorry state of the world in which they lived. Even mystics were marked for mayhem.

Smiling and friendly, Chester welcomed Roy into The Place Of The Way. He was potbellied, about fifty, mostly bald but with a Friar Tuck fringe of hair, deeply tanned in midwinter, bearish and strong looking in spite of his gut. He wore Rockports, khaki slacks, and a khaki shirt with the sleeves rolled to expose thick, hairy forearms.

Chester led Roy through rooms with yellow pine floors buffed to a high polish, Navajo rugs, and rough-hewn furniture that looked more suitable to a lodge in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains than to a home in Burbank. Beyond the family room, which boasted a giant-screen TV, they entered a vestibule and then a round room that was about twelve feet in diameter, with white walls and no windows other than the round skylight in the domed ceiling.

A round pine table stood in the center of the round room. Chester indicated a chair at the table. Roy sat. Chester offered a beverage—“anything from diet Coke to herbal tea”—but Roy declined because his only thirst was of the soul.

In the center of the table was a basket of plaited palm leaves, which Chester indicated. “I’m only an assistant in these matters. Guinevere is the spiritual adept. Her hands must never touch money. Though she’s transcended earthly concerns, she must eat, of course.”

“Of course,” Roy said.

From his wallet, Roy extracted three hundred dollars and put the cash in the basket. Chester seemed to be pleasantly surprised by the offering, but Roy had always believed that a person could expect only the quality of enlightenment for which he was willing to pay.

Chester left the room with the basket.

From the ceiling, pin spots had washed the walls with arcs of white light. Now they dimmed until the chamber filled with shadows and a moody amber radiance that approximated candlelight.

“Hi, I’m Guinevere! No, please, don’t get up.”

Breezing into the room with girlish insouciance, head held high, shoulders back, she went around the table to a chair opposite the one in which Roy sat.

Guinevere, about forty, was exceedingly beautiful, in spite of wearing her long blond hair in medusan cascades of cornrows, which Roy disliked. Her jade-green eyes flared with inner light, and every angle of her face was reminiscent of every mythological goddess Roy had seen portrayed in classical art. In tight blue jeans and a snug white T-shirt, her lean and supple body moved with fluid grace, and her large breasts swayed alluringly. He could see the points of her nipples straining against her cotton shirt.

“How ya doin’?” she asked perkily.

“Not so good.”

“We’ll fix that. What’s your name?”

“Roy.”

“What are you seeking, Roy?”

“I want a world with justice and peace, a world that’s perfect in every way. But people are flawed. There’s so little perfection anywhere. Yet I want it so badly. Sometimes I get depressed.”

“You need to understand the meaning of the world’s imperfection and your own obsession with it. What road of enlightenment do you prefer to take?”

“Any road, all roads.”

“Excellent!” said the beautiful Nordic Rastafarian, with such enthusiasm that her cornrows bounced and swayed, and the clusters of red beads dangling from the ends clicked together. “Maybe we’ll start with crystals.”

Chester returned, pushing a large wheeled box around the table to Guinevere’s right side.

Roy saw that it was a gray-and-black metal tool cabinet: four feet high, three feet wide, two feet deep, with doors on the bottom third and drawers of various widths and depths above the doors. The Sears Craftsman logo gleamed dully in the amber light.

While Chester sat in the third and last chair, which was two feet to the left and a foot behind the woman, Guinevere opened one of the drawers in the cabinet and removed a crystal sphere slightly larger than a billiard ball. Cupping it in both hands, she held it out to Roy, and he accepted it.

“Your aura’s dark, disturbed. Let’s clean that up first. Hold this crystal in both hands, close your eyes, seek a meditative calm. Think about only one thing, only this clean image: hills covered with snow. Gently rolling hills with fresh snow, whiter than sugar, softer than flour. Gentle hills to all horizons, hills upon hills, mantled with new snow, white on white, under a white sky, snowflakes drifting down, whiteness through whiteness over whiteness on whiteness…”

Guinevere went on like that for a while, but Roy couldn’t see the snow-mantled hills or the falling snow regardless of how hard he tried. Instead, in his mind’s eye, he could see only one thing: her hands. Her lovely hands. Her incredible hands.

She was altogether so spectacular looking that he hadn’t noticed her hands until she was passing the crystal ball to him. He had never seen hands like hers. Exceptional hands. His mouth went dry at the mere thought of kissing her palms, and his heart pounded fiercely at the memory of her slender fingers. They had seemed perfect.

“Okay, that’s better,” Guinevere said cheerily, after a time. “Your aura’s much lighter. You can open your eyes now.”

He was afraid that he had imagined the perfection of her hands and that when he saw them again he would discover that they were no different from the hands of other women — not the hands of an angel after all. Oh, but they were. Delicate, graceful, ethereal. They took the crystal ball from him, returned it to the open drawer of the tool cabinet, and then gestured — like the spreading wings of doves — to seven new crystals that she had placed on a square of black velvet in the center of the table while his eyes had been closed.

“Arrange these in any pattern that seems appropriate to you,” she said, “and then I’ll read them.”

The objects appeared to be half-inch-thick crystal snowflakes that had been sold as Christmas ornaments. None was like another.

As Roy tried to focus on the task before him, his gaze kept sliding surreptitiously to Guinevere’s hands. Each time he glimpsed them, his breath caught in his throat. His own hands were trembling, and he wondered if she noticed.

Guinevere progressed from crystals to the reading of his aura through prismatic lenses, to Tarot cards, to rune stones, and her fabulous hands became ever more beautiful. Somehow he answered her questions, followed instructions, and appeared to be listening to the wisdom that she imparted. She must have thought him dim-witted or drunk, because his speech was thick and his eyelids drooped as he became increasingly intoxicated by the sight of her hands.

Roy glanced guiltily at Chester, suddenly certain that the man — perhaps Guinevere’s husband — was angrily aware of the lascivious desire that her hands engendered. But Chester wasn’t paying attention to either of them. His bald head was bowed, and he was cleaning the fingernails of his left hand with the fingernails of his right.

Roy was convinced that the Mother of God could not have had hands more gentle than Guinevere’s, nor could the greatest succubus in Hell have had hands more erotic. Guinevere’s hands were, to her, what Melissa Wicklun’s sensuous lips were to her, oh, but a thousand times more so, ten thousand times more so. Perfect, perfect, perfect.

She shook the bag of runes and cast them again.

Roy wondered if he dared ask for a palm reading. She would have to hold his hands in hers.

He shivered at that delicious thought, and a spiral of dizziness spun through him. He could not walk out of that room and leave her to touch other men with those exquisite, unearthly hands.

He reached under his suit jacket, drew the Beretta from his shoulder holster, and said, “Chester.”

The bald man looked up, and Roy shot him in the face. Chester tipped backward in his chair, out of sight, and thudded to the floor.

The silencer needed to be replaced soon. The baffles were worn from use. The muffled shot had been loud enough to carry out of the room, though fortunately not beyond the walls of the house.

Guinevere was gazing at the rune stones on the table when Roy shot Chester. She must have been deeply immersed in her reading, for she seemed confused when she looked up and saw the gun.

Before she could raise her hands in defense and force Roy to damage them, which was unthinkable, he shot her in the forehead. She crashed backward in her chair, joining Chester on the floor.

Roy put the gun away, got up, went around the table. Chester and Guinevere stared, unblinking, at the skylight and the infinite night beyond. They had died instantly, so the scene was almost bloodless. Their deaths had been quick and painless.

The moment, as always, was sad and joyous. Sad, because the world had lost two enlightened people who were kind of heart and deep-seeing. Joyous, because Guinevere and Chester no longer had to live in a society of the unenlightened and uncaring.

Roy envied them.

He withdrew his gloves from an inside coat pocket and dressed his hands for the tender ceremony ahead.

He tipped Guinevere’s chair back onto its feet. Holding her in it, he pushed the chair to the table, wedging the dead woman in a seated position. Her head flopped forward, chin on her breast, and her cornrows rattled softly, falling like a beaded curtain to conceal her face. He lifted her right arm, which hung at her side, and put it on the table, then her left.

Her hands. For a while he stared at her hands, which were as appealing in death as in life. Graceful. Elegant. Radiant.

They gave him hope. If perfection could exist anywhere, in any form, no matter how small, even in a pair of hands, then his dream of an entirely perfect world might one day be realized.

He put his own hands atop hers. Even through his gloves, the contact was electrifying. He shuddered with pleasure.

Dealing with Chester was more difficult because of his greater weight. Nevertheless, Roy managed to move him around the table until he was opposite Guinevere, but slumped in his own chair rather than in the one Roy had been using.

In the kitchen, Roy explored the cabinets and pantry, collecting what he needed to finish the ceremony. He looked in the garage as well, for the final implement he required. Then he carried those items to the round room and placed them atop the wheeled chest in which Guinevere stored her divining aids.

He used a dish towel to wipe off the chair in which he had been sitting, for at the time he had not been wearing gloves and might have left fingerprints. He also buffed that side of the table, the crystal ball, and the snowflake crystals that he had arranged earlier for the psychic reading. He had touched nothing else in the room.

For a few minutes he pulled open drawers and doors in the tool chest, examining the magical contents, until he found an item that seemed appropriate to the circumstances. It was a pentalpha, also called a pentagram, in green on a field of black felt, used in more serious matters — such as attempted communication with the spirits of the dead — than the mere reading of runes, crystals, and Tarot cards.

Unfolded, it was an eighteen-inch square. He placed it in the center of the table, as a symbol of the life beyond this one.

He plugged in the small electric reciprocating saw that he had found among the tools in the garage, and he relieved Guinevere of her right hand. Gently, he placed the hand in a rectangular Tupperware container on another soft dish towel that he had arranged as a bed for it. He snapped the lid on the container.

Although he wanted to take her left hand, too, he felt that it would be selfish to insist on possessing both. The right thing was to leave one with the body, so the police and coroner and mortician and everyone else who dealt with Guinevere’s remains would know that she’d possessed the most beautiful hands in the world.

He lifted Chester’s arms onto the table. He placed the dead man’s right hand over Guinevere’s left, on top of the pentalpha, to express his conviction that they were together in the next world.

Roy wished he had the psychic power or purity or whatever was required to be able to channel the spirits of the dead. He would have channeled Guinevere there and then, to ask if she would really mind if he acquired her left hand as well.

He sighed, picked up the Tupperware container, and reluctantly left the round room. In the kitchen, he phoned 911 and spoke to the police operator: “The Place Of The Way is just a place now. It’s very sad. Please come.”

Leaving the telephone off the hook, he snatched another dish towel from a drawer and hurried to the front door. As far as he could recall, when he had first entered the house and followed Chester to the round room, he had touched nothing. Now, he needed only to wipe the doorbell-push and drop the dish towel on the way to his car.

He drove out of Burbank, over the hills, into the Los Angeles basin, through a seedy section of Hollywood. The bright splashes of graffiti on walls and highway structures, the cars full of young thugs cruising in search of trouble, the pornographic bookstores and movie theaters, the empty shops and the littered gutters and the other evidence of economic and moral collapse, the hatred and envy and greed and lust that thickened the air more effectively than the smog — none of that dismayed him for the time being, because he carried with him an object of such perfect beauty that it proved there was a powerful and wise creative force at work in the universe. He had evidence of God’s existence secured in a Tupperware container.

Out on the vast Mojave, where the night ruled, where the works of humankind were limited to the dark highway and the vehicles upon it, where the radio reception of distant stations was poor, Spencer found his thoughts drawn, against his will, to the deeper darkness and even stranger silence of that night sixteen years in the past. Once captured in that loop of memory, he could not escape until he had purged himself by talking about what he had seen and endured.

The barren plains and hills provided no convenient taverns to serve as confessionals. The only sympathetic ears were those of the dog.

…bare-chested and barefoot, I descend the stairs, shivering, rubbing my arms, wondering why I’m so afraid. Perhaps even at that moment, I dimly realize that I’m going down to a place from which I’ll never be able to ascend.

I’m drawn forward by the cry that I heard while leaning out the window to find the owl. Although it was brief and came just twice, and then only faintly, it was so piercing and pathetic that the memory of it bewitches me, the way a fourteen-year-old boy can sometimes be seduced as easily by the prospect of strangeness and terror as by the mysteries of sex.

Off the stairs. Through rooms where the moonlit windows glow softly, like video screens, and where the museum-quality Stickley furniture is visible only as angular black shadows within the blue-black gloom. Past artworks by Edward Hopper and Thomas Hart Benton and Steven Ackblom, from the latter of which peer vaguely luminous faces with eerie expressions as inscrutable as the ideograms of an alien language evolved on a world millions of light-years from Earth.

In the kitchen, the honed-limestone floor is cold beneath my feet. During the long day and all night it has absorbed the chill from the Freon-cooled air, and now it steals the heat from my soles.

Beside the back door, a small red light burns on the security-system keypad. In the readout window are three words in radiant green letters: ARMED AND SECURE. I key in the code to disarm the system. The red light turns green. The words change: READY TO ARM.

This is no ordinary farmhouse. It isn’t the home of folks who earn their living from the bounty of the land and who have simple tastes. There are treasures within — fine furnishings and art — and even in rural Colorado, precautions must be taken.

I disengage both deadbolts, open the door, and step onto the back porch, out of the frigid house, into the sultry July night. I walk barefoot across the boards to the steps, down to the flagstone patio that surrounds the swimming pool, past the darkly glimmering water in the pool, into the yard, almost like a boy sleepwalking while in a dream, drawn through the silence by the remembered cry.

The ghostly silver face of the full moon behind me casts its reflection on every blade of grass, so the lawn appears to be filmed by a frost far out of season. Strangely, I am suddenly afraid not merely for myself but for my mother, although she has been dead for more than six years and is far beyond the reach of any danger. My fear becomes so intense that I am halted by it. Halfway across the backyard, I stand alert and still in the uncertain silence. My moonshadow is a blot on the faux frost before me.

Ahead of me looms the barn, where no animals or hay or tractors have been kept for at least fifteen years, since before I was born. To anyone driving past on the county road, the property looks like a farm, but it isn’t what it appears to be. Nothing is what it appears to be.

The night is hot, and sweat beads on my face and bare chest. Nevertheless, the stubborn chill is beneath my skin and in my blood and in the deepest hollows of my boyish bones, and the July heat can’t dispel it.

It occurs to me that I’m chilled because, for some reason, I’m remembering too clearly the late-winter coldness of the bleak day in March, six years ago, when they found my mother after she had been missing for three days. Rather, they had found her brutalized body, crumpled in a ditch along a back road, eighty miles from home, where she had been dumped by the sonofabitch who kidnapped and killed her. Only eight years old, I’d been too young to understand the full meaning of death. And no one dared tell me, that day, how savagely she’d been treated, how terribly she had suffered; those were horrors still to be revealed to me by a few of my schoolmates — who had the capacity for cruelty that is possessed only by certain children and by those adults who, on some primitive level, have never matured. Yet, even in my youth and innocence, I had understood enough of death to realize at once that I would never see my mother again, and the chill of that March day had been the most penetrating cold that I’d ever known.

Now I stand on the moonlit lawn, wondering why my thoughts leap repeatedly to my lost mother, why the eerie cry that I heard when I leaned out my bedroom window strikes me as both infinitely strange and familiar, why I fear for my mother even though she’s dead, and why I fear so intensely for my own life when the summer night holds no immediate threat that I can see.

I begin to move again, toward the barn, which has become the focus of my attention, though initially I had thought that the cry had come from some animal out in the fields or in the lower hills. My shadow floats ahead of me, so that no step I take is on the carpet of moonlight but, instead, into a darkness of my own making.

Instead of going directly to the huge main doors in the south wall of the barn, in which a smaller, man-size door is inset, I obey instinct and head toward the southeast corner, crossing the macadam driveway that leads past the house and garage. In grass again, I round the corner of the barn and follow the east wall, stealthy in my bare feet, treading on the cushion of my moonshadow all the way to the northeast corner.

There I halt, because a vehicle I’ve never seen before is parked behind the barn: a customized Chevy van that no doubt isn’t charcoal, as it appears to be, for the moonlight alchemizes every color into silver or gray. Painted on the side is a rainbow, which also seems to be in shades of gray. The rear door stands open.

The silence is deep.

No one is in sight.

Even at the impressionable age of fourteen, with a childhood of Halloweens and nightmares behind me, I’ve never known strangeness and terror to be more seductive, and I can’t resist their perverse allure. I take one step toward the van, and—

— something slices the air close overhead with a whoosh and a flutter, startling me. I stumble, fall, roll, and look up in time to see enormous white wings spread above me. A shadow sweeps over the moonlit grass, and I have the crazy notion that my mother, in some angelic form, has swooped down from Heaven to warn me away from the van. Then the celestial presence arcs higher into the darkness, and I see that it’s only a great white owl, with a wingspan of five feet, sailing the summer night in search of field mice or other prey.

The owl vanishes.

The night remains.

I rise to my feet.

I creep toward the van, powerfully drawn by the mystery of it, by the promise of adventure. And by a terrible truth, which I don’t yet know that I know.

The sound of the owl’s wings, though so recent and frightening, doesn’t remain with me. But that pitiful cry, heard at the open window, echoes unrelentingly in my memory. Perhaps I’m beginning to acknowledge that it wasn’t the plaint of any wild animal meeting its end in the fields and forests, but the wretched and desperate plea of a human being in the grip of extreme terror….

In the Explorer, speeding across the moonlit Mojave, wingless but now as wise as any owl, Spencer followed insistent memory all the way into the heart of darkness, to the flash of steel from out of shadows, to the sudden pain and the scent of hot blood, to the wound that would become his scar, forcing himself toward the ultimate revelation that always eluded him.

It eluded him again.

He could recall nothing of what happened in the final moments of that hellish, long-ago encounter, after he pulled the trigger of the revolver and returned to the slaughterhouse. The police had told him how it must have ended. He had read accounts of what he’d done, by writers who based their articles and books upon the evidence. But none of them had been there. They couldn’t know the truth beyond a doubt. Only he had been there. Up to a point, his memories were so vivid as to be profoundly tormenting, but memory ended at a black hole of amnesia; after sixteen years, he’d still not been able to focus even one beam of light into that darkness.

If he ever recalled the rest, he might earn lasting peace. Or remembrance might destroy him. In that black tunnel of amnesia, he might find a shame with which he could not live, and the memory might be less desirable than a self-administered bullet to the brain.

Nevertheless, by periodically unburdening himself of everything that he did remember, he always found temporary relief from anguish. He found it again in the Mojave Desert, at fifty-five miles an hour.

When Spencer glanced at Rocky, he saw that the dog was curled on the other seat, dozing. The mutt’s position seemed awkward, if not precarious, with his tail dangling down into the leg space under the dashboard, but he was evidently comfortable.

Spencer supposed that the rhythms of his speech and the tone of his voice, after countless repetitions of his story over the years, had become soporific whenever he turned to that subject. The poor dog couldn’t have stayed awake even if they’d been in a thunderstorm.

Or perhaps, for some time, he had not actually been talking aloud. Perhaps his soliloquy had early faded to a whisper and then into silence while he continued to speak only with an inner voice. The identity of his confessor didn’t matter — a dog was as acceptable as a stranger in a barroom — so it followed that it was not important to him if his confessor listened. Having a willing listener was merely an excuse to talk himself through it once more, in search of temporary absolution or — if he could shine a light into that final darkness — a permanent peace of one kind or another.

He was fifty miles from Vegas.

Windblown tumbleweeds as big as wheelbarrows rolled across the highway, through his headlight beams, from nowhere to nowhere.

The clear, dry desert air did little to inhibit his view of the universe. Millions of stars blazed from horizon to horizon, beautiful but cold, alluring but unreachable, shedding surprisingly little light on the alkaline plains that flanked the highway — and, for all their grandeur, revealing nothing.

When Roy Miro woke in his Westwood hotel room, the digital clock on the nightstand read 4:19. He had slept less than five hours, but he felt rested, so he switched on the lamp.

He threw back the covers, sat on the edge of the bed in his pajamas, squinted as his eyes adjusted to the brightness — then smiled at the Tupperware container that stood beside the clock. The plastic was translucent, so he could see only a vague shape within.

He put the container on his lap and removed the lid. Guinevere’s hand. He felt blessed to possess an object of such great beauty.

How sad, however, that its ravishing splendor wouldn’t last much longer. In twenty-four hours, if not sooner, the hand would have deteriorated visibly. Its comeliness would be but a memory.

Already it had undergone a color change. Fortunately, a certain chalkiness only emphasized the exquisite bone structure in the long, elegantly tapered fingers.

Reluctantly, Roy replaced the lid, made sure the seal was tight, and put the container aside.

He went into the living room of the two-room suite. His attaché case computer and cellular phone were already connected, plugged in, and arranged on a luncheon table by a large window.

Soon he was in touch with Mama. He requested the results of the investigation that he’d asked her to undertake the previous evening, when he and his men had discovered that the DMV address for Spencer Grant was an uninhabited oil field.

He had been so furious then.

He was calm now. Cool. In control.

Reading Mama’s report from the screen, tapping the PAGE DOWN key each time he wanted to continue, Roy quickly saw that the search for Spencer Grant’s true address hadn’t been easy.

During Grant’s months with the California Multi-Agency Task Force on Computer Crime, he’d learned a lot about the nationwide Infonet and the vulnerabilities of the thousands of computer systems it comprised. Evidently, he had acquired codes-and-procedures books and master programming atlases for the computer systems of various telephone companies, credit agencies, and government offices. Then he must have managed to carry or electronically transmit them from the task-force offices to his own computer.

After quitting his job, he had erased every reference to his whereabouts from public and private records. His name appeared only in his military, DMV, Social Security, and police department files, and in every case the given address was one of the two that had already proved to be false. The national file of the Internal Revenue Service contained other men with his name; however, none was his age, had his Social Security number, lived in California, or had paid withholding taxes as an employee of the LAPD. Grant was missing, as well, from the records of the State of California tax authorities.

If nothing else, he was apparently a tax evader. Roy hated tax evaders. They were the epitome of social irresponsibility.

According to Mama, no utility company currently billed Spencer Grant — yet no matter where he lived, he needed electricity, water, telephone, garbage pickup, and probably natural gas. Even if he had erased his name from billing lists to avoid paying for utilities, he couldn’t exit their service records without triggering disconnection of essential services. Yet he could not be found.

Mama assumed two possibilities. First: Grant was honest enough to pay for utilities; however, he altered the companies’ billing and service records to transfer his accounts to a false name that he had created for himself. The sole purpose of those actions would be to further his apparent goal of disappearing from public record, making himself hard to find if any police agency or governmental body wanted to talk to him. Like now. Or, second: He was dishonest, eliminating himself from billing records, paying for nothing — while maintaining service under a false name. In either case, he and his address were somewhere in those companies’ files, under the name that was his secret identity; he could be located if his alias could be uncovered.

Roy froze Mama’s report and returned to the bedroom to get the envelope that contained the computer-projected portrait of Spencer Grant. This man was an unusually crafty adversary. Roy wanted to have the clever bastard’s face for reference while reading about him.

At the computer again, he paged forward in the report.

Mama had been unable to find an account for Spencer Grant at any bank or savings and loan association. Either he paid for everything with cash, or he maintained accounts under an alias. Probably the former. There was unmistakable paranoia in this man’s actions, so he wouldn’t trust his funds in a bank under any circumstances.

Roy glanced at the portrait beside the computer. Grant’s eyes did look strange. Feverish. No doubt about it. A trace of madness in his eyes. Maybe even more than a trace.

Because Grant might have formed an S-chapter corporation through which he did his banking and bill paying, Mama had searched the files of the California Secretary of the Treasury and various regulatory bodies, seeking his name as a registered corporate officer. Nothing.

Every bank account had to be tied to a Social Security number, so Mama looked for a savings or checking account with Grant’s number, regardless of the name under which the money was deposited. Nothing.

He might own the home in which he lived, so Mama had checked property tax records in the counties that Roy targeted. Nothing. If he did own a home, he held title under a false name.

Another hope: If Grant had ever taken a university class or been a hospital patient, he might not have remembered that he’d supplied his home address on applications and admissions forms, and he might not have deleted them. Most educational and medical institutions were regulated by federal laws; therefore, their records were accessible to numerous government agencies. Considering the number of such institutions even in a limited geographical area, Mama needed the patience of a saint or a machine, the latter of which she possessed. And for all her efforts, she found nothing.

Roy glanced at the portrait of Spencer Grant. He was beginning to think that this man was not merely mentally disturbed, but something far darker than that. An actively evil person. Anyone this obsessed with his privacy was surely an enemy of the people.

Chilled, Roy returned his attention to the computer.

When Mama undertook a search as extensive as the one that Roy had requested of her and when that search was fruitless, she didn’t give up. She was programmed to apply her spare logic circuits — during periods of lighter work and between assignments — to riffle through a large store of mailing lists that the agency had accumulated, looking for the name that couldn’t be found elsewhere. Name soup. That was what the lists were called. They were lifted from book and record clubs, national magazines, Publishers Clearing House, major political parties, catalogue-sales companies peddling everything from sexy lingerie to electronic gadgetry to meat by mail, interest groups like antique-car enthusiasts and stamp collectors, as well as from numerous other sources.

In the name soup, Mama had found a Spencer Grant different from the others in the Internal Revenue Service records.

Intrigued, Roy sat up straighter in his chair.

Almost two years ago, this Spencer Grant had ordered a dog toy from a mail-order catalogue aimed at pet owners: a hard-rubber, musical bone. The address on that list was in California. Malibu.

Mama had returned to the utility companies’ files, to see whether services were maintained at that address. They were.

The electrical connection was in the name of Stewart Peck.

The water service and trash collection account was in the name of Mr. Henry Holden.

Natural gas was billed to James Gable.

The telephone company provided service to one John Humphrey. They also billed a cellular phone to William Clark at that address.

AT&T provided long-distance service for Wayne Gregory.

Property tax records listed the owner as Robert Tracy.

Mama had found the scarred man.

In spite of his efforts to vanish behind an elaborate screen of multifarious identities, though he had diligently attempted to erase his past and to make his current existence as difficult to prove as that of the Loch Ness monster, and though he had nearly succeeded in being as elusive as a ghost, he had been tripped up by a musical rubber bone. A dog toy. Grant had seemed inhumanly clever, but the simple human desire to please a beloved pet had brought him down.

NINE

Roy Miro watched from the blue shadows of the eucalyptus grove, enjoying the medicinal but pleasant odor of the oil-rich leaves.

The rapidly assembled SWAT team hit the cabin an hour after dawn, when the canyon was quiet except for the faintest rustle of the trees in an offshore breeze. The stillness was broken by shattering glass, the whomp of stun grenades, and the crash of the front and back doors going down simultaneously.

The place was small, and the initial search required little more than a minute. Toting a Micro Uzi, wearing a Kevlar jacket so heavy that it appeared to be capable of stopping even Teflon-coated slugs, Alfonse Johnson stepped out onto the back porch to signal that the cabin was deserted.

Dismayed, Roy came out of the grove and followed Johnson through the rear entrance into the kitchen, where shards of glass crunched under his shoes.

“He’s taken a trip somewhere,” Johnson said.

“How do you figure?”

“In here.”

Roy followed Johnson into the only bedroom. It was almost as sparsely furnished as a monk’s cell. No art brightened the roughly plastered walls. Instead of drapes or curtains, white vinyl blinds hung at the windows.

A suitcase stood near the bed, in front of the only nightstand.

“Must have decided he didn’t need that one,” said Johnson.

The simple cotton bedspread was slightly mussed — as if Grant had put another suitcase there to pack for his trip.

The closet door stood open. A few shirts, jeans, and chinos hung from the wooden rod, but half the hangers were empty.

One by one, Roy pulled out the drawers on a highboy. They contained a few items of clothing — mostly socks and underwear. A belt. One green sweater, one blue.

Even the contents of a large suitcase, if returned to the drawers, would not have filled them. Therefore, Grant had either packed two or more suitcases — or his clothing and home-decorating budgets were equally frugal.

“Any signs of a dog?” Roy asked.

Johnson shook his head. “Not that I noticed.”

“Look around, inside and out,” Roy ordered, leaving the bedroom.

Three members of the SWAT team, men with whom Roy had not worked before, were standing in the living room. They were tall, beefy guys. In that confined space, their protective gear, combat boots, and bristling weapons made them appear to be even larger than they were. With no one to shoot or subdue, they were as awkward and uncertain as professional wrestlers invited to tea with the octogenarian members of a ladies’ knitting club.

Roy was about to send them outside when he saw that the screen was lit on one of the computers in the array of electronic equipment that covered the surface of an L-shaped corner desk. White letters glowed on a blue background.

“Who turned that on?” he asked the three men.

They gazed at the computer, baffled.

“Must’ve been on when we came in,” one of them said.

“Wouldn’t you have noticed?”

“Maybe not.”

“Grant must’ve left in a hurry,” said another.

Alfonse Johnson, just entering the room, disagreed: “It wasn’t on when I came through the front door. I’d bet anything.”

Roy went to the desk. On the computer screen was the same number repeated three times down the center:

31

31

31

Suddenly the numbers changed, beginning at the top, continuing slowly down the column, until all were the same:

32

32

32

Simultaneously with the appearance of the third thirty-two, a soft whirrrrr arose from one of the electronic devices on the large desk. It lasted only a couple of seconds, and Roy couldn’t identify the unit in which it originated.

The numbers changed from top to bottom, as before: 33, 33, 33. Again: that whispery two-second whirrrrr.

Although Roy was far better acquainted with the capabilities and operation of sophisticated computers than was the average citizen, he had never seen most of the gadgetry on the desk. Some items appeared to be homemade. Small red and green bulbs shone on several peculiar devices, indicating that they were powered up. Tangles of cables, in various diameters, linked much of the familiar equipment with the units that were mysterious to him.

34

34

34

Whirrrrr.

Something important was happening. Intuition told Roy that much. But what? He couldn’t understand, and with growing urgency he studied the equipment.

On the screen, the numbers advanced, from top to bottom, until all of them were thirty-five. Whirrrrr.

If the numbers had been descending, Roy might have thought that he was watching a countdown toward a detonation. A bomb. Of course, no cosmic law required that a time bomb had to be triggered at the end of a countdown. Why not a countup? Start at zero, detonate at one hundred. Or at fifty. Or forty.

36

36

36

Whirrrrr.

No, not a bomb. That didn’t make sense. Why would Grant want to blow up his own home?

Easy question. Because he was crazy. Paranoid. Remember the eyes in the computer-generated portrait: feverish, touched with madness.

Thirty-seven, top to bottom. Whirrrrr.

Roy started exploring the tangle of cables, hoping to learn something from the way in which the devices were linked.

A fly crept along his left temple. He brushed impatiently at it. Not a fly. A bead of sweat.

“What’s wrong?” Alfonse Johnson asked. He loomed at Roy’s side — abnormally tall, armored, and armed, as if he were a basketball player from some future society in which the game had evolved into a form of mortal combat.

On the screen, the count had reached forty. Roy paused with his hands full of cables, listened to the whirrrrr, and was relieved when the cabin didn’t blow up.

If it wasn’t a bomb, what was it?

To grasp what was happening, he needed to think like Grant. Try to imagine how a paranoid sociopath might view the world. Look out through the eyes of madness. Not easy.

Well, all right, even if Grant was psychotic, he was also cunning, so after nearly being apprehended in the assault on the bungalow Wednesday night in Santa Monica, he had figured that a surveillance unit had photographed him and that he had become the subject of an intense search. He was an ex-cop, after all. He knew the routine. Although he’d spent the past year performing a gradual disappearing act from every public record, he hadn’t yet taken the final step into invisibility, and he’d been acutely aware that they would find his cabin sooner or later.

“What’s wrong?” Johnson repeated.

Grant would have expected them to break into his home in the same manner as they had broken into the bungalow. An entire SWAT team. Searching the place. Milling around.

Roy’s mouth was dry. His heart was racing. “Check the door frame. We must’ve set off an alarm.”

“Alarm? In this old shack?” Johnson said doubtfully.

“Do it,” Roy ordered.

Johnson hurried away.

Roy frantically sorted through the loops and knots of cables. The computer in action was the one with the most powerful logic unit among Grant’s collection. It was connected to a lot of things, including an unmarked green box that was, in turn, linked to a modem that was itself linked to a six-line telephone.

For the first time he realized that one of the red power-on lights gleaming in the equipment was actually the in-use indicator on line one of the telephone. An outgoing call was in progress.

He picked up the handset and listened. Data transmission was under way in the form of a cascade of electronic tones, a high-speed language of weird music without melody or rhythm.

“Magnetic contact here on the doorsill!” Johnson called from the front entrance.

“Visible wires?” Roy asked, dropping the telephone handset into the cradle.

“Yeah. And this was just hooked up. Bright, new copper at the contact point.”

“Follow the wires,” Roy said.

He glanced at the computer again.

On the screen, the count was up to forty-five.

Roy returned to the green box that linked computer and modem, and he grabbed another gray cable that led from it to something that he had not yet found. He traced it across the desk, through snarled cords, behind equipment, to the edge of the desk, and then to the floor.

On the other side of the room, Johnson was ripping up the alarm wire from the baseboard to which it was stapled, and winding it around one gloved fist. The other three men were watching him and edging backward, out of the way.

Roy followed the gray cable along the floor. It disappeared behind a tall bookcase.

Following the alarm wire, Johnson reached the other side of the same bookcase.

Roy jerked on the gray cable, and Johnson jerked on the alarm wire. Books wobbled noisily on the next to the highest shelf.

Roy looked up from the cable on which his attention had been fixed. Almost directly in front of him, slightly higher than eye level, a one-inch lens peered darkly at him from between the spines of thick volumes of history. He pulled books off the shelf, revealing a compact videocamera.

“What the hell’s this?” Johnson asked.

On the display screen, the count had just reached forty-eight at the top of the column.

“When you broke the magnetic contact at the door, you started the videocamera,” Roy explained.

He dropped the cable and snatched another book from the shelf.

Johnson said, “So we just destroy the videotape, and no one knows we were here.”

Opening the book and tearing off one corner of a page, Roy said, “It’s not so easy as that. When you turned on the camera, you also activated the computer, the whole system, and it placed an outgoing phone call.”

“What system?”

“The videocamera feeds to that oblong green box on the desk.”

“Yeah? What’s it do?”

After working up a thick gob of saliva, Roy spat on the page fragment that he had torn from the book, and he pasted the paper to the lens. “I’m not sure exactly what it does, but somehow the box processes the video image, translates it from visuals to another form of information, and feeds it to the computer.”

He stepped to the display screen. He was less tense than he had been before finding the camera, for now he knew what was happening. He wasn’t happy about it — but at least he understood.

51

50

50

The second number changed to fifty-one. Then the third.

Whirrrrr.

“Every four or five seconds, the computer freezes a frame’s worth of data from the videotape and sends it back to the green box. That’s when the first number changes.”

They waited. Not long.

52

51

51

“The green box,” Roy continued, “passes that frame of data to the modem, and that’s when the second number changes.”

52

52

51

“The modem translates the data into tonal code, sends it to the telephone, then the third number changes and—”

52

52

52

“—at the far end of the phone line, the process is reversed, translating the encoded data back into a picture again.”

“Picture?” Johnson said. “Pictures of us?”

“He’s just received his fifty-second picture since you entered the cabin.”

“Damn.”

“Fifty of them were nice and clear — before I blocked the camera lens.”

“Where? Where’s he receiving them?”

“We’ll have to trace the phone call the computer made when you broke down the door,” Roy said, pointing to the red indicator light on line one of the six-line phone. “Grant didn’t want to meet us face-to-face, but he wanted to know what we look like.”

“So he’s looking at printouts of us right now?”

“Probably not. The other end could be just as automated as this. But he’ll stop by there eventually to see if anything’s been transmitted. By then, with a little luck, we’ll find the phone to which the call was placed, and we’ll be waiting there for him.”

The three other men had backed farther away from the computers. They regarded the equipment with superstition.

One of them said, “Who is this guy?”

Roy said, “He’s nothing special. Just a sick and hateful man.”

“Why didn’t you pull the plug the minute you realized he was filming us?” Johnson demanded.

“He already had us by then, so it didn’t matter. And maybe he set up the system so the hard disk will erase if the plug is pulled. Then we wouldn’t know what programs and information had been in the machine. As long as the system’s intact, we might get a pretty good idea of what this guy’s been up to here. Maybe we can reconstruct his activities for the past few days, weeks, even months. We should be able to turn up a few clues about where he’s gone — and maybe even find the woman through him.”

55

55

55

Whirrrrr.

The screen flashed, and Roy flinched. The column of numbers was replaced by three words: THE MAGIC NUMBER.

The phone disconnected. The red indicator light on line one blinked off.

“That’s all right,” Roy said. “We can still trace it through the phone company’s automated records.”

The display screen went blank again.

“What’s happening?” Johnson asked.

Two new words appeared: BRAIN DEAD.

Roy said, “You sonofabitch, bastard, scarfaced geek!”

Alfonse Johnson backed off a step, obviously surprised by such fury in a man who had always been good-natured and even-tempered.

Roy pulled the chair out from the desk and sat down. As he put his hands to the keyboard, BRAIN DEAD blinked off the screen.

A field of soft blue confronted him.

Cursing, Roy tried to call up a basic menu.

Blue. Serene blue.

His fingers flew over the keys.

Serene. Unchanging. Blue.

The hard disk was blank. Even the operating system, which was surely still intact, was frozen and dysfunctional.

Grant had cleaned up after himself, and then he had mocked them with the BRAIN DEAD announcement.

Breathe deeply. Slowly and deeply. Inhale the pale-peach vapor of tranquility. Exhale the bile-green mist of anger and tension. In with the good, out with the bad.

When Spencer and Rocky had arrived in Vegas near midnight, the towering ramparts of blinking-rippling-swirling-pulsing neon along the famous Strip had made the night nearly as bright as a sunny day. Even at that hour, traffic clogged Las Vegas Boulevard South. Swarms of people had filled the sidewalks, their faces strange and sometimes demonic in the reflected phantasmagoria of neon; they churned from casino to casino and then back again, like insects seeking something that only insects could want or understand.

The frenetic energy of the scene had disturbed Rocky. Even viewing it from the safety of the Explorer, with the windows tightly closed, the dog had begun to shiver before they had gone far. Then he’d whimpered and turned his head anxiously left and right, as if certain that a vicious attack was imminent, but unable to discern from which direction to expect danger. Perhaps, with a sixth sense, the mutt had perceived the fevered need of the most compulsive gamblers, the predatory greed of con men and prostitutes, and the desperation of the big losers in the crowd.

They had driven out of the turmoil and had stayed overnight in a motel on Maryland Parkway, two long blocks from the Strip. Without a casino or cocktail lounge, the place was quiet.

Exhausted, Spencer had found that sleep came easily even on the too-soft bed. He dreamed of a red door, which he opened repeatedly, ten times, twenty, a hundred. Sometimes he found only darkness on the other side, a blackness that smelled of blood and that wrenched a sudden thunder from his heart. Sometimes Valerie Keene was there, but when he reached for her, she receded, and the door slammed shut.

Friday morning, after shaving and showering, Spencer filled one bowl with dog food, another with water, put them on the floor by the bed, and went to the door. “They have a coffee shop. I’ll have breakfast, and we’ll check out when I get back.”

The dog didn’t want to be left alone. He whined pleadingly.

“You’re safe here,” Spencer said.

Guardedly, he opened the door, expecting Rocky to rush outside.

Instead of making a break for freedom, the dog sat on his butt, huddled pathetically, and hung his head.

Spencer stepped outside onto the covered promenade. He looked back into the room.

Rocky hadn’t moved. His head hung low. He was shivering.

Sighing, Spencer reentered the room and closed the door. “Okay, have your breakfast, then come with me while I have mine.”

Rocky rolled his eyes to watch from under his furry brows as his master settled in the armchair. He went to his food bowl, glanced at Spencer, then looked back uneasily at the door.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Spencer assured him.

Instead of wolfing down his food as usual, Rocky ate with a delicacy and at a pace not characteristically canine. As if he believed that this would be his last meal, he savored it.

When the mutt was finally finished, Spencer rinsed the bowls, dried them, and loaded all the luggage into the Explorer.

In February, Vegas could be as warm as a late-spring day, but the high desert was also subject to an inconstant winter that had sharp teeth when it chose to bite. That Friday morning, the sky was gray, and the temperature was in the low forties. From the western mountains came a wind as cold as a pit boss’s heart.

After the luggage was loaded, they visited a suitably private corner of a brushy vacant lot behind the motel. Spencer stood guard, with his back turned and his shoulders hunched and his hands jammed in his jeans pockets, while Rocky attended to the call of nature.

With that moment successfully negotiated, they returned to the Explorer, and Spencer drove from the south wing of the motel to the north wing, where the coffee shop was located. He parked at the curb, facing the big plate-glass windows.

Inside the restaurant, he selected a booth by the windows, in a direct line with the Explorer, which was less than twenty feet away. Rocky sat as tall as he could in the passenger seat of the truck, watching his master through the windshield.

Spencer ordered eggs, home fries, toast, coffee. While he ate, he glanced frequently at the Explorer, and Rocky was always watching.

A few times, Spencer waved.

The dog liked that. He wagged his tail every time that Spencer acknowledged him. Once, he put his paws on the dashboard and pressed his nose to the windshield, grinning.

“What did they do to you, pal? What did they do to make you like this?” Spencer wondered aloud, over his coffee, as he watched the adoring dog.

Roy Miro left Alfonse Johnson and the other men to search every inch of the cabin in Malibu while he returned to Los Angeles. With luck, they would find something in Grant’s belongings that would shed light upon his psychology, reveal an unknown aspect of his past, or give them a lead on his whereabouts.

Agents in the downtown office were already penetrating the phone company system to trace the call placed earlier by Grant’s computer. Grant had probably covered his trail. They would be lucky if they discovered, even by this time tomorrow, at what number and location he had received those fifty images from the videocamera.

Driving south on the Coast Highway, toward L.A., Roy put his cellular unit on speakerphone mode and called Kleck in Orange County.

Although he sounded weary, John Kleck was in fine, deep voice. “I’m getting to hate this tricky bitch,” he said, referring to the woman who had been Valerie Keene until she abandoned her car at John Wayne Airport on Wednesday and became, yet again, someone new.

As he listened, Roy had difficulty picturing the thin, gangly young agent with the startled-trout face. Because of the reverberant bass voice, it was easier to believe that Kleck was a tall, broad-chested, black rock singer from the doo-wop era.

Every report that Kleck delivered sounded vitally important — even when he had nothing to report. Like now. Kleck and his team still had no idea where the woman had gone.

“We’re widening the search to rental-car agencies countywide,” Kleck intoned. “Also checking stolen-car reports. Any set of wheels heisted anytime Wednesday — we’re putting it on our must-find sheet.”

“She never stole a car before,” Roy noted.

“Which is why she might this time — to keep us off balance. I’m just worried she hitchhiked. Can’t track her on the thumb express.”

“If she hitchhiked, with all the crazies out there these days,” Roy said, “then we don’t have to worry about her anymore. She’s already been raped, murdered, beheaded, gutted, and dismembered.”

“That’s all right with me,” Kleck said. “Just so I can get a piece of the body for a positive ID.”

After talking to Kleck, though the morning was still fresh, Roy was convinced that the day would feature nothing but bad news.

Negative thinking usually wasn’t his style. He loathed negative thinkers. If too many of them radiated pessimism at the same time, they could distort the fabric of reality, resulting in earthquakes, tornadoes, train wrecks, plane crashes, acid rain, cancer clusters, disruptions in microwave communications, and a dangerous surliness in the general population. Yet he couldn’t shake his bad mood.

Seeking to lift his spirits, he drove with only his left hand until he’d gently extracted Guinevere’s treasure from the Tupperware container and put it on the seat beside him.

Five exquisite digits. Perfect, natural, unpainted fingernails, each with its precisely symmetrical, crescent-shaped lunula. And the fourteen finest phalanges that he’d ever seen: None was a millimeter more or less than ideal length. Across the gracefully arched back of the hand, pulling the skin taut: the five most flawlessly formed metacarpals he ever hoped to see. The skin was pale but unblemished, as smooth as melted wax from the candles on God’s own high table.

Driving east, heading downtown, Roy let his gaze drift now and then to Guinevere’s treasure, and with each stolen glimpse, his mood improved. By the time he was near Parker Center, the administrative headquarters of the Los Angeles Police Department, he was buoyant.

Reluctantly, while stopped at a traffic light, he returned the hand to the container. He put that reliquary and its precious contents under the driver’s seat.

At Parker Center, after leaving his car in a visitor’s stall, he took an elevator from the garage and, using his FBI credentials, went up to the fifth floor. The appointment was with Captain Harris Descoteaux, who was in his office and waiting.

Roy had spoken briefly to Descoteaux from Malibu, so it was no surprise that the captain was black. He had that almost glossy, midnight-dark, beautiful skin sometimes enjoyed by those of Caribbean extraction, and although he evidently had been an Angeleno for years, a faint island lilt still lent a musical quality to his speech.

In navy-blue slacks, striped suspenders, white shirt, and blue tie with diagonal red stripes, Descoteaux had the poise, dignity, and gravitas of a Supreme Court justice, even though his sleeves were rolled up and his jacket was hanging on the back of his chair.

After shaking Roy’s hand, Harris Descoteaux indicated the only visitor’s chair and said, “Please sit down.”

The small office was not equal to the man who occupied it. Poorly ventilated. Poorly lighted. Shabbily furnished.

Roy felt sorry for Descoteaux. No government employee at the executive level, whether in a law-enforcement organization or not, should have to work in such a cramped office. Public service was a noble calling, and Roy was of the opinion that those who were willing to serve should be treated with respect, gratitude, and generosity.

Settling into the chair behind the desk, Descoteaux said, “The Bureau verifies your ID, but they won’t say what case you’re on.”

“National security matter,” Roy assured him.

Any query about Roy that was placed with the FBI would have been routed to Cassandra Solinko, a valued administrative assistant to the director. She would support the lie (though not in writing) that Roy was a Bureau agent; however, she could not discuss the nature of his investigation, because she didn’t know what the hell he was doing.

Descoteaux frowned. “Security matter — that’s pretty vague.”

If Roy got into deep trouble — the kind to inspire congressional investigations and newspaper headlines — Cassandra Solinko would deny that she’d ever verified his claim to be with the FBI. If she was disbelieved and subpoenaed to testify about what little she knew of Roy and his nameless agency, there was a stunningly high statistical probability that she would suffer a deadly cerebral embolism, or a massive cardiac infarction, or a high-speed, head-on collision with a bridge abutment. She was aware of the consequences of cooperation.

“Sorry, Captain Descoteaux, but I can’t be more specific.”

Roy would experience consequences similar to Ms. Solinko’s if he himself screwed up. Public service could sometimes be a brutally stressful career — which was one reason why comfortable offices, a generous package of fringe benefits, and virtually unlimited perks were, in Roy’s estimation, entirely justified.

Descoteaux didn’t like being frozen out. Trading his frown for a smile, speaking with soft island ease, he said, “It’s difficult to lend assistance without knowing the whole picture.”

It would be easy to succumb to Descoteaux’s charm, to mistake his deliberate yet fluid movements for the sloth of a tropical soul, and to be deceived by his musical voice into believing that he was a frivolous man.

Roy saw the truth, however, in the captain’s eyes, which were huge, as black and liquid as ink, as direct and penetrating as those in a Rembrandt portrait. His eyes revealed an intelligence, patience, and relentless curiosity that defined the kind of man who posed the greatest threat to someone in Roy’s line of work.

Returning Descoteaux’s smile with an even sweeter smile of his own, convinced that his younger-slimmer-Santa-Claus look was a match for Caribbean charm, Roy said, “Actually, I don’t need help, not in the sense of services and support. Just a little information.”

“Be pleased to provide it, if I can,” said the captain.

The wattage of their two smiles had temporarily rectified the problem of inadequate lighting in the small office.

“Before you were promoted to central administration,” Roy said, “I believe you were a division captain.”

“Yes. I commanded the West Los Angeles Division.”

“Do you remember a young officer who served under you for a little more than a year — Spencer Grant?”

Descoteaux’s eyes widened slightly. “Yes, of course, I remember Spence. I remember him well.”

“Was he a good cop?”

“The best,” Descoteaux said without hesitation. “Police academy, criminology degree, army special services — he had substance.”

“A very competent man, then?”

“‘Competence’ is hardly an adequate word in Spence’s case.”

“And intelligent?”

“Extremely so.”

“The two carjackers he killed — was that a righteous shooting?”

“Hell, yes, as righteous as they get. One perp was wanted for murder, and there were three felony warrants out on the second loser. Both were carrying, shot at him. Spence had no choice. The review board cleared him as quick as God let Saint Peter into Heaven.”

Roy said, “Yet he didn’t go back out on the street.”

“He didn’t want to carry a gun anymore.”

“He’d been a U.S. Army Ranger.”

Descoteaux nodded. “He was in action a few times — in Central America and the Middle East. He’d had to kill before, and finally he was forced to admit to himself he couldn’t make a career of the service.”

“Because of how killing made him feel.”

“No. More because…I think because he wasn’t always convinced that the killing was justified, no matter what the politicians said. But I’m guessing. I don’t know for sure what his thinking was.”

“A man has trouble using a gun against another human being — that’s understandable,” Roy said. “But the same man trading the army for the police department — that baffles me.”

“As a cop, he thought he’d have more control over when to use deadly force. Anyway, it was his dream. Dreams die hard.”

“Being a cop was his dream?”

“Not necessarily a cop. Just being the good guy in a uniform, risking his life to help people, saving lives, upholding the law.”

“Altruistic young man,” Roy said with an edge of sarcasm.

“We get some. Fact is, a lot are like that — in the beginning, at least.” He stared at his coal-black hands, which were folded on the green blotter on his desk. “In Spence’s case, high ideals led him to the army, then the force…but there was something more than that. Somehow…by helping people in all the ways a cop can help, Spence was trying to understand himself, come to terms with himself.”

Roy said, “So he’s psychologically troubled?”

“Not in any way that would prevent him from being a good cop.”

“Oh? Then what is it he’s trying to understand about himself?”

“I don’t know. It goes back, I think.”

“Back?”

“The past. He carries it like a ton of stone on his shoulders.”

“Something to do with the scar?” Roy asked.

“Everything to do with it, I suspect.”

Descoteaux looked up from his hands. His huge, dark eyes were full of compassion. They were exceptional, expressive eyes. Roy might have wanted to possess them if they had belonged to a woman.

“How was he scarred, how did it happen?” Roy asked.

“All he ever said was he’d been in an accident when he was a boy. A car accident, I guess. He didn’t really want to talk about it.”

“He have any close friends on the force?”

“Not close, no. He was a likable guy. But self-contained.”

“A loner,” Roy said, nodding with understanding.

“No. Not the way you mean it. He’ll never wind up in a tower with a rifle, shooting everyone in sight. People liked him, and he liked people. He just had this…reserve.”

“After the shooting, he wanted a desk job. Specifically, he applied for a transfer to the Task Force on Computer Crime.”

“No, they came to him. Most people would be surprised — but I’m sure you’re aware — we have officers with degrees in law, psychology, and criminology like Spence. Many get the education not because they want to change careers or move up to administration. They want to stay on the street. They love their work, and they think a little advanced education will help them do a better job. They’re committed, dedicated. They only want to be cops, and they—”

“Admirable, I’m sure. Though some might see them as hard-core reactionaries, unable to give up the power of being a cop.”

Descoteaux blinked. “Well, anyway, if one of them wants off the street, he doesn’t wind up processing paperwork. The department uses his knowledge. The Administrative Office, Internal Affairs, Organized Crime Intelligence Division, most divisions of the Detective Services Group — they all wanted Spence. He chose the task force.”

“He didn’t perhaps solicit the interest of the task force?”

“He didn’t need to solicit. Like I said, they came to him.”

“Before he went to the task force, had he been a computer nut?”

“Nut?” Descoteaux was no longer able to repress his impatience. “He knew how to use computers on the job, but he wasn’t obsessed with them. Spence wasn’t a nut about anything. He’s a very solid man, dependable, together.”

“Except that — and these are your words — he’s still trying to understand himself, come to terms with himself.”

“Aren’t we all?” the captain said crisply. He rose and turned from Roy to the small window beside his desk. The angled slats of the blind were dusty. He stared between them at the smog-cloaked city.

Roy waited. It was best to let Descoteaux have his tantrum. The poor man had earned it. His office was dreadfully small. He didn’t even have a private bathroom with it.

Turning to face Roy again, the captain said, “I don’t know what you think Spence has done. And there’s no point in my asking—”

“National security,” Roy confirmed smugly.

“—but you’re wrong about him. He’s not a man who’s ever going to turn bad.”

Roy raised his eyebrows. “What makes you so sure of that?”

“Because he agonizes.”

“Does he? About what?”

“About what’s right, what’s wrong. About what he does, the decisions he makes. Quietly, privately — but he agonizes.”

“Don’t we all?” Roy said, getting to his feet.

“No,” Descoteaux said. “Not these days. Most people believe everything’s relative, including morality.”

Roy didn’t think Descoteaux was in a hand-shaking mood, so he just said, “Well, thank you for your time, Captain.”

“Whatever the crime, Mr. Miro, the kind of man you want to be looking for is one who’s absolutely certain of his righteousness.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

“No one’s more dangerous than a man who’s convinced of his own moral superiority,” Descoteaux said pointedly.

“How true,” Roy replied, opening the door.

“Someone like Spence — he’s not the enemy. In fact, people like that are the only reason the whole damn civilization hasn’t fallen down around our ears already.”

Stepping into the hall, Roy said, “Have a nice day.”

“Whatever side Spence settles on,” said Descoteaux with quiet but unmistakable belligerence, “I’d bet my ass it’s the right side.”

Roy closed the office door behind him. By the time he reached the elevators, he’d decided to have Harris Descoteaux killed. Maybe he would do it himself, as soon as he had dealt with Spencer Grant.

On the way to his car, he cooled down. On the street once more, with Guinevere’s treasure on the car seat beside him exerting its calming influence, Roy was sufficiently in control again to realize that summary execution wasn’t an appropriate response to Descoteaux’s insulting insinuations. Greater punishments than death were within his power to bestow.

The three wings of the two-story apartment complex embraced a modest swimming pool. Cold wind chopped the water into wavelets that slapped at the blue tile under the coping, and Spencer detected the scent of chlorine as he crossed the courtyard.

The burned-out sky was lower than it had been before breakfast, as if it were a pall of gray ashes settling toward the earth. The lush fronds of the wind-tossed palm trees rustled and clicked and clattered with what might have been a storm warning.

Padding along at Spencer’s side, Rocky sneezed a couple of times at the chlorine smell, but he was unfazed by the thrashing palms. He had never met a tree that scared him. Which was not to say that such a devil tree didn’t exist. When he was in one of his stranger moods, when he had the heebie-jeebies and sensed evil mojo at work in every shadow, when the circumstances were just right, he probably could be terrorized by a wilted sapling in a five-inch pot.

According to the information that Valerie — then calling herself Hannah May Rainey — had supplied to obtain a work card for a job as a dealer in a casino, she’d lived at this apartment complex. Unit 2-D.

The apartments on the second floor opened onto a roofed balcony that overlooked the courtyard and that sheltered the walkway in front of the ground-floor units. As Spencer and Rocky climbed concrete stairs, wind rattled a loose picket in the rust-spotted iron railing.

He’d brought Rocky because a cute dog was a great icebreaker. People tended to trust a man who was trusted by a dog, and they were more likely to open up and talk to a stranger who had an appealing mutt at his side — even if that stranger had a dark intensity about him and a scar from ear to chin. Such was the power of canine charm.

Hannah-Valerie’s former apartment was in the center wing of the U-shaped structure, at the rear of the courtyard. A large window to the right of the door was covered by draperies. To the left, a small window revealed a kitchen. The name above the doorbell was Traven.

Spencer rang the bell and waited.

His highest hope was that Valerie had shared the apartment and that the other tenant remained in residence. She had lived there at least four months, the duration of her employment at the Mirage. In that much time, though Valerie would have been living as much of a lie as in California, her roommate might have made an observation that would enable Spencer to track her backward from Nevada, the same way that Rosie had pointed him from Santa Monica to Vegas.

He rang the bell again.

Odd as it was to try to find her by seeking to learn where she’d come from instead of where she’d gone, Spencer had no better choice. He didn’t have the resources to track her forward from Santa Monica. Besides, by going backward, he was less likely to collide with the federal agents — or whatever they were — following her.

He had heard the doorbell ringing inside. Nevertheless, he tried knocking.

The knock was answered — though not by anyone in Valerie’s former apartment. Farther to the right along the balcony, the door to 2-E opened, and a gray-haired woman in her seventies leaned her head out to peek at him. “Can I help you?”

“I’m looking for Miss Traven.”

“Oh, she works the early shift at Caesars Palace. Won’t be home for hours yet.”

She moved into the doorway: a short, plump, sweet-faced woman in clunky orthopedic shoes, support stockings as thick as dinosaur hide, a yellow-and-gray housedress, and a forest-green cardigan.

Spencer said, “Well, who I’m really looking for is—”

Rocky, hiding behind Spencer, risked poking his head around his master’s legs to get a look at the grandmotherly soul from 2-E, and the old woman squealed with delight when she spotted him. Although she toddled more than walked, she launched herself off the threshold with the exuberance of a child who didn’t know the meaning of the word “arthritis.” Burbling baby talk, she approached at a velocity that startled Spencer and alarmed the hell out of Rocky. The dog yelped, the woman bore down on them with exclamations of adoration, the dog tried to climb Spencer’s right leg as if to hide under his jacket, the woman said “Sweetums, sweetums, sweetums,” and Rocky dropped to the balcony floor in a swoon of terror and curled into a ball and crossed his forepaws over his eyes and prepared himself for the inevitability of violent death.

Bosley Donner’s left leg slipped off the foot brace on his electric wheelchair and scraped along the walkway. Laughing, letting his chair coast to a halt, Donner lifted his unfeeling leg with both hands and slammed it back where it belonged.

Equipped with a high-capacity battery and a golf-cart propulsion system, Donner’s transportation was capable of considerably greater speeds than any ordinary electric wheelchair. Roy Miro caught up with him, breathing heavily.

“I told you this baby can move,” Donner said.

“Yes. I see. Impressive,” Roy puffed.

They were in the backyard of Donner’s four-acre estate in Bel Air, where a wide ribbon of brick-colored concrete had been installed to allow the disabled owner to access every corner of his elaborately landscaped property. The walkway rose and fell repeatedly, passed through a tunnel under one end of the pool patio, and serpentined among phoenix palms, queen palms, king palms, huge Indian laurels, and melaleucas in their jackets of shaggy bark. Evidently, Donner had designed the walkway to serve as his private roller coaster.

“It’s illegal, you know,” Donner said.

“Illegal?”

“It’s against the law to modify a wheelchair the way I’ve done.”

“Well, yes, I can see why it would be.”

“You can?” Donner was amazed. “I can’t. It’s my chair.”

“Whipping around this track the way you do, you could wind up not just a paraplegic but a quadriplegic.”

Donner grinned and shrugged. “Then I’d computerize the chair so I could operate it with vocal commands.”

At thirty-two, Bosley Donner had been without the use of his legs for eight years, after taking a chunk of shrapnel in the spine during a Middle East police action that had involved the unit of U.S. Army Rangers in which he had served. He was stocky, deeply tanned, with brush-cut blond hair and blue-gray eyes that were even merrier than Roy’s. If he’d ever been depressed about his disability, he had gotten over it long ago — or maybe he’d learned to hide it well.

Roy disliked the man because of his extravagant lifestyle, his annoyingly high spirits, his unspeakably garish Hawaiian shirt — and for other reasons not quite definable. “But is this recklessness socially responsible?”

Donner frowned with confusion, but then his face brightened. “Oh, you mean I might be a burden to society. Hell, I’d never use government health care anyway. They’d triage me into the grave in six seconds flat. Look around, Mr. Miro. I can pay what’s necessary. Come on, I want to show you the temple. It’s really something.”

Rapidly gaining speed, Donner streaked away from Roy, downhill through feathery palm shadows and spangles of red-gold sunshine.

Straining to repress his annoyance, Roy followed.

After being discharged from the army, Donner had fallen back on a lifelong talent for drawing inventive cartoon characters. His portfolio had won him a job with a greeting card company. In his spare time, he developed a comic strip and was offered a contract by the first newspaper syndicate to see it. Within two years, he was the hottest cartoonist in the country. Now, through those widely loved cartoon characters — which Roy found idiotic — Bosley Donner was an industry: best-selling books, TV shows, toys, T-shirts, his own line of greeting cards, product endorsements, records, and much more.

At the bottom of a long slope, the walkway led to a balustraded garden temple in the classical style. Five columns stood on a limestone floor, supporting a heavy cornice and a dome with a ball finial. The structure was surrounded by English primrose laden with blossoms in intense shades of yellow, red, pink, and purple.

Donner sat in his chair, in the center of the open-air temple, swathed in shadows, waiting for Roy. In that setting, he should have been a mysterious figure; however, his stockiness and broad face and brush-cut hair and loud Hawaiian shirt all combined to make him seem like one of his own cartoon characters.

Stepping into the temple, Roy said, “You were telling me about Spencer Grant.”

“Was I?” Donner said with a note of irony.

In fact, for the past twenty minutes, while leading Roy on a chase around the estate, Donner had said quite a lot about Grant — with whom he had served in the Army Rangers — and yet had said nothing that revealed either the inner man or any important details of his life prior to joining the army.

“I liked Hollywood,” Donner said. “He was the quietest man I’ve ever known, one of the most polite, one of the smartest — and sure as hell the most self-effacing. Last guy in the world to brag. And he could be a lot of fun when he was in the right mood. But he was very self-contained. No one ever really got to know him.”

“Hollywood?” Roy asked.

“That’s just a name we had for him, when we wanted to kid him. He loved old movies. I mean, he was almost obsessed with them.”

“Any particular kind of movies?”

“Suspense flicks and dramas with old-fashioned heroes. These days, he said, movies have forgotten what heroes are all about.”

“How so?”

“He said heroes used to have a better sense of right and wrong than they do now. He loved North by Northwest, Notorious, To Kill a Mockingbird, because the heroes had strong principles, morals. They used their wits more than guns.”

“Now,” Roy said, “you have movies where a couple of buddy cops smash and shoot up half a city to get one bad guy—”

“—use four-letter words, all kinds of trash talk—”

“—jump into bed with women they met only two hours ago—”

“—and strut around with half their clothes off to show their muscles, totally full of themselves.”

Roy nodded. “He had a point.”

“Hollywood’s favorite old movie stars were Cary Grant and Spencer Tracy, so of course he took a lot of ribbing about that.”

Roy was surprised that his and the scarred man’s opinions of current movies were in harmony. He was disturbed to find himself in agreement on any issue with a dangerous sociopath like Grant.

Thus preoccupied, he’d only half heard what Donner had told him. “I’m sorry — took a lot of ribbing about what?”

“Well, it wasn’t particularly funny that Spencer Tracy and Cary Grant must’ve been his mom’s favorite stars too, or that she named him after them. But a guy like Hollywood, as modest and quiet as he was, shy around girls, a guy who didn’t hardly seem to have an ego — well, it just struck us funny that he identified so strongly with a couple of movie stars, the heroes they played. He was still nineteen when he went into Ranger training, but in most ways he seemed twenty years older than the rest of us. You could see the kid in him only when he was talking about old movies or watching them.”

Roy sensed that what he had just learned was of great importance — but he didn’t understand why. He stood on the brink of a revelation yet could not quite see the shape of it.

He held his breath, afraid that even exhaling would blow him away from the understanding that seemed within reach.

A warm breeze soughed through the temple.

On the limestone floor near Roy’s left foot, a slow black beetle crawled laboriously toward its own strange destiny.

Then, almost eerily, Roy heard himself asking a question that he had not first consciously considered. “You’re sure his mother named him after Spencer Tracy and Cary Grant?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Donner replied.

“Is it?”

“It is to me.”

“He actually told you that’s why she named him what she did?”

“I guess so. I don’t remember. But he must have.”

The soft breeze soughed, the beetle crawled, and a chill of enlightenment shivered through Roy.

Bosley Donner said, “You haven’t seen the waterfall yet. It’s terrific. It’s really, really neat. Come on, you’ve got to see it.”

The wheelchair purred out of the temple.

Roy turned to watch between the limestone columns as Donner sped recklessly along another down-sloping pathway into the cool shadows of a green glen. His brightly patterned Hawaiian shirt seemed to flare with fire when he flashed through shafts of red-gold sunshine, and then he vanished past a stand of Australian tree ferns.

By now Roy understood the primary thing about Bosley Donner that so annoyed him: The cartoonist was just too damned self-confident and independent. Even disabled, he was utterly self-possessed and self-sufficient.

Such people were a grave danger to the system. Civil order was not sustainable in a society populated by rugged individualists. The dependency of the people was the source of the state’s power, and if the state didn’t have enormous power, progress could not be achieved or peace sustained in the streets.

He might have followed Donner and terminated him in the name of social stability, lest others be inspired by the cartoonist’s example, but the risk of being observed by witnesses was too great. A couple of gardeners were at work on the grounds, and Mrs. Donner or a member of the household staff might be looking out a window at the most inconvenient of all moments.

Besides, chilled and excited by what he believed he’d discovered about Spencer Grant, Roy was eager to confirm his suspicion.

He left the temple, being careful not to crush the slow black beetle, and turned in the opposite direction from that in which Donner had vanished. He swiftly ascended to higher levels of the backyard, hurried past the side of the enormous house, and got in his car, which was parked in the circular driveway.

From the manila envelope that Melissa Wicklun had given him, he withdrew one of the pictures of Grant and put it on the seat. But for the terrible scar, that face initially had seemed quite ordinary. Now he knew that it was the face of a monster.

From the same envelope, he took a printout of the report that he’d requested from Mama the previous night and that he’d read off the computer screen in his hotel a few hours ago. He paged to the false names under which Grant had acquired and paid for utilities.

Stewart Peck

Henry Holden

James Gable

John Humphrey

William Clark

Wayne Gregory

Robert Tracy

Roy withdrew a pen from his inside jacket pocket and rearranged first and last names into a new list of his own:

Gregory Peck

William Holden

Clark Gable

James Stewart

John Wayne

That left Roy with four names from the original list: Henry, Humphrey, Robert, and Tracy.

Tracy, of course, matched the bastard’s first name — Spencer. And for a purpose that neither Mama nor Roy had yet discovered, the tricky, scarfaced son of a bitch was probably using another false identity that incorporated the name Cary, which was missing from the first list but was the logical match for his last name — Grant.

That left Henry, Humphrey, and Robert.

Henry. No doubt Grant sometimes operated under the name Fonda, perhaps with a first name lifted from Burt Lancaster or Gary Cooper.

Humphrey. In some circle, somewhere, Grant was known as Mr. Bogart — first name courtesy of yet another movie star of yesteryear.

Robert. Eventually they were certain to find that Grant also employed the surname Mitchum or Montgomery.

As casually as other men changed shirts, Spencer Grant changed identities.

They were searching for a phantom.

Although he couldn’t yet prove it, Roy was now convinced that the name Spencer Grant was as phony as all the others. Grant was not the surname that this man had inherited from his father, nor was Spencer the Christian name that his mother had given him. He had named himself after favorite actors who had played old-fashioned heroes.

His real name was cipher. His real name was mystery, shadow, ghost, smoke.

Roy picked up the computer-enhanced portrait and studied the scarred face.

This dark-eyed cipher had joined the army under the name Spencer Grant, when he was just eighteen. What teenager knew how to establish a false identity, with convincing credentials, and get away with it? What had this enigmatic man been running from at even that young age?

How in the hell was he involved with the woman?

On the sofa, Rocky lay on his back, all four legs in the air, paws limp, his head in Theda Davidowitz’s ample lap, gazing up in rapture at the plump, gray-haired woman. Theda stroked his tummy, scratched under his chin, and called him “sweetums” and “cutie” and “pretty eyes” and “snookums.” She told him that he was God’s own little furry angel, the handsomest canine in all creation, wonderful, marvelous, cuddly, adorable, perfect. She fed him thin little slices of ham, and he took each morsel from her fingertips with a delicacy more characteristic of a duchess than of a dog.

Ensconced in an overstuffed armchair with antimacassars on the back and arms, Spencer sipped from a cup of rich coffee that Theda had improved with a pinch of cinnamon. On the table beside his chair, a china pot held additional coffee. A plate was heaped with homemade chocolate-chip cookies. He had politely declined imported English tea biscuits, Italian anisette biscotti, a slice of lemon-coconut cake, a blueberry muffin, gingersnaps, shortbread, and a raisin scone; exhausted by Theda’s hospitable perseverance, he had at last agreed to a cookie, only to be presented with twelve of them, each the size of a saucer.

Between cooing at the dog and urging Spencer to eat another cookie, Theda revealed that she was seventy-six and that her husband — Bernie — had died eleven years ago. She and Bernie had brought two children into the world: Rachel and Robert. Robert — the finest boy who ever lived, thoughtful and kind — served in Vietnam, was a hero, won more medals than you would believe…and died there. Rachel — oh, you should have seen her, so beautiful, her picture was there on the mantel, but it didn’t do her justice, no photo could do her justice — had been killed in a traffic accident fourteen years ago. It was a terrible thing to outlive your children; it made you wonder if God was paying attention. Theda and Bernie had lived most of their married life in California, where Bernie had been an accountant and she’d been a third-grade teacher. On retirement, they sold their home, reaped a big capital gain, and moved to Vegas not because they were gamblers — well, twenty dollars, wasted on slot machines, once a month — but because real estate was cheap compared with California. Retirees had moved there by the thousands for that very reason. She and Bernie bought a small house for cash and were still able to bank sixty percent of what they’d gotten from the sale of their home in California. Bernie died three years later. He was the sweetest man, gentle and considerate, the greatest good fortune in her life had been to marry him — and after his death, the house was too large for a widow, so Theda sold it and moved to the apartment. For ten years, she’d had a dog — his name was Sparkle and it suited him, he was an adorable cocker spaniel — but, two months ago, Sparkle had gone the way of all things. God, how she’d cried, a foolish old woman, cried rivers, but she’d loved him. Since then she’d occupied herself with cleaning, baking, watching TV, and playing cards with friends twice a week. She hadn’t considered getting another dog after Sparkle, because she wouldn’t outlive another pet, and she didn’t want to die and leave a sad little dog to fend for itself. Then she saw Rocky, and her heart melted, and now she knew she would have to get another dog. If she got one from the pound, a cute pooch destined to be put to sleep anyway, then every good day she could give him was more than he would have had without her. And who knew? Maybe she would outlive another pet and make a home for him until his time came, because two of her friends were in their mid-eighties and still going strong.

To please her, Spencer had a third cup of coffee and a second of the immense chocolate-chip cookies.

Rocky was gracious enough to accept more paper-thin slices of ham and submit to more belly stroking and chin scratching. From time to time he rolled his eyes toward Spencer, as if to say, Why didn’t you tell me about this lady a long time ago?

Spencer had never seen the dog so completely, quickly charmed as he’d been by Theda. When his tail periodically swished back and forth, the motion was so vigorous that the upholstery was in danger of being worn to tatters.

“What I wanted to ask you,” Spencer said when Theda paused for breath, “is if you knew a young woman who lived in the next apartment until late last November. Her name was Hannah Rainey and she—”

At the mention of Hannah — whom Spencer knew as Valerie — Theda launched into an enthusiastic monologue seasoned with superlatives. This girl, this special girl, oh, she’d been the best neighbor, so considerate, such a good heart in that dear girl. Hannah worked at the Mirage, a blackjack dealer on the graveyard shift, and she slept mornings through early afternoons. More often than not, Hannah and Theda had eaten dinner together, sometimes in Theda’s apartment, sometimes in Hannah’s. Last October Theda had been desperately ill with the flu and Hannah had looked after her, nursed her, been like a daughter to her. No, Hannah never talked about her past, never said where she was from, never talked about family, because she was trying to put something terrible behind her — that much was obvious — and she was looking only to the future, always forward, never back. For a while Theda had figured maybe it was an abusive husband, still out there somewhere, stalking her, and she’d had to leave her old life to avoid being killed. These days, you heard so much about such things, the world was a mess, everything turned upside down, getting worse all the time. Then the Drug Enforcement Administration had raided Hannah’s apartment last November, at eleven in the morning, when she should have been sound asleep, but the girl was gone, packed up and moved overnight, without a word to her friend Theda, as if she’d known that she was about to be found. The federal agents were furious, and they questioned Theda at length, as if she might be a criminal mastermind herself, for God’s sake. They said Hannah Rainey was a fugitive from justice, a partner in one of the most successful cocaine-importing rings in the country, and that she had shot and killed two undercover police officers in a sting operation that had gone sour.

“So she’s wanted for murder?” Spencer asked.

Making a fist of one liver-spotted hand, stamping one foot so hard that her orthopedic shoe hammered the floor with a resounding thud in spite of the carpet, Theda Davidowitz said, “Bullshit!”

Eve Marie Jammer worked in a windowless chamber at the bottom of an office tower, four stories below downtown Las Vegas. Sometimes she thought of herself as being like the hunchback of Notre Dame in his bell tower, or like the phantom in his lonely realm beneath the Paris Opera House, or like Dracula in the solitude of his crypt: a figure of mystery, in possession of terrible secrets. One day, she hoped to be feared more intensely, by more people, than all those who had feared the hunchback, the phantom, and the count combined.

Unlike the monsters in movies, Eve Jammer was not physically disfigured. She was thirty-three, an ex-showgirl, blond, green-eyed, breathtaking. Her face caused men to turn their heads and walk into lampposts. Her perfectly proportioned body existed nowhere else but in the moist, erotic dreams of pubescent boys.

She was aware of her exceptional beauty. She reveled in it, for it was a source of power, and Eve loved nothing as much as power.

In her deep domain, the walls and the concrete floor were gray, and the banks of fluorescent bulbs shed a cold, unflattering light in which she was nonetheless gorgeous. Though the space was heated, and though she occasionally turned the thermostat to ninety degrees, the concrete vault resisted every effort to warm it, and Eve often wore a sweater to ward off the chill. As the sole worker in her office, she shared the room only with a few varieties of spiders, all unwelcome, which no quantity of insecticide could eradicate entirely.

That Friday morning in February, Eve was diligently tending the banks of recording machines on the metal shelves that nearly covered one wall. One hundred twenty-eight private telephone lines served her bunker, and all but two were connected to recorders, although not all the recorders were on active status. Currently, the agency had eighty taps operating in Las Vegas.

The sophisticated recording devices employed laser discs rather than tape, and all the phone taps were voice activated, so the discs would not become filled with long stretches of silence. Because of the enormous capacity for data storage allowed by the laser format, the discs seldom had to be replaced.

Nevertheless, Eve checked the digital readout on each machine, which indicated available recording capacity. And although an alarm would draw attention to any malfunctioning recorder, she tested each unit to be certain that it was working. If even one disc or machine failed, the agency might lose information of incalculable value: Las Vegas was the heart of the country’s underground economy, which meant that it was a nexus of criminal activity and political conspiracy.

Casino gambling was primarily a cash business, and Las Vegas was like a huge, brightly lighted pleasure ship afloat on a sea of coins and paper currency. Even the casinos that were owned by respectable conglomerates were believed to be skimming fifteen to thirty percent of receipts, which never appeared on their books or tax returns. A portion of that secret treasure circulated through the local economy.

Then there were tips. Tens of millions in gratuities were given by winning gamblers to card dealers and roulette croupiers and craps-table crews, and most of that vanished into the deep pockets of the city. To obtain a three-or five-year contract as the maître d’ at main showrooms in most major hotels, a winning applicant had to pay a quarter million in cash — or more — as “key money” to those who were in a position to grant the job; tips reaped from tourists seeking good seats for the shows quickly made the investment pay off.

The most beautiful call girls, referred by casino management to high rollers, could make half a million a year — tax free.

Houses frequently were bought with hundred-dollar bills packed in grocery bags or Styrofoam coolers. Each such sale was by private contract, with no escrow company involved and no official recording of a new deed, which prevented any taxing authority from discovering either that a seller had made a capital gain or that a buyer had made the purchase with undeclared income. Some of the finest mansions in the city had changed hands three or four times over two decades, but the name on the deed of record remained that of the original owner, to whom all official notices were mailed even after his death.

The IRS and numerous other federal agencies maintained large offices in Vegas. Nothing interested the government more than money — especially money from which it had never taken its bite.

The high-rise above Eve’s windowless realm was occupied by an agency that maintained as formidable a presence in Las Vegas as any arm of government. She was supposed to believe that she worked for a secret though legitimate operation of the National Security Agency, but she knew that was not the truth. This was a nameless outfit, engaged in wide-ranging and mysterious tasks, intricately structured, operating outside the law, manipulating legislative and judicial branches of government (perhaps the executive branch as well), acting as judge and jury and executioner when it wished — a discreet gestapo.

They had put her in one of the most sensitive positions in the Vegas office partly because of her father’s influence. However, they also trusted her in that subterranean recording studio because they thought that she was too dumb to realize the personal advantage to be made of the information therein. Her face was the purest distillation of male sex fantasies, and her legs were the most lithe and erotic ever to grace a Vegas stage, and her breasts were enormous, defiantly upswept — so they assumed that she was barely bright enough to change the laser discs from time to time and, when necessary, to call an in-house technician to repair malfunctioning machines.

Although Eve had developed a convincing dumb-blonde act, she was smarter than any of the Machiavellian crowd in the offices above her. During two years with the agency, she had secretly listened to the wiretaps on the most important of the casino owners, Mafia bosses, businessmen, and politicians being monitored.

She had profited by obtaining the details of secret corporate-stock manipulations, which allowed her to buy and sell for her own portfolio without risk. She was well informed about the guaranteed point spreads on national sporting events on those occasions when they were rigged to ensure gigantic profits for certain casino sports books. Usually, when a boxer had been paid to take a dive, Eve had placed a wager on his opponent — through a sports book in Reno, where her amazing luck was less likely to be noticed by anyone she knew.

Most of the people under agency surveillance were sufficiently experienced — and larcenous — to know the danger of conducting illegal activities over the phone, so they monitored their own lines twenty-four hours a day for evidence of electronic eavesdropping. Some of them also used scrambling devices. They were, therefore, arrogantly convinced that their communications couldn’t be intercepted.

However, the agency employed technology available nowhere else outside the inner sanctums of the Pentagon. No detection equipment in existence could sniff out the electronic spoor of their devices. To Eve’s certain knowledge, they operated an undiscovered tap on the “secure” phone of the special agent in charge of the Las Vegas office of the FBI; she wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that the agency enjoyed equal coverage of the director of the Bureau in Washington.

In two years, making a long series of small profits that no one noticed, she had amassed more than five million dollars. Her only large score had been a million in cash, which had been intended as a payoff from the Chicago mob to a United States Senator on a fact-finding junket to Vegas. After covering her tracks by destroying the laser disc on which a conversation about the bribe had been recorded, Eve intercepted the two couriers in a hotel elevator on their way from a penthouse suite to the lobby. They were carrying the money in a canvas book bag that was decorated with the face of Mickey Mouse. Big guys. Hard faces. Cold eyes. Brightly patterned Italian silk shirts under black linen sport coats. Eve was rummaging in her big straw purse even as she entered the elevator, but the two thugs could see only her boobs stretching the low neckline of her sweater. Because they might have been quicker than they looked, she didn’t risk taking the Korth.38 out of the handbag, just shot them through the straw, two rounds each. They hit the floor so hard that the elevator shook, and then the money was hers.

The only thing she regretted about the operation was the third man. He was a little guy with thinning hair and bags under his eyes, squeezing into the corner of the cab as if trying to make himself too small to be noticed. According to the tag pinned to his shirt, he was with a convention of dentists and his name was Thurmon Stookey. The poor bastard was a witness. After stopping the elevator between the twelfth and eleventh floors, Eve shot him in the head, but she didn’t like doing it.

After she reloaded the Korth and stuffed the ruined straw purse into the canvas book bag with the money, she descended to the ninth floor. She was prepared to kill anyone who might be waiting in the elevator alcove — but, thank God, no one was there. Minutes later she was out of the hotel, heading home, with one million bucks and a handy Mickey Mouse tote bag.

She felt terrible about Thurmon Stookey. He shouldn’t have been in that elevator. The wrong place, the wrong time. Blind fate. Life sure was full of surprises. In her entire thirty-three years, Eve Jammer had killed only five people, and Thurmon Stookey had been the sole innocent bystander among them. Nevertheless, for a while, she kept seeing the little guy’s face in her mind’s eye, as he had looked before she’d wasted him, and it had taken her the better part of a day to stop feeling bad about what had happened to him.

Within a year, she would not need to kill anyone again. She would be able to order people to carry out executions for her.

Soon, though unknown to the general populace, Eve Jammer would be the most feared person in the country, and safely beyond the reach of all enemies. The money she socked away was growing geometrically, but it was not money that would make her untouchable. Her real power would come from the trove of incriminating evidence on politicians, businessmen, and celebrities that she had transmitted at high speed, in the form of supercompressed digitized data, from the discs in her bunker to an automated recording device of her own, on a dedicated telephone line, in a bungalow in Boulder City that she had leased through an elaborate series of corporate blinds and false identities.

This was, after all, the Information Age, which had followed the Service Age, which itself had replaced the Industrial Age. She’d read all about it in Fortune and Forbes and Business Week. The future was now, and information was wealth.

Information was power.

Eve had finished examining the eighty active recorders and had begun to select new material for transmission to Boulder City when an electronic tone alerted her to a significant development on one of the taps.

If she had been out of the office, at home or elsewhere, the computer would have alerted her by beeper, whereupon she would have returned to the office immediately. She didn’t mind being on call twenty-four hours a day. That was preferable to having assistants manning the room on two other shifts, because she simply didn’t trust anyone else with the sensitive information on the discs.

A blinking red light drew her to the correct machine. She pushed a button to turn off the alarm.

On the front of the recorder, a label provided information about the wiretap. The first line was a case-file number. The next two lines were the address at which the tap was located. On the fourth line was the name of the subject being monitored: THEDA DAVIDOWITZ.

The surveillance of Mrs. Davidowitz was not the standard fishing expedition in which every word of every conversation was preserved on disc. After all, she was only an elderly widow, an ordinary prole whose general activities were no threat to the system — and therefore were of no interest to the agency. By merest chance, Davidowitz had established a short-lived friendship with the woman who was, at the moment, the most urgently sought fugitive in the nation, and the agency was interested in the widow only in the unlikely event that she received a telephone call or was paid a visit by her special friend. Monitoring the old woman’s dreary chats with other friends and neighbors would have been a waste of time.

Instead, the bunker’s autonomous computer, which controlled all the recording machines, was programmed to monitor the Davidowitz wiretap continuously and to activate the laser disc only upon the recognition of a key word that was related to the fugitive. That recognition had occurred moments ago. Now the key word appeared on a small display screen on the recorder: HANNAH.

Eve pressed a button marked MONITOR and heard Theda Davidowitz talking to someone in her living room on the other side of the city.

In the handset of each telephone in the widow’s apartment, the standard microphone had been replaced with one that could pick up not only what was said in a phone conversation but what was said in any of her rooms, even when none of the phones were in use, and pass it down the line to a monitoring station on a continuous basis. This was a variation on a device known in the intelligence trade as an infinity transmitter.

The agency used infinity transmitters that were considerably improved over the models available on the open market. This one could operate twenty-four hours a day without compromising the function of the telephone in which it was concealed; therefore, Mrs. Davidowitz always heard a dial tone when she picked up a receiver, and callers trying to reach her were never frustrated by a busy signal related to the infinity transmitter’s operation.

Eve Jammer listened patiently as the old woman rambled on about Hannah Rainey. Davidowitz was obviously talking about rather than to her friend the fugitive.

When the widow paused, a young-sounding man in the room with her asked a question about Hannah. Before Davidowitz answered, she called her visitor “my pretty-eyed snookie-wookums” and asked him to “give me a kissie, come on, give me a little lick, show Theda you love her, you little sweetums, sweet little sweetums, yeah, that’s right, shake that tail and give Theda a little lick, a little kissie.”

“Good God,” Eve said, grimacing with disgust. Davidowitz was going on eighty. From the sound of him, the man with her was forty or fifty years her junior. Sick. Sick and perverted. What was the world coming to?

“A cockroach,” Theda said as she gently rubbed Rocky’s tummy. “Big. About four or five feet long, not counting the antennae.”

After the Drug Enforcement Administration raided Hannah Rainey’s place with a force of eight agents and discovered that she’d already fled, they grilled Theda and other neighbors for hours, asking the dumbest questions, all those grown men insisting Hannah was a dangerous criminal, when anyone who had ever met the precious girl for five minutes knew she was incapable of dealing drugs and murdering police officers. What absolute, total, stupid, silly nonsense. Then, unable to learn anything from neighbors, the agents had spent still more hours in Hannah’s apartment, searching for God-knew-what.

Later that same evening, long after the Keystone Kops had departed — such a loud, rude group of nitwits — Theda went to 2-D with the spare key that Hannah had given her. Instead of breaking down the door to get into the apartment, the DEA had smashed the big window in the dining area that overlooked the balcony and courtyard. The landlord already had boarded over the window with sheets of plywood, until the glazier could fix it. But the front door was intact, and the lock hadn’t been changed, so Theda let herself in. The apartment — unlike Theda’s own — was rented furnished. Hannah had always kept it spotless, treated the furniture as though it were her own, a fastidious and thoughtful girl, so Theda wanted to see what damage the nitwits had done and be sure that the landlord didn’t try to blame it on Hannah. In case Hannah turned up, Theda would testify about her immaculate housekeeping and her respect for the landlord’s property. By God, she wouldn’t let them make the dear girl pay for the damage plus stand trial for murdering police officers whom she obviously never murdered. And, of course, the apartment was a mess, the agents were pigs: They had ground out cigarettes on the kitchen floor, spilled cups of take-out coffee from the diner down the block, and even left the toilet unflushed, if you could believe such a thing, since they were grown men and must have had mothers who taught them something. But the strangest thing was the cockroach, which they’d drawn on a bedroom wall, with one of those wide-point felt-tip markers.

“Not well drawn, you understand, more or less just the outline of a cockroach, but you could see what it was meant to be,” Theda said. “Just a sort of line drawing but ugly all the same. What on earth were those nitwits trying to prove, scrawling on the walls?”

Spencer was pretty sure that Hannah-Valerie herself had drawn the cockroach — just as she had nailed the textbook photograph of a roach to the wall of the bungalow in Santa Monica. He sensed it was meant to taunt and aggravate the men who had come looking for her, though he had no idea what it signified or why she knew that it would anger her pursuers.

Sitting at her desk in her windowless jurisdiction, Eve Jammer telephoned the operations office, upstairs, on the ground floor of the Las Vegas quarters of Carver, Gunmann, Garrote & Hemlock. The morning duty officer was John Cottcole, and Eve alerted him to the situation at Theda Davidowitz’s apartment.

Cottcole was electrified by the news and unable to conceal his excitement. He was shouting orders to people in his office even while he was still on the line with Eve.

“Ms. Jammer,” Cottcole said, “I’ll want a copy of that disc, every word on that disc, you understand?”

“Sure,” she said, but he hung up even as she was replying.

They thought that Eve didn’t know who Hannah Rainey had been before becoming Hannah Rainey, but she knew the whole story. She also knew that there was an enormous opportunity for her in that case, a chance to hasten the growth of her fortune and power, but she hadn’t quite yet decided how to exploit it.

A fat spider scurried across her desk.

She slammed one hand down, crushing the bug against her palm.

Driving back to Spencer Grant’s cabin in Malibu, Roy Miro opened the Tupperware container. He needed the mood boost that the sight of Guinevere’s treasure was sure to give him.

He was shocked and dismayed to see a bluish-greenish-brownish spot of discoloration spreading from the web between the first and second fingers. He hadn’t expected anything like that for hours yet. He was irrationally upset with the dead woman for being so fragile.

Although he told himself that the spot of corruption was small, that the rest of the hand was still exquisite, that he should focus more on the unchanged and perfect form of it than on the coloration, Roy could not rekindle his previous passion for Guinevere’s treasure. In fact, though it didn’t yet emit a foul odor, it wasn’t a treasure any longer: It was just garbage.

Deeply saddened, he put the lid on the plastic box.

He drove another couple of miles before pulling off Pacific Coast Highway and parking in the lot at the foot of a public pier. But for his sedan, the lot was empty.

Taking the Tupperware container with him, he got out of the car, climbed the steps to the pier, and walked toward the end.

His footsteps echoed hollowly off the boardwalk. Under those tightly set beams, breakers rolled between the pilings, rumbling and sloshing.

The pier was deserted. No fishermen. No young lovers leaning against the railing. No tourists. Roy was alone with his corrupted treasure and with his thoughts.

At the end of the pier he stood for a moment, gazing at the vast expanse of glimmering water and at the azure heavens that curved down to meet it at the far horizon. The sky would be there tomorrow and a thousand years from tomorrow, and the sea would roll eternally, but all else passed away.

He strove to avoid negative thoughts. It wasn’t easy.

He opened the Tupperware container and threw the five-fingered garbage into the Pacific. It disappeared into the golden spangles of sunlight that gilded the backs of the low waves.

He wasn’t concerned that his fingerprints might be lifted by laser from the pallid skin of the severed hand. If the fish didn’t eat that last bit of Guinevere, the salt water would scrub away evidence of his touch.

He tossed the Tupperware container and its lid into the sea as well, although he was stricken with a pang of guilt even as the two objects arced toward the waves. He was usually sensitive to the environment, and he never littered.

He was not concerned about the hand, because it was organic. It would become a part of the ocean, and the ocean would not be changed.

Plastic, however, would take more than three hundred years to completely disintegrate. And throughout that period, toxic chemicals would leach from it into the suffering sea.

He should have dumped the Tupperware in one of the trash cans that stood at intervals along the pier railing.

Well. Too late. He was human. That was always the problem.

For a while Roy leaned against the railing. He stared into an infinity of sky and water, brooding about the human condition.

As far as Roy was concerned, the saddest thing in the world was that human beings, for all their ardent striving and desire, could never achieve physical, emotional, or intellectual perfection. The species was doomed to imperfection; it thrashed forever in despair or denial of that fact.

Though she had been undeniably attractive, Guinevere had been perfect in only one regard. Her hands.

Now those were gone too.

Even so, she had been one of the fortunate, because the vast majority of people were imperfect in every detail. They would never know the singular confidence and pleasure that must surely arise from the possession of even one flawless feature.

Roy was blessed with a repetitive dream, which came to him two or three nights every month, and from which he always woke in a state of rapture. In the dream, he searched the world over for women like Guinevere, and from each he harvested her perfect feature: from this one, a pair of ears so beautiful that they made his foolish heart pound almost painfully; from that one, the most exquisite ankles that it was within the mind of man to contemplate; from yet another, the snow-white, sculptured teeth of a goddess. He kept these treasures in magic jars, where they did not in the least deteriorate, and when he had collected all the parts of an ideal woman, he assembled them into the lover for whom he had always longed. She was so radiant in her unearthly perfection that he was half blinded when he looked upon her, and her slightest touch was purest ecstasy.

Unfortunately, he always woke from the paradise of her arms.

In life he would never know such beauty. Dreams were the only refuge for a man who would settle for nothing less than perfection.

Gazing into the sea and sky. A solitary man at the end of a deserted pier. Imperfect in every aspect of his own face and form. Aching for the unattainable.

He knew that he was both a romantic and a tragic figure. There were those who would even call him a fool. But at least he dared to dream and to dream big.

Sighing, he turned away from the uncaring sea and walked back to his car in the parking lot.

Behind the steering wheel, after he switched on the engine but before he put the car in gear, Roy allowed himself to withdraw the color snapshot from his wallet. He had carried it with him for more than a year, and he had studied it often. Indeed, it had such power to mesmerize him that he could have spent half the day staring at it in dreamy contemplation.

The photo was of the woman who had most recently called herself Valerie Ann Keene. She was attractive by anyone’s standards, perhaps even as attractive as Guinevere.

What made her special, however, what filled Roy with reverence for the divine power that had created humankind, was her perfect eyes. They were more arresting and compelling than even the eyes of Captain Harris Descoteaux of the Los Angeles Police Department.

Dark yet limpid, enormous yet perfectly proportioned to her face, direct yet enigmatic, they were eyes that had seen what lay at the heart of all meaningful mysteries. They were the eyes of a sinless soul yet somehow also the eyes of a shameless voluptuary, simultaneously coy and direct, eyes to which every deceit was as transparent as glass, filled with spirituality and sexuality and a complete understanding of destiny.

He was confident that in reality her eyes would be more, not less, powerful than they were in the snapshot. He had seen other photographs of her, as well as numerous videotapes, and each image had battered his heart more punishingly than the one before it.

When he found her, he would kill her for the agency and for Thomas Summerton and for all those well-meaning others who labored to make this a better country and a better world. She had earned no mercy. Except for her single perfect feature, she was an evil woman.

But after Roy had fulfilled his duty, he would take her eyes. He deserved them. For too brief a time, those enchanting eyes would bring him desperately needed solace in a world that was sometimes too cruel and cold to bear, even for someone with an attitude as positive as that which he cultivated.

By the time Spencer was able to make it to the front door of the apartment with Rocky in his arms (the dog might not have left under his own power), Theda filled a plastic bag with the remaining ten chocolate-chip cookies from the plate beside the armchair, and she insisted that he take them. She also toddled into the kitchen and returned with a homemade blueberry muffin in a small brown paper bag — and then made another trip to bring him two slices of lemon-coconut cake in a Tupperware container.

Spencer protested only the cake, because he wouldn’t be able to return the container to her.

“Nonsense,” she said. “You don’t need to return it. I’ve got enough Tupperware to last two lifetimes. For years I collected and collected it, because you can keep just anything in Tupperware, it has so many uses, but enough is enough, and I have more than enough, so just enjoy the cake and throw the container away. Enjoy!”

In addition to all the edible treats, Spencer had acquired two pieces of information about Hannah-Valerie. The first was Theda’s story about the portrait of the cockroach on the wall of Hannah’s bedroom, but he still didn’t know what to make of that. The second concerned something that Theda remembered Hannah saying during idle dinner conversation one evening shortly before packing up her things and dusting Vegas off her heels. They had been discussing places in which they had always dreamed of living, and although Theda couldn’t make up her mind between Hawaii and England, Hannah had been adamant that only the small coastal town of Carmel, California, had all the peace and beauty that anyone could ever desire.

Spencer supposed that Carmel was a long shot, but at the moment it was the best lead he had. On one hand, she hadn’t gone straight there from Las Vegas; she had stopped in the Los Angeles metropolitan area and tried to make a life as Valerie Keene. On the other hand, perhaps now, after her mysterious enemies had found her twice in large cities, she would decide to see if they could locate her as easily in a far smaller community.

Theda had not informed the band of loud, rude, window-shattering nitwits about Hannah’s mention of Carmel. Maybe that gave Spencer an advantage.

He was loath to leave her alone with the memories of her beloved husband, long-mourned children, and vanished friend. Nevertheless, thanking her effusively, he stepped across the threshold onto the balcony and walked to the stairs that led down into the courtyard.

The mottled gray-black sky and the blustery wind surprised him, for when he had been in Thedaworld, he had all but forgotten that anything else existed beyond its walls. The crowns of the palms still thrashed, and the air was chillier than before.

Carrying a seventy-pound dog, a plastic bag full of cookies, a blueberry muffin in a paper sack, and a Tupperware container heavy with cake, he found the stairs precarious. He lugged Rocky all the way to the bottom, however, because he was certain that the dog would race straight back to Thedaworld if put down on the balcony.

When Spencer finally released the mutt, Rocky turned and gazed longingly up the stairs toward that little piece of canine heaven.

“Time to plunge back into reality,” Spencer said.

The dog whined.

Spencer walked toward the front of the complex, under the windwhipped trees. Halfway past the swimming pool he looked back.

Rocky was still at the stairs.

“Hey, pal.”

Rocky looked at him.

“Whose hound are you anyway?”

An expression of doggy guilt overcame the mutt, and at last he padded toward Spencer.

“Lassie would never leave Timmy, even for God’s own grandmother.”

Rocky sneezed, sneezed, and sneezed again at the pungent scent of chlorine.

“What if,” Spencer said as the dog caught up to him, “I’d been trapped here, under an overturned tractor, unable to save myself, or maybe cornered by an angry bear?”

Rocky whined as if in apology.

“Accepted,” Spencer said.

On the street, in the Explorer again, Spencer said, “Actually, I’m proud of you, pal.”

Rocky cocked his head.

Starting the engine, Spencer said, “You’re getting more sociable every day. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you’ve been raiding my cash supply to pay for some high-priced Beverly Hills therapist.”

Half a block ahead, a mold-green Chevy rounded the corner in a high-speed slide, tires screaming and smoking, and almost rolled like a stock car in a demolition derby. Somehow it stayed on two wheels, accelerated toward them, and shrieked to a stop at the curb on the other side of the street.

Spencer assumed the car was driven by a drunk or by a kid hopped up on something stronger than Pepsi — until the doors flew open and four men, of a type he recognized too well, exploded out of it. They hurried toward the entrance to the apartment-house courtyard.

Spencer popped the hand brake and shifted into drive.

One of the running men spotted him, pointed, shouted. All four of them turned toward the Explorer.

“Better hold tight, pal.”

Spencer tramped on the accelerator, and the Explorer shot into the street, away from the men, toward the corner.

He heard gunfire.

TEN

A bullet smacked into the tailgate of the Explorer. Another ricocheted off metal with a piercing whine. The fuel tank didn’t explode. No glass shattered. No tires blew out. Spencer hung a hard right turn past the coffee shop on the corner, felt the truck lifting, trying to tip over, so he pushed it into a slide instead. Rubber barked against blacktop as the rear tires stuttered sideways across the pavement. Then they were into the side street, out of sight of the gunmen, and Spencer accelerated.

Rocky, who was afraid of darkness and wind and lightning and cats and being seen at his toilet, among a dauntingly long list of other things, was not in the least frightened by the gunfire or by Spencer’s stunt driving. He sat up straight, his claws sunk into the upholstery, swaying with the movement of the truck, panting and grinning.

Glancing at the speedometer, Spencer saw that they were doing sixty-five in a thirty-mile-per-hour zone. He accelerated.

In the passenger seat, Rocky did something that he had never done before: He began to bob his head up and down, as if encouraging Spencer to greater speed, yesyesyesyes.

“This is serious stuff,” Spencer reminded him.

Rocky chuffed, as though scoffing at the danger.

“They must have been running audio surveillance on Theda’s apartment.”

Yesyesyesyesyes.

“Wasting precious resources monitoring Theda—and ever since last November? What the hell do they want with Valerie, what’s so damned important that it’s worth all this?”

Spencer looked at the rearview mirror. One and a half blocks behind them, the Chevy rounded the corner at the coffee shop.

He had wanted to get two blocks away before swinging left, out of sight, hoping that the trigger-happy torpedoes in the mold-green sedan would be deceived into thinking that he had turned at the first cross street rather than the second. Now they were on to him again. The Chevy was closing the distance between them, and it was a hell of a lot faster than it looked, a souped-up street rod disguised as one of the stripped-down wheezemobiles that the government assigned to Agriculture Department inspectors and agents of the Bureau of Dental Floss Management.

Though in their sights, Spencer hung a left at the end of the second block, as planned. This time he entered the new street in a wide turn to avoid another time-wasting, tire-stressing slide.

Nevertheless, he was going so fast that he spooked the driver of an approaching Honda. The guy wheeled hard right, bounced up onto the sidewalk, grazed a fire hydrant, and rammed a sagging chain-link fence that surrounded an abandoned service station.

From the corner of his eye, Spencer saw Rocky leaning against the passenger door, pushed there by centrifugal force, yet bobbing his head enthusiastically: Yesyesyesyesyes.

Pillowy hammers of cold wind buffeted the Explorer. From out of several empty acres on the right, dense clouds of sand churned into the street.

Vegas had grown haphazardly across the floor of a vast desert valley, and even most of the developed sectors of the city embraced big expanses of barren land. At a glance they seemed to be only enormous vacant lots — but, in fact, they were manifestations of the brooding desert, which was just biding its time. When the wind blew hard enough, the encircled desert angrily flung off its thin disguise, storming into the surrounding neighborhoods.

Half blinded by the seething tempest of sand, with shatters of dust hissing across the windshield, Spencer prayed for more: more wind, more clouds of grit. He wanted to vanish like a ghost ship disappearing into a fog.

He glanced at the rearview mirror. Behind him, visibility was limited to ten or fifteen feet.

He started to accelerate but reconsidered. Already he was plunging into the dry blizzard at suicidal speed. The street was no more visible ahead than it was behind. If he encountered a stopped or slow-moving vehicle, or if he suddenly crossed an intersection against the flow of traffic, the least of his worries would be the four homicidal men in the supercharged fedwagon.

One day, when the axis of the earth shifted just the tiniest fraction of a degree or when the jet streams of the upper troposphere suddenly deepened and accelerated for reasons mysterious, the wind and desert would no doubt conspire to tumble Vegas into ruin and bury the remains beneath billions of cubic yards of dry, white, triumphant sand. Maybe that moment had arrived.

Something thumped into the back end of the Explorer, jolting Spencer. The rearview mirror. The Chevy. On his ass. The fedwagon receded a few feet into the swirling sand, then leaped forward again, tapping the truck, maybe trying to make him spin out, maybe just letting him know they were there.

He was aware of Rocky looking at him, so he looked at Rocky.

The dog seemed to be saying, Okay, now what?

They passed the last of the undeveloped land and exploded into a silent clarity of sandless air. In the cold steely light of the pending storm, they had to abandon all hope of slipping away like Lawrence of Arabia into the swirling silicate cloaks of the desert.

An intersection lay half a block ahead. The signal light was red. The flow of traffic was against him.

He kept his foot on the accelerator, praying for a gap in the passing traffic, but at the last moment he rammed the brake pedal to the floor, to avoid colliding with a bus. The Explorer seemed to lift onto its front wheels, then rocked to a halt in a shallow drainage swale that marked the brink of the intersection.

Rocky yelped, lost his grip on the upholstery, and slid into the leg space in front of his seat, under the dashboard.

Belching pale-blue fumes, the bus trundled past in the nearest of the four traffic lanes.

Rocky eeled around in the cramped leg space and grinned up at Spencer.

“Stay there, pal. It’s safer.”

Ignoring the advice, the dog scrambled onto the seat again as Spencer accelerated into traffic in the reeking wake of the bus.

As Spencer turned right and swung around the bus, the rearview mirror captured the mold-green sedan bouncing across the same shallow swale in the pavement and arcing right into the street, as smoothly as if it were airborne.

“That sonofabitch knows how to drive.”

Behind him, the Chevy appeared around the side of the city bus. It was coming fast.

Spencer was less concerned about losing them than about being shot at again before he could get away.

They would have to be crazy to open fire from a moving car, in traffic, where stray bullets could kill uninvolved motorists or pedestrians. This wasn’t Chicago in the Roaring Twenties, wasn’t Beirut or Belfast, wasn’t even Los Angeles, for God’s sake.

On the other hand, they hadn’t hesitated to blast away at him on the street in front of Theda Davidowitz’s apartment building. Shot at him. No questions first. No polite reading of his constitutional rights. Hell, they hadn’t even made a serious effort to confirm that he was, in fact, the person they believed him to be. They wanted him badly enough to risk killing the wrong man.

They seemed convinced that he’d learned something of staggering importance about Valerie and that he must be terminated. In truth, he knew less about the woman’s past than he knew about Rocky’s.

If they ran him down in traffic and shot him, they would flash real or fake ID from one federal agency or another, and no one would hold them responsible for murder. They would claim that Spencer had been a fugitive, armed and dangerous, a cop killer. No doubt they’d be able to produce a warrant for his arrest, issued after the fact and postdated, and they would clamp his dead hand around a drop gun that could be linked to a series of unsolved homicides.

He accelerated through a yellow traffic light as it turned red. The Chevy stayed close behind him.

If they didn’t kill him on the spot, but wounded him and took him alive, they would probably haul him away to a soundproofed room and use creative methods of interrogation. His protestations of ignorance would not be believed, and they would kill him slowly, by degrees, in a vain attempt to extract secrets that he didn’t possess.

He had no gun of his own. He had only his hands. His training. And a dog. “We’re in big trouble,” he told Rocky.

In the cozy kitchen of the cabin in the Malibu canyon, Roy Miro sat alone at the dining table, sorting through forty photographs. His men had found them in a shoe box on the top shelf in the bedroom closet. Thirty-nine of the pictures were loose, and the fortieth was in an envelope.

Six of the loose snapshots were of a dog — mixed breed, tan and black, with one floppy ear. It was most likely the pet for which Grant had bought the musical rubber bone from the mail-order firm that still kept his name and address on file two years later.

Thirty-three of the remaining photographs were of the same woman. In some she appeared to be as young as twenty, in others as old as her early thirties. Here: wearing blue jeans and a reindeer sweater, decorating a Christmas tree. And here: in a simple summer dress and white shoes, holding a white purse, smiling at the camera, dappled in sun and shadow, standing by a tree that was dripping clusters of white flowers. In more than a few, she was grooming horses, riding horses, or feeding apples to them.

Something about her haunted Roy, but he couldn’t understand why she so affected him.

She was an undeniably attractive woman, but she was far from drop-dead gorgeous. Though shapely, blond, blue-eyed, she nonetheless lacked any single transcendent feature that would have put her in the pantheon of true beauty.

Her smile was the only truly striking thing about her. It was the most consistent element of her appearance from one snapshot to the next: warm, open, easy, a charming smile that never seemed to be false, that revealed a gentle heart.

A smile, however, was not a feature. That was especially true in this woman’s case, for her lips weren’t particularly luscious, as were Melissa Wicklun’s lips. Nothing about the set or width of her mouth, the contours of her philtrum, or the shape of her teeth was even intriguing, let alone electrifying. Her smile was greater than the sum of its parts, like the dazzling reflection of sunlight on the otherwise unremarkable surface of a pond.

He could find nothing about her that he yearned to possess.

Yet she haunted him. Though he doubted that he had ever met her, he felt that he ought to know who she was. Somewhere, he had seen her before.

Staring at her face, at her radiant smile, he sensed a terrible presence hovering over her, just beyond the frame of the photograph. A cold darkness was descending, of which she was unaware.

The newest of the photographs were at least twenty years old, and many were surely three decades out of the darkroom tray. The colors of even the more recent shots were faded. The older ones held only the faintest suggestions of color, were mostly gray and white, and were slightly yellowed in places.

Roy turned each photo over, hoping to find a few identifying words on the reverse, but the backs were all blank. Not even a single name or date.

Two of the pictures showed her with a young boy. Roy was so mystified by his strong response to the woman’s face and so fixated on figuring out why she seemed familiar that he did not at first realize that the boy was Spencer Grant. When he made the connection, he put the two snapshots side by side on the table.

It was Grant in the days before he had sustained his scar.

In his case, more than with most people, the face of the man reflected the child he had been.

He was about six or seven years old in the first photo, a skinny kid in swimming trunks, dripping wet, standing by the edge of a pool. The woman was in a one-piece bathing suit beside him, playing a silly practical joke for the camera: one hand behind Grant’s head, two of her fingers secretly raised and spread to make it appear as though he had a small pair of horns or antennae.

In the second photograph, the woman and the boy were sitting at a picnic table. The kid was a year or two older than in the first picture, wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and a baseball cap. She had one arm around him, pulling him against her side, knocking his cap askew.

In both snapshots, the woman’s smile was as radiant as in all those without the boy, but her face was also brightened by affection and love. Roy felt confident that he’d found Spencer Grant’s mother.

He remained baffled, however, as to why the woman was familiar to him. Eerily familiar. The longer he stared at the pictures of her, with or without the boy at her side, the more certain he became that he knew her — and that the context in which he had previously seen her was deeply disturbing, dark, and strange.

He turned his attention again to the snapshot in which mother and son stood beside the swimming pool. In the background, at some distance, was a large barn; even in the faded photograph, traces of red paint were visible on its high, blank walls.

The woman, the boy, the barn.

On a deep subconscious level, a memory must have stirred, for suddenly the skin prickled across Roy’s scalp.

The woman. The boy. The barn.

A chill quivered through him.

He looked up from the photographs on the kitchen table, at the window above the sink, at the crowded grove of trees beyond the window, at the meager coins of noontime sunlight tumbling through the wealth of shadows, and he willed memory to glimmer forth, as well, from the eucalyptic dark.

The woman. The boy. The barn.

For all his straining, enlightenment eluded him, although another chill walked through his bones.

The barn.

Through residential streets of stucco homes, where cacti and yucca plants and hardy olive trees were featured in low-maintenance desert landscaping, through a shopping center parking lot, through an industrial area, through the maze of a self-storage yard filled with corrugated-steel sheds, off the pavement and through a sprawling park, where the fronds of the palms tossed and lashed in a frenzied welcome to the oncoming storm, Spencer sought without success to shake off the pursuing Chevrolet.

Sooner or later, they were going to cross the path of a police patrol. As soon as one unit of local cops became involved, Spencer would find it even more difficult to get away.

Disoriented by the twisting route taken to elude his pursuers, Spencer was surprised to be flashing past one of the newest resort hotels, on the right. Las Vegas Boulevard South was only a few hundred yards ahead. The traffic light was red, but he decided to bet everything that it would change by the time he got there.

The Chevy remained close behind him. If he stopped, the bastards would be out of their car and all over the Explorer, bristling with more guns than a porcupine had quills.

Three hundred yards to the intersection. Two hundred fifty.

The signal was still red. Cross traffic wasn’t as heavy as it could get farther north along the Strip, but it was not light, either.

Running out of time, Spencer slowed slightly, enough to allow himself more maneuverability at the moment of decision but not enough to encourage the driver of the Chevy to try to pull alongside him.

A hundred yards. Seventy-five. Fifty.

Lady Luck wasn’t with him. He was still playing the green, but the red kept turning up.

A gasoline tanker truck was approaching the intersection from the left, taking advantage of the rare chance to make a little speed on the Strip, going faster than the legal limit.

Rocky began bobbing his head up and down again.

Finally the driver of the tanker saw the Explorer coming and tried to brake quickly without jackknifing.

“All right, okay, okay, gonna make it,” Spencer heard himself saying, almost chanting, as if he were crazily determined to shape reality with positive thought.

Never lie to the dog.

“We’re in deep shit, pal,” he amended as he curved into the intersection in a wide arc, around the front of the oncoming truck.

As panic shifted his perceptions into slo-mo, Spencer saw the tanker sweep toward them, the giant tires rolling and bouncing and rolling and bouncing while the terrified driver adroitly pumped the brakes as much as he dared. And now it was not merely approaching but looming over them, huge, an inexorable and inescapable behemoth, far bigger than it had seemed only a split second ago, and now bigger still, towering, immense. Good God, it seemed bigger than a jumbo jet, and he was nothing but a bug on the runway. The Explorer began to cant to starboard, as if it would tip over, and Spencer corrected with a slight pull to the right and a tap of the brakes. The energy of the aborted rollover was channeled into a slide, however, and the back end traveled sideways with a shriek of tormented tires. The steering wheel spun back and forth through his sweat-dampened hands. The Explorer was out of control, and the gasoline tanker was on top of them, as large as God, but at least they were sliding in the right direction, away from the big rig, although probably not fast enough to escape it. Then the sixteen-wheel monster shrieked by with only inches to spare, a curved wall of polished steel passing in a mirrored blur, in a gale of wind that Spencer was certain he could feel even through the tightly closed windows.

The Explorer spun three hundred sixty degrees, then kept going for another ninety. It shuddered to a halt, facing the opposite direction — and on the far side of the divided boulevard — from the gasoline tanker, even as that behemoth was still passing it.

The southbound traffic, into the lanes of which Spencer had careened, stopped before running him down, although not without a chorus of screaming brakes and blaring horns.

Rocky was on the floor again.

Spencer didn’t know if the dog had been thrown off the seat again or, in a sudden attack of prudence, had scrambled down there.

He said, “Stay!” even as Rocky clambered up onto the seat.

The roar of an engine. From the left. Coming across the broad intersection. The Chevy. Hurtling past the back of the halted tanker, toward the side of the Explorer.

He jammed his foot down hard on the accelerator. The tires spun, then rubber got a bite of pavement. The Explorer bulleted south on the boulevard — just as the Chevy shot past the rear bumper. With a cold squeal, metal kissed metal.

Gunshots erupted. Three or four rounds. None seemed to strike the Explorer.

Rocky remained on the seat, panting, claws dug in, determined to hold fast this time.

Spencer was headed out of Vegas, which was both good and bad. It was good because as he proceeded farther south, toward the open desert and the last entrance to Interstate 15, the risk of being brought to a stop by a traffic jam would quickly diminish. It was bad, however, because beyond the forest of hotels, the barren land would provide few easy routes of escape and even fewer places to hide. Out on the vast panoramas of the Mojave, the thugs in the Chevy could slip a mile or two behind and still keep a watch on him.

Nevertheless, leaving town was the only sane choice. The turmoil at the intersection behind him was sure to bring the cops.

As he was speeding past the newest hotel-casino in town — which included a two-hundred-acre amusement park, Spaceport Vegas — his only sane choice became no real choice at all. From across the boulevard, a hundred yards ahead, a northbound car swung out of the oncoming traffic, jumped the far side of the low median strip, smashed through a row of shrubs, and bounced into the southbound lanes. It slid to a stop at an angle, blocking the way, ready to ram Spencer if he tried to squeeze around either end of it.

He stopped thirty yards from the blockade.

The new car was a Chrysler but, otherwise, so like the Chevy that the two might have been born of the same factory.

The driver stayed behind the wheel of the Chrysler, but the other doors opened. Big, troublesome-looking men got out.

The rearview mirror revealed what he’d expected: The Chevy also had halted at an angle across the boulevard, fifteen yards behind him. Men were getting out of that vehicle too — and they had guns.

In front of him, the men at the Chrysler had guns too. Somehow that didn’t come as a surprise.

The final picture had been kept in a white envelope, which had been fastened shut with a length of Scotch tape.

Because of the shape and thinness of the object, Roy knew that it was another photograph before he opened the envelope, though it was larger than a snapshot. As he peeled off the tape, he expected to find a five-by-seven studio portrait of the mother, a memento of special importance to Grant.

It was a black-and-white studio photograph, sure enough, but it was of a man in his middle thirties.

For a strange moment, for Roy, there was neither a eucalyptus grove beyond the windows nor a window through which to see it. The kitchen itself faded from his awareness, until nothing existed except him and that single picture, to which he related even more powerfully than to the photos of the woman.

He could breathe but shallowly.

If anyone had entered the room to ask a question, he could not have spoken.

He felt detached from reality, as if in a fever, but he was not feverish. Indeed, he was cold, though not uncomfortably so: It was the cold of a watchful chameleon, pretending to be stone on a stone, on an autumn morning; it was a cold that invigorated, that focused his entire consciousness, that contracted the gears of his mind and allowed his thoughts to spin without friction. His heart didn’t race, as it would have in a fever. Indeed, his pulse rate declined, until it was as ponderously slow as that of a sleeper, and throughout his body, each beat reverberated like a recording of a cathedral bell played at quarter speed: protracted, solemn, heavy tolling.

Obviously, the shot had been taken by a talented professional, under studio conditions, with much attention to the lighting and to the selection of the ideal lens. The subject, wearing a white shirt open at the throat and a leather jacket, was presented from the waist up, posed against a white wall, arms folded across his chest. He was strikingly handsome, with thick dark hair combed straight back from his forehead. The publicity photograph, of a type usually associated with young actors, was a blatant glamour shot but a good one, because the subject possessed natural glamour, an aura of mystery and drama that the photographer didn’t have to create with bravura technique.

The portrait was a study in light and shadow, with more of the latter than the former. Peculiar shadows, cast by objects beyond the frame, appeared to swarm across the wall, drawn to the man as night itself was drawn across the evening sky by the terrible weight of the sinking sun.

His direct and piercing stare, the firm set of his mouth, his aristocratic features, and even his deceptively casual posture seemed to reveal a man who had never known self-doubt, depression, or fear. He was more than merely confident and self-possessed. In the photo, he projected a subtle but unmistakable arrogance. His expression seemed to say that, without exception, he regarded all other members of the human race with amusement and contempt.

Yet he remained enormously appealing, as though his intelligence and experience had earned him the right to feel superior. Studying the photograph, Roy sensed that here was a man who would make an interesting, unpredictable, entertaining friend. Peering out from his shadows, this singular individual had an animal magnetism that made his expression of contempt seem inoffensive. Indeed, an air of arrogance seemed right for him — just as any lion must walk with feline arrogance if it was to seem at all like a lion.

Gradually, the spell cast by the photograph diminished in power but didn’t altogether fade. The kitchen reestablished itself from the mists of Roy’s fixation, as did the window and the eucalyptuses.

He knew this man. He had seen him before.

A long time ago…

Familiarity was part of the reason that the picture affected him so strongly. As with the woman, however, Roy was unable to put a name to the face or to recall the circumstances under which he had seen this person previously.

He wished the photographer had allowed more light to reach his subject’s face. But the shadows seemed to love the dark-eyed man.

Roy placed that photo on the kitchen table, beside the snapshot of the mother and her son at poolside.

The woman. The boy. The barn in the background. The man in the shadows.

At a full stop on Las Vegas Boulevard South, confronted by armed men in front of and behind him, Spencer pounded the horn, pulled the wheel hard to the right, and tramped on the accelerator. The Explorer rocketed toward the amusement park, Spaceport Vegas, pressing him and Rocky against their seats as if they were astronauts moonward bound.

The cocksure boldness of the gunmen proved that they were feds of some kind, even if they used fake credentials to conceal their true identity. They would never ambush him on a major street, before witnesses, unless they were confident of pulling rank on local cops.

On the sidewalk in front of Spaceport Vegas, on their way from casino to casino, pedestrians scattered, and the Explorer shot into a driveway posted for buses only, though no buses were in sight.

Perhaps because of the February cold snap and the pending storm, or maybe because it was only noon, Spaceport Vegas wasn’t open. The ticket booths were shuttered, and the thrill rides that were high enough to be seen behind the park walls were in suspended animation.

Nevertheless, neon and futuristic applications of fiber optics throbbed and flashed along the perimeter wall, which was nine feet high and painted like the armored hull of a starfighter. A photosensitive cell must have switched on the lights, mistaking the midday gloom of the advancing storm for the onset of evening.

Spencer drove between two rocket-shaped ticket booths, toward a twelve-foot-diameter tunnel of polished steel that penetrated the park walls. In blue neon, the words TIME TUNNEL TO SPACEPORT VEGAS promised more escape than he needed.

He flew up the gentle ramp, never tapping the brakes, and raced unheeding through time.

The massive pipe was two hundred feet long. Tubes of brilliant blue neon curved up the walls, across the ceiling. They blinked in rapid sequence from the entrance to the exit, creating an illusion of a funnel of lightning.

Under ordinary circumstances, patrons were conveyed into the park on lumbering trams, but the half-blinding surges of light were more effective at greater speed. Spencer’s eyes throbbed, and he could almost believe that he had been catapulted into a distant era.

Rocky was doing the head-bobbing bit again.

“Never knew I had a dog,” Spencer said, “with a need for speed.”

He fled into the far reaches of the park, where the lights had not been activated like those on the wall and in the tunnel. The deserted and seemingly endless midway rose and fell, narrowed and widened and narrowed again, and repeatedly looped back on itself.

Spaceport Vegas featured corkscrew roller coasters, dive-bombers, scramblers, whips, and the other usual gut churners, all tricked up with lavish science fiction facades, gimmicks, and names. Lightsled to Ganymede. Hyperspace Hammer. Solar Radiation Hell. Asteroid Collision. Devolution Drop. The park also offered elaborate flight-simulator adventures and virtual-reality experiences in buildings of futuristic or bizarrely alien architecture: Planet of the Snakemen, Blood Moon, Vortex Blaster, Deathworld. At Robot Wars, homicidal machines with red eyes guarded the entrance, and the portal to Star Monster looked like a glistening orifice at one end or the other of an extraterrestrial leviathan’s digestive tract.

Under the bleak sky, swept by cold wind, with the gray prestorm light sucking the color out of everything, the future as imagined by the creators of Spaceport Vegas was unremittingly hostile.

Curiously, that made it appear more realistic to Spencer, more like a true vision and less like an amusement park than its designers ever intended. Alien, machine, and human predators were everywhere on the prowl. Cosmic disasters loomed at every turn: The Exploding Sun, Comet Strike, Time Snap, The Big Bang, Wasteland. The End of Time was on the same avenue of the midway that offered an adventure called Extinction. It was possible to look at the ominous attractions and believe that this grim future — in its mood if not its specifics — was sufficiently terrifying to be one that contemporary society might make for itself.

In search of a service exit, Spencer drove recklessly along the winding promenades, weaving among the attractions. He repeatedly glimpsed the Chevy and the Chrysler between the rides and the exotic structures, though never dangerously close. They were like sharks cruising in the distance. Each time he spotted them, he whipped out of sight into another branch of the midway maze.

Around the corner from the Galactic Prison, past the Palace of the Parasites, beyond a screen of ficus trees and a red-flowering oleander hedge that were surely drab compared with the shrubs that grew on the planets of the Crab Nebula, he found a two-lane service road that marked the back of the park. He followed it.

To his left were the trees, aligned twenty feet on center, with the six-foot-high hedge between the trunks. On his right, instead of the neon-lit wall that was featured in the public portions of the perimeter, a chain-link fence rose ten feet high, topped with coils of barbed wire, and beyond it lay a sward of desert scrub.

He rounded a corner, and a hundred yards ahead was a pipe-and-chain-link gate, on wheels, controlled by overhead hydraulic arms. It would roll out of the way at the touch of the right remote-control device — which Spencer didn’t possess.

He increased speed. He’d have to ram the gate.

Reverting to his customary prudence, the dog scrambled off the passenger seat and curled in the leg space before he could be thrown there by the upcoming impact.

“Neurotic but not stupid,” Spencer said approvingly.

He was more than halfway to the gate when he caught a flicker of motion out of the corner of his left eye. The Chrysler erupted from between two ficus trees, tearing the hell out of the oleander hedge, and crashed into the service way in showers of green leaves and red flowers. It crossed Spencer’s wake and rammed the fence so hard that the chain-link billowed, as if made of cloth, to the end of the lane.

The Explorer trailed that billow by a split second and hit the gate with enough force to crumple the hood without popping it open, to make Spencer’s restraining harness tighten painfully across his chest, to knock the breath out of him, to clack his teeth together, to make his luggage rattle under the restraining net in the cargo area — but not hard enough to take out the gate. That barrier was torqued, sagging, half collapsed, trailing tangles of barbed wire like dreadlocks — but still intact.

He shifted gears and shot backward as if he were a cannonball returning to the barrel in a counterclockwise world.

The hitmen in the Chrysler were opening the doors, getting out, drawing their guns — until they saw the truck reversing toward them. They reversed too, scrambling inside the car, pulling the doors shut.

He rammed backward into the sedan, and the collision was loud enough to convince him that he’d overdone it, disabled the Explorer.

When he shifted into drive, however, the truck sprang forward. No tires were flat or obstructed by crumpled fenders. No windows had shattered. No smell of gasoline, so the tank wasn’t ruptured. The battered Explorer rattled, clinked, ticked, and creaked — but it moved, with power and grace.

The second impact took down the gate. The truck clambered over the fallen chain-link, away from Spaceport Vegas, into an enormous plot of desert scrub on which no one had yet built a theme park, a hotel, a casino, or a parking lot.

Engaging the four-wheel drive, Spencer angled west, away from the Strip, toward Interstate 15.

He remembered Rocky and glanced down at the leg space in front of the passenger seat. The dog was curled up, with his eyes squeezed shut, as if anticipating another collision.

“It’s okay, pal.”

Rocky continued to grimace in anticipation of disaster.

“Trust me.”

Rocky opened his eyes and returned to his seat, where the vinyl upholstery had been well scratched and punctured by his claws.

They rocked and rolled across the eroded and barren land, to the base of the superhighway.

A steep slope of gravel and shale rose thirty or forty feet to the east-west lanes. Even if he could find a break in the guardrail above him, no escape could be found — and certainly no salvation — on that highway. The people who were seeking him would establish checkpoints in both directions.

After a brief hesitation, he turned south, following the base of the elevated interstate.

From the east, across the white sand and the pink-gray slate, came the mold-green Chevrolet. It was like a heat mirage, although the day was cool. The low dunes and shallow washes would defeat it. The Explorer was made for overland travel; the Chevrolet was not.

Spencer came to a waterless riverbed, which the interstate crossed on a low concrete bridge. He drove into that declivity, onto a soft bed of silt, where driftwood slept and where dead tumbleweeds moved as ceaselessly as strange shadows in a bad dream.

He followed the dry wash under the interstate, west into the inhospitable Mojave.

The forbidding sky, as hard and dark as sarcophagus granite, hung within inches of the iron mountains. Desolate plains rose gradually toward those more sterile elevations, with a steadily decreasing burden of withered mesquite, dry bunchgrass, and cactus.

He drove out of the arroyo but continued to follow it upslope, toward distant peaks as bare as ancient bones.

The Chevrolet was no longer in sight.

Finally, when he was sure that he was far beyond the casual notice of any surveillance teams posted to watch the traffic on the interstate, he turned south and paralleled that highway. Without it as a reference, he would be lost. Whirling dust devils spun across the desert, masking the telltale plumes cast up behind the Explorer.

Although no rain yet fell, lightning scored the sky. The shadows of low stone formations leaped, fell back, and leaped again across the alabaster land.

Rocky’s cloaks of courage had been cast off as the Explorer’s speed had fallen. He was huddled once more in folds of cold timidity. He whined periodically and looked at his master for reassurance.

The sky cracked with fissures of fire.

Roy Miro pushed the troubling photographs aside and set up his attaché case computer on the kitchen table in the Malibu cabin. He plugged it into a wall outlet and connected with Mama in Virginia.

When Spencer Grant had joined the United States Army, as a boy of eighteen, more than twelve years ago, he must have completed the standard enlistment forms. Among other things, he’d been required to provide information about his schooling, his place of birth, his father’s name, his mother’s maiden name, and his next of kin.

The recruiting officer through whom he had enlisted would have verified that basic information. It would have been verified again, at a higher level, prior to Grant’s induction into the service.

If “Spencer Grant” was a phony identity, the boy would have had considerable difficulty getting into the army with it. Nevertheless, Roy remained convinced that it was not the name on Grant’s original birth certificate, and he was determined to discover what that birth name had been.

At Roy’s request, Mama accessed the Department of Defense dead files on former army personnel. She brought Spencer Grant’s basic information sheet onto the display screen.

According to the data on the VDT, Grant’s mother’s name, which he had given to the army, was Jennifer Corrine Porth.

The young recruit had listed her as “deceased.”

The father was said to be “unknown.”

Roy blinked in surprise at the screen. UNKNOWN.

That was extraordinary. Grant had not simply claimed to be a bastard child, but had implied that his mother’s promiscuity had made it impossible to pinpoint the man who fathered him. Anyone else might have cited a false name, a convenient fictional father, to spare himself and his late mother some embarrassment.

Logically, if the father was genuinely unknown, Spencer’s last name should have been Porth. Therefore, either his mother borrowed the “Grant” from a favorite movie star, as Bosley Donner believed she’d done, or she named her son after one of the men in her life even without being certain that he had fathered the boy.

Or the “unknown” was a lie, and the name “Spencer Grant” was just another false identity, perhaps the first of many, that this phantom had manufactured for himself.

At the time of Grant’s enlistment, with his mother already dead and his father unknown, he had given his next of kin as “Ethel Marie and George Daniel Porth, grandparents.” They had to be his mother’s parents, since Porth was also her maiden name.

Roy noticed that the address for Ethel and George Porth — in San Francisco — had been the same as Grant’s current address at the time that he’d enlisted. Apparently the grandparents had taken him in, subsequent to the death of his mother, whenever that had been.

If anyone knew the true story of Grant’s provenance and the source of his scar, it would be Ethel and George Porth. Assuming that they actually existed and were not just names on a form that a recruitment officer had failed to verify twelve years ago.

Roy asked for a printout of the pertinent portion of Grant’s service file. Even with what seemed to be a good lead in the Porths, Roy wasn’t confident of learning anything in San Francisco that would give more substance to this elusive phantom whom he’d first glimpsed less than forty-eight hours ago in the rainy night in Santa Monica.

Having erased himself entirely from all utility-company records, from property tax rolls, and even from the Internal Revenue Service files — why had Grant allowed his name to remain in the DMV, Social Security Administration, LAPD, and military files? He had tampered with those records to the extent of replacing his true address with a series of phony addresses, but he could have entirely eliminated them. He had the knowledge and the skill to do so. Therefore, he must have maintained a presence in some data banks for a purpose.

Roy felt that somehow he was playing into Grant’s hands even by trying to track him down.

Frustrated, he turned his attention once more to the two most affecting of the forty photographs. The woman, the boy, and the barn in the background. The man in the shadows.

On all sides of the Explorer lay sand as white as powdered bones, ash-gray volcanic rock, and slopes of shale shattered by millions of years of heat, cold, and quaking earth. The few plants were crisp and bristly. Except for the dust and vegetation stirred by the wind, the only movement was the creeping and slithering of scorpions, spiders, scarabs, poisonous snakes, and the other cold-blooded or bloodless creatures that thrived in that arid wasteland.

Silvery quills and nibs of lightning flashed continually, and fast-moving thunderheads as black as ink wrote a promise of rain across the sky. The bellies of the clouds hung heavy. With great crashes of thunder, the storm struggled to create itself.

Captured between the dead earth and tumultuous heavens, Spencer paralleled the distant interstate highway as much as possible. He detoured only when the contours of the land required compromise.

Rocky sat with head bowed, gazing at his paws rather than at the stormy day. His flanks quivered as currents of fear flowed through him like electricity through a closed circuit.

On another day, in a different place and in a different storm, Spencer would have kept up a steady line of patter to soothe the dog. Now, however, he was in a mood that darkened with the sky, and he was able to focus only on his own turmoil.

For the woman, he had walked away from his life, such as it was. He had left behind the quiet comfort of the cabin, the beauty of the eucalyptus grove, the peace of the canyon — and most likely he would never be able to return to that. He had made a target of himself and had put his precious anonymity in jeopardy.

He regretted none of that — because he still had the hope of gaining a real life with some kind of meaning and purpose. Although he had wanted to help the woman, he had also wanted to help himself.

But the stakes suddenly had been raised. Death and disclosure were not the only risks he was going to have to take if he continued to involve himself in Valerie Keene’s problems. Sooner or later, he was going to have to kill someone. They would give him no choice.

After escaping the assault on the bungalow in Santa Monica on Wednesday night, he had avoided thinking about the most disturbing implications of the SWAT team’s extreme violence. Now he recalled the gunfire directed at imagined targets inside the dark house and the rounds fired at him as he had scaled the property wall.

That was not merely the response of a few edgy law-enforcement officers intimidated by their quarry. It was a criminally excessive use of force, evidence of an agency out of control and arrogantly confident that it wasn’t accountable for any atrocities it committed.

A short while ago, he had encountered equivalent arrogance in the reckless behavior of the men who harried him out of Las Vegas.

He thought about Louis Lee in that elegant office under China Dream. The restaurateur had said that governments, when big enough, often ceased to play by the codes of justice under which they were established.

All governments, even democracies, maintained control by the threat of violence and imprisonment. When that threat was divorced from the rule of law, however, even if with the best of intentions, there was a fearfully thin line between a federal agent and a thug.

If Spencer located Valerie and learned why she was on the run, helping her would not be simply a matter of dipping into his cash reserves and finding the best attorney to represent her. Naively, that had been his nebulous plan, on those few occasions when he had bothered to think about what he might do if he tracked her down.

But the ruthlessness of these enemies ruled out a solution in any court of law.

Faced with the choice of violence or flight, he would always choose to flee and risk a bullet in the back — at least when no life but his own was at stake. When he eventually took responsibility for this woman’s life, however, he could not expect her to turn her own back on a gun; sooner or later he would have to meet the violence of those men with violence of his own.

Brooding about that, Spencer drove south between the too-solid desert and the amorphous sky. The distant highway was only barely visible to the east, and no clear path lay before him.

Out of the west came rain in blinding cataracts of rare ferocity for the Mojave, a towering gray tide behind which the desert began to disappear.

Spencer could smell the rain even though it hadn’t reached them yet. It was a cold, wet, ozone-tainted scent, refreshing at first but then strange and profoundly chilling.

“It’s not that I’m worried about being able to kill someone if it comes to that,” he told the huddled dog.

The gray wall rushed toward them, faster by the second, and it seemed to be more than mere rain that loomed. It was the future too, and it was all that he feared knowing about the past.

“I’ve done it before. I can do it again if I have to.”

Over the rumble of the Explorer’s engine, he could hear the rain now, like a million pounding hearts.

“And if some sonofabitch deserves killing, I can do him and feel no guilt, no remorse. Sometimes it’s right. It’s justice. I don’t have a problem with that.”

The rain swept over them, billowing like a magician’s scarves, bringing sorcerous change. The pale land darkened dramatically with the first splash. In the peculiar storm light, the desiccated vegetation, more brown than green, suddenly became glossy, verdant; in seconds, withered leaves and grass appeared to swell into plump tropical forms, though it was all illusion.

Switching on the windshield wipers, shifting the Explorer into four-wheel drive, Spencer said, “What worries me…what scares me is…maybe I waste some sonofabitch who deserves it…some piece of walking garbage…and this time I like it.”

The downpour could have been no less cataclysmic than that which had launched Noah upon the Flood, and the fierce drumming of rain on the truck was deafening. The storm-cowed dog probably could not hear his master above the roar, yet Spencer used Rocky’s presence as an excuse to acknowledge a truth that he preferred not to hear, speaking aloud because he might lie if he spoke only to himself.

“I never liked it before. Never felt like a hero for doing it. But it didn’t sicken me, either. I didn’t puke or lose any sleep over it. So…what if the next time…or the time after that…?”

Beneath the glowering thunderheads, in the velvet-heavy shrouds of rain, the early afternoon had grown as dark as twilight. Driving out of murk into mystery, he switched on the headlights, surprised to find that both had survived the impact with the amusement-park gate.

Rain fell straight to the earth in such tremendous tonnage that it dissolved and washed away the wind that had previously stirred the desert into sand spouts.

They came to a ten-foot-deep wash with gently sloping walls. In the headlight beams, a stream of silvery water, a foot wide and a few inches deep, glimmered along the center of that depression. Spencer crossed the twenty-foot-wide arroyo to higher ground on the far side.

As the Explorer crested the second bank, a series of massive lightning bolts blazed across the desert, accompanied by crashes of thunder that vibrated through the truck. The rain came down even harder than before, harder than he had ever seen it fall.

Driving with one hand, Spencer stroked Rocky’s head. The dog was too frightened to look up or to lean into the consoling hand.

They went no more than fifty yards from the first arroyo when Spencer saw the earth moving ahead of them. It rolled sinuously, as though swarms of giant serpents were traveling just below the surface of the desert. By the time he braked to a full stop, the headlights revealed a less fanciful but no less frightening explanation: The earth wasn’t moving, but a swift muddy river was churning from west to east along the gently sloping plain, blocking travel to the south.

The depths of this new arroyo were mostly hidden. The racing water was already within a few inches of its banks.

Such torrents couldn’t have risen just since the storm had swept across the plains minutes ago. The runoff was from the mountains, where rain had been falling for a while and where the stony, treeless slopes absorbed little of it. The desert seldom received downpours of that magnitude; but on rare occasions, with breathtaking suddenness, flash floods could inundate even portions of the elevated interstate highway or pour into low-lying areas of the now distant Las Vegas Strip and sweep cars out of casino parking lots.

Spencer couldn’t judge the depth of the water. It might have been two feet or twenty.

Even if only two feet deep, the water was moving so fast, with such power, that he didn’t dare attempt to ford it. The second wash was wider than the first, forty feet across. Before he’d traveled half that distance, the truck would be lifted and carried downriver, rolling and bobbing, as if it were driftwood.

He backed the Explorer away from the churning flow, turned, and retraced his route, arriving at the first arroyo, to the south, more quickly than he expected. In the brief time since he had crossed it, the silvery freshet had become a turbulent river that nearly filled the wash.

Bracketed by impassable cataracts, Spencer was no longer able to parallel the distant north-south interstate.

He considered parking right there, to wait for the storm to pass. When the rain ended, the arroyos would empty as swiftly as they had filled. But he sensed that the situation was more dangerous than it appeared.

He opened the door, stepped into the downpour, and was soaked by the time he walked to the front of the Explorer. The pummeling rain hammered a chill deep into his flesh.

The cold and the wet contributed to his misery less than did the incredible noise. The oppressive roar of the storm blocked all other sounds. The rattle of the rain against the desert, the swash and rumble of the river, and the booming thunder combined to make the vast Mojave as confining and claustrophobia-inducing as the interior of a stuntman’s barrel on the brink of Niagara.

He wanted a better view of the surging flux than he’d gotten from inside the truck, but a closer look alarmed him. Moment by moment, water lapped higher on the banks of the wash; soon it would flood across the plain. Sections of the soft arroyo walls collapsed, dissolved into the muddy currents, and were carried away. Even as the violent gush eroded a wider channel, it swelled tremendously in volume, simultaneously rising and growing broader. Spencer turned from the first arroyo and hurried toward the second, to the south of the truck. He reached that other impromptu river sooner than he expected. It was brimming and widening like the first channel. Fifty yards had separated the two arroyos when he’d first driven between them, but that gap had shrunk to thirty.

Thirty yards was still a considerable distance. He found it difficult to believe that those two spates were powerful enough to eat through so much remaining land and ultimately converge.

Then, immediately in front of his shoes, a crack opened in the ground. A long, jagged leer. The earth grinned, and a six-foot-wide slab of riverbank collapsed into the onrushing water.

Spencer stumbled backward, out of immediate danger. The sodden land around him was turning mushy underfoot.

The unthinkable suddenly seemed inevitable. Large portions of the desert were all shale and volcanic rock and quartzite, but he had the misfortune to be caught in a cloudburst while traveling over a fathomless sea of sand. Unless a hidden spine of rock was buried between the two arroyos, the intervening land might indeed be washed away and the entire plain recontoured, depending on how long the storm raged at its current intensity.

The impossibly heavy downfall abruptly grew heavier still.

He sprinted for the Explorer, clambered inside, and pulled his door shut. Shivering, streaming water, he backed the truck farther from the northern arroyo, afraid that the wheels would be undermined.

With head still downcast, from under his lowered brow, Rocky looked up worriedly at his master.

“Have to drive between arroyos, east or west,” Spencer thought aloud, “while there’s still something to drive on.”

The windshield wipers weren’t coping well with the cascades that poured across the glass, and the rain-blurred landscape settled into deeper degrees of false twilight. He tried turning the wiper control to a higher setting. It was already as high as it would go.

“Shouldn’t head toward lower land. Water’s gaining velocity as it goes. More likely to wash out down there.”

He switched the headlamps to high beams. The extra light didn’t clarify anything: It bounced off the skeins of rain, so the way ahead seemed to be obscured by curtain after curtain of mirrored beads. He selected the low beams again.

“Safer ground uphill. Ought to be more rock.”

The dog only trembled.

“The space between arroyos will probably widen out.”

Spencer shifted gears again. The plain sloped gradually up to the west, into obscure terrain.

As giant needles of lightning stitched the heavens to the earth, he drove into the resultant narrow pocket of gloom.

At Roy Miro’s direction, agents in San Francisco were seeking Ethel and George Porth, the maternal grandparents who had raised Spencer Grant following the death of his mother. Meanwhile, Roy drove to the offices of Dr. Nero Mondello in Beverly Hills.

Mondello was the most prominent plastic surgeon in a community where God’s work was revised more frequently than anywhere except Palm Springs and Palm Beach. On a misshapen nose, he could perform miracles equivalent to those that Michelangelo had performed on giant cubes of Carrara marble — though Mondello’s fees were substantially higher than those of the Italian master.

He had agreed to make changes in a busy schedule to meet with Roy, because he believed that he was assisting the FBI in a desperate search for a particularly savage serial killer.

They met in the doctor’s spacious inner office: white marble floor, white walls and ceiling, white shell sconces. Two abstract paintings hung in white frames: The only color was white, and the artist achieved his effects solely with the textures of the heavily layered pigment. Two whitewashed lacewood chairs with white leather cushions flanked a glass-and-steel table and stood before a whitewashed burled-wood desk, against a backdrop of white silk draperies.

Roy sat in one of the lacewood chairs, like a blot of soil in all that whiteness, and wondered what view would be revealed if the draperies were opened. He had the crazy notion that beyond the window, in downtown Beverly Hills, lay a landscape swaddled in snow.

Other than the photographs of Spencer Grant that Roy had brought with him, the only object on the polished surface of the desk was a single blood-red rose in a Waterford cut-crystal vase. The flower was a testament to the possibility of perfection — and drew the visitor’s attention to the man who sat beyond it, behind the desk.

Tall, slender, handsome, fortyish, Dr. Nero Mondello was the focal point of his bleached domain. With his thick jet-black hair combed back from his forehead, warm-toned olive complexion, and eyes the precise purple-black of ripe plums, the surgeon had an impact almost as powerful as that of a spirit manifestation. He wore a white lab coat over a white shirt and red silk necktie. Around the face of his gold Rolex, matched diamonds sparkled as though charged with supernatural energy.

The room and the man were no less impressive for being blatantly theatrical. Mondello was in the business of replacing nature’s truth with convincing illusions, and all good magicians were theatrical.

Studying the DMV photograph of Grant and the computer-generated portrait, Mondello said, “Yes, this would have been a dreadful wound, quite terrible.”

“What might’ve caused it?” Roy asked.

Mondello opened a desk drawer and removed a magnifying glass with a silver handle. He studied the photographs more closely.

At last he said, “It was more a cut than a tear, so it must have been a relatively sharp instrument.”

“A knife?”

“Or glass. But it wasn’t an entirely even cutting edge. Very sharp but slightly irregular like glass — or a serrated blade. An even blade would produce a cleaner wound and a narrower scar.”

Watching Mondello pore over the photographs, Roy realized that the surgeon’s facial features were so refined and so uncannily well proportioned that a talented colleague had been at work on them.

“It’s a cicatricial scar.”

“Excuse me?” Roy said.

“Connective tissue that’s contracted — pinched or wrinkled,” Mondello said, without looking up from the photographs. “Though this one is relatively smooth, considering its width.” He returned the magnifying glass to the drawer. “I can’t tell you much more — except that it’s not a recent scar.”

“Could surgery eliminate it, skin grafts?”

“Not entirely, but it could be made far less visible, just a thin line, a thread of discoloration.”

“Painful?” Roy asked.

“Yes, but this”—he tapped the photo—“wouldn’t require a long series of surgeries over a number of years, as burns might.”

Mondello’s face was exceptional because the proportions were so studied, as though the guiding aesthetic behind his surgery had been not merely the intuition of an artist but the logical rigor of a mathematician. The doctor had remade himself with the same iron control that great politicians applied to society to transform its imperfect citizens into better people. Roy had long understood that human beings were so deeply flawed that no society could have perfect justice without imposing mathematically rigorous planning and stern guidance from the top. Yet he’d never perceived, until now, that his passion for ideal beauty and his desire for justice were both aspects of the same longing for Utopia.

Sometimes Roy was amazed by his intellectual complexity.

“Why,” he asked Mondello, “would a man live with that scar if it could be made all but invisible? Aside, that is, from being unable to pay for the surgery.”

“Oh, cost wouldn’t be a deterrent. If the patient had no money and the government wouldn’t pay, he’d still receive treatment. Most surgeons have always dedicated a portion of their professional time to charity work like this.”

“Then why?”

Mondello shrugged and pushed the photographs across the desk. “Perhaps he’s afraid of pain.”

“I don’t think so. Not this man.”

“Or afraid of doctors, hospitals, sharp instruments, anesthesia. There are countless phobias that prevent people from having surgery.”

“This man’s not a phobic personality,” Roy said, returning the photos to the manila envelope.

“Could be guilt. If he lived through an accident in which others were killed, he could have survivor’s guilt. Especially if loved ones died. He feels he’s no better than they were, and he wonders why he was spared when they were taken. He feels guilty just for living. Suffering with the scar is a way of atoning.”

Frowning, Roy got to his feet. “Maybe.”

“I’ve had patients with that problem. They didn’t want surgery because survivor’s guilt led them to feel they deserved their scars.”

“That doesn’t sound right, either. Not for this guy.”

“If he’s not either phobic or suffering from survivor’s guilt,” said Mondello, coming around the desk and walking Roy to the door, “then you can bet it’s guilt over something. He’s punishing himself with the scar. Reminding himself of something he would like to forget but feels obligated to remember. I’ve seen that before as well.”

As the surgeon talked, Roy studied his face, fascinated by the finely honed bone structure. He wondered how much of the effect had been achieved with real bone and how much with plastic implants, but he knew that it would be gauche to ask.

At the door, he said, “Doctor, do you believe in perfection?”

Pausing with his hand on the doorknob, Mondello appeared mildly puzzled. “Perfection?”

“Personal and societal perfection. A better world.”

“Well…I believe in always striving for it.”

“Good.” Roy smiled. “I knew you did.”

“But I don’t believe it can be achieved.”

Roy’s smile froze. “Oh, but I’ve seen perfection now and then. Not perfection in the whole of anything, perhaps, but in part.”

Mondello smiled indulgently and shook his head. “One man’s idea of perfect order is another man’s chaos. One man’s vision of perfect beauty is another man’s notion of deformity.”

Roy did not appreciate such talk. The implication was that any Utopia was also Hell. Eager to convince Mondello of an alternate view, he said, “Perfect beauty exists in nature.”

“There’s always a flaw. Nature abhors symmetry, smoothness, straight lines, order — all the things we associate with beauty.”

“I recently saw a woman with perfect hands. Flawless hands, without a blemish, exquisitely shaped.”

“A cosmetic surgeon looks at the human form with a more critical eye than other people do. I’d have seen a lot of flaws, I’m sure.”

The doctor’s smugness irritated Roy, and he said, “I wish I’d brought those hands to you — the one, anyway. If I’d brought it, if you’d seen it, you would have agreed.”

Suddenly Roy realized that he had come close to revealing things that would have necessitated the surgeon’s immediate execution.

Concerned that his agitated state of mind would lead him to make another and more egregious error, Roy dawdled no longer. He thanked Mondello for his cooperation, and he got out of the white room.

In the medical building parking lot, the February sunshine was more white than golden, with a harsh edge, and a border of palm trees cast eastward-leaning shadows. The afternoon was turning cool.

As he twisted the key in the ignition and started the car, his pager beeped. He checked the small display window, saw a number with the prefix of the regional offices in downtown Los Angeles, and made the call on his cellular phone.

They had big news for him. Spencer Grant had almost been chased down in Las Vegas; he was now on the run, overland, across the Mojave Desert. A Learjet was standing by at LAX to take Roy to Nevada.

Driving up the barely perceptible slope between two rushing rivers, on a steadily narrowing peninsula of sodden sand, searching for an intruding formation of rock on which to batten down and wait out the storm, Spencer was hampered by decreasing visibility. The clouds were so thick, so black, that daylight on the desert was as murky as that a few fathoms under any sea. Rain fell in Biblical quantities, overwhelming the windshield wipers, and although the headlights were on, clear glimpses of the ground ahead were brief.

Great fiery lashes tortured the sky. The blinding pyrotechnics escalated into nearly continuous chain lightning, and brilliant links rattled down the heavens as though an evil angel, imprisoned in the storm, were angrily testing his bonds. Even then, the inconstant light illuminated nothing while swarms of stroboscopic shadows flickered across the landscape, adding to the gloom and confusion.

Suddenly, ahead and a quarter mile to the west, at ground level, a blue light appeared as if from out of another dimension. At once, it moved off to the south at high speed.

Spencer squinted through rain and shadow, trying to discern the nature and size of the light source. The details remained obscure.

The blue traveler turned east, proceeded a few hundred yards, then swung north toward the Explorer. Spherical. Incandescent.

“What the hell?” Spencer slowed the Explorer to a crawl to watch the eerie luminosity.

When it was still a hundred yards from him, the thing swerved west, toward the place where it had first appeared, then dwindled past that point, rose, flared, and vanished.

Even before the first light winked out, Spencer saw a second from the corner of his eye. He stopped and looked west-northwest.

The new object — blue, throbbing — moved incredibly fast, on an erratic serpentine course that brought it closer before it angled east. Abruptly it spun like pinwheel fireworks and disappeared.

Both objects had been silent, gliding like apparitions across the storm-washed desert.

The skin prickled on his arms and along the nape of his neck.

For the past few days, although he was usually skeptical of all things mystical, he had felt that he was venturing into the unknown, the uncanny. In his country, in his time, real life had become a dark fantasy, as full of sorcery as any novel about lands where wizards ruled, dragons roamed, and trolls ate children. Wednesday night, he had stepped through an invisible doorway that separated his lifelong reality from another place. In this new reality, Valerie was his destiny. Once found, she would be a magic lens that would forever alter his vision. All that was mysterious would become clear, but things long known and understood would become mysterious once more.

He felt all that in his bones, as an arthritic man might feel the approach of a storm before the first cloud crossed the horizon. He felt more than understood it, and the visitations of the two blue spheres seemed to confirm that he was on the right trail to find Valerie, traveling to a strange place that would transform him.

He glanced at his four-legged companion, hoping that Rocky was staring toward where the second light had vanished. He needed confirmation that he had not imagined the thing, even if his only reassurance came from a dog. But Rocky was huddled and shivering in terror. His head remained bowed, and his eyes were downcast.

To the right of the Explorer, lightning was reflected in raging water. The river was much closer than he expected. The right-hand arroyo had widened dramatically in the past minute.

Hunched over the wheel, he angled to the new midpoint of the ever narrower strip of high ground and drove forward, seeking stable rock, wondering if the mysterious Mojave had more surprises for him.

The third blue enigma plunged out of the sky, as fast and plumb as an express elevator, two hundred yards ahead and to the left. It halted smoothly and hovered just above the ground, revolving rapidly.

Spencer’s heart thudded painfully against his ribs. He eased off the accelerator. He was balanced between wonder and dread.

The glowing object shot straight at him: as large as the truck, still without detail, silent, otherworldly, on a collision course. He tramped the accelerator. The light swerved to counter his move, swelled brighter, filled the Explorer with blue-blue light. To make a smaller target of himself, he turned right, braked hard, putting the back end of the truck to the oncoming object. It struck without force but with sprays of sapphire sparks, and scores of electrical arcs blazed from one prominent point of the truck to another.

Spencer was encapsulated in a dazzling blue sphere of hissing, crackling light. And knew what it was. One of the rarest of all weather phenomena. Ball lightning. It wasn’t a conscious entity, not the extraterrestrial force he had half imagined, neither stalking nor seducing him. It was simply one more element of the storm, as impersonal as ordinary lightning, thunder, rain.

Perched on four tires, the Explorer was safe. As soon as the ball burst upon them, its energy began to dissipate. Sizzling and snapping, it swiftly faded to a fainter blue: dimmer, dimmer.

His heart had been pounding with a strange jubilation, as though he desperately wanted to encounter something paranormal, even if it proved hostile, rather than return to a life without wonder. Though rare, ball lightning was too mundane to satisfy his expectations, and disappointment brought his heart rate almost back to normal.

With a jolt, the front of the truck dropped precipitously, and the cab tipped forward. As a final arc of electricity crackled from the left headlight rim to the top right corner of the windshield frame, dirty water sloshed over the hood.

In his panic, as he had tried to avoid the blue light, Spencer had swung too far to the right, braking at the brink of the arroyo. The soft wall of sand was eroding beneath him.

His heart raced again, his disappointment forgotten.

He shifted into reverse and eased down on the accelerator. The truck moved backward, up the disintegrating slope.

Another slab of the bank gave way. The Explorer tipped farther forward. Water surged across the hood, almost to the windshield.

Spencer abandoned caution, accelerated hard. The truck jumped backward. Out of the water. Tires eating through the soft, wet ground. Tipping back, back, almost horizontal again.

The arroyo wall was too unstable to endure. The churning wheels destabilized the gelatinous ground. Engine shrieking, tires spinning in the treacherous muck, the Explorer slid into the flood, protesting as noisily as a mastodon being sucked into a tar pit.

“Sonofabitch.” Spencer inhaled deeply and held his breath as though he were a schoolboy leaping into a pond.

The truck splashed beneath the surface, fully submerged.

Unnerved by the calamitous sound and motion, Rocky wailed in misery, as though responding not only to current events but to the cumulative terrors of his entire troubled life.

The Explorer broke the surface, wallowing like a boat in rough seas. The windows were closed, preventing an inrush of cold water, but the engine had gone dead.

The truck was swept downstream, pitching and yawing, riding higher in the flood than Spencer had expected. The choppy surface lapped four to six inches below the sill of his side window.

He was assaulted by liquid noises, a symphonic Chinese water torture: the hollow paradiddle of rain on the roof, the whoosh and swish and plash and gurgle of the churning flow against the Explorer.

Above all the competing sounds, a drizzling noise drew Spencer’s attention, because it was intimate, not muffled by sheet metal or glass. The maracas of a rattlesnake wouldn’t have been more alarming. Somewhere, water was getting into the truck.

The breach wasn’t catastrophic — a drizzle, not a gush. With every pound of water taken aboard, however, the truck would ride lower, until it sank. Then it would tumble along the river bottom, pushed rather than buoyed, body crumpling, windows shattering.

Both front doors were secure. No leaks.

As the truck heaved and plunged downstream, Spencer turned in his seat, snared by his safety harness, and examined the cargo hold. All windows were intact. The tailgate wasn’t leaking. The backseat was folded down, so he couldn’t see the floor concealed under it, but he doubted that the river was getting through the rear doors, either.

When he faced front again, his feet sloshed in an inch of water.

Rocky whined, and Spencer said, “It’s okay.”

Don’t alarm the dog. Don’t lie, but don’t alarm.

Heater. The engine was dead, but the heater still functioned. The river was invading through the lower vents. Spencer switched off the system, closed the air intakes. The drizzle was silenced.

As the truck pitched, the headlights slashed the bruised sky and glistered in the mortal torrents of rain. Then the truck yawed, and the beams cut wildly left and right, seeming to carve the arroyo walls; slabs of earth crashed into the dirty tide, spewing gouts of pearlescent foam. He killed the lights, and the resultant gray-on-gray world was less chaotic.

The windshield wipers were running on battery power. He didn’t switch them off. He needed to see what was coming, as best he could.

He would be less stressed — and no worse off — if he lowered his head and closed his eyes, like Rocky, and waited for fate to deal with him as it wished. A week ago, he might have done that. Now he peered forward anxiously, hands locked to the useless steering wheel.

He was surprised by the fierceness of his desire to survive. Until he had walked into The Red Door, he had expected nothing from life: only to keep a degree of dignity and to die without shame.

Blackened tumbleweed, thorny limbs of uprooted cacti, masses of desert bunchgrass that might have been the blond hair of drowned women, and pale driftwood rode the rolling river with the Explorer, scraping and thumping against it. In emotional turmoil equal to the tumult of the natural world, Spencer knew that he had been traveling the years as if he himself were driftwood, but at last he was alive.

The watercourse abruptly dropped ten or twelve feet, and the truck sailed over a roaring cataract, airborne, tipping forward. It dove into the rampaging water, into a diluvial darkness. Spencer was first jerked forward in his harness, then slammed backward. His head bounced off the headrest. The Explorer failed to hit bottom, exploded through the surface, and rollicked on downriver.

Rocky was still on the passenger seat, huddled and miserable, claws hooked in the upholstery.

Spencer gently stroked and squeezed the back of the mutt’s neck.

Rocky didn’t raise his bowed head but turned toward his master and rolled his eyes to look up from under his brow.

Interstate 15 was a quarter mile ahead. Spencer was stunned that the truck had been carried so far in so little time. The currents were even faster than they seemed.

The highway spanned the arroyo — usually a dry wash — on massive concrete columns. Through the smeary windshield and heavy rain, the bridge supports appeared to be absurdly numerous, as if government engineers had designed the structure primarily to funnel millions of dollars to a senator’s nephew in the concrete business.

The central passage between the bridge supports was broad enough to let five trucks pass abreast. But half the flood churned through the narrower races between the closely ranked columns on each side of the main channel. Impact with the bridge supports would be deadly.

Swooping, plunging, they rode a series of rapids. Water splashed against the windows. The river picked up speed. A lot of speed.

Rocky was shaking more violently than ever and panting raggedly.

“Easy, pal, easy. You better not pee on the seat. You hear?”

On 1-15, the headlights of big rigs and cars moved through the storm-darkened day. Emergency flashers threw red light into the rain where motorists had stopped on the shoulder to wait out the downpour.

The bridge loomed. Exploding ceaselessly against the concrete columns, the river threw sheets of spray into the rain-choked air.

The truck had attained a fearful velocity, shooting downstream. It rolled violently, and waves of nausea swelled through Spencer.

“Better not pee on the seat,” he repeated, no longer speaking only to the dog.

He reached under his fleece-lined denim jacket, under his soaked shirt, and withdrew the jade-green soapstone medallion that hung on a gold chain around his neck. On one side was the carved head of a dragon. On the other side was an equally stylized pheasant.

Spencer vividly recalled the elegant, windowless office beneath China Dream. Louis Lee’s smile. The bow tie, suspenders. The gentle voice: I sometimes give one of these to people who seem to need it.

Without slipping the chain over his head, he held the medallion in one hand. He felt childish, but he held it tightly nonetheless.

The bridge was fifty yards ahead. The Explorer was going to pass dangerously close to the forest of columns on the right.

Pheasants and dragons. Prosperity and long life.

He remembered the statue of Quan Yin by the front door of the restaurant. Serene but vigilant. Guarding against envious people.

After a life like yours, you can believe in this?

We must believe in something, Mr. Grant.

Ten yards from the bridge, ferocious currents caught the truck, lifted it, dropped it, tipped it half onto its right side, rolled it back to the left, and slapped loudly against the doors.

Sailing out of the storm into the eclipsing shadow of the highway above, they passed the first of the bridge columns in the row immediately to the right. Passed the second. At horrendous speed. The river was so high that the solid underside of the bridge was only a foot above the truck. They surged nearer to the columns, bulleting past the third, the fourth, nearer still.

Pheasants and dragons. Pheasants and dragons.

The currents pulled the truck away from the concrete supports and dropped it into a sudden swale in the turbulent surface, where it wallowed with filthy water to its windowsills. The river teased Spencer with the possibility of safe passage in that trough, pushing them along as if they were on a bobsled in a luge chute — but then it mocked his brief flicker of hope by lifting the truck again and tossing it passenger-side-first into the next column. The crash was as loud as a bomb blast, metal shrieked, and Rocky howled.

The impact pitched Spencer to his left, a move that the safety harness couldn’t check. The side of his head slammed into the window. In spite of all the other clamor, he heard the tempered glass webbing with a million hairline cracks, a sound like a crisp slice of toast being crushed with a sudden clench of a fist.

Cursing, he put his left hand to the side of his head. No blood. Only a rapid throbbing that was in time with his heartbeat.

The window was a mosaic of thousands of tiny chips of glass, held together by the gummy film in the center of the sandwiched pane.

Miraculously, the windows on Rocky’s side were undamaged. But the front door bulged inward. Water dribbled around the frame.

Rocky lifted his head, suddenly afraid not to look. He whimpered as he peered at the wild river, at the low concrete ceiling, and at the rectangle of cheerless gray storm light beyond the bridge.

“Hell,” Spencer said, “pee on the seat if you want to.”

The truck sank into another swale.

They were two-thirds of the way through the tunnel.

A hissing, needle-thin stream of water squirted through a tiny breach in the twisted door frame. Rocky yelped as it spattered him.

When the truck soared out of the trough, it wasn’t thrown into the columns after all. Worse, the river heaved as if passing over an enormous obstruction on the floor of the wash, and it slammed the Explorer straight up into the low concrete underside of the bridge.

Braced with both hands on the steering wheel, determined not to be thrown into the side window, Spencer was unprepared for the upward rush. He dropped in his seat as the roof crumpled inward, but he was not quick enough. The ceiling cracked against the top of his skull.

Bright bolts of pain flashed behind his eyes, along his spine. Blood streamed down his face. Scalding tears. His vision blurred.

The river carried the truck down from the underside of the bridge, and Spencer tried to push up in his seat. The effort made him dizzy, so he slumped again, breathing hard.

His tears swiftly darkened, as if polluted. His blurred vision faded. Soon the tears were as black as ink, and he was blind.

The prospect of blindness panicked him, and panic opened a door to understanding: He wasn’t blind, thank God, but he was passing out.

He held desperately to consciousness. If he fainted, he might never wake. He balanced on the edge of a swoon. Then hundreds of gray dots appeared in the blackness, expanded into elaborate matrices of light and shadow, until he could see the interior of the truck.

Pulling himself up in the seat as far as the crumpled roof would allow, he again almost passed out. Gingerly, he touched his bleeding scalp. The wound seeped rather than gushed, not a mortal laceration.

They were in the open once more. Rain hammered on the truck.

The battery wasn’t dead yet. Wipers still swept the windshield.

The Explorer gamely wallowed down the center of the river, which was broader than ever. Perhaps a hundred twenty feet wide. Brimming against its banks, within inches of spilling over. God knew how deep it might be. The water was calmer than it had been but moving fast.

Gazing worriedly at the liquid road ahead, Rocky made pitiful sounds of distress. He wasn’t bobbing his head, wasn’t delighted by their speed, as on the streets of Vegas. He didn’t seem to trust nature as much as he had trusted his master.

“Good old Mr. Rocky Dog,” Spencer said affectionately, and was unnerved to hear that his speech was slurred.

In spite of Rocky’s concern, Spencer couldn’t see any unusual dangers immediately ahead, nothing like the bridge. For a couple of miles the flow appeared to proceed unimpeded, until it vanished into rain, mist, and the iron-colored light of thunderhead-filtered sun.

Desert plains lay on both sides, bleak but not entirely barren. Mesquite bristled. Clumps of wiry grass. Outcroppings of gnarled rock also grew out of the plains. They were natural formations but achieved the strange geometry of ancient Druid structures.

A new pain blossomed in Spencer’s skull. Irresistible darkness flowered behind his eyes. He might have been out for a minute or an hour. He didn’t dream. He just went away into a timeless dark.

When he revived, cool air fluttered feebly across his brow, and cold rain spattered his face. The many liquid voices of the river grumbled, hissed, and chuckled louder than before.

He sat for a while, wondering why the sound was so much louder. His thoughts were muddled. Eventually, he realized that the side window had collapsed while he’d been unconscious. Gummy laces of highly fragmented tempered glass lay in his lap.

Water was ankle-deep on the floor. His feet were half numb with cold. He propped them on the brake pedal and flexed his toes in his saturated shoes. The Explorer was riding lower than when last he’d noticed. The water was only an inch below the bottom of the window. Though moving fast, the river was less turbulent, perhaps because it had broadened. If the arroyo narrowed or the terrain changed, the flow might become tempestuous again, lap inside, and sink them.

Spencer was barely clearheaded enough to know that he should be alarmed. Nevertheless, he could muster only a mild concern.

He should find a way to seal the dangerous gap where the window had been. But the problem seemed insurmountable. For one thing, he would have to move to accomplish it, and he didn’t want to move.

All he wanted to do was sleep. He was so tired. Exhausted.

His head lolled to the right against the headrest, and he saw the dog sitting on the passenger seat. “How you doin’, fur butt?” he asked thickly, as if he had been pouring down beer after beer.

Rocky glanced at him, then looked again at the river ahead.

“Don’t be afraid, pal. He wins if you’re afraid. Don’t let the bastard win. Can’t let him win. Got to find Valerie. Before he does. He’s out there. He’s forever…on the prowl….”

With the woman on his mind and a deep uneasiness in his heart, Spencer Grant rode through the glistening day, muttering feverishly, searching for something unknown, unknowable. The vigilant dog sat silently beside him. Rain ticked on the crumpled roof of the truck.

Maybe he passed out again, maybe he only closed his eyes, but when his feet slipped off the brake pedal and splashed into water that was now halfway up his calves, Spencer lifted his throbbing head and saw that the windshield wipers had stopped. Dead battery.

The river was as fast as an express train. Some turbulence had returned. Muddy water licked at the sill of the broken window.

Inches beyond that gap, a dead rat floated on the surface of the flow, pacing the truck. Long and sleek. One unblinking, glassy eye fixed on Spencer. Lips skinned back from sharp teeth. The long, disgusting tail was as stiff as wire, strangely curled and kinked.

The sight of the rat alarmed Spencer as he had not been alarmed by the flood lapping at the windowsill. With the breathless, heart-pounding fear familiar from nightmares, he knew he would die if the rat washed into the truck, because it was not merely a rat. It was Death. It was a cry in the night and the hoot of an owl, a flashing blade and the smell of hot blood, it was the catacombs, it was the smell of lime and worse, it was the door out of boyhood innocence, the passageway to Hell, the room at the end of nowhere: It was all that in the cold flesh of one dead rodent. If it touched him, he’d scream until his lungs burst, and his last breath would be darkness.

If only he could find an object with which to reach through the window and shove the thing away without having to touch it directly. But he was too weak to search for anything that could serve as a prod. His hands lay in his lap, palms up, and even contracting his fingers into fists required more strength than he possessed.

Maybe more damage had been done than he had first realized, when the top of his head had hit the ceiling. He wondered if paralysis had begun to creep through him. If so, he wondered if it mattered.

Lightning scarred the sky. A bright reflection transformed the rat’s tenebrous eye into a flaring white orb that seemed to swivel in the socket to glare even more directly at Spencer.

He sensed that his fixation on the rat would draw it toward him, that his horrified gaze was a magnet to its iron-black eye. He looked away from it. Ahead. At the river.

Though he was sweating profusely, he was colder than ever. Even his scar was cold, not ablaze any longer. The coldest part of him. His skin was ice, but his scar was frozen steel.

Blinking away the rain as it slanted through the window, Spencer watched the river gain speed, racing toward the only interesting feature in an otherwise tedious landscape of gently declining plains.

North to south across the Mojave, vanishing in mist, a spine of rock jutted as high as twenty or thirty feet in some places, as low as three feet in others. Though it was a natural geological feature, the formation was weathered curiously, with wind-carved windows, and appeared to be the ruined ramparts of an immense fortification erected and destroyed in a warring age a thousand years prior to recorded history. Along some of the highest portions of the expanse were suggestions of crumbling and unevenly crenelated parapets. In places the wall was breached from top to bottom, as though an enemy army had battered into the fortress at those points.

Spencer concentrated on the fantasy of the ancient castle, superimposing it upon the escarpment of stone, to distract himself from the dead rat floating just beyond the broken window at his side.

In his mental confusion, he was not initially concerned that the river was carrying him toward those battlements. Gradually, however, he realized that the approaching encounter might be as devastating to the truck as had been the brutal game of pinball with the bridge. If the currents conveyed the Explorer through one of the sluiceways and along the river, the queer rock formations would be just interesting scenery. But if the truck clipped one of those natural gateposts…

The spine of rock traversed the arroyo but was breached in three places by the flow. The widest gap was fifty feet across and lay to the right, framed by the south shore and by a six-foot-wide, twenty-foot-high tower of dark stone that rose from the water. The narrowest passage, not even eight feet wide, lay in the center, between that first tower and another pile of rocks ten feet wide and twelve high. Between that pile and the left-hand shore, where the battlements soared again and ran uninterrupted far to the north, lay the third passage, which must have been twenty to thirty feet across.

“Gonna make it.” He tried to reach out to the dog. Couldn’t.

With a hundred yards to go, the Explorer seemed to be drifting swiftly toward the southernmost and widest gateway.

Spencer wasn’t able to stop himself from glancing to the left. Through the missing window. At the rat. Floating. Closer than before. The stiff tail was mottled pink and black.

A memory scuttled through his mind: rats in a cramped place, hateful red eyes in the shadows, rats in the catacombs, down in the catacombs, and ahead lies the room at the end of nowhere.

With a quiver of revulsion, he looked forward. The windshield was blurred by rain. Nevertheless, he could see too much. Having closed within fifty yards of the point at which the river divided, the truck no longer sailed toward the widest passage. It angled left, toward the center gate, the most dangerous of the three.

The channel narrowed. The water accelerated.

“Hold on, pal. Hold on.”

Spencer hoped to be carried sharply to the left, past the center gate, into the north passage. Twenty yards from the sluiceways, the lateral drift of the truck slowed. It would never reach the north gate. It was going to race through the center.

Fifteen yards. Ten.

Even to transit the center passage, they would need some luck. At the moment, they were rocketing toward the twenty-foot-high gatepost of solid rock on the right of that opening.

Maybe they would just graze the pillar or even slide by with a finger’s width to spare.

They were so close that Spencer could no longer see the base of the stone tower past the front of the Explorer. “Please, God.”

The bumper rammed the rock as though to cleave it. The impact was so great that Rocky slid onto the floor again. The right front fender tore loose, flew away. The hood buckled as if made of tinfoil. The windshield imploded, but instead of spraying Spencer, tempered glass cascaded over the dashboard in glutinous, prickly wads.

For an instant after the collision, the Explorer was at a dead stop in the water and at an angle to the direction of the flow. Then the raging current caught the side of the truck and began to push the back end around to the left.

Spencer opened his eyes and watched in disbelief as the Explorer turned crosswise to the flow. It could never pass sideways between the two masses of rock and through the center sluiceway. The gap was too narrow; the truck would wedge tight. Then the rampaging river would hammer the passenger side until it flooded the interior or maybe hurled a driftwood log through the open window at his head.

Shuddering, grinding, the front of the Explorer worked along the rock, deeper into the passage, and the back end continued to arc to the left. The river pushed hard on the passenger side, surging halfway up the windows. In turn, as the driver’s side of the truck was shoved fully around toward the narrow sluiceway, it created a small swell that rose over the windowsill. The back end slammed into the second gatepost, and water poured inside, onto Spencer, carrying the dead rodent, which had remained in the orbit of the truck.

The rat slipped greasily through his upturned palms and onto the seat between his legs. Its stiff tail trailed across his right hand.

The catacombs. The fiery eyes watching from the shadows. The room, the room, the room at the end of nowhere.

He tried to scream, but what he heard was a choked and broken sobbing, like that of a child terrified beyond endurance.

Possibly half paralyzed from the blow to his head, without a doubt paralyzed by fear, he still managed a spasmodic twitch of both hands, casting the rat off the seat. It splashed into a calf-deep pool of muddy water on the floor. Now it was out of sight. But not gone. Down there. Floating between his legs.

Don’t think about that.

He was as dizzy as if he had spent hours on a carousel, and a fun-house darkness was bleeding in at the edges of his vision.

He wasn’t sobbing anymore. He repeated the same two words, in a hoarse, agonized voice: “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry….”

In his deepening delirium, he knew that he was not apologizing to the dog or to Valerie Keene, whom he would now never save, but to his mother for not having saved her, either. She had been dead for more than twenty-two years. He had been only eight years old when she’d died, too small to have saved her, too small then to feel such enormous guilt now, yet “I’m sorry” spilled from his lips.

The river industriously shoved the Explorer deeper into the sluiceway, although the truck was now entirely crosswise to the flow. Both front and rear bumpers scraped and rattled along the rock walls. The tortured Ford squealed, groaned, creaked: It was at most one inch shorter from back to front than the width of the water-smoothed gap through which it was struggling to be borne. The river wiggled it, wrenched it, alternately jammed and finessed it, crumpled it at each end to force it forward a foot, an inch, grudgingly forward.

Simultaneously, gradually, the tremendous power of the thwarted currents actually lifted the truck a foot. The dark water surged against the passenger side, no longer halfway up the windows on that flank but swirling at the base of them.

Rocky remained down in the half-flooded leg space, enduring.

When Spencer had quelled his dizziness with sheer willpower, he saw that the spine of rock bisecting the arroyo was not as thick as he had thought. From the entrance to the exit of the sluiceway, that corridor of stone would measure no more than twelve feet.

The jackhammering river pushed the Explorer nine feet into the passage, and then with a skreek of tearing metal and an ugly binding sound, the truck wedged tight. If it had made only three more feet, the Explorer would have flowed with the river once more, clear and free. So close.

Now that the truck was held fast, no longer protesting the grip of the rock, the rain was again the loudest sound in the day. It was more thunderous than before, although falling no harder. Maybe it only seemed louder because he was sick to death of it.

Rocky had scrambled onto the seat again, out of the water on the floor, dripping and miserable.

“I’m so sorry,” Spencer said.

Fending off despair and the insistent darkness that constricted his vision, incapable of meeting the dog’s trusting eyes, Spencer turned to the side window, to the river, which so recently he had feared and hated but which he now longed to embrace.

The river wasn’t there.

He thought he was hallucinating.

Far away, veiled by furies of rain, a range of desert mountains defined the horizon, and the highest elevations were lost in clouds. No river dwindled from him toward those distant peaks. In fact, nothing whatsoever seemed to lie between the truck and the mountains. The vista was like a painting in which the artist had left the foreground of the canvas entirely blank.

Then, almost dreamily, Spencer realized that he had not seen what was there to see. His perception had been hampered as much by his expectations as by his befuddled senses. The canvas wasn’t blank after all. Spencer needed only to alter his point of view, lower his gaze from his own plane, to see the thousand-foot chasm into which the river plunged.

The miles-long spine of weathered rock that he had thought marched across otherwise flat desert terrain was actually the irregular parapet of a perilous cliff. On his side, the sandy plain had eroded, over eons, to a somewhat lower level than the rock. On the other side was not another plain but a sheer face of stone, down which the river fell with a cataclysmic roar.

He had also wrongly assumed that the increased rumble of rain was imaginary. In fact, the greater roar was a trio of waterfalls, altogether more than one hundred feet across, crashing a hundred stories to the valley floor below.

Spencer couldn’t see the foaming cataracts, because the Explorer was suspended directly over them. He lacked the strength to pull himself against the door and lean out the window to look. With the flood pushing hard against the passenger side, as well as slipping under it and away, the truck actually hung half in the narrowest of the three falls, prevented from being carried over the brink only by the jaws of the rock vise.

He wondered how in God’s name he was going to get out of the truck and out of the river alive. Then he rejected all consideration of the challenge. The fearfulness of it sapped what meager energy he still had. He must rest first, think later.

From where Spencer slumped in the driver’s seat, though he had no view of the river gone vertical, he could see the broad valley beneath him and the serpentine course of the water as it flowed horizontally again across the lower land. That long drop and the tilted panorama at the bottom caused a new attack of vertigo, and he turned away to avoid passing out.

Too late. The motion of a phantom carousel afflicted him, and the spinning view of rock and rain became a tight spiral of darkness into which he tumbled, around and around and down and away.

…and there in the night behind the barn, I’m still spooked by the swooping angel that was only an owl. Inexplicably, when the vision of my mother in celestial robes and wings proves to be a fantasy, I am overcome by another image of her: bloody, crumpled, naked, dead in a ditch, eighty miles from home, as she had been found six years before. I never actually saw her that way, not even in a newspaper photograph, only heard the scene described by a few kids in school, vicious little bastards. Yet, after the owl has vanished into the moonlight, I can’t retain the vision of an angel, though I try, and I can’t shed the gruesome mental picture of the battered corpse, although both images are products of my imagination and should be subject to my control.

Bare-chested and barefoot, I move farther behind the barn, which hasn’t been a real working barn for more than fifteen years. It’s a well-known place to me, part of my life since I can remember — yet tonight it seems different from the barn I’ve always known, changed in some way that I can’t define but that makes me uneasy.

It’s a strange night, stranger than I yet realize. And I’m a strange boy, full of questions I’ve never dared to ask myself, seeking answers in that July darkness when the answers are within me, if I would only look for them there. I am a strange boy who feels the warp in the wood of a life gone wrong, but who convinces himself that the warped line is really true and straight. I am a strange boy who keeps secrets from himself — and keeps them as well as the world keeps the secret of its meaning.

In the eerily quiet night, behind the barn, I creep cautiously toward the Chevy van, which I’ve never seen before. No one is behind the wheel or in the other front seat. When I place my hand on the hood, it’s warm with engine heat. The metal is still cooling with faint ticks and pings. I slip past the rainbow mural on the side of the van to the open rear door.

Although the interior of the cargo section is dark, enough pale moonlight filters back from the windshield to reveal that no one is in there, either. I’m also able to see this is only a two-seater, with no apparent amenities, though the customized exterior led me to expect a plush recreational vehicle.

I still sense there’s something ominous about the van — other than the simple fact that it doesn’t belong here. Seeking a reason for that ominousness, leaning through the open door, squinting, wishing I’d brought a flashlight, I’m hit by the stink of urine. Someone has pissed in the back of the van. Weird. Jesus. Of course, maybe it’s only a dog that made the mess, which isn’t so weird after all, but it’s still disgusting.

Holding my breath, wrinkling my nose, I step back from the door and hunker down to get a closer look at the license plate. It’s from Colorado, not out of state.

I stand.

I listen. Silence.

The barn waits.

Like many barns built in snow country, it had been essentially windowless when constructed. Even after the radical conversion of the interior, the only windows are two on the first floor, the south side, and four second-floor panes in this face. Those four above me are tall and wide to capture the north light from dawn to dusk.

The windows are dark. The barn is silent.

The north wall features a single entrance. One man-size door.

After moving around to the far side of the van, finding no one there, either, I’m indecisive for precious seconds.

From a distance of twenty feet, under a moon that seems to conceal as much with its shadows as it reveals with its milky light, I nevertheless can see that the north door is ajar.

On some deep level, perhaps I know what I should do, what I must do. But the part of me that keeps secrets so well is insistent that I return to my bed, forget the cry that woke me from a dream of my mother, and sleep the last of the night away. In the morning, of course, I’ll have to continue living in the dream that I’ve made for myself a prisoner of this life of self-deception, with truth and reality tucked into a forgotten pocket at the back of my mind. Maybe the burden of that pocket has become too heavy for the fabric to contain it, and maybe the threads of the seams have begun to break. On some deep level, maybe I have decided to end my waking dream.

Or maybe the choice I make is preordained, having less to do with either my subconscious agonies or my conscience than with the track of destiny on which I’ve traveled since the day I was born. Maybe choice is an illusion, and maybe the only routes we can take in life are those marked on a map at the moment of our conception. I pray to God that destiny isn’t a thing of iron, that it can be flexed and reshaped, that it bends to the power of mercy, honesty, kindness, and virtue — because otherwise, I can’t tolerate the person I will become, the things I will do, or the end that will be mine.

That hot July night, beaded with sweat but chilled, fourteen in moonlight, I am thinking about none of that: no brooding about hidden secrets or destiny. That night, I’m driven by emotion rather than intellect, by sheer intuition rather than reason, by need rather than curiosity. I’m only fourteen years old, after all. Only fourteen.

The barn waits.

I go to the door, which is ajar.

I listen at the gap between the door and the jamb.

Silence within.

I push the door inward. The hinges are well oiled, my feet are bare, and I enter with a silence as perfect as that of the darkness that welcomes me….

Spencer opened his eyes from the dark interior of the barn in the dream to the dark interior of the rock-pinned Explorer, and he realized that night had come to the desert. He had been unconscious for at least five or six hours.

His head was tipped forward, his chin on his chest. He gazed down into his own upturned palms, chalk white and supplicant.

The rat was on the floor. Couldn’t see it. But it was there. In the darkness. Floating.

Don’t think about that.

The rain had stopped. No drumming on the roof.

He was thirsty. Parched. Raspy tongue. Chapped lips.

The truck rocked slightly. The river was trying to push it over the cliff. The tireless damned river.

No. That couldn’t be the explanation. The roar of the waterfall was gone. The night was silent. No thunder. No lightning. No water sounds out there anymore.

He ached all over. His head and neck were the worst.

He could barely find the strength to look up from his hands.

Rocky was gone.

The passenger door hung open.

The truck rocked again. Rattled and creaked.

The woman appeared at the bottom of the open door. First her head, then her shoulders, as if she were levitating up out of the flood. Except, judging by the comparative quiet, the flood was gone.

Because his eyes were adapted to darkness and cool moonlight shone between ragged clouds, Spencer was able to recognize her.

In a voice as dry as cinders, but without a slur, he said, “Hi.”

“Hi, yourself,” she said.

“Come in.”

“Thank you, I think I will.”

“This is nice,” he said.

“You like it here?”

“Better than the other dream.”

She levered herself into the truck, and it wobbled more than before, grinding against rock at both ends.

The motion disturbed him — not because he was concerned that the truck would shift and break loose and fall, but because it stirred up his vertigo again. He was afraid of spiraling out of this dream, back into the nightmare of July and Colorado.

Sitting where Rocky had once sat, she remained still for a moment, waiting for the truck to stop moving. “This is one tricky damned situation you’ve gotten into.”

“Ball lightning,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“Ball lightning.”

“Of course.”

“Knocked the truck into the arroyo.”

“Why not,” she said.

It was so hard to think, to express himself clearly. Thinking hurt. Thinking made him dizzy.

“Thought it was aliens,” he explained.

“Aliens?”

“Little guys. Big eyes. Spielberg.”

“Why would you think it was aliens?”

“Because you’re wonderful,” he said, though the words didn’t convey what he meant. In spite of the poor light, he could see that the look she gave him was peculiar. Straining to find better words, made dizzier by the effort, he said, “Wonderful things must happen around you…happen around you all the time.”

“Oh, yeah, I’m the center of a regular festival.”

“You must know some wonderful thing. That’s why they’re after you. Because you know some wonderful thing.”

“You been taking drugs?”

“I could use a couple aspirin. Anyway…they’re not after you because you’re a bad person.”

“Aren’t they?”

“No. Because you’re not. A bad person, I mean.”

She leaned toward him and put a hand against his forehead. Even her light touch made him wince with pain.

“How do you know I’m not a bad person?” she asked.

“You were nice to me.”

“Maybe it was an act.”

She produced a penlight from her jacket, peeled back his left eyelid, directed the beam at his eye. The light hurt. Everything hurt. The cool air hurt his face. Pain accelerated his vertigo.

“You were nice to Theda.”

“Maybe that was an act too,” she said, now examining his right eye with the penlight.

“Can’t fool Theda.”

“Why not?”

“She’s wise.”

“Well, that’s true.”

“And she makes huge cookies.”

Finished examining his eyes, she tipped his head forward to have a look at the gash in the top of his skull. “Nasty. Coagulated now, but it needs cleaned and stitched.”

“Ouch!”

“How long were you bleeding?”

“Dreams don’t hurt.”

“Do you think you lost a lot of blood?”

“This hurts.”

“’Cause you’re not dreaming.”

He licked his chapped lips. His tongue was dry. “Thirsty.”

“I’ll get you a drink in just a minute,” she said, putting two fingers under his chin and tipping his head up again.

All this head tipping was making him dangerously dizzy, but he managed to say, “Not dreaming? You’re sure?”

“Positive.” She touched his upturned right palm. “Can you squeeze my hand?”

“Yes.”

“Go ahead.”

“All right.”

“I mean now.”

“Oh.” He closed his hand around hers.

“That’s not bad,” she said.

“It’s nice.”

“A good grip. Probably no spinal damage. I expected the worst.”

She had a warm, strong hand. He said, “Nice.”

He closed his eyes. An inner darkness leaped at him. He opened his eyes at once, before he could fall back into the dream.

“You can let go of my hand now,” she said.

“Not a dream, huh?”

“No dream.”

She clicked on the penlight again and directed it down between his seat and the center console.

“This is really strange,” he said.

She was peering along the narrow shaft of light.

“Not dreaming,” he said, “must be hallucinating.”

She popped the release button that disengaged the buckle on his safety harness from the latch between his seat and the console.

“It’s okay,” he said.

“What’s okay?” she asked, switching off the light and returning it to her jacket pocket.

“That you peed on the seat.”

She laughed.

“I like to hear you laugh.”

She was still laughing as she carefully extricated him from the harness.

“You’ve never laughed before,” he said.

“Well,” she said, “not much recently.”

“Not ever before. You’ve never barked either.”

She laughed again.

“I’m going to get you a new rawhide bone.”

“You’re very kind.”

He said, “This is damned interesting.”

“That’s for sure.”

“It’s so real.”

“Seems unreal to me.”

Even though Spencer remained mostly passive through the process, getting out of the harness left him so dizzy that he saw three of the woman and three of every shadow in the car, like superimposed images on a photograph.

Afraid that he would pass out before he had a chance to express himself, he spoke in a raspy rush of words: “You’re a real friend, pal, you really are, you’re a perfect friend.”

“We’ll see if that’s how it turns out.”

“You’re the only friend I have.”

“Okay, my friend, now we’ve come to the hard part. How the hell am I going to get you out of this junker when you can’t help yourself at all?”

“I can help myself.”

“You think you can?”

“I was an Army Ranger once. And a cop.”

“Yes, I know.”

“I’ve been trained in tae kwon do.”

“That would really be handy if we were under assault by a bunch of ninja assassins. But can you help me get you out of here?”

“A little.”

“I guess we’ve got to give it a try.”

“Okay.”

“Can you lift your legs out of there, swing them to me?”

“Don’t want to disturb the rat.”

“There’s a rat?”

“He’s dead already but…you know.”

“Of course.”

“I’m very dizzy.”

“Then let’s wait a minute, rest a minute.”

“Very, very dizzy.”

“Just take it easy.”

“Goodbye,” he said, and surrendered to a black vortex that spun him around and away. For some reason, as he went, he thought of Dorothy and Toto and Oz.

The back door of the barn opens into a short hallway. I step inside. No lights. No windows. The green glow from the security-system readout—NOT READY TO ARM—in the right-hand wall provides just enough light for me to see that I am alone in the corridor. I don’t ease the door all the way shut behind me but leave it ajar, as I found it.

The floor appears to be black beneath me, but I’m on polished pine. To the left are a bathroom and a room where art supplies are stored. Those doorways are barely discernible in the faint green wash, which is like the unearthly illumination in a dream, less like real light than like a lingering memory of neon. To the right is a file room. Ahead, at the end of the hallway, is the door to the large first-floor gallery, where a switchback staircase leads to my father’s studio. That upper chamber occupies the entire second floor and features the big north-facing windows under which the van is parked outside.

I listen to the hallway darkness.

It doesn’t speak or breathe.

The light switch is to the right, but I leave it untouched.

In the green-black gloom, I ease the bathroom door all the way open. Step inside. Wait for a sound, a sense of movement, a blow. Nothing.

The supply room is also deserted.

I move to the right side of the hall and quietly open the door to the file room. I step across the threshold.

The overhead fluorescent tubes are dark, but there is other light where no light should be. Yellow and sour. Dim and strange. From a mysterious source at the far end of the room.

A long worktable occupies the center of that rectangular space. Two chairs. File cabinets stand against one of the long walls.

My heart is knocking so hard it shakes my arms. I make fists of my hands and hold them at my sides, struggling to control myself.

I decide to return to the house, to bed, to sleep.

Then I’m at the far end of the file room, though I don’t recall having taken a single step in that direction. I seem to have walked those twenty feet in a sudden spell of sleep. Called forward by something, someone. As if responding to a powerful hypnotic command. To a wordless, silent summons.

I am standing in front of a knotty-pine cabinet that extends from floor to ceiling and from corner to corner of the thirteen-foot-wide room. The cabinet features three pairs of tall, narrow doors.

The center pair stand open.

Behind those doors, there should be nothing but shelves. On the shelves should be boxes of old tax records, correspondence, and dead files no longer kept in the metal cabinets along the other wall.

This night, the shelves and their contents, along with the back wall of the pine cabinet, have been pushed backward four or five feet into a secret space behind the file room, into a hidden chamber I’ve never seen before. The sour yellow light comes from a place beyond the closet.

Before me is the essence of all boyish fantasies: the secret passage to a world of danger and adventure, to far stars, to stars farther still, to the very center of the earth, to lands of trolls or pirates or intelligent apes or robots, to the distant future or to the age of dinosaurs. Here is a stairway to mystery, a tunnel through which I might set out upon heroic quests, or a way station on a strange highway to dimensions unknown.

Briefly, I thrill to the thought of what exotic travels and magical discoveries might lay ahead. But instinct quickly tells me that on the far side of this secret passage, there is something stranger and deadlier than an alien world or a Morlock dungeon. I want to return to the house, to my bedroom, to the protection of my sheets, immediately, as fast as I can run. The perverse allure of terror and the unknown deserts me, and I’m suddenly eager to leave this waking dream for the less threatening lands to be found on the dark side of sleep.

Although I can’t recall crossing the threshold, I find myself inside the tall cabinet instead of hurrying to the house, through the night, the moonlight, and the owl shadows. I blink, and then I find that I’ve gone farther still, not back one step but forward into the secret space beyond.

It’s a vestibule of sorts, six feet by six feet. Concrete floor. Concrete-block walls. Bare yellow bulb in a ceiling socket.

A cursory investigation reveals that the back wall of the pine cabinet, complete with the attached and laden shelves, is fitted with small concealed wheels. It’s been shoved inward on a pair of sliding-door tracks.

To the right is a door out of the vestibule. An ordinary door in many ways. Heavy, judging by the look of it. Solid wood. Brass hardware. It’s painted white, and in places the paint is yellowed with age. However, though it’s more white and grimy yellow than it is anything else, tonight this is neither a white nor a yellow door. A series of bloody handprints arcs from the area around the brass knob across the upper portion of the door, and their bright patterns render the color of the background unimportant. Eight, ten, twelve, or more impressions of a woman’s hands. Palms and spread fingers. Each hand partially overlapping the one before it. Some smeared, some as clear as police-file prints. All glistening, wet. All fresh. Those scarlet images bring to mind the spread wings of a bird leaping into flight, fleeing to the sky, in a flutter of fear. Staring at them, I am mesmerized, unable to get my breath, my heart storming, because the handprints convey an unbearable sense of the woman’s terror, desperation, and frantic resistance to the prospect of being forced beyond the gray concrete vestibule of this secret world.

I can’t go forward. Can’t. Won’t. I’m just a boy, barefoot, unarmed, afraid, not ready for the truth.

I don’t remember moving my right hand, but now it’s on the brass knob. I open the red door.