Dead Run

Harley raked his black beard, reluctant to admit that Roadrunner had a point, because to do so would be admitting that somethingwas wrong. "Maybe they're already there and they just haven't had time to call. This wasn't a pleasure cruise, you know. They have work to do."

"Are you saying Grace and Annie just forgot to call?"

Harley sighed. "Grace left a sheet with contact numbers on it, right?"

Roadrunner nodded.

"Okay, genius, why don't you call Green Bay and find out if they showed yet?"

Roadrunner started pacing again, faster than before. "Yeah, but what if they're not there?"

"Jesus. You run yourself ragged worrying about them, and now you're afraid to call and find out if you should be worrying at all?" He stretched out his hand and waved it impatiently. "Give me the damn number and go take a Valium or something."

"NICE OF YOU to ferry me all over town like this, buddy."

"No problem." Magozzi took a turn off Snelling and headed back into the residential checkerboard of one of St. Paul's older neighborhoods. "But as long as I'm over here, I should take a drive past Grace's house while she's gone. Just to keep an eye on things." Gino rolled his eyes. "Uh-huh."

"Seriously. It's not the best neighborhood, you know." "Yeah, right. You can always spot a crime-ridden neighborhood by all the tricycles in the yards. And those kids in that plastic wading pool over there? Talk about your unsavory types. Look at 'em. They're probably planning a heist right this minute."

"Oh, give me a break. It's just a few blocks out of the way."

"Twenty-two, to be exact. And the point is, my friend, you got it bad."

"Meaning what?" Magozzi pulled to the curb in front of Grace's little house and stared at the lifeless windows.

"Meaning you're mooning over an empty house, buddy, just because your girlfriend lives there. Shit, I haven't done that kind of stuff since high school."

"I am not mooning over an empty house. I am looking for burglars and arsonists."

Gino snorted. "Special Forces couldn't break into Grace's house, and you know it. Damn thing's probably rigged to self-destruct if the paperboy steps on the front mat." He leaned across the front seat and looked out Magozzi's window. "Man, the only yard in the city sadder than yours is Grace's. Between the two of you, you've got the landscape sense of a fire ant. Nobody's trying to kill he anymore, so why doesn't she put some shrubs or something around that place? Looks like nuclear winter."

Magozzi sighed and pulled away from the curb. "She likes it that way."

"Why doesn't that surprise me?"

Ten minutes later, they pulled into Harley's driveway and Gino wasted no time in pointing out the superior landscaping. "Now here's a yard. Living grass, mature trees, and nice, big shrubs with those puffy white things all over them."

"Flowers. Why are you suddenly so obsessed with people's yards?"

"I'm not. All I'm saying is that there's nothing wrong with a little pride in ownership."

"Uh-huh. Angela finally made you dig out that flower bed she's been talking about for three years, didn't she?"

"That's not the point."

Magozzi smiled. "Right. Pride in ownership."

"Exactly. By the way, I got all my plants at Uptown Nursery, and Lily Gilbert gave me twenty percent off, and if she knew what your yard looked like, she'd probably donate everything."

"I'll think about it."

He and Gino got out of the car and headed up the front walk, Gino lagging behind as usual. He'd always taken it slow on the way up to Harley's house, and Magozzi used to think it was because the grandeur of the place intimidated him. But now he was beginning to suspect that Gino had been examining the garden layout all along, making mental notes that he could use later to impress Angela.

"You sure Harley said to just walk in?" Gino had finally caught up and was now standing at the mansion's massive front doors, staring at the huge iron demon face that served as a knocker.

"Yeah. He said come in the front, look for the beer, and we'd know where to take it from there."

"Great. A treasure hunt in Frankenstein's castle."

The heavy oak doors swung open with surprising ease-just like they always did in old horror movies, Gino was thinking, as they let themselves into the vast foyer. All the dark wood and Titan-sized antiques inside added to the sense of foreboding that had started with the demon door knocker, but Gino was quick to home in on the one ray of sunshine amid all the gloom and doom: sitting on an elaborately carved, marble-topped table in the middle of the parquet floor was a champagne bucket filled with ice and bottled beer. A hastily scrawled note beside it read: "'Vator to 3rd fl, bring the beer."

Gino brightened immediately. "I love this guy," he said, scooping up the ice bucket. "He moves his ten-million-year-old vase to make room for some Rolling Rocks. Talk about getting your priorities straight. Now where the hell's the elevator? This place gives me the creeps."

Since neither of them had ever ventured much farther than the foyer without an escort before, it took them a while to negotiate the dizzying maze of rooms and doors, stairways and dead-ends, before finally ferreting out the understated mahogany panels that opened onto a high-tech elevator. By the time they were finally lifted up to the third-floor office, Harley was waiting for them at the doors, a huge grin plastered across his face. "Don't tell me the super-cops got lost down there."

"Hell, no, we were just giving your Minotaur directions," Gino grumbled, handing over the beer bucket. "Next time you invite guests over for an unguided tour, you might want to think about laying down glow-in-the-dark footprints."

Harley let out a belly laugh and gave them each an affectionate slug on the arm. "Come on in, grab a beverage, and make yourselves comfortable. I'm still working on your little project, Rolseth, but we'll get to the bottom of it."

Gino was visibly grateful, which was no small feat for him. "Thanks, man. I really appreciate this."

"No problem. And I gotta tell you, this whole plan was nothing short of pure, diabolical genius, and I mean that in the nicest possible way. Makes me jealous I didn't think of it myself."

Roadrunner was waiting to greet them, too, but hanging back a little, as he always did. He gave them a goofy smile and an awkward wave. "Hey, Magozzi, hey, Gino."

"Roadrunner! What the hell-you been working out or something?" Gino asked.

Roadrunner examined his shoes while he turned a thousand shades of red. "Not really. Just biking a lot."

"Yeah? Well, the Arizona sun was good to you."

He looked up hopefully. "I did get a little color when I was down there, huh?"

Harley rolled his eyes at Magozzi. "Yeah, right. He still looks like a lefse to me. Come on, buddy, let's you and I pull up some chairs and trade gossip while those two discuss sunscreen."

They hadn't made it more than two steps into the main room when a furry rocket came barreling toward them and skidded to a halt in front of Magozzi. Charlie submitted to a few moments of chin-scratching, just to be polite, but it was pretty clear that this was not the dog's final destination. Trembling with excitement, he gave Magozzi's hand a quick, apologetic swipe with his tongue, then bounded toward Gino, who dropped down on all fours and started blubbering to the dog as if he were his only child. It was disgusting.

Magozzi shook his head sadly. "Sometimes that dog makes me feel undervalued."

"Tell me about it. I've been feeding him Ben & ferry's all day, and this is how I rate." Harley waved Magozzi over to a pair of chairs on the far side of the room, opened some beers, and spoke in a low, quiet voice, making sure he wouldn't be overheard. "Have you heard from Grace?"

"No .. , why? What's wrong?"

"Nothing, I don't think. It's just that Roadrunner was freaking out before you guys showed up, and I don't want to get him started again. If he gets any hotter, his suit is gonna melt into a puddle of Lycra, and I don't think any of us want to see him naked."

"Uh .. . I'm not sure I understand."

"Oh, yeah, sorry. Well, maybe you knew, maybe you didn't, but Grace, Annie, and Sharon were all supposed to be in Green Bay at four. So four comes and goes and by five, we still hadn't heard from them and we couldn't raise them on their cells. That's when Chicken Little here starts proclaiming the end of the world, because they should be somewhere near Green Bay by now, in which case their cells would work. I tried to calm him down-give them another hour, I told him, but you know how he gets. So I called the Green Bay detectives they're supposed to be meeting, and it's the same story there. Hadn't called, hadn't shown, hadn't checked in to their hotel, couldn't be reached on their cells. I tried very politely to convey my concern to those no-neck cheeseheads, but the bastard hung up on me, and now it's way past six, and even I'm starting to get a little worried. They always call. Theypromised to call. It's just not something they'd blow off unless something was wrong."

Magozzi felt a little tickle of apprehension, then reminded himself whom they were talking about. "Come on, Harley. This is Grace and Annie. Even if anyone were stupid enough to try to give those two trouble, it's the perps you should be worrying about. Plus, they've got Sharon with them. Those three together could probably take down a small country if they had to. . . ."

Harley was shaking his shaggy head. "Okay, this is the problem with homicide cops. Somebody mentions trouble, you automatically think bad guys. Roadrunner's been talking car wrecks."

Magozzi actually felt his brain screech to a halt, and pictured little nerve impulses putting on their back-up lights and heading in a different direction. Harley was right about the way his mind worked, but it wasn't just because he was a cop. The notion of extraordinary Grace being vulnerable to something as ordinary as a car wreck had never occurred to him. "Shit," he mumbled, starting to rise from his chair. "I'll call Wisconsin Highway Patrol, have them check the accident reports. . . ."

"Don't bother. Already did that, and the prick at WHP didn't have a very cooperative spirit, if you know what I mean, so we plugged into the statewides and looked for ourselves. Nothing. At least nothing that's been reported yet. We've got a tag alarm on the website if anything comes in, so we're covered there."

Magozzi eased back down in his chair, took a careful look at Harley, and felt that trickle of apprehension swell and roll in his belly.

Gino ambled across the room and stood over them, his hands in his pockets. "What are you two whispering about? You sound like a couple old ladies."

Magozzi glanced at Harley, then slid his eyes over to where Road-runner was pacing again. "Roadrunner's a little worked up."

Gino shrugged. "Of course he's worked up. The ladies are missing. He told me."

"Not missing. Just late."

"You gotta be kidding. Those three? Ten minutes over, they're late. This long? They're missing."

IT WAS AFTER SIX when Halloran dialed Grace MacBride's cell number again and got the same canned voice telling him to leave a message. He'd already left three and decided a fourth would probably cross the line between urgent and rude-not a prudent thing to do when you were begging a favor.

He'd been telling himself that the urgency he felt was purely professional. He'd convinced himself that they needed Grace's facial-recognition software to help ID the bodies from the lime quarry. And if he was going to drive the morgue shots down to Green Bay tonight, he wanted to get on the road before dark. But there was another little voice inside that kept asking if maybe the urgency didn't have something to do with Sharon Mueller and the possibility of seeing her. Halloran dearly hated those little voices.

Bonar strolled in just as he was hanging up the phone. "Just take a look at this," he said, holding his arms out and turning sideways.

"What am I looking at?"

"Please. Surely you can see that I'm becoming emaciated. Wasting away before your eyes."

"Really? Then congratulations. You're pregnant."

Bonar dropped his chin to look down at his stomach. "That's bloat from malnutrition. Plus, they're going to be out of the special at the diner if we don't get over there."

"What's the special?"

"Chicken-fried steak in milk gravy."

Halloran sighed and pushed away from his desk. "God, I love that stuff."

"Who doesn't?" Bonar picked up the phone and pushed a number he'd memorized about a million years ago. "Cheryl? This is Bonar. Put a couple of those specials on the back burner and guard them with your life, okay?" He hung up the phone and frowned. "Don't you think it's kind of funny that a woman that old is named Cheryl? Her name ought to be Emma or Violet or something."

Halloran considered that while he slipped a clip in his weapon and snugged it down into his belt holster. "Never thought about it. How old do you suppose she is?"

"She's seventy-three. Criminy, Mike, you've seen her almost every day of your life since you were a kid. How can you not know how old she is?"

"Maybe because I was never rude enough to ask."

"You hardly ever have to ask a woman anything straight-out. You just have to listen close. That's your problem, you know."

Halloran grabbed his cigarettes out of the drawer and closed it just a little harder than necessary. "Who says I have a problem?"

"You've got lots of problems. Women just happen to top the list. You can't even get Grace MacBride to call you back, and she doesn't even know you well enough to dislike you yet."

Halloran ignored the dig. "I'm thinking of just driving those morgue shots over to Green Bay so they'll be waiting for her."

"Why don't you just fax them?"

"Magozzi says the program works better with the original photo, and I want the best shot we can get. I don't suppose Wausau has any news about the autopsies yet?"

"They do, and you're not going to like it. The ME called about a half hour ago. He took custody of our three bodies this afternoon and was prepping for the autopsies when the Feds charged in like the cavalry and rode off into the sunset with them."

"They took ourbodies?"

Bonar nodded. "Uh-huh."

"They can't do that."

"They can, and they did."

"Just when did you plan on telling me all this?"

Bonar shrugged. "After supper. Why ruin a good meal with something you can't do anything about anyway?"

Halloran snatched the phone and started pushing buttons. "God-damnit, Bonar, you think I'm going to sit on this? I'm going to get some answers right now. . . ."

"I already called them."

"Who?"

"Whoever you're trying to call. And I already asked all the questions you're going to ask. That's what you pay me for, remember?"

Halloran was still miffed, but he replaced the receiver. "Oh, really. Okay, then give it to me, starting with who the hell gave those Federal body snatchers carte blanche at a Wisconsin ME's office."

Bonar sighed and took a seat. "The Federal judge who signed the warrant, that's who. I'm guessing those prints we sent to Milwaukee got some attention after all."

"So what did they tell the ME?"

"Nothing. They just slapped down the warrant, said it was a Federal case now and they were taking over. He didn't know a thing about it until they came waltzing in, and neither did anybody else down there, including the director of the lab."

"What the hell would make them move so fast?"

"That's exactly what I wanted to know. So after I hung up with the ME, I gave Milwaukee a call and spent another fifteen minutes talking to every FBI buck-passer in the whole God-blessed office, learning exactly nothing except that anybody who knows anything about this is either out of the office, out of town, or just plain out. They ran me around in so many circles, I'm still dizzy."

"So much for interagency cooperation."

Bonar nodded sullenly. "They said to call Monday."

"Right. Like the weekend will make a difference. Damn, this really pisses me off. If there's a Federal crime involved, fine, they can have it, but at least they could have given us a courtesy call."

"So what do you want to do? We're kind of paralyzed here."

"We're more than that-we're out of the loop. But I'd sure as hell like to find out what's going on and get a leg up on the FBI, just so I could rub it in their faces Monday morning."

"Me, too." Bonar let his eyes drift thoughtfully to the window and the cow pasture beyond. "Of course, Sharon could probably find out for us in five minutes, if you'd just swallow your pride and give her a call. . .."

Hailoran kept his expression perfectly flat and unreadable, but Bonar's eyes had zoomed in on him in one of those spooky looks that made Hailoran feel like he was getting an x-ray.

After a few moments, Bonar was grinning smugly. "So you did try to call her."

"Well, yeah, sure, I tried her a couple times," he said, going for nonchalance. "When I couldn't get ahold of Grace, I thought maybe I could reach her through Sharon."

"You don't have to explain yourself to me."

Hailoran grabbed his phone irritably. "I wish you'd stop reading my mind. It's creepy."

"I'm no mind reader-you're just totally transparent. Who are you calling?"

"Green Bay."

Bonar's heavy brows went up. "You're going to call Sharon out of a meeting?"

"I am."

"Uh, excuse me, but first you threaten to fire the woman, and now you're going to ask for a favor?"

"That's the plan."

"This should be interesting. You do know that if chicken-fried steak sits in the gravy too long, the breading gets all mushy."

Hailoran almost smiled. "I do know that."

THE LEAD DETECTIVE in Green Bay was a fast talker with a broken-glass voice that sounded more blues singer than cop. Hailoran picked up the hint of an East Coast accent. Detective Yustin was cordial enough, but a bit bent out of shape, understandably so.

"No sir, Sheriff Hailoran, haven't heard a word, can't raise them on their mobiles, and they were supposed to be here two hours ago. Four o'clock, Miss Mueller said, give or take, and it's after six. Don't get me wrong-this is a favor they're doing us, strictly gratis, so I'm not complaining, but I have four other guys here since three and I'm doing the overtime math in my head, you know? And overtime math :s like tax-audit math-it never adds up the way you want it to."

Having never been audited, the whole tax analogy was lost on Hailoran, but he understood the sentiment. "I'd be grateful if you could tell Agent Mueller to give me a call as soon as she gets there. I won't keep her long, but it's fairly urgent."

"These ladies are a hot ticket today."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean you and me aren't the only people looking for them. I got a call from Minneapolis earlier."

"Huh. You get a name?"

"Yeah, sure, a tough guy, said his name was Harley Davidson, if you can believe that, and when I told him they weren't here yet, he got a little testy and proceeded to tell me how to do my job. Put out a watch for the car, call in the troops, like that. And this was when the ladies were only an hour late. Hell, if I put out calls every time somebody was an hour late, my fourteen-year-old would be on our most-wanted list, you know? The guy sounded a little too tightly wound to me. I'm thinking jealous boyfriend, if you're curious."

Halloran smiled a little. "Actually, he's the business partner of the two women Sharon Mueller is bringing along."

"You mean the two incredibly generous women who are donating their time and software to help me out?"

"The very same."

"Oops. Guess I have some apologizing to do. You mind if I ask you a question?"

"Fire away."

"Well, this software has to be worth a billion dollars, and they're giving it away? Maybe it's just me, but I don't understand philanthropy when there are that many zeros attached."

Halloran said, "From what I understand, all the partners made some serious money on their software company, but one of their games got a lot of people killed."

Detective Yustin grunted. "The Monkeewrench murders last October."

"Right."

"So this is, what? Some kind of penance?"

"Maybe. Hell, I don't know. Maybe they'd give this stuff away anyway. They're nice people, every one of them."

"Well, that's good to know. I'll pass on your message to Agent Mueller when she arrives, Sheriff."

By the time Halloran hung up with Detective Yustin, Bonar was over at the credenza, finishing a call on another line. He gave Halloran a dark look. "That was dispatch. Gretchen Vanderwhite's missing."

"The cake lady?"

"Yeah. She was hand-delivering a cake to a wedding over by Beaver Lake this morning; stopped to pick up Ernie's insulin at the pharmacy on the way, and was supposed to be back in plenty of time for Ernie's next shot. He's an hour overdue already."

"Is Ernie still driving?"

"Nah. He can't see a fly on the end of his nose anymore. Doc Hanson's on his way over there now to shoot him up. Dispatch called the bride's family. Gretchen never showed, and boy are they pissed. The bride and groom had to cut a grocery-store angel food for the pictures, and the bride cried during every damn one of them."

Gretchen Vanderwhite had started baking cakes about the same time the first McDonald's opened in Green Bay. She'd taken a fancy to the big sign that kept track of the number of burgers sold, and decided to put one up in her own yard. Everyone had gotten a chuckle out of that in the beginning, but then the numbers had started to climb and Ernie'd had to get a bigger sign. The last time Halloran drove by their farm, the sign had read more than four thousand, and as far as he knew, she'd never missed a single delivery. "We gotta move on this, Bonar," he said.

"I know." He was already punching numbers into the phone. "I'll sweet-talk Cheryl into running our dinners over here, then we'll get things moving before you have to head to Green Bay."

"That's on hold for a while. They're not there yet."

Bonar looked up. "What do you mean?"

"Just that. They haven't showed up, haven't called. They're two hours late."

Bonar's fingers froze over the buttons. "That doesn't sound like Sharon. That woman would be ten minutes early for her own execution."

"Apparently, it doesn't sound like Grace or Annie, either. Harley Davidson already called Green Bay a while ago, all hot and bothered."

Bonar pushed the disconnect button and just stood there a moment, lips pushed out almost as far as his gut, his thick brows coming down like a couple of furry blinds. "Do you have Davidson's number? Maybe Grace checked in with him since then. They're a pretty tight crew."

"No. But Magozzi can probably reach him." Halloran picked up the phone, thinking he hadn't made this many calls to the Minneapolis detective since the Monkeewrench case. Something about that gave him a bad feeling.

WHEN MAGOZZI saw the Wisconsin area code on his caller ID, he nearly put his thumb through the talk button answering it. He was more than a little disappointed to hear Halloran's voice on the other end instead of Grace's, but it was a call he was about to make himself anyhow-the Sheriff had just beat him to the punch.

When he hung up ten minutes later, he felt like an injured deer in a pack of wolves. Roadrunner and Harley had mobbed him during the conversation, straining to hear what Halloran was saying. He caught beer breath from Harley on one side and lime breath from Roadrunner on the other, which seemed peculiar, although nothing really surprised Magozzi anymore when it came to the odd man-child with the mind of a super-computer. For all he knew, the guy subsisted on an all-citrus diet. Gino was taking it all in from a big leather office chair, with Charlie at his feet, head lifted in rapt attention. It was the perfect portrait of a country gentleman and his loyal dog, sans the smoking jacket and hunt prints.

"Okay, Halloran just got off the phone with Green Bay before he called me, and they're still not there. But you probably already figured that out."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," Harley said impatiently. "Jump to the good part where you asked if he could help us out and then you were really quiet for a long time."

"He's going to do what he can."

"Which is?" Roadrunner asked.

"He'll get out a statewide APB on the Rover ASAP, plus he's going to make some personal calls to the counties they'd drive through and ask for some extra pairs of eyes out on the roads looking. I guess they have a pretty tight Sheriffs' Association over there, and according to him, they all owe him favors." He stood up slowly, as if he didn't completely trust the ability of his legs to hold him, and looked at Gino. "You want to come along?"

"Give me a sec." Gino patted Charlie on the head, then pulled out his cell phone and pushed a single button. "Hey, Angela . . . Jesus, what's that noise? Oh, yeah? Well, it doesn't surprise me. I had that kid pegged as Satan's spawn years ago. Listen, the thing is, I'm probably not going to make it home tonight. You know that strip bar near Marshfield you never let me stop at? Hell, no, we're not going to bust them, we just want to watch, maybe get a lap dance or two. ... Of course we'll be careful, don't worry, Magozzi told me all the women are behind glass." Gino clicked off, ruffled Charlie's ears one last time, then pushed himself up out of the chair.

Roadrunner and Harley were staring at him. "You're going to a strip club inMarshfield?" Harley asked.

Gino rolled his eyes. "Christ, of course not. We're going to Wisconsin to find the ladies."

"Just like that?"

"Just like that."

Magozzi was already halfway to the door when Gino caught up to him. "I'm probably jumping the gun here, Gino."

"Probably."

"You talked to Angela earlier, right?"

"Yep. Called her after Roadrunner told me what was going on. Figured you'd want to head over there."

"What'd she say?"

"She wanted to know why we hadn't left yet."

Magozzi smiled. "I love Angela."

"Me, too."

"We don't even know which road they took."

Gino shrugged. "We're detectives. We'll figure it out."

Roadrunner and Harley were right behind them before they got to the elevator. "We can all go together in the rig," Harley said.

"Actually, we'll need the radio in the unmarked-" Gino started to say.

Harley slapped him good-naturedly on the shoulder and nearly knocked him down. "My friend, we got more communications in that rig than you've seen in your life, police band and any other band you can think of. You can call the goddamn space station if you want."

Gino raised his brows. "No shit?"

"No shit. Besides, the computers might come in handy."

Having all of them in the elevator at the same time was tight, and Gino looked worried. "You got a payload limit on this thing?"

"Damned if I know," Harley replied, and pushed the down button.

TWILIGHT HAD LEACHED the color from the town of Four Corners. It lay silent and still in the deepening shadows, like an old black-and-white photograph. The street was empty, the buildings were starting to disappear into their own darkness, and the silence was total.

Inside the little house behind the cafe, Annie turned the bathroom faucet a fraction of an inch and washed her hands under a trickle of water. They had to be careful, Grace had said. The pump had already kicked in once when they'd washed their hands after handling the dead dog, and the noise had sounded like an explosion in the unnatural quiet. If they used too much water, it could happen again. Annie frowned, remembering the long list of things Grace had warned them to be wary of-things Annie wouldn't have thought of in a million years.

She bent her head over the sink and pressed some cool water against her eyes. Damnit. After more than ten years of full-blown paranoia, every sense on high alert at all times, Grace had started to get a little better. Closing the books on the Atlanta horror had helped, so had her relationship with Magozzi, but all that progress had been erased in a few hours, as if it hadn't happened. The old Grace had settled in for another long stay.

It was almost fully dark already-time for them to leave the house-and they were each taking a turn in the bathroom while the other two watched the windows, front and back.But don't flush. Anddon't use the toilet paper roll. It's wooden and loose and might clatter. Take some sheets off the fresh roll on the back of the can.

Even Sharon had raised her brows at the thought process that pulled that little detail out of the murky realm of possibility. Grace wasn't leaving anything to chance anymore.

Annie could barely see herself in the tiny medicine-chest mirror, and she decided that was a good thing. She'd caught a glimpse earlier, before the woods had swallowed the sun, and had barely recognized her own reflection. It wasn't the grime on her face or the running mascara or even the disheveled hair, as much as that distressed her. What Annie had inside could shine through all things superficial- but there was something in her eyes that made her look like a stranger, something she hadn't seen there since her seventeenth birthday, on the night she'd discovered what knives could do.

When she was finished in the bathroom, she went to stand next to Sharon at the kitchen window. She wrinkled her nose at the faint odor coming from the pilot lights of the old-fashioned gas stove. "Your turn," she murmured.

Sharon nodded absently, still staring at the dark backyard and the black woods beyond. She looked a little brittle to Annie. "How long have we been in here?"

"About forty minutes. Too long, according to Grace."

"She's right. It's starting to feel safe."

"It isn't. Too easy to get trapped in here."

"I know." Sharon stepped away from the counter, then stopped and looked down at the old wavy linoleum beneath her feet. "When I was little-five or six, maybe-our barn caught fire one night, went up so fast there was no time to get the cows out. But the horses had an outside door of their own, always open, so they could run in and out and get away from the bugs. So the timbers were falling and the cows were bawling and starting to cook and you could look through the big open door into where the horses were all bunched together in the smoke and the flames, screaming, kicking at each other, looking right out the door they ran in and out of a hundred times a day."

Annie just stood there as Sharon walked away, looking out the window at the darkened backyard, at the clothesline over in the corner, at the zinnias someone had planted around the poles, feeling a little silly for watching for armed soldiers coming to kill her. Suddenly, it just seemed too surreal, and she could feel her mind slipping, telling her that this was simply too preposterous to be believed. Surely there wouldn't be soldiers in a place with zinnias and clotheslines, and even if there were, surely they wouldn't be bent on murder. They were panicking, jumping to conclusions, following Grace's paranoia when they were really perfectly safe here. .. .

And then she closed her eyes and saw a burning barn and wanted desperately to get out of the house.Right now.

Three minutes later, they were all huddled around the front door, peering through the glass panel at the top. There was nothing out there, just a hint of light at the top of the trees that towered around the town, advertising that somewhere beyond their view, the moon had risen. Apparently, it was high enough to start painting the shadow of the cafe on the grass between it and the house.

And then part of the shadow moved.

Grace froze, afraid to look away, afraid to blink, but everything was still. Maybe her eyes were tired, playing tricks, or maybe an errant breeze in this breathless air had moved a single leaf on a bush.

But Annie and Sharon had seen it, too. They were already moving toward the basement door, down the steps without a sound. Grace followed, turning on the top step and starting to close the door. Had it squeaked when they'd opened it? She couldn't remember.

Outside the house, two shadowy figures crept up to the front door and immediately dodged to either side, flattening their backs against the siding. A shower of loose paint chips crackled softly, then fluttered down to the cement stoop.

Grace froze at the top of the basement stairway, the door an inch from closing. In this too-quiet town where the absolute silence had been ruptured only intermittently-by gunfire and jeeps and soldiers unconcerned with making noise-the faint shussing she'd just heard outside was menacing in its subtlety. Seconds passed, almost a minute, but she heard nothing more. She released her breath slowly, then took another step down and closed the door behind her. The latch engaged with a soft click.

Outside on the front stoop, one head jerked, cocked an ear toward the door. His partner looked over at him and lifted his brows in a question.Did you hear something?

They both listened, eyes narrowed on each other, palms wet on their rifle grips. After a sixty-second count, they entered the house quietly, the muzzles of their rifles swinging in a deadly double arc.

Down in the basement, Sharon and Annie waited for Grace on either side of the wooden door that led up the back concrete steps and through the storm door to the backyard. Neither of them made a move to open it. Maybe they were waiting for the last possible second before they risked making noise, or maybe they were just terrified of what might be waiting for them on the other side.

Grace reached past them for the metal knob, then froze when she heard a floorboard creak overhead.

The three women were rigidly still, their eyes rolled upward to look at the basement ceiling. Not one of them doubted the cause of

that long creak above their heads. Even though there hadn't been another sound for almost a full minute, they all knew. Somebody was upstairs.

A few seconds later, Grace felt a breath of air, the soft pulse of a baby's exhale touching her face.Air exchange! Air exchange! The thought screamed like a Klaxon in her head.

Someone had opened the door at the top of the stairwell.

The women stood motionless in the black basement while beads of silence gathered on the string of time. Grace was looking over her shoulder in the direction of the stairwell, listening, waiting. The Sig felt heavy hanging in her right hand.

They're up there. Men with guns a lot bigger than this one are standing up there at the top of the stairs, wondering if the treads will creak under their weight, listening for sounds from down here before they risk the first step. . . .

When it finally came-the barely audible tap of a rubber sole against the wood of the first riser-it was almost anticlimactic.

First step.

Grace's hand began to turn the knob . . .

Tap. Second step.

. . , farther to the right in perfect, beautiful silence . ..

The third riser creaked faintly just as the latch eased free of its housing and Grace pulled the door open slowly, not too far, just a crack, just big enough for Sharon to slip through silently, silently . . .

Grace never heard the next step, but she knew when it happened, because she felt the weight of that oh-so-silent boot coming down, as if he were treading on her chest instead of the fourth step down . . .

Sharon slipped through the doorway like a floating shadow. She rounded her back and went up the first few concrete steps bent in half, then squeezed to one side. The presence of the slanted overhead door bore down on her like a great, invisible weight. A few of her hairs brushed against its splintery underside and pulled free from her scalp.

In what had to be the most graceful movements of her life, Annie followed like water flowing uphill. She squeezed next to Sharon, every muscle in her body screaming with tension.

Grace felt the mass of their three bodies crowding the small space as she took a silent step after Annie, then turned and pulled the door closed behind her.How many steps have they come down now? Are they at the bottom, on the dirt floor? Can they see the door yet? She gritted her teeth and started to ease the knob back to its resting place, a millimeter at a time.

And then she heard them on the other side.

Sharon's hands went up instantly and pressed against the slanted door over her head. Someone on the other side of the door in the basement was talking, heedless of noise now. Apparently, they'd decided that the building was empty. She couldn't make out the words, just syncopated mumblings muted by the heavy wooden door. Stupid men. Stupid, stupid men. They hadn't checked behind door number two. Yet. She tightened her stomach muscles and pushed the overhead door up an inch, then another and another.

Annie's eyes lifted as a slice of muggy air wafted into the tiny space, then she straightened slightly and poked her head up into the night.Silly, she thought.What are you going to do if there's someone out here? Just sink back down and take odds on who'll find you first? The guys outside or the guys inside? She moved quickly then, up the rest of the steps, turning to hold the heavy door by its handle while Sharon and Grace crept up after her. The three of them shared the weight, easing it carefully back down until it stopped soundlessly in its frame. Still bent over, they froze at the unmistakable sound of the inner door opening, and then a low-pitched voice, muffled only slightly by the outer door and the three feet of space that separated it from their ears.

"Come on. Let's go out this way. . . ."

Before the man had finished his sentence, they were halfway across the yard, sprinting silently on the balls of their feet, heading for the side of the house. They'd just ducked around the corner and pressed their backs to the siding when the outer storm door began to lift from its casing.

"So now what, the gas station?" The man's murmur traveled clearly in the silence, snaked around the corner, and pinned the three women in place.

"Then the cafe . . ." Their voices receded as they turned away and started moving across the house's backyard in the opposite direction.

For a few moments, the women remained flat against the side of the house, watching, listening, waiting for their hearts to slow down.

Grace's eyes were wide open, but she couldn't see a thing. Somewhere the moon was probably washing open fields with pale yellow light, but it hadn't risen high enough to shine down into the hole in the forest that was Four Corners. For all she knew, this kind of utter darkness was common in a place so far from the reflected glow of city lights, but even she knew that this kind of utter silence wasn't common anywhere.

No sleepy bird sounds, no croaking frogs, no mosquitoes, for God's sake.

Gradually, her eyes adjusted to the black night, and shadows began to separate into distinctive shapes. Directly across from where they stood, an elderly, virtually impenetrable hedge of lilacs ran the length of the house, up to the cafe beyond, all the way to the shallow ditch bordering the road. They crept quietly across the grass into the deeper blackness of the hedge's shadow, then inch by cautious inch, they made their way to within a few yards of the highway. The three dropped simultaneously to their bellies in the dirt.

Straight ahead, a hint of starlight played off the pebbled surface of the two-lane strip of tar. To the left, past the hulking outlines of the cafe and the gas station beyond, the black mouth of the forest swallowed the road.

To the right, the direction they had chosen, the delineation between the dark highway and the darker sky was almost indiscernible, and the road simply disappeared over a small rise. Nothing moved. Nothing made a sound.

Grace glanced at Annie on her left, saw a glitter of white where the eyes would be in a nearly invisible face, and then began to wriggle forward, past the shelter of the lilac hedge, down into the shallow, grassy ditch. There was no way they could risk getting in and out of the cafe now-only a faint hope that the purses might not be seen in the dark.

With virtually no sounds to hear other than the ones they made themselves, and no light by which to see, Grace's other senses seemed to sharpen and overlap, as if to compensate. She could smell the oil from her gun, caught a whiff of brackish water from somewhere up ahead, and breathing through her mouth, tasted something she could only describe as green.

After the first few yards, Annie decided that crawling on your belly was one of those activities you very sensibly gave up when you started to develop breasts. She felt as if she were trying to propel two ripe cantaloupes through grass so long and slick that even the insides of her feet had trouble gaining traction.

It was a relief when she sensed the floor of the ditch sloping down, even as the highway sloped up.Good, she thought, thinking that if it went deep enough, they could crawl on their hands and knees instead of trying to slither on their bellies. Snakes with legs, she decided, would be every bit as handicapped as people without them. It all depended on what you got used to.

The ground beneath the thick grass was dampening with every push forward that Grace made. When the fingers of her left hand dipped into standing water puddling around the roots, she bent her right elbow to keep her gun clear of the water. A few more yards, and she felt the giddy relief of a floating sensation as she pushed into water deep enough to displace part of her weight.

By now the ditch had widened slightly, and the walls were a good three feet above their heads. Grace stopped and waited for the others to come up next to her. Easing onto her haunches to give her back a rest, she felt the fronts of her legs sink into the compressed muck beneath the water. Her face felt heavy. When she touched her cheek, her finger skated through sweat.

She felt it in her legs long before she heard it-a low, throbbing vibration that traveled through the ground. "They're coming," she said quietly. "Get down."

The jeep seemed to thunder by above on their left, shooting grit from the road onto their backs, whipping the tall grass above them into a chaotic dance. And then the silence wrapped itself around them again.

Eventually, as soon as her heart slowed down, Grace started inching forward again, the other two following soundlessly in her grassy wake. The ditch became shallow again as they crawled up a slight incline until Grace's head topped the rise and she could see what lay ahead. She ducked down almost immediately and scrambled backward until she was with the other two.

She spoke downward, letting the ditch absorb her voice. Annie and Sharon had to tip their heads close to hear what she said. "Another roadblock. More soldiers."

Sharon whispered, "Can we get past?"

"Too far away. Can't tell." Suddenly, Grace realized that she could see Sharon's profile. Her eyes lifted and she saw the rim of a huge, rising moon topping the forest. A full, bright moon. "It's getting lighter. It's time to get away from the road. We're too exposed here."

All three of them raised their heads high enough to look over the edge of the ditch. There was a cornfield directly across from them, and beyond that, set far back from the road, the outline of a silo, its metal hood glinting in the moonlight.

And then suddenly there was a flicker of light up the road, less than twenty yards away. A suspended face appeared to be floating in the distance, and then a second one, moving close to the first. They heard the distinctive click of a lighter closing, then saw only two sparks of red in the darkness as the men drew on freshly lit cigarettes.

The three women slid silently down into the ditch to lie in the water again. Male voices, surprisingly clear, rode the thick, still air to where they lay.

"I don't like this. We should just clear the hell out."

"Won't do much good if someone got in."

"Christ, if somebody had gotten in, we would have found them by now. That car was outside the perimeter. It could have been there for a week, for all we know."

"There was luggage inside. Nobody leaves luggage for a week."

"So the car broke down, and whoever it was got a lift, and we sure as hell better be gone by the time they come back for it, or we're fucked anyhow."

"At least the farm's done."

There was a soft grunt of acknowledgment, and it frightened Grace that the sound carried so well. Then the soldiers' footsteps faded gradually as the men walked on the stony shoulder away from the women and toward the roadblock.

A minute passed, then another. There was the sound of gears grinding far up the road, and the labored growl of an engine, then nothing.

Grace closed her eyes. It was a little better than she'd thought. Yes, the soldiers had found the Range Rover, but they weren't sure they had company yet. And the farm was "done," whatever that meant. Probably that they'd just finished searching it.

By the time the three women felt secure enough to creep back up the rise and peek over it, the moon was halfway over the tallest of the forest's giants, and a diffuse white light was rolling back the night. The corn across the road was full-grown, nearly ten feet tall, thick and dark and welcoming.That way, Grace thought.

A quick glance confirmed that the blinking yellow lights of the roadblock were still in place. The lights stuttered periodically as the shadows of men passed in front of them.

Grace's eyes shifted downward to where the white line of moonlight sliced the ditch in half. If they were going to cross this road, they had to do it fast, before the moon rose any farther.

They crossed the road on their stomachs, just beneath the rise so they wouldn't be visible from the roadblock, then rose to their hands and knees and scrambled deep into the cornfield. A few more rows in, and it was thick enough to block the moonlight, tall enough to allow them to stand in perfect concealment. The women stopped crawling and rose to their feet.

Homo erectus,Sharon thought as they started walking in a cultivation furrow. She pulled the soft fragrance of living, growing corn deep into her lungs and longed for the first bite of the season's sweet corn exploding sugary juice into her mouth.Another week, she thought,maybe two. If we live that long.

The field angled to the right, leading them farther into the land, closer to the silo, and then suddenly only a single row separated them from a closely clipped lawn.

The farmhouse was a large, two-story cube sheltered by motionless umbrellas of old elms. The shadowy shapes of hollyhocks towered around the small back porch, leaning against it, making their own miniature forest. The three women stood at the edge of the cornfield, listening, watching.

The house looked solid in its darkness, as if there were no windows or doors, as if whatever lived inside could not bear the radiance of light of any kind.

Sharon caught a quick breath, suddenly understanding why she always left a lamp on all night long, in spite of burned-out lightbulbs and the battered bodies of moths that she had to sweep from the end table on summer mornings. It was for moments like this, for people like her who stood paralyzed in the night, affected beyond reason by the unshakable certainty that dark was evil and light was good.

This is a bad place.

BY NINE P.M., the lights were blazing in Halloran's office, the rich aromas of the chicken-fried steak Cheryl had brought over from the diner were already a fading memory, and wisps of Bonar's thinning hair were sticking out at all angles from his head. He slammed the phone down on the credenza and ran his hands through his hair again, making a bad situation worse. "I swear to God, the collective IQ of all gas-station attendants drops about a hundred points on the weekend."

"Nobody saw our cake lady?" Halloran asked from his desk. He had the phone cradled on his shoulder, and his pen was busy on the state map that was spread out on his desk.

Bonar exhaled noisily. "Who the heck knows? Stopping at any one of those northern back-road gas stations is like jumping into a black hole. Hell, she could have stopped at every one of them, stripped naked, and danced around the pumps, and those bozos wouldn't remember."

Halloran switched the phone to his other shoulder and rubbed his neck. They'd both been working the phones for more than two hours, trying to track the missing cake lady in the northern counties between here and the wedding in Beaver Lake, and throwing out a more casual net for Grace MacBride's car in the counties along the major routes from Minnesota to Green Bay. Halloran figured his ear would fall off soon. "They'd remember Gretchen. That woman blocks out the sun."

"One would think."

"You sure you got all the stations? There's got to be a lot of them between here and there."

"Forty-two, to be precise, and we pinned down the attendants that were on this morning for every one of them, which was no mean feat, I might add. Tracked down half of them at some bar or other in the middle of their second or third or tenth Saturday-night beer, almost too stupid to live. One kid asked if I was going to arrest him, and when I reminded him I was on the phone, calling from fifty miles away, he asked me if I wanted him to wait until I got there. You know, I don't get it. We have a drink or two on occasion, and I do believe we get more brilliant with every swallow."

Halloran managed a smile. "I agree absolutely. So maybe Gretchen didn't stop for gas at all."

"No chance. Ernie said she left with under a quarter tank, and that old guzzler she drives gets about five miles a gallon max. You on hold?"

"For most of my life."

Bonar grinned and stood up, arching his back to work the kinks out. "So true, but who are you waiting on this time?"

"Ed Pitala."

"Over in Missaqua?"

"Yeah, I've been trying to reach him for the past two hours. His dispatch is having some trouble patching me through."

Bonar snorted. "Good luck. Missaqua's serious toolies country. They've probably still got phones with cranks up there."

"I know. Bothers me a little, though, not being able to reach Ed. He's old school, never out of touch for long, and this isn't like him."

"I can't imagine Gretchen taking that route to Beaver Lake anyhow. The roads curlicue all over the place. Adds about thirty miles."

"I'm just trying to cover all the bases. Maybe she cut across Missaqua County to stop at a friend's or something."

"You are a good and thorough officer of the law. So isn't the lovely blooming Dorothy still working night dispatch there? She'll put the word out on Gretchen with or without Ed's say-so."

"Well, that's the thing. She said she would normally, but not tonight. Got real tight-lipped when I asked why, and I got the feeling she was running pretty close to the edge, for some reason."

Bonar stretched out his legs and scowled down at the scuffed toes of his duty boots. The northern counties were pretty relaxed about some of the rules, and if one Sheriff called in a missing person, they all usually hopped on board without looking at the clock or jumping through chain-of-command hoops. "Maybe Ed dressed her down again for stepping on his star. That woman gives more orders in that department than he does."

"Maybe."

"How about all the counties Sharon might have come through? You get the word out there?"

Halloran nodded. This was a different set of counties, south of the ones Gretchen would have passed through. He'd called Sheriff Bull Rupert three counties over first, who'd laughed about him looking for women who were only a few hours late, and asked if he wanted him to stake out garage sales, which really set Halloran's teeth on edge. From then on, he'd asked everyone to pass on a callback to a Deputy Mueller he needed to reach fast, and under those circumstances, every Sheriff between Green Bay and the Minnesota border was happy to put Grace MacBride's Range Rover on the watch-and-stop list. "No problem with those . . ."

Suddenly he ducked his mouth down to the phone again. "Yeah, Dorothy, I'm still on, you got him? Uh . . , sure, that's fine." He hung up the phone and shrugged. "Ed's calling me back on his cell."

Bonar's brows shot up. "Ed Pitala's calling you on his own nickel?"

"It is a wonder."

"More like a miracle. Bound to be a short conversation then. Be right back." Bonar hitched up his pants and headed for the restroom.

He scared himself to death when he looked in the mirror, and spent over a minute wetting down his hair and combing it smooth. He still had high hopes of getting over to Marjorie's before she finally gave up on him and went to bed alone.

By the time he sauntered back into Halloran's office, Mike was sitting very still at his desk, his hands flattened on the open map, staring at the opposite wall.

"Man, I wish you wouldn't do that. I hate when you sleep with your eyes open."

Halloran's eyes shifted to his. "I talked to Ed."

There was nothing ominous about the words, but the way Hallo-ran said it made the hairs on the back of Bonar's neck stand up. "And?"

"And he said he'd called on his cell because the FBI is crawling all over them up there, and they put the lid on radio transmissions. He was real nervous telling me that much, even on his own phone."

Bonar took a breath that strained the buttons on his brown shirt, then walked over to the desk and pulled up a chair. "The FBI's just popping up all over the place today, isn't it?" he said quietly. "So what are they doing up in Missaqua County?"

Halloran shook his head. "Ed didn't know for sure, but they called all his patrols in. Not that they have that many on the road up there- you got a thousand square miles with about that many people-but they still called them in. There's one deputy on his way home; other

than that, there's not one cruiser on the road in the whole damn county, and Ed's having a real hissy fit."

Bonar was tensing up. "They can't do that. Can't strip a whole damn county of police protection just because they feel like it."

"Apparently, they can, under certain circumstances. Ed tracked down the Attorney General at his lake cabin and got the word."

"What circumstances?"

"That's the kicker. They don't have to tell during an active operation, and that's apparently what's going on. They didn't want some cruiser on patrol stumbling into the middle of it while it was ongoing, blowing the lid off."

Bonar looked positively vapid for a minute-a very rare expression for that broad, wise face. "That doesn't make any sense. An operation that covers the whole damn county?"

"That's exactly what I said. Ed figures they've got somebody on the roads they don't want to spook."

Bonar leaned back in the chair and pulled a roll of breath mints out of his breast pocket.

Halloran arched a brow and glanced at his watch. "Your optimism is amazing."

Bonar popped a mint. "I figure if we find Gretchen and Sharon's crew in the next five minutes, I'll still make it over to Marjorie's before she gets the night cream on."

Halloran's cell rang from its holster, and with only a handful of likely callers, he felt a brief, foolish surge of the kind of optimism that Bonar lived with all the time. And then he heard the voice on the other end.

"Simons? What the hell are you doing calling in on my cell? What's wrong with the radio?" There was a short pause while Halloran listened. "Hang on a second while I find the speaker on this thing. I want Bonar to hear this."

"You've got a speaker on your cell?"

"That's what they said. It's a new one, haven't figured it all out yet.. .. There it is." He pushed a button and Simons's voice filled the room. It sounded a little like a chipmunk on speed.

".. , guys crawling all over, so I don't. . ."

"You're on speaker, Simons. Start over."

Bonar leaned closer to the desk and heard Simons take a deep breath.

"Okay. This is the deal. I was off Twenty-three, running patrol south past the lime quarry, saw the crime-scene tape broken and what looked like lights through the trees, decided I'd drive in there and kick some kids' asses and haul 'em in for underage, and then I get down to the quarry and all of a sudden there's about a dozen suits around the car with their weapons out, screaming at me, and those big lights on stands set up all over the damn place, and a bunch of other people in white coveralls crawling over our scene like a bunch of friggin' ants.. .."

"Hold it," Halloran interrupted. "Are you talking FBI?"

"They told me to get out, Mike. Just like that. Get out of my own damn crime scene on my own goddamned patrol in my own goddamned county, and when I went for the radio to call in, this asshole gorilla reached right inside my unit and took the mike out of my hand, said if I put it out over the radio that they were there, I'd spend the rest of my life looking out the wrong side of a concertina fence. Shit." He paused and took another breath, this one shaky. "I reached for the cell phone then, and next thing I knew I was looking into the muzzles of about half a dozen nines pointed right at my head . . ."

Bonar's eyes opened wider than Halloran would have thought possible.

".. , and all I could think of was to tell the big muckety-muck that I'd already called the stop in to you directly, and if I didn't check back within the next minute like I was supposed to, they'd have twenty patrol cars out here, and how the fuck would they like that?"

Bonar grinned. "You lied to the FBI?"

"I did."

"Simons, you are my hero."

"Yeah, well, I don't feel like no hero right about now. I feel like a man who ought to go home and change his shorts.. .. Oh, Christ on a crutch. Here comes the big A now. You're gonna have to talk to him, Mike."

There was a spurt of static as Simons's cell changed hands, and then Halloran heard a deep male voice that he didn't recognize.

"Sheriff Michael Halloran? This is Special Agent in Charge Mark Wellspring. I want you to listen carefully."

Halloran bristled instantly, straightened at his desk, and squared his shoulders as if he were facing the man head-on. "No." They could hear a sharp intake of breath through the speaker. "First, I want an okay from my deputy that he's checked your credentials, and then I want to run them, and if they check out, then maybe I'll listen to what you have to say. Until that happens, you're just a bunch of thugs trampling my crime scene and drawing down on my officer, and that's exactly what I'll be putting out on the radio when I bring every other patrol I've got on the road down on you."

He and Bonar stared at each other during the long silence that followed, then they heard Simons's voice again.

"Sheriff Halloran? This is Deputy Simons, sir."

Halloran raised his brows at the "sir." Simons wasn't big on titles or proper forms of address-no one in the department was, really-and in that moment, Halloran understood the extent of his fear and felt sorry for the man. Like a lot of men of small stature, Simons did a lot of strutting, but right now he sounded like he'd dropped about six inches, and when you were only five-six to start with, that was a blow.

"Didn't have a chance to tell you, but I checked the creds first thing, Sheriff, and as far as I could tell, they're legit. And I took a careful look at the warrant. It's Federal, judge Peakons out of Milwaukee, got the right seal and everything, and the number's in the computer."

"Okay, Simons. Good work. Put him back on."

"Satisfied, Sheriff Halloran ?"

"Enough to listen to what you have to say, Agent Wellspring, and then we'll run our own check from here."

"As you should. Firstly, this is no longer your crime scene. It is ours, and we are fully authorized and prepared to protect it by any means necessary. Are we absolutely clear on that?"

He wouldn't say another word until Halloran finally grumbled, "We are."

"Good. Secondly, this is a national security operation, our very presence here is closely guarded. . . ."

"Not very." Bonar couldn't help himself.

Agent Wellspring cleared his throat but held his temper. "Your man may have gotten in, Sheriff-that was our mistake-but I hope you notice that he hasn't gotten out yet."

Halloran was turning bright red, and Bonar's forehead was so furrowed you could have planted corn in it.

"As I was saying, our presence here is guarded, and that's the way it will remain until our operation is concluded, at which time we will share with you any pertinent information gleaned from the crime scene, according to law. Until then, your transmissions are being monitored, and mister, your whole department is under a microscope. Are you hearing me?"

Halloran took a breath so he wouldn't explode. "Loud and clear, Agent. I want my man back here in fifty-seven minutes. That's how long it will take him, if he leaves in the next sixty seconds."

"Then you'd better hope he doesn't hit a deer on the way back. We're disabling his radio and confiscating his cellular phone."

There was a sharp click of disconnection, and then silence.

"Jesus, Mike," Bonar finally murmured. "I'm starting to feel like we're standing in the path of an avalanche here."

DINO WAS RIDING shotgun in the posh cockpit of the Monkeewrench RV while Harley maneuvered the massive rig over a dark, twisting Wisconsin country road that wasn't much wider than his driveway. They'd turned north off the freeway a half hour ago, but it hadn't taken that long for the absolute darkness of the empty countryside to swallow them. There were no signs of civilization, no happy green road signs that told them they'd ever see civilization again, and Gino was starting to feel anxious. "How much further to the gas station?"

Harley reached over to press a display button on the GPS console. "Five-point-six miles, give or take thirty feet."

Gino relaxed a little and leaned back in the plush leather captain's chair, tweaking the lumbar support, just because he could. "Good. This is starting to get a little too Lewis-and-Clark for me."

Harley nodded, his face glowing in primary colors from the dashboard lights. "I can't figure out what the hell they were doing on this road. This thing heads due north all the way to Canada. They should have headed east on Twenty-nine."

Gino rummaged for the map Roadrunner had printed out after he'd traced Sharon's credit card to Badger State Feed and Fuel, and examined the network of red and blue lines. "Yep, you're right. They should have stayed on Twenty-nine, but let me tell you from experience that there is no way of predicting what females will do once they're in a car. If there's an Amish sweatshop or a house made of beer bottle caps within a thousand miles, they're drawn to it like moths to a flame."

"Those three aren't exactly the tourist-trap types."

"They're women, aren't they? Hell, Angela's loaded with common sense, but the last time we took a road trip together, she made me drive sixty miles out of the way to see Bob's Kettle Moraine Grotto."

Harley gave him a blank look, and Gino just shrugged. "No clue. Still can't figure it out."

Magozzi, who'd spent most of the trip in the office with Roadrunner, walked up from the back and knelt down on the console between Harley and Gino. "The clerk who works the day shift at the gas station is on his way over there now to talk to us. He says he remembers them."

"Let's hope like hell they asked him for directions, otherwise we're driving blind," Harley grumbled. "There's gotta be at least fifty weird little shortcuts from here to Green Bay they could have taken."

"That's what Roadrunner's working on now," Magozzi said. "As soon as he started using probability equations, I checked out."

Up ahead, the ugly glow of fluorescent lights seeped into the night and Badger State Feed and Fuel came into view. Harley eased the rig into an ample fueling area obviously built to accommodate semis, tractors, and sundry other heavy equipment, and before he'd even lowered the stairs, a wiry, sun-cured old man wearing a trucker cap that advertised Purina Feed ambled over, giving the RV a reticent once-over while he waited for the occupants to disembark.

Magozzi, Gino, Harley, and Roadrunner all clambered down, a motley group if there ever was one, but if the old man noticed, he didn't let on.

"Dutch McElroy," he said, offering his hand to each of them as they came off the bottom step, as if they were visiting dignitaries.

"We really appreciate you coming back here to talk to us tonight," Magozzi said.

"No problem. Gives an old man something to do on a Saturday night." He eyed the RV again. "That's a beaut you got there. Need to top off your tanks?"

Harley shrugged. "Sure, why not?"

Dutch winked at him and unhooked the fuel hose. "Thought so. Rig like this sucks down the juice faster than an Irishman on Saint Paddy's."

Magozzi took a closer look at Dutch's bulbous red nose and decided he was speaking from experience.

"So, you boys are after some women who were in here today?"

"Yes, sir," Magozzi said. "Three women in a Range Rover. On the phone, you said you remembered them."

"Not likely to forget. I may be old, but I ain't dead yet, and when three lookers like that come into a little backwoods place like this, you stand up and take notice, if you know what I mean."

Magozzi decided to take the last comment at face value so he didn't have to hit a geriatric. "Did you talk to them?"

"Talked to one of them-a big gal, real pretty, real friendly. She came in for a pit stop, bought some water and a few lottery tickets, and we got to chit-chatting about weather and such."

"Did she happen to mention where they were going or what they were doing?"

Dutch shrugged. "Not right off, but she was wearing some kind of dress that looked like a wildcat had got to it-I figured it for a costume, so curiosity got the best of me and I asked where they were heading. When she told me Green Bay, that gave me pause. This place ain't exactly on the way to Green Bay, and I told her so, offered her a map. She didn't take it, though." He sounded disappointed.

"Why didn't she take it?"

"Said they weren't lost. Said one of her lady friends was from around here and knew where she was going."

"She didn't mention why they were on this particular road when they were supposed to be going to Green Bay?" Gino asked.

"Nope. I wondered, sure, but I'm not the nosy type."

At that point, Magozzi knew they'd hit a wall. Honest, salt-of-the-earth folks might make polite conversation by asking where you're headed, but they wouldn't push it further than that unless you offered.

"So these women," Dutch said. "Are they dangerous?"

You don't know the half of it, buddy, Magozzi thought, but he just shook his head. "No, but they are missing."

"Sorry to hear that. Wish I could be of more help." He finished fueling the RV and replaced the nozzle while Harley peeled off some twenties to pay him.

"One more thing," Magozzi said. "Did you notice which direction they went when they left?"

"Sure did. They pulled out and kept heading north. Now, if they had a local with them, she'd probably know that there are only a couple good ways to cross back over east and head to Green Bay, so I'd take a look at those. Come on into the station, I'll show you on a map."

The four men followed Dutch into the station and waited patiently while he took a new map from a cardboard stand on the counter and spread it open. "These used to be free for paying customers, but now we have to charge for them. This one's on me, though. Doesn't make sense, does it? Back in the old days, gas was cheap and you got real service-we'd pump your gas, wash your windshield, check yourtires . . , plus you got a free map. Now gas is through the roof, nobody does squat for you except take your money at the register, and they charge you for maps on top of it all."

As Dutch painstakingly highlighted roads with a felt-tipped marker, Magozzi's cell rang. When he answered, he heard the distinctive, prehistoric sound of coins being plunked into a pay phone, then the background noise of clinking glasses, multiple conversations, and country-western music. "It's Halloran. Are you still at Harley Davidson's place?"

"Actually, we're all at a gas station in some place called Medford now. Me, Gino, Harley, and Roadrunner."

"Medford, Wisconsin? What the hell are you doing there?"

Magozzi colored a little, still half feeling that he'd jumped the gun a bit, hoping that's what he'd done. Grace wasn't in trouble, absolutely couldn't be in trouble, and even if she was, she didn't need him or anyone else on some imaginary white horse tearing across the country looking for them. Grace took care of herself. Always had, always would. "Making an ass out of myself, most likely," is what he told Halloran.

"Women-hunting?"

"Yep. Roadrunner traced Sharon's credit card here. Last transaction."

"Medford? That's totally out of the way . . , shit. This is getting weirder and weirder."

"Where the hell are you, anyway? Sounds like a bar."

"That's exactly where I am. I've got FBI ears all over the place here. Can you call me back? I've only got two quarters left." He read off a number.

"No problem," Magozzi said, then waved the others back to the RV.

The minute Magozzi mentioned FBI, Harley went into black-op mode and insisted that they call Halloran back on the sat phone. "It's fully encrypted and trace-proof."

"The FBI's monitoring Halloran, not us."

"You can never be too sure with those sneaky sons of bitches. Besides, Roadrunner can patch the sat phone through the audio so we can all hear him loud and clear. It'll be like he's in the room with us."

They all moved into the RV's back office while Roadrunner took his place at his computer station to set up the call. As his fingers flew over the keys, Magozzi tried not to look at the gnarled joints and crooked fingers of his hands.

Suddenly, Halloran's voice filled the room like surround sound in a theater. "You there, Magozzi?"

"We're all here."

"Uh . . , this is making me a little nervous. I'm getting this weird delay on the line. . . ."

"We're calling you via satellite. No chance this phone is covered, so don't worry."

"Jesus. Cops get satellites in that big city of yours?"

"No, we're in the Monkeewrench RV. This thing has more electronics than the Kennedy Space Center."

"I'll be damned. And I was excited because I just figured out my cell phone had a speaker on it today. Probably just as well you've got an alternative. That cell of yours isn't going to be much good if you go any further north."

"That's what Roadrunner told us," Magozzi said.

"Okay," Halloran continued. "Here's the long and short of it. This morning, we pulled three bodies out of a local swimming hole, no IDs. Our ME said it was automatic rifle fire. So we run the prints and nothing comes back. Next thing we know, the FBI snatches our sinkers right out of the state lab, and they won't tell us beans."

Magozzi's brows shot up. "They took your bodies?"

"Right off the damn slab, according to the ME down there."

Harley folded his beefy arms across his chest. "This is getting interesting."

"That's just the start of it," Halloran said. "A couple hours after that, the cake lady comes up missing."

"What's a cake lady'"

"Gretchen Vanderwhite, sixties, bakes wedding cakes. She was delivering one over to Beaver Lake in Missaqua County this morning, never made it there."

Magozzi grunted. "You got the dogs out?"

Halloran took a noisy breath that came through the speakers like a hurricane. "This is where it really starts to get weird. Apparently, the FBI pulled every one of Missaqua's patrols in from the road a couple hours ago, won't even let a uniform out on the street."

Gino actually stood up. "What the hell? They can't do that. That isn't even legal, is it?"

"We're getting the word that it is, but that's not the end of it. I just got a call from one of my men who found a couple dozen Feds crawling over our crime scene at the swimming hole. They kicked us out, made some pretty nasty threats, and now they're monitoring our radios and God knows what else. Christ. If they nail this phone call to me, I'm toast."

"Rest easy, friend," Harley said. "Can't be done; we got you covered."

"I sure as hell hope so. Anyway, now you tell me Sharon and the others were in Medford, and that far north, anything that heads to Green Bay runs smack-dab through Missaqua County."

Roadrunner had been typing busily while he listened. He had a map of Wisconsin on one side of the big monitor with certain areas highlighted. In another open screen were endless lines of text that Magozzi couldn't begin to understand. "So this whole thing started when you ran the prints on those three bodies, right?" he piped up.

Halloran waited a beat. "Right. That's when the FBI moved in and took them."

"Did you scan those prints into a computer file?"

"Sure did."

"Can you send them to me? I might be able to access some other databases for you."

"Son, nothing would make me happier. How about that facial-recognition software? Can you run that from your rig?"

"Sure," Harley said, "but how far are we from you?"

"About two hours," Halloran said.

"So we'd have to work off a fax, which is less than ideal. And that program is damn slow. Let's try the prints first."

Gino was pacing, scrubbing at his brush cut. "Can we get back to the ladies here for a second while I get this straight in my head? We've got Grace, Annie, and Sharon off the radar, and you've got a missing cake lady, and if they aren't all in Missaqua County, they sure as hell could have been headed that way?"

"Right."

"And the cheerless horde of Huns just shut down that whole damn county."

"Right again."

Gino stopped pacing and looked at Magozzi. "We gotta go there."

GRACE, ANNIE, and Sharon were crouched in the deep shadows beneath some kind of weeping bushes that crowded against the back wall of the farmhouse. The quick run from the protection of the cornfield had left them all breathless.

There was a towering light pole close to the driveway, the kind that illuminates barnyards all across the Midwest, but thankfully, it was dark. Fortunate, and yet strange, Sharon thought. Normally those things were set to come on automatically at nightfall, or even during storms if the clouds were thick enough to block the sun. Burned out? It didn't seem likely in a place this well-kept.

Someone shut it off.

The three women hadn't spoken aloud in a long time, but through gestures, they had all agreed to bypass the house and head for the weathered barn that loomed across the drive, so enormous that it ate up a huge chunk of the sky.

Annie was hoping for sanctuary. Her heels were already blistered from the ill-fitting purple high-tops, and her muscles were screaming from tension and all the unaccustomed exertion. All she wanted was a few blessed minutes to stay in one place and let her heart slow down, and the barn seemed like a logical place to fulfill that fantasy. Even if the soldiers did come back, it would take a hundred of them to search every nook and cranny in a building that big.

Sharon was hoping for some kind of drivable vehicle behind the giant tractor doors, since there hadn't been a single one in town. Every old barn she'd ever been in contained a vehicle of some sort, from old hot rods buried under decades of hay dust to pristine classics preserved under heavy tarps. This was no bachelor pad; this was a family farm, and if there was one thing farms had in abundance, it was vehicles. Normally they were scattered all over the yard, tucked in long grass behind buildings, sheltered under an open shed, and certainly lining the drive. But there wasn't one of any kind in sight here, and that, almost more than anything else, seemed so dreadfully wrong. Surely the people who lived here couldn't have driven away in every single car they owned.

Grace was staring intently at the barn. Too big, she thought. The damn thing had to be at least eighty feet long, and that was too long to be out in the open. But if the inside was safe, they could travel through the barn to the back and, she hoped, a way out of this godforsaken town. She took a breath, glanced at the others, then moved.

They all darted from shadow to shadow across the moon-washed yard to the barn, and although the actual distance they covered was less than fifty yards, they were all breathing hard by the time they pressed against the cool blocks of the building's foundation. Hollyhocks grew here, too, leaning against the side of the massive structure as if the weight of their flowers was too much for the thick stems to bear.

Sharon's nostrils flared at the sharp, musky fragrance of the plants, and she remembered the hollyhocks that had grown on the side of her mother's potting shed.

"Oh, shit," Annie whispered from right behind her.

"What?"

"Shit. Literally." She grimaced and scraped the bottom of her shoe through the grass.

Sharon started to shake her head, then stopped the motion abruptly. She straightened against the side of the barn, lifting her head on her neck, then looked all around without saying anything.

"Did you hear something?" Grace asked.

Sharon jerked her head to look at her. "Nothing. I don't hear anything. That's the problem." She was preoccupied, eyes still busy. "Look at this place. Fenced paddock, those big hay bales stacked in front of the barn, feed sacks on that trailer over there, and now manure."

Annie snorted softly. "It's a farm, honey. What did you expect?"

"Animals. Where are all the animals?"

Grace felt a prickle at the back of her neck.

The three of them were perfectly silent for a long time, each one straining to hear the slightest sound. "Maybe they're in the barn," Annie whispered.

With her blue eyes narrowed and focused, Grace started to creep along the edge of the barn toward a door. It was man-sized, cut into one of those big, rolling tractor doors hanging from a metal track. She pressed her ear flat against the wood, listening, then eased back and reached for the rusty latch. The door opened smoothly, without a sound, and the unfamiliar rotting smell of cow manure filled her nostrils. She stood in the doorway for a moment, listening to her heart pound in her ears, then stepped inside.

There was a huge overhead loft filled to the rafters with sweet, green alfalfa hay. To the right, there were open pens and box stalls filled with straw that looked freshly laid. To the left, a concrete walkway bordered with gutters and lined with metal stanchions led to a closed door at the far end of the barn.

But there were no animals. Not one. Even the dozens of mud nests clinging to the rafters overhead were empty. Not a single sleepy swallow peeped at the intrusion.

Sharon looked left down the aisle lined with stanchions. Sloppy, wet piles of manure deteriorated into brown dots, heading for the door at the far end of the barn, a bovine dotted line. "That's where the cows are. There's probably a huge pasture behind the barn."

"Maybe we can get out that way," Annie whispered. "Through the fields with the cows."

The cold glow of moonlight made white vertical stripes out of the cracks in the siding as they walked tentatively past the medieval-looking stanchions. The door at the end was a double-Dutch affair, each half latched with a simple hook and eye. As Annie and Sharon crowded in on either side of her, Grace popped the top one and pushed the door open.

The women stared out at a large, empty paddock with a sturdy three-rail fence. The dirt was ice-rink smooth and totally barren. "Shit. No cows," Annie whispered.

"No shit, either." Sharon's eyes coursed over the strangely pristine surface.

Grace was leaning over the bottom half of the door, squinting into the distance. Moonlight laced the top rail of the fence at the far end, except for a broad gap of darkness directly across from them. "It looks like there's an open gate down there. Probably pasture beyond that. Are you ready?"

Annie looked to the left and right of the paddock, at the grass on either side of the rectangle of smooth dirt. Tall, but not tall enough to hide a man standing upright, or even hunched over. "Looks okay."

But Sharon felt her stomach caving in as she stared out at nothing, her expression bleak. This was wrong. Just like the lack of a yard

light and the absence of vehicles. No way cows didn't leave hoof-prints.

Grace glanced at her, then touched her arm. Sharon blinked, then her head jerked once in a reluctant nod.

Grace unlatched the bottom half of the door and pushed it open, and they all stepped down nearly a foot onto soil so hard-packed it felt like cement. "What's that?" she whispered.

Sharon followed her gaze to the far end of the paddock. Something big. And . . , green? She squinted at the shape hulking in the opening in the paddock fence, trying to bring it into focus. "Tractor. One of the big ones. A John Deere."

Annie frowned, took a few tentative steps forward, then stretched her head forward on her neck like a turtle. The huge shape was just beyond the back fence line, cold light glinting off dirty green metal. She took another step forward, then another.

Mother may I? Mother may I take two giant steps?They'd always played "Mother May I?" on the playground at recess-how old had she been then? Eight? Nine?-and no one would ever let roly-poly Annie take a giant step, because nobody wanted the fat girl on their side, as if fat were a disease you could catch by standing too close. Well, she could take goddamned giant steps now, she thought, stretching her right leg out in a long stride, grunting softly when her foot sank promptly in soil so soft, it seemed to suck at her shoe. She made a tiny cry, pinwheeling her arms to keep her balance as she brought her left foot forward. It sank, too, down over the laces of the purple high-tops, past her ankle, halfway up her calf, and then suddenly she was flat on her face with her arms stretched, her nose and mouth jammed into dirt that tasted of manure, her chest aching from the impact.

She raised her head, sputtering, spitting, furious with herself at the momentary loss of grace that made her trip over dirt. She tried to bring a knee under her, it sank, and she almost panicked. The stuff was like quicksand. Oh, Lord, maybe it was like one of those sink-holes that kept sucking up houses in Florida, and maybe that's what happened to the cows, and maybe that's what was going to happen to her.

She floundered halfheartedly, afraid to move, afraid not to, tugging at the foot that had somehow gotten jammed into the hole it had made. When she tried to brace herself, her arms sank to her elbows, but by then Grace and Sharon were on either side, grabbing her upper arms, pulling her back up onto her haunches.

"Damnit," she panted, brushing the dirt from her chest and arms. Grace was looking down to where her own feet had sunk into the earth. "Whatis this?"

"They must have just plowed it up."

Annie was using her hand like a trowel to move the dirt away from her trapped foot.

Grace looked out at the undisturbed surface beyond them, so smooth it looked as if it had been ironed. She started to say that it didn't look plowed, but then Annie made a funny sound and she looked down. "What?"

Annie was just sitting there in the dirt, staring straight ahead. Grace followed her gaze but saw nothing."What, Annie?"

Still, she didn't say anything. It didn't look like she was even breathing.

Grace fell to her knees and peered into Annie's face, her whisper tense. "Whatis it?"

Annie's eyes shifted a fraction to look at Grace, then dropped to look at what her hand had grabbed instead of soft, mucky earth. She felt a little pop inside her head, as if something tiny and fragile had just been disconnected.

Her fingers were wrapped around a smooth, plump human forearm, half buried in the dirt. It was a strange, grayish color, and tiny grains of soil were caught in the downy hairs along its length.

Annie knew those barely audible, high-pitched sounds were coming from her throat, and then as Grace and Sharon bent to examine

what she'd seen, she heard other sounds join in with the ones she was making. They were all tiny sounds, as if she were standing on the shore, listening to someone drowning far, far out in the ocean.

Sharon pressed the fingers of both hands so hard over her mouth that the skin around them seemed to glow white.

Grace was staring down at the arm, not blinking, not moving, the only one of the three not making a sound. Very, very slowly, she lifted her eyes and gazed down the full length of the paddock, and it seemed to go on forever.

The sounds coming from Annie's throat began to form the words of a frantic chant: "I have to go, I have to go, I have to go . . ." And suddenly she was scrambling in the loose soil like a panicked crab, the purple high-tops digging long, shallow trenches as she struggled. "Come on, come on." Her voice came out tiny and staccato, like a little girl screaming in a whisper as she shot to her feet and began to stumble-run headlong down the center of the paddock.

Behind her, Grace and Sharon saw her feet unearth another tubular shape of grayish, ghostly white, but this one was broad and muscular and sprinkled with dark, coarse hair, and it wasn't the mate to the first, it didn't belong, it wasn't a matched set. God, how many?They're here. They're all here. Welcome to Four Corners.

They both cried out at the same time to stop Annie, but Annie couldn't hear them anymore.

Dirt sprayed from the holes that her tennis shoes punched in the ground, like tiny volcanic eruptions marking her passage. Sometimes she could take as many as three strides without falling, then suddenly she would sink almost to the knee in an air pocket, her foot sliding against spongy lumps that shouldn't have been there. She tripped again and again, caught herself with her hands, touched things she wouldn't look at, and pushed herself up to plunge forward again. Finally, near the end of the paddock, she fell hard. She felt the searing pain of lungs emptied of air and simply lay there with her right cheek pressed to the dirt, trying to gasp.

If I move my arms and legs, I can make an angel in the dirt. It would have a head, a long skirt, wings, and very big boobs. That's why you never make angels in the snow on your stomach, because then they would show body parts that angels aren't supposed to have.

Then she heard Grace and Sharon floundering toward her from the back. She heard the tiny gasps and cries that meant they'd seen something, felt something, stepped on something.. . .

She lifted her head and gazed at the great concave blade that faced her from just a few feet away. Clods of earth stuck to its shadowy surface, and behind and above that, the cab of the enormous tractor gleamed in the moonlight.

Sharon and Grace collapsed to their knees on either side of her until she sat up and looked at them both.

Her lungs tugged at the sodden air while she wiped her face with the heel of her hand, leaving a ragged white streak in the grime. "They buried them with that," she said, pointing at the tractor that seemed to crouch like some great beast waiting to spring on unsuspecting prey.

Grace was sucking in deep breaths. She felt strangely light, like a helium-filled balloon in the slippery grasp of a child's hand. She looked over her shoulder at the pockmarks behind them and shuddered at the tactile memory of softness that wasn't soil.

Annie was sitting there, staring back in the direction of the barn, at the holes and furrows that opened up into the land of the dead. Her eyes drifted a yard to the right, where the last ghostly shape lay exposed. She felt empty now, numb, staring at a little jeans-clad leg, trying to make her mind connect it to a body she knew had to be a child. Very close to it, a long, silky, brown-and-black ear lay on top of a soil clod like a disconnected thing she couldn't make sense of.

After what might have been a few seconds or ten or twenty, she took a deep breath and moved on her hands and knees. Two paces. Two little, soft, round knee holes in the dirt, and she was there. She sat back on her heels and looked down, and with a trembling hand, she reached out like a child trying to make herself touch a snake for the first time.It's not slimy, it's dry, really, and the moment her fingertips brushed against the little leg, she started to cry.

In all the years she had known her, Grace had never seen Annie cry, and this, more than anything that had happened this day, scared her to death.

The leg was cold.This was a person, Annie kept telling herself.Thiswas a person. This isn't a horror movie, and this isn't a monster or a ghost, just the empty body of the little person it used to be. And it isn't scary at all. It's just very, very sad.

Sharon was kneeling right next to her, hands away from her mouthand covering her eyes now.See no evil, see no evil; hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou among women. . . . Where are you, Mary? Where were you when all these people died? Did you watch from some heavenly perch with your plump little hands folded in front of your flowing blue gown, and did that Mona Lisa smile falter just a little when they shoveled dirt on top of the bodies, and how about when my own mother stuck a gun in her mouth? WHERE WERE YOU THEN?

She was vaguely aware of Grace murmuring to Annie in the background, a whispery, soothing drone of comfort that rang horribly false, seemed almost as evil as what had happened here.Quiet, Annie, hush. It's going to be all right. ., a nd that was such a dreadful lie. She took her hands away from her eyes and gazed dully past the corner of the barn toward the farmhouse, couldn't see very well anymore because her vision was blurred. When she blinked, water fell from her eyes onto the front of her little filthy FBI suit, and now it looked like one of the farmhouse windows was winking at her. She blinked again, her head tipped curiously. The window winked again, and then the window next to it winked, flashing a circle of light like the pupil of a large eye reflecting the sun.

Suddenly, her fuzzy thoughts sharpened and splintered away from one another. She jerked her eyes left, looked past the corner of the barn down the long drive, and breathed, "Oh my God."

Grace and Annie grunted when Sharon crashed into them, her hands clutching and pulling, her feet digging trenches into the soil around them. "Quick, quick," she hissed frantically. "Headlights, cars coming down the driveway, hurry, hurry. . . ."

. . , and then they were all scrambling in the loose soil, hitting the solid ground outside the paddock fence and into the tall grass on the other side.

Sharon was flying, number-one hunchback in a party of three, racing away from the barn and the paddock, past the dirty, green tractor at the end, over the lip of a hill, and onto a downward slope. She could hear Grace and Annie close behind her, their breath like thunder. Ahead of them, the moonlit tops of tall grass marched down a hill to mingle at the bottom with the oblong heads of cattails.

"Down!" someone hissed, just as headlights pierced the gloom above their heads like fingers of light jabbing into the dark sky. They all crashed to their bellies in the grass, facing the crest of the shallow hill, their nostrils flaring at the ripe smell of a midwestern lake in midsummer.

The still night air carried the sound of jeep doors creaking open up near the barn, then slamming shut.

"Jesus Christ," a man said aloud after a moment, his voice even closer than the sound of the jeep's doors. "Look at this shit. Looks like someone tried to dig them all up."

The women flattened themselves even farther into the long grass, pressing their faces close to the fragrant earth beneath.

"Get on the radio," the voice said to someone else. "Get the Colonel out here, fast."

With her left cheek smashed into the bent stalks of grass, Grace stared at Sharon and Annie on her right, staring back at her.They'll come now. They'll all come.

Her arms were stretched out in front of her, her left hand cradling the right. She continued to stare into Sharon's eyes as her right thumb moved up the Sig's grip to the safety and flicked it off.

WITHIN TEN MINUTES of the harried radio call announcing the mess in the paddock, the disturbed mass grave was striped with the yellow beams of headlights. Haifa dozen jeeps nosed up to the paddock's fence, engines murmuring as their drivers stared solemnly at the things their headlights illuminated in the disturbed soil.

Like hunting dogs coursing for a scent, a dozen men spread out over the farmyard and surrounding land. They used flashlights indiscriminately, and the small noises of their movements carried clearly in the still night air.

From just inside the paddock fence, Colonel Hemmer glanced up at the five-man squad approaching the fence, ammo pouches and canteens clattering softly against their pistol belts. He squinted against the glare of the headlights, his grizzled face reflecting an unearthly glow beneath the black shadow of his field cap. "Anything, soldier?"

"No, sir. Nothing in the house or barn."

"What about the loft?"

"The loft, sir? The loft is empty."

"That loft is full of hay. You ever play in a barn loft when you were a kid?"

"Uh .., yes, sir."

"Get your men up there. Check it again. Move every bale."

Hemmer looked back at where Acker was sweeping the ground with the beam of a flashlight. Parts of the paddock were still smooth, the punched holes of running feet dark and jarring on the surface, like black blemishes on an otherwise flawless face. In a few places, there were compacted depressions where someone had fallen, surrounded by the gouges and scattered soil of panic. In each of those places, something better left buried protruded from the dirt, as if the residents of Four Corners had been trying to dig themselves out.

"No doubt someone was here, sir," Acker said soberly.

The Colonel's eyes narrowed.Jesus Christ. Goddamn women, stupid enough to leave their silly purses behind and right out in the open, walking all over this goddamned stupid town as if they owned the place. . . .

"Looks like they ran down to the end near the tractor, sir, but they could have come back this way. The dirt's a hell of a mess, makes them hard to track."

And if they weren't running scared before, they sure as hell were now.Hemmer's mouth moved in disgust as he watched Acker's light arc across the paddock. "How long could these tracks have been here?" he asked.

"The men have been making rounds since we found the Rover, but the last time would have been before moonrise. We weren't showing light then. We could have missed it."

The Colonel's jaw tightened. That meant this could have happened more than an hour ago. Goddamned women. Where the hell were they?Where the hell were they?

"Sir?"

He started, then blinked rapidly. Had he said that out loud? Suddenly, he was aware of the still-idling jeeps, the drivers with nothing to do but look at the horror in their headlights. "Get those men out in the field with the others, Acker."

"Yes, sir."

Acker hustled away while Hemmer strode back down the length of the paddock toward the tractor. Pausing next to the hulking machine, he laid a hand on the cold ridge of a tire tread and closed his eyes for a moment, waiting for revelation. The tractor knew where the women went; the tractor saw them. But the goddamned fucking tractor wasn't talking.

He sucked air in through his teeth and moved to the edge of the slope. The flashlight picked up the parallel tracks of flattened grass off to the right, where the ill-fated truck had been rolled into the lake. Directly in front of him, the grass was smashed and slick in places where the cows had gone over.They'll pop up to the surface soon, he thought.

His eyes lifted and traveled around the uneven circle of the moonlit lake, saw several dots of light bobbing around the circumference as the men continued to search.

Three years,he thought.Three years of meticulous planning, training, preparation, all at risk now because some stupid woman's car had broken down. "For want of a nail," he murmured under his breath.

"Sir?"

Hemmer's heart leaped at the sound of Acker's voice at his left shoulder.Jesus. The kid had crept back up on him like a shadow. He was losing it-that second sight that saved you in the field. If this had been the Gulf, he would have been dead by now.

He pretended to be deep in thought, staring out into the black distance while his heart slowed down. After a moment, he started down the slope, Acker right at his heels. He stopped when his boots sank into the soft mud next to the shoreline and scoured the ground with the beam of his flashlight.

Pointless,he thought, looking up again. Between the cattle and men who had tried to manage that rolling stampede into the lake, the ground was ravaged.

The cattails towered over him here. He glared at them, wishing he had a machete to slice them down to size. "Place is a goddamned jungle," he muttered.

"Yes, sir," Acker said, startling him again.

He snapped the light on Acker's face, making him squint. He kept it there for a moment, watched his baby face twitching in discomfort. When he spoke again, his voice was disturbingly quiet. "We should have found them by now."

Acker tipped his head, trying to avoid the light. "They can't get out, sir. And we've got their purses and their cells, so they can't call out, even if they could get a signal. I'm sure we'll find them soon."

"Are you?"

"Yes, sir, of course, sir."

"Then you're a fool." The Colonel scowled and looked away, clenching his jaw so hard his teeth hurt.Take it easy, he commandedhimself,hosing your temper is the first sign of losing control. Relax. Take a deep breath. Take command of yourself first, then your men. "We mustfind them," he said evenly. "They've seen too much."

"Yes, sir."

The Colonel turned to regard Acker's soft features, the sometimes startling innocence of his young face. "These women are not the enemy. Not any more than those people in the paddock up there were the enemy. Just unfortunate souls who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time." He paused, met Acker's eyes. "They were all dead by the time we got here. There was absolutely nothing we could do. But this will be very different. Intentional. Could you do it,

Acker?If you were the one who found them, could you shoot innocent women to save the mission?"

Acker was facing the Colonel, his back to the lake. "Of course, sir," he replied instantly, offended that the Colonel had to ask.

Directly behind him, less than ten feet into the forest of cattails and down near the surface of the stagnant water, a pair of terrified blue eyes stared up through the stalks.

GRACE WAS KNEELING in the sucking mud that anchored the roots of the cattails, her gaze riveted on the shadowy figures straight ahead. Their bodies were dissected crazily by the thick stalks that she peered through, as if they weren't real men at all-just scattered pieces of men whose conversation was as surreal as their visages.

Don't move. Don't breathe. Don't make a sound, because there's a very young man out there who's ready, willing, and able to shoot you dead. And this is what happens when you let little boys play with G.I. Joe dolls.

Only her head protruded from the stinking water; that, and her right hand. It was pressed next to her ear, gripping the Sig. The barrel was tangled in her hair, pointed skyward, still dry.

Directly next to Grace, Sharon couldn't feel her feet anymore, couldn't feel the cold muck seeping through her shoes and clothes, pasting them to her body like glue. Terror had numbed her senses long ago, focused the sum of her awareness on the simple life-and-death struggle to remain perfectly still.

It was pleasantly dark in this black nest of rigid stalks, and if it was dark, no one could see her, and she would be safe. Whatever evil was out there wouldn't be able to find her if she stayed perfectly still. She kept staring straight ahead, pretending she didn't see or hear or exist. . ..

". ..Come on, honey, you have to come out. Come to Daddy. It's all right, I'm here. Daddy's right here. ..."But Daddy was out there,where everything bad lived. Nothing bad was in here. Just her mother's faint scent lingering, silky dresses brushing the top of her head, her mother's shoes upside down on the metal rack, waiting patiently for her mother's feet. The dresses didn't know; the shoes didn't know; the hats and boxes, the terry robe on the hook-none of these things knew what had happened out there. In this tiny fragrant closet, her mother still lived, and Sharon wanted to stay here forever. . . .

Next to Sharon, Annie's mouth was open an inch above the water, an orifice only slightly larger than her eyes. She could feel the blurred racing of her panicked heart, beating so fast it was a buzz in her chest, and she wondered absently if it would hurt to get shot.

The cow was still behind her, braced against her, its bloating, rigid body stuck in the mud of the shallows. She'd bumped into it, nearly fallen on it when they'd first slid into the concealment of the cattails together, but she hadn't screamed. She was very proud of that. She'd bumped right into this terrible, disgusting, deadthing and she hadn't screamed.

Her eyes were bright with tension, her face stiff with fear as she watched and listened to the two men. All the muscles in her bodyseemed locked into immobility.That's why the deer freeze in the headlights. You always wondered why they didn't leap out of harm's way, off the side of the road, into the safety of the woods, and this is it. This is the reason. The survival instinct breaks down when danger gets too close. You can act only up to a point, and then you can't act at all.

She concentrated, sent the paralysis draining down her body into the water and out through the soles of her shoes, and then, at last, she was free to blink.

COLONEL HEMMER'S smile was faint, barely there. Acker was a good soldier. All of his men were good soldiers. His smile

faded. If they were all such goddamned good soldiers, how the hell had these women gotten this far? He clasped his hands behind his back and began to pace back and forth along a ten-foot stretch of shoreline, his combat boots slurping in the mud. "Any chance they could have slipped away from here, across the lake, for instance?"

"Absolutely not, sir. The cordon around the lake has been tight. We treated it as a funnel point."

Hemmer had known the answer before he'd asked the question, and the question hadn't really been necessary anyway. He knew the women were here. He could feel them the way you feel a cold starting deep in your throat. Soft, silly women who could never understand the concept of dying for your country or killing for it, so short-sighted that the term "acceptable losses" would horrify them. These were the kind of people who had let the world become such a dangerous place. "At ten hundred hours, those two trucks will blow, a thousand people will die, and the world will start changing. Unless those women get away."

"That will not happen, sir."

Colonel Hemmer stopped pacing and looked up at the silhouettes on top of the slope. A dozen soldiers stared down at him. Christ. They looked like goddamned Indians lining the canyon wall in an old Western, watching with that endless, alien patience, waiting for the proper moment to charge down. "What is it, soldier?"

"They're gone, Colonel," a man called down. "We've searched the buildings, every inch of the farm, and around the lake. Shall we start the search pattern again, sir?"

"No." The Colonel flashed blue eyes up the slope. "Trying to track them in the dark is pointless. But they're still here, and we goddamned better keep them here. I want every man back out on the perimeter. Every. Single. Man. And we'll stay on that perimeter until dawn, and then we'll move in fast and start to tighten the circle."

The soldiers on the slope saluted as a unit, then turned and double-timed away.

Acker waited until he could no longer hear their footsteps, then spoke hesitantly. "You don't think it's risky, sir? Keeping this town closed off until dawn?"

Hemmer turned slowly to face him, and spoke with amazing control. "Yes, Acker, I think it's risky. But riskier still to leave holes in the perimeter while our men fumble around in the dark, trying to find them. If they get out, others will come, and once they see this place, they'll figure it out in a hurry. They'd have a nationwide alert out on the other two trucks in a matter of hours. We'd lose them before they blow. We'd lose the gas. We'd lose the element of surprise.We'd lose the war, Acker. "

Acker closed his eyes and lowered his head in embarrassment. "Yes, sir. Sorry to question you, sir."

The apology made the Colonel feel magnanimous, almost paternal. "It's all right, Acker. None of us expected this kind of duty. We're all on the edge here."

"And what about the hourly patrols, sir?" Acker put in timidly.

"Cancel the patrols. All of them. Let the women have the whole goddamned town if they want it. For a few more hours, anyway."

DEPUTY DOUGLAS LEE arched his spine away from the seat, grimacing at a sharp twinge in his lower back. And it was no wonder, he thought. He'd pulled the empty northern sector for his patrol tonight, and taking a leak was about the only reason you ever had to get out from behind the wheel on this run.

He'd written up only two tickets in eight hours-one for a burned-out taillight on a '56 pickup, and another for a rusted-out Grand Prix pushing forty in Gill Lake's twenty-mile-per-hour zone. Lord, no wonder Wisconsin cops had a reputation for nuisance tickets. Unless you were highway patrol on the interstate, there wasn't a whole hell of a lot else to do. Thank God.

He eased back when he felt the lap belt press against his stomach. Never used to do that, he thought, patting the belly that had been rising like a loaf of Paula's bread ever since he married her last year. He was going to have to start the nightly sit-ups again, get himself back in some kind of shape before he had to endure the humiliation of moving up to a larger uniform size.

He yawned and rubbed at the black stubble sprouting from his chin, wondering what Paula had waiting for their late supper tonight. Who knew that a Phi Beta Kappa with about a million med schools vying for her favor would turn into a gourmet chef? For that matter, who would expect that a drop-dead looker with that kind of future would choose to put everything on hold while she took a year or two to be the stay-at-home wife of some bumpkin cop with a size-forty-eight shirt and a size-six hat? Lee figured he was about the luckiest man in the world, and then some.

He slowed the cruiser at the intersection of Double-P, then, at the last minute, decided to turn south. He automatically looked up and down the black crossroads, even though traffic on this stretch was as scarce as hen's teeth. It weaved in and out of the edge of the state forest, and basically, you could go nowhere in either direction. With only four cars per shift and hundreds of miles of roads to cover, trouble-free roads like this one rarely saw a patrol. But a trouble-free road was exactly what Lee was looking for tonight. Officially off duty for the last seven minutes, the last thing he wanted was to come across anything that would interrupt a straight run home.

Twenty miles to Paula's arms, he thought, smiling. He had to concentrate to keep his foot light on the accelerator and his eyes busy on the far edge of the headlight beams. The deer were everywhere this far north, and they thought they owned the roads.

Too bad he hadn't spotted the Range Rover. It hadn't been an official call, really-just nosy Dorothy at dispatch, eavesdropping earlier this evening on the highway patrol frequency, passing along some poor bastard's worry about a car full of rich women-surely rich, because the Rover was out of Minneapolis, pretty new and pretty pricey. Lee liked stopping Minnesotans, with their tough cars and city attitudes. He might be a county deputy living in the sticks, but he had theticket book and the authority, and in a way he knew wasn't healthy, that made him feel better about himself.

He eased up on the accelerator and frowned. Yellow lights were flashing through the trees up ahead on the left, and there was no reason in the world for them to be there.

His headlights caught the black cross on a yellow intersection sign, and his frown deepened as he drew close enough to see the barrier blocking the narrow strip of asphalt on his left.

It was rare enough to see highway-maintenance crews up in this neck of the woods-the most wear these roads ever got came from deer crossing from one side to the other-but to see a road closed overnight was damn near unbelievable, especially a narrow little country road like the one that passed through Four Corners. Hell, he could probably repave the full length of it in a single day all by himself-with a teaspoon and a tar bucket.

He slowed to a crawl as he neared the intersection and squinted out his window, puzzled. There should have been some kind of a detour sign on the highway, and the boys at County Highway knew that. He shook his head and clucked his tongue, then cranked the wheel left. The headlights glared on the barrier's reflective paint and nearly blinded him as he braked a few feet back from the blinking yellow lights.

He shoved the gearshift into park and let the car idle while he tried to squint past the light. No highway equipment that he could see, no signs explaining the barrier. And now that he thought about it, it wasn't one of those fence-like barriers the county always used; it was just painted sawhorses stretched across the road, battery-operated lights jury-rigged to the tops, and no room on either side for local traffic.

He sagged back in the seat to puzzle it out, wrists draped over the top of the steering wheel. Finally, he reached for the clipboard to make a note to call Dorothy when he got home and ask if she knew what the hell was going on. . . .

"Sir?"

"Jee-zuz!"Lee gasped, dropping the clipboard and spinning his head toward his open window. His heart rate doubled within the space of a second. A man was standing there, right next to the car, and Lee hadn't heard so much as the scuff of a boot on asphalt.

"Sorry, sir. Didn't mean to startle you. Deputy ... ?"

"Lee, goddamnit! And where the hell did you come from?" he bellowed furiously. Damn. He hadn't been surprised like this since his older brother had popped out of his black closet and scared the shit out of him when he was eleven.

"Glad you're here, Deputy Lee. We were beginning to wonder if anyone was ever going to respond to our call...."

"What call? What the hell are you talking about? I didn't get any call." Then Lee colored a little, remembering that he'd been in one of the county's infamous dead zones since he'd left Gill Lake, twisting around the roads that dipped through the northern hills that played havoc with straight radio transmissions. "Shit," he muttered, then squinted up at the man's face, trying to make out his features in the reflected glow of the dashboard lights. He'd already seen the camouflage fatigues, the familiar shape of a field cap . ..Jesus Christ. Was that an M16? What the hell?

"I don't understand, sir. Your dispatch didn't send you?"

Lee moved his hand to unsnap his seat belt slowly. "Dispatch didn't send me anywhere. I'm off duty, on my way home, just stopped to see what the roadblock was for. Now what the hell is going on here, and who the hell are you?"

The man's brow furrowed. "I don't understand. We called the highway patrol some time ago.. .."

"Sheriff's Office and the patrol don't always automatically share calls up here. Besides, I've been off the air for the past half hour."

"Well, that explains it, I guess." The man nodded. "But I'm still glad you're here. We're on a blackout weekend maneuver up here___"

"Who's 'we'?"

"National Guard, sir."

Deputy Lee took a breath and relaxed a little.

"And about forty minutes ago, a dark blue Dodge Ram blasted through our roadblock doing about eighty, and when one of our men fired a warning shot, the passenger fired back. Shotgun, we think."

Lee closed his eyes and shook his head. Some out-of-season deer-shiner with too many beers in his belly and too many shells in the chamber taking on the U.S. National Guard. "You get a plate?"

"No, sir. He was moving too fast, and to tell you the truth, he had us pretty shook up. We have to assume he was shooting live ammo."

Lee eyed the man's weapon. "Shotgun or no, I'll bet he wasn't as armed as you are."

The man looked down at his rifle with a rueful shake of his head. "Blank cartridges, sir. They don't issue live ammo for weekend maneuvers."

Lee released a sigh of relief. "I suppose not."

"But he went straight out of here and down that way." He pointed south, the direction Lee had been headed anyway. "The Colonel would sure like to see a man who shoots at U.S, troops in custody."

Lee grabbed his clipboard, unsnapped his holster as he did whenever he left the car, and opened the door with a jerk, oddly pleased when the young soldier had to scramble back out of the way. He took another step back when Lee climbed out and stood upright, facing him. Six-foot-four and built like a linebacker, he towered over most men, this one included. He rested his hand on the grip of his nine, just for effect, and kept it there.

"Uh .. , aren't you going to go after him, sir?"

"In a minute. You know how it is. Seems I'm back on the clock, and I'm going to need a little information before I call this in. You saw the truck?"

"I did."

"Good. In the meantime, call whoever's in charge of this little show-Colonel, you said?"

"That's affirmative."

"Well, call him on up here so I can get some kind of confirmation."

The soldier stared at him for a moment. He was young, Lee noticed, and he looked scared to death. Probably some accountant from Wausau who never in a million years had actually expected to get shot at. "We appreciate that, sir."

Lee turned his back and reached through the open window of the car to turn off the ignition. When he tipped his head inside the car, he swore he could smell the stick of peppermint gum in the glove box and the oil on the muzzle of the shotgun on the rack above the cage. He heard the irregular breathing of the young soldier behind him. . ..

Just as his fingers brushed the key, he saw . . , something. A reflection in the closed passenger window, moving too slowly, too purposefully, and suddenly he remembered things that had seemed silly at the time. Academy runs, slinking through the darkened training house where cardboard gunmen popped out of every doorway or dropped from the ceiling and your heart beat so hard that your chest wall ached for days afterward. . . .

His head and his hand remembered those days like they were five minutes ago, which surprised him a little. He spun sideways, flinging his back against the door frame just as the report of the M16 exploded in his ears. His nine-millimeter was in his hand long before his brain would have thought to initiate the gesture, and then he had a split-second image of the young soldier standing there with the muzzle of the rifle leveled at Lee's head, and then there was another gunshot, so close on the heels of the first that they blurred together.

For a moment that seemed to stretch into eternity, Deputy Lee and the young soldier stared at each other in disbelief. Then Lee gaped down in horror as the soldier sank slowly to the pavement, a black-red circle spreading on his chest. The M16 clattered uselessly to the asphalt.

"Jesus," Lee muttered stupidly, unable to tear his eyes away. "Jesus." The muzzle of his nine dropped toward the ground.

"Becker!"

The hiss came from the trees on the left side of the road, and as instinctively as Lee had spun and drawn his weapon and fired his first shot into the young soldier's chest, he sprinted around to the other side of the car. A bullet kicked up stones from the road just behind him, then another zinged by his left ear with a whining whistle. He ducked down next to the car and reached for the door handle as a volley of shots hit the pavement just behind him. Lee didn't believe for one minute that they were blanks.

He dashed down the berm into the forest, blood streaming from where the young soldier's first shot had grazed the side of his head.

BONAR WALKED into the Hunter's Inn, spied Halloran hunched over in a back booth, and made a beeline for him, he slid into the cracked vinyl seat with a heavy sigh. He looked every minute of the long day they'd put in so far. "Okay. I sent the prints for our bodies off to that Roadrunner character and moved all the stuff you wanted into my ride, but why you want to drive all over the north woods in a 'sixty-nine Camaro is beyond me."

Halloran tapped the eraser of a stubby pencil on the map he'd been studying. "We're going to meet up with Magozzi and the rest of them at Hamilton, right?"

"Right. I figured we'd pop down to the state highway and make some good time, but you know darn well the Camaro's Smokey bait. They wouldn't stop us in the county SUV. If we kept the lights going, we'd have clear sailing."

Halloran leaned back and rubbed at his eyes. "We've got about a half an hour on Magozzi's crew. Thought we'd take the northern route."

Bonar worked his thick eyebrows halfway up his forehead. "Through Missaqua County?"

"Might as well take a look-see on our way. If the Feds are hot enough to pull Ed Pitala's patrols off the road, I'm guessing they'll have some blocks set up to stop any other cops that might wander in. Civilian traffic is another thing. No way they can stop that. And a 'sixty-nine Camaro's about as civilian as you can get."

Bonar puffed his cheeks in a miserable exhale and signaled to Joe over at the bar. "If we get stopped at the Missaqua border by a few hundred gentlemen in really nice suits, I think the uniforms might give us away anyhow. Unless, of course, you're planning on just mowing them down with the shotgun and riot gun you had me stash in the backseat."

Halloran slurped a sip of the best coffee in Kingsford County. "After the way they've jerked us around today, I'm beginning to think that might be a pleasant way to spend a Saturday night."

Bonar rolled troubled eyes up to the stuffed jackalope mounted to the wall over the booth and grimaced. "Man, what're we doing here? You know I hate this place."

"Best food around, and you wanted to eat before we took off. The diner's closed, and there's nothing on the road where we're headed. Cheeseburger rare, heavy on the onions, and every side old Joe's got back there on the grill."

Bonar smiled a little. "You got me onions when we're riding together?"

"I figured you'd be real polite and hold your breath the whole way."

"At least you didn't pick the booth with the stuffed cat."

"Even I can't stand that one. Used to pat that cat every time I came in here."

Bonar took a quick look around the dark interior, then wrinkled his nose and pretended he hadn't seen a thing. The place was made from hand-hewn pine logs pulled down by Joe's grandfather a hundred years ago, and every few feet, the glass eyes of some dead animal or other stared down at you. It gave Bonar the creeps.

There was the two-headed calf one of Barkley Widen's prize Guernseys had dropped back in the 70s, a loose-lipped moose with a giant, moldy rack, and every other woodland animal you could think of, including a family of chipmunks fastened to a wall plaque with fake moss falling off. To the best of Bonar's knowledge, Joe hadn't killed a single one. The man couldn't bear the thought of taking the life of any creature, but the animals had been hanging since his grandfather's day and, as he put it, taking them down would be a pure waste of good taxidermy.

And then there was the cat-the one and only dead thing Joe himself had contributed to the grisly decor. Lord, how he had loved that cat, every one of the twenty-three years the tabby stray had prowled around the bar, taking the occasional swipe at a paying customer with his long, untrimmed claws, relenting only when he licked enough suds from where the beer tap dripped to put him to sleep. Seemed a strange way to honor the memory of a companion, Bonar thought- stuffing it and having it mounted on a wall.

"I don't think I can eat here," he said unhappily.

Halloran gave him a tired grin. "You'll eat in your coffin."

"This is like eating in someone else's coffin."

His discomfort slowed him down, and it took him a full ten minutes to put away the cheeseburger, and another five to polish off the french fries, onion rings, and coleslaw.

Halloran watched him eat, sipping a fresh cup of coffee to keep him awake on the road. When Bonar pushed his plate away, he threw down a handful of bills and slid out of the booth. "We need to go."