From Potter`s Field

13

I spent the rest of the morning working on two homicide cases I had not counted on while a SWAT team swarmed my building. Police were on the lookout for the hot-wired blue van. It had vanished while everyone was looking for Detective Jakes.

X-rays revealed he had received a crushing blow to the chest prior to death. Ribs and sternum were fractured, his aorta torn, and a STAT carbon monoxide showed he was no longer breathing when he was set on fire.

It seemed Gault had delivered one of his karate blows, but we did not know where the assault had occurred. Nor could we come up with a reasonable scenario that might explain how one person could have lifted the body onto a gurney. Jakes weighed 185 pounds and was five foot eleven, and Temple Brooks Gault was not a big man.

'I don't see how he could do it,' Marino said.

'I don't either,' I agreed.

'Maybe he forced him at gunpoint to lie down on the gurney.'

'If he was lying down, Gault could not have kicked him like that.'

'Maybe he gave him a chop.'

'It was a very powerful blow.'

Marino paused. 'Well, it's more likely he wasn't alone.'

'I'm afraid so,' I said.

It was almost noon, and we were driving to the house of Lamont Brown, also known as Sheriff Santa, in the quiet neighborhood of Hampton Hills. It was across Gary Street from the Country Club of Virginia, which would not have wanted Mr. Brown for a member.

'I guess sheriffs get paid a whole lot more than I do,' Marino said ironically as he parked his police car.

'This is the first time you've seen his house?' I asked.

'I've been by it when I've been back here on patrol. But I've never been inside.'

Hampton Hills was a mixture of mansions and modest homes tucked in woods. Sheriff Brown's brick house was two stories with a slate roof, a garage and a swimming pool. His Cadillac and Porsche 911 were still parked in the drive, as were a number of police vehicles. I stared at the Porsche. It was dark green, old, but well maintained.

'Do you think it's possible?' I started to say to Marino.

'That's bizarre,' he said.

'Do you remember the tag?'

'No. Dammit.'

'It could have been him,' I went on as I thought about the black man tailing us last night.

'Hell, I don't know.' Marino got out of the car.

'Would he recognize your truck?'

'He sure could know about it if he wanted to.'

'If he recognized you he might have been harassing you,' I said as we followed a brick sidewalk. That might be all there was to it.'

'I got no idea.'

'Or it simply could have been your racist bumper sticker. A coincidence. What else do we know about him?'

'Divorced, kids grown.'

A Richmond officer neat and trim in dark blue opened the front door and we stepped into a hardwood foyer.

'Is Neils Vander here?' I asked.

'Not yet. ID's upstairs,' the officer said, referring to the police department's Identification Unit, which was responsible for collecting evidence.

'I want the alternate light source,' I explained.

'Yes, ma'am.'

Marino spoke gruffly, for he had worked homicide far too many years to be patient with other people's standards. 'We need more backups than this. When the press catches wind, all hell's gonna break loose. I want more cars out front and I want a wider perimeter secured. The tape's got to be moved back to the foot of the driveway. I don't want anybody walking or driving on the driveway. And tape's got to go around the backyard. This whole friggin' property's got to be treated like a crime scene.'

'Yes, sir, Captain.' He snapped up his radio.

The police had been working out here for hours. It had not taken them long to determine that Lamont Brown was shot in bed in the master suite upstairs. I followed Marino up a narrow staircase covered with a machine-made Chinese rug, and voices drew us down a hallway. Two detectives were inside a bedroom paneled in dark-stained knotty pine, the window treatments and bedding reminiscent of a brothel. The sheriff was fond of maroon and gold, tassels and velvet, and mirrors on the ceiling.

Marino did not voice an opinion as he looked around. His judgment of this man had been made before now. I stepped closer to the king-size bed.

'Has this been rearranged in any way?' I asked one of the detectives as Marino and I put on gloves.

'Not really. We've photographed everything and looked under the covers. But what you see is pretty much how we found it.'

'Were the doors locked when you got here?' Marino asked.

'Yeah. We had to break the glass out of the one in back.'

'So there was no sign of forced entry whatsoever.'

'Nothing. We found traces of coke downstairs on a mirror in the living room. But that could have been there for a while.'

'What else have you found?'

'A white silk handkerchief with some blood on it,' said the detective, who was dressed in tweed, and chewing gum. 'It was right there on the floor, about three feet from the bed. And looks like the shoelace used to tie the trash bag around Brown's head came from a running shoe there in the closet.' He paused. 'I heard about Jakes.'

'It's real bad.' Marino was distracted.

'He wasn't alive when…'

'Nope. His chest was crushed.'

The detective stopped chewing.

'Did you recover a weapon?' I asked as I scanned the bed.

'No. We're definitely not dealing with a suicide.'

'Yeah,' said the other detective. 'It'd be a little hard to commit suicide and then drive yourself to the morgue.'

The pillow was soaked with reddish-brown blood that had clotted and separated from serum at the margins. Blood dripped down the side of the mattress, but I saw none on the floor. I thought of the gunshot wound to Brown's forehead. It was a quarter of an inch with a burned, lacerated and abraded margin. I had found smoke and soot in the wound and burned and unburned powder in the underlying tissue, bone and dura. The gunshot wound was contact, and the body had no other injuries that might indicate a defensive gesture or struggle.

'I believe he was lying on his back in bed when he was shot,' I said to Marino. 'In fact, it's almost as if he were asleep.'

He came closer to the bed. 'Well, it'd be kind of hard to stick a gun between the eyes of somebody awake and not have them react.'

'There's no evidence he reacted at all. The wound is perfectly centered. The pistol was placed snugly against his skin and it doesn't seem he moved.'

'Maybe he was passed out,' Marino said.

'His blood alcohol was.16. He could have been passed out but not necessarily. We need to go over the room with the Luma-Lite to see if we find blood we might be missing,' I said.

'But it would appear he was moved from the bed directly into the body pouch.' I showed Marino the drips on the side of the mattress. 'If he had been carried very far, there would be more blood throughout the house.'

'Right.'

We walked around the bedroom, looking. Marino began opening drawers that had already been gone through. Sheriff Brown had a taste for pornography. He especially liked women in degrading situations involving bondage and violence. In a study down the hall we found two racks filled with shotguns, rifles and several assault weapons.

A cabinet underneath had been pried open, and it was difficult to determine how many handguns or boxes of ammunition were missing since we did not know what had been there originally. Remaining were nine-millimeters, ten-millimeters, and several.44 and.357 Magnums. Sheriff Brown owned a variety of holsters, extra magazines, handcuffs, and a Kevlar vest.

'He was into this big time,' Marino said. 'He's got to have had heavy connections in DC, New York, maybe Miami.'

'Maybe there were drugs in those cabinets,' I said. 'Maybe the guns weren't what Gault was after.'

'I'm thinking they,' Marino said as feet sounded on the stairs. 'Unless you think Gault could have handled that body pouch all by himself. What did Brown weigh?'

'Almost two hundred pounds,' I replied as Neils Vander rounded the corner, holding the Luma-Lite by its handle. An assistant followed with cameras and other equipment.

Vander wore an oversize lab coat and white cotton gloves that looked ridiculously incongruous with his wool trousers and snow boots. He had a way of looking at me as if we had never met. He was the mad scientist, as bald as a lightbulb, always in a rush and always right. I was terribly fond of him.

'Where do you want me to set up this thing?' he asked nobody in particular.

'The bedroom,' I said. 'Then the study.'

We returned to the sheriff's bedroom to watch Vander shine his magic wand around. Lights out and glasses on, and blood dully lit up, but nothing else important did until several minutes later. The Luma-Lite was set to its widest beam and looked like a flashlight shining through deep water as it worked its way around the room. A spot on a wall, high above a chest of drawers, luminesced like a small, irregular moon. Vander got close and looked.

'Someone get the lights, please,' he said.

Lights went on and we took our tinted glasses off. Vander was standing on his tiptoes, staring at a knothole.

'What the hell is it?' Marino asked.

'This is very interesting,' said Vander, who rarely got excited about anything. 'There's something on the other side.'

'The other side of what?' Marino moved next to him and stared up, frowning. 'I don't see anything.'

'Oh yes. There's something,' Vander said. 'And somebody touched this area of paneling while they had some type of residue on their hands.'

'Drugs?' I inquired.

'It certainly could be drugs.'

All of us stared at the paneling, which looked quite normal when the Luma-Lite wasn't shining on it. But when I pulled a chair closer, I could see what Vander was talking about. The tiny hole in the center of the knothole was perfectly round. It had been drilled. On the other side of the wall was the sheriff's study, and we had just searched it.

'That's weird,' Marino said as he and I went back out the bedroom door.

Vander, oblivious to adventure, resumed what he was doing while Marino and I walked inside the study and went straight to the wall where the knothole should be. It was covered by an entertainment center that we had gone through once. Marino opened the doors again and slid out the television. He pulled books off shelves overhead, not seeing anything.

'Hmmm,' he said, studying the entertainment center. 'Interesting that it's out about six inches from the wall.'

'Yes,' I said. 'Let's move it.'

We pulled it out more, and directly in line with the knothole was a tiny video camera with a wide-angle lens. It was simply situated on a shallow ledge, a cord running from it into the base of the entertainment center, where it could be activated by a remote control that looked like it belonged to the television set. By doing a little bit of experimentation, we discovered that the camera was completely invisible from Brown's bedroom, unless one put his eye right up to the knothole and the camera was on, a red light glowing.

'Maybe he was doing a few lines of coke and decided to have sex with somebody,' Marino said. 'And at some point he got up close to look through the hole to make sure the camera was going.'

'Maybe,' I said. 'How fast can we look at the tape?'

'I don't want to do it here.'

'I don't blame you. The camera's so small we couldn't see much anyway.'

'I'll take it to the Intelligence Division as soon as we finish up.'

There was little left for us to do at the scene. As he suspected, Vander found significant residues in the gun cabinet, but no blood anywhere else in the house. The neighbors on either side of Sheriff Brown's property were cloistered amid trees and had not heard or seen any activity late last night or early this morning.

'If you'll just drop me by my car,' I said as we drove away.

Marino glanced suspiciously at me. 'Where are you going?'

'Petersburg.'

'What the hell for?' he said.

'I've got to talk to a friend about boots.'

There were many trucks and much construction along a stretch of 1-95 South that I always found bleak. Even the Philip Morris plant with its building-high pack of Merits was stressful, for the fragrance of fresh tobacco bothered me. I desperately missed smoking, especially when I was driving alone on a day like this. My mind streaked, eyes constantly on mirrors as I looked for a dark blue van.

The wind flailed trees and swamps, and snow-flakes were flying. As I got closer to Ft. Lee I began to see barracks and warehouses where breastworks once had been built upon dead bodies during this nation's cruelest hour. That war seemed close when I thought of Virginia swamps and woods and missing dead. Not a year passed when I didn't examine old buttons and bones, and Minie balls turned into the labs. I had touched the fabrics and faces of old violence, too, and it felt different from what I put my hands on now. Evil, I believed, had mutated to a new extreme.

The US Army Quartermaster Museum was located in Ft. Lee, just past Kenner Army Hospital. I slowly drove past offices and classrooms housed in rows of white trailers, and squads of young men and women in camouflage and athletic clothes. The building I wanted was brick with a blue roof and columns and the heraldry of an eagle, crossed sword and key just left of the door. I parked and went inside, looking for John Gruber.

The museum was the attic for the Quartermaster Corps, which since the American Revolution had been the army's innkeeper. Troops were clothed, fed and sheltered by the QMC, which also had supplied Buffalo soldiers with spurs and saddles, and General Fatten with bullhorns for his jeep. I was familiar with the museum because the corps was also responsible for collecting, identifying and burying the army's dead. Ft. Lee had the only Graves Registration Division in the country, and its officers rotated through my office regularly.

I walked past displays of field dress, mess kits, and a World War II trench scene with sandbags and grenades. I stopped at Civil War uniforms that I knew were real and wondered if tears in cloth were from shrapnel or age. I wondered about the men who had worn them.

'Dr. Scarpetta?'

I turned around.

'Dr. Gruber,' I said warmly. 'I was just looking for you. Tell me about the whistle.' I pointed at a showcase filled with musical instruments.

'That's a Civil War pennywhistle,' he said. 'Music was very important. They used it to tell the time of day.'

Dr. Gruber was the museum's curator, an older man with bushy gray hair and a face carved of granite. He liked baggy trousers and bow ties. He called me when an exhibit was related to war dead, and I visited him whenever unusual military objects turned up with a body. He could identify virtually any buckle, button or bayonet at a glance.

'I take it you've got something for me to look at?' he asked, nodding at my briefcase.

'The photographs I mentioned to you over the phone.'

'Let's go to the office. Unless you'd like to look around a bit.' He smiled like a bashful grandfather talking about his grandchildren. 'We have quite an exhibit on Desert Storm. And General Eisenhower's mess uniform. I don't believe that was here when you were here last.'

'Dr. Gruber, please let me do it another time.' I did not put up any pretenses. My face showed him how I felt.

He patted my shoulder and led me through a back door that took us out of the museum into a loading area where an old trailer painted army green was parked.

'Belonged to Eisenhower,' Dr. Gruber said as we walked. 'He lived in there at times, and it wasn't too bad unless Churchill visited. Then the cigars. You can imagine.'

We crossed a narrow street, and the snow was blowing harder. My eyes began to water as I again envisioned the pennywhistle in the showcase and thought about the woman we called Jane. I wondered if Gault had ever come here. He seemed to like museums, especially those displaying artifacts of violence. We followed a sidewalk to a small beige building I had visited before. During World War II it had been a filling station for the army. Now it was the repository for the Quartermaster archives.

Dr. Gruber unlocked a door and we entered a room crowded with tables and manikins wearing uniforms from antiquity. Tables were covered with the paperwork necessary to catalog acquisitions. In back was a large storage area where the heat was turned low and aisles were lined with large metal cabinets containing clothing, parachutes, mess kits, goggles, glasses. What we were interested in was found in large wooden cabinets against a wall.

'May I see what you've got?' Dr. Gruber asked, turning on more lights. 'I apologize about the temperature, but we've got to keep it cold.'

I opened my briefcase and pulled out an envelope, from which I slid several eight-by-ten black-and-white photographs of the footprints found in Central Park. Mainly, I cared about those we believed had been left by Gault. I showed the photographs to Dr. Gruber, and he moved them closer to a light.

1 realize it's rather difficult to see since they were left in snow,' I said. 'I wish there were a little more shadow for contrast.'

'This is quite all right. I'm getting a very good idea. This is definitely military, and it's the logotype that fascinates me.'

I looked on as he pointed to a circular area on the heel that had a tail on one side.

'Plus you've got this area of raised diamonds down here and two holes, see?' He showed me. 'Those could be shoe grip holes for climbing trees.' He handed the photographs to me. 'This looks very familiar.'

He went to a cabinet and opened its double doors, revealing rows of army boots on shelves. One by one he picked up boots and turned them over to look at the soles. Then he went to the second cabinet, opened its doors and started again. Toward the back he pulled out a boot with green canvas uppers, brown leather reinforcements and two brown leather straps with buckles at the top. He turned it over.

'May I see the photographs again, please?'

I held them close to the boot. The sole was black rubber with a variety of patterns. There were nail holes, stitching, wavy tread and pebble grain. A large oval at the ball of the foot was raised diamond tread with the shoe grip holes that were so clear in the photographs. On the heel was a wreath with a ribbon that seemed to match the tail barely visible in the snow and also on the side of Davila's head where we believed Gault's heel had struck him.

'What can you tell me about this boot?' I said.

He was turning it this way and that, looking. 'It's World War Two and was tested right here at Ft. Lee. A lot of tread patterns were developed and tested here.'

'World War Two was a long time ago,' I said. 'How would someone have a boot like this now? Could someone even be wearing a boot like this now?'

'Oh sure. These things hold up forever. You might find a pair in an Army Surplus store somewhere. Or it could have been in someone's family.'

He returned the boot to its crowded locker, where I suspected it would be neglected again for a very long time. As we left the building and he locked it behind us, I stood on a sidewalk turning soft with snow. I looked up at skies solid gray and at the slow traffic on streets. People had turned their headlights on, and the day was still. I knew what kind of boots Gault had but wasn't sure it mattered.

'Can I buy you coffee, my dear?' Dr. Gruber said, slipping a little. I grabbed his arm. 'Oh my, it's going to be bad again,' he said. 'They're predicting five inches.'

'I've got to get back to the morgue,' I said, tucking his arm in mine. 'I can't thank you enough.'

He patted my hand.

'I want to describe a man to you and ask if you might have seen him here in the past.'

He listened as I described Gault and his many shades of hair. I described his sharp features and eyes as pale blue as a malamute's. I mentioned his odd attire, and that it was becoming clear he enjoyed military clothing or designs suggestive of it, such as the boots and the long black leather coat he was seen wearing in New York.

'Well, we get types like that, you know,' he said, reaching the museum's back door. 'But I'm afraid he doesn't ring a bell.'

Snow frosted the top of Eisenhower's mobile home. My hair and hands were getting wet, and my feet were cold. 'How hard would it be to run down a name for me?' I said. 'I'd like to know if a Peyton Gault was ever in the Quartermaster Corps.'

Dr. Gruber hesitated. 'I'm assuming you believe he was in the army.'

'I'm not assuming anything,' I said. 'But I suspect he's old enough to have served in World War Two. The only other thing I can tell you is at one time he lived in Albany, Georgia, on a pecan plantation.'

'Records can't be obtained unless you're a relative or have power of attorney. That would be St. Louis you'd call, and I'm sorry to say records A through J were destroyed in a fire in the early eighties.'

'Great,' I said dismally.

He hesitated again. 'We do have our own computerized list of veterans here at the museum.'

I felt a surge of hope.

'The veteran who wants to pull his record can do so for a twenty-dollar donation,' Dr. Gruber said.

'What if you want to pull the record of someone else?'

'Can't do it.'

'Dr. Gruber' - I pushed wet hair back - 'please. We're talking about a man who has viciously murdered at least nine people. He will murder many more if we don't stop him.'

He looked up at snow coming down. 'Why on earth are we having, this conversation out here, my dear?' he said. 'We're both going to catch pneumonia. I assume Peyton Gault is this awful person's father.'

I kissed his cheek. 'You've got my pager number,' I said, walking off to find my car.

As I navigated through the snowstorm, the radio was nonstop about the murders at the morgue. When I reached my office I found television vans and news crews surrounding the building, and I tried to figure out what to do. I needed to go inside.

'The hell with it,' I muttered under my breath as I turned into the parking lot. Instantly, a school of reporters darted toward me as I got out of my black Mercedes. Cameras flashed as I walked with purpose, eyes straight ahead. Microphones appeared from every angle. People yelled my name as I hurried to unlock the back door and slam it shut behind me. I was alone in the quiet, empty bay, and I realized everyone else probably had gone home for the day because of the weather.

As I suspected, the autopsy suite was locked, and when I took the elevator upstairs, the offices of my assistant chiefs were empty, and the receptionists and clerks were gone. I was completely alone on the second floor, and I started feeling frightened. When I entered my office and saw CAIN's dripping red name on my computer screen, I felt worse.

'All right,' I said to myself. 'No one is here right now. There's no reason to be afraid.'

I sat behind my desk and placed my.38 within reach.

'What happened earlier is the past,' I went on. 'You've got to get control of yourself. You're decompensating.' I took another deep breath.

I could not believe I was talking to myself. That wasn't in character, either, and I worried as I began dictating the morning's cases. The hearts, livers and lungs of the dead policemen were normal. Their arteries were normal. Their bones and brains and builds were normal.

'Within normal limits,' I said into the tape recorder. 'Within normal limits.' I said it again and again.

It was only what had been done to them that was not normal, for Gault was not normal. He had no limits.

At a quarter of five I called the American Express office and was fortunate that Brent had not left for the day.

'You should head home soon,' I said. 'Roads are getting bad.'

'I have a Range Rover.'

'People in Richmond do not know how to drive in the snow,' I said.

'Dr. Scarpetta, what can I help you with?' asked Brent, who was young and quite capable and had helped me with many problems in the past.

'I need you to monitor my American Express bill,' I said. 'Can you do that?'

He hesitated.

'I want to be notified about every charge. As it comes in, I'm saying, versus waiting until I get the statement.'

'Is there a problem?'

'Yes,' I said. 'But I can't discuss it with you. All I need from you this moment is what I just requested.'

'Hold on.'

I heard keys click.

'Okay. I've got your account number. You realize your card expires in February.'

'Hopefully, I won't need to do this by then.'

There are very few charges since October,' he said. 'Almost none, actually.'

'I'm interested in the most recent charges.'

'There are five for the twelfth through the twenty-first. A place in New York called Scaletta. Do you want the amounts?'

'What's the average?'

'Uh, average is, let's see, I guess about eighty bucks a pop. What is that, a restaurant?'

'Keep going.'

'Most recent.' He paused. 'Most recent is Richmond.'

'When?' My pulse picked up.

Two for Friday the twenty-second.'

That was two days before Marino and I delivered blankets to the poor and Sheriff Santa shot Anthony Jones. I was shocked to think Gault might have been in town, too.

'Please tell me about the Richmond charges,' I then said to Brent.

'Two hundred and forty-three dollars at a gallery in Shockhoe Slip.'

'A gallery?' I puzzled. 'You mean an art gallery?'

Shockhoe Slip was just around the corner from my office. I couldn't believe Gault would be so brazen as to use my credit card there. Most merchants knew who I was.

'Yes, an art gallery.' He gave me the name and address.

'Can you tell what was purchased?'

There was a pause. 'Dr. Scarpetta, are you certain there isn't a problem here that I can help you with?'

'You are helping me. You're helping me a great deal.'

'Let's see. No, it doesn't say what was purchased.

I'm sorry.' He sounded more disappointed than I was.

'And the other charge?'

'To USAir. A plane ticket for five hundred and fourteen dollars. This was round trip from La Guardia to Richmond.'

'Do we have dates?'

'Only of the transaction. You'd have to get the actual departure and return dates from the airline. Here's the ticket number.'

I asked him to contact me immediately if further charges showed up on the bank's computer. Glancing up at the clock, I flipped through the telephone directory. When I dialed the number of the gallery, the phone rang a long time before I gave up.

Then I tried USAir and gave them the ticket number Brent had given me. Gault, using my American Express card, had flown out of La Guardia at 7:00 a.m. on Friday, December 22. He had returned on the 6:50 flight that night. I was dumbfounded. He was in Richmond an entire day. What did he do during that time besides visit an art gallery?

'I'll be damned,' I muttered as I thought about New York laws.

I wondered if Gault had come here to buy a gun, and I called the airline again.

'Excuse me,' I said, identifying myself one more time. 'Is this Rita?'

'Yes.'

'We just spoke. This is Dr. Scarpetta.'

'Yes, ma'am. What can I do for you?'

'The ticket we were just discussing. Can you tell if bags were checked?'

'Please hold on.' Keys rapidly clicked. 'Yes, ma'am. On the return flight to La Guardia one bag was checked.'

'But not on the original flight out of La Guardia.'

'No. No bags were checked on the La Guardia to Richmond leg of the trip.'

Gault had served time in a penitentiary that once was located in this city. There was no telling who he knew, but I was certain if he wanted to buy a Glock nine-millimeter pistol in Richmond, he could. Criminals in New York commonly came here for guns. Gault may have placed the Glock in the bag he checked and the next night he shot Jane.

What this suggested was premeditation, and that had never been part of the equation. All of us had supposed Jane was someone Gault chanced upon and decided to murder, much as he had his other victims.

I made myself a mug of hot tea and tried to calm down. It was only the middle of the afternoon in Seattle, and I pulled my National Academy of Medical Examiners directory off a shelf. I flipped through it and found the name and number of Seattle's chief.

'Dr. Menendez? It's Dr. Kay Scarpetta in Richmond,' I said when I got him on the phone.

'Oh,' he said, surprised. 'How are you? Merry Christmas.'

'Thank you. I'm sorry to bother you, but I need your help.'

He hesitated. 'Is everything all right? You sound very stressed.'

'I have a very difficult situation. A serial killer who is out of control.' I took a deep breath. 'One of the cases involves an unidentified young woman with a lot of gold foil restorations.'

'That's most curious,' he said thoughtfully. 'You know, there are still some dentists out here who do those.'

'That's why I'm calling. I need to talk to someone. Maybe the head of their organization.'

'Would you like me to make some calls?'

'What I'd like you to do is find out if by some small miracle their group is on a computer system. It sounds like a small and unusual society. They might be connected through E-mail or a bulletin board. Maybe something like Prodigy. Who knows? But I've got to have a way to get information to them instantly.'

'I'll put several of my staffers on it immediately,' he said. 'What's the best way for me to reach you?'

I gave him my numbers and hung up. I thought of Gault and the missing dark blue van. I wondered where he had gotten the body pouch he zipped Sheriff Brown in, and then I remembered. We always kept a new one in each van as a backup. So he had come here first and stolen the van. Then he had gone to Brown's house. I thumbed through the telephone directory again to see if the sheriff's residence was listed. It was not.

I picked up the phone and called directory assistance. I asked for Lament Brown's number. The operator gave it to me and I dialed it to see what would happen.

'I can't get to the phone right now because I'm out delivering presents in my sleigh…' the dead sheriff's voice sounded strong and healthy from his answering machine. 'Ho! Ho! Ho! Merrrrrrry Christmas!'

Unnerved, I got up to go to the ladies' room, revolver in hand. I was walking around my office armed because Gault had ruined this place where I had always felt safe. I stopped in the hall and looked up and down it. Gray floors had a buildup of wax and walls were eggshell white. I listened for any sound. He had gotten in here once. He could get in again.

Fear gripped me strongly, and when I washed my hands in the bathroom sink, they were trembling. I was perspiring and breathing hard. I walked swiftly to the other end of the corridor and looked out a window. I could see my car covered in snow, and just one van. The other van remained missing. I returned to my office and resumed dictating.

A telephone rang somewhere and I started. The creaking of my chair made me jump. When I heard the elevator across the hall open, I reached for the revolver and sat very still, watching the doorway as my heart hammered. Quick, firm footsteps sounded, getting louder as they got nearer. I raised the gun, both hands on the rubber grips.

Lucy walked in.

'Jesus,' I exclaimed, my finger on the trigger. 'Lucy, my God.' I set the gun on my desk. 'What are you doing here? Why didn't you call first? How did you get in?'

She looked oddly at me and the.38. 'Jan drove me down, and I've got a key. You gave me a key to your building a long time ago. I did call, but you weren't here.'

'What time did you call?' I was light-headed.

'A couple hours ago. You almost shot me.'

'No.' I tried to fill my lungs with air. 'I didn't almost shoot you.'

'Your finger wasn't on the side of the trigger guard, where it was supposed to be. It was on the trigger. I'm just glad you didn't have your Browning right now. I'm just glad you didn't have anything that's single action.'

'Please stop it,' I quietly said, and my chest hurt.

'The snow's more than two inches, Aunt Kay.'

Lucy was standing by the door, as if she were unsure about something. She was typically dressed in range pants, boots and a ski jacket.

An iron hand was squeezing my heart, my breathing labored. I sat motionless, looking at my niece as my face got colder.

'Jan's in the parking lot,' she was saying.

'The press is back there.'

'I didn't notice any reporters. But anyway, we're in the pay lot across the street.'

'They've had several muggings there,' I said. 'There was a shooting, too. About four months ago.'

Lucy was watching my face. She looked at my hands as I tucked the revolver in my pocketbook.

'You've got the shakes,' she said, alarmed. 'Aunt Kay, you're white as a sheet.' She stepped closer to my desk. 'I'm getting you home.'

Pain skewered my chest, and I involuntarily pressed a hand there.

'I can't.' I could barely talk.

The pain was so sharp and I could not catch my breath.

Lucy tried to help me up, but I was too weak. My hands were going numb, fingers cramping, and I leaned forward in the chair and shut my eyes as I broke out in a profuse cold sweat. I was breathing rapid, shallow breaths.

She panicked.

I was vaguely aware of her yelling into the phone. I tried to tell her I was all right, that I needed a paper bag, but I could not talk. I knew what was happening, but I could not tell her. Then she was wiping my face with a cool, wet cloth. She was massaging my shoulders, soothing me as I wearily stared down at my hands curled in my lap like claws. I knew what was going to happen, but I was too exhausted to fight it.

'Call Dr. Zenner,' I managed to say as pain stabbed my chest again. 'Tell her to meet us there.'

'Where is there?' Terrified, Lucy dabbed my face again.

'MCV.'

'You're going to be all right,' she said.

I did not speak.

'Don't you worry.'

I could not straighten my hands, and I was so cold I was shivering.

'I love you, Aunt Kay,' Lucy cried.