Dead Run

DEAD RUN

P. J. Tracy

FOUR CORNERS hadn't been much of a town since October 17, 1946. That was the day Hazel Krueger's father set the Whitestone Lodge on fire and danced naked through the flames in some sort of sorry recompense for all he'd seen and all he'd done in a place called Normandy.

Not that the town had been such a thriving metropolis before that-more like a tiny open spot in Wisconsin's north woods where someone had dropped a lake by mistake-but without the lodge and the trickle of fishermen who made the long drive up from Milwaukee and Madison every summer, the town sort of sat down on itself and started to dry up, corner by corner.

By the time Tommy Wittig was born, the lodge road that crossed the county tar had faded back into the forest, and it was only last week that Tommy, approaching his eighth birthday and given to the solitary contemplation of a lonely child, had ever wondered aloud why the town had been named Four Corners when it had only two.

Grandpa Dale had told him, while walking him out to WhitestoneLake and showing him the crumbled remains of a brick wall that had once framed the base of the old lodge.

"You peel your eyes when you walk through these woods," he'd said, waving the gnawed end of a briar pipe he hadn't lit in thirty years because he always had his nose stuck inside some engine or other and feared blowing his own head off. "You can still mark the hole that fire burned in the forest when it jumped from the lodge to the trees. Probably would have burnt down the whole damn state if it hadn't started to rain."

Tommy had marveled at that, wondering where he would have been born if Wisconsin had burned right to the ground that day, and if the flag would have looked funny with forty-nine stars on it instead of fifty.

"Now, if you was a hawk flying overhead, you'd see a fifty-acre circle of second growth, all strangly with those prickery briars that get stuck in your sneaker laces. That was the fire, and I remember it like it was yesterday. Killed this old town, is what it did. Prime white pines was going up like sixty-foot candles on a birthday cake."

"Was he really naked?" Tommy had asked, focusing on the single part of the story that he found most remarkable. Grandpa Dale had laughed and said that yes, indeed, Mr. Everett Krueger had been naked as the day he was born.

"Did old Hazel see him?" Hazel ran the cafe that sat on the corner next to Grandpa Dale's gas station-the only other business left in Four Corners-and she was about a hundred years old, as far as Tommy could tell.

That's when Grandpa Dale had squatted down and looked Tommy right in the eye the way he did when something was really serious and he wanted him to pay attention.

"We don't make no mention of that fire in front of Hazel, you understand, Tommy? She was barely older than you when her daddy up and did this thing, and she was right there, watching, just a little girl peekin' through a porthole into hell, watching her own daddy sizzle away into a blackened stick. Can you imagine such a thing?"

Tommy had been trying to imagine it for almost a whole week, and still he couldn't put a picture in his mind of Hazel Krueger as a little girl, let alone one touched by tragedy.

He was straddling his old bike across the street from the cafe, staring through the plate-glass window, watching Hazel's broad back hunch and move over the grill plate behind the counter. Even through the dust-streaked window, he could see that great pile of too-black hair wobbling on top of her head, and when she turned around to plop a plate down on the counter in front of a customer, he saw the loose skin of remembered chins cascading down over the place where her neck was supposed to be.

Tommy squinted until Hazel's bright red lips were a blur and her wrinkles disappeared, and he still couldn't see the little girl under all those years.

On the other side of the plate glass, Hazel looked up and caught sight of him and wiggled her fingers and Tommy waved back, suddenly shy. For all the years of his life she'd just been old Hazel with the arms so big they could squeeze the squeaks out of you, and the crazy hair, and the free french fries anytime he set foot inside the cafe.

But ever since Grandpa Dale had told him the story of how Four Corners became two, Hazel had seemed like a different person-an exotic and interesting stranger who'd watched her own daddy burn to a cinder.

He heard the old Ford pickup when it was still a good quarter mile behind him, and he trotted his bike onto the shoulder close to the trees and looked around frantically. "C'mon, boy! C'mon, where are you?"

The pup was an early birthday present, little more than a black-and-tan fluffball with too-long ears and too-big feet and a penchant for wandering. The dog had absolutely no sense when it came to cars.

"Hey, pup!" Tommy laid down his bike and squatted, peering into the trees that marched nearly up to the tar across the road from the cafe and the gas station. There were ghostly tendrils of morning ground fog still hugging the trunks, and he dearly hoped the pup would come out on his own, because Tommy didn't want to go in there after him. It looked like a scene from one of Saturday night's Creature Features, when mist started floating around crooked graveyard tombstones and you just knew something bad was coming any minute.

It startled him when the pup came bounding out of a dew-speckled fern bank and jumped into his arms, grinning. A wet, busy tongue found his ear and made him giggle just as the battered white pickup topped the rise that dipped down into the down. "Hold still, you squirmy worm," he said as he hugged the pup close to his chest as the truck passed slowly, then turned left into Grandpa Dale's station. Tommy's mom leaned out the passenger window and crooked her finger at him.

The pup galumphed after him as Tommy pedaled across the road to the station. Halfway there, the oversized feet tangled and set the pup tumbling like a fuzzy roll of black-and-tan yarn. He scrambled upright, shook his head, then sat down abruptly on short, crooked haunches and let out a plaintive yip.

Jean Wittig watched out the truck window, shaking her head. She was a pretty blond woman with fair skin just beginning to show the cruelties that the sun inflicts on a farmer's wife. "You need to watch that pup on the road, remember."

Tommy screeched the old bike to a halt next to the truck and looked up at his mother. "I will," he said, solemn with the weight of this responsibility.

"We might be late, so remember to help with the milking, and anything else Grandpa Dale asks you to do. What are you grinning at?"

"Nothin.'" Tommy kept grinning.

"Think we're going birthday shopping, don't you?"

"Uh-huh."

Harold Wittig leaned forward and peered past his wife out the window at his son, affecting surprise. "Somebody's havin' a birthday?"

Tommy's grin widened.

"Hell, we're just goin' to Fleet Farm to pick up some new parts for that old milker."

"Don't say 'hell' in front of the boy, Harold."

Harold rolled his eyes and got out of the truck to pump gas.

"Here, Tommy." His mother handed him a dollar bill. "Run over to Hazel's and get us two donuts for the road. Those ones with the jelly filling."

"Hey, Mom, did you know that Hazel watched her daddy burn in a big fire a long time ago?"

"Oh, Lord. Harold ... ?"

"Wasn't me. Talk to your dad."

Grandpa Dale chose that moment to walk out of the station, and Jean fixed him with a look that made Tommy decide it was a good time to go get those donuts.

The cafe was bustling this morning, with all three of the booths and half of the counter stools filled. Hazel was manic, propelling her bulk from grill to booth to refrigerator to counter with a speed that was absolutely amazing for a woman of her size.

Tommy suffered a pat on the head and a cheek tweak from Pastor Swenson and his wife, respectively, nodded like he'd seen his dad do at the two hired hands who were helping put up hay at the farm, and eyed with some interest the two families in the other booths and a lone woman at the counter. Not many strangers found themselves on the mile-long strip of tar that passed through Four Corners as it connected County Road Double-P to County Road Double-O, and this many at one time was downright unheard of.

"Here you go." Hazel distributed five plates at one booth, all expertly balanced on her slablike arms, then pulled a map out of her pocket and slapped it down on the table. "But like I said, all you gotta do is head up to Double-O, hang a left, then keep going. You'll hit Beaver Lake in under an hour if you don't get the itch to wander off the county roads again."

A frazzled-looking woman in sunglasses with tiger stripes on them took the map and tucked it into her purse. "We'll take the map, just in case."

"Suit yourself." Hazel poked her fists into hips like bread dough and looked down at Tommy. "Well, Tommy Wittig, as I live and breathe I swear you've grown a foot since I saw you last!"

Tommy blushed because Hazel saw him almost every day of his life, and he was sure everyone in the cafe, stranger or not, knew that.

"Must be because your birthday is tomorrow and you're growin' so fast." She tipped her head sideways, and for one terrible minute, Tommy thought that pile of black hair was going to fall right off and land at his feet like some dead animal.

"I need two donuts really quick!"

Hazel laughed a big laugh, like a man, then went behind the counter and opened the glass case where her homemade donuts were laid out like jewelry. "What kind today, honey?"

Tommy looked up at that broad, sagging face with its familiar smear of red lipstick, and the dark eyes that always twinkled, and thought how silly he was to have been so leery of old Hazel this past week, to have thought of her as a stranger.

"Hazel?"

"What, hon?"

"Urn . . . I'm sorry . . , well . . . I'm sorry your dad died."

Hazel's face went quiet then, and she looked at him for a long time. It was sort of a grown-up look, and in a funny-nice kind of way, it made Tommy feel old. "Why, thank you, Tommy. I appreciate that,"

she finally said, and then she took one of the little white bakery bags that she put donuts in off a stack on the case and shook it open.

By the time he got back outside, the mist was gone from the woods across the road, and Grandpa Dale was standing next to Dad at the pickup truck, hands shoved deep in his coverall pockets. If Mom had scolded him for telling the story about the lodge fire and Hazel's dad, it was over now, because all three of them were smiling around a secret. They stopped talking abruptly when they saw him coming, and Tommy knew they'd been whispering about his birthday present.

He walked toward the truck slowly, his eyes on his dad in absolute adoration, pushing back the nagging thought that if Hazel's daddy could die, then maybe other daddies could die. But not his. His was the tallest, broadest, strongest dad in the world, and even fire couldn't hurt him. Sometimes he'd catch a head-butt from one of the cows clattering out of the barn after milking, and he'd holler after her that she was a goddamn milkin' whore, and Mom's face would get all stiff and she'd tell him he'd burn for taking the Lord's name in vain, and that's when he always said he was too full of vinegar to ever catch fire.

His father laid a big, work-roughened hand on his shoulder as he passed and squeezed a little. "Be good, son."

"Yes, sir." His shoulder felt cold and light when his father took his hand away and climbed into the truck.

"Thanks, honey." His mom took the donut bag and leaned out the window and planted a kiss on his head. "You be good, now. See you at suppertime."

Grandpa Dale walked him out to the center of the road and they stood there, waving after the pickup as it roared away around the curve toward County Road Double-P. The pup sat crookedly at Tommy's side, leaning against his leg, pink tongue lolling.

Grandpa Dale put his hand on Tommy's shoulder. It wasn't nearly as big as Dad's hand, or as warm. "Unusual number of strangers intown this morning." He nodded toward the two unfamiliar cars parked on the side street between the station and the cafe.

"They got lost," Tommy said.

"I figured. Pumped nearly thirty gallons of gas already just on those two."

"That's a lot."

Grandpa Dale nodded. "Your grandma's in there working on the books today. Guess she could pump gas with the best of them if the need arises, which means maybe you and me could go fishing in a bit, if we had a mind to."

Tommy grinned up at him, and Grandpa Dale ruffled his hair.

A quarter mile north of town, Pastor Swenson's twin sixteen-year-old sons, Mark and Matthew, were working in the Wittig's roadside pasture. The house and hundred-year-old barn were behind them, etched against a cornflower sky at the end of a drive as straight and true as the rows in Harold Wittig's cornfield. Behind the barn, Whitestone Lake lay like a giant blue plate in a necklace of cattails.

A prime herd of Holsteins grazed close to where the boys were repairing the white board fence, near a sign that read "Pleasant Hills Dairy Farm." Jean Wittig had painted the sign herself with green enamel left over after Harold touched up the old John Deere, and everyone agreed that on the whole, the sign looked mighty professional. The P in "Pleasant" was canted slightly to the right, as if it were in a hurry to catch up to the other letters, but Harold thought that gave the sign zip, and he wouldn't let Jean repaint it.

Mark and Matthew had their headphones on full blast, listening to their favorite heavy-metal bands, so they didn't hear the truck making the turn off Double-O, and wouldn't have thought much of it, even if they'd looked up and seen it coming. It was a sight they were used to-just a truck that looked like all the other dairy tankers traveling from farm to farm on Wisconsin's secondary roads, taking on raw milk from the state's productive herds. It had a dusty white cab and a shiny stainless-steel tank that looked like a giant's Thermos bottle. "Good Health Dairies" was spelled out in royal blue lettering along its length.

The truck was going forty miles per hour when it hit the place the tar had buckled in yesterday's afternoon heat, right at the end of the long driveway leading back to the Wittig farm. The cab's right front tire bounced violently over the worst of the break, then veered into the soft pea gravel of the shoulder. There was a long, high-pitched squeal as the driver slammed on the brakes, and then, its forward momentum diverted, the truck began a sickening lurch to one side. It balanced on its left wheels for an endless moment, as if giving the driver time to think about what was to come, then jackknifed and crashed to its side and slid across the asphalt with a deafening metallic screech.

Wide-eyed and terrified, the driver lay pressed against his door, the metal handle poking into his ribs, his hands still frozen in a white-knuckled grip around the steering wheel. The cab was pointed toward a distant cluster of farm buildings, and through the stone-pocked windshield, he saw two boys running toward him down the dusty drive. In an adjacent pasture, a tight cluster of panicked Holsteins was running the other way.

"Shit," he finally managed in a shuddered exhale that broke the word into half a dozen syllables. He flexed his fingers on the wheel, wiggled his toes, then released a shaky, breathy laugh, giddy to find all his body parts intact. His smile froze when he heard the compressor behind the cab kick in, and vanished altogether when he glanced at the dashboard and saw the needle on the bulk tank gauge dropping slowly.

"Sweet Jesus," he whispered, groping frantically for the small computer unit built into the console. He depressed the large red button in the middle, then hit the send key. A message appeared on the tiny screen, blinking innocently in large, baby blue letters.

SPILLED MILK

SPILLED MILK

SPILLED MILK

Mark and Matthew were almost to the truck, running flat out, legs and arms and hearts pumping hard. They dropped like stones a few yards shy of the truck, and for one terrifying instant, saw horror in each other's eyes.

On the other side of the pasture, the cows in Harold Wittig's prime herd of Holsteins began to sink to their knees.

Haifa mile downwind in Four Corners, the screeching noise had split the quiet morning like a thousand fingernails scraping down a blackboard. The puppy wailed and batted at his ears; Grandpa Dale and Tommy both covered theirs with their hands. For a second, Dale wondered if those Swenson boys had taken out Harold's old John Deere and tipped it over in the road again, but he dismissed the possibility almost as soon as he thought of it. The horrible noise was going on much too long for that, spearing into his brain, making his eyes hurt.

The curious and the worried had already started to come out of Hazel's by the time the awful noise had stopped, all of them looking up the road toward the Wittig farm, shading their eyes in the bright light of morning. The pastor and his wife were the worried ones, thinking of their sons working up there. The sudden silence was almost more upsetting than the sounds of the crash had been, and they both moved quickly toward where they had parked the big Chevy in front of the cafe. The others were wandering right into the middle of the road, as if that would help them figure out what had happened over a hill and out of sight.

Inside the cafe, Hazel was waiting impatiently for the donuts she'd just put in the fryer to finish so she could follow her customers outside and investigate for herself. Excitement of any kind was a rare thing in Four Corners, and not to be missed. When she finally lifted the basket and hooked it on the edge of the fryer-another perfect batch- she had only enough time to glance out the window and marvel at the sight of her customers prayerfully sinking to their knees, some of

them right in the middle of the road, before her candy-red mouth sagged open and her throat started to close.

When Dale saw the first person go down just a few yards away, he scooped up Tommy in one arm and the pup in the other and tried to race away, but already his heart was pounding too slow for that. He never felt the pup slip from his grasp and tumble to the asphalt, but he never let go of Tommy, not even when he finally fell.

R ICKY SCHWANN was freezing his ass off. Damned water in this quarry never warmed up, no matter how hot the summer. It was great when you needed to quick-chill a case of brews, but it really sucked when you were two hundred pounds of muscle in a pair of swimming trunks and had to dive in after it. Ricky had worked hard his senior year at Paper Valley High to get down to five percent body fat, but now he was wishing he'd porked down a few more Big Macs, just for the insulation.

Ten feet down into the black water, his lungs were already starting to burn and his eyes hurt from the cold. He squeezed them shut. The water was so black that you couldn't see more than a few inches anyway. He yanked hard again on the rope that tethered the case of beer he was after, but it wouldn't budge. He was going to have to go all the way down. Five, ten more feet, he figured.

He went hand over hand down the rope until he felt it veer sideways, snagged on whatever it was that was holding it down. He jerked on the rope and felt it loosen, then opened his eyes in time to see another pair of eyes floating toward him. They were blue, just like his, but wide and empty.

"WHAT'D I TELL YOU?" Deputy Bonar Carlson was leaning forward in the passenger seat of the patrol car, jabbing a chubby finger at the windshield. "Look at the top of those Norways. Yellowing already, and August is still a youngster."

Sheriff Michael Halloran kept his eyes on the twisting strip of tar so he wouldn't run into one of the Norway pines that Bonar wanted him to look at. The forest moved in on everything man-made when you got this far north in Wisconsin, and roads were no exception. He felt like he was driving through a tunnel. "We are not having a drought," he said. "You're doing that Chicken Little thing again."

"It's going to be a bad one. Maybe as bad as 'eighty-seven."

"That's such a load of crap. We nearly drowned in June. Broke every record in the book for rainfall."

Bonar snorted and flopped back, sticking a thumb under the seat belt to ease the pressure on his considerable, cherished stomach. "That was then, this is now. Just wait until we get to the lime quarry. I'll bet the water is at least a foot low, maybe two."

"No way." Halloran eased the car around an unbanked turn, watching sunlight dapple the road ahead like a strobe. He'd known since the fifth grade that only a fool questioned anything Bonar stated as fact, but he just couldn't help himself. One of these days, he was going to prove him wrong about something. The law of averages was on his side. "Did I miss the turn? Feels like we've been driving for hours."

"Fifty-seven minutes from the office to the lime quarry, and that's if you don't run into a deer or a bear. How long since you've been up there?"

Halloran thought about it for a minute, and then got sad. "Senior-class party."

Bonar sighed. "Yeah. Gives me the creeps every time I pass the place. Haven't dipped a toe in that water since."

The old lime quarry they were heading for hugged the northern county line, about as far from human habitation as you could get in this part of the state, making it an ideal party site for every teenage bash since the quarry and kiln had closed in the '40s. Fifty feet down from ground level, the lime had petered out and buried springs had bubbled up, filling the ugly machine-made hole with icy water. Halloran had always liked thinking about that-man working decades to make a piece of earth ugly, nature covering the scars in a blink, if you just left her alone to do her job.

But the water and the isolation made the place a magnet for kids and kegs, and every now and then something bad would happen. Like at the senior-class party nearly twenty years ago, when Howie Dexheimer dove into that cold black water and disappeared, as if the quarry had swallowed him whole. Every diver in the county had worked the deep water for weeks but never found the body. As far as anyone knew, Howie Dexheimer was still down there.

"You think it's him?" Bonar interrupted Halloran's thoughts as if he'd been following them.

"Lord, I hope not. I sure don't want to see Howie after twenty years in the water."

When Bonar was thinking hard, his whole face screwed up. "Might not be so bad. Water's too damn cold for anything to live in, including most bacteria. The body could be almost perfectly preserved if the alkaline content isn't too high."

Halloran winced. The idea of a perfectly preserved Howie was almost worse.

Fifteen minutes later, he found the two-lane dirt track that made a hole in the woods. Deputy Walter Simons was blocking the access with his legs spread and his arms crossed over his chest, a banty rooster with an Elvis haircut trying to look like Colossus.

Halloran pulled up alongside him and opened his window. "Tell me something I don't know, Simons."

Simons swatted ineffectually at a congregation of deerflies buzzing around his head. "Goddamn deerflies bite like a son of a bitch, did you know that?"

"I did."

"Well, it isn't poor old Howie Dexheimer, anyway. I caught a glimpse just when they were pulling him out, and Howie never had hair that long."

"Hair grows after death," Bonar told him.

"Go on."

"So some people say."

"Does it tie itself up in a pony tail with a rubber band?"

"Hardly ever."

"Well, there you go. Besides, Doc Hanson says this was an older guy, mid-twenties at least, and not in the water that long. No ID, no nothin'. Naked as a jaybird. You want to send Cleaton back out here with the squad? Another ten minutes out in these bugs and I'm going to be a pint low."

About a tenth of a mile in, the two-lane track broadened onto an open grassy area clogged by cars-Doc Hanson's old blue station wagon, three patrol cars that had responded to the call, and a brand-new Ford pickup that would have eaten up a year of Halloran's salary. Had to belong to the kid who had called it in, he decided. These days half the kids in the district got new trucks just for graduating.

Just beyond the makeshift parking lot, an earthen ramp that had once been access for heavy machinery led down to the water. They'd called it "the girlie road" in the old days, and no self-respecting, testosterone-crazed teenage boy would ever set foot on it. There was only one acceptable entrance into the water for them.

Halloran's eyes shifted to either side of the ramp, where the quarry walls rose a good fifteen feet from the black water. Mature trees leaned over the rim as if peering downward, and frayed ropes hung from many of the bigger branches. He and Bonar had hung ropes just like them when they were young and immortal, swung on them like foolish apes until they arced over the water and let go. Timing had been everything. You let go too soon, and you landed on the jagged rocks that climbed the ridge wall. That had been the thrill of it, and with the sharp and fearful eye of maturity, Halloran thought it was pretty much a miracle that they had survived their own stupidity.

He glanced over at five teenagers tangled together in a distressed knot near one of the county cars. Their expressions cycled through the spectrum of human emotion-shock, horror, fear, fascination, and back again-as they tried to make sense of their gruesome discovery. He recognized Ricky Schwann, a full head taller and a few shades grayer than the rest of them.

Halloran and Bonar ignored the kids for the moment, got out of the car, and headed down the rock-strewn slope to the little beach below, where Doc Hanson's crouched form was partially blocking the view of what Halloran dearly hoped was an intact body. Initially, all he could see of it was a head and a pair of legs so white they looked like they belonged on a plaster statue. As they drew closer, the doc got up and took a step back, giving them their first look at the torso.

"Oh, man." Halloran's cheeks went up and his mouth turned down when he saw the band of neat, pencil-sized black holes that stitched a perforated line across the white flesh of the dead man's chest. "We just figured it for a drowning."

Doc Hanson was holding his gloved hands away from his sides so he wouldn't forget and shove them in his pockets. "So did I, until they pulled him out." He stooped and moved a tangled clump of wet hair away from the open filmy eyes. "You know him?"

Halloran and Bonar both took a long look at the frozen face, then shook their heads.

"Me either. And I figure I know just about everybody in this county. Hell, I delivered half of them. But I've never laid eyes on this boy."

"Identifying marks?" Halloran asked.

Doc Hanson shook his head."No freckles, no moles, no scars, no tattoos.He might have had something on his back, but there isn't much left of it anymore. You want me to roll him?"

"Lord, no," Bonar said, already picturing what that many exit wounds might have done to the body. "It looks like somebody tried to cut the poor guy in half."

Doc nodded. "Eight full penetrations, head-on, another one that scraped his left side, see?" He pointed to a raw strip where tissue had been burned instead of blown away. "Mowed him down, is what they did. Looks like NATO rounds some fool fired on full automatic, which is flat-out overkill. That stuff fragments like crazy. One good chest hit like any one of these"-he gestured at the body-"and the job's done."

Halloran looked curiously at the kindly, time-worn face of the doctor who'd delivered him, who'd given him lollipops with every childhood vaccination and mixed india ink with the plaster so he could have a "manly-colored" cast when he'd broken his wrist in second grade-not the kind of man you'd think would know a whole lot about the end results of automatic rifle fire. "NATO rounds, Doc?" he asked softly. "You learn about those in med school?"

The softening jowls under the old doctor's jaw tightened a little. '"Nam," he said in a way that made the single syllable sound heavy and dark and final.

Halloran and Bonar shot each other a look. You could know a man for all of your life, it seemed, and still know so little.

The sound of spilling water made them all look toward the ramp, where a diver was emerging, looking strange and shiny and alien in his scuba gear. Halloran thought of old monster matinees and wished he was at home watching one now.

The diver pulled off his mask as he waded toward them. "You're going to need a couple more body bags down here."

Within the hour, there were two more bodies lying on the tiny beach-one younger, one older, but both as nude as the first, with similar chest wounds. Doc Hanson had two unhappy deputies move the corpses until they were in the order he wanted.

"There," he said, finally satisfied, gesturing Halloran and Bonar over to where he stood at the feet of the body in the center of the ghastly trio. "Now look at the wounds, left to right. Looks like the bullet holes almost sew them together, doesn't it?"

Halloran squinted, narrowing his eyes to tighten his line of vision so he saw only the wounds, not the human bodies the bullets had punctured. "This is the way they were standing when they were shot," he said quietly, and Doc nodded.

"Just so. Right-handed shooter, sweeping left to right."

Bonar's lips were pushed out, as if he'd just tasted something very bad. "Why not a left-handed shooter, sweeping right to left?"

Doc Hanson hesitated before he responded, as if he were reluctant to confess that he knew the answer. "There's a burst when you fire an automatic rifle, Bonar-the bullets come so fast when you pull the trigger that if you're not used to it, you get a heavy cluster before you start your sweep. See the man on the left, the one we pulled out first? Nine shots. He was the first in line. The one in the middle was hit five times, the one on the right only three. So this is what happened. Someone lined these men up and executed them all at once."

There was a hollow sound to Doc's voice that kept Halloran from looking at him. He looked at the bodies instead. "You've seen this kind of thing before?"

Doc Hanson shoved his hands in his pockets, then pulled them out and looked irritably at the latex gloves he'd just ruined. "Not in this country."

GRACEMACBRIDE was standing at one of the open mullioned windows on the third floor, resting her eyes on the greenery outside while several computers hummed behind her. She was finally growing used to the new office, to lush treetops outside the window instead of the Minneapolis skyline, to the relative quiet of the exclusive Summit Avenue neighborhood instead of the brash bustle of the warehouse district.

Moving the Monkeewrench office into Harley Davidson's mansion was supposed to have been temporary, but it was almost a year since they'd abandoned the bloodied loft that had been home to their company for ten years, and not one of them had even suggested looking for another space. It was comfortable here-Harley saw to that-and for a quartet of societal rejects that comprised all the family any of them had, a home seemed a proper environment.

Besides, Charlie liked it here. He was sitting perfectly upright in the ladder-hacked wooden chair next to her desk, haunches and four big feet crowded onto the small seat, what was left of his tail sticking through the back. His brown eyes followed every move she made. She laid a hand on the top of his wiry head and he closed his eyes. "Two days," she said, and the dog sighed.

Grace was dressed for travel, which meant she was wearing two guns instead of one-the Sig in the shoulder holster low under her left arm; the derringer tucked into one of the tall English riding boots she wore every time she left her house. Her jeans and T-shirt were lightweight in deference to the August heat, but they were still black. Something about the color made her feel safe and hidden and powerful, and she couldn't discard it any more than she could discard the boots and the guns. The one day in eleven years she had tried, a man with a gun of his own had come calling, reminding her that such a venture was pure folly. Life was dangerous, and facing it unarmed was simply too risky.

She turned away from the window when she heard the first muffled footfalls on the carpeted stairs two floors down, and then the strident hum of the small elevator that served this wing of the house. She knew it was Harley and Roadrunner on the stairs, and Annie on the elevator, but still, her stomach clenched and she automatically laid her hand on the Sig. She didn't lower it until she heard Harley bellow from the first landing, "Coming up, Grade!" Harley knew she had her hand on the gun. She really loved him for that.

Roadrunner was first through the door, his six-foot-seven-inch, sapling-sized frame clad in his customary one-piece Lycra biking suit. Today's selection was navy blue with a red swoosh across the back. "I don't care how rare it is or how much it cost," he threw over his shoulder at Harley. "It's still ugly."

Harley stomped in behind him, a massive, bearded man with beefy, tattooed arms wrapped lovingly around a monstrous clay pot that presumably held the item in question-some sort of cactus bristling with three-inch quills. "And that coming from a man who painted his friggin' kitchen pink."

"It's not pink, it's cerise, and the guy at the paint store said it was one of their most popular interior colors."

"It's baboon-butt pink, Roadrunner, and the guy at the paint store should be imprisoned for telling you any different." Harley tenderly placed the cactus down in the corner and backed up to admire it. "What doyou think, Grade? It looks great there, doesn't it?"

Harley was a man of great passion, and when he found something new that struck his fancy, he went after it zealously. He had amassed a world-class collection of vintage motorcycles and a wine cellar that could reduce a sommelier to tears, and Grace understood those things, because they were utilitarian and therefore worth the time and expense. But after the Monkeewrench crew's recent trip to Arizona, he'd developed an unlikely obsession with cacti and now had an entire room downstairs filled with the things, which baffled her- they simply weren't useful. "I guess we won't have to worry about watering it," was all she could muster.

Harley gave her a look of crushing disappointment. "I was expecting a little more from you, Grace. And by the way, if you hear a strange, clattering sound, ignore it-it's just my heart breaking and shattering on the floor."

Grace couldn't help but smile. "Sorry, Harley. I just don't get it."

"Neither do I." Annie Belinsky fluttered into the room in a dress made to look as if a thousand silk butterflies were feasting on her body every time she moved. She had tiny feet and a rosebud mouth, but everything else about Annie was pure, queen-sized Renaissance, and her parading around in that dress in front of Harley all morning had been like dragging a side of bacon in front of a starving dog. She stood in front of the cactus with her hands on her hips and a stern look of disapproval on her face. "I thought we agreed you'd keep your acupuncture experiments downstairs."

"I told you, this is a special cactus and it's brand-new. I want to keep an eye on it until it gets acclimated."

Annie rolled her eyes. "You're losing your mind, Harley. Why couldn't you fixate on something pretty, like orchids?"

"Orchids arechick plants," he said in disgust. "But the cactus is tough, a take-no-prisoners kind of plant. I like to think of them as the botanical equivalent of me-all man."

"Yeah-annoying as hell."

"The kind of man who could take that dress off your big, beautiful body with his teeth, one piece of silk at a time."

"Pig-"

"Hey, I knew those little fluttery things were silk, didn't I? I just can't figure out what's holding them on. . . ." He reached for her dress, but Annie slapped his hand and turned toward Grace in exasperation.

"I'm being mauled. Can we get out of here yet?"

"Almost ready. I'm just burning the last disk."

It was their fourth month taking the Monkeewrench computerized detective software on the road, donating their time and equipment to local police departments that were coming up empty on homicides that were, or might be, serials. Over the past ten years, the software that Monkeewrench had produced-particularly the games-had made all the partners extremely wealthy. But the last game they created spawned a string of grisly murders, and the names and faces of the victims haunted them still. So they were doing penance the only way they knew how: by turning the computer genius that had sparked those killings against other killers, wherever they could find them. They'd brought down two already-one in Arizona and one in Texas.

We're batting a thousand, Grace thought, but philanthropy in this arena was an exhausting and depressing endeavor. There were too many killers out there, too many police departments ill equipped to sort through and collate the volume of information that always accompanied such investigations. Their new software was amazingly effective, making connections in seconds that would normally take months of legwork, but it was the only prototype in the world, and picking a single case to work from the hundreds of urgent requests had become an ongoing moral dilemma.

Today she and Annie were driving to Green Bay to set up for a case that they wouldn't have given a second glance if Sharon Mueller hadn't asked them to take it on. Once Sheriff Halloran's deputy in Wisconsin, now on temporary loan to the Minneapolis FBI office as a profiler, Sharon was convinced a serial killer was just beginning a spree in the Green Bay area, even if her superior at the FBI wasn't. Special Agent in Charge Paul Shafer refused to authorize bureau time and resources on what seemed to be three very dissimilar murders, so technically Sharon was off the clock on this weekend jaunt. The Green Bay police didn't see a connection either, but they had three unsolveds on the books and were more than happy to take any help Monkeewrench was offering free of charge. After reviewing the file, the Monkeewrench crew wasn't so sure they had a serial, either, but Sharon had nearly died saving Grace's life last year, and if she'd asked them to go to the moon, they would have found a way.

Harley sank down into the broad, padded leather chair at his workstation and propped his jackbooted feet up on the desk. "So what do you think? Is Sharon going to stay in Wisconsin?"

Annie was delicately picking through a drawer in her desk, trying to capture a favorite tube of lip gloss without chipping her manicure. "Who knows? She's got the cushy FBI job here if she wants it, but then again, Mr. Dreamboat is waiting for her in the sticks."

Harley blew a raspberry. "Mr. Dreamboat is a dumbshit, or he would have dragged her back to Wisconsin a long time ago."

"I thought you liked Sheriff Halloran."

"I do like him. He's a hell of a sheriff and a hell of a nice guy, but that doesn't make him any less of a dumbshit. If I had some red-hot pixie like Sharon all googly-eyed over me, I sure as hell wouldn't be cooling my heels in the hinterlands, waiting for her to come knocking. Even the Italian Stallion knows better than that, doesn't he, Grade?"

Grace gave him one of those long, steady looks that frightened children and strangers, but it didn't work on Harley at all.

"Leo Magozzi's just not the kind of guy who lies in the weeds with his fingers crossed," he went on. "I'll bet he's been on your doorstep every night since we got back from the Southwest, hasn't he? Hallo-ran could take a lesson from that guy."

Annie drummed her rainbow nails on her desk, instantly capturing his attention. "For a man with no discernible love life, you're pretty free and easy with the sage advice."

"What do you mean? I have several discernible love lives."

"I'm talking about relationships where you actually know the other person's name. Come on, Grace. I told Sharon we'd pick her up by ten."

The computer Grace was working on chimed, and she pulled the finished disk from its drive. "Okay, that's the last one."

She patted Harley on the head as she passed his desk on the way to Roadrunner's bank of computers. He turned off the monitor before she got close enough to decipher the scrolling lines of code.

"Something you don't want me to see?" she asked, a little amused.

Roadrunner lifted one angular shoulder. "It's a surprise Harley and I are working on."

"Really?"

"Aw, shit." Harley came storming over. "You didn't let her see it, did you?"

"No, I didn't let her see it. . . ."

"See what?"

Harley folded his arms over his chest and grinned at her. "Never you mind. Besides, if we told you, you'd be an accessory, and this has got to be the most illegal thing we've ever done."

"I like the sound of that."

"I went on the criminal justice board. Fifty, sixty years if we get caught."

"And I like the sound of that," Annie drawled from the doorway.

"You're going to call when you get there, right?" Roadrunner asked Grace.

"Of course we will."

"Because your cell phones probably won't work, you know. I checked it out. There are hardly any towers in northern Wisconsin."

"Excuse me?" Annie sounded like a kid who'd just learned that Santa Claus wasn't real.

Roadrunner sighed. "No cell towers, no cell coverage. Northern Wisconsin is pretty much a wasteland when it comes to telecommunication. You might not be able to call out until you get close to Green Bay."

Annie looked at him as if he'd lost his mind. "That is absolutely impossible. I called Paris from the top of the ski lift on Aspen Mountain last winter, and Aspen iswilderness."

"Yeah, right," Harley scoffed. "That's why every friggin' couture house in the world has a shop there. Let me tell you, you haven't begun to see wilderness until you've been to northern Wisconsin."

"Like you would know."

"Well, as it happens, I do know. Drove an Ojibwa friend up to the Bad River Rez once. Saw nothing but black bear for about three hours straight, and not one of them was carrying a cell phone."

"See?" Roadrunner said to Grace, his forehead wrinkled with worry. "You're going to be totally out of touch for a really long time."

Grace smiled at him. Roadrunner somehow managed to be both the child and the fretting mother of the Monkeewrench crew. His outlook had always been dark, his general philosophy one of blanket pessimism. "It's only a six-hour drive, Roadrunner."

"Yeah, well, a lot can happen in six hours. The car could blow up. You could hit a moose or have a blowout, and then veer off the road into a tree and lie there unconscious with all your arms and legs broken. . . ."

Harley smacked him on the back of the head.

Ten minutes later, Harley, Roadrunner, and Charlie stood at the end of the driveway like three abandoned puppies, watching Grace and Annie pull away in Grace's Range Rover.

"We should have gone with them," Roadrunner said.

Charlie whined his agreement.

"No room in that puny little SUV for two big, strapping men like ourselves and three women with all their makeup. Annie took a frig-gin' trunk, can you believe that? For a weekend in Green Bay, where nobody ever wears anything except Packers sweatshirts."

"We could have taken the RV. . .."

"Damnit, Roadrunner, how many times do I have to tell you not to call it that' It's a luxury motor coach."

"Whatever. We could have taken it. There's plenty of room for all of us."

Harley stared at the clump birch in the yard across the street. He rocked back and forth on his run-down heels. "I hate goddamned Wisconsin."

"The Harley-Davidson plant is in Wisconsin."

Harley's big head moved up and down a little. "Yeah. There is that."

A LOT OF PEOPLE assumed that Chicago was the windiest city in the country, just because of the "Windy City" moniker someone had slapped on the place more than a century ago. The truth was that Chicago wasn't anywhere near the top on any known list, and Minneapolis was windier by a whopping tenth of a mile per hour. Perched on the northern edge of the Great Plains, it was an easy target for the prairie winds that swept across the Midwest during the summer, which made the warm months tolerable for a population that wore parkas six or seven months out of the year. But every August, the prairies seemed to run out of breath, the wind stopped, and the heat settled over the city like shrink-wrap.

Grace had never minded the heat-or the cold, for that matter. Even after eleven years in the state, she was still baffled by the local fixation on the weather. But Annie had succumbed to the obsession almost immediately. Like almost every other resident, she watched every weathercast on every channel every chance she got, and spewed statistics like a meteorologist on uppers. They'd been in the car exactly two minutes when she started tapping the digital temperature readout on the dash.

"Lord, would you look at that. Eighty-eight degrees and it's not even ten in the morning. Another hour and we'll be fish poachin' in a kettle."

"We'll turn up the air-conditioning."

"Hah. As if air-conditioning could put a dent in the dew point we're expecting today. Did you hear how high it's going to be?"

"I don't even know what the dew point is."

"Honey, no one really knows what the dew point is, but it's going to be bad. Tropical. And Fat Annie is going to suffer. Is that Sharon?"

Haifa block ahead, Sharon was standing at the curb outside her apartment building, wearing her little navy FBI pants suit and her dreadful black lace-ups. She wore her brown hair in a short pixie cut, and would have been button-cute if it hadn't been for the mean-little-dog expression on her face. She had a big leather handbag over one shoulder and a canvas duffel at her feet. "Look at that bitty thing. Was she that short last week?"

"Shorter. She was sitting down."

The three of them had arranged to meet at a bar and grill on the fringes of downtown to take a look at the documentation Sharon had gathered on the case. She had already commandeered a large booth in the back by the time Grace and Annie had arrived, and was frightening the regulars with a spread of autopsy photos she'd laid on the table. "Are those all from the Green Bay case?" Grace had asked, and Sharon had swept the photos aside immediately. "Lord, no. I just take these along whenever I'm going out alone. No one hits on a woman looking at dead people."

Grace smiled at the memory, as she had smiled then. Most women would have worn a ring on their left hand to avoid unwanted male attention; Sharon brought pictures of corpses, and Grace liked that about her.

Annie rolled down her window when they pulled up to the curb. "Sharon Mueller, what on earth are you doing standing out there in this heat, especially in that sorry synthetic getup?"

Sharon stepped up to the window and breathed mint into the car. "I am a representative of the Federal government, and this is my Federal government outfit. In the back?" She hefted her duffel.

Grace nodded and got out to open the back gate for her. As Sharon tossed her duffel in, she eyed Annie's trunk suspiciously. "Somebody planning to stay awhile?"

"Only the weekend, honey," Annie answered as she climbed out of the passenger seat and held the door open for Sharon. "I bring at least two trunks for anything longer than that. Now, you come on up here and sit in the front. I'll be needing the backseat to accommodate this dress. If it gets wrinkled, the appliqués poke out this way and that, and I end up looking like I've been run through a paper shredder."

"It's a pretty amazing dress," Sharon said, giving her the once-over.

"I knew there was hope for you, darlin'."

After a minute on the road, Sharon said, "This feels weird."

"What, the car?"

"Nah. Going on a road trip with a couple of women."

"You've been on road trips with men?" Annie asked from the backseat, immediately intrigued.

"A couple. I wouldn't recommend it, though. Guys have this thing about getting from point A to point B as fast as possible. No side trips.

They never want to stop and look at anything. And they never have to go to the bathroom either."

"Yeah, yeah, I know all that, but who'd you go on a road trip with? Sheriff Halloran?"

"God, no. Elias McFarressey. He played the accordion, among other things."

Annie's jaw dropped. "You dated a man who played the accordion?"

"It was Wisconsin. You kind of had to be there."

"I'm seeing Lawrence Welk."

"It wasn't quite that bad. Grace, do you know where you're going?"

"I figured I'd head east until you tell me to make a turn."

"That'll work. I'm better than any GPS, at least in Wisconsin."

"Good thing, because I don't have one."

"I thought all these fancy rides had GPS."

"Grace wouldn't hear of it," Anne said. "Too Big Brother. They always know where you are with a GPS."

Sharon cocked her head at Grace. "And who is 'they'?"

Grace shrugged. "Could be anybody."

DOWN THE LONG DRIVE that led to the Wittig farm, behind the barn and out of sight of the road, three figures in bulky white suits stood motionless in the tall grass bordering a paddock fence, looking as alien in this landscape as the barn would have looked on the moon.

Through the thick transparent shields in their helmets, three pairs of busy eyes watched the slow progress of a big green tractor with a blade doing work it was never designed for. Flattening the grass with heavy, dirt-caked treads, the machine lumbered inexorably toward a lip of land behind the paddock that sloped down to a small lake. Behind the tractor, at the end of a long chain with links as fat as a man's fist, the dairy tanker followed as obediently as a dog on a leash.

Behind his shield, Chuck Novak's lips compressed and he tasted salt. Rivulets of sweat were coursing down his reddened face-sweatborn as much of fear as of the unrelenting heat that turned the heavy suit into a portable sauna. His companions were sweating, too, but their expressions revealed none of the nervousness that was churning in Chuck's stomach like acid in a Mixmaster. Maybe they weren't afraid. Maybe they'd understood the hurried lecture about vacuums and pressure and molecular weights that was so far beyond Chuck's high-school education it might as well have been delivered in Chinese-maybe they were a hell of a lot more certain than he was that all the gas had long since escaped from the milk truck's stainless-steel tank, just like the Colonel had said.

But if that was true-if there was no danger whatsoever that any of the lethal gas lingered-why the hell did they have to wear these suits? Why had all the others been pulled back out of range until they were finished with the truck?

Because somebody wasn't a hundred percent sure,Chuck thought.

He blinked sweat out of his eyes and watched the tractor grind to a halt at the edge of the slope, then ease back to put slack on the chain. For a long moment, none of the three white-suited men moved, then one of them waddled toward the back of the tractor to release the chain. The second man headed toward the front of the truck, and after taking a deep, shaky breath of canned air, Chuck brought up the rear.

The thick, bulky gloves attached to the arms of their suits foiled dexterity, and it seemed to take them a long time to release the chain from the oily undercarriage of the truck. By the time it was accomplished, the tractor had already positioned itself to the rear, its massive blade raised slightly and ready to push. In a stiff-legged hobble, the three men moved as quickly as possible to one side, near the edge of the slope, so they could watch the truck go over.

Someone should at least say some words, Chuck thought, looking first down the hill that slid into the lake, then back up at sunlight glinting off the truck's windshield. After all, there was a man in that truck, and this was his burial. He had a mental flash of Alvin slumped across the seat, the cab around him splattered with things he didn't want to think about, and the bitter taste of nausea crawled up his throat. He stiffened immediately. Even worse than the memory of what had been left of Alvin was the prospect of throwing up in a contained suit.

Bless him, Father, for he has sinned,he thought, paraphrasing the beginning of every confession, but by then the tractor's blade had cupped the truck's rear bumper and the big engine was growling.

There had been some concern about the truck tipping as it rolled down the slope toward the lake, but the distance was short, the angle of descent was steady and relatively shallow, and the truck went in almost gracefully, like some gallant old ship consigned to a watery grave. Momentum pushed it through a bank of cattails to a sharp dropoff, and then its great weight pulled it promptly down to a muddy bottom.

Thirty feet deep, their diver had said-cold, spring-fed, and apparently stocked with walleye. Chuck smiled a little at that, remembering that Alvin had been a fisherman. He thought of the water filling the cab, buoying the dead man up to gaze sightlessly out the windshield at all those fish.

He stood at the edge of the hill for what seemed like a long time, staring down at where the dark water had closed over the shiny steel tank, and then he heard the impatient revving of the tractor behind him.

Turning, he saw the massive blade almost hidden behind a messy pile of black and white and red. As the tractor inched forward, its treads biting into the soft manure-rich soil in the paddock, the pile shifted and started to tumble sickeningly.

Shit, Chuck thought. Now came the hard part. Dead cows wouldn't roll down that hill to the lake with the same ease and dignity as the truck.

He shuddered and turned away, imagining a logjam of Holsteins at the bottom of the hill, bobbing around in the shallow water at the lake's edge. There was going to be some handwork involved here, and he wasn't looking forward to it.

THREE AND A HALF hours into the trip to Green Bay, Grace heard a telltale click and glanced right, where Sharon was slouched in the passenger seat, her hands at war with her shoulder harness. This was the universal background music of women traveling by car, Grace mused-the click and rattle of seat belts being constantly adjusted to pass between the breasts instead of smashing one of them flat.

"Damn seat belts," Sharon muttered. "If one of these things ever dared press against a man's balls, you can bet your life the designer would end up hanging by his."

Annie chuckled from the backseat, unbuckling her own seat belt quietly-very quietly, so Grace wouldn't hear.

"Honey, you think you've got it bad? You should be toting my cargo. I swear I added a bra size at that diner, and I still haven't figured out what the hell I ate. Everything was white. Hey, Gracie, just how lost are we? I haven't seen a house or a car in about a million miles."

Grace had never understood the concept of being lost. It was one of those things you had to learn in childhood, a sense of time and place that only had meaning if you belonged somewhere, if you were expected. No one had ever expected Grace to be anywhere, and therefore she had never been late, never been missing, never been lost.

Once when she was very young, she'd ended up in a night-darkened alley in some city or other-cities were basically the same, and differentiating them by name was not a priority in her memory - and there she had watched with unabashed amazement as an ageless, ragged-looking creature poked a needle into her arm. Oblivious to her audience of one, the woman performed her self-destructive magic act on the stage of Grace's curious child-stare, eventually raising foggy eyes and saying, "Hey, kid. What the fuck are you doing here? You lost, or what?"

At the time, she'd thought it was an odd question. How could she have been lost? She was standing right there. Even then, in a city with no name and an alley with no hope, Grace hadn't felt an inkling of that impending panic others felt in unfamiliar surroundings, or when they didn't know precisely where they were. You were alwayssomewhere, right?

So she didn't understand the apprehension that had crept into Annie's voice as they drove deeper into a maze of twisting, empty country roads that coiled through the northern Wisconsin wilderness. "We're not lost, Annie, it's just a detour."

"So said Hansel to Gretel," Annie grumped. "And we turned off the detour an hour ago to go see that silly ol' barn, which, incidentally, was almost the very last sign of human habitation I've seen. Lord knows where we are now."

"My fault." Sharon gave her a sheepish shrug. "Mea culpa."

"Oh, honey, don't apologize. That barn was the most amazing thing I've seen since the day Roadrunner took his shirt off. I just didn't realize it was the gateway to hell."

Annie looked out at the tunnel of towering white pines that crowded the strip of tar like silent spectators at a parade. The thick trunks seemed to swallow the light, offering occasional strobe-light glimpses of what lay within. She had no idea what might be lurking out there in the shifting shadows, but she was quite certain it was unpleasant. "This is absolutely the spookiest place I have ever been in my life. I never heard of anyone famous from Wisconsin, and now I know why. Nobody lives here."

Sharon turned around in the front passenger seat and lowered her sunglasses so Annie didn't look orange. "Ed Gein was famous. He lived here."

"Never heard of him."

"He used to kill people, grind them up, and eat them."

"Hmph. Well, apparently he ate them all."

Sharon smiled at her, and the pull of muscles puckered the small, circular scar on her neck. Every time Annie noticed it, she remembered a pool of blood on the floor of the Monkeewrench warehouse, a smeared trail leading away where Sharon had crawled on her belly to get upstairs and save Grace.

"There aren't many people up here," Sharon said. "Mostly state forests. This far north, they just seem to go on forever."

"Speaking of which, I've been keeping an eye on that little ol' compass up there on the dashboard. It's been pointing north an awful long time, and I just don't think Wisconsin is all that tall. Maybe we should see if we can't find a right turn before we hit the North Pole."

"Looks like we're about to get a chance to do just that," Grace said, tipping her head toward a small sign coming up on the right that read, "Four Corners ->2 mi."

"Praise Jesus." Annie sighed. "Civilization." She patted the dark bob that had become her signature hairstyle over the past year, then fished a compact and a tube of lip gloss from her purse. From what she'd seen at the Holy Cow Diner, more than a few of the Wisconsin country women rivaled her in girth, but they didn't know beans about presentation. It was Annie's job as a fashion missionary to show them the way.

She had the lip gloss at a critical point in the application when the Range Rover suddenly backfired, then lurched, sending a streak of magenta across her upper lip. "Damnit, Grace. What'd you do? Run over a reindeer?"

But Grace didn't answer her. Sharon was looking curiously at the gauges on the dash, and Annie suddenly noticed the kind of silence that didn't belong in a moving car. She looked out at the trees passing ever more slowly. "Oh, for God's sake. Did this thing just up and quit?" This was flabbergasting. Grace's car would never break down. It wouldn't dare.

"Looks that way," Grace said calmly, adjusting her left hand on the wheel to compensate for the sudden loss of power steering, trying to restart the car with her right. There was no response when she turned the key, and the only sound in the car was the muted hiss of the tires on the road.

Grace never actually frowned, at least not like other people. But something showed in her eyes, even as her face remained expressionless, almost as if they were turning inward to examine the emotions that others rarely saw. It wasn't a conscious thing-just a lesson learned long, long ago, that if you kept your feelings to yourself, people couldn't use them against you. At the moment, her dominant feeling was rage, directed toward her mechanic in particular and internal combustion engines in general.

You can't control everything.A smug, condescending psychiatrist had said that to her ten years ago, demonstrating his mastery of stating the obvious. Of course you couldn't control everything. Grace had learned that when she was five. But you could anticipate and prepare for any eventuality your imagination could come up with, and she was very good at that. The worst-case scenario was her specialty.

Not once did she consider that the Range Rover would start again, or that some Good Samaritan would come along to lend a hand and give them a ride. These were things that happened in some perfect, predictable world, but Grace had never been there. In her world, they were going to end up walking, and that's what she prepared for.

Her eyes scanned the side of the road for anything resembling a turnoff as the Range Rover slowed. They'd almost exhausted the last of their momentum when she spotted a dirt track making a doorway into the woods on the right. "Is that a driveway?"

"Maybe . . ." was all Sharon had time to say before Grace turned the wheel and the Range Rover shot forward on the track's initial downward slope. Pine boughs slapped against the windows as the car lumbered around one sharp turn, then another. They were well into the woods by the time the car coasted to a stop. The shiny Range Rover sat in the middle of the shaded greenery like a black mistake, and for a moment, the only sound was the engine ticking as it cooled.

"That was exciting," Sharon finally said. "I liked the part where we zoomed down that little hill and almost ran into that tree. You know, I'm not sure how it works in the city, but over here if you're having car trouble, you just pull onto the shoulder."

Grace unbuckled her seat belt and popped the hood. "If we have to leave the car, I want it out of sight. We've got a fortune in hardware back there, most of it one of a kind."

Annie was peering out her window, her breath fogging the glass. "This is not a driveway."

"It could be an old logging road," Sharon suggested. "And it looks like it might cut through the woods over to Four Corners. I bet we could walk it easy."

Annie was horrified. "You meanoutside? It's a million degrees out there, and you want me to go hiking through the woods? Have you seen my shoes?"

But by then Grace and Sharon had both opened their doors, and a wave of heat had rolled into the car, obliterating what was left of the air-conditioning. "Oh, for God's sake," Annie grumbled, following them out, catching her breath when the full force of the afternoon heat hit her. She fluffed out her dress and minced her way to the front of the Rover, careful not to let the spiky heels of her pumps touch the forest floor. "Well, open this thing's mouth so we can fix it and get out of here."

"Annie, you don't know a thing about cars," Grace reminded her. "I know you look under the hood when they break. Besides, I'm an intelligent woman, and it's just an engine-how hard could it be to figure out? Maybe one of the gerbils died."

Grace raised the hood and stood back a little, amused by Annie's look of concentration as she peered inside.

"This is so disorganized. Is it supposed to look like this?" "Sort of." Sharon leaned forward, then tipped her head to look at Grace. "What are you thinking?" "That we need a tow truck."

Annie looked at the obviously useless engine as if it were a puppy that had just wet on the rug, then flounced back to the car and snatched her cell phone from the backseat.

"Not a lot of towers around here," Sharon said, but that didn't stop Annie from waving the phone around like a magic wand as she spun in a slow circle, trying to snatch a signal out of the hot, heavy air. She tried Grace's phone, too, just in case hers was in some way inferior, then let her hands drop to her sides, thoroughly indignant. "This is outrageous. It's the twenty-first century, we're in the most technologically advanced country in the world, and I cannot make a phone call. How do people live like this?"

For a moment, the three of them stood quietly, looking around. There was a deep, unnatural silence to the shadowy forest, as if it weren't a real forest at all, just a movie set. It was Grace who finally uttered the words Annie dreaded most.

"I guess we walk."

Annie looked down helplessly at her beautiful, fluttery silk dress and her beautiful four-inch heels.

"I've got some extra tennies in my bag," Sharon offered.

"Thank you," Annie said, then thought about it for a minute, considering what was really important. "What color are they?"

As it turned out, they were lavender high-tops, and as Annie looked down at the rounded toes, damned if she didn't like what she saw.

"You look ridiculous," Grace said.

"I refuse to entertain fashion criticism from a woman with a hundred black T-shirts. Besides, you put some heels on these things and they just might work."

The logging road, if that's what it was, quickly deteriorated to a narrow dirt path pocked with the sliced prints of deer. Eventually, even the tracks of animals disappeared under a thick carpet of crackling, rust-colored needles. On either side, the forest thickened and darkened, with the lacy fronds of giant ferns quivering at their passage.

Annie eyed the foliage suspiciously, thinking it looked entirely too prehistoric for her taste. And it wasn't just the tropical heat or the mutant ferns that reminded her ofLand of the host-everything about this little excursion had set them back ten thousand years. "This is absurd," she mumbled, shifting the strap of her voluminous shoulder bag. Grace had tried to talk her out of taking it, but the day Annie went anywhere without her makeup would be the day they put her in the ground. "An hour ago, we were three intelligent, successful women in a seventy-thousand-dollar car with cell phones and some of the most advanced computer equipment on the face of the earth, and now we're slogging through a primordial forest like the Barbarella triplets."

Sharon laughed. "Nature's the great equalizer."

"Nature sucks. It's hot and sticky, and it smells like dirt out here. And by the way, would you two waifs slow down? You're with a size-large woman who's wearing flat shoes for the first time in her life, and this path is a death trap. There are tree roots poking out everywhere. Somebody should pave this thing."

The ninety-degree heat made short work of Annie's laundry list of grievances about the great outdoors, and silence closed around their little parade. The farther into the woods they went, the more the forest seemed to press down on them as giant pines linked boughs overhead, creating a dark, aromatic canopy. The silence was as dense as the tightly packed carpet of dried needles underfoot, and as oppressive as the weight of air so still it almost seemed to have substance.

Eventually, the trees seemed to thin a bit, and then abruptly, the woods opened before them, like a door onto a lighted room. They took a step out of the trees onto a circle of old, broken asphalt that formed a crude cul-de-sac. It narrowed into a strip of potholcd tar that intersected a road a hundred feet ahead.

"Thank God," Annie muttered, fanning her perspiring face with a plump hand. "Damn woods is like a sauna." Then she raised her hand to shield her eyes from the bright afternoon sun and looked around. "Good heavens. Is this supposed to be a town?"

There was an old frame house nearly backed into the woods on their right, a pair of concrete-block buildings up on each corner, and not much else.

"At least there's a gas station," Sharon said, nodding at the rusting hulks of old cars jammed together behind the building on the left.

"Well," Annie said, plucking at her bodice. "Good luck to us all if that's the Range Rover service center."

Sharon smiled. "You might be surprised. Some of these smalltown mechanics can fix just about anything."

Grace stood very still for a moment, watching, listening, trying to shake the feeling that she'd just crept uninvited through someone's back door. "All we need is a phone," she finally said, and started toward the gas station.

Up at the intersection, they all hesitated and squinted up and down the empty two-lane road. The woods on the other side looked almost solid, like a living green glacier moving inexorably to swallow whatever puny structures man had erected here. To the left, just past the gas station, the road curved quickly out of sight into the thick woods. It disappeared just as quickly to the right over the crest of a small hill. There was no movement and no sound. Grace could almost hear herself breathe.

Annie looked around, irritated. "Four Corners my foot. There are only two corners in this town. Talk about delusions of grandeur." The silence seemed to swallow the echo of her voice, and she frowned abruptly. "Damn, it's quiet here."

Sharon chuckled. "You've never spent much time in the country, have you?"

Annie snorted. "Of course I have. The country's what you drive through on the way from city to city."

"Well, this is what it's like when you get out of the car. It's a hot, lazy, summer Saturday in a little nowhere burg, and quiet is one thing you get in abundance in a place like this."

Grace thought about that. Sharon was the native, the country deputy from Wisconsin, and as alien as this kind of quiet was to Annie and Grace, Sharon accepted it as perfectly normal, and Sharon would know. Still, she felt uneasy.

It wasn't just that there were no people in sight-that wouldn't have been so odd in a little town where the census takers probably counted on their fingers-but there was no evidence that there were people anywhere. No radios, no dogs barking, no muted laughter of children in the distance-no sound at all.

She looked at the building to their right, at the sign hanging from a wrought-iron bracket with letters spelling out "Hazel's Cafe." To the left was the gas station, obviously showing its best side to the highway. The two old-fashioned pumps squatted on a concrete island between the building and the road, their metal cases polished and oddly clean. A faded blue sign hung on a tall metal post, advertising "Dale's Gas" in white block letters. At least the door was wide open, suggesting that someone might be inside, out of the heat.

Her boots clicked on the concrete as she crossed the apron toward the door. It seemed strange not to hear the syncopated accompaniment of Annie's omnipresent high heels next to her, just the soft slap of the borrowed high-tops and the leather squeak of Sharon's laceups. It bothered her that she could hear these sounds so clearly.

The gas station was as empty and still as the town itself. Grace stepped inside, listened for a moment, then moved toward an interior doorway that opened onto a darkened, deserted garage. Her nose wrinkled at the ripe smells of old oil, gasoline, and solvents, advertising that this was a working garage, even though the picture didn't match the smells. From what she could see in the shadowy garage, the entire place was coated with layers of grime that could probably count the years like rings on a tree. But the inside of the station proper seemed almost spit-shined. Hands that touched an oil can apparently never made it to the register. There wasn't a single greasy fingerprint smeared across its keys or the white Formica countertop it sat on. Even the inside of the window bore the streaked circles of a recent washing, which seemed strange since the outside of the glass was still spotted from the last rain.

Sharon was preoccupied with a map of Wisconsin tacked to one wall, but Annie was looking around the station, hands on her hips. "Good Lord, who owns this place? The Amish?" She ran a fingernail over the top of the counter, then inspected it. "Harley's kitchen should be so clean."

"Oh, boy." Sharon was tapping a point in the map. "You are here," she pronounced. "We're a little more off the track than I thought."

Grace looked over her shoulder and winced. "Looks like we're still about a hundred miles from Green Bay."

"I'd better call them, give them a heads-up on the delay. I told the detectives we'd be there by four, and there's no way we're going to make that." Sharon went to the phone on the counter, picked up the receiver and put it to her ear, then frowned and pushed the disconnect button a few times before she hung up. "Damn thing's broken."

Annie rolled her eyes and turned in a flutter of limp silk, grumbling about small towns stuck in the dark ages, cars, heat, humidity, and the telecommunicating world in general. She kept up her monologue as Grace and Sharon followed her all the way across the crumbling side street and up the three concrete steps that led to the cafe's screen door. "I'm going to order myself a quart of iced tea and then-" She stopped in mid-sentence as she opened the door, then released a great breath. "All right, ladies. This is starting to get a little weird."

Grace eased the screen door closed behind them, and the three women stood there for a moment in the silence, staring at the empty booths, the empty stools by the counter, the empty galley cooking area behind it. Everything was spotless. If it hadn't been for the odors of fried food and baked goods still lingering under an acrid, antiseptic smell, Grace would have thought the place hadn't been a working cafe for years.

Sharon went to the counter and picked up the phone that sat by the register. She looked sheepishly at the other two when she put it down again. "So the phones are out all over town." She shrugged. "Probably takes the phone company days to get out to a little spot like this and make repairs."

Annie raised one perfectly arched brow. "And the people?"

"Who knows? Fishing, town picnic, siesta..." Sharon looked from Annie to Grace, saw the uncertainty in one face and the hard tension in the other, and realized for the first time how very different they all were. She knew the origins of Grace's paranoia-hell, if she had lived with a serial killer's bull's-eye on her for ten years, she'd be paranoid, too. And from the first time she'd met her in the hospital, she'd pegged Annie as a woman who'd learned the hard way not to trust in much. But Sharon had her own history now-had been living on the edge of panic for months, ever since she'd taken a bullet in the Monkeewrench warehouse. But for the first time since she'd feltthat slug plow into her neck, she felt oddly comfortable and safe in this place where the emptiness and quiet were so disturbing to the other two.

She laid her shoulder bag on the counter and sank onto a stool. "Okay. I get that you're weirded out by this place, but what you have to understand is that this is normal. I spent most of my life in a little town not much bigger than this, and you know the first time I locked a door? When the FBI put me in that Minneapolis apartment nine months ago, right after I got out of the hospital."

Annie scowled at her. "These are businesses. You don't walk away from a business on a Saturday afternoon and leave the door unlocked, no matter where you live. That's just plain crazy."

Sharon sighed. "I'm telling you, that's the way it is in a place like this. What customers are they going to miss? Their neighbors? They'd probably help themselves and leave the money on the counter. And neighbors don't steal from neighbors out here. Grace, what are you looking for?"

She'd been wandering around the cafe, eyes sweeping the floor, the empty booths, and finally the front window. "Hmm?"

"You see something out there?"

"Outside? No. But I'm going to take a walk, check out the house we passed on the way in. Be right back."

Grace started to walk around the side of the cafe toward the frame house behind it, then stopped, blue eyes riveted to the small metal box bolted into the concrete block. A fat sheath of PVC snaked down from the bottom into the ground. She walked a little closer to read the name of the local telephone company imprinted on the box, just to make sure, then felt a shot of adrenaline fire at her heart. The PVC sheath, and the cluster of wires within, had been sliced through.

Grace froze in position, moving only her eyes, and felt her hearing sharpen, trying to pull sounds out of this eerily silent place.

Kids,she told herself.Kids with a pocketknife and a serious streaky of ill-guided mischief.

After a few moments she moved slowly, cautiously, circling the gas station until she found its phone box and severed cord sprouting ragged wire ends. Her mind was moving at light speed, compensating for the restraint she forced on her body.

She found the outside phone box on the house, another clean cut, and then moved warily to the front door, opened it, looked into the shadows, and listened. It wasn't necessary to search the place. She knew instantly that there was no one inside.

She closed the door to the house quietly, then stood there on the stoop for a moment, looking, listening, longing for a breeze to ruffle the silence that threatened to smother her.

She didn't care what Sharon said about normalcy and small towns and unlocked doors on a Saturday afternoon. She couldn't think of any of that now. She was too busy listening to the voice in her head that said they weren't supposed to be there.

SHERIFF MICHAEL HALLORAN was sitting in his office on the second floor of the Kingsford County Government Center, his chair turned toward the big window that looked out over Helmut Krueger's dairy farm.

He'd never heard anyone describe Bonar Carlson as brilliant, but the man saw more than most and paid attention to details that the rest of the world glossed over. That was part of what made him such a good cop. Halloran was now seeing what Bonar had noticed a long time ago, and it made him feel a little inferior, like he'd been walking around with his eyes shut for most of the summer.

Helmut Krueger's pasture wasn't nearly as lush and green as it should have been; it had that autumn cast that happens when grass starts to dry from the roots up and the yellow shows through. And if that wasn't enough to confirm Bonar's predictions of drought, all you had to do was look at the herd of Holsteins. They were crowded into a black-and-white jumble today, butts out like football players in a huddle, tails beating ineffectually at the plague of biting flies that could take a hundred pounds off a heifer in a matter of days.

Bugs of one sort or another were a constant bother during any Wisconsin summer, but when drought threatened, the mosquito population went way down while the deerflies, horseflies, and stable flies reproduced in epidemic numbers to torment the daylights out of farm animals.

The signs had all been there in front of him, and Halloran hadn't seen them. It made him question his own powers of observation, made him wonder what he was doing in a job where success often rested on seeing what other people didn't.

Like this case. This was his second homicide case in as many years, after a decade of thinking that breaking up a bar fight was going to be the pinnacle of his law enforcement career. No way did that kind of background prepare you for making sense of three bodies that looked like war casualties dumped in a rural swimming hole.

He looked down at the case file cover sheet on his desk, the blank lines taunting him with all he didn't know.

Bonar gave the doorjamb a cursory rap on his way in, heading straight for the chair opposite Halloran's desk. When he sat down, the cheap vinyl wheezed like a defective whoopee cushion. "I've got a thumbprint on my birth certificate," he said without preamble. "You do, too."

"I do?"

"You were born at Kingsford General, right?"

"Right."

"Then you were printed."

Halloran lifted a pen. "Should I be taking notes?"

"Most hospitals print newborns right in the delivery room. Feet, hands, thumb, something, so they don't send the wrong baby home

with the mother. So what I want to know is, how hard would it be to print a full set off every kid when they were born and put them in some kind of a database?"

"Gee, Bonar, you've got the makings of a despot."

"Do you know how many bodies go unidentified every year? How many families sit around waiting for someone to come home, and all the time they're in the ground somewhere under a John Doe marker?"

Halloran sighed. "I'll take a wild guess here. Nothing came up on the prints, right?"

"Not in AFIS, or anywhere else they let us look. And I don't mind telling you I was pretty surprised that not one of the three had an arrest record. It seems obvious that they were running in a pretty rough crowd, and not one of them did time? That almost defies logic."

Halloran started making folds in the case cover sheet. "Maybe they were just nice young men who got caught in the wrong place at the wrong time."

"You're going to have to do some fast talking to convince me that an execution with an automatic rifle was just some kind of unfortunate turn of events." Bonar pulled a flattened Snickers bar out of his pants pocket, ripped it open, and took a huge bite. "Any luck with Missing Persons?"

"Nothing on our sheets. I've got Haggerty posting the photos on the nationwides, for all the good it will do."

Bonar dabbed a fleck of chocolate from his lip with his little finger. "These boys are pretty fresh. Maybe no one's missing them yet."

"Could be. The autopsies might give us a place to start, but that's going to take a while. Doc says the state boys at Wausau are backed up with that multiple on Highway 29."

Bonar sighed and got up to throw his Snickers wrapper in the garbage can. "You want to tell me how we're supposed to solve a triple homicide without knowing who the victims are?"

Halloran went back to folding the paper on his desk. "How many automatic rifles you figure we've got in this neck of the woods, Bonar?"

"Probably one or two more than Fort Bragg."

"And who uses them?"

Bonar thought about that for a minute. "Well, we busted Karl Wildenauer for blasting ducks with one last November."

"Besides Karl."

"Green Bay took a couple of AK-47s in that cocaine bust last week."

Halloran scribbled on a notepad. "Okay. Drug dealers."

Bonar made a face. "Kingsford County may have a few teenagers trying to grow pot in their folks' corn patch every now and again, but I doubt they've got firing squads on retainer. The real serious bad boys usually do their dealing in the cities."

"So maybe it's city business. Maybe this was a body dump, pure and simple. Wouldn't be the first time. How about if we send the morgue shots to some of the narc divisions around the state, maybe even Chicago, see if anybody recognizes them."

"That's an excellent thought."

"Thank you. Now tell me who else uses automatic rifles, just in general."

Bonar rolled his eyes to the ceiling and started rattling them off: "Military, organized crime, militia crackpots, collectors-and we have a fair number of all of those in the Dairy State."

"That's about the same list I came up with, and I'm thinking that if our three victims were involved in any one of those, Milwaukee might be able to help us out with an ID."

"The FBI?"

"And maybe the ATF-I'd be willing to bet they both have lists nobody else gets to see."

"I take it you feel like spending the rest of the weekend jumping through flaming hoops."

"Not particularly. I was hoping we could grease the wheel a little. What about that buddy of yours you used to play poker with? Doesn't his son work for the Feds?"

Bonar clucked his tongue. "Not anymore. Poor kid had some nervous troubles a while back and had to resign. I think he's managing a Dairy Queen in Fond du Lac now."

"Sorry to hear that."

"It's not all bad. We can probably get free ice cream whenever we're in the neighborhood."

"Terrific. In the meantime, let's fax off the morgue shots and prints to the Milwaukee SAC anyhow, cover all our bases."

"Sure, we can go the horse-and-buggy route if you want. Or you could just call Sharon in Minneapolis and tell her to run it through."

Halloran pretended he hadn't heard that and started shuffling through papers on his desk. "What's the SAC's name again? Burt somebody?"

"Eckman."

"That's right. You want to put together a package while I jot him a note?"

Bonar cocked his head curiously. "You've got a direct line to the FBI, and you're not going to use it because ... ?"

Halloran continued sifting through papers urgently until he found a blank fax cover, then began filling it in with a surgeon's concentration. He ignored Bonar for as long as he could, until he was hovering over Halloran's desk like a sadistic Goodyear Blimp.

"Call her, Mike. Purely business."

Halloran laid down his pen very carefully. "Do not try to come up on that kind of crap sideways, Bonar. Sharon and I don't talk anymore, and you know it."

"Yeah, I know it, and it's a damn shame, if you ask me."

"I didn't."

"You're going to have to talk to her sometime. Technically, she's still a Kingsford County Deputy."

"Only until Monday."

"Huh?"

"That's when her leave expires. If she's not at roll call Monday morning, she's out."

That put Bonar right back down in his chair, staring at his old friend across the desk. "Jesus, does she know that?"

Halloran nodded shortly. "Official notification went out a month ago. Certified. She got it."

"You sent her a letter telling her she was out?Aletter!"

"Thirty days' notice in writing. That's the law."

"A phone call might have been nice."

Halloran laid down his pen and looked Bonar in the eyes. "This is the way it is. I've got a department to run; I've got a hole in the roster I've been working around for months, ever since Sharon took her so-called 'temporary leave,' and I've got a phone that rings anytime a deputy of mine takes the trouble to dial the number. Sharon stopped returning my calls months ago, and I got tired of talking to her machine. Now. Do you want to keep riding me about Sharon, or do you want to hear my other idea on how to ID our three sinkers?"

Bonar leaned back and folded his arms across what he could still find of his chest. "I'd really like to keep riding you about Sharon, but if it'll make you happy, I'll listen to your idea first."

IT WAS THE THIRD YEAR the Minneapolis Police Department had sponsored a Fun Fair for the Youth in Crisis Program, and this one promised to be the most successful yet. It was nearly four o'clock already, but the park was still jammed with parents and kids, and most of the cops who weren't on duty were either volunteering at one of the booths or enjoying the festivities with their own children in tow.

Detective Leo Magozzi had just finished his volunteer stint selling hot dogs in the food tent, and now it was time for some real fun. He bought three tickets for the dunk tank from a new hire out of Fraud, politely laughed at his lame"drunk tank" crack, then got in line under the bright August sun with about twenty other people, including Chief Malcherson. Tall, light-haired, and icy-eyed, the man looked far too Nordic to carry off summer wear. It was the first time Magozzi had ever seen the painfully genteel man in anything other than a very expensive suit, and it was a little unsettling. Even the Chief himself seemed slightly at odds in his alien skin of lightweight shirt and slacks, his hand straying every now and then to his tieless collar, as if searching for a missing body part.

"Afternoon, sir. I'm glad you could make it today," Magozzi greeted him.

Malcherson gave him just a hint of a droll smile. "I'm happy to be here, Detective. Although I must admit I'm feeling slightly guilty about standing in this line, planning to willfully contribute to the discomfort of one of our own."

"You're in good company, sir."

"I see that. And itis for a good cause."

"That's exactly right, sir, and if it makes you feel any better, I know for a fact that Detective Rolseth is delighted for the opportunity to make such a substantial contribution."

That, of course, was bullshit, and everybody, including Chief Malcherson, knew it. Gino Rolseth, Magozzi's partner and best friend, was mad as hell to be the main attraction today, but he really hadn't had much say in the matter. Earlier in the week, an anonymous donor had offered to match this year's Fun Fair proceeds, but only under the condition that Gino take the perch above the dunk tank.

Gino had immediately thrown a world-class fit, refusing flat-out, but once word got out in Homicide, everybody was quick to remind him that his refusal would be tantamount to ripping food from the mouths of needy children in danger of turning to the streets, et cetera, et cetera.

Nobody knew who was behind it-they all had their theories- but one thing was certain: It would be the only case Gino would be working until he figured it out.

Magozzi and Malcherson both cringed a little when they heard a loud salvo of hoots and hollers coming from the front of the line. A few minutes later, skinny little carrot-haired Detective Johnny McLaren was practically jigging toward them, a bright blue snow-cone smile plastered on his sun-pinkened face.

"Man, was that great! You should have seen the expression on his face when the ball connected and he went down. Glad I'm on vacation next week, is all I have to say." He turned toward Malcherson. "Come on, Chief, you've gotta know who's behind this. You took the call, right?"

Chief Malcherson's expression was stone. "I truly have no idea, Detective. I was hardly in a position to press the matter of identity, given this very generous individual's adamant wish to remain unnamed."

McLaren smirked a little and rocked back and forth on his feet, trying to decide whether or not to believe him. "Okay, sure, Chief. The whole gift horse thing. Well, good luck, guys. I'm going to go buy myself another ticket."

"I CANNOT frigging believe that you, of all people, my own partner for Christ's sake, actually participated in this travesty." Gino was sitting morosely at a sunny picnic table with Magozzi, slurping the sticky remains of a snow cone out of its limp paper holder. He'd exchanged his soaked swimming trunks and T-shirt for jeans and a vintage bowling shirt that had seen better days, probably sometime during the Korean War.

Magozzi did his best to look contrite. "The Chief and I were actually having second thoughts there for a while, but when we saw your own daughter dunk you, that pretty much nailed it for us."

"Yeah, but I've got an avenue of remuneration for that little traitor-Helen's going to be fifty before I let her get her learner's permit. Damnit, I knew I should never have let her go out for Softball."

"Well, if it's any consolation, I'm feeling pretty bad about the whole thing. Hell, I had no idea I could still throw like that."

Gino glared at him. "Yeah, right, and neither did the Chief, who I just found out was an all-star frigging pitcher at the U of M. I'll tell you what-you find out who the comedian is who set me up and maybe I'll think about forgiving you."

"The Chief doesn't even know who it is."

Gino scowled and scrubbed at his blond brush of wet hair. "Yeah, right. You know what I think? I think this whole thing was a departmental conspiracy, and ten bucks says McLaren was the mastermind, the little Irish rat. I bet there isn't any anonymous donor, and you guys are all busting a gut right now."

"Nope. I saw the wire-transfer number on Malcherson's desk the other day. Looked legit to me."

"No kidding? Did you check it out?"

"Hey, I'd step in the line of fire any day for you, buddy, but I'm not willing to lose my job over this." Magozzi paused for a meaningful moment and then grinned. "I did give it to Grace, though."

Gino's scowl melted faster than his snow cone had. "You are officially off my shit list, buddy."

"Glad to hear it."

"Okay, so spill it-justice awaits."

"I don't know anything yet. Grace didn't have time to check it out before she left for Green Bay."

"Damn, I forgot about that. When's she coming back?"

"In a couple days."

"Oh, man, I can't wait that long." Gino brooded over his predicament for a few moments, then looked at Magozzi triumphantly. "Hey, what about Harley and Roadrunner? They can run the number just as easily as Grace can, and I bet they're bored out of their skulls without two high-maintenance women in their hair. We can take them out for beer and burgers later for their trouble."

"It's Saturday night. Don't you have a hot date with the wife and kids'"

"The wife and kids are deserting me for a pizza party for Helen's softball team."

"You're passing up pizza?"

"It's at one of those hideous theme restaurants where they let toddlers run amok and wallpaper with pepperoni. I have standards, you know. Besides, it's an all-girl thing."

"What about the Accident? Isn't his manhood going to be adversely affected by going to an all-girls thing?"

"Gender discrimination doesn't start until age five."

Magozzi shrugged. "I'll give Harley a call."

Gino beamed at him. "You're the man. Hey, buy me a hot dog, I'm starving."

As Magozzi reached for his wallet, his cell phone chirped. "Go on," he said, passing over a twenty. "Gotta get this." He was foolishly hoping that perhaps Grace MacBride had been overwhelmed with the sudden need to hear his voice. This had never happened before, but sometimes you just had to hold on to the dream.

He was hanging up as Gino wandered back to the picnic table, loaded with three footlongs, two bags of mini-donuts, and an unidentifiable deep-fried thing on a stick.

Gino handed over two dollars in change.

"That'sit?"

"Hey, it's for a good cause, that's what you kept telling me. Was that Grace?"

"Nope. Our old buddy Mike Halloran."

It took Gino a couple of seconds to place the name. "No kidding?Howthe hell's life in the Cheese Belt?"

"Pretty interesting, as of this morning."

"Yeah? What's up?"

"They pulled three bodies out of a swimming hole this morning, figured them for drownings. But when they laid them out, they saw a whole lot of holes that shouldn't have been there. Somebody took a swipe at them with an automatic, the coroner thought maybe anM16."

"Now that's something you don't see every day."

"Not outside a third-world country, anyhow. All the shots lined up, too, execution-style."

Gino took a monstrous bite out of a mustard-and-onion-slathered dog. "Jesus. What a way to spend a Saturday. But why did he call you? Does he think there's a Minneapolis connection or what?"

Magozzi shrugged. "They don't know where to start, because they can't ID the bodies-totally nude, no identifying marks, and no hits on the fingerprints. Halloran was hoping Grace would run the morgue shots through her facial-recognition software, see if anything popped that way."

"So why didn't he just call Sharon? They're practically driving past his front door." Gino polished off his first dog and started in on the second one.

"Because Halloran had no clue Sharon was on her way to Green Bay with Grace and Annie."

Gino's brows lifted. "I thought those two were a hot item."

"It's hard to date when you live two hundred miles apart."

"What's wrong with phone sex?"

"I didn't ask."

"Christ, I hope she didn't dump him for a suit."

"We didn't get into particulars."

"Did you call Grace?"

"No answer on her cell. I left a message." Magozzi eyed Gino's deep-fried-thing-on-a-stick. "What the hell is that?"

"Dill pickle."

"That's disgusting."

"Like you would know."

WHEN GRACE FINISHED checking all the phone lines, she walked back to the street in front of the cafe and stood there for a moment, listening. The only sounds she heard were Annie's and Sharon's muffled voices coming from inside, but when she turned to look, the glare of the sun bouncing off the big plate-glass windows nearly blinded her.

They looked up when Grace pushed open the screen door. Annie and Sharon were sitting at the counter, sipping from soda cans taken from the glass-fronted cooler, Annie waving her cell phone, trying to find a signal. "This piece of crap is hopeless. Doesn't work outside, doesn't work inside. . . . You find anybody, darlin'?" She handed Grace a bottled water and tucked the useless phone back in her purse.

Grace shook her head, opened the bottle, and took a quick drink before she spoke. "Someone cut all the phone lines."

"What?"

"Right below the feeder boxes. On the cafe, the gas station, and the house."

All three were silent for a moment.

Sharon finally said, "Kids, maybe."

"Maybe."

Annie was watching Grace's face. "What are you thinking, Grace?"

"That we should get out of here."

Annie sighed, took a last drink from her soda can, and pushed herself up off the stool. She went over to the cooler, grabbed three bottles of water, and set one on the counter in front of Sharon.

"What's this for?"

"Tuck it in your bag, darlin'. It's mighty hot out there, and it appears we're going to be doing a little more walking."

"You're kidding, right? According to the map in the gas station, it's at least another ten miles to the next town, and that's after we hoof it all the way back to the truck. Can't a couple of techno-whizzes like you fix the phone lines?"

"It's a twenty-five-pair cable," Grace replied. "That's a lot of splicing. It might take a couple hours."

"By which time the people who live here will probably be back from wherever they went and will be happy to give us a ride. In the meantime, we've got food and drink and a place to get out of the sun. . . ."

Annie looked at Sharon as if she'd lost her mind, forgetting for a moment that not everyone in the free world knew that when Grace said "we should get out of here," it was like a Seeing Eye dog jerking a blind person out of the way of a runaway bus. "We should leave now."

"Okay," Sharon continued, trying to be reasonable. "How about this. You and Grace stay here, start working on the phones, and in the meantime, just to cover all our bets, I'll start walking, maybe get lucky and catch a ride. No offense, Annie, but it's over ninety out there, and I'm guessing aerobics isn't your . . ."

"Quiet." Grace had moved quickly, almost soundlessly, over to the screen door, where she stood with her eyes closed and her concentration focused in a cone of awareness that headed left past the gas station, around the curve that disappeared into the woods. What she'd heard had been nothing specific, nothing immediately identifiable- just a faint, muted roaring sound that didn't belong.

"Something's coming" was all she had time to say.

HAROLD WITTIG slammed the gearshift into park and draped his wrists over the pickup's steering wheel, his lips tightened in annoyance. He lifted one arm and wiped his sweaty forehead on his sleeve, promising himself for the hundredth time that he was going to junk this damn truck and get one of the big new Fords with an air conditioner that would turn a two-dollar whore frigid. Damn, it was hot, and the day had been one disaster after another.

First a flat tire on the way into Rockville this morning, then Fleet Farm hadn't had Tommy's birthday bike assembled and they'd had to wait two hours while a couple doofuses fumbled around with Allen wrenches and a forty-page instruction manual, then Jean got her period and made him run into the store to buy a box of Tampax and he thought he'd die right there at the checkout when the pretty young cashier had smiled sweetly and said, "Just the Tampax? Is that it?" and now this. Christ, what a day.

He glared out the dusty windshield at the empty jeep on the side of the road and the two orange-and-white sawhorses topped with blinking yellow lights, blocking both lanes. Two men stood in front of the roadblock, wearing camouflage and combat boots and the earnest expressions of little boys playing soldier. M16s that Harold dearly hoped weren't loaded with live rounds were slung over their shoulders. The way his luck was running today, one of them would probably walk up to the truck and shoot him in the head.

Jean was leaning forward in her seat, as if another inch closer to the windshield would make the reason for the peculiar roadblock perfectly clear. Her face was dewy with the heat, and her lips were folded in on each other in that slightly alarmed expression she always wore when something didn't make sense. "What are they? Soldiers?"

"Looks like. Probably Guard."

"What are they doing? Why do they have the road blocked off?" Her voice was rising up the scale as a seed of panic germinated, and Harold knew her imagination was already running wild, manufacturing improbable scenarios of tornadoes, floods, riots, and any of the other disasters that brought the National Guard out into the civilian world.

"Relax, honey." He laid a comforting hand on her knee. "They're just weekend warriors, and they've got to practice somewhere." But the truth was that he felt a little tickle of unease on the back of his own neck as one of the young men headed toward the driver's side of the truck. This one was fair and freckled and sporting a brand-new sunburn, but he had the bearing down pat: straight back, clipped movements, and that tucked chin you see only in the posture of a military man at attention. "Afternoon. What's up, soldier?"

The soldier stepped right up to Harold's open window, his rifle now casually at his side, and gave them a friendly nod. "Afternoon, sir, ma'am. I'm afraid the road's closed temporarily. We're detouring traffic up to County S-"

"What do you mean, the road's closed? Why?"

"Military maneuvers, sir. Your tax dollars at work."

Jean breathed a sigh of relief, then felt irritation rise to fill the empty space where panic had lived just a moment before. She'd been prepared to deal with catastrophe, but not inconvenience. She brushed a clump of damp blond curls from her forehead and started fanning her face with the Fleet Farm sale flyer. "What do you mean, military maneuvers?" she snapped at the young soldier, and Harold had to smile as the man's brows shot up in surprise, almost pitying him for being stupid enough to put a roadblock between Jean and her shower on the first day of her period. "We live on this road and there were no military maneuvers going on here when we left this morning."

Harold started to give the soldier an apologetic grin, but something in the man's face made his smile falter. The stoic, soldierly countenance was suddenly gone, replaced by a ripple of confusion and maybe even a little fear, and that made him nervous. Men in uniform weren't supposed to be confused or fearful, and when they were, bad things happened. "Uh . . , you say you live on this road, ma'am?"

"That's right. About a half a mile the other side of Four Corners. The big farm on the left. And now we'll thank you to move that little barrier out of the way so we can get home to our son."

The soldier was very still for a moment, then he took a breath and put the tough face back on. "I'm very sorry, ma'am, but I can't do that. We have orders not to let anyone by."

"You haveorders to keep me from going home?" Jean asked incredulously, leaning forward in her seat so she could shoot a withering glance in the soldier's direction. "I don't think so. Now let us by or we'll drive right over you and your roadblock."

Oh, this was just terrific,Harold thought. He was planted smack-dab in the middle of a firing zone between a raging woman and a stressed-out kid with a firearm. He gave Jean a warning glance, then turned back to the soldier, forced a thin smile, and tried his best to sound reasonable, even though his patience was fraying. "Listen, soldier, we just want to get home to our boy. Surely you can understand that."

"I do, sir, but we have our orders," he repeated.

"And just what are we supposed to do? Drive around until you're finished playing your war games?"

"That's up to you, sir. I'm just doing my job."

"This is not your job. I want to speak to your commanding officer right now. And if you don't make that happen, I'm going to turn this truck around, find the closest phone, and you can make your explanations to the Missaqua County Sheriff's Department."

The soldier was clearly distressed now, his eyes darting back and forth between them, and Harold thought he saw a flicker of guilt and remorse in his eyes. "Would you wait just a moment, sir, ma'am?" I'm going to have to call this in." And with that, he spun smartly on his heel and double-timed it back to the sawhorses where the other soldier stood watching.

Startled by his sudden departure, Harold felt the little tickle on the back of his neck intensify, and he nearly jumped out of his skin when Jean touched his hand.

"Something's wrong," she whispered, and he heard the tremor in her voice and felt its echo deep in the pit of his stomach. "Something happened, something they won't tell us. ..."

"Honey, take it easy." Harold covered her hand with his and squeezed, trying to dredge up a reassuring smile. "These boys can only do what they're told. If he has orders to block the road, he'll keep his own mother out, but a higher-up will straighten him out."

He watched the two soldiers through the windshield. Freckle-face was over at the jeep, talking to somebody on the radio; the other one kept his eyes trained on the pickup.

Harold rubbed at the sweat trickling down his neck. Damn truck was a sweatbox when it wasn't moving, and this was taking too damn long. "Wait here. I'm going to see what the holdup is."

Freckle-face had just signed off the radio when he heard the long screech of the truck door opening on rusty hinges and saw Harold Wittig step down onto the road. His first thought was how much the man looked like a comic-book Superman, with a curl of black hair over his forehead and the arms and shoulders of a weight lifter. His second thought was barely a thought at all-just an animal's instinctive response to stimuli. He spun in place like a deadly ballerina, swinging his rifle around to point directly at Harold Wittig's mid-

section, and even before he had completed his turn, his partner was down in a crouch with his rifle aimed. "Hold it right there!"

Harold stopped dead and gaped at the rifles in utter disbelief. He finally remembered to blink when his eyes started to burn. He closed his mouth to swallow, then asked quietly, "Are you boys out of your minds? What the hell do you think you're doing?"

The soldier's voice was a little shaky, but the muzzle pointed at Harold never wavered. "We're just doing our job, sir."

Harold stared at him, incredulous. "Your job? It's your job to point a weapon at an unarmed civilian? It's your job to keep people from going home?" He started to take a step forward.

"Sir!"The soldier rattled the strap on the Ml6 as he jerked it to brace on his hip.

Harold froze.

"Please don't move, sir."

Goddamn weekend warriors, Harold thought, suddenly furious that a couple of toy soldiers who came out only once a month to play had the nerve to point guns, loaded or not, at one of the taxpayers who paid their salaries. He squared his shoulders and dropped his head and looked from one to the other. "You boys have just bought yourselves a world of hurt. . . ."

"Harold?"

Confused by the unexpected sound of his wife's voice, Harold swung his big head around to see Jean out of the truck, cowering by the right fender, terrified eyes jerking back and forth from her husband to the rifles. Jesus Christ, he would never understand women. She wouldn't eat eggs for fear of clogging an artery forty years down the line, but she'd walk out in front of two M16s as if she were made of Kevlar.

"Get back in the truck, Jean," he said calmly, because even though he was sure-absolutely sure-those guns weren't loaded, he didn't need her out here complicating matters.

She looked at him for a moment, then turned and got back into the truck.

"You too, sir," Freckle-face called out, gesturing with his rifle. "Back in the truck, please. Now. You're almost cleared for entry. I'm just waiting for a callback. It should only be another minute or so."

Harold glared at him for a second, then climbed up into the truck. He glanced at the tears coursing down his wife's face, saw the violent trembling of her hands, and for the first time in his life, wanted to harm another human being. Two of them, in fact. For right now, there wasn't a whole lot he could do with a couple of puffed-up hot-shots who might or might not be carrying live ammunition, but by God, the second he got near a phone he was going to burn up the wires all the way to Washington if he had to, and see these assholes up on ...

Wait a minute, Harold.

He'd been staring at the soldiers by the jeep, vision and mind clouded by the red blur of impotent fury, and goddamnit, he hadn't seen it, hadn't seen what any clear-eyed fool would have noticed right off, and now he felt a ball of fear that clenched at his stomach and almost stopped his heart.

"Jean," he whispered, eyes straight ahead now, lips barely moving, sweat rolling down from his forehead like someone had just turned on a faucet. "Get down on the seat and hang on."

The funny thing was that Jean, as strong-minded a woman as he'd ever known, did as she was told without a second's hesitation, probably because she had known long before he did how wrong things were here. "Are we going to find Tommy?" was the only thing she asked.

"That's where we're going."

Harold eased the gearshift out of park, slowly, carefully, sliding his butt forward on the seat until he could barely see over the wheel, and then his lug-soled lace-up punched the accelerator and the old Ford leaped forward and smashed through the sawhorses like a crazed bull going through a barn wall. Shards of wood were flying everywhere, and the engine was roaring so loud that they could hardly hear the gunfire that was shattering the windows around them.

ANNIE AND SHARON had moved up next to Grace at the cafe's screen door by the time the distant popping sound started to syncopate the roar of whatever was coming.

Annie was pretty excited. She'd already identified the roaring as the approach of a big pickup-she'd spent a fair amount of time in those during her Mississippi youth, both upright and reclined-and at this point she wasn't at all particular about the mode of transportation arriving. Just so she didn't have to walk ten miles in this heat or spend two hours trying to patch twenty-five telephone wires. The popping was troublesome, though. "What is that? Firecrackers?"

"Automatic rifles," Sharon replied without a trace of doubt, slipping her weapon from her leather shoulder bag, and Annie's vision of rescue by some husky country good ol' boys took a dark turn.

Grace already had her Sig in her hand. Over the years, her survival instinct had been honed down to the most primal level. She never stopped to analyze, to moralize, to ethically weigh the wisdom of pulling her gun. If she sensed danger, the weapon came out of the holster. It was that simple. And automatic rifle fire didn't belong in the Wisconsin countryside.

She was still looking through the screen door to the left where the road curved into the woods, and then they all heard it and saw it at the same time: a battered white pickup roaring around the curve and into the town, zigzagging crazily, steam pouring out of the grill, the shredded rubber of its tires slapping the tar while sparks flew from the undercarriage.

Grace flung out an arm, saying, "Back! Back!" and pushing Annie and Sharon away from the door and the big front windows, her first fear being that the truck would veer into the cafe, shattering the glass.

Instead, the roaring sound ended abruptly with the sudden death of its engine, and the truck came to a wheezing stop in the middle of the street directly in front of the cafe, its windows shattered, its side peppered with what had to be bullet holes.

In the next heartbeat, a jeep came careening around the curve and screeched to a halt inches behind the crippled truck, and Grace and Sharon both started to raise their guns. But then two soldiers jumped out, automatic rifles leveled at the truck, both of them red-faced and screaming, "Get out! Get out! Get out!" and for the very first time in more than a decade, Grace was holding a gun in her hand and wasn't certain what to do with it. Pulling her gun at the sound of automatic weapon fire had seemed perfectly sensible, but when the fire was coming from men in uniform, it changed everything. She caught a glimpse of Sharon's gun in her peripheral vision, frozen at half-mast as hers was.

The soldiers were yelling, the damaged passenger door screamed as it was flung open, and then there was silence so deep that Grace could hear the bright tinkling of shattered glass tumbling to the asphalt. A pretty blonde woman in a print dress stepped down from the truck and would have collapsed, had she not been supported by the strong hands of the man who climbed down behind her. Grace had a millisecond to see the flash of a gold wedding band on the man's left hand and a skim of white slip showing below the hem of the young woman's dress before the soldiers opened fire.

The man fell first, a red blossom erupting on the blue of his denim shirt. And then new red flowers bloomed all over the woman's dress and she began to sink to the ground.

For an instant, Grace, Sharon, and Annie were frozen in place like mannequins on display-three women with their breath caught in their throats, standing ten feet behind a plate-glass window in plain view of anyone who happened to look.

But the guns kept firing, and when the man and the woman fell, that single heartbeat of immobility was over. The three women dove to the floor as one, below the sight line of the windows, and started scrambling on hands and knees toward the cafe's back door. They slipped outside with the guns still firing behind them, bolted across the narrow strip of grass between the cafe and the frame house, then into the woods.

That was the great thing about women, Grace thought. Forget the female reputation for endless speculation and discussion-when things went south, women didn't stop to analyze. Even women with guns in their hands deferred to instincts honed by centuries. Warning. Danger. Run. Hide.

A FEW YARDS into the trees, the relative darkness of the forest closed around the three women, giving the illusion, if not the reality, of safety.

And then the shooting stopped.

It was deathly still again-quiet enough to hear the muffled voices of the soldiers in the street in front of the cafe, even with the buildings and trees between them-quiet enough for the soldiers to hear them if they made too much noise.

The three women froze, moving again only when new noises broke the silence-another vehicle arriving in front of the cafe, then more voices that sounded like mad dogs barking.

More soldiers,Grace thought.But how many more, where are they coming from, and why the hell did they shoot those people down?

She remembered last October, when the entire city of Minneapolis knew that a killer would be at the Mall of America looking for the next anonymous victim; and she remembered how many people went to the mall anyway, blinded by that ingrained belief that bail things happened to other people, not to them. Grace had never thought that way- If there was a bad thing in the neighborhood, it was surely coming for her next, and the very first thing you did was try to get the hell out of there.

Her eyes searched the trees until she caught a glimpse of the old logging road, and when she started to move toward it, Annie and Sharon followed. Apparently all of them had the same thought in mind: getting back to the Range Rover, to the highway they'd come in on, away from whatever nightmare was happening in this town.

The going was easier on the old overgrown logging road. They moved quickly and silently past lacy banks of ferns so tall and thick that they brushed against their hands as they passed. Grace stayed in the lead, stopping every few yards to listen, long after the sounds from the street in front of the cafe had faded into the distance.

When they came to the place where the path angled left, Grace stopped again, but this time she went so still and rigid that Annie and Sharon both stopped in mid-step behind her, eyes wide to pierce the gloom, finally focusing on what Grace had seen before them. None of them breathed.

Several yards ahead, nearly obscured by the drooping arms of a big white pine, a soldier leaned casually against the tree, looking directly at them.

Sharon's fingers twitched ever so slightly.

Don't do that. Don't reach for the gun. You should have had it in hand anyway, you idiot, because now you don't dare move a muscle, you don't dare unsnap the holster because a tiny noise like that could get us all filled. And what the hell do you think, you're going to do with it anyway? You've never shot anyone in your life, even that one time you should have, and now you're planning to start with a man in uniform? Jesus God, you don't even know what's going on here, you don't know who the bad guys are,

and what if those people in the truck were terrorists planning to blow up the country and you shoot the brave soldier risking his life to defend his country just because he has a gun bigger than yours and you're scared? Think, goddamnit. Think like a cop, not like a woman.

She eased a quiet breath into her lungs and expelled it slowly, silently, her eyes on the soldier, trying to figure out if he was really looking right at them or if it only appeared that way.

After an endless, heart-stopping moment, he turned his head to the side and said, "Pearson, you got a cigarette?" and then all three women looked in the direction he had turned and saw things that hadn't been readily visible before: another soldier standing a few yards to the right of the first, filtered sunlight glancing off the metal barrel of a gun, and farther away still, the distinctive shapes of other heads and shoulders, shifting slightly to relieve stiff muscles.

"They didn't say we could smoke out here."

"Yeah, well, they didn't say we could take a piss, either, and you didn't let that stop you."

"All right, all right, just a sec."

As the two men moved together and dipped their heads to share a light, Grace sidestepped ever so slowly off the path, into the trees, and ducked into the lush cover of a thick stand of the giant ferns. She kept her head above the level of the greenery until Annie and Sharon were settled on their bellies beside her. When she was sure she couldn't see either one of them, even this close, she eased all the way down, closed her eyes, and listened to the pounding of her heart. It seemed terribly loud, and yet the rest of the woods was so quiet that she could hear the soldiers' conversation over it quite clearly.

"We're too tight here, Durham. We should spread out more."

"Tight on the funnel points, Pearson. Perimeter 101."

"You ask me, it's a waste of time. If we pulled everyone in off the perimeter, we could be out of here a hell of a lot sooner."

"If somebody else gets through, it wouldn't matter how fast we pulled out. Containment. That's what it's all about now."

Silence for a long moment, then the sound of a throat clearing. "It wasn't supposed to go down like this."

"It never is. And then the wild card shows up. Anybody with half a brain would have turned around at that roadblock instead of crashing through it."

"I heard their kid was in here, Durham. What if there are other people out there like that? People who weren't here when everything went to hell, on their way back home right now? Then what?"

"You know damn well what. We follow orders, just like Zacher and Harris did. Look at it this way, Pearson. Everyone they knew is dead anyway. Not a lot to come home to. Bottom line, anybody gets into this town, they don't get out, fucking period, end of story."

And there it was, Sharon thought, as clear as new glass. The man and woman in the pickup had not been terrorists, drug runners, foreign agents, or any of the other things her mind had been buzzing through, searching for something that might explain, if not justify, being gunned down by American soldiers. They'd simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Just like we are.

"Goddamnit, Durham, this is a fucking nightmare. Somebody's going to find out."

"Not if we do our job."

Right next to her, Sharon heard Annie take a soft breath. And then a plump hand moved a fraction of an inch in the darkness beneath the greenery, and a rainbow fingernail touched her hand. It startled her at first. She'd never seen Annie touch anyone. For the first time in nearly twenty years, she felt a sharp sting behind her eyes. She'd been alone for a very long time.

On Sharon's other side, Grace had rested her forehead on the tops of her hands, eyes closed.Too close, she was thinking.Too damn close. They'd almost walked into those soldiers, and it was her fault. She had been in the lead and she'd almost gotten them all killed. She put the guilt away, back in the place where she carried all the guilt for so many other things, and began to inch backward on her belly, deeper into the woods, farther away from the path. She moved very slowly, careful not to disturb the fronds overhead, because there could be no more mistakes. After several minutes of this painstaking, backward belly crawl, they were deep enough into the cover of the trees to rise to their hands and knees and begin the agonizingly slow, silent crawl away from the soldiers, away from freedom, back toward the town.

After what seemed like a very long time, they reached the edge of the woods behind Four Corners and lay abreast in the cover of a thicket of young locust trees.

Grace examined the strip of lawn that lay between them and the frame house behind Hazel's Cafe, then looked carefully in every direction, focusing longer on the shadows behind them. Those men in the woods had been so hard to see until they were almost on top of them. There could be a dozen of them within spitting distance and she wouldn't know it.

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, forcing herself to clear her mind and concentrate only on the needs of the moment, and what they needed at the moment was a place to hide, a relatively safe place where they could consider all they'd seen and heard and decide what to do next.

Her gaze fixed on the storm-cellar door that slanted up to the foundation of the frame house. In front of the door was a bare patch of grass, indicating frequent use-maybe it was unlocked, too, like everything else in this town.

Grace looked over at Sharon and Annie, held up one finger that told them to stay put, then sprang away, darting across the grass, grasping the handle of the heavy wooden door and heaving it upward. The hinges moved easily in their oiled casings. She laid the door to rest on a concrete block obviously placed for that purpose, then looked down a short, steep flight of concrete steps. There was another wooden door at the bottom. Without a moment's thought to what she would do if there was someone behind that door, she scrambled down the steps, turned the old metal knob, and pushed inward.

A wall of cool, dank air rushed past her like a chilly ghost anxious to warm up. Goose bumps rose on her arms, as much from the temperature change as from anything lurking within. Her hand closed tighter on the sweat-slicked grip of her Sig as she let her eyes adjust to the gloomy space, barely illuminated by the thin, brownish light that filtered in through window wells near the ceiling. Sweating rock walls shored up the foundation, and rough-hewn uprights marched across a packed earth floor. Stacks of cardboard boxes with sides bowed and sagging from the damp climbed around some of the posts like moldy pyramids.

Grace moved silently through the clutter, zeroing in on every shadow that had the potential to conceal, then hurried back up the concrete steps to wave Sharon and Annie in. She watched as the two women crossed the lawn in the kind of fearful, crouching run you saw in war movies, not in real life.

Once they all were safely inside and the doors were closed behind them, Annie made a beeline for an old, four-legged concrete sink-to get a drink, wash her hands, rinse out her dress, who knew with Annie-but Grace grabbed her arm and pointed silently toward the ceiling. Even turning on a faucet wouldn't be safe if there was someone upstairs.

She moved to the flight of open wooden steps leading up a dark passage to the first floor, Sharon and Annie right behind her. At the top, she stopped and pressed her ear to the door, holding her breath, listening for a long time before turning the knob.

The door opened onto a central hallway that bisected the house from front to back. To their right was the front door that Grace had peered through earlier from the other side, when she'd been standing on the stoop, wondering who on earth would cut all the phone lines in this little nowhere town.

They moved soundlessly through the house in a stealthy, tiptoe exploration, stopping briefly at the open, double-hung windows in the living room to look and listen. There were no sounds coming from the street anymore, and that in itself was chilling. There should be noise after a slaughter, Grace thought-the wail of sirens and people to mark the terrible occasion. And yet there was nothing.

In the kitchen, at least, they found evidence that someone actually lived in this town-there was an unopened package of four pork chops floating in a bowl in the sink. The three women raised their heads from the sink and looked around, more wary than ever that this abnormally deserted town had been normal not so long ago, populated by normal people who took pork chops out to thaw for supper.

The bedroom and bath belonged to an older woman, filled with a lifetime of knickknacks, crocheted doilies, and bizarrely, an old stuffed animal propped carefully against the pillows on the bed. Grace imagined a carnival game fifty years past and an aging woman's memories of a lanky boy and better times. The pervasive, sickly-sweet smell of cheap perfume that's been in the bottle too long lingered in the stifling air.

Sharon sat on the bed and reached halfheartedly for the phone on the nightstand. She knew it wouldn't work. It was just something you did. "You heard them," she said, putting down the useless phone. "They're all dead. Everybody who lived in this town. The woman who lived in this house."

Grace and Annie just looked at her. Well, yes, that was probably true, but that didn't mean there was any reason to just blurt it out like that.

"And they're not soldiers. Our soldiers do not kill civilians. They do not shoot down people in the street."

Grace didn't think it was necessary to remind her that such unthinkable things had indeed happened, in this country and others. Sharon knew that as well as any American. But good soldiers and good cops had a bond and common purpose that Grace had never experienced. She'd been on the other side too long, glimpsing it only through Magozzi's eyes. And Annie didn't bother herself with such trifles, never trusted a man inside or outside of a uniform, as far as Grace knew.

"It wouldn't be the first time the military tried to bury a screwup," Annie said tactlessly. "Maybe it's not soldiers-maybe it's some fringe group of whackos with a charge card at the local surplus store, but it could be either. And in the long run, what does it matter? These are not nice people."

Sharon narrowed her eyes. "You sound like every conspiracy theorist I ever met. Do you really think soldiers just walked into this place and started shooting everybody?"

Annie found a little boudoir chair at a makeup table that interested her. It held a jumble of cosmetics tubes and jars and a surprisingly neat row of nail enamel in every color of the rainbow. She picked a jar of purple with sparkles in it and held it up to the window. "I'll tell you what I think. I think something unexpected happened here-an accident, maybe-and those assholes in camouflage, whether they're soldiers or not, are trying to keep it quiet, and they're willing to kill people to do it-including us, just because we happened to stumble onto the place."

Grace was watching Sharon's face, thinking this was harder for her. She was a good cop, like Magozzi. Believing the worst of the people you thought shared your ideals was almost impossible. "Annie's right about one thing," she said. "Who or what they are doesn't make a whole lot of difference at this point. We need to get the hell out of here. Those men are all over the woods, and eventually they're going to find the Rover, then there won't be a place in this town that's safe."

"Oh, Lord," Annie whispered, staring into the mirror as if she were seeing something that wasn't her reflection. "That's not the only thing they're going to find. We left our purses in the cafe."

Sharon closed her eyes. "Oh, Jesus."

Grace blew out a long sigh and glanced out the window. "What time does it get dark?"

"Seven-thirty, eight," Annie said immediately, but Sharon shook her head.

"That's Minneapolis. It's a half hour earlier this far east, earlier still in woods like these."

Grace was weighing the risks of trying to escape in daylight against waiting another hour until dark. It was one of those decisions that could either save your life or get you killed, and it never occurred to her to let someone else make it. "We'll wait for dark," she decided. "If it seems safe, we can pick up the purses on our way."

"And just how are we supposed to get out?" Sharon asked. "Those guys are too hard to see in the woods, and we sure as hell can't just stroll down the road. . . ."

"Not on it, but right next to it, down in the ditch, on our bellies again if we have to. And not back the way we came in. We know there are soldiers covering that end of town, so we'll try the other direction. Even if they're patrolling the road itself, they'll do it by jeep, and we can hear them coming." She looked at Sharon specifically. "How does that sound?"

Sharon almost smiled. That Grace had asked the question at all was simply a courtesy, because ultimately, Grace MacBride would do what she wanted to do. "Actually, it sounds wrong. I've got a gun and two badges, and I'm supposed to be chasing bad guys, not running away from them."

"Honey, not even Rambo would take on these kinds of odds," Annie said.

"Yeah, I know," Sharon said, stretching her arm until the fingers of her right hand brushed the long, silky fur of the stuffed animal next to her on the bed. Suddenly she went still, frowning. The fur felt . . , sticky. She focused on the strands twined in her fingers, then raised her gaze slightly and stared straight into the glassy eyes of a very dead Yorkshire terrier. Some awful liquid had oozed from its open mouth to puddle and congeal beneath the fur of its chest-the very fur she had been stroking. "Oh, shit," she whispered, launching herself off the bed, holding her hand at arm's length. "That's a real goddamned dog." Then she raced into the bathroom.

Grace and Annie moved to the bed and stared down at the pathetic pile of fur. From this angle, it still looked remarkably like a stuffed animal; they had to bend even closer to see the extent of the horror that had sent Sharon on her first solo flight of the day.

Annie squeezed her eyes shut as Grace handled the dog, slipping her fingers into its long hair, searching. Finally she straightened.

"There isn't a mark on that dog," she said quietly.

Annie wrinkled her nose. Unlike Grace, she wasn't all that familiar with death. As a matter of fact, she'd seen only one dead person in her entire life, and since she'd inflicted the damage herself, the gross-ness of it hadn't really bothered her that much at the time. But this was disgusting. "It looks like it threw up. Poison?"

Grace shrugged. "I suppose it could have been. Or any number of natural causes, for that matter. Death is seldom a pretty event." She looked down at her hands and hoped Sharon would finish in the bathroom soon so she could wash them.

ROADRUNNER WAS PACING back and forth across the considerable length of the office, his shoes screeching on the polished wood with each pirouette and about-face. Harley hunkered down a little lower in front of his computer screen, trying to ignore him as he worked on a trace of the bank account that had financed Gino Rolseth's humiliation by dunk tank-a simple enough task if you didn't have a string bean in Lycra melting down in front of your eyes.

"Goddamnit, Roadrunner," he finally snapped. "You're wrecking the floor."

"I am not. I'm wearing sneakers."

"Okay, how about this?You're driving me fucking crazy. I can't work with you clumping and screeching all over my quarter-sawn oak. And you're upsetting Charlie. Look at him. He's frowning."

Harley nodded toward Grace's morose-looking wirehaired mongrel, who had assembled himself on a stool at a small bistro table in the corner.

"He's frowning because you gave him too much ice cream. You know it gives him headaches."

Charlie's head lifted and his little stump of a tail wiggled when he heard "ice cream."

"Does that look like a dog who gets ice-cream headaches? I don't think so. Did you feed him his chicken stew yet?" Roadrunner stopped pacing."Chicken stew?" "Yeah, it was in that square plastic thing.. . . Oh, Jesus, don't tell me you ate the dog's food."

Roadrunner turned a vibrant shade of crimson. "I thought Grace brought that over for us."

Harley put his head in his hands. "One day I'm going to replace that little toy brain of yours with the brain of a human being."

"How was I supposed to know? It didn't look like dog food. It didn'ttaste like dog food. .. ."

"Lucky for you, it's not. That dog eats better than we do." He looked over at Charlie. "Well, buddy, looks like you and me are going to have to get some pizza. What do you think of that, boy?" Charlie lowered his head and whined. "No pizza? What kind of a slob are you?"

"He's not hungry, he's worried, and you should be, too. It's already five o'clock. They were supposed to be in Green Bay by four."

"I keep telling you-they're women. God knows how many times they had to stop to eat or put on lipstick or stretch their legs or whatever else it is women do that makes road trips so damn irritating. And on top of that, Annie's with them. Do you know how many vintage clothing stores there are between here and Green Bay?"

Roadrunner folded his arms huffily across his hollow chest. "This isn't like them, and you know it. Grace promised to call, and she hasn't. And when Annie has an appointment, you can set a clock by her. Worse yet, none of them are answering their cell phones. Something's wrong."