I Shall Not Want

I

Her car gave out on the Schuylerville Road. At night, of course. At least five miles from the Stewart's on Route 117. No, Stewart's didn't have a garage, did they? Just pumps.

Hadley tipped her head back against the seat and breathed slowly and deeply. I am not going to fall apart. She was going to count her blessings. It was a 45-degree night in mid-May, instead of a 15-degree night in mid-February. The kids were safe at home, hopefully, please God, not harassing their greatgrandfather into complete exhaustion. She was-her mind went blank. She couldn't think of anything. She tried again. It was-

Nope. That was it. She ran out of blessings after two. She opened her purse and dug out her cell phone-prepaid, thirty cents a minute-and dialed home. It picked up on the fourth ring.

"Knox and Hadley household Hudson speaking may I help you please," her son said.

"Hey, lovey, it's Mom. Can you put Granddad on?"

"Okay, Mom. How was police school?"

"We learned about crime scenes tonight, just like on TV. I got some yellow tape from the instructor for you."

"Cool! Are you coming home soon?"

"As soon as I can." In her rearview window, she saw lights. She leaned over and locked the passenger and driver's doors. This is what becoming a cop was doing to her. Nowadays, she assumed every car on the road held a potential threat. She hadn't been that paranoid in big bad LA.

"Hey, honey, what's up?"

She sighed. "My car's not working. Can you call someone to give me a tow? I'm on the Schuylerville Road, about a mile from Route 117."

"Are you okay? What happened?"

"I don't know. All the warning lights came on and then it just sort of… lost power. I'm fine, I just glided off the side of the road."

"Humph. You stay put. I'll pop the kids into my car and we'll come and get you."

"No, no, no." God, no. Her grandfather had terrible night vision. Not to mention the assorted drugs he was taking. "It's already close to nine. It's a school night. I don't want Hudson and Genny up late. Call someplace in town. I'll wait here with the car and get a ride home on the tow truck."

They argued about it back and forth for a while, with Hadley mentally tallying up each thirty cents as it vanished into the airwaves. Eventually, she had to threaten to get out and walk toward town if he and the kids came. That shut him up, except for the grumbling. He promised to call for a tow, and was starting in on a list of things she should do to check the car, when her phone ran out of minutes, right in the middle of "… spark plug connectors…" She was almost grateful.

She sat back, resigned to the wait, letting herself drift in the cooling dark. She tried to recall the last time she had time to sit, nowhere to go, nothing to do. She could remember times when she was pregnant with Hudson. She'd be so tired after getting home from her receptionist gig that she'd sprawl out on the sofa, not eating, not watching TV, not doing anything. Dylan would come home from whatever party he had been working and ask her how the hell she could waste an entire evening doing nothing. She always figured she was doing something. She was growing a baby. Not that he would've given her credit for that.

Lights coming toward her, this time. She sat up to see if it might be the tow truck. It slowed down, its high beams making her squint, then crawled past, a bass line vibrating right through her closed windows. A jacked-up, giant, my-penis-isn't-big-enough Humvee. Or were they Hummers? She couldn't remember. God, she had a test on car recognition next week. She was going to flunk for sure.

Red brake lights bloomed in her rearview mirror. Then white, as the SUV backed up, returning. She sat up straight again. It parked on the opposite shoulder. The back door opened, illuminating the interior, showing her a brief glimpse of four men.

Oh, shit. Why her? Why now? Why couldn't it be some elderly couple on their way home from a revival meeting?

The guy who had exited the back sauntered across the road, the headlights outlining the fluid roll of his hips. Hadley reached inside her purse and grabbed the inactive cell phone. She held it up to her ear and began chatting animatedly with dead air. "So, you'll never believe this, honey, but there's an SUV stopped right across the road from me. A young man's gotten out. I think he wants to help me. No, no, I'll just let him know you're almost here."

He was a young man, maybe Flynn's age, but pimped out in an exaggerated hip-hop style that would have worked a lot better if he had been seventeen. And black. And somewhere else besides the cow country outside Millers Kill. He bent down and smiled at her through the window, and she saw he was Latino. He had three studs spaced along his upper lip, and for a second Hadley forgot to be scared, thinking, How the hell do you eat with that?

"Having car trouble?" His voice sounded flat and faintly accented through the glass.

"I'm fine," she said loudly. "I'm on the phone with my husband, and he's headed over here now." She smiled like an idiot.

"Pop the hood, I'll take a look."

"No, no, that's fine-" He strolled to the front of her decrepit car. Her flashers cycled him from light, to dark, to light again.

"Open the hood!" He smiled while he shouted. It reminded her of Dylan, the way he'd yell, "What's your problem? We're having fun, goddammit!"

She put on her best hapless female look and shrugged. He just smiled again, fished something long and flat out of his commodious cargo pocket, and leaned against the hood. The car dipped. Hadley heard a metallic clunk and the hood flew up, hiding Stud Boy, who, for all she knew, was stripping down her engine.

For the first time since she had been issued her service piece, she wished she had her gun. For two months, it had been too heavy, too alien, too intimidating. Now she wished she could pull it out from the lockbox under her passenger seat and rap on her window and see the look on this guy's face. Not, despite her firing instructor's gung-ho pep talks about "yer best friend," that she'd ever use it.

But, oh, she wished she had it now. Then maybe she wouldn't feel so scared.

Stud Boy ambled back to her door without bothering to replace the hood. "I hate to tell you, but it looks bad. Your alternator belt's broke."

She had no idea if he was bullshitting her or not.

"C'mon, we'll take you where you're going. Pretty girl like you shouldn't be all alone out here." His smile made her flesh crawl.

She held up the useless cell phone. "Thanks, but my husband's already on his way."

He rapped her window with a silver ring in the shape of a skull. He held it out, as if she ought to admire it. He had letters printed over each of his knuckles. Jailhouse tats, inked in with a sharpened pen and a homemade hammer. Oh, shit. His smile grew broader. "If you have a husband, how come you don't have no ring?" His fingers slid down, out of sight, and she heard the click-click of the door as he tried the lock.

She dropped the little-wife routine. Hardened her voice. "I'm not going with you. There's a tow truck on the way… and the man I live with knows where I am." She considered telling him she was a cop, but with nothing to back that up, she figured it would just make her look more scared and desperate.

He kept smiling. He released her door handle and let his fingers glide over the window, creating shapes. She realized he was miming touching her and her stomach flipped over with a nauseated lurch. With his other hand, he beckoned to the Hummer. Across the road, doors swung open and men got out.

Oh, shit, she thought. Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.

"We don't have to take you anywhere," Stud Boy said. "You can just hang out with us in our truck." A short, broad Latino pressed up against her door next to Stud Boy. He had a nervous ferret face that made him look like Peter Lorre.

Click-click. Click-click. He was trying the rear door. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the two others, dark shapes on the passenger side.

Click-click.

"You must be getting cold, stuck out here," Stud Boy said cheerfully. "You come with us. We'll let you warm up." One of the ones on the opposite side of the car said something, and they all laughed.

"You like to party?" Stud Boy asked. "We'll have a party. We'll make you feel real good." He said something over the roof that she couldn't make out, and one of the shadowy figures detached himself from her car and meandered across the road. Back to their SUV. He flung open the driver's door and reached under the dash. Their rear hatch popped open. She thought about the handy do-it-yourself hood opener Stud Boy had produced from his pocket and knew, with the horrible sinking certainty of someone whose luck always ran bad, that the one across the road was going to pull a jimmy strip out of the back of that truck, and she was going to be screwed. In every sense of the word.

She eased her key ring out of the ignition and folded her right hand around it, letting the keys jut up between her fingers. If she pretended to play along and acted scared and helpless-God knew, that wasn't going to take much effort-she figured she'd have one good chance to catch Stud Boy off guard. Keys in his throat, knee in his balls, then the flat of her foot to his kneecap with her weight behind it. If she could put him down-put him down hard so he wasn't getting back up again-the others might back off. She swallowed. Laid her hand on her door rest.

In her rearview mirror, she saw the flash of red and whites.

Oh, God, thank you, God, thank you!

The cruiser rolled in tight behind her vehicle, flooding her interior with the brilliant white light of the kliegs. She couldn't tell if it was a state trooper or the MKPD, but whoever it was, she prayed he was big, hairy, and heavily armed. Stud Boy and his ferret friend stepped away from her window, and the guy on the far side vanished toward the front of her car. A moment later, her hood thunked into place.

Through the glass, she heard the crunch of boots on gravel. "What's going on here?" a man said, his voice hard with suspicion and authority. She could see him outlined in her rearview mirror, tall, big, one hand resting on the butt of his service weapon.

Stud Boy raised his hands placatingly. "Nada, nada. We were just stopping to see if the lady needed any help."

"Yeah? Well, she's got help now. Clear off."

The smaller, weaselly guy scuttled across the road, but Stud Boy hesitated.

"Either you're in your vehicle, or you're facedown in the dirt with my boot in your back. Your choice. You got ten seconds."

Stud Boy glanced at the guy who was still hovering just out of reach at the front of her car, then gestured toward the Hummer. "We don't want any trouble," he said, smiling. His lip piercings glittered in the cruiser's cold white light. He glanced down at Hadley. "Later, pretty girl."

She wrenched her eyes from his and focused on her hands. Holding her keys. Her knuckles were white. She heard the thudding of overengineered doors, and then the Hummer roared to life and, in a spatter of gravel, pulled into the road and vanished.

The boots crunched toward her. The officer squatted down. "Hey," Kevin Flynn said. "Are you all right?"

II

"Your granddad called the station." They were sitting in Flynn's cruiser with the heater on high. Flynn had complained of the cold when he snapped it on, but she knew it was because she was shaking. She couldn't seem to stop. He had kept up a steady flow of chatter, walking her to the cruiser, grabbing her notebook and her criminal justice text, toting the two bags of groceries she had picked up at the Sam's Club down in Albany. It was almost like the way she'd hear him rattling on at the station, except he kept sneaking glances at her when he thought she wasn't looking. Taking her emotional temperature.

"Of course, dispatch isn't manned, most nights. Womanned? I bet Harlene would like womanned. Anyway, his call shot off to the Glens Falls board, and they gave me a squawk, and here I am."

"Thank you." She sounded like Hudson, when she made him thank his little sister. She took a deep breath-it was getting easier the longer she sat in the self-contained world that was the squad car-and tried again. "I mean it. Thank you. They… I was…" She shook her head.

His hand touched her shoulder, so tentatively she might have imagined it. "You don't have to say anything," he said. "And you don't have to thank me."

"You don't understand," she said. "I didn't-I just sat there. Like a victim. Like a babysitter in a horror movie."

"Naw. They scream and run around a lot."

She looked at him.

"Sorry," he said.

"I'm used to taking shit from men, you know? They trash-talk at me, and I flip it right back to them. But these guys… I didn't even tell them I was a cop. You know why? Because I'm not. I'm just a woman who gets dressed up in a costume five days a week and pretends to be one." She leaned forward, bracing her arms on her knees, and his hand fell away instantly. "I am such a failure at this. A failure and a fake."

"What, because you didn't get out of your car and mix it up with four bad dudes? That's just being smart. Hell, if it'd been me in that car with no weapon and no radio, I would've done just what you did. Stay put and keep my mouth shut."

She shook her head again. "You don't need a gun. You have that thing, you know, that cop thing going on. With the hard voice and the take-no-shit attitude." She looked at him again. Eyeing his frame. "You looked huge. I mean, you're tall, but you're not-" She curled her fists and shook her arms in an iron-man pose.

He grinned. "It's a trick I learned from Lyle MacAuley. He leaves his bomber jacket unzipped and kind of spreads his arms out. Makes him look twice as wide as he really is."

She let her mind wrap around that one. "There are tricks to it? As in, performing?"

He twisted in his seat so he could face her. "Sure. Like what you were just talking about. The voice? And the attitude? I just copy the chief. Nobody gives him shit." He paused. "Well, nobody except for Reverend Fergusson." He smiled a little. "Look, when I started at the MKPD, I felt exactly the same way you do now. It was, like, the day after I turned twenty-one. I was sworn in before I'd had my first legal drink. And I was even skinnier than I am now, if you can believe that." He held his arms open, inviting her to gaze upon his skeletal thinness. She didn't see it. He was lean, all right, but in a good way, the way of a healthy young man who hasn't quite finished fleshing out.

"I felt like somebody's little brother, getting to tag along with the big boys. I kept waiting for… I dunno, some TV moment, when I would suddenly stop being Skinny Flynnie and start being bad-ass Officer Flynn."

"Skinny Flynnie?"

He blushed. "That's what they called me in high school."

"Hah. They called me-" She stopped. "Never mind. High school sucks."

"Oh, yeah." He reached out to turn the blower down a few notches, and the way his wrist bones poked out of his shirt cuff did make him look like a teenaged boy. "Anyway, I was working this case last year, interviewing a witness, and she lied to me. She and her husband. I had to go back with the dep and reinterview her. I was really pissed off, thinking about how she'd played me, but then, it suddenly struck me; it was my own fault. Because up here"-he tapped his temple-"I was still Skinny Flynnie. I knew the rules and regs, I had learned the tricks, but I didn't believe."

"Believe." This was starting to sound very California. "In what, yourself?"

He shook his head. "In the power of the suit."

"Okay, you've lost me."

"You know that movie where the dad puts on the Santa suit and he turns into Kris Kringle?"

"The Santa Clause? Oh, yeah. I know it." Hudson and Genny had watched it approximately eight hundred times last December.

"Okay. All this"-he waved his arm around, taking in the computer and the mic and the racked and locked shotgun and his hat balanced on the dashboard-"is the suit. You put on the suit, and you become The Man."

She thought about that for a moment. "I don't know. I've got the uniform and all that, and I still feel like a fraud."

"Just give it time."

Her mouth crooked up. Words of wisdom from a-"Flynn," she said, "how old are you?"

"Twenty-four."

From a kid who was eight years younger than her. She curled into the seat. "I think you may have more time than I do."

Spinning yellow lights appeared on the road ahead of them, resolving into a tow truck. She stirred, ready to get up, but Flynn's hand was in the way. "Gimme your key," he said. "I'll take care of it."

She stripped the key off her ring and dropped it onto his open palm. She watched through the windshield as he spoke with the tow truck operator, handed over the key, and shook the man's hand. Weird. Considering what almost happened with the freaks in the Hummer, she should still be jangling, jumpy, coked up. Instead, she felt as relaxed and boneless as she did in the shampoo girl's chair at the salon.

Letting someone else take care of her.

Huh.

Kevin climbed back into the cruiser and tossed his hat back on the dash. "All set." He turned off his light bar and shifted into gear. "He's taking it to Ron Tucker's garage. Best mechanic in town. He'll do you right." He pulled onto the road. She let the rolling fields and farms slip past them, almost invisible in the darkness.

"Flynn." The question popped into her head from nowhere. "Did you run the plates on those guys?"

He grinned.

"What?"

"There you go. That's thinking like a cop."

"Did you?"

"Of course I did. When I pulled in behind you. The truck's registered to Josefina Feliciano, DOB 7-25-61, POR Brooklyn, New York. Three points down for passing a school bus, no record."

She shook her head. "Did you see the guy who was hassling me? With three studs in his upper lip? He looked like he escaped from an S and M convention."

"Maybe Ms. Feliciano likes to hang out with rough trade."

"You sure the vehicle wasn't stolen?"

"It hasn't been reported. Maybe one of them was Feliciano's son?"

"God. Can you imagine? If my son ever gets anything other than his earlobe pierced-" She pictured the pumped-up SUV and the young men in their city clothes. "What were they doing up here, anyway? It's a little far for a ride in the country. And it's too early for people coming up to do Lake George."

"Hikers? White rafting? Bird-watchers?"

She opened her mouth to shoot him down, then noticed his grin.

"Mexicans and Jamaicans control the pot trade up through the North Country," he said. "Mexicans, for the most part. They bring it up out of the Caribbean and Central America, funnel it through New York City, and distribute it up here."

"You think maybe they were here on business?"

"What do you think?"

"I think we should flag the car. Send out its plate and description to area law enforcement."

"I think you're right, Officer Knox." He grinned again.

"What?"

"Who's The Man? You're The Man. Say it with me now. Who's The Man?"

She mumbled.

"I didn't hear you!"

"I'm The Man! Idiot." She shook her head and looked out the window. Her own reflection, limned by the computer lights, looked back at her. She thought it might be smiling.

III

Amado Esfuentes wiped the sweat from his forehead before tugging his work gloves back on. He reshouldered the spool of electrical cable he had set against the fence post. "Ready?" he asked Raul. Raul groaned as he picked up the buckets of porcelain conductors and screw plates.

"If this was barbed wire, we'd have been done by now," Raul said.

"If you worked as hard as you complain, we'd be done by now." Amado wished, as he had every day in the month since the accident, that his little brother was toiling beside him. Octavio worked more and talked less than any other man on the crew, and when he did have something to say, he didn't whine like Raul. But Octavio was in town, sweeping and polishing for a lady minister and answering to the name "Amado." Meanwhile, Amado was the McGeochs' foreman "Octavio," always partnering Raul because he couldn't, in good conscience, stick any of the others with the laziest guy on the farm.

"Cheer up." Amado let the electrical cable slip off the wooden spool as he walked over the uneven ground toward the next fence post. "We'll be finished and back before lunch," he said. "And this is better for the cows than barbed wire."

Raul gave a detailed suggestion of what Amado might like to do to the cows.

"Oh, I would," Amado said, "but I'm afraid I might hurt them, on account of being so large."

Raul roared with laughter. They reached the next post, and Amado clipped off the cable while Raul screwed an insulating plate into the wood and attached the conductor. Amado threaded the cable through, untwisted the wires, and fastened them around the conductors. Then he did the same thing in the opposite direction for the next length of cable.

Amado tied off the insulated black wire, and they picked up and moved down the line. This portion of the property was divided from the mountain by a swiftly churning stream that cut a hollow almost deep enough to call a gorge in places: an irresistible lure that would mean lost and trapped cows, in the best cases, and broken legs and drowned carcasses in the worst. Amado had no problem taking a little extra time and fencing it off nice and tight.

"Mark my words, they're going to have us back here next month, hauling in watering troughs and throwing hoses into that creek."

Amado, tugging the cable taut, grunted. "It splits, maybe a kilometer from here. One branch runs into the McGeochs' land. The cows can water from that."

Raul stared. "How do you know? We haven't worked this section before."

Amado knew because he had crossed this stream several times in the past weeks, headed up the mountain to meet with Isobel Christie in a high, sheltered meadow that straddled Christie and McGeoch land. Not that he was going to tell Raul that. "I followed the stream that runs past our bunkhouse one evening. I was curious."

Raul shaded his eyes against the strong rays of the morning sun as he followed the path of the water. "You're crazy. I wouldn't get off my bed if I weren't getting-" He took a step forward, then another.

"Hello there. Aren't you forgetting your buckets?"

"What's that?" Raul's voice sounded different. Amado holstered his wire cutters and walked over to where the other man stood, a scant foot away from the crumbling edge of the stream gully. Raul pointed. "There. You see that?"

Amado nodded. It was an odd shape, soft amid the sharp angles of rock and tree and spiky fern. Half hidden in a cluster of bushes and sucker vine. White and red against the brown and gray and green. He stooped, picked up a rock, and lobbed it as hard as he could toward the thing. A cloud of furious flies rose into the air. Something dead.

Raul's lips thinned. "A cow?"

"I don't think so." Amado stepped over the grassy edge, taking a moment to let his boot find a good firm hold in the gully's soil.

"What are you doing?"

"I'm going to take a look."

"Forget it! Whatever it is, it has nothing to do with us! Leave it alone!"

Amado ignored him, making his way down the steeply angled slope step by step, pausing when too much earth crumbled beneath his boots. He reached the water and walked downstream a few yards, until he reached a wide and shallow spot. He forded the stream the same way he descended into the wash, slowly and carefully.

Downstream and downwind, he could smell it. His nose wrinkled and he turned his head without meaning to, overwhelmed by the sour-sweet reek of corruption.

"You're crazy! You'll have the police out here! We'll have to hide in the woods again!"

Amado dipped his neckerchief in the water and held it close to his nostrils. It helped some. He hiked up to where the bushes were dug into the slope with knotted half-visible roots that looked like old men's fingers.

He saw the flat green leaves and the starburst clusters of tiny white flowers. He saw the pale birch saplings trembling in the mountain's exhalation. He saw the dead thing. He saw the bloat, and the burst skin, and the white bone and the gray brain. He saw the place where an animal had chewn off the cloth and started to-

He turned away. Closed his eyes and gritted his teeth against the acid rush of his stomach's contents. He retraced his steps downslope, recrossed the stream, and climbed the opposite side to the gully.

Raul just looked at him. He knew what it was. He had known since he first spotted it. His eyes pleaded with Amado to ignore what they had found. "Let's just go," he whispered. "Finish the fence. We don't have to have seen anything."

Amado shook his head. The…thing caught in the underbrush may have had a family. Had a girl. Had friends. Somewhere, someone was praying. Waiting and hoping and dreading.

"Let's go get the truck," Amado said. "We have to go back."

IV

Clare attributed the sense that she was being watched to her general uneasiness. Standing in the McGeochs' barnyard, struggling to make light conversation with Russ Van Alstyne's sister, was not her idea of a fun way to spend a Friday morning. She kicked out her ankle-length skirt, surreptitiously checking to make sure she hadn't marked the black cotton with dust-or worse-from the barnyard. She had a Eucharist to celebrate at noon, and she didn't want to show up smelling like cow manure.

"So," Janet said. "I'm pleased Amado is working out for you. I mean, with his broken arm and all."

"Mmm." Where was the kid? Janet had called the bunkhouse's phone right after Clare arrived. That had been ten minutes ago. He knew they needed him at the church today. Or at least she thought he did. Giving him directions by reading out of a Spanish-English phrase book left room for misinterpretation.

"So… how's the lady who was driving them-him? The nun."

"Sister Lucia. She's in rehab in Glens Falls. Broken hip. She sounded mighty peeved about it when I called her. They're keeping a close eye on her. She was pretty banged up for a woman her age."

"Ah. Good." Janet shoved her hands in her jeans pockets. " Elizabeth 's down in Albany for a conference?"

"Diaconate training." And what was with Janet? When they had met in the hospital, she had been to-the-point and self-assured. Very… Van Alstyne-like, Clare supposed. Now she was as jumpy as the proverbial long-tailed cat.

"It said in the paper you're having a choral concert tonight." Janet twisted around as she spoke, looking in the direction of the old bunkhouse, hidden from their view by the massive barn.

"Yeah. Last one of the season before the choir disbands for the summer." Clare blinked. It wasn't her imagination. That shadow, the one between the side of the barn and the milk tank. It had moved. "Janet. Is that… Amado?"

The shadow detached itself from the barn and walked into the sunlight. No, not her employee. This clean-shaven man was a half-dozen years older, broader at the shoulders, with two whole muscular arms and the grimly determined expression of someone carrying out an unpleasant duty.

"My," Clare said. "You certainly got those legal replacement workers fast."

Janet's mouth opened. Clare could see her casting about for a denial. Then she shut her mouth. Her face collapsed into lines of guilt and anxiety. "You can't tell. I mean it, Clare, we could be seriously screwed if you told."

Clare sighed. "How long have they been here?"

"The first one got here the morning after the accident. The last one"-she flicked her fingers in the direction of the man crossing the barnyard toward them-"got in two days later."

"Did you check their papers?"

"Of course we did!" Janet ran her fingers through her blond hair. Clare could see where her roots were coming in, sandy brown and gray like her brother's. "They were all fakes. Just like the one Agent Hodgden showed us."

The man was almost to them. "Janet, have you and your husband thought this through? I mean, not just about the fines or what all you'll be liable for. What about Russ?"

"What about him?"

Clare put her hands on her hips. "Playing dumb doesn't suit you."

Janet exhaled. "He's not going to find out. We keep them out of sight if someone's here."

"Oh. You mean, like right now?"

"He's not supposed to come into the barnyard if he sees-" her voice switched abruptly from panic to control. "Hola, Octavio. ¿Qué pasa?"

"Señora McGeoch," he said. His dark eyes flickered toward Clare. She could see a resemblance to Amado, in his aristocratic cheekbones and his nose like an adze. She remembered what Paula Hodgden had said, about groups of men coming from the same village. If it was anything like Millers Kill, they were all related in some degree. "Señora Reverenda."

She nodded. "Hola."

"Raul y yo cercábamos el pasto lejano-" He broke off. Looked at the expression of incomprehension on Janet's face, an expression Clare knew was mirrored on her own.

"I fix fence. Encontré un hombre muerto." He spoke slowly and clearly. "Hombre muerto." He pointed past the barn, once, twice, three times. A long way that way.

Janet gaped. "A dead man?"

He nodded. "Dead." He held a finger like a gun next to the back of his head. "Man." He gestured toward himself, then expanded his arms, as if he were growing larger.

Bloating, Clare realized.

"Oh, my God." Janet's knees buckled. Clare and the man-Octavio-caught her by her arms. "Oh, my God," Janet repeated. "Oh, my God."

"Octavio," Clare said, "El hombre es muerto con-" she couldn't begin to guess the Spanish word for gun. She shifted, so she could support Janet with one hand, and made the same gesture he had, finger and thumb. "Bang-bang?"

His lips twitched, but he kept from smiling. "Sí. Bang- bang. Allí hacia fuera lo están por un rato." He pinched his nose and waved his hand in the air, as if dispelling a foul smell.

"No-uh, ¿Muerto naturale?"

He shook his head. "Bang-bang." He touched the back of his head again and, for a second, something moved behind his eyes. The photographic image of horror, that, Clare knew from personal experience, would never, ever leave him. She reached out and squeezed his forearm. He looked at her, surprised.

"Are you okay?" She hoped her quiet tone would convey everything she couldn't communicate with words.

His expression eased. "Estoy bien. Gracias. I am okay."

A nasty thought occurred to her. "Janet, are you sure every one of your missing workers showed up?"

Janet nodded. "Well, unless there was an extra man coming along they hadn't told us about."

"El hombre. Es anglo? Or-um-Latino? Un amigo?"

"No Anglo. Latino. No amigo. Un extranjero."

"A stranger?" Clare said. The man-Octavio-looked at her steadily. Across the barrier of language, she suspected they were both thinking the same thing: If it isn't one of the McGeochs' workers, who could it be?

"Oh, my God," Janet said again. "Somebody's killed an illegal on our land. What am I going to do?"

Clare shook her. "First, you're going to stand up." Janet took a deep breath and got her legs underneath her. "Then, you're going to call the police."

"I can't! What am I going to say? That my illegal employee whom I should have turned in to the ICE found a body on my property?"

Clare frowned, thinking. "It may not be important who found the body." She turned to Octavio. "Did you touch anything? Touch," she mimed poking, picking at, opening, "el hombre?"

He shook his head. Held up his hands. "No."

"Okay, then." She looked at Janet. "What was Octavio doing and where was he doing it?"

Janet took another deep breath. "He's our foreman. He and one of the other men were stringing electrical fencing. Out at the farthest pasture. About three miles from here, right up against the mountain."

"Is that a job you can do?"

"Of course." Janet's face cleared. "Of course! I was the one who found the body."

"Okay. Take Octavio with you to show you where, and as soon as he's done that, he can take off." There was a small voice in the back of her head suggesting that none of this was a good idea. She ignored it.

"I can stop by the bunkhouse on the way out and tell the hands to hide."

Clare raised her eyebrows. "They're in the bunkhouse?"

Janet looked down at her sneakers. "That's the drill if anyone pulls into the barnyard. Get out the back of the barn as quickly as possible and go to the bunkhouse."

Clare shook her head. "You have got to find some way of getting these guys papers. There's no way you can carry on like this for the entire summer." She rubbed at the back of her neck, where sweat was gathering beneath her dog collar. "I suppose Amado is hiding out there?"

The foreman looked at her.

"Yeah," Janet said.

"Well, tell him it's okay to come out. We've got to get the church cleaned for the Eucharist and then ready for the concert tonight."

Janet clutched Clare's arm. "You can't go!"

"Janet, you don't need me. Let Octavio show you where the body is, and then as soon as he's out of sight, call the MKPD."

"I need you to call them for me!"

"Me? Why?"

"Because I'm a terrible liar. You'll be able to do it so much more convincingly."

Boy, if that didn't win the prize for backhanded compliments. She thought of another summer, Russ, grinning at her from the driver's seat of his pickup. You're pretty sneaky, for a priest.

"Please, Clare. Please, please, please."

"Oh, good Lord." She tilted her head up toward the clear blue sky. "All right. I'll give you ten minutes to get there, and then I'll call. But I think it's muddying the waters unnecessarily."

"Thank you!" Janet hugged her, hard. "Cell phones can get tricky out here. Go ahead and use the phone in the tack room." She whirled and, beckoning to the foreman to follow her, vanished around the barn. A moment later, Clare heard an engine fire up.

It struck her that she was going to be on the fringes of a police investigation. Again. The bishop was not going to be happy with her. Her deacon was not going to be happy with her. Russ was most definitely not going to be happy with her.

That thought, at least, cheered her up. She headed into the barn to find the phone.

V

"Fifteen fifty-seven, this is Dispatch."

Russ slowed behind an eighteen-wheeler signaling to turn into the Wal-Mart. He nodded to the officer riding beside him. "Go ahead. Pick it up."

Hadley Knox unclipped the mic and switched it on. "Fifteen fifty-seven, go ahead, Dispatch."

"What's your forty?"

"Uh… Morningside Drive, headed toward Fort Henry."

Outside the garden shop at the Wal-Mart, they had wading pools and riding mowers. He shook his head. Memorial Day was less than a week away. It had only been a little over four months, and they had already slid through two seasons. Was this how it was going to be for the rest of his life? Him, pinned to a snow-ravaged crossroads in January while the world reeled about him?

Harlene's voice slammed his book of remonstrance shut. "We have a report of human remains found on the property at Three-fifteen Lick Springs Road."

Knox stared at the mic. "Human remains? You mean, like a dead body?"

Russ should have corrected her response, but he was too busy trying to envision the farms along the Lick Springs Road. He had a bad feeling he wasn't going to like this. He gestured for the mic. "Harlene," he said, "isn't that my brother-in-law's new place?"

"You got it, Chief."

Christ on a bicycle. That spread had more trouble attached to it than the Dew Drop Inn on a Saturday night. "What do we know?"

"Possible gunshot victim. Latino. Not fresh. No identification as yet."

"Latino?" His stomach soured. Christ. None of the men who had fled the van wreck had been spotted since that night in April. What if one of them had been hurt bad? Not fresh. Yeah, a month-plus out in the open would definitely be not fresh.

"You call the ME?"

"Doc Scheeler from the Glens Falls Hospital is covering for Dr. Dvorak. He's on his way now, along with the bag boys."

"I want Lyle to run the Lost-and-Missing and have it ready for me when I get back."

"He's already on it."

"And get hold of that ICE agent who was supposed to follow up on the missing guest workers." Maybe whoever found the body had been mistaken. Nobody liked to look at a ripe one any longer than necessary-especially his brother-in-law, a guy who got upset when their barn cat killed a mouse. "Who called it in, Mike McGeoch?"

There was a pause. "I believe Mrs. McGeoch found the body."

He sighed. "We're on our way. Fifteen fifty-seven out." He switched on the light bar and stepped on the gas.

"She said gunshot victim. Does that mean it's a homicide?" He stole a glance at his newest officer. Unlike Kevin Flynn, who would be sparking like a live wire at the thought of responding to a violent crime, Knox just looked sick.

"It may be a gunshot victim. My sister-Mrs. McGeoch-isn't any expert. I'd rather go in there with an open mind and see what the scene and the ME can tell us. It could be an accident, suicide-lots of possibilities."

"Oh."

He glanced at her again. "You ever see a dead body before?"

"My grandmother. At the funeral home. I'm guessing this one won't be laid out on satin with an ugly arrangement of carnations draped over him."

Okay. If she could keep her sense of humor, she'd be fine. "Why don't you tell me what we need to do and what we'll be looking for once we get there."

She went through the list with minimal prodding from him, and by the time they emerged from the mountain road into the bright sunshine spilling across the valley he felt confident she could handle herself without a lot of babysitting on his part.

"Is that your sister's house?" Knox asked, pointing to the bungalow ahead.

"No, she and her husband live a few miles down the road. This farm's a new addition to-" He broke off. Janet's car was parked on a denuded piece of earth angled between the massive central barn and the silos, and right next to it was a bright red Subaru WRX. As he pulled in, he saw the old bumper stickers, THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH WELCOMES YOU and MY OTHER CAR IS AN OH-58 had been joined by JESUS IS COMING: LOOK BUSY. His throat felt thick with anticipation and dread.

"Isn't that Reverend Clare's car?" Knox asked. Her eyes went round. "Oh," she said. "Sorry."

He killed the engine. Turned to look at his juniormost officer, who had the same expression he'd expect to find if she'd lost the key to the evidence locker.

"Sorry? What for?"

She had one of those birthstone rings on her finger. She twisted it around in a circle, not meeting his eyes. "Um," she said. "Deputy Chief MacAuley told me not to mention the Reverend around you."

Sweet tap-dancing Jesus. "He did, huh?"

She nodded. "Or St. Alban's."

He opened the door and got out. Popped the locker and retrieved the backpack with their basic evidence kit and a fistful of bright purple non-latex gloves. She got out on her side, and he tossed her a pair. "You don't happen to know if that suggestion was just for you or for the whole department, do you?"

She shrugged, clearly wishing she had never brought the matter up.

Christ only knew what MacAuley had told the rest of the force. Either that he'd break down sobbing or go postal at any reminder of his… his former relationship.

Beloved, his inner voice corrected.

He shook it off. "Officer Knox. In the future, please feel free to talk about the reverend, or St. Alban's, or any other citizen or organization in town. Nobody is off limits to me."

Clare is.

The small side door of the central barn swung open, and she emerged. After picturing her in her BDUs for the past month, he was startled to see her sober clericals: black skirt, black blouse, white collar, silver cross. He became aware of Knox's nervous glance toward him at the same moment he realized he was staring.

"Reverend Fergusson," he said.

"Chief Van Alstyne." She looked at Knox and smiled. "Hi, Hadley. I thought you were teamed up with Officer Flynn."

Knox shook her head. "That was just the one time. Usually, I ride with one of the older officers."

"Mmm." She glanced at Russ, and her eyes lit with a well-worn private joke. "There're few older than Chief Van Alstyne."

"Don't start with me," he said, irrationally pleased that she was teasing him. He glanced over her shoulder, toward the gaping entrance to the barn. "Where's Janet?"

"I believe she's going to meet you halfway and show you the location of the body. It's at the far end of the property, where the new electrical fencing is going up."

"What are you doing here? Please don't tell me you were with her when she found it."

Clare shook her head. "I came to pick up Amado."

He looked at her blankly.

"The kid with the broken arm? Our interim sexton."

Oh, yeah. A fourteen-dollar name for the temporary janitor. "I remember."

"Janet asked me to call it in and wait for… whoever showed up. She said cell phones rarely work out there."

"Did she give you a description of what she saw?"

Clare paused. When she spoke, she spoke as if dictating for an unseen recorder. "The body is a male Latino, bloated, with damage to the back of the skull that might be from a gunshot wound."

"Did she recognize him as one of the missing workers?"

She shook her head. "No. She was sure it wasn't one of them."

"How?"

She blanked. "Uh… pictures?"

"Anything else? Description? Clothing?"

"No. Janet was pretty upset." She looked into his eyes. "Go easy on her when you talk to her, okay?"

"As easy as I can."

She nodded. Turned and pointed to the other side of the barn. "There's a two-rut road running between the big barn and those outbuildings that leads toward the mountain. She took that."

A black GMC Scout slowed on the road and turned into the barnyard, doglegging tight to park on the other side of Janet's car. Russ didn't recognize the car, but he wasn't surprised to see the Glens Falls pathologist get out. By his jeans and WASHINGTON COUNTY SOFTBALL LEAGUE T-shirt, Russ deducted they had interrupted Scheeler's Saturday morning game.

"Chief Van Alstyne." Scheeler crossed toward their small group. "Good to see you again." He shook Russ's hand. The clip-bearded pathologist radiated the kind of intellectual intensity Russ associated with revolutionaries and Jesuits. Now he trained that intensity on Russ. "I was so sorry to hear about your wife. It must have been a great loss."

"Yes. Thank you." Russ inhaled. "You haven't met our newest officer, Hadley Knox." Knox and the pathologist shook hands. "And this is the Reverend Clare Fergusson."

Scheeler's dark eyebrows went up as he shook Clare's hand. "Are you the one who found the decedent, Ms. Fergusson?"

Russ answered for her. "No. Unfortunately, that was my sister."

Scheeler's attention returned to him. "You do have a small town here, don't you? Is this going to be awkward?"

Only if she killed the guy. He pinched the bridge of his nose. Why had he come back to his hometown for this job? He knew there had been a reason, but damned if he could remember it.

"I arrested my mother a couple years ago," Russ said. "I figure I can handle questioning my sister. If I have to rough her up, I'll just ask Officer Knox to take over."

"Chief?" Knox's eyes went round again.

"He's joking, Hadley." Clare gave him a we-are-not-amused look. Scheeler's black eyes glinted. Russ gestured toward the Scout with his head.

"Does that thing have four-wheel drive?"

"It wouldn't do me much good in the winter if it didn't."

"Can we take it? We have to get across a few pastures to the site, and our squad car isn't built for off-roading."

"As long as I can bill the town for the car wash afterward."

"You got it," Russ said. "Throw in a wax, too."

"Do we need to wait for the State Crime Scene truck?"

"We haven't called them in yet. You're here to help us figure out if this is a crime scene."

Scheeler nodded. "Let's go see, then. Officer Knox?" The pathologist ushered the young officer toward the SUV.

Russ turned toward Clare. "I know asking you to stay away is a lost cause, but-"

She raised her hands. "My part in this is done. I'm collecting Amado and heading back to St. Alban's. I-"

"No, no, no!"

"What?"

"Your interim sexton is the only person I have who might be able to ID our body. I need him."

"Why? Because he's Latino? I told you, the dead man isn't one of the missing workers."

"How do you know?"

"I-" She poked at her hair, twisted into a knot at the back of her head. Her eyes slid past him to examine the silos. He frowned. She wasn't being straight with him.

"Clare…?"

"I don't know," she blurted out. "But I really do need Amado. We have to get the church cleaned up after the noon Eucharist and ready for the choir concert tonight, and then put it back to rights after the concert." She glanced at her watch, a steel-edged Seiko hanging from a much-worse-for-wear khaki strap. "He should be done for the afternoon by three or four. Could you wait until then?"

He exhaled. "I'll send someone by St. Alban's to pick him up. If you promise me you won't discuss anything you know with him beforehand."

"I promise," she said, holding up two fingers like a Girl Scout. "Most of our communicating is done via the Pocket Guide to Useful Spanish Phrases, anyway."

"Yeah? How useful is it?"

"It would be great if I needed to tell him how long I wanted a hotel room or rental car. It's a little thin on 'Help me move this pew' and 'Can you vacuum here?' "

He snorted. "I bet. Look, what time do you need him back?"

"The concert's from seven to eight, so-" She frowned. "Wait a minute. It doesn't take four hours to identify a body."

"I may need to ask him a few questions."

"A few questions! The boy doesn't know a word of English."

"Entonces es una buena cosa que sé hablar español."

She looked at him, suspicion glittering green in her hazel eyes. "I want you to promise me you'll accord him the same rights and warnings you would any English-speaking citizen."

"What do you think I'd do?"

"I don't know. But I know you. You've got an unexplained dead man in your town, and that's going to ride you and ride you like a jockey with a whip until you can figure out who and what and where and why. I don't want my poor sexton getting trampled because he's in the way."

He blinked. I know you. "Okay," he said.

"Okay?"

"I won't treat your guy any different than I would anyone else."

Her mouth quirked, one-sided. "I'm not sure that's a comfort."

"You know what I mean."

She nodded. "Yes. I do." Their words hung in the air like dust motes floating through the late-morning sun. He had that sense that he only ever got around Clare, that they were saying one thing and talking about something entirely different.

"So." She studied her watch. Glanced toward the barn. "I guess I'll see you around."

"Yeah." He took a step toward the waiting Scout. Turned back toward her. "How have you been?"

She looked surprised. "Good. I've been good. Keeping busy. Last Sunday was Pentecost, that's a big one, and this evening we've got the concert, and then the parish picnic is coming up next week, So… busy. Good." She looked at him, with her eyes that always seemed to say You can tell me anything, and it'll be all right. "You?"

"I'm doing okay. Still at my mom's for the time being."

She nodded. "I bet that helps. Both of you."

"Yeah. I-" Miss you. He cleared his throat.

"¿Señora Reverenda?" They both turned to see the young man they had been discussing lope across the barnyard, a small duffel bag clutched in his good hand.

"This way, Señor Esfuentes." Clare pointed toward her car, already moving, already leaving him. "Sorry," she called over her shoulder. "I can't be late for the noon Eucharist. Say hi to your mother for me." And then she was gone, slipping into her Subaru, starting up the engine before the kid had even shut his door. Eager to get away from him. Not that he could blame her.

The Scout honked. Knox powered down the window. "Are you coming, Chief?"

He nodded. Better this way. He climbed into the backseat. "Let's go," he said.

VI

She had worried about not knowing what to do. She had worried about not fouling the scene. She had worried about looking like a raw newbie with nothing but the fig leaf of eight weeks of classes to cover her.

What she should have worried about was her breakfast.

"You all right?" Chief Van Alstyne patted her back. In response, the rest of her stomach lurched up and out and spattered onto the ferns and grass at the creek's edge. Oh, God.

"Nothing to be embarrassed about," he said. "We've all done it."

From her doubled-over vantage point, Hadley saw jeans and sneakers approaching. "He throws up all the time," Mrs. McGeoch said. Now that Hadley had fallen apart, the chief's sister seemed a whole lot calmer. "Here. Water from the truck. It's clean." Hadley squirted a cupful into her mouth. It was hot and tasted of plastic. She bent over again and spat it into the creek.

"I do not," the chief said, over her back.

"You do, too. You throw up when you're stressed."

"If I threw up when I was stressed I wouldn't be able to leave the damn bathroom for more than ten minutes at a time."

Hadley straightened. "Sorry," she croaked.

"Don't worry about it," the chief said. She heard the snapping of footsteps through the brush and then Scheeler's voice.

"If we didn't vomit five or six times the first year of medical school, the professors didn't think they were doing their job."

Hadley wiped her mouth with her sleeve and turned toward the pathologist, keeping her eyes on him so as not to glimpse the bloated, fly-blasted corpse.

"I remember this one old coot," he went on, "used to have us drink urine. We were supposed to be able to-"

The chief peered at her face. "I don't think that's the best topic of conversation right now."

"Oh. Right. All right, then, let's talk about John Doe, here. Or maybe we should call him Juan Doe."

"That is a gunshot wound, isn't it?" the chief said.

Scheeler nodded. "The occipital entry point has been enlarged by animal depredation"-Hadley's stomach lurched again when she translated the med-speak as animals ate his brains-"but there's no doubt. I suspect, from the lack of any anterior damage, I'll be digging out a small load. Maybe a twenty-two."

"Knox." The chief's voice, addressing her, caused her to snap to. "Tell me what you can infer from what Doctor Scheeler here has told us."

"Uh…" She took a deep breath. The surfaces of things seemed hallucinogenically bright; the sun bouncing off the chief's uniform buttons, the razor edges of the willow leaves drooping toward the ground. "A twenty-two. Not much stopping power. Whoever killed him would have had to have been pretty close."

"Do you think it could have been a hunting accident?"

"Do people hunt with twenty-twos?"

Scheeler snorted.

"Yes," the chief said, his voice patient.

"Uh… no. A hunting accident would mean someone mistook him for an animal from a distance, or discharged their weapon up close by mistake. A shot in the back of the skull doesn't jibe with either of those."

"Good."

She was surprised to find she felt better.

"I very much doubt that the guy was a farmworker, not with two-hundred dollar sneakers and that trendy jacket. So what was he doing out here?"

"Flynn told me Mexicans sell most of the pot up here. Maybe he was a dealer?"

"The gangs dominate wholesale distribution. They have networks of locals who do the retailing."

"Maybe a carnie from Lake George?" the pathologist suggested.

"Maybe. I'm going to put in a call to the state CSI, see if we can get Morin or Haynes over here with the van. I want you to get up to the top of that rise in the woods-" the chief pointed to where the mountain first flanked up from the creek bed-"and start working downward. You're looking for anything: fiber, hair, impressions, cartridges."

She nodded.

"Do you think he was rolled from above?" Scheeler asked.

"Can you assure me he didn't drop where Janet found him?"

The pathologist shook his head. "It's been at least a month. His blood patterns are gone."

"It's a funny spot to be hanging around, waiting to get shot. But if he got tapped up there, he might easily roll until he lodged against that bush." He turned toward his sister, who was hanging back at the edge of the stream. "Janet, is that still your property?"

"Yeah. It goes back into the hills a ways, until you see some blaze markers. It's useless land."

The chief's mouth thinned. "Not entirely. It's a pretty good place to hide a murder."

VII

So far, Hadley hadn't found much in common between her old job guarding cons and her new job policing them, but working the crime scene was just like watching the cell block during open hour: a combination of detailed observation and mind-numbing boredom. Under Van Alstyne's direction, she squatted in the grass and scrub brush, parting saplings and peering under dock leaves for some bit of evidence. She worked her way up to where the chief stood, surmounting a heavily wooded rise. He did a 360, taking in the thick forest behind them and the fields spreading out below.

"Who the hell was this guy?" She didn't think he was speaking to her. "Damn, I want a look at the lost-and-missing file."

Across the stream, at the top of the bluff, the state CSI van had pulled in. A figure emerged from the driver's side. The chief pointed. "Knox, get over there and help Morin with his gear."

She thudded down the hill, picked her way across the stream, and climbed up to the van. Sergeant Morin of the NYSPD shook her hand, looked at her chest, stuttered a hello, and had her take one end of a footlocker-sized box. They staggered down to the stream, heels digging into the crumbling earth, the flesh at the back of Hadley's neck creeping and itching the closer they got to the body.

"Do you know if anybody moved him?" Morin asked.

Her eyes involuntarily went to the John Doe. "The chief thinks he might have rolled…" Her voice trailed off.

Dr. Scheeler glanced up at her. "Uh-oh," he said.

"No." She shook her head. "It's not that. His hand." She could only see one. The other was rubber-banded inside a brown paper bag. "The tattoos. The symbols on his fingers. I saw two guys with the same tattoo. Last night."

VIII

The barn was on the edge of a pasture ringed with woods, the last things left, he guessed, from a long-ago homestead that hadn't worked out. From his side, a half-hidden trail led down the mountain, over the stream, and onto the McGeochs' land. On her side, a rutted sheep-churned path broad enough to admit a hay cart. Leading, he guessed, to her home.

The barn stood beside an oval fire pond levied up around a creek some long-ago summer. From inside the open doorway, Amado watched the sluggish trickle, water in through one bank, out through the other.

The first time Isobel had brought him here had been a few hours before dawn, the night they met. She had left him there, to sleep away the morning, and when she'd returned that afternoon, they had found a fox skeleton against the cut-stone foundation. The skull, smooth and yellow-white, was their signal. Right now, it hung on a nail on the pasture-side door, letting her know, if she saw it, that he was here. Waiting for her.

It was a pole barn, straight up and down, designed for one thing: to store hay against the hard, long winter. The doorways, front and back, were set hay-wagon high, and he had to haul himself up to the edge and then climb a stack of square bales before getting to his feet. Then he could either climb again, to sit on one of the massive beams transversing the barn, or spread out the quilt she had left on the mound of loose hay in the corner. He usually chose the beam or sat cross-legged on the hard bales. The soft mow and the quilt were too casual, too… sexual. No need to chase temptation.

This had been her special place before she had ever shown it to him. She had a crate filled with books, CDs, a CD player, and water bottles. He knew she smoked here, too, though she never did so in front of him; there was a lingering smell of marijuana above the green and dusty scent of the new and old hay.

He balanced on the beam and peeked through the small off-center window that looked out over the pasture. His rib cage lifted, expanded, when he spotted her making her way across the field, stepping over sheep droppings and swishing at early daisies. It was stupid, he knew. Stupid and dangerous. At home, if she had been one of them, he could have courted her, met her brothers, taken her to his parents' home. Here, they couldn't even be seen together.

No, it was more than that. Here, he couldn't let himself think about her in that way. She was anglo, a North American, part of a family that owned, as near as he could tell from their halting conversations, an entire mountain and the rolling farmlands around it. And she was tangled in darkness and violence. If he hadn't gotten that message on the night they met, he would have figured it out today, when Raul had stumbled across a murdered man halfway between her property and the McGeochs'. No. She was out of bounds, for more reasons than he could count.

It wasn't as if she were a great beauty. She was too pale, the bones in her face too square. It was, he guessed, because she reminded him of girls he had admired at home. She was rounded, womanly, but tough. A hard worker. Quick to smile, but not cheap and available, like so many of the women up north. And she needed him, needed his strength, in some way he hadn't yet identified.

She vanished from his line of sight, to reappear in a moment at the back door, swinging a paper sack up onto the hay before lifting herself over the edge of the doorway. "Amado?" She blinked in the dimmed light. "I have lunch. Um, la comida."

He dropped down from the beam. "Oh!" She clapped her hand to her chest and said something in English too rapid for him to follow. He held his hand to his ear. "Eh?" he said.

"Eh?" She laughed.

"Lunch," he said. "I am hungry."

"¿Yo hambre?"

"Tengo hambre," he corrected. He grabbed the quilt and snapped it open, letting it float down on the hay bales to make a picnic cloth. She opened the sack and removed paper napkins and sandwiches and corn chips and apples. They sat on opposite sides. Not touching. The sandwich was delicious, real bread stuffed thick with meat and cheese. He wondered if she had made it for him or taken one that was meant for another of her family. He wondered if she felt the high, hard bars that kept them apart. He wondered what she thought of him when she was alone.

"Por qué… you… here now?" she said, around a handful of corn chips. "No work por la día?"

"Hide," he said. He swallowed the last of his sandwich. He didn't know if he was bringing trouble to her door, or if he was helping her avoid it, but he had to tell her about the dead man. It was too near to her land and too soon after her flight through the woods to be coincidental.

He spoke in Spanish, wanting to tell the whole story before trying to pick out the words and concepts he could convey to her in English. He told her about the smell, and the way it seemed to linger inside his nostrils all the way back to the barnyard. He told her about the surprise of seeing his brother Octavio's lady priest, and Mrs. McGeoch's near collapse, and about rounding up the men-again-and having to deal with their whining about the heat and boredom of the ancient farmhouse they bunked in. He told her about hiding in the woods until the last possible moment, watching the black truck roll up and disgorge two policía.

All the while, she listened intently, though he doubted she understood one word in ten. And when he finished, she tilted her head to one side, looked at him as if she knew exactly what he'd been going through, and said, "I'm sorry. Lo siento."

He took a deep breath. "I find a dead man," he said in English. "By the water."

Isobel went very still. No surprise. No horror. Instead, her eyes, usually as brown and deep as rich coffee, went flat. As if she was looking in, rather than out. "By the water," she said. "Where? ¿Dónde es?"

He didn't know the English word, so he made rippling, winding motions. "El arroyo." He arched his hand up and over, representing the mountain, then traced the water's course along the imaginary edge of the property.

She drew her knees up and bent her head forward. Her face disappeared behind a curtain of hair. "¿La policía?" she asked, after a while.

"Yes." He felt sick at the thought she had something to do with the bloated thing he had seen that morning, but he had to curl his hands into fists to keep from taking her by the shoulders and drawing her near. She looked up at him. Her eyes shone with tears. She said something low and rapid he couldn't make out, and he realized, at bottom, it didn't matter what she had done, he would still help her in any way he could.

"I help you," he said.

She shook her head.

"Please," he said.

She smiled, just a little, and the change in her expression broke the water in her eyes so that tears rolled down her cheeks. She said something else-he caught the word "man" and the word "good"-and then reached out and took one of his hands in hers.

He squeezed it. "I help you," he insisted.

She looked at him for a long moment. Finally, she nodded. "Okay." She rose, tugging him up with her. She released his hand, scooped up the empty paper sack, and walked across the bales to the open doorway. She jumped to the ground with an easy grace, and he followed her as she slipped around the corner. She stopped, dropped the sack on the grass, and traced the edges of the clapboards where they butted against the stone foundation.

Isobel tugged one of the peeling boards. "Help me," she said. He stood beside her, wedged his fingers into the narrow gap between one board and the next, and pulled. Once, twice, and a four-foot section of board came off, reeling him backward. She plunged her hands into the narrow slice of darkness. There was something odd about it, a space where there shouldn't have been any more than a few inches to the interior lathing, but before he could get close enough to study it, she hauled out the biggest, ugliest pistol he had ever seen and thrust its butt end toward him.

He dropped it. "De qué joder!"

She was still digging around inside the gap. He stared at the gun, horrified. She dragged something else from the interior and turned toward him. She had a hard-covered writing tablet in one hand and a cell phone in the other. She followed his gaze to the gun. Her eyes widened. Whatever she said was unintelligible to him, but he got the gist of it. He grabbed the thing awkwardly, trying not to touch the trigger, the barrel, or the grip. He wound up pinching it between two white-jointed, sweat-slick fingers, as if he were holding a dead rat that weighed eight pounds. He eased the gun into the sack. He had no idea if it was ready to fire or not. He didn't even know how to check to see if it was loaded.

She dropped the notebook on the grass. Considered the sleek, flat cell phone in the other. Finally, she shoved it into her jeans pocket. Reaching back inside the space, she emerged with a large padded envelope, the kind of thing used to post books or small presents. She pressed against the sides, popping the top open and tipped it upside down over the paper bag. With a mixture of fascination and repulsion, he watched as brick after brick of American cash thudded into the sack.

She bent down, retrieved the writing tablet, and stuffed it into the mailer. She put it back into her hiding space. Picked up the board and fitted it over the gap. Wedged it back into place.

The sack was still dangling, open, from his nerveless fingers. Isobel took it and rolled its edges down until it resembled an oversized lunch bag. She held it out to him. "Hide," she said.

God almighty above. He looked at the unremarkable brown paper sack in his hand. Looked at her face, full of desperation and fear and hope. "Isobel," he said. He cradled her cheek in one hand. How could he ask her what he wanted to know? Did you kill that man? Is this your gun?

"Amado." Only a whisper between them. Then she stepped toward him and not even that remained. Slowly, shyly, she wrapped her arms around him. He dropped the sack. Cupped her face in both hands.

He didn't know what made him tear his eyes away from her, toward the woods at the other end of the pasture. An instinct for self-preservation forged during two illegal crossings, maybe. Whatever it was, he looked-and saw a burly, blond Anglo framed in the footpath's opening. Even from that distance, he could tell the man was related to Isobel.

"Mierda," he whispered.

Isobel whirled. Inhaled. Turned to him. "Go," she said.

He shook his head. He wasn't about to leave her to face her family alone. "No. You come."

"Please! Go! Vamanose!" She glanced back over her shoulder. Said something fast and full of despair. She pushed at him. "Please, Amado, please. Go. No come back. I okay."

"No!"

She dragged him around the corner of the barn, out of sight of the approaching man, and pinned him in place with her body. "You no come back! I okay. He-" She struggled to find a word, then sliced her finger across her throat. Then she leaped over all those high bars and good reasons keeping them apart as easily as she jumped from the haymow and kissed him.

Time stopped in an endless moment of soft and wet and the taste of coffee and corn chips. His breath caught and his eyes fluttered shut, and then she pulled away and shoved him toward the woods. He tucked the sack under his arm and ran, his mind fogged, until the thrash of branches and the sawing of his own breath alerted him to the fact that a blind man could follow the noisy trail he was making. He stopped, chest heaving. Wait. He had to make sure she was all right.

He doubled back toward the barn, slipping between hemlocks and birch trees. He stayed low, sticking to shadows and scrub brush. He spotted a deadfall pine, moldering into the forest floor, and he dropped belly-down next to it.

He could hear them, faintly, the big man bellowing and Isobel yelling. He was demanding, she was defying-that Amado got from the pitch of their voices. Then-oh, God-there was the meaty sound of flesh hitting flesh. Isobel shrieked. He heard it again. He was up from his hiding place, up and moving, his hand flailing at the paper bag, reaching for the gun, when he heard her, over the sound of his thudding feet.

"Amado!" He skidded to a stop. She wasn't calling his name. She was… naming him. He moved closer, tree to tree to tree. He could hear her, sobbing. "Amado, okay?" she said. Then more-between the weeping and the English, he couldn't make it out-but he heard her say "McGeochs" clear enough.

His fingers curled around the butt of the gun. Through the leaves, he could make out the top half of the barn. He dropped the sack and fell to his stomach again, crawling through the underbrush until he could see.

Isobel was curled on the ground, trapped between the barn and the big man. She had both arms wrapped around her in futile protection. She shook with sobs. Her lip was bleeding. Amado brought the gun up and sighted it. The bastard's back was wide enough; even an inexperienced shot couldn't miss.

Then Isobel's attacker bent over and scooped her up. He cradled her tenderly, making soothing noises, stroking her back and hair. She clung to the monster, still weeping, and buried her face in his shoulder.

Amado lowered the gun. He turned away, fighting to keep his gorge down. He knew what that was. He had seen it before. There were a few women in his village whose husbands would beat them Saturday night and woo them Sunday morning. But he was sure Isobel was unmarried. A brother, then? Or an uncle? He stared at the gun in his hand, heavy and unfamiliar, and almost dropped it again. Sweet mother of Christ. Had the bearded giant been hitting Isobel because he had seen her with a dark-skinned man? Or because this was missing?

Hide, she had said. Hide. He bent, scooped up the sack he had dropped, and replaced the gun inside. Slowly, carefully, he threaded his way through the trees. Back toward the McGeochs' land. To do what she had asked him to do.

IX

The first person Kevin ran into as he snuck into the station that afternoon was the deputy chief. "What the hell are you doin' here?" MacAuley asked.

"Uh… I wanted to get in a little early for my shift."

"An hour early? Damn, boy, your hair's still wet."

"I showered at the gym. I was working out."

MacAuley's caterpillar eyebrows went up. "You. Were working out." He thwacked Kevin on the chest with a manila folder. "I thought you were more into pickup basketball games."

Kevin shrugged.

MacAuley shook his head and looked upward, to where acoustic tiles covered the hallway's original plaster ceiling. "God help us all," he said. He thumbed toward the briefing room. "May as well get back there. You can tell the chief about your stop last night."

"My what?"

MacAuley looked at him impatiently. "You stopped to pick up Knox, right? Ran plates on a Hummer driven by a guy with tattoos? A corpse cake turned up this morning in the woods off of Lick Springs Road. Matching marks on his hands. La-ti-no." He rolled his eyes. "Not PC to say Mexican anymore. Hunh. Maybe I'll start calling myself a Hibernian-American."

"I think you mean Caledonian-American, Dep. Hibernian-American would be Irish. Like me." By the look on MacAuley's face, that last "like me" might have been overdoing it.

"Get in there, before I go Irish on your ass."

Kevin hustled into the squad room, grinning to himself. To be rewarded by the sight of her, seated at the big table, studying a series of photos.

"Hey, Hadley," he said, his voice a pitch-perfect blend of friendly and casual. He had practiced in his Aztek on the way over.

"Hey, Flynn." She didn't take her eyes off the pictures.

"You can call me Kevin, you know."

That made her glance up. "I don't think so."

"What are you doing here so early?" The voice made him jump. Oh. Yeah. There was somebody else in the room. Kevin turned toward the bulletin board, where the chief was tacking up rap sheets. "Never mind," he continued, "Come here and tell me if you recognize any of these."

Kevin crossed to the board. The sheets had the familiar formatting of the NYS VCAP database. Eight young Latinos stared at him, captured by booking photographers in Brooklyn and Manhattan and the Bronx: defiant, stoned, sullen, smirking. Kevin tapped the smirking face. "That's the one I had to chase off. He doesn't have his piercings in this shot"-he touched his upper lip-"but that's him." He leaned closer to read the guy's short list. Fresh out of Plattsburgh, less than four months ago. Three possessions, carrying concealed, auto theft, assault, and assault with a deadly weapon. Possible associate of the Punta Diablos. No wonder he'd intimidated Hadley.

The chief grunted. "Knox ID'd him as well. Anybody else?"

Kevin closed his eyes for a moment. Tried to re-create the moment in his mind: his lights on Hadley's car, the men, two on either side as he drove up. One pair scuttling for the Hummer before he had gotten out of his cruiser. Leaving his rig twisted frontward some, so the big block of his Colt.44 could make an impression. The littler rat-faced guy squinting at his gun. Panicked.

He opened his eyes again. Pointed. "That one. He was with, uh-" he leaned forward to read the smirking guy's name-"Alejandro Santiago."

"You smell anything on 'em?"

"Nope."

Hadley looked at them, one eyebrow lifted.

"Pot," Kevin explained. "Like we talked about." He turned back to the chief. "Lyle says we've got a dead body?"

"Mmm." The chief's face was abstracted as he studied the two sheets.

"One of these guys?" Kevin gestured to the board.

"I don't think so. We don't have an ID yet, but he's been dead at least a month, maybe more, and we've got confirmation from the First District Anti-Gang Task Force that all these charmers were alive and well as of the beginning of this month, when they reported in to their parole officers. We're interested in the group in the car because Officer Knox said Santiago and one other guy had prison tats on their fingers that look very much like the ones on our John Doe."

"Just like," Hadley muttered.

The chief crossed to the table and picked up one of the photos. It was a close-up of a human hand, puffed up like a rubber-glove balloon, with what looked like gang tags between the knuckles and first joints. "Do these look familiar to you?"

Kevin shook his head. "No."

"I mean, do they look like the tattoos on Alejandro Santiago?"

Kevin glanced at Hadley. "I-uh, didn't see any tattoos, Chief. I may not have been close enough."

"I just want to make sure Officer Knox isn't accidentally conflating two different things. There's no mention of any hand or finger markings on either of these sheets."

"He had prison tats on his hands," Hadley said. "I worked in the California DOC for two years. Believe me, the ballpoint special is distinctive." She turned to Kevin. "I told you last night, remember? About how they were inked in?"

Oh, crap. "I-Uh…"

The chief gave him a long look. "Kevin? Did Officer Knox describe any tattoos to you?"

"No," he said. Shit. "She didn't say anything about tattoos at the time." He grabbed at a straw. "But she was real shaken up by the whole thing. I wouldn't expect her to remember every little detail."

"Mmm." The chief turned toward Hadley, who was clench-jawed and rigid. "Kevin's got a point. You've been in two high-stress situations, back-to-back. It may be you're creating links where there aren't any. Not intentionally," he added, holding up his hands. "That's just the way people are. We all go looking for patterns."

"Like those trick abstract prints where the dots and dashes make you see a human face," Kevin said.

"Yes. Thank you, Kevin."

Too late, he realized that wasn't going to make Hadley feel any better. "I know what I saw," she said. "And I saw those markings"-she jammed a finger against the photo the chief was still holding-"on that man." Her arm swept toward the bulletin board, where Santiago 's picture was displayed.

"We're still going to follow up on the guys in the car." The chief dropped the photo back into the file. "We have one dead Latino with gang markings, and two live Latinos with possible gang connections up from the Bronx. It's a pretty thin connection, but it's the only string we've got."

"I wanna know what the hell they were doing in Millers Kill." Lyle MacAuley strolled into the squad room. "Recruiting?"

The chief looked unsettled at the suggestion. "This isn't the Latin Kings or Los Traveosos. The AGTF classifies them as known associates, that's all. Besides, most gangs tend to be racially cohesive. Last I looked, Millers Kill and its surrounds didn't have much in the way of a Hispanic population."

"You're not looking hard enough. Every fourth farm in the county has Mexicans working for 'em nowadays." MacAuley handed the chief a mug of coffee. The chief took it and blew across the top. MacAuley cocked an eyebrow. "You don't think some of those farmhands up here for a crack at the good life wouldn't trade hard labor for a chance to walk tough and make big money? Sellin' drugs is a hell of a lot easier on a man than milkin' cows."

"Until you get gunned down." The chief took a sip, grimaced, then took another. "Did Harlene make this?"

"Just because I didn't put six teaspoons of sugar in it? Jesus." MacAuley gestured toward the hallway. "You get anything out of Pedro, there?"

"The kid's name is Amado. Amado Esfuentes. And no, I didn't get anything. It was a long shot, anyway."

"Amado?" Kevin asked. They both looked at him as if the filing cabinet had spoken.

"You should check 'im out, Kevin. He's the only guy I've ever seen has a worse beard than yours was." MacAuley stroked his chin.

"He's the guest worker who broke his arm in that accident back in April," the chief said. He took another drink from his mug, wincing. "I figured, since he is Latino and he's living out on my brother-in-law's farm-where the body was found-he might have some information."

"I thought he was shifty." Hadley's voice was still tight, but she sounded as if she was trying to let it go. "Like he was hiding something. He didn't like it when you asked him about anyone he might have seen around the McGeoch place."

The chief nodded. "I agree."

Kevin opened his mouth. She got to sit in on an interrogation? I never get to do that! He snapped his jaw shut. He wasn't going to move up from patrol by being a crybaby. A new and unpleasant thought occurred to him. Maybe he wasn't going to be the one stepping into departed officer Mark Durkee's shoes. Maybe he wasn't advancing from street work to investigations. Maybe they had hired Hadley Knox for that. That would explain why, despite her reluctance, the chief kept pushing her into the investigations. Maybe her DOC experience gave her an edge. Maybe they still thought he was too young. Maybe there was some sort of equal opportunity quota and they needed a woman.

The chief was still talking. "Don't forget he probably views any American in uniform as a threat. I suspect his uneasiness may have more to do with his legal status as an alien than with trying to conceal anything criminal. Still… let's keep that in mind."

"Maybe you should let Knox question him alone." MacAuley looked at Hadley speculatively over the rim of his coffee cup. "He might find her less threatening. Open up more."

Solo questioning! And she's not even out of Basic! God damn! Hadley, however, didn't seem to appreciate that she was in like Flynn-except this Flynn obviously wasn't. She got a panicked look on her face. "Uh…" she said.

The chief shook his head. "I want to talk with my sister and brother-in-law first. Kevin?"

"Chief?"

"I want you to drive Mr. Esfuentes back to St. Alban's." He paused. MacAuley turned his considering gaze on the chief. "Tell Reverend Fergusson we'll run him back out after he finishes work tonight," the chief continued. "We'll keep everything nice and informal and friendly-like."

"Uh… okay."

"Officer Knox, go with him to the interview room and let Mr. Esfuentes know what's going on." He glanced at the clock on the wall. "Then you may as well knock off for the day."

She stood. "Yes, sir."

In the hallway, out of earshot of the old guys, Kevin said, "Look, I'm sorry about what went down back there. I mean, about not backing you up on the tattoos."

She gave him a jaundiced look. "I don't expect you to lie for me, Flynn." She inhaled. "It doesn't matter if they believe me or not. I shared like the chief told me to. What they do with it is their business." She turned and marched down the hall.

She was smack-dab in the middle of the corridor, so he had to bob and weave to keep up with her. "Is your car fixed?"

"No." She pressed on, past the dispatch room.

"Hi, Kevin!" Harlene yelled.

He paused. Waved. "Hi, Harlene!" He had to take two large steps to catch up with Hadley, which was something, considering his legs were a lot longer than hers. "Did you drive your grandfather's car?"

"No."

He stopped in front of the interview room. It differed from the interrogation room in that it had windows, and the table and chairs weren't bolted to the floor. "How are you getting home?"

"I'm walking."

"To Burgoyne Street?"

She finally looked up at him. "It's not the other side of the moon, Flynn. It'll take me thirty minutes, tops."

"Come with me. I'll drop you off after I run this guy to St. Alban's."

She shook her head. "No, thanks."

"You're angry with me. About what I said to the chief."

She set the edge of her jaw. "Forget what you said to the chief. It's just… Look. Last night was an emergency. I'm not letting you take me anywhere if I can get there on my own."

"Why not?" He meant it to be civil, inquiring; instead it steamed out, frustrated and perplexed. "It's not like I'm asking you out. I'm not trying to steal a march on your spectacular career in the department. I'm just trying to be friendly, for chrissakes. That's all. Why do you keep blowing me off?"

She looked at him as if he had donned a hockey mask and fired up his chain saw. "My spectacular career in the department?"

He erased the words in midair. "I didn't mean to say that. Forget it."

Her lush lips thinned, and two angry red blotches marred her perfect skin. "Are you making fun of me?" She didn't look so beautiful now, and it was a relief, because for the first time it felt like maybe they might belong to the same species. "Because I haven't been studying to be a cop since I was in diapers? Which for you was, like, four weeks ago."

He could feel it, in that second, a fault line running through his head and heart as his blind adoration cracked and fell away. "I'm not making fun of you. I'm trying to be friends. I'm starting to guess you don't recognize the concept because you don't have any."

She held up her hands as if framing a camera shot. "Let me set you straight. I didn't come here to make friends. I came here to do a job, get paid, and go home."

"Where your life is so perfect, no doubt."

"Where my life belongs to me. And my children. And I don't have to explain, or justify, or meet anyone else's expectations. So, no, Flynn, I don't want to be your friend. If you thought otherwise because you caught me in a weak moment last night, I'm sorry, but that was your thought, not anything I said or did to encourage you."

She swung the door to the interview room open and stepped in, hanging off the doorknob. She rattled off a long sentence in loud Spanish, then swung back into the hall, pulling the door with her. Her eyes went round. "Sir," she said.

Kevin whirled around. The chief was a few feet behind him, his expression a blend of irritation and weariness. "Kevin," he said, "are you bothering Officer Knox with unwelcome and unprofessional attention?"

"No! I mean, I didn't think I was. I didn't mean to."

The chief's eyes cut to Hadley. "Officer Knox?"

She jerked her chin up. "I was just setting down the ground rules for Officer Flynn, sir. No offense taken."

"Then let me set down the ground rule. Singular and simple. There will be no fraternization among members of this department. Failure to observe this rule will result in administrative notice, disciplinary action, and possible suspension. Do I make myself clear?"

"Yes, sir."

"Yes, Chief."

"Good. This is a police department, not a high school dance." The chief pinched the bridge of his nose beneath his glasses. "Appearances sometimes to the contrary."

X

"I don't know why he seemed nervous." Janet tucked the phone more firmly beneath her chin and lifted the lid on the pot. The water had come to a boil. "Maybe because he's a stranger in a strange land? Maybe because when you come over all cop you can be as intimidating as hell?" She ripped the top off a bag of egg noodles and dumped them into the water.

"I didn't try to browbeat the kid," her brother said. "For chrissakes, you sound like Clare-Reverend Fergusson."

Interesting. Should she pursue that line of-

"I just want to know if you've observed anything, anything at all, that might account for his twitchiness."

"Not here," she lied. "He spends most of his time working at St. Alban's. I suggest you ask Clare-Reverend Fergusson." She plunged a slotted spoon into the pot and stirred while listening to Russ breathe. He had this certain way of doing it when you pushed his buttons just right. She smiled to herself.

"I'm going to bring Amado back to your place-the new place-after he finishes up tonight. It'll give me a chance to check out the house he's living in. Just to get a feel for things."

Oh, shit. "Aren't you supposed to get a warrant before you search people's property?"

"Well, it sort of depends, Janet. Do I need to get a warrant on you and Mike?"

She dropped the colander in the sink, letting the crash disguise her hiss of frustration. "Of course not," she said, when her voice was under control. "By all means, bring him home and check out the house. Maybe you'll find he's got a box of Playboys under his bed and he feels guilty about that."

His voice was dry. "If I do, I'll hand him over to Mom. Since she's already had experience with that sort of thing."

The doorbell dinged. "Emma!" There was no answering yell from her thirteen-year-old. The bell dinged again. "Hang on," she told Russ. "Somebody's at the door."

God. She was going to have to call over to the bunkhouse and have all the men clear out. Their stuff, too. Where was she going to put them, the barn?

She yanked the door open. A tall heavyset man in shit-kicker boots stood there. He wore a barn jacket and blond hair that had escaped from 1983. " 'Scuse me, ma'am," he said, "but I'm looking for Amado? He works for you?"

She shook her head. "He works at St. Alban's Church, in town. He just rooms out here." She'd seen this guy before, but she couldn't place where. The IGA or the Agway? "I'm sorry. Have we met before?"

He stuck out a grubby hand. "Dunno, but I've met your husband at the auctions. I'm Neil." He pumped her arm like he was trying to get water from a well. She resisted the urge to rub her shoulder when he finished.

"How on earth do you know Amado?"

"Hah. How I know Amado. Well. It's like this."

"Mom!" Oh, of course, now Emma was around. "Uncle Russ is on the phone and wants to know if you're going to be all night?"

"What are you doing picking up the phone?" She glanced at the guy. "Sorry."

"I wanted to know if you were using it! I'm waiting to get on line! If we had cable I wouldn't have to wait!"

"Oh, God," Janet muttered. Emma could go on in that vein for an hour.

"I can see you're busy, ma'am. If you could just let me know when he's getting home?"

Oh, sure. The last thing she needed was another stranger roaming around by the bunkhouse, ready to stumble over seven illegals. "He's at St. Alban's late tonight, cleaning up after their concert. Your best bet is to catch him there."

"Thanks, ma'am." He stepped off the porch and was vanishing into the dusk by the time she had the chance to close the door. She wondered again, for a second, how another local farmer had met up with their church-cleaning boarder. It teased at her, but then Emma started up again with her tirade against dial-up Internet access, and she remembered Russ was waiting, and she thought, How am I going to hide my employees from my brother? And the thought was gone.

XI

Peace be within thy walls,

And plenteousness within thy palaces!

The choir finished. The organ thundered to a close. There was a moment of silence, as the last triumphant notes of Parry's "I Was Glad When They Said Unto Me" reverberated. Then someone clapped, and in a second, St. Alban's stone walls echoed with deafening applause. Clare, whose official duties had been completed after welcoming everyone to the church and introducing the choir, whanged away with the rest of them, amazed, as she always was, that the same group of people she heard grumbling and going flat and repeating a single musical phrase over and over and over in their rehearsals could create a sound of such inexpressible beauty.

The choir bowed, and then the music director, Betsy Young, emerged from behind the organ, her cheeks brilliantly colored, bits of her hair sticking to the side of her face. One of the tenors brought her a hefty bouquet of roses, and she turned an even more spectacular shade of red.

Clare caught Doug Young's eye and slid out of her pew at the rear of the church. Betsy's husband had been pressed into service collecting the "suggested donations," and now it was time to see how well they had done. He scooped up the metal change box and Clare fished the sacristy key out of her skirt pocket. "They were wonderful," she said, as they threaded their way through the crowd to the front of the church.

"They were," he said. "And I am so glad it's over." He flashed her a grin.

Yes, well. Betsy had been a tad caught up in prepping for the concert.

Doug glanced around. "Your friend from New York's not here?"

"Hugh? No, he had to work. Some deal his bank is putting together. He had to fly to Las Vegas."

"Too bad. For you, I mean, not for him. Vegas isn't any hardship."

"It's okay. We're pretty casual. And he'll be up for the St. Alban's Festival next month."

"I hope he has some money left over from his trip."

Clare laughed.

"Reverend Fergusson," someone called. "Can I speak to you for a sec?"

She handed Doug the key and told him she'd be back as soon as she could. Which turned out to be forty-five minutes later. She fielded questions about the upcoming parish picnic, spoke to a woman who wanted to volunteer for their teen mother mentoring program, praised every choir member she clapped eyes on, and, gratifyingly, talked with no less than three different people who expressed interest in trying out next Sunday's Eucharist.

"I feel like we're getting them under false pretenses," she confessed to Betsy. The church had emptied out except for a few last choristers, gossiping in the center aisle. "They don't know the choir's about to break for the summer."

"We'll just have to rely on your preaching to snag them after Trinity Sunday, then, won't we?"

"Oh, yeah, they'll come for miles around for that." She let the music director precede her into the sacristy. "The only thing people want from a sermon in the summertime is that it be five minutes or less." She spotted Amado, peeping around the corner from the main office. His bright yellow cast glowed in the shadow. "It's okay, Señor Esfuentes. You can go ahead and start cleaning. Uh, Limpiar la iglesia, por favor."

"I bet you can't wait for Glenn Hadley to come back to work," Doug said from his seat beside the lockbox.

"He is easier to communicate with," Clare admitted. "On the other hand, Señor Esfuentes doesn't feel compelled to call me Father."

"How'd we do?" Betsy asked. The choir was planning an August trip to a choral festival in England-if they could raise enough to cover some of their expenses. They had been fund-raising with concerts and bake sales since last fall.

"Four hundred fifty-two dollars and seventy-five cents." Doug grinned hugely.

"Yessss!" Betsy clenched her fists in triumph.

Clare and Doug signed off on the receipt slip and Doug zippered the deposit bag and dropped it into the lockbox.

"Are you two going out to celebrate your artistic and financial triumph?" Clare asked. She ushered them out of the sacristy and locked the door behind her.

Betsy shook her head vehemently. "I'm going to go home, have a large bourbon, and crawl into bed. And I'm not getting out until Sunday morning."

Clare laughed. "You let me know if you want to stay there. I'm sure I can enlist someone to play guitar for us."

"Not unless I'm dead. Guitars." The organist shuddered.

"Are you headed for the rectory?" Doug asked. "We'll walk you there."

Clare checked her old steel Seiko: 8:45 P.M. Kevin Flynn had said "they" would take Amado home. It probably meant he would return. Kevin. Not Russ. It probably wouldn't be Russ.

"Clare?"

"Sorry." She smiled at the Youngs. "No, I'll stay here until Señor Esfuentes's ride comes for him."

She made her farewells to the Youngs in the narthex. The choristers had gone, leaving only Amado, wrestling the large upright vacuum cleaner into position in the north aisle. He was getting adept at doing everything one-and-a-half-handed. She cruised the pews, looking for hymnals or prayer books out of place, picking up discarded concert programs.

She had reached the front of the church again when the inner doors opened. She looked up, but instead of Russ or Kevin she saw two big, burly country boys, one with a reddish ZZ Top beard, the other with an oh-so-fashionable mullet. She stepped into the center of the nave, blocking their path. "May I help you?" she said. The bearded guy looked familiar, but she couldn't place where she had seen him.

"Well, ma'am," the mullet began, and the bearded one said, "There he is," and they both turned toward Amado with the coordination of sharks spotting a tuna.

"C'mere, lover boy," the bearded man said. "We wanna have a talk with you."

Her sexton froze behind the vacuum cleaner. His caramel skin was pasty, throwing his scraggly beard and mustache into high relief. Clare doubted he understood anything they had said, but he didn't need to. The smell of violence clung to the intruders, filling the church. The kid shivered, toppled the vacuum into the aisle, and rabbited toward the hallway behind him.

"Hey!" ZZ Top roared. He and the mullet accelerated down the center aisle. Clare, seeing five hundred pounds of good ol' boy bearing down on her, whirled and dashed for the same doorway Amado had disappeared through. Hide. Where? Everything still unlocked had to be locked by key. She'd never have-

Just short of the door, she lunged sideways, to where the processional cross and torches were cradled in their wooden brackets. She grabbed the processional cross and spun back toward the invaders. "Stop!" she shouted. Amazingly, they did so.

She held the heavy six-foot-long oak staff cross-braced in her hands, barring the way like Little John at the ford. The gleaming cross screwed atop it was a foot high, cast in solid bronze, weighty enough to break bones. "Get out of here," she said, her voice hard.

"What are you, a ninja? Get outta my way," the mullet said. He feinted toward the door she blocked. Clare rammed the butt of the staff into his chest and, as he folded with an explosion of hacking coughs, hit him over the head with a crack that sounded like a branch being snapped in two. He dropped.

"What the hell!" The bearded guy stared at the fallen man. "What did you do to my brother, you bitch?"

He lunged toward her. She tried the ramming trick again, but he dodged left, reaching for the staff. She let it drop out of one hand and swung it low with the other, slamming into his knees and calves, hard enough to hurt, not-dammit all!-hard enough to cripple him.

"You goddamn bitch!" He lurched forward, hands outstretched, deflecting her blows with forearms, left, right, left. She was backed against the wall beside the door, unable to get the leverage to make them count. He got his hands on the processional cross and shook, hard, Clare clinging on, jerking back and forth, knowing if she let go he'd use it to beat her unconscious. Bad breath and spittle and a stream of monotonously vile words spewed into her face. She brought her head back and then forward, fast, her forehead connecting to his nose with a crunch that left her eyes watering.

He howled. Rammed himself into her, oaken staff and all, splattering her with the blood running out his nose and driving the breath from her body. She stomped, stomped again, trying to get his instep, his foot, anything.

She heard a loud click.

"Step away from her or I blow your brains out," Russ said.

The bearded man let her go. Raised his hands. Stepped back. Clare sagged against the wall, clinging to the cross.

"On the floor," Russ said.

The bearded man looked at him sullenly. "She attacked me! I was just-"

Russ holstered his Glock, drew back his arm, and smashed his fist into the side of the man's head. Clare shrieked. The bearded man reeled, and Russ punched him, once, twice, his back and shoulders working, until the attacker fell to his knees. Russ reached for him, twisting his fists in the front of his sweatshirt, ready to haul him up and pound him again. Clare dropped the processional cross and grabbed Russ's arm, trying, without much success, to drag him away from the injured man.

"Stop!" she said, her voice a strangled whisper in her throat. "Stop!"

He looked at her with eyes she didn't recognize. "You're bleeding."

"It's not my blood. He was after Amado, not me. It's not my blood. I'm okay."

He shook himself. Looked at Clare's assailant, who was bleeding copiously into his beard. Released his sweatshirt. "Down on the floor," Russ said. The man slumped forward without protest this time, spread-eagled on the polished wood.

From outside, she heard the rising and falling of a siren. Russ yanked at the handcuffs on his belt. He got down on one knee and clicked them around the bearded man's beefy wrists. "You have the right to remain silent," he said.

She raised the cross off the floor with shaking hands.

"You have the right to an attorney."

The intricate bronze work was spotless.

"If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you."

She drew her sleeve across her mouth, wiping away the blood and spittle, and kissed it.

"Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law."

In thanksgiving. In apology.

The siren broke off, and a moment later the inner doors swung open. Kevin Flynn charged into the nave, his gun out, followed by Amado, who stayed well behind, clutching his cast.

"Call an ambulance, Kevin," Russ said, levering himself off his knee. The younger officer skidded to a stop, his eyes widening at the prone bodies and blood-spattered floor.

"What the-?" He looked at Russ. "What happened?"

Russ glanced at the two on the floor. Then at her. "They were stupid enough to mess with Reverend Fergusson."

XII

Her kitchen light was on. He hadn't known if it would be. It had been at least two hours since he had stalked out of St. Alban's, his arms still spasming with unspent rage, his head pounding blackly behind his eyes. He had walked-across the street, into the park, around the circle-while Paul Urquhart arrived and Kevin took Clare's statement and the EMTs loaded the two Christies into the ambulance. He finally cooled off enough to be sure he wasn't going to break his hand hitting a wall, and went back to question the young sexton, who was both terrified and bewildered by the Christies' interest in him.

They hadn't gotten anything out of the Christies, of course-well, out of Donald, who was the only one able to talk. Neil was still unconscious. Russ hadn't been as neat and efficient as Clare. When she put a man down, he stayed down.

Christ, wasn't that the truth.

The Christies were in the Washington County Hospital, waiting for their lawyer and their medical releases before Urquhart transported them to the county jail. Their would-be victim, despite Russ's glowering and Kevin's offer to take him back to the old farmhouse on Lick Spring Road, was bunking at the rectory tonight, at the insistence of his employer and savior. When Russ had seen the hero worship in the kid's eyes, his warnings about Clare putting Amado up fell flat. After this evening, her latest charity case would cheerfully take a bullet for her.

Another poor sonofabitch down for the count.

Now he was sitting in the cab of his truck, pulled over across the street, looking at the rectory. It was dark, except for a single lamp deep inside the living room and the kitchen light shining out the side door.

He pulled into her drive, butting up snug against the rear of her Subaru. He got out, closing his door with a solid thunk, letting her know he was coming. He saw a shadow at the kitchen door, and as he trudged up the steps, he heard the sound of a bolt turning and a chain rattling as it was drawn away. She opened the door to him.

"You locked your door," he said, like an idiot.

"Yeah."

He stepped inside. The kitchen smelled of chocolate and peppermint. "You never lock your door."

"You've been after me about it for three years now. Eventually, even I can learn something new." She looked up at him. "I'm not going to just let someone waltz in here and hurt me."

He stared at his boots until she walked back to the white enamel stove. Her feet were bare. She was wearing a blue and white seersucker robe loose over mint-green pajamas. "I didn't know if you'd still be up," he said.

"I couldn't fall asleep." She glanced at the ceiling, to where, presumably, her guest was dreaming of happier days south of the border. Although she kept her voice low, so maybe he wasn't asleep yet, either. "I got Amado settled in, but my mind was going a mile a minute, so I decided to come downstairs and make hot cocoa." She gestured to a mug on the white counter. HELICOPTER PILOTS DO IT WITH BOTH HANDS, it read. There was a bottle of peppermint schnapps and an open carton of eggs next to it. "I still have some in the pan, if you'd like a mug."

"No, thanks," he said.

"It's nonalcoholic. I put the schnapps in afterward." She took a long drink from her own mug.

"I'm not staying long," he said, even as he shucked his jacket and dropped it on the back of one of the chairs drawn haphazardly against the heavy pine table.

She shrugged. "More for me." She took another pull from her drink and turned toward the stove. He heard the click-click-click of the gas jet, and then the pilot caught and a blue flame shot up from the black iron burner. She turned it down and slid a cobalt-blue omelet pan over the heat.

"How're you doing?" he asked.

"Fine," she said. She reached for the egg carton. Cracked an egg into a grass-green ceramic bowl. "Grab the milk out of the fridge for me, will you?"

Her twenty-year-old refrigerator was almost buried beneath photos, clippings, comics, and brochures. He figured the whole appliance was held together by magnetic force at this point.

He set the carton on the counter next to where she was now whisking eggs furiously in the bowl. She took another drink of hot cocoa before slopping a measure of milk into the frothing eggs. He eyeballed the schnapps bottle. It was more empty than full.

She cracked pepper from a scarlet peppermill into the mixture and then beat it as if it might get up and walk away if not subdued. She crossed to the refrigerator, popped it open, and retrieved a lump of greasy white paper, which, unwrapped, proved to be a lump of greasy white something else. She hacked off a piece of it and dropped it into the omelet pan. It snapped and sizzled.

"What's that?" he asked.

"Pig fat," she said, taking another swig of hot cocoa. She bottomed out the mug and looked into it, frowning. "You can't make comfort food without pig fat." He noticed her Virginia accent was more pronounced. She took a spoon from the drainboard, stirred the pan at the back of the stove, and poured more hot cocoa into her mug. She unscrewed the schnapps and added a liberal splash.

"Don't you think you ought to ease up on that?"

She turned on him. Cocked her fist against one hip. "Maybe I should relax by beating somebody to a pulp instead?"

"Christ, Clare, you were the one who broke his nose!"

"I was defending myself. What's your excuse?"

He inhaled, took his glasses off, and rubbed them on his shirtfront. "I don't have any excuse." He tossed his glasses onto the pine tabletop and ran both hands through his hair, tugging at it, hard. "God knows, I already feel bad enough without you laying into me. If one of my officers had done that, I'da had him on suspension by now." He dragged a chair out and dropped into it. "I don't know what got into me. I just don't know." He stared at his hands. In the glow of the hanging lamp, he could see the nicks and scars from every accident he'd ever had. The knuckles of his right hand were reddened and puffy and aching.

"Do you want some ice for that?" she said, her voice quiet.

"No." He flexed his fingers into a fist and opened them again. "I want it to hurt."

She sighed. He heard the sizzling pan slide off its burner. He heard her bare feet as she crossed the floor. Then her hand settled over his, light and warm. "What did you come here for, Russ? Absolution?"

He shook his head. "I wanted to… make sure you were okay." He folded his hands on the table and stared at them. She hesitated for a moment, then touched his hair, her fingers stroking him like you'd pet a cat. "I'm sorry," he said. "I guess that was…"

She gave him time to finish, but he had no idea what he was saying. She sighed again. "I can't solve your problems, dear heart. I'm part of them."

He looked up at her, then. "No," he said. "Never that. It's me. I'm… stuck. I'm like an old truck up to its hubcaps in snow. I go forward, I go back, nothing ever changes or shakes loose, and the whole time I'm cold, inside and out. The only time I feel anything is when I'm angry. And that scares the crap out of me."

Her hand never stopped moving over his hair. "How do you feel now?"

He studied her face. Let himself feel for a moment. "Naked. Sometimes you scare the crap out of me, too."

She laughed a little. He pressed his palms against the table and pushed himself up. She stepped back. "I better head home," he said. "I think I've reached my maximum daily limit of honesty." He pushed the chair back into place. "If you hear or see anything, anything at all, that makes you nervous, call nine-one-one. And call me. We'd rather come out on a false alarm than see you get into trouble again."

She smiled, one-sided. "Thank you, Chief Van Alstyne."

He covered his eyes with one hand. "Christ, I'm pitiful, aren't I?"

He felt her arms go around him. She hugged him, something she probably wouldn't have done without the encouragement of the schnapps. "No," she said. "You're human. And someday, when you can admit that to yourself, you'll stop feeling so bad that you can't save everyone."

He looked down at her, about to say that sounded like a pretty damn accurate description of her, but her eyes were X-raying through him, and her pointed half smile said I know you.

He didn't let himself think. He kissed her. As lightly and briefly as one of her blessings. A thanksgiving and an apology. Then he lifted his head and saw her face, tipped back like the survivor of a long winter on the first day of hot spring sunshine. "Clare," he said, his voice thick. She opened her eyes, full of heat, and just like that the desperate desire he thought he'd never feel again flamed to life like blue gas jetting out of cold iron.

He dug his fingers into her hair and pulled her to him, kissing her, deep, hungry kisses that tasted of chocolate and peppermint. She moaned in the back of her throat and wrestled her hands free from around his waist to twine them about his neck. He bumped against the kitchen table and bent her back, kissing her, kissing her, her mouth and her jaw and the pulse trip-hammering in her throat. He felt something huge and powerful racing through him, sparking every nerve end, blanking out everything in the world except Clare, the taste of her, the sound of her, panting and gasping, the feel of her, oh, God, better than anything he had ever fantasized, as he yanked open her pajama top and pushed it aside and touched her, touched her, touched her.

She cried out, and he shut her mouth with more kisses, wet and dark, remembering they had to keep quiet even though he couldn't remember why. She pushed at him, tugging at his shirt, and he reared back, taking her with him, the two of them standing hip to hip and toe to toe, frantic to remove his uniform blouse without letting any space or light or air between them. She undid the two top buttons and he yanked the shirt off over his head, tossing it on the table, and it was Clare, warm and alive and half naked in his arms. His eyes nearly rolled back in his head from the feel of her skin on his.

Bed. Bed. Bed. He herded her toward the kitchen's swinging door, the two of them stumbling around and between each other's legs, Russ dropping kisses on her hair, her ears, her temples while she pressed her face into his chest, her mouth and tongue making him mindless. They rocked through the door and staggered into the dimly lit living room, and when she bit him, he felt his knees buckling. The bed was too far away, he would never make it. He was going to burn alive before then. He hip-checked the sofa and dropped onto its squishy cushions. She let the pajama top and the robe fall to the floor, letting him look at her, look at her, and then she crawled on top of him. He gritted his teeth to keep from whimpering and begging and singing hallelujah. He seized her hips and pulled her to him, so she could feel how hard she made him, Christ, like he was seventeen again.

"Russ," she said, her voice unrecognizable. "Oh, God." She fit herself around him, and he could feel the weight and the strength of her, the long muscles of her thighs and her back beneath his hands. He heard a groan tearing out of his chest as he rolled her underneath him, his arms shaking, the breath hitching in his throat.

A light snapped on upstairs. "Señora Reverenda?" The voice sounded small and scared and about twelve years old. He stilled as best he could with his chest working like a bellows. Dropped his forehead to hers. Goddamn. It really was like being seventeen again. Next, Clare's parents would phone to see how the babysitting job was going.

Clare drew an unsteady breath. "It's-" She swallowed. Tried again. "It's all right, Señor Esfuentes. Everything's okay. Um…" She looked at him helplessly.

He rolled off her, reaching out and snagging her robe off the floor. He handed it to her. "Es yo, Amado. Chief Van Alstyne. Acabo de venir cerca comprobar en usted dos. Vaya de nuevo a cama."

"Okay," Amado said. "Buenos noches."

"What did you say?" Clare whispered.

"I told him to go away, we were getting naked."

She whacked his shoulder, hard.

"Ow!"

She curled into a sitting position and put on the robe. He rolled onto his back, throwing his arm over his eyes, trying to calm the pounding of his heart. "You're going to toss me out, aren't you?"

There was a pause. "Yes."

"Christ, Clare…"

She twisted to speak to him; then, as if she thought better of staying within arm's reach, she stood up and stepped back. Her cheeks and chest were stained with high color, her hair a wild tangle, her lips red and swollen. He had to shut his eyes before he broke something.

"We can't do this," she said.

He could smell her from where she stood. "Come back over here," he said, his voice heavy and full. "I'll show you how it works."

She sat in one of the overstuffed chairs that faced each other across the coffee table. Her hand, clutching the edges of her robe together, was trembling. "And what happens when we wake up tomorrow morning with your wife's dead body between us?"

"Jesus Christ!" He convulsed upward. His feet, still booted, thudded to the floor.

"It's too soon, Russ. Even if we didn't have this…"-she waved a hand in the air-"this mess between us, it would still be too soon. She's only been dead five months. There's a reason the old mourning period was a year. People who lived with death knew it took time."

"What is this about? You want to make me wait? For what? Payback? To see if I'll jump through some arbitrary hoop for you?"

She bent over, twining and twisting her hands together, letting them dangle between her knees. She finally looked at him. "I love you," she said. "And God knows, I want you." She laughed a little, without humor. "I think we just proved that. But I deserve to have your whole heart."

"I'm not going to stop loving her just because she's dead." His voice was harsh.

"I know that. I don't expect you to. I meant you need to love me wholly, not half want me, half blame me for Linda's death."

"I don't-" he began.

"Oh, for God's sake!" She glanced toward the stairs and continued in a lower tone. "Can't we at least be honest about that? If you hadn't stopped to get me out of trouble, if you hadn't been with me, Linda would be alive right now."

He shook his head.

"It's true!" She jumped to her feet. "Admit it! Admit it!"

"All right, dammit! Yes! If I hadn't gone into that goddam barn, my wife would still be alive." He surged to his feet and grabbed her by the upper arm. "But don't you see? You would have been dead. You would have been the one to die. And that's what's killing me. I can't regret that. I can't be sorry. Christ, I can't imagine a world without you in it, Clare. But that means Linda was an acceptable loss. It means I chose you over her." He dropped her arm and ground his fists into his temples. "If you knew how many times I've replayed that afternoon over and over and over in my head, every decision I made, every word I said… and the hell of it is, I never, ever make the right decision. Because there is no right decision. I'll never be right on this. And if I just… come to you with open arms and a big smile on my face, it's like I'm spitting on her grave."

He turned away from her. Ran his good hand over his face. It came away wet. She touched his back, pressed her palm between his shoulder blades. Skin to skin.

"Don't," he said, not sure what he was forbidding her. Don't love me? Don't comfort me? Don't touch me, because I don't know how many of your touches I can withstand before I break?

"Dear heart," she said, "you have got to see a therapist."

It was so practical, so Clare, that he almost laughed. Instead he made a noise. "I don't need a goddam therapist. I just need some time to figure things out."

Her hand dropped away. "Because you're doing such a good job of it." Her voice was dry.

He looked at the reddened flesh on his knuckles. The bruises were starting to emerge. "I have to go," he said, his voice almost inaudible. He strode toward the kitchen, pulled his shirt back over his head, and put his glasses on. The kitchen sprang into focus, cheap white fittings and warm pine. Yanking on his jacket, he kept his eyes on the calendar by the door. A bunch of men in togas stared at each other, drop-mouthed at the flames sprouting from their heads. He wondered if the fiery hairdos were a blessing or a punishment. He took hold of the brass knob. Opened it to the cooling darkness beyond her door.

Behind him, he heard a ca-chunk as she walked into the kitchen. He inhaled. He was a jerk, but he wasn't enough of a jerk to walk out without facing her. He turned around.

She looked as miserable as he felt. Great. He had come here to make sure she was all right. Instead, he had screwed with her head and kicked her in the teeth. And still-still-he wanted her. If she opened her arms, he'd take her right here on the kitchen floor, no questions asked. God, he was pond scum.

"How do you stand me?" he asked her. "Most of the time, I can't even stand me."

Her eyes filled with tears. She opened her mouth. Shut it again. Shook her head.

His throat tightened so that he wasn't sure he could get anything out. "I'm sorry. I never meant to hurt you."

She nodded. Wiped her eyes with the heels of her hands. "I knew what I was getting into, remember?" She gave him a fractured smile. "I said we were going to break our hearts."