Immoral

33

Jerky Bob lived in a trailer moored off a minor road a few miles south of Las Vegas. He had arrived, as so many vagabonds in the Las Vegas valley do, out of nowhere. About a year ago, the trailer appeared, dragged perilously by a truck that waited barely long enough to unhitch it before disappearing back into the city. A day after the trailer took up permanent residence off the dusty road, a hand-scrawled sign on a wooden stake appeared near the California highway. It read:

Jerky Bob

And then below it:

New Age Gifts

Psychic Poetry

BeefJerky

Bob curtained off one end of the trailer, where the rear entrance was, put up a rickety table and cash box, and opened for business. He hung dozens of stained glass wind chimes, stuck pyramid magnets to a metal plate nailed to the wall, filled shelves with incense burners and sandalwood candles, and handwrote epic poetry that he copied on an ancient duplicating machine and tied up in scrolls with purple ribbons.

His repeat customers didn't come back for the wind chimes or the poetry, though. They came for the dried meats: beef jerky, chicken jerky, and turkey jerky, sold in flavors like teriyaki and Cajun from shoe boxes inside an old refrigerator. Most of the people who stopped were truckers. It only took a couple of them, stopping out of curiosity, to start a buzz that made its way through the trucker network of the Southwest Word got passed. Going to Vegas? Stop at Jerky Bob. They came twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, which were his regular hours. If they came while he was sleeping, they simply woke him up, and he sold them jerky. He made enough money each month that, if it had stayed in his pocket, he could have moved back to the city and opened a real shop, complying with health codes and paying taxes instead of flying under the government radar.

But money didn't last long with Bob. Half of it ended up down the gullet of slot machines. Half ended up in empty gin bottles, tossed from the back of his trailer into the desert, where they glistened like a field of diamonds.

He had committed suicide a year ago, but his body hadn't figured it out yet.

The truckers talked about it. Bob looked normal enough, a year ago, for a man marooned in the desert. From that point, month by month, he got older. He never shaved, other than cutting tangles out of his long, graying beard. His hair dangled in messy strands below his shoulders. His skin was shriveled and gray, and his eyes receded into his skull. He ate little but jerky himself, getting thinner and thinner until he was barely a hundred and twenty pounds. He never washed his clothes, which usually consisted of jeans and a Las Vegas T-shirt hanging on his skinny frame. The stench got so bad that some of his trucker customers refused to come inside, and they told him that even the jerky was beginning to smell. Bob just opened a window, letting dry, dusty air blow through the trailer.

He couldn't go into the casinos anymore. They turned him away at the door. Instead, he spent time every few days at a bar a half mile up the highway from his trailer, where he played video poker until the bartender got sick of the smell. Then he'd buy another bottle of gin and go home, drink, and pass out In the morning, or whenever a trucker pounded loudly enough to wake him up, he would throw the bottle out back.

Last night had been a two-bottle night. Or maybe it had been two nights ago, or even three. He didn't know.

He didn't remember much. On the television it said Wednesday, but he couldn't remember when he had started his binge. His last visitor had arrived in the afternoon, and that night, whichever night it was, he had begun pouring glass after glass of gin. And now it was Wednesday.

Bob sighed. He had to piss.

He stood up, propping himself against the wall for balance. The trailer spun in his head for a few seconds before righting itself. He stepped down off the mattress onto the floor and watched a few bugs skitter away from him. The two gin bottles lay empty a few feet away. He crouched, picking them up and staring inside. There was a small puddle of gin in each one, clinging to the glass, enough to wet his tongue when he turned the bottles upside down over his mouth. His body was sufficiently poisoned that the taste caused his stomach to heave, and he had to swallow hard to avoid retching.

Bob held the two bottles by their necks. He looked around for his sandals, saw them under a chair, and stuck his feet into them. The sandals flapped as he padded to the center door of the trailer. The latch had long since broken. With his knee, he nudged the door open, and daylight roared in. Still naked, Bob shuffled down the rusty steps into the desert behind his trailer.

The sun was ferocious, like a yellow fire burning out of control above the hills. His eyes squinted, barely able to open, and his skin tightened, starting to cook. As he sucked in each labored breath, a furnace of air seared his lungs.

His penis twitched, ready to release. He began pissing a virtually clear stream of urine onto the ground. The liquid raised a cloud of dust, then gathered into a small pool in an indentation in the earth. He kept pissing into the center, causing droplets to splatter onto his toes. He watched the flow intently, as if it were his life's blood leaking out of him. The urine was frothy and reeked of gin. In a few seconds, the pool would be gone, baked away by the sun.

The stream dissipated to a trickle.

Underhanded, he heaved one of the gin bottles into the air, watching it glint in the sun in a shallow arc before crashing back to earth. He heard the glass shatter and saw shards burst in every direction. Carefully, he repeated the ritual with the second bottle, enjoying the noise as it whooshed in the air and then smashed on the ground.

There were dozens of bottles in pieces out there. It was his private little minefield. Most of the shards quickly gathered dust, but the recent ones shined, reflecting the sunlight like laser beams.

He squinted, staring at the desert. He had only been outside a few minutes, but it was already time to go inside, where there was no relief from the heat but where at least his body didn't shrivel from the direct sun. His wizened skin had burned so often that he had small sores that oozed and never healed. He could feel them now, stinging as the sun burned them.

Even so, Bob lingered.

He didn't know what it was, but something caught his eye. He saw the tough little windswept creosote bushes and the yuccas that looked like dwarf palm trees. They were right where they should be. And the hills in the distance were the same. And the broken bottles glinted like they always did. Like diamonds.

Except-no, that wasn't true.

Something was out of place. He saw the sun shining, glinting, but not in the minefield where he always tossed the bottles. The reflections catching his eye were farther away, and off to the side, nowhere near any of the other shards he could see. But they shimmered in the hot sun, little diamonds winking at him from under one of the creosote bushes.

What were they?

Bob frowned. He didn't know why, but he found himself shuffling across the desert, wanting to know what it was he saw. The closer he got, the faster he walked, until he was almost running. He was out of shape and out of breath, but he jogged naked across the last twenty yards until he was right over the spot where the diamonds lay hidden. Then he stopped and stared down at his feet.

The glinting diamonds were really the shine of glitter sprinkled on skin, sparkling on a woman's body in the dirt.

It lay, face up, partially obscured by the overhanging bush. The body was as naked as he was, but utterly lifeless and ageless, a shrunken corpse whose cooked skin had collapsed in on itself, whose eyes were wide open but shrunk to tiny marbles, whose blonde hair was grayed with dust, whose mouth was open in a silent scream as desert beetles led a parade to eat her flesh from inside. It was almost unrecognizable as anything that had once been human and beautiful.

Bob sank to his knees.

She was staring at him. And her lips, which had no color at all, were curled into a smile. He tentatively reached a hand out to touch her skin, as if he was afraid she would suddenly awaken and grab him. But she didn't move. Her skin felt like sandpaper under his touch.

Then he saw her face twitch. It was like a nightmare. She couldn't be alive!

Bob stared in horror as a fat roach squeezed its way out of the corpse's nose and wiggled its antennae at him. He stumbled backward, then ran. He didn't head back to his trailer, just turned and sprinted clumsily for the road. His sandals fell away. The rocky floor of the desert scratched and cut his feet until he left blood trails with each footfall. He ran anyway, not slowing down or looking behind him, as if the girl's ghost were on his heels.

34

Serena Dial of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department pushed her sunglasses to the tip of her nose and stared down at the body.

"Nice."

She said it to no one in particular. In fact, the scene wasn't nice at all. She hated desert corpses. They all looked about a hundred years old, and sometimes, if you got there after the birds and animals did, they were chewed up, with missing eyeballs, flesh eaten away, the kind of thing that flashed back in a nightmare. She mostly saw dead people with knives in their backs or gunshot wounds, which, when you got past the blood, were not really so hard to stomach. At least the body still looked like a body. Not like this.

Definitely a woman. That was easy enough to determine. The sun did terrible things to people who had the bad fortune to lie deceased in a desert, but it wasn't known to make cocks disappear. Breasts, on the other hand, flattened out into nothing. Except, she realized, this corpse still had a pretty good set. That was interesting. The body also seemed to glint in the sun, twinkling at her. That was interesting, too.

Serena got on her hands and knees, getting close to the body, staring at it from an inch or two away without touching it. She started at the girl's feet, moved up her legs, spent more time than she wanted to at her crotch, then her stomach, her breasts, and finally her face and lips, which looked ready to give her a macabre kiss.

Serena stood up, slid a digital tape recorder from her pocket, and dictated a few notes.

The wind tousled her hair, which was lush and black, shoulder length. She was as statuesque as a showgirl, which was what most strangers in Las Vegas mistook her for when they met her. She had taken to wearing her shield on the outside, which tended to cut down on the unwelcome advances from drunk convention rats. Serena was nearly six feet tall, lithe and well proportioned. She wore a sleeveless white tank top, tucked into snug, faded jeans. She was muscled and strong, from an intense workout routine. Her skin was tanned golden brown from days spent mostly in the sun.

Serena was in her midthirties. Her eyes, normally hidden behind the apricot lenses of her sunglasses, were emerald green. Her mouth was small, with pale lips and a soft curve forming her chin. She didn't look young, not girlish young, and she never had. She had looked the way she looked now, adult and beautiful, since she was a teenager. It was only recently that her age had begun to catch up to the image she had sported all her life. At idle moments, she wondered what she would look like as the years began to get ahead of her.

Probably the girl at her feet had wondered the same thing, but she wasn't going to find out. And it was just as well that this girl couldn't see herself now.

"Age," Serena said into her tape recorder. "Have to wait for the ME on that, but I'm thinking early twenties at most. Cause of death looks like blunt trauma to the head. There's matted blood in the hair toward the back of the skull, and without moving the body, it looks like the skull may be caved in back there. Hair originally black, dyed blonde."

Serena studied the desert floor where the body lay.

"She wasn't murdered here. Not enough blood on the ground. Whoever did it hauled the body and dumped her here. The body is nude, but no immediate sign of sexual assault, no bruising in the pelvic area, no broken fingernails, scratches, or other wounds. We'll run the rape kit. Time of death, no way to tell? I wonder if the ME will even be able to peg this one. At least a couple days, I guess. Rigor is long gone. We're just lucky the vultures didn't get her."

A thought occurred to her. She gingerly poked the dead girl's wrinkled breast with one finger. "Naturally," she said to herself, standing up again.

Serena continued taking notes. "Pierced ears, but no earrings in them. No watch. No rings. Fingernails and toenails are painted red. Evidence of heavy makeup on the face. Glitter on most of the skin."

She heard footsteps approaching and then a voice calling to her. "Hola."

"Watch where you walk, Cordy," Serena said without turning around. Not that it mattered. She had run searches in the desert before, and it rarely offered up any clues. Little wonder the gangsters of old Vegas liked to leave their targets to rot in the Mojave.

Cordy feigned offense. "And what am I? A rookie?"

Cordero Elias Angel was her partner of the last six months. Serena, who had earned a reputation with her lieutenant for being difficult to work with, went through partners quickly, but Cordy seemed to have staying power. He gave as good as he got, he did what he was told, and he hadn't once made a pass at her. Cordy preferred girls small, blonde, and young, and Serena was none of the three. He was also six inches shorter than Serena and six years younger. There was nothing romantic between them.

Looking like she did, Serena got plenty of offers, but when she lowered her guard and succumbed to a date, it usually ended early. Her blunt style scared them away. She hadn't had sex in years. She told herself she didn't miss it.

Cordy, in contrast, had an active social life. In the short time they had been together, she had seen him with six different women, ranging from twenty to twenty-three years old. None of them lasted beyond the first calisthenics in bed. For at least two of them, it really was their first time in bed, or so Cordy claimed. Serena found it disgusting and told him so. Cordy just grinned, and she dropped it, rather than digging up old ghosts.

He was an attractive, if compact, package. He always dressed impeccably. Today, he wore a floral Tommy Bahama shirt and black silk pants. Cordy had jet black hair, greased straight back over his head. His skin had a dark cast, the color of virgin olive oil. His teeth looked noticeably white against it, and he had predatory brown eyes.

Serena jerked a thumb at the trailer. "So what's his story?"

"Ah, he's a pathetic old man. Not so old, but going downhill fast, you know? Spends each night drowning in a gin bottle. You see all the broken glass out here? He just tosses them out back when he's done."

Serena took note of the broad swath of glass shards behind the trailer. "Make sure the forensics team studies the glass pieces carefully. If our delivery man cut himself hauling the body in, maybe we'll get some blood."

"Uh-huh," Cordy said.

"We'll probably find Jerky Bob decomposing in the trailer in a few months," Serena said. "Did he call it in?"

Cordy shook his head. "He found the body and freaked. Started running naked down the road. A motorist spotted him from the highway and reported it. When the unis got to him, he was babbling about a corpse that was alive."

"Does he know the girl?"

Cordy shook his head. " Nan, he says he's never seen her before. Just saw the body when he came outside to take a piss. Surprise."

"How about timing? He have any idea when our little package may have been dropped off? Did he hear or see anything?"

"Man, he didn't hear nothing. Nada. Guy's been blacked out at least two days, maybe three. So it could have been anytime."

Serena sighed. "Great."

"So we don't got a lot to go on here, is what I'm thinking."

"I assume you scoped out the trailer for blood," she said.

"Uh-huh. His feet were bleeding from his run, but not enough to account for bashing in someone's head. And believe me, the place has not been cleaned up. Unless she was asphyxiated by the smell, the deceased was not inside. You should check out the jerky, though. He gave me a piece. Cajun turkey, I think it was. Good stuff, if you can stand the smell."

"If you have to pull off the road and take a dump in the desert on the way back to the city, you'll wish you hadn't tried it"

"I'm Mexican. Stomach of iron. Chiles, mama." Cordy thumped his chest.

Serena shook her head. "Salmonella, sweetie. It's not just for gringos."

"You forget. I wanted to see if he was hiding anything in his refrigerator, and I had no warrant. So now, one piece of jerky later, I know there is nothing in those shoe boxes but dried meat"

"Now you impress me, sweetie. You really do."

Serena took another look at the body, wishing she could cover it up and give the girl a little dignity. Las Vegas had its share of bizarre crimes, and she was long past surprise at anything they found in the city. She had been involved in the strip search of a female suspect, only to discover, after baring her impressive breasts, that the girl was actually a she-male with oversized equipment She had investigated the murder of a midget who had been put on a homemade rack by two thrill-seeking teenagers and stretched to death. She had arrested a man for walking downtown, naked, with two goats in tow. Weird, sick, stupid, she had been there, done that. Once in a great long while, though, she came across a case where her instincts told her she had stumbled into something deep, interesting, and dark. Which was exactly what her sixth sense was telling her now.

There was more, too. She felt a special pain when she worked on a case involving the murder of a young woman. It was too easy to remember her own teenage years in Phoenix and to realize that, if one turn or another had gone a different way, she could have been the body lying naked in the desert.

"What's your name, honey?" Serena murmured under her breath, staring at the girl's body.

"Looks like the cavalry is here," Cordy said. He pointed at the road, where a stream of police and medical vehicles had begun to arrive. "Tell me we're not going to stay out here and roast for five hours while they poke around the rocks."

Serena shook her head. "We'll get the scene sealed and transfer control to Neuss. An afternoon in the sun will do him good. We'll talk to the ME and see if he notices anything about the body that I missed. Then you and I are going to see if we can identify this girl."

"You want to tell me how you plan on identifying a body that no one's going to recognize?"

"Well, first you're going to have the department fax us local reports of missing persons, white, female, thirteen to thirty, in the last two weeks."

"Uh-huh. You want that bound or on CD-ROM?"

"I said two weeks, Cordy, not two years. I'll be surprised if we find her in there, anyway."

"Why?"

"I suspect she ran in circles where going missing isn't a big deal," Serena said.

"Uh-huh. So then what do we do?"

"Then we visit some strip clubs."

Cordy howled. "My kind of day, mama. You think the chick was a stripper? I hope she looked better than that. See that thing stripping off, and you'd be back home with the wife forever, you know?"

"Shut up, Cordy."

"Okay, so what am I missing? You find a stripper's union card or something? Why are you so sure she did the occasional lap dance?"

Serena shrugged. "She's got breast implants. That's why they didn't cave. Her pubic area is neatly shaved so that only a vertical strip of hair remains. There's remnants of sparkle on her breasts and thighs. She has a small tattoo of a heart on her left breast. Put it all together, and I say the girl's been twirling around a brass pole."

"Uh-huh. That only narrows it down to about four hundred joints. Not to mention all the on-call services."

"I said stripper, not hooker. Hookers don't bother with sparkle, sweetie. Or implants. Them's for show. We'll start with the big-name places and hope the girl was good enough at the bump and grind to break in there."

Cordy smiled. "You're the boss. If I have to spend my day talking to women who like to get naked in clubs, so be it."

35

Serena's eyes adjusted slowly to the darkness inside the club. The air was smoky and vaguely perfumed. Rock music blared from hidden speakers, with a thumping beat they could feel vibrating under the floor. The walls of the cramped foyer were covered with a dark wood paneling. A red upholstered door separated them from the interior of the club, and beside the door was a podium, with an erotic Chinese painting hung on the wall behind it. As they entered, a hulking man in a gray business suit slipped through the red door and confronted them with a smile. He had curly blonde hair and a bushy mustache.

He glanced at Cordy without interest, then his eyes lingered on Serena, drinking her in from head to toe.

"It's free for you, sweetheart. For Dudley Moore here, it's $24.95 cover."

The gorilla grinned at Cordy, and Serena thought she could see actual smoke coming out of her partner's ears.

"We're not customers," Serena said, flashing her shield. "We're from Metro. We're investigating a murder."

The smile vanished, replaced by cool indifference. "Whose?" the man asked, shrugging his broad shoulders.

"That's what we're trying to find out. It's a Jane Doe, found in the desert, back of her head bashed in. We think she may have worked one of the clubs."

Cordy slid a Polaroid from inside his jacket and presented it to Superman. "Recognize this girl?"

Serena watched the man's reaction, noticing his skin grow a shade paler and an involuntary grimace tighten his face.

"When was she in the business, 1940?"

"If you lie out in the desert for a few days, be sure to use sunblock," Serena said. "Do you recognize her?"

"No."

"Any of your girls gone missing in the last few days?"

The man laughed. It came out as a booming guffaw. "Are you kidding? Girls come and go every week, every day. This ain't exactly career work, you know?"

"We're just talking about the last few days," Serena said. She hated guys like this. Users. They gobbled up young flesh and then spit it back in the street when its value was gone.

"The answer is no."

"How about tattoos? You got a girl with a heart tattoo on her left breast?"

"Tattoos? We got dragons, kittens, boyfriends, barbed wire, sunflowers, and Dwight Yoakam. No hearts."

"You're sure?" Serena asked.

The man grinned. "I've seen them all."

"I'm sure you won't mind if we talk to the girls ourselves," Cordy said.

"You got a warrant?"

"We don't need a warrant to talk," Serena said. "On the other hand, if you want us to get a warrant, and we happen to find any drugs around here, well, that's going to take a bite out of business, isn't it?"

"Make it quick," the man replied, scowling. "And hey, some of the girls may look young, but they're all over eighteen, all right? I checked their IDs."

"Sure," Serena said. Her fake ID at sixteen had gotten her into clubs easily enough. Back in the bad days.

They pushed through the red door and entered the club. It looked and sounded identical to the seven others they had already visited today. The music, loud enough in the foyer, was deafening inside. A large, elevated runway, interrupted by shiny brass poles that reached to the ceiling, jutted out into the center of the club. Narrow schoolroom tables surrounded the runway, with squat stools squeezed side by side along the tables. Most of the action was on the runway, but there were also three low stages, with circular benches fitted around them, scattered across the club floor. Velvet-lined booths hugged the walls. The rest of the place was crammed with dinner tables and cocktail tables.

The club reeked of beer and pheromones. A hazy cloud clung near the ceiling, where the smoke from the cigarettes gathered.

Serena counted about thirty men, ranging from horny college kids in T-shirts to old men in suits, with a mixture of freaks and drunks thrown in. Some of them got into it, hooting and hollering, trying to get as close to groping the girls as they could without getting bounced. Others sat in awe, then-jaws hanging open, silly grins on their faces. Others sat and sipped their drinks and watched through slitted eyes. Those were the scary ones, who didn't show any emotion at all.

Serena felt the same claustrophobic sensation she had felt in all the other clubs. Involuntarily, she looked down, expecting to see her own body exposed, wondering what it would feel like to trade places with the girls up there. She was the only woman in the club, except for a couple of cocktail waitresses, who was wearing more than panties. Not surprisingly, she didn't attract much attention, except from a few men who didn't expect to see any women here at all who weren't naked. Those that looked at her gave her the same appraising glance they gave the girls onstage. Serena felt sick.

She studied the faces of the girls parading down the runway, looking past the plastic smiles. You could see their age in their faces. The more makeup they wore, the more they were trying to cover up. In the smoky, dark environs of the club, it usually worked, because most of the men didn't bother looking at faces. Serena could tell, though. She could look in their eyes and see their secrets. This was a higher-paying joint, where the girls were younger, not yet ravaged by alcohol or drug abuse. A girl here could still fool herself that she would wind up rich, like another Jenna Jameson. But Serena had seen too many wasted faces over the years, perched atop taut bodies. Eventually their bodies sagged, too, and the downward spiral began.

She remembered arriving in town at sixteen, just her and a girlfriend, both of them escaping from their lives in Phoenix. Serena got a job at one of the casinos. Her girlfriend wound up here, at one of the clubs, doing lap dances. She tried to talk Serena into doing it, too. The money was better. It was tempting, but Serena had already seen enough of men that she couldn't imagine parading herself in front of them. Lucky for her. Her friend moved up to a nicer apartment, did some low-budget porn films, and eventually wound up with AIDS. She died a hideous death at age twenty-two.

The girl in the desert was dead. Her friend was dead. Sometimes Serena felt guilty that she had survived.

A cheer arose from one of the satellite stages. Serena and Cordy edged closer, watching a hole appear in the center of the small stage. Slowly, rising out of the well, they saw two black arms, sensually twisting to the music. The girl emerged inch by inch as the elevator platform rose from beneath the floor. Her long arms went on forever, and then Serena saw dark hair and a sculpted ebony face. This girl was perfect, barely eighteen and stunning. A newcomer-Serena could see it in her eyes. The girl was still aroused by the hypnotic spell she could cast and the throaty bellows of the men. She was enjoying herself, and the men knew it. There was nothing more exciting than a girl who was truly trying to turn them on and not playing a weary game. The men knew the difference, and this girl was it.

Someone shouted, "Lavender!"

The girl turned to the man who had called her name and gave him a thick-lipped smile and a wink. All the while, she kept dancing, as more of her body rose into view. She wore a spaghetti-strap teddy that was ruby red against her coal skin. Her breasts were ready to burst out of the lace. The flaps of the fabric left her taut stomach bare, and below, she wore a thong parity. Her legs, trim and smooth, stretched down to blood-red pumps with three-inch heels.

"Put your tongue back in your mouth," Serena told Cordy.

"It's hard, mama, it's hard," he whispered.

"Is that a weather report from down south?" Serena asked, grinning.

Cordy didn't reply. He was transfixed, watching Lavender pop the buttons one by one, letting her cleavage spill out.

"What gives, Cordy? I thought you liked your girls short. and blonde."

"A good salsa is made up of many chiles," Cordy said.

"What is that, a Mexican proverb?"

"Nah, it's my new philosophy of life."

Serena watched as Lavender finally revealed her giant nipples, as hard as bullets. The girl cupped her full breasts in her hands as the crowd screamed.

"Come on, Don Juan, let's go backstage."

Serena dragged Cordy, craning his neck to keep an eye on Lavender, to the back of the club, where another upholstered door was labeled PERFORMERS ONLY. It was manned by a beefy black guard who wore a don't-fuck-with-me scowl. Serena explained that they needed to talk to the girls, and he scrutinized their shields before grudgingly standing aside.

Cordy smiled sweetly as he passed the guard. "Will the girls be self-conscious with a man down there?"

Serena laughed. The guard didn't.

They went down a flight of stairs, then entered the dressing room, which was a beehive of activity, filled with at least ten girls in different stages of nudity. Some were adjusting their breasts inside skimpy costumes, ready to go onstage. Others patiently sat before lighted mirrors and applied their makeup. Three girls who had completed their shifts were changing into their street clothes. They paid little attention to Cordy and Serena, although a couple of the girls gave Cordy an inviting smile. He smiled back.

Serena started with the girls who were getting ready to leave the club. One was already dressed; the second wore a black bra and jeans; the third, a natural redhead, was stark naked. She was reaching for a camisole on a hanger inside her locker.

"We'd like to ask you girls a few questions," Serena said.

The girls, who were chatting and laughing loudly together, clammed up. One of them shrugged indifferently. The redhead, seeing Cordy, twisted so her nude body was on display, right down to the trimmed auburn mound between her legs. She looked him right in the eyes and grinned, daring him to look down. Cordy resisted, although Serena knew it was killing him.

Serena explained why they were there and described the dead girl in general terms, mentioning the heart tattoo on her breast. When they heard about the murder, the girls' attitude changed. They were in a business that attracted more than a few sick freaks, and when one of their own got killed, they all immediately wondered who did it and whether they might be next on a killer's hit list.

"What about it?" Serena asked. "Do you know her?"

The girls glanced at each other.

"Girls come and go," the redhead said, idly stroking one of her breasts. "I mean, that description could fit a hundred girls who work in various clubs."

"How about the tattoo?" Cordy asked.

They all shook their heads.

It had been the same story all day. Girls come and go. Who notices if they're here one day and gone the next? And so many of them are young and half-blonde.

They quickly interviewed the other girls in the dressing area and got the same response from each one. They were about to leave and head for the next club on their list when Cordy pointed at the stage lift, which was now revolving slowly back to the floor, with Lavender on it, carefully balancing so she didn't tumble off. The black stripper stepped off onto the floor, and the lift returned upward to the circular stage.

She was naked except for a tiny G-string, fringed with cash stuffed inside. Her breasts jiggled as she crossed the tile floor, her high heels clicking. She stopped in front of a Coke machine and extracted a dollar from her waist. She bought herself a diet soda, popped it, and took a long swig. Then her eyes settled on Serena and Cordy.

"What do the two of you want?" Lavender demanded.

"They're police," the redhead called out helpfully. She was now dressed in the camisole and leather pants. "Looking for a missing girl."

"We're all missing," Lavender said.

Cordy made no pretense of keeping his eyes off this girl's body. He made eye contact, then slowly let his gaze drop down her long expanse of nude skin, pausing in all of the interesting places. Lavender had an amused smile on her face.

"Guys pay good money to see that," she said. "What makes you think cops get it for free?"

"If we go to dinner, that wouldn't be free," Cordy said. "What do you say?"

Serena rolled her eyes.

Lavender laughed. "Is your dick as big as your balls?"

"Only one way to find out," Cordy said.

Lavender glanced at Serena. "I take it you and he are not an item? I don't get into this three-way stuff."

"We're barely partners," Serena said, giving Cordy a sharp elbow to the side. "After today, maybe not at all."

"What's your name?" Lavender asked, looking at Cordy again. Serena knew the girl was interested. It was strange, watching Cordy's magnetism at work. She herself didn't feel it, but a lot of girls did.

"You can call me Cordy."

"I've got a few niches on you, Cordy. I wouldn't want to hurt you accidentally." Her lips twitched into a grin.

"You can't hurt anyone when you're tied up," Cordy teased her.

"Okay, that's enough, boys and girls," Serena said. "No mas, Cordy, you hear me?"

"Friday night?" Cordy continued, smiling at Lavender.

Lavender shrugged, but it was an acquiescence. "Okay, slick. You got it. Pick me up here at eight o'clock. We'll have six hours until my next shift."

Serena sighed. "That's great. Real romantic. Meanwhile, we've got a dead girl, and we're trying to find out who she is."

"Girls come and go around here," Lavender said.

"I know. This one came and went. Five-foot-seven, black hair dyed blonde, somewhere between seventeen and twenty-five, or that's what we're guessing. She's probably been missing at least two or three days."

"Could be anybody," Lavender said.

Cordy reached out and brushed his index finger below Lavender's left nipple. "She had a heart tattoo right about here."

Damn, the guy was good. Sometimes Serena felt like a robot, watching all the sex in this town and feeling no emotion about any of it.

She knew what the other cops called her. Barb. Not for Barbara-it was short for Barbed Wire. The girl with the high fence and the NO TRESPASSING sign. That was her own fault. Even when she liked a man, she usually found a way to leave him bleeding on the other side, instead of letting him in. Sometimes she envied Cordy that he could make it look so easy.

"A heart?" Lavender said slowly.

Serena saw it in Lavender's eyes. For the first time that day, she felt her pulse quicken.

"You knew her?" Serena asked.

Lavender bit her lower lip. "Maybe. There was a girl at the last club where I worked, had a tattoo like that, matched that description."

"What was her name?"

"Christi. Christi Katt. I mean, I figure it was a fake name, okay? Like I'm not really Lavender, and if I ever tell you my real name, I know you too well."

"What was the club?" Cordy asked.

"The Thrill Palace. On the Boulder Strip."

Serena knew it. "You know where this girl lived?"

"She had a dump of an apartment over near the airport. Oh, shit, what was the place called again? Vagabond, I think. Yeah, the Vagabond Apartments. Fits, huh? Most of the rentals there are weekly, I bet. Maybe daily."

"You remember much about her?"

"Not a lot. She wasn't a talker. Came in, did her thing. Most of the girls, we pal around, but she didn't do that."

"When did you last see her?" Serena asked.

"When I left the club," Lavender said. "About a month ago."

Cordy reluctantly slid the photo out of his coat pocket. "Could this be her?"

Lavender glanced at the photo and immediately shut her eyes, looking away. She opened them again and took another quick look. "Shit That really sucks. No one deserves to look like that, I mean no one."

"Could that be her?"

Lavender squinted. "Could be. I don't know. Who can tell from that? Christi was really pretty, not like that thing. Hell, she was almost as sexy as I am. If that's her-well, shit"

She shook her head and handed the photo back upside down.

"Thanks, Lavender," Serena told her. "You've been a big help."

Cordy winked. "Gracias. See you Friday."

"Hey, you've already seen me, slick," Lavender said. "Friday I get to see you."

36

They got off I-15 at Tropicana Avenue and waited impatiently at the light at Las Vegas Boulevard. On their right was the fake Arthurian castle of the Excalibur Hotel and, on then-left, the fake Manhattan skyline of New York-New York. Fountains sprayed from miniature fire boats surrounding a fake Statue of Liberty.

Some of the spray blew out in the street, and Serena felt dampness on her cheek. The cool water felt good. She glanced at the hordes of tourists milling outside in the stale early evening air, taking a break from losing their money inside. They looked hot, wiping their brows and tugging at their shirt collars. Even with the sun hidden behind the mountains, it was still ninety degrees.

The light changed. They headed past the MGM Grand and turned left at Koval Lane. Serena turned right again, and almost immediately, they exited the glitzy world of the Strip and found themselves in a seedy neighborhood, populated with two-bedroom houses with bars on the windows. The Vegas melting pot lived here, blacks, Mexicans, Indians, and immigrants from a dozen other countries who held down low-paying jobs in the service sectors of the casinos. It wasn't a high-crime area, not compared to the Naked City near the Stratosphere, where most of the city's murders took place. Old women still walked alone on the streets, pushing carts with groceries back to their homes. Children played in the yards, poking scorpions with sticks.

Half a mile down, they found the Vagabond Apartments, a two-level building with cracked white stucco, laid out like a motel. The ground-floor apartments opened onto the parking lot, and one flight up, the second-story units opened onto a narrow corridor with a rusty railing. All of the windows had thick curtains pulled shut, and the peeling navy doors had deadbolt locks.

For a moment, staring at the building, Serena was a teenager again, back in the apartment in Phoenix. She felt a chill break through the stifling heat. Images popped like flashbulbs. Her mother's dead eyes, watching her. The tattoo of a lizard on the man's chest, wiggling its pink tongue at her. Afterward, brown water dripping from the shower head.

Serena took a labored breath and pushed the past away.

"I don't know," she said. "I pictured this girl for a higher-class kind of joint. You'd think she could have afforded better than this, working at the Thrill Palace." Unless she was an alcoholic, Serena thought Or an addict.

"Maybe she was hiding out," Cordy said.

Serena shrugged. "Let's find the manager."

The nearest apartment on the ground floor had an open door that led into a small foyer filled with mailboxes. They passed a short, balding man of about fifty, wearing shorts and no shirt, flipping through his mail as he strolled out of the office. He didn't look up. Serena noticed him thumbing through a copy of Penthouse in the stack. They entered the apartment office, which was compact, with the mailboxes on one wall and vending machines for soda and snacks on the other.

At the rear of the office was a counter with a buzzer on it, and behind the counter was a closed door decorated with a nudie calendar. Several sections of the morning newspaper lay on the counter, one section open to the want ads, another to the comics. A paper plate with a few doughnut crumbs sat on top of the paper, gathering flies. Cordy pushed the call button, and they heard the muffled buzzer sounding behind the wall. No one came to greet them. Cordy pushed the button again, holding it down, until they heard footsteps inside.

The door flew open. A kid of about twenty, with earrings in both ears, long mousy hair, and sideburns, stared at them. He was tall and thin, with a narrow pimply face and protruding chin. Like the tenant they had passed, he was wearing shorts and no shirt.

"Yeah?"

He didn't sound happy to be interrupted. Serena could hear noises inside the apartment and figured the kid wasn't alone.

"We want an apartment, muchacho," Cordy said. "How about you show us the hot tub and the tennis courts?"

"What the fuck?" the kid said.

Serena smiled. "Are you the manager?"

"Yeah, so what?"

"We're cops. Does a woman named Christi Katt live here?"

"Yeah, so what?" he repeated.

"So you're going to lose the attitude and give us her key. Okay?"

Cordy grinned. "You can show us the pool later."

The kid shook his head. "Fucking cops, you guys are really something. Yeah, okay, apartment 204. She's been here about a year. Hot number, you get me? She's a lot nicer than the other trash we get around here."

He looked nervously over his shoulder, obviously wondering if his guest had heard him.

"When's the last time you saw her?" Serena asked.

"Don't know," the kid said. "A few days ago, I guess."

"But not in the last couple days."

"No, it's been a while, okay?"

Cordy wandered over to the wall of mailboxes and found the box labeled 204. "There's a lot of mail in here."

"Ain't that what I said? Maybe she's shacking up somewhere else."

"You see her around with anyone lately? Boyfriend, girlfriend, anybody like that?" Serena watched his eyes, trying to see a flicker of a lie.

"She kept to herself," the kid said.

"Nobody asking about her?" Serena asked.

"Just you."

"What kind of car does she drive?"

"It's an old beater. Red Chevy Cavalier."

Serena glanced at Cordy, who took a few steps out of the office. He came back a moment later and nodded. "It's in the lot."

"Have you noticed if the car has come and gone lately?" Serena asked.

"Who knows? I don't pay attention."

"Okay, let's have the key."

The kid hesitated. "Don't you need a warrant or something like that? Christi's going to be mad if I just let you in there."

Christi won't be mad at anyone anymore, Serena thought. She smiled at the young manager. "Just give me the key."

He shrugged and disappeared back inside his apartment. Serena heard a whiny female voice, and then the kid hissed, "Shut up." He reappeared a few seconds later with a key tied with a rubber band to a paint-stirring stick.

"You'll make sure I get this back, right?" The kid scowled at them, men retreated inside his apartment and slammed the door.

"Let's take a look at the car," Serena said.

They returned outside and wandered past the ground-floor apartments toward the end of the parking lot. The red Cavalier was parked on the street side of the lot. They walked over to it and peered inside, cupping their hands next to their eyes to block the glare. The car was locked and empty. Serena looked in the front and back seats for papers or trash, but if Christi Katt was the owner, she kept a clean car.

Serena noticed an Indian girl, about eight years old, walking toward the office with her hands folded behind her back. She wore a plain white dress with blue fringe on the collar. The dress fell to her calves. She wore sandals that clip-clopped on the pavement. Her straight black hair fell below her shoulders.

Serena beckoned her over.

"Hi," Serena said. "You know who owns this car?"

The girl's head bobbed. "Oh, yes. Very pretty lady. She lives upstairs."

Cordy smiled at the girl. "Have you seen the pretty lady around here lately?'

"I saw her on Sunday. She leaves for work. Since then, no."

It was Wednesday evening.

"Was she with anyone when you saw her?"

The girl thought about it, then shook her head.

"You didn't see her come back?"

"No," the girl said. "But I go outside at night to see stars, and her car is parked right there."

"What time was that?"

The girl shrugged her shoulders. "Late."

"Has the car been here ever since?" Serena asked.

The girl nodded. "Yes, parked right there."

"Thanks, sweetheart."

Serena and Cordy headed for the stairs, dodging crumpled fast food bags and candy wrappers littering the ground. They jogged to the second floor. Cordy rapped his knuckles sharply on the door to room 204, not expecting an answer. He didn't get one. They looked up and down the corridor to see if they had attracted any other attention, but the place was deserted.

"Gloves," Serena said.

Cordy nodded. He extracted a slim box from his suit pocket, and they both slipped on fresh pairs of white latex gloves, which clung to their hands like a second skin.

"Some people die from these things," Cordy said.

"Gloves?"

"Latex allergy. Like peanuts. People go into convulsions."

"Maybe it's the salt," Serena said.

"On the gloves?"

"No, the peanuts. Open the damn door, Cordy."

Cordy inserted the master key in the lower lock. Delicately, using two fingertips, he turned the door handle. The latch clicked, and he was able to push the door open. A crack of light streamed in, but the rest of the apartment was dark. Cordy took two steps inside, found the light switch, and carefully flipped it up with the point of the key.

In the light, he took a quick survey of the apartment and said, "Bull's-eye, mama."

Serena followed him in. Her eyes fell immediately on a dried reddish-brown stain, about two feet in diameter, in the middle of the carpet. The air in the apartment was stale, but the mineral smell of blood lingered.

"I'll call for a forensics team," Cordy said, sliding his cell phone out of his pocket.

Serena nodded. "And get some uniforms to start knocking on doors. We need to know when this girl was last seen, whether anyone was with her, who she hung out with, that son of thing. Once we're done here, we can check out the Thrill Palace. Oh, and have someone run Christi Katt through the system. See what comes up."

"Uh-huh," Cordy said.

While Cordy connected with the station, Serena wandered around the apartment. It was a small unit with a living area in which the murder had occurred, a matchbox kitchen, and a bedroom visible through a doorway on the rear wall. Christi's furnishings were sparse and cheap, including what looked like a garage-sale sofa and loveseat, discount-store shelving for a small television and boom box, and a few mismatched tables and chairs. The carpet was worn and gray.

Serena clicked on her recorder. "The apartment looks sterile-nothing personal. No photographs. No posters on the wall. No knickknacks or collectibles that might suggest who this girl was or what was in her head. There's no history here."

Serena entered the kitchen and began gingerly exploring.

"No magnets on the refrigerator. Virtually no food in the fridge and nothing more than a few cereal boxes, dried pasta, and canned soup in the cabinets. We're not talking about Julia Child here. It looks like she just moved in, but the manager said she's been here about a year."

She glanced in the sink and found a heavy glass vase there, washed and left on its side. Serena retreated to the living room and began examining the shelves propped against the wall not far from the bloodstain.

"Find something?" Cordy asked.

"Maybe. There's a vase in the sink. I'm betting it's the murder weapon. Look here, on the shelf. There's a lighter ring in the dust. It's the right size and shape to match the bottom of the vase. Christi and the killer are standing here, okay? She turns her back, the killer grabs the vase and wham, splits her skull open."

"Uh-huh," Cordy said. "No sign of forced entry or struggle, either. I am guessing that, one, she knew her killer, and, two, the murder was an unplanned spontaneous act of passion. Anger. Jealousy. I would not rule out jealousy with this girl."

"And you base this on what?"

Cordy put a finger on the side of his nose. "It just smells right."

Serena laughed. "Sure. Well, smell your way into the bedroom. Let's see if this girl left any clues behind"

The bedroom was a twelve-by-twelve box, with a closet and bathroom on the right wall. Christi had a full-sized bed, a nightstand, and a small dresser. As in the rest of the apartment, the walls were bare.

"No blanket on the bed," Serena said.

"Maybe she was hot."

"Or maybe the killer used it to transport the body."

Serena went into the bathroom, which included a toilet, a pedestal sink, and a shower with a pink plastic curtain. She checked for traces of blood in the sink and shower and found nothing visible. The forensics team would check it with luminol. In the medicine cabinet, she found a sparse array of toiletries. To her surprise, she found no evidence of any kind of birth control. Either Christi's men brought the condoms or her sex life was about as exciting as Serena's.

She returned to the bedroom, where Cordy was examining the top drawer of Christi's nightstand. "Anything?"

Cordy shook his head. "Not much. Matchbooks from two other strip clubs. Those might be prior employers, so we can check them out. Otherwise, no letters, no postcards, no love notes, no bills, no receipts, no credit card statements. This girl was one private senorita."

"My dresser drawers are a mess," Serena said. "Ten years' worth of shit. You could write my biography by going through it"

"Not Christi Katt. Or whoever she was."

"Well, keep looking. Any condoms in there, by the way?"

"Why, you running low?"

Serena sighed. "How are you feeling, Cordy? You're looking pale. It could be a latex allergy. Now tell me before you go into convulsions."

"No condoms," Cordy said, chuckling.

Serena explored the girl's closet, which didn't take long. There were a few pairs of high heels on the floor, several blouses, skirts, and dresses on hangers, and two small stacks of T-shirts and jeans on a wire shelf. She rifled through the pockets of the jeans and found only a small quantity of loose change and a few sticks of gum.

She emerged, shaking her head. "This girl is quite a little mystery. How about a wallet or keys? Find anything like that?"

"Nada," Cordy said.

"That's interesting. Where are they?"

"Maybe the killer took them."

Serena reflected. "Maybe so. Let's say Christi's at home, keys and wallet in her pockets. The killer comes to the door. For some reason, she lets him in. Either she knows him or she doesn't feel threatened. Big mistake. They talk, maybe argue, she turns her back, and it's lights out The killer, a fastidious type, cleans the vase, wipes off prints-unless we're really lucky-and wraps the body in a blanket from the bed. No tracking blood outside that way. He waits until it's dark and deserted outside, hauls the body to his car, drives off, and dumps her body in the desert."

"Uh-huh," Cordy said. "Except the body was naked. I could see the guy taking the wallet and keys. But why leave her in the buff? Who knows, maybe a little horizontal tango with the corpse? This could be one sick dude."

"No shortage of those," Serena said. "Forensics can tell us whether there was sexual activity. But stripping the body down does make it seem like there's a sex angle. Unless she had a boyfriend with her and was already naked."

"But no condoms, right?"

"Right. So we've got virtually no trace of this girl's life, and yet she had someone angry enough to kill her. Nice. I hope she made some friends at the Thrill Palace. Or at one of those other clubs."

"Don't take bets on that, mama," Cordy said.

"I'm not. Look, check out the dresser, and make sure we haven't missed anything. I want to eyeball the living room again before all the guys with big feet get here."

She left Cordy in the bedroom. Slowly, she traversed the apartment for a second time, looking at every surface, studying the floor and the walls. In the kitchen, she checked for the garbage under the sink and found coffee grounds, orange peels, and an outdated TV Guide.

Back in the living room, she checked out a handful of compact discs near the boom box, opening each case carefully, but found nothing else inside. She found it mildly interesting that Christi liked jazz. Serena, too, had wallowed in jazz during her low periods as a teenager in the first few years in Vegas, before she grew up and went country. Jazz was for trouble. Country was for living.

She heard Cordy whistle, long and loud.

"What?" she called.

Cordy was silent.

Curious, Serena returned to the bedroom. She found Cordy sitting cross-legged on the floor. The full-sized mattress had been shoved half off the bed. Next to Cordy was a small stack of newspapers. Cordy had one of the sections unfolded, and he was reading it transfixed.

"Her secret stash?" Serena asked.

Cordy nodded.

"You should have waited for the search team before touching this stuff," Serena told him. Then she gave in to her own curiosity. "What's in them?"

Cordy put down the paper. "So how long you figure that body's been lying in the desert?"

Serena shrugged "A few days. Why?"

"Well, in that case, we got a problem, mama."

37

Stride heard Andrea slip out of bed at six o'clock on Thursday morning to get ready for work. He opened his eyes without moving in bed and saw her, in the darkness of their bedroom, as she slid her white nightgown over her head and peeled down her panties. Her naked body had become softer and fleshier in three years but was still attractive.

"Hi," he said softly.

Andrea didn't look at him. "Hi yourself."

"What was your name again?"

She shook her head. "Not funny, Jon."

"I know. I'm sorry." Last night, he and Maggie had interrogated a suspect in a gang-related Asian drug ring until past one in the morning. There had been a string of late nights for several months.

"A phone call would sure be nice once in a while," Andrea said. "This is three nights in a row, and I haven't known when I'll see you. You're not there for me. You're never there."

"This case-" Stride began.

"I don't care about the case," she said. "If it's not this one, it would be another one."

Stride nodded and didn't reply. She was right. And it was getting worse. He realized he was taking on parts of the investigations that should really be delegated down the line. Even K-2 had noticed it and asked him bluntly if he was looking for excuses to avoid going home. He said no, but deep down, he wasn't sure.

"How's Denise?" he asked. "I feel like I haven't seen you since then."

"That's because you haven't. You haven't asked me anything about it. Do you care? You don't know anything about me anymore."

Andrea waited, with her hands on her hips. When he didn't say anything more, she turned and stalked into the bathroom, shutting the door with a sharp click. He heard the shower running.

The problems had begun a year ago. They had spent two years in relative peace, avoiding conflicts by not talking about them, but recently the troubles between them had come into the open. It started with the issue of kids, which Andrea wanted desperately and Stride didn't. He was too old by now. He would be over sixty by the time the kids left home.

Andrea persisted. Eighteen months after their marriage, with his reluctant acceptance, she went off the pill. They made love at every time of the day, to the point where there was no longer anything romantic about it. For all the trying, nothing happened. He tried to look disappointed that they couldn't conceive, but he was afraid that his real relief showed in his face. He knew what Andrea believed, that if she had had a baby with her first husband, then he never would have left her, and her life would still be perfect. She was afraid that if she failed again, she would end up losing Stride, too-so she had to get pregnant.

But it was not to be.

He told her over and over that it didn't matter to him, but misery gradually took over her face, and in the year since then, it had never really left. They were well on the road to becoming strangers.

He heard the shower shut off.

The door opened, and Andrea stood naked in the doorway, watching him. He could see beads of water on her bare skin, dripping on the carpet. She was biting her lower lip, and he could make out her face well enough in the shadows to see she had been crying. They stared at each other for a long while, silently.

It was as if she had read his thoughts, and they scared her.

"We need to talk," she said.

He heard it in her tone. He knew it was coming. Divorce. The only question was which one of them would say the word first.

"I'm sorry," she said in a hushed voice.

"I'm the one who should be sorry," Stride told her.

He spread his arms wide, and she came to him. He folded up her wet body in his grasp. He saw anxiety in her bloodshot blue eyes. He put his hands up to her face, cupping her cheeks, and they both smiled weakly, trying to make the pain go away. He was conscious of her naked body on top of his, and he responded automatically. He shifted, wanting to enter her, but she let go and rolled off him onto her back, tugging gently on his shoulder. He followed her, sliding on top. His hands slid behind her neck. He went to kiss her, but she turned her face away. He felt her legs spreading for him, her knees bending and coming up. She didn't move; she just held onto him as he slid into her. The sex was quick and unsatisfying. Eventually, he eased down on top of her, and they lay like that for several minutes. When he felt gentle pressure from her hands, he knew to roll off her. She kissed him, a brush of her lips, then got out of bed quickly before he could touch her.

He heard her clean herself up in the bathroom and watched her as she hurried to put clothes on. She didn't say a word. When she was dressed, she hesitated in the doorway. She looked at him with an empty expression on her face, then turned and left, leaving him alone.

He was in the midst of uneasy dreams when the phone rang, startling him awake. He noticed the clock and groaned as he fumbled for the receiver. It was nine-thirty, an hour past his morning meeting.

"I'm late," he growled into the phone. "Sue me."

Stride expected a sarcastic barb from Maggie. Instead, after a pause, he heard a low, teasing laugh that was new to him.

"Is that Lieutenant Stride? You sound like you just woke up."

He lay back in bed and closed his eyes. "I did just wake up. And I won't admit to being Stride until I make a pot of coffee. So how about we call this a wrong number?"

That's too bad. Someone named Maggie told me you give great phone sex."

Stride laughed, confused now, but also intrigued. "Not that Maggie would know. Who the hell is this?"

"My name is Serena Dial. I'm with the Las Vegas Metro Police. Unfortunately, I have news about an old case that you're not going to like, Lieutenant"

Las Vegas. Stride was immediately awake. It didn't matter that three years had passed-he knew why Serena was calling. Rachel. He heard the girl's name in his head and saw her body again in that amazing photograph.

The silence stretched out on the phone. Finally, Stride said, "I'm guessing you have her in custody."

"No. In the morgue."

"Rachel's dead?"

He didn't understand. In his idle fantasies, when someone from Las Vegas called him, Rachel was still alive. Sometimes he imagined Rachel herself would call.

"Dead. Murdered. Dumped in the desert. I know this causes problems for you."

Stride wondered if he was dreaming. "When?"

"Last few days, as near as we can tell," Serena told him.

She really was alive, Stride thought Until now. "Do you know what happened? Who killed her?"

"Not yet," Serena said. "But if you can pick me up at the airport this evening, maybe we can work it together."

"You're coming here?"

"That's where the trail leads, Lieutenant To Duluth."

38

Maggie readily confessed to everyone who drove with her that her body wasn't made for driving a truck. She sat on a phone book to make sure she could see over the steering wheel, and the accelerator and brake pedals had blocks to allow her feet to reach them. Before she married Eric Sorenson two years ago, she owned a miniature Geo Metro. But Eric, an ex-Olympic swimmer, didn't fit in her small car, and so their first purchase together was a much larger vehicle, in which Eric could ride without hugging his knees on his chest.

Stride didn't like driving with Maggie. She wasn't the greatest driver to begin with, and the jury-rigged modifications to make her body SUV-compatible didn't help. He also suspected she drove more recklessly with him, purely out of spite. He tried not to jam his foot into an imaginary brake or to wince audibly at the many close calls.

It was early evening on Thursday. Serena Dial's plane from Las Vegas, via Minneapolis, was expected in half an hour. As they climbed farther from the lakeshore, heading up Miller Hill toward the Duluth airport, the air roaring between the open windows got warmer.

Maggie shook her head. The light ahead of them turned red, and she honked her horn as she sped through the intersection, not slowing down.

"She was alive the whole damn time," Maggie said. "Archie Gale's going to love this."

Stride nodded wearily. "Dan won't be happy to learn that he prosecuted a man for murdering a girl who wasn't dead. I don't think it's going to give his campaign a boost."

"Have you told him yet?" Maggie asked.

"Not yet I asked K-2 if I could hold off until tomorrow. The detective from Vegas agreed to keep it under wraps until we could tell Emily."

Maggie frowned. "I hope Emily doesn't fall to pieces. Imagine killing your husband for killing your daughter and then finding out he was innocent."

Stride shrugged. "Innocent of murder, maybe. I still think Graeme was sleeping with Rachel."

"The question is, what the hell really happened to her?"

"She had to have help disappearing," Stride said. "No way she left town on her own. We would have picked up some trace of her. Maybe she got someone to drive her to Minneapolis. She disguised herself and hopped a bus from there. The friend drove back to Duluth and kept quiet"

"And the evidence we found at the barn? The bracelet, the blood, the footprints?"

"I know, that's the problem. We know Rachel was at the barn that Friday night" Stride rubbed his lower lip and stared out the window at the fast food restaurants and liquor stores passing by. "Okay, what about this? Rachel gets home that night Graeme wants a rendezvous, since Emily's out of town. He and Rachel drive to the barn, climb in the back of the van, and start steaming up the windows."

Maggie frowned. "Why go to the barn? No one's home, why not just do it in the bedroom?"

"Who knows? Maybe the barn was their place. Maybe Graeme didn't tell her what he had in mind. One way or another, he gets her out there. But something goes wrong. Maybe Rachel says no this time, and that's not what Graeme wants to hear. Or maybe they're playing a kinky game with the knife that starts to go too far. Rachel manages to get out of the van, and he chases her. They struggle, she loses her bracelet, her shirt is torn. He wrestles her back to the van."

"And then what?" Maggie asked. "Remember, he didn't kill her."

"I know. Graeme suddenly comes to his senses. He's never gone this far before, and it scares him, like a cold shower. Or maybe it's just like what happened with Sally. He hears another car coming and hightails it out of there. He pretends it was all a mistake, drives Rachel home, and tells her to forget the whole thing."

Maggie jammed on the brakes as a car turned in front of them. She squealed into the left lane and roared around the other car, shooting a dirty look through the window.

"But when they get home, Rachel is scared shitless," Maggie speculated.

"Me, too," Stride said.

"Big baby. You taught me to drive like this, you know. So what happens next? Rachel is scared. She's fed up."

"Right She calls a friend and says, 'Get me out of here.' And she's gone."

"Okay," Maggie acknowledged. "Then why not take her own car? Why not pack some clothes to take with her?"

Stride bit his lip, thinking. "Panic, maybe. She doesn't want to be found, and the car is easy to trace. She doesn't want to stick around another minute, even to pack. Maybe she thinks Graeme is going to try again, so she doesn't even go in the house with him."

Maggie turned off the main road and onto the lonelier highway leading to the airport. She immediately accelerated to seventy-five miles an hour, and the dashboard began to vibrate. "If we're right that means someone knew that Rachel was alive. And whoever it was didn't come forward, even with an innocent man on trial for murder."

Stride nodded. "If Rachel told him what happened at the bam, maybe he thought Graeme was getting what he deserved."

"And why didn't Graeme explain what happened?"

"Graeme? Tell the truth?" Stride laughed. "Forget it. If he admitted having sex with the girl, he was toast. I'm sure Gale told him that. No one would believe his story. He was better off saying none of it happened."

"Okay, take your theory one more step. Who's the mysterious friend?"

"I don't know," Stride said. "It never seemed to me that Rachel had any friends. At least no one she would really trust."

"Except Kevin."

Stride nodded. "Yeah. Except Kevin. But can you picture him staying quiet? He doesn't seem like a smooth enough liar to have pulled it off on the witness stand."

"Well, how about Sally? We know she was hiding something. Hell, we know she went to Rachel's house that night. And I don't imagine she would have been unhappy to see Rachel go away forever, where she couldn't bother Kevin anymore."

Stride put the pieces together in his head. "That's an interesting theory."

"You think we should talk to her?"

"Definitely," Stride said. "Rachel won't be coming back to seduce Kevin, and Stoner's out of the picture. Maybe she'll tell the truth this time."

Maggie turned left onto the entrance road into the Duluth airport and continued along the curving road that led up to the terminal building. The terminal was barely a football field in length, built in the shape of a triangle and dominated by a steep chocolate brown roof. Maggie pulled up to the far end of the terminal and parked, leaving her police placard on the dashboard. They proceeded through the giant revolving doors into the lower level of the terminal, which was almost empty, and took the escalator up to the second level. Country music played softly on the speakers overhead. Stride recognized Vi nee Gill's gentle croon.

They still had a long wait before the plane arrived. He dropped a quarter in a pinball machine, a two-level model decorated with a huge-busted girl in a micro-mini pointing a gun at his face and squealing, "Hit me." He had been pretty good at pinball in his high school days, but unlike riding a bicycle, it didn't come right back to him. He lost the first ball straight down the middle. The second danced around at the top, winning him a few thousand points, before slipping around the graveyard corridor on the left By the third ball, he had some of his rhythm back, swiveling his hips as he banged the flippers with the heels of his hands. Maggie went and got a Coke from a vending machine and drank it as she watched him play.

"Does this cop from Vegas think someone from Duluth killed her?"

Stride shrugged without taking his eyes off the machine. "She didn't say. She just said the trail leads here."

"Serena Dial," Maggie said. "She sounded sharp on the phone. I bet she's a looker."

"Why's that?"

"She's from Vegas. All the girls in Vegas are gorgeous."

"I've never been there," Stride said.

"You need to get out more, boss."

"Well, my idea of a vacation is being alone in the woods, not surrounded by thousands of people in Coney Island." He got distracted and almost lost the last ball, but rescued it with a nifty flip at the last second.

"Alone?" Maggie asked.

"You know what I mean."

The building quivered as loud thunder rumbled around them, a jet engine bellowing as a plane landed on the runway outside. Stride noticed a ticket agent, chewing gum, emerge from the escalator and head toward Gate 1. He took his eyes from the machine long enough to let the silver ball slip past the flipper, ending the game.

He and Maggie headed for the gate area.

"How will we recognize her?" Maggie asked.

"We'll wing it"

Recognizing Serena wasn't a problem. All of the passengers on the jet were typical Minnesotans, dressed in quiet clothes, blending into their surroundings, not attracting attention. Except for Serena Dial. She stuck out from the other passengers as loudly as a piece of crystal amid a row of Burger King plastic cups. She was dressed in baby blue leather pants that clung to her long legs like a second skin. A silver chain belt looped around her waist, with the ties dangling between her legs. She wore an undersized white T-shirt that didn't reach far enough to cover the last inch of skin on her flat stomach. Her black leather raincoat draped almost to her ankles. She had glossy black hair, loose and luscious.

"Wow," Maggie said.

Stride couldn't remember when he had seen a more attractive woman in his life. It occurred to him that, had Rachel grown up, she might have looked just like her.

Serena stopped at the end of the gate area and studied the people from behind her honey-colored sunglasses. She picked out Stride and Maggie immediately, and with a hint of a smile, she glided over to them. Everyone nearby followed her every move, but she didn't seem to notice.

"You Stride?" she asked. With her heels on, she was as tall as Stride, and she looked right at him.

"That's right." He found himself holding eye contact with her. Flirting. "This is my partner, Maggie Bei, who spreads lies about me on the phone."

"It's Sorenson," Maggie said. "He forgets I'm married." She took note of the way Stride and Serena were looking at each other and smirked. "Apparently, he forgets that he is, too."

Stride shot Maggie an evil glance, and she quickly stuck out her tongue at him.

"I love your uniform," Maggie added. "Do all the chick cops in Vegas get to wear that?"

Serena stripped off her sunglasses and studied Maggie from head to toe. Her smile curled into something more wicked. "Only the chick cops with tits, sweetie."

Maggie laughed out loud. She turned to Stride. "I like her."

Stride took another glance at Serena's body and didn't try to hide his interest. He felt something electric when she looked back. "You're in Minnesota now," Stride told Serena. "There's a dress code."

"You mean boring?"

"Exactly."

"Well, you guys don't seem so boring," Serena said.

Maggie laughed. "Wait until you get to know us."

They headed out of the gate area. Heads continued to rotate in Serena's direction as she passed by. Maggie and Stride lingered a few steps behind, and Maggie, laughing, leaned closer and whispered, "Do you two want to be alone?"

"Oh, shut up," Stride retorted.

On the lower level, they retrieved a hard-sided blue Samsonite suitcase that matched Serena's leather pants. Stride lifted the case off the carousel and gasped under the weight.

"Holy shit, did you bring the body with you?"

Serena laughed. "Oh, sorry, would that not be correct procedure here?"

They returned through the revolving doors. The air was still warm, but a breeze rolled in across the hills. Serena put on her sunglasses again and took a deep breath. "God, that's great Fresh air. Feels like winter."

"Well, it's a little cooler in winter," Stride said.

"Like a hundred degrees cooler," Maggie said.

Serena nodded. "Yeah, I looked up Minnesota on the Web, and it pretty much sounded like the icebox of the nation. But this is nice. It's a buck twenty back home. Hot Preheat your oven sometime, then stick your face inside. That's Vegas."

"I was married in Reno," Maggie told her.

"Yeah? I like Reno. I love the mountains. I keep telling myself someday I'll get the hell out of the desert"

"You married?" Maggie asked her.

Serena shook her head. "No."

They reached Maggie's SUV. Serena clambered into the backseat and leaned casually over the front seat to talk with Stride as they got inside. Stride felt her elbow grazing his neck and could smell a hint of perfume. Her breath was sweet. He was uncomfortably aware of everything about her.

"You're absolutely sure the body you found in the desert is Rachel Deese?" Maggie asked her.

Serena nodded. "I'm sure. Prints matched what you put in the system. Plus, a witness identified her photo from a news clipping. Sorry about that. I know it puts you guys in an awkward position."

"We're used to that," Maggie said, chuckling.

"Does anyone else out here know about this yet?' Serena asked.

Stride shook his head. "Just us and the chief. I didn't want it leaking out I thought we could break the news to her mother first. It'll hit the papers and television as soon as we start talking to people."

"Yeah, I imagine this will be big news around here. I read the newspaper report Bizarre case. If I were you, I would have thought she was dead, too."

"Thanks," Stride said.

"Anyway, after we tell the mother, I guess we should open up the case files and start investigating the girl's friends and anyone else who knew her."

Stride twisted around in his seat. Their faces were only a couple of inches apart. "How's that going to help solve a murder in Vegas?"

Serena took off her sunglasses again, and Stride looked into her jade-green eyes. Originally, when he saw her walk off the plane, he thought she was younger than she was, but close up, he could see the maturity in her face. Her smile lines were deep. She must have been in her midthirties, which to Stride was still young, but her face was etched with an older, wiser sensibility. Her smile came often and easily, and her eyes joked with him, but there was also a distance, a lack of trust that hovered between them like a thin film. He wondered if it was because she sensed the same sexual chemistry between them that he did.

He realized she hadn't answered his question.

"Well, Serena?" Maggie asked, giving them both a sideways glance.

"I take it you guys are familiar with the Range Bank," Serena said.

"Sure," Stride said. "I bank there, along with half the city. What difference does that make?"

Serena leaned even closer. "CSI found part of an ATM receipt from the Range Bank in Rachel's apartment. So either she was back here recently or someone from home paid her a visit."

39

Stride picked up Serena at the motel on Friday morning just after nine o'clock. He knocked on her door, and when she answered, her black hair was damp from a recent shower, and her skin glowed. She had toned down her wardrobe, wearing a faded pair of blue jeans, a snug navy T-shirt, and cowboy boots. She flashed a welcoming smile.

"Hey, Stride," she said. "Come on in. I'm almost ready."

Her shower had left the tiny room humid and fragrant. The mirror beside the television was steamed over. He saw her suitcase open on the bureau, her clothes folded inside. A queen-sized bed was squeezed between the walls.

"Sorry about the room," he said. "Summer's the busy season here."

Serena shrugged. "That's all right."

She sat on the edge of the bed and began to put on tiny silver earrings. Her fingertips seemed to caress her earlobes. Stride found he couldn't take his eyes off her. Serena looked up and noticed and, after a long moment, glanced nervously away.

"I called Rachel's mother on the cell phone on the way over," he said, feeling awkward. "I finally got through to her. We can stop there first."

"Did you break the news?"

Stride shook his head. "No, I just said I wanted to talk to her. She probably suspects."

Serena stood up. They were close enough to kiss, and Stride felt a wild desire to do just that.

"We better go," he said.

Outside, they climbed into Stride's truck. The seats were coming apart, and he had covered the dashboard with Post-it notes related to various investigations. A day-old mug of coffee was lodged in the cup holder, and part of the Duluth newspaper was strewn on the floor.

Serena saw his embarrassment and smiled. "Don't worry. I like a truck with that lived-in look. How old's the coffee?"

"Old."

"You guys got a Starbucks near here?"

"Sure. But I usually go to McDonald's. It's hot and cheap. Want to drive through?"

"Okay," she said. "But I may hit you up for some real coffee later."

They got two steaming cups of coffee, and Stride threw out the old one. He also ordered some hash browns and munched them as they drove. Serena dangled her arm outside the truck. The breeze whipped in and mussed her newly brushed hair. She sipped her coffee. Stride stole glances at her, and once or twice, she looked back his way. They didn't say much.

A few islands of fog lingered on the road. He switched on his headlights as he drove in and out of the patches of mist. At the crest of the hill, overlooking the rest of the city, he saw Serena lean forward, staring down at the hints of lake visible through the haze.

"This is amazing," she murmured. "When you live in the desert for a long time, you forget about water and trees."

"I've never been to the desert," Stride said.

"Never? You should go. It's beautiful in its own way,"

"Are you from Las Vegas originally?" Stride asked.

"No, Phoenix." He watched her green eyes grow distant, and he guessed that he had stumbled onto sensitive ground. "I moved to Vegas with a girlfriend when I was sixteen," she added.

"Young," he said, wondering what she had been running away from. Serena didn't explain.

Stride followed the curving road down to the freeway and headed south, which was the fastest route toward the neighborhood in which Emily and Dayton Tenby lived. They had gotten married while Emily was still in prison, and she had been paroled six months ago.

"I'm freezing," Serena said, rubbing her arms.

"I've got a sweater in the trunk. You want to borrow it?"

Serena nodded. She wrinkled her nose. "I smell cigarettes. Do you smoke?"

"I used to," Stride admitted. "I finally quit about a year ago. The smell lingers in here."

"Was it tough to quit?"

Stride nodded. "But I saw another guy on the force die of cancer last year. He was only about ten years older. That scared me."

"Good for you," Serena said.

Stride found Dayton and Emily's house without difficulty. It was only two blocks from the church that he and Maggie had visited in the snow more than three years earlier. He parked on the street and retrieved a rust-colored wool pullover sweater from his trunk. Serena shrugged it over her shoulders as they walked up the driveway. She pushed the sleeves up to bare her forearms.

"You're a life saver," she told him and squeezed his arm.

Emily answered the bell at once. He expected that prison would have aged her, but if anything, she looked younger than she had during the dark days of the trial. Her makeup was neat, her lipstick smoothed and red. Her blue eyes, once sullen and dead, were bright again, and her dark hair was cut in a cute bob. She wore a pair of brown slacks and a loose-fitting white cotton blouse.

"Hello, Lieutenant," she said. "It's been a long time."

"Yes, it has. You're looking well, Mrs. Tenby."

"Please, call me Emily," she said pleasantly.

"Of course. And this is Serena Dial. She's with the police in Las Vegas, Nevada."

Emily's eyebrows rose. "Las Vegas?"

Serena nodded. Emily's lips pursed in concern. She pulled the door open farther, inviting them in.

"Dayton is in the living room. I'm sorry you weren't able to reach us last night. We got your message, but we got home very late. Our flight into the Cities was delayed by two hours, and then we still had to drive north."

"Were you on vacation?" Serena asked.

"Partly, and partly work for Dayton. There was a national church convention in San Antonio, down by the River Walk. We added on a few extra days to make a week out of it."

She guided them into the living room. Dayton Tenby was seated on the sofa, and he immediately got up and extended his hand to both of them. Dayton's hair was now completely gray, although there was little of it left, except around the crown of his narrow skull. He had put on a few pounds, enough to make him look less gaunt than he had when Stride first met him. He wore gray dress pants, a starched white shirt, and a black acrylic vest.

Emily and Dayton sat down next to each other on a love seat and held hands. Stride and Serena sat opposite them on the sofa. Stride could see that marriage had agreed with both of them. Despite more than ten years' difference in age between them, they seemed to be happy.

"I want you to know, Lieutenant, that I still don't regret what I did," Emily said. "I don't mind paying my debt to society, but if I had it to do over again, I would do the same thing."

Stride hesitated. "I understand."

Dayton looked at them. "We don't expect that this is a social call. You must have some news for us."

"Yes, we do," Stride said. "I want you to understand that this could be very upsetting."

"You found her," Emily said.

"Yes, we did. But not in the circumstances you might expect. Earlier this week, Ms. Dial was called to a location in the desert just outside of Las Vegas. A young girl's body was found there. I'm afraid it was Rachel." He paused and went on. "She had only been dead for a short time. Just a few days. It appears that Rachel was actually alive these past three years."

"Alive?" Emily whispered, her eyes widening. "All this timer?"

He saw Emily squeeze Dayton's hand tightly. She closed her eyes and leaned her head slowly against his shoulder.

"How did she die?" Dayton asked.

"I'm sorry," Serena told them softly. "She was murdered."

Dayton shook his head. "Oh, no."

Emily straightened up, rubbing her eyes. She pulled a tissue from a box on the coffee table and sniffled into it. She blinked and tried to compose herself. "You're telling me that Graeme didn't kill my daughter?"

"That's right," Stride said.

"Oh my God." She turned to Dayton. "I killed him. And he didn't do it! She was alive!"

"He may not have killed her, but that doesn't mean he was innocent," Dayton told her.

"I know, I know. But she must have been laughing wherever she was. She tricked me into killing him!"

"Do you have any idea what happened?" Dayton asked Serena. "Who killed her?"

"We're still investigating," Serena said. "I know this is a difficult time for you, but I do have to ask. Did you have any reason to believe that your daughter might still be alive? Did she ever try to contact you?"

Dayton and Emily looked at Stride.

"Just the postcard you showed us," Dayton said.

Stride explained to Serena about the postcard he had received shortly after the trial, with the Las Vegas postmark.

"Did you pursue it?" Serena asked.

"As far as we could. There were no prints on the card and no DNA on the stamp. I alerted the Vegas police and asked if they could scout around for me, but they didn't seem too keen on using their resources to hunt for an eighteen-year-old runaway who might or might not be dead and who might or might not be in Las Vegas."

"I'm not sure I would have done anything differently in their shoes," Serena admitted.

Stride nodded.

"I did investigate, Ms. Dial," Dayton announced.

Stride and Serena both looked at him in surprise. Dayton paused, asking permission from Emily with his eyes. She nodded at him.

"To me, the postcard-well, it seemed exactly like the kind of game Rachel would play. To taunt us. It convinced me she was alive. Emily was in prison, of course, and I didn't want the trail to grow cold, as it were. So I went to find her."

"You went to Las Vegas?" Stride asked.

"Yes, for a week. When you told me the police there weren't being helpful, I decided to look into it myself. For Emily. She deserved to know the truth."

"How did you go about it-the search, I mean?" Serena asked.

"Well, I know I sound like one of the Hardy Boys," Dayton said. "I took a photograph of Rachel with me. I just went to all the casinos and showed the photograph around at the security desks. You know, to see if anyone had seen her. They keep close tabs on people there, if you believe the television shows. I just assumed if she was there, she'd be working at a casino. It seems like everyone does. So I went up and down the Strip, and then downtown, and then to the outlying areas."

"And did you find her?" Stride asked.

Dayton shook his head sadly. "Not a trace. No one had seen her. After a week, I began to believe that it was all a mistake, that the postcard wasn't from Rachel."

"Have you been back to Vegas since then?" Serena asked.

"No, I haven't."

"Have you had any other reason since then to believe Rachel might be alive?" Stride asked, making eye contact with both of them. "Any other odd communications? Phone calls?"

"Nothing at all," Emily said. "Frankly, I never believed it, like Dayton did. I never thought she was alive."

"Oh? Why?" Serena asked.

An ironic smile flitted across Emily's lips. "I was in prison. If she were alive, I was sure Rachel would have found a way to throw that in my face."

Stride nodded. "We've taken up enough of your time," he said. He stood up, and Serena followed his lead.

"How do we arrange to have Rachel's body sent back?" Dayton asked.

"I'll have someone call you," Serena said. "We'll release her just as soon as we can. It's a criminal investigation, you understand. But one word of advice, if you don't mind. You may not want to view the body when it's returned. She was found in the desert, and, well, the desert isn't very kind to human remains."

Emily swallowed hard. "I understand."

They shook hands, and Dayton escorted them to the door. Serena offered the minister a small smile.

"Once again, I'm very sorry. I hope at least the two of you had a nice vacation before this."

Dayton hesitated. "Oh. Yes, we did. Thank you."

"I love the River Walk in San Antonio," Serena continued. "Where did you stay?"

"The convention was at the Hyatt."

"Did you get a chance to get out of the city?"

"Not really. We visited the Alamo, that kind of thing."

"Of course," Serena said.

Dayton touched her shoulder as they turned to leave. "May I ask you something?"

Serena nodded.

"I was wondering if you knew what Rachel was doing. Where she worked. I was just thinking, if I had searched a little bit harder-"

"She was working in a strip club," Serena told him without sugarcoating.

Dayton wet his lips with his tongue. "Ah. Well. I didn't look there."

40

"Do you believe him?" Stride asked as they headed back to the city. He glanced out his window and saw charcoal clouds massing in the southwest corner of the sky. A summer storm was bearing down.

"If he's lying, he's good at it," Serena said. "But I'm a cynic when it comes to men and teenage girls."

"You think a preacher who sounds too good to be true probably is?" Stride asked.

"It's more than that, Jonny."

She didn't explain. He couldn't help but wonder about her secrets. The fact that she called him Jonny also rolled around in his head. It flowed from her casually, without thought-he wondered if she even knew she had done it-but there was a familiarity in how she said it that was intimate.

He didn't think Andrea's voice had ever carried such weight in calling his name, and he remembered that a similar intimacy had been there from the beginning with Cindy. Those were scary, unwelcome thoughts. He realized that he had avoided thinking about Andrea since Serena arrived. His attraction to her was so sudden and intriguing that it seemed to push aside his other emotions. He was not the kind of man to have an affair, but right now, he wanted one. Badly.

"Have you really been to the River Walk?" he asked.

"Never," Serena said with a sly smile.

Stride laughed. "You're beautiful."

He wanted her to feel the double meaning in his voice. He wasn't sure, but he thought she actually blushed.

"I'll have Maggie check it out," he continued. "We'll look into this church conference and make sure they were really there."

"Even if they checked in, they could have gone to and from Vegas in a day. In and out. No one would know."

"We'll check the airlines, too. And credit card records."

Before he could reply, Stride heard the chirping of his cell phone. He slid it out of his pocket and pressed it to his ear.

"We need to talk," a man's voice said. Stride recognized Dan Erickson.

"Yes, we do," Stride said. "You got my message?"

"You're goddamned right I did. Are you sure about this?"

"Yeah, we're sure."

"Shit," Dan hissed. There was a silence, and Stride could almost hear the calculations grinding in Dan's mind. "This is unbelievable. I don't want to do this over the phone."

"You want me to swing by your office?"

"Hell, no. I don't want you anywhere near my office. Meet me in the parking lot of the high school in an hour."

"Won't we need some kind of secret code to identify ourselves?" Stride asked.

"Funny. Real fucking funny. Just be there."

Stride clicked the phone off.

Serena raised her eyebrows. She could make out most Of the call.

"Dan Erickson prosecuted Graeme Stoner for Rachel's murder," Stride said. "He isn't too pleased with the news."

"Why the cloak-and-dagger?"

"Dan's the county attorney, but he's going after the Democratic nomination for state attorney general. I think trying someone for murdering a girl who wasn't dead is likely to be a 'negative spin event' for his campaign."

Serena frowned. "Watch your ass, Jonny. A politician like that would have you fired if it meant deflecting blame from himself."

"Yeah, that would be Dan's style," Stride said. He heard "Jonny" on her lips again.

"You don't care?"

Stride stared through the windshield as the first drops of rain began to fall. "It's funny. I'm not sure I do."

By the time Stride dropped Serena at the station and reached the hillside road that led to the school parking lot, his windshield wipers were screeching in protest as they pounded back and forth, sluicing aside gallons of water. Stride leaned over the steering wheel, squinting to catch a glimpse of the pavement through his headlights. Somewhere in the summer sky, the sun was high, but it might as well have been night, with the swath of black clouds overhead.

Stride drove to the far side of the lot before he spotted Dan Erickson's Lexus, parked off by itself. He pulled around and parked next to it. The Lexus was navy blue with smoked windows. Dan had left the lights on and the motor running.

The rain beat down on Stride's truck. When he pushed open the door, the rain flooded over him, stinging his skin like tiny pinpricks. He slammed the door and yanked on the passenger door of the Lexus. It was locked. Already soaked. Stride pounded on the window. He heard a low click, and he piled inside the car, bringing a smattering of rain with him.

"Good to see you, too, Dan," Stride muttered, flicking droplets of water around the car as he shook his sleeves.

"These are leather seats," Dan said, scowling.

The interior of the car smelled like Dan's wife, which meant it smelled like money. Stride knew the Lexus and everything else belonged to Lauren, not Dan, but Dan wore the trappings well. On his left hand, Stride saw a fat wedding ring with a ruby stone, and on his wrist, a gold Rolex. His navy suit looked custom-tailored, and it bent in easy folds without wrinkling.

The local public radio station was on in the background. Dan reached over and turned it off. They sat silently for a moment while the rain thumped on the roof.

"It's not on the news yet," Dan said. "Let's keep it that way."

Stride shook his head. "That's impossible. This will be big news, you know that. The most we can hope is to keep it bottled up for a couple more days, but even that's optimistic. It only takes one leak."

"Who knows about this?"

"The Vegas cops and several members of the force here in Duluth. Plus Emily and her husband, Dayton Tenby."

"You should have talked to me before informing them."

"Christ, Dan, she's the girl's mother," Stride protested.

Dan sighed. "Tell me exactly what happened."

Stride explained about the discovery of Rachel's body in the Las Vegas desert and the possible Duluth connection in the murder.

"But we don't know yet what happened in Vegas," Stride continued. "We also don't know what really happened when she disappeared the first time. Obviously, Stoner didn't kill her."

"Do you have any leads?"

"Not so far, no. We're reviewing the files from the original investigation, and we're going to start tracking down the people who were involved back then."

Dan frowned. "The more people you talk to, the more likely this will all come out."

"I'm aware of that. But this isn't just ancient history. This is an active murder investigation. Someone killed Rachel less than a week ago, and I want to know who. The only reason we're not holding a press conference is I want the element of surprise when I talk to these people."

"Great," Dan said. "Just great The Republicans are going to love this."

"I have faith in you, Dan. You'll talk your way out of it."

Dan looked at Stride sharply. "Is that a crack? Look, Stride, I put the responsibility for the original failure squarely on the investigating team."

Two points, Serena.

Stride nodded. "We made some mistakes, no question about it But it was your decision to go to trial without a body, Dan."

"I recall your telling me that Stoner was the guy. He did it."

"That's what I thought. That's what we all thought. But our evidence was weak. I told you so from day one."

Dan shook his head. "We're not getting in a public shooting match over this. I expect you to take full responsibility. Am I clear? I want you to stand up and tell the world this was a police screwup. I was acting in good faith based on misinformation from the police. You guys already let one killer get away-the guy who did Kerry McGrath. And you were so desperate to solve Rachel's disappearance that you cut corners."

There were elements of truth in what Dan said. Stride could hardly deny the obsession he felt back then to find Rachel or to bring her killer to justice. He might have sacrificed some of his objectivity, because he was convinced that Stoner was guilty.

But it was Dan, personally, who chose to go to trial for murder, without a body, despite the long odds.

"I'll take my share of the blame," Stride said. "But that's not the whole story."

"It is now."

"That sounds like an ultimatum," Stride said.

Dan shrugged. "Take it however you like, but you can bet there will be consequences if you try to wriggle out of this. I won't give K-2 any choice."

"Well, I guess I'll have to give it some thought. You got any other helpful words of advice for me?"

Dan was silent.

Stride shoved open the door and clambered out. He held it open, letting the rain roar in, soaking the passenger seat and spraying Dan's nice suit. Finally, he slammed the door shut and waited in the downpour as Dan sped away.

41

Serena sat alone in the basement conference room in city hall, her eyes blurring as she made her way through a mountain of yellowing paperwork. Page by page, the records from the investigation told her the story of Rachel's disappearance. The girl was becoming real to her. They all did eventually, but this time, it was like looking in a mirror, right down to the raven hair and emerald eyes. Rachel might as well have been her twin.

That made Serena think of her mother. She's my little evil twin, her mother used to say about Serena when she was a child, because they looked so much alike.

But her mother was the evil one. Selling herself to the devil for a few grams of white powder-and her little girl, too.

She understood the venom in Rachel's heart. She didn't have to read far to know what kind of man Graeme was and what kind of game the two of them were playing. It could have been her. She had felt the same choking desire for revenge. The only difference was, she had escaped, although she knew in her soul what a very close escape it was.

Serena checked her watch, feeling lonely and distraught. The memories did that. They made her long for a drink, too, and that was dangerous. It was after six o'clock. Maggie had gone out into the rain a half hour ago to get dinner for the two of them. Stride was missing in action. He had called in the early afternoon to say he was on the scene of a bank robbery across town, playing gopher for the Feebs.

She wanted him back, and she wanted him to stay away.

Even so, her heart raced when she heard footsteps in the hall. She made a special effort to look calm and disinterested. Which was a lie.

But it wasn't Stride. Maggie breezed into the conference room in a damp raincoat, balancing a pizza box in one hand and two liters of Diet Coke in the other. The tiny Chinese cop grinned at her.

"Special delivery. And it's sausage, so don't give me any shit about vegetarian pizza or whatever it is you eat out west."

Serena laughed and opened the box, letting the aroma of mozzarella and seasoned pork waft into the room. Maggie filled two plastic cups with pop, then grabbed a slice and sat down, leaning her chair back until it was propped against the wall. Her feet dangled above the floor.

"Got the case solved?" she asked.

"I still think Graeme did it," Serena said, smiling.

"Yeah, it was a lot easier that way. Any word from Stride? Guppo called and said the boss was heading back here."

"No, nothing from Jonny." Serena took a slice of pizza and put it down without biting into it.

Maggie took a long swallow of Coke and then, watching Serena, her eyes narrowed with concern. "You okay?"

"Sure, why?"

Maggie tugged on her eyelid. "Glassy eyes. Tears. What's up?"

"Oh, that," Serena said. She shook her head. "It's nothing. Thinking about the bad old days. Something about this case, it gets to me."

That happens to all of us."

"Even a hard-ass like you?" Serena asked, teasing her.

"Me, no, I'm a rock," Maggie said. "Come on, try the pizza, it's delicious."

Serena picked up the slice again and took a tentative bite. She realized she was hungry, and she began to take larger bites, finishing the first piece and reaching for another. She washed it down with a drink, belched long and loud, and began giggling uncontrollably.

"Nice," Maggie said, straight-faced. "Do you take requests?"

Serena started laughing again and was afraid the Coke would wind up coming out her nose. Maggie lost it, too, and the two of them spent five minutes cracking up before they ran out of breath. Serena wound up hot and sweaty. She wiped her brow and used a napkin to blow her nose.

"You are too much," she told Maggie.

"Thank you," Maggie said, in her best Elvis voice. "Thank you very much."

"Oh, God, don't get me started again." Serena pushed her hair out of her face. She closed her eyes and propped her chair against the wall, like Maggie's.

"Tell me something," Maggie said.

Serena was mellow now, her defenses down. "Sure."

"Was that real smoke I saw coming off you and Stride in the airport?"

Serena flopped her chair back on the floor with a bang and opened her eyes. Maggie had a broad grin spread across her golden face. "What?"

"Oh, don't play innocent with me, girl. You know he wants you. Stride couldn't hide it if he tried. And it seems to me you want him, too."

"Maggie, he's married. And we just met."

Maggie took another piece of pizza. "Call it marriage if you want, but it's long gone and dead. The Big D is around the corner. Thank God. And don't get hung up on time, kiddo. I mean, is there a right time? A week? A month? It only took me about a day to fall in love with Stride."

"You?"

Maggie nodded. "Oh, yeah. I had it bad for years."

"What happened?"

"Nothing happened. He was in a real love match back then. When she died, I took my chance. But we were made to be friends, not lovers. Fortunately, I met Eric eventually, and he managed to break through all my cynical wisecracks, the little shit. And I think it made Stride kind of jealous, which was a nice bonus."

Serena gave her a small smile. "I admit, I'm very attracted to him."

"So go for it."

"Yeah, right. Not so simple. They don't call me Barbed Wire back home for nothing. I've got skeletons in the closet Big, ugly ones."

"You won't scare him off," Maggie said.

"Watch me."

"Do you want to sleep with him?"

"Sure I do, but I'm not going to."

"I thought everyone in Vegas had a great sex life," Maggie said.

"I've got a terrific sex life, but I'm usually alone."

Maggie laughed again, long and hard. "Hey, whatever works. But I can attest that with the right guy, there's no substitute."

Serena scrunched up her face. She wasn't convinced. "I just met him," she repeated.

"Fight it all you want, girl," Maggie said, sighing. "But it pisses me off, you know, that I tried to turn him on for years, and all you had to do was walk off the fucking plane. Your breasts ain't that great."

"Like hell they're not" Serena replied.

When he returned to city hall, Stride didn't know how to read the chemistry in the conference room, except to realize that Maggie and Serena had become fast friends during the course of the afternoon. He draped his wet coat over the back of a chair. With a tired groan, he sat down and put his feet up on the scratched wood of the tabletop.

"FBI," he announced. "Full of Bullshit Ideas."

"It's enough to bask in the reflected glow of their presence," Maggie told him.

Stride nodded. "I'm glad you feel that way. I told K-2 that you could babysit the Feebs next time."

"Thanks a lot," Maggie said.

"What happened with Dan Erickson?" Serena asked.

Stride groaned again and gave them a run-down of Dan's threats.

"I told you he was an asshole," Maggie said.

"And you were right," Stride admitted. He explained to Serena. "Maggie and Dan had a brief fling a few years ago. It ended badly. Something about her burning down Dan's house."

"That's a gross exaggeration," Maggie said. "It was an accidental cigarette burn on a Burberry coat."

"Yes, but you don't smoke," Stride reminded her.

Serena chuckled. "I love you two."

"Did you come up with anything while I was gone?" Stride asked.

"We made some breakthroughs, but on a different case," Maggie said, winking at Serena. Stride noticed that Serena gave Maggie a withering stare, then turned beet red and grabbed a manila folder from the desk and began reading. He noted that the folder was upside down.

"What caser Stride asked.

"A head case, actually. The twisted mind of Jonathan Stride."

Stride smiled. "Do you charge by the hour?"

"You can't afford us."

"Lucky me. In between, did you get any actual police work done while I was arranging lattes for the FBI?"

Serena put the folder down, composed again. "Nothing that gets us any answers. But at least I know the case now."

"All right, let's get back to Rachel's original disappearance," Stride said. "I'm betting if we knew what really happened then, we'd know why she was killed."

"Except we were all wrong three years ago," Maggie said.

"Yes, but we know something now that you didn't know then," Serena pointed out.

"Such as?" Stride asked.

"We know Rachel was really alive."

Stride nodded. He stood up and poured a cup of lukewarm coffee. An air-conditioning vent hummed loudly, blowing cold air on his head. "That's true. All right, what else do we know?"

"We know Rachel was at the barn that night," Maggie said.

"Do we?" Serena asked. "Could the evidence have been planted?"

"What, you think a mysterious stranger came by with an eye dropper and left her blood?" Maggie shook her head. "Rachel was mere-and she was in the back of Graeme's van, too. The fibers from her shirt matched."

"It wasn't just Rachel," Stride reminded her. "We've got Graeme's footprints at the barn, too-don't forget that Remember the shoes he bought and then couldn't produce? To me, that says they were both there. Whatever happened between them, it was enough to spook Rachel and make her ran."

"But we know Graeme didn't kill her," Serena said.

Stride proceeded to explain to Serena his alternate theory about what might have happened between Rachel and Graeme that night at the barn, and how Rachel might have turned to a friend to help her escape.

Serena stared at the ceiling, nodding thoughtfully. She brushed her hair out of her eyes and drank from a can of Diet Coke. "That's not bad. But it leaves us with no obvious motive for anyone from Duluth to kill her three years later."

"Except for Dan," Maggie said, smirking.

"If Rachel ran, who helped her?" Serena asked. "Dayton Tenby? I'm still suspicious of him hunting up and down the Strip for little lost Rachel."

Stride shook his head. "Dayton and Emily were in Minneapolis that Friday night, having an affair."

"Unless Rachel called her mother," Serena said.

"I think Emily is the last person Rachel would have called," Stride said.

Maggie pursed her lips. "This all comes back to Sally. We know she saw Rachel the night she left town. She lied about it from the start And she would have been very unhappy if Rachel came back to Duluth after all these years to say in to Kevin."

Stride pulled out his cell phone. "Sally and Kevin are shacking up in an apartment near the university. I tried to call them earlier, but there was no answer."

He dialed again. After five rings, he was ready to hang up, but then he heard a female voice on the line.

"Hello? Sally?" Stride frowned and listened. "Do you know where she is? I'm a friend, and I need to reach her right away."

He waited for the reply and then hung up with a brief good-bye.

It seems Kevin and Sally are due back later tonight. That was the neighbor who's taking care of their cat. They've been on a cross-country driving trip for the last two weeks. To the Grand Canyon."

"Well, well" Maggie said.

"I-40," Serena added. "Five hours to Vegas."

42

Cordy enjoyed the envious stares as he and Lavender promenaded through the lobby of the Bellagio, underneath the giant, multicolored glass flowers that decorated the ceiling. As a couple, they were cool and attractive, a perfect fit for the upscale surroundings. Cordy wore a black collarless silk shirt, a gold chain, and a crisply pressed tan linen suit. His shoes were polished to a reflective glow, and a waft of fragrance oozed from his slicked hair. Lavender wore a formfitting red bodysuit, with ovals strategically cut away to reveal generous patches of ebony skin and to confirm for everyone who stared mat she wore neither a bra nor panties. She couldn't have attracted more attention if she were naked.

As they entered the Bellagio's elegant Japanese restaurant, he saw the eyes of a dozen Asian businessmen lock onto Lavender through a cloud of cigarette smoke. She flirted with them as she sat down, confidently staring back.

"What's it like?" Cordy asked.

He didn't say what he meant, but Lavender understood. The attention. The stares. What's it like to trail men's eyes wherever you go?

"I love it," Lavender said. She had a sly smile and a breathy voice, with a hint of the street lingering in her twang. "I'm the queen, baby. I've got the power."

She licked her broad lips with her tongue, and Cordy felt her shoeless foot stroking his ankle under the table. The waiter came over, a wizened, expressionless Japanese man in a starched tuxedo, and Lavender began ordering things he didn't recognize, like ika, maguro, and uni.

"What are we getting?" Cordy asked when the waiter left.

"Tuna. Yellowtail. Squid. Sea urchin. Things like that."

"Sea urchin? I'm going to throw up."

"Trust me," Lavender said.

Cordy jerked his thumb at the Asian businessmen at the other tables. "No offense, Lav, but why work where you do? I mean, shouldn't you be living on an island with one of those guys?"

"You got a problem with what I do? If so, tell me now, okay? Don't waste my time."

"No, no," Cordy protested.

Lavender jabbed a finger at him. "The only people who humiliate themselves are the guys drooling in the audience every night I'm in control. They worship me. There's nothing wrong with that. You ask why I do it. Simple. For the m-o-n-e-y."

"Sorry," Cordy said.

"Don't be. Everyone asks. But you have to get over it baby, or we've got a short evening ahead."

The waiter brought a black lacquer tray, elegantly arrayed with gold-flecked rolls and slivers of fish, each tied to a sticky mound of rice with a black belt of seaweed. It turned out that Cordy liked sushi a lot particularly the way Lavender balanced each piece on the chopsticks and fed him bites. She herself ate in a big way, stuffing a roll into her mouth and grinning at him as she wolfed it down. He didn't recall ever being so turned on simply by eating dinner.

When they were done, Lavender ordered sake, and Cordy was surprised to find the liquor both hot and intoxicating, given how little fit into each glass and how smoothly it slid down his throat. They went through two miniature carafes before Cordy called for the check and paid it with a slight grimace of pain.

They left the restaurant and Cordy discovered to his delight that they were now holding hands. Her hips swished against his side as they strolled through the casino. Her fingers rubbed the inside of his palm, and he realized that even that small touch aroused him. The stares of other patrons continued to follow them.

"So how come you're not dating your hottie partner?" Lavender asked.

"Who, Serena? She's a friend, and that's that. Not my type."

Lavender poked him in the side. "Yeah, right. She may have a few years on you, but she's still a looker. You never made a play for her?"

Cordy shrugged. "She set me straight from day one. No hanky-panky. And everybody already knows her reputation. Guys ask her out, she cuts off their balls. She's got barbed wire around her."

"Why is that?" Lavender asked.

Cordy shook his head. "She hasn't told me." He let his hand slide down her back and come to rest on the curve of her buttocks. He rubbed her skin through one of the oval slits in her dress. "So you want to play for a while?"

"You mean gambling or fucking?"

"Isn't it the same thing? I get screwed either way."

Lavender threw her head back and laughed. "I like you, baby. Yeah, I like you."

"I like you, too. Listen, I got a five-hundred-dollar bill in my wallet. Let me play until I lose it or double it, and then we'll go to your place."

Lavender tugged on his chin and planted her luscious lips on his mouth, pressing her tongue inside. "Just make it quick."

Cordy steered her to the high-limit slots area. He normally played five-dollar blackjack at the tables at Sam's Town, but he didn't feel like sitting at a table and getting into the rhythm of the game. Besides, it felt like penny ante tonight. His luck was high, and he wanted to ride Lavender like a good luck charm. He chose a five-dollar Triple Play video poker machine that took up to five coins per hand, which meant the maximum bet on each pull was seventy-five dollars. Win or lose, it would be quick, and then they could get to the real business of the evening.

Over the next ten minutes, he shot ahead three hundred dollars, before sinking back after a quick series of losing hands. Then he hit a straight on two out of three hands and was well ahead again, although he hadn't quite doubled his money. He felt the usual fever overtaking him, and the only thing that kept him from losing himself in the game was the sensation of Lavender's fingers creeping closer to his crotch. Between the blips of the machine and the aching of his erection, his mind was flying.

He barely heard Lavender when she asked, "So did you and the hottie figure out what happened to Christi?"

"Damn!" He had a pair of aces, but he couldn't pull a third ace on the draw. "What did you say?"

"Christi. The girl who got killed. Did you find out who did it?"

Cordy watched another seventy-five bucks come and go on the next series of hands. "Huh? Oh, not yet Serena's in Minnesota now."

"Minnesota?"

Cordy nodded. "Yeah, the girl, Christi, came from some town up north in Minnesota. Looks like someone from home paid her a visit"

Cordy bet the max again and held his breath. He pumped his fist when he saw four-fifths of a spade flush flip up on the original deal. "Come on, mama, give me a spade."

Lavender wasn't watching the screen. She let one finger slip between his legs, where she traced the swelling there. "Is that from me or the game?"

Cordy didn't answer. He carefully held four cards, then punched the draw button and held his breath. "Fuck!"

Lavender sighed and removed her hand. She began studying her painted nails. "I see why I don't gamble."

"Huh?" Cordy said idly.

"Nothing. I'm surprised whoever killed Christi was from out of town. I would have thought it was that creepy boyfriend of hers."

"Yes!" Cordy shrieked as the machine dealt him three kings. "Come on, four of a kind, four of a kind!"

He fluttered his fingers over the button, then pushed it with a silent prayer. The remaining cards popped up: three, ace, seven, nine, queen, king.

"Yes!" Cordy screamed, watching the fourth king fill out the third hand. "Yes!" He grabbed Lavender, wrapped her tightly in his arms, and planted a long, extended kiss on her lips, to which she responded with enthusiasm. When he disentangled himself and looked back, he saw he had doubled his money. More than five hundred bucks!

Cordy cashed out, relishing the loud clanking of five-dollar coins banging into the tray. He filled two plastic buckets with the coins and stacked them on top of each other as he peered around for the nearest change booth. With the buckets under one arm and Lavender hanging on his other side, he strutted through the casino as if he were on top of the world. At the booth, he handed the buckets to the attendant and watched her pile them into the counting machine, then licked his lips as the numbers shot over a thousand dollars.

It was only then that his brain caught up with the whirl of thoughts in his head. Cordy felt his blood turn to ice, and he swung around on Lavender, his face tense and his fantasies of sex and money leeching away.

"Boyfriend?"

43

Stride and Serena sat in the dark in his truck, underneath a broken streetlight, parked opposite Kevin and Sally's university apartment building. The truck windows were open, letting the cool evening air blow through with a few lingering raindrops. They had staked out the building for an hour. He knew they could have waited until morning to talk to them, but he wanted the element of surprise, before Kevin and Sally had time to rehearse their reactions.

It also gave him a reason not to go home, which was the last place he wanted to be. That was the ugly truth. He was intensely attracted to Serena, and he wanted to be with her. Not with Andrea. Not with his own wife.

She was a silhouette seated next to him, but he knew that she could feel him studying her. Broadcasting his feelings. Shouting them silently.

"Tell me about Phoenix," he said. "About your past"

She shook her head. "I don't talk about that"

"I know. But tell me anyway."

"Why do you care about my past?" Serena asked. "You don't know me."

"That's why. I want to know you."

Serena was silent. He heard her breathing, which was fast and nervous.

"What is it you really want Jonny?" she asked. "To sleep with me?"

Stride didn't know what to say. "How do I answer that?" he said finally. "If I say no, you know I'm lying. If I say yes, then I'm another shallow cop looking for an affair."

"You wouldn't be the first"

"I know that. And all I can say is, I know where I should be. Home. Not here with you. This is not me, not the man I am. But here I am anyway."

"You tell me something," Serena said, turning to him in the dark. "Maggie says your marriage is over. That it was over three years ago. Is that true?"

He was tired of pretending. "It's true."

"Don't you lie to me, Jonny," Serena insisted. "I'm nobody's fling, understand? You don't know how rare it is for me to talk to a man like this. Particularly someone I just met"

"I think I do. And I'm not lying."

"Tell me why. Why it's over."

He struggled to find the right words. "We've both got ghosts rattling around in our attic. Her first husband ran off. I couldn't fill the void."

"And what about you? What's your ghost's name?"

Stride smiled. "Cindy."

"Did she break your heart?"

Enough time had passed that Cindy was a dull ache in his soul, not the sharp wound she once was. He told Serena about losing her, and it was a faraway tragedy, as if it had happened to someone else. Serena listened silently, then reached over and laced her fingers with his.

For a few still moments, the truck was a bubble, a little universe of its own.

"You really want my story?" Serena asked.

"I do."

He could see her wrestling with her fear and mistrust.

"When I was fifteen in Phoenix, my mom got into drugs," she began quietly. "She became addicted. She ran through our money. We lost our house. My dad left us. Left me."

Her voice sounded flat, not like Serena at all, as if she had drained the emotions out of her words. He sensed that something profound was happening between them, that she had invited him into a world that was previously just for her.

"We moved in with her dealer. I guess you could say I was part of my mother's payment plan. He did whatever he wanted with me. My mother would watch, stoned out of her mind."

Stride felt his emotions stir. He was angry for her. Protective.

"I got pregnant," Serena continued. "I went to a clinic by myself and had an abortion. And then I never went home again. If I went home, I knew I'd kill them both. I mean that I spent time thinking about how I would kill them. But I wasn't going to give up my own life because of what they'd done to me. So I hooked up with a girlfriend, and we took the bus to Vegas. Sixteen years old, alone on the Strip. I took shit jobs in the casinos. I went to school at night. Became a cop."

"Most girls with that background would have wound up dead."

"I know. Like Rachel."

"You're amazing," he told her.

Serena shook her head. "I'm no angel. I can be a bitch. Most guys would tell you that I am. I've spent most of my life fending off men."

"Why aren't you fending me off?" he asked. "Or is that what you're trying to do?"

"Sure I am, Jonny. For your sake."

He didn't say anything. When a lamp went on in the nearest apartment, it cast a faint light on their faces. He found his eyes drawn to her pale lips. She was conscious of his desire, and she let her lips barely part Hesitating, uncertain, she leaned toward him, her long hair tumbling forward.

The light went off again, as quickly as it came. They were invisible as they kissed. Then Serena pulled away, and they were silent for the next hour, without any need to talk.

The strawberry Malibu pulled up around midnight.

They watched Kevin and Sally shrug backpacks onto their shoulders and tramp wearily up the steps of the apartment building. When they were inside, Stride touched Serena's shoulder, and they followed across the street.

Stride knocked on the third-floor apartment door, and Kevin answered immediately, his eyes bloodshot. Kevin assessed him suspiciously, then realized who he was. The recognition dawned, and Kevin, quick as lightning, knew why he was there.

"It's Rachel, isn't it?" he asked.

Stride nodded. "Sorry to surprise you like this, Kevin. And yes, it's about Rachel. We've found her body."

Kevin backed up from the door, his eyes growing moist with tears. He was maturing into a handsome man, with wavy blond hair and sunburned skin.

Stride introduced Serena as they entered the apartment, not mentioning that she was from Las Vegas. He took a quick look around at the garage-sale furniture and immediately realized that something was missing.

Their backpacks weren't there.

"Where's Sally?" he asked.

Kevin looked up blankly. "What? Oh, doing the laundry."

"The laundry!" Serena said. She turned and ran from the apartment, and Stride followed on her heels, leaving Kevin standing in the doorway. They found the stairs and took them two at a time down to the basement, where they emerged into a darkened corridor that hummed with machinery. Stride stopped and listened. He heard the familiar chug-chug of a washing machine across the hall.

They burst into the laundry room.

Sally sat on the end of a ratty sofa. She was reading a copy of People magazine. Her eyes widened with surprise and fright as the door swung open and banged into the wall.

Stride saw the two backpacks lying empty on the floor and two washing machines rinsing away any evidence. He cursed softly and switched them both off.

"What the hell is going on?" Sally demanded, her voice quavering.

Stride took a long look at Sally. She had lost weight, and it looked good on her. She wore a pink tank top, white short shorts, and one sandal that she dangled on her left foot. The other sandal was on the yellowing linoleum floor in front of the sofa.

"Do you remember me?" Stride asked.

Sally studied his face, and her eyes narrowed. She relaxed a little. "Yes, I do. And I still want to know what the hell is going on."

"Who gets home at midnight from a long drive and does laundry?" Serena asked.

"I do," Sally said. "I don't want smelly laundry in my apartment, thank you very much. Now what do you two want?"

"Rachel's dead," Stride told her bluntly.

He saw what he wanted to see: confusion flitting across Sally's face. That was the first telltale sign of the truth of what had happened when Rachel disappeared. Sally was surprised to hear that Rachel was dead. And that meant, when Rachel vanished, Sally knew she was still alive.

It also meant she hadn't killed her.

As the reality dawned on Sally, he saw something else, too. The girl could barely keep a smile from her lips, and a look of vast relief and satisfaction crept onto her face. "Where did you find her?"

"Las Vegas," Stride said. "This is Serena Dial from the police department in Nevada. Rachel was murdered there last weekend."

"Murdered?"

"That's right," Serena said. "How did you like the Grand Canyon?"

Sally nodded slowly, understanding. "Oh, I get it. You think we went to Vegas. You think we saw her."

"Did your Stride asked.

"Like I'd let Kevin get anywhere near Rachel," Sally snapped. She looked Serena up and down. "And I don't approve of gambling or any of the other things that go on in that city. We didn't go there."

"She's telling the truth," a male voice announced. Stride saw Kevin in the doorway. He had been listening outside. "I can't believe Rachel was alive all this time."

"It's a hell of a coincidence, Kevin," Stride told him. "You and Sally were just a few hours from Las Vegas when she was killed."

"We didn't go there," Sally repeated.

Kevin nodded. "That's right."

Stride and Serena exchanged quick looks, and they came to the same conclusion. These two were telling the truth.

"We're still going to need to check your clothes and your car," Stride said. "I'm sorry."

"All you'll find is dust and bugs," Sally said.

"I'm going to assume you two are telling the truth," Stride said. "But we're trying to find out if there's a connection between Rachel's murder and her original disappearance. It means it's more important than ever to know what really happened back then."

Sally's face clouded over, and she looked away.

Stride realized he wasn't going to get anywhere while Kevin was in the room. "Kevin, can you give us a couple minutes to talk to Sally?"

Sally's eyes widened. She didn't want to be left alone. But Kevin's mind was far away, under Rachel's spell again. Like a robot, he slouched from the room without looking back at Sally.

Serena closed the door, and Stride leaned against an empty dryer and stared down at Sally on the sofa. Sally glared at both of them and folded her arms defiantly.

"She's dead, Sally," Stride said. "You don't have to keep her secrets now."

Sally resumed a lotus position on the sofa and closed her eyes.

"It's just us now," he said. "No judge, no jury. No Kevin, either."

"I don't know what you're talking about"

"Sure you do. You lied in court You never heard Rachel and Graeme fighting that night You made that up. It doesn't matter now, Sally. No one's going to arrest you for perjury. You're in no danger. But we do need to know the truth."

"Rachel's dead, and we want to know why," Serena said.

Sally shrugged. "You thought she was dead then. What's changed?"

"We know you were at her house that night. You were seen on the street."

"So what?" Sally asked. "I walked over, I didn't see her, I walked home. End of story."

"If that's true, then why lie about Rachel fighting with Graeme?"

Sally hesitated. "I panicked. That lawyer was trying to make it look like I was involved, which was crazy. And I really thought Graeme was guilty. Hell, they fought all the time. It wasn't such a big lie."

"The trouble is, you're lying again, Sally," Serena said. "You can't bullshit another woman."

Stride knelt by the sofa. He was level with Sally's face, only a few inches away. "You knew Rachel was alive."

"That's ridiculous," Sally said. But her voice trembled.

"You helped her escape," Serena said.

"I didn't."

"Then tell us what happened that night, Sally." Stride reached out and laid a hand gently on her shoulder. "Look, I know what Rachel was like. I know how she could manipulate people."

Sally stared back at him. "No, you don't," she whispered.

Inside her coat, Sally balled her hands into tight fists. Her elbows were squeezed against her side, and her feet stamped on the sidewalk, causing her curls to bounce. All she could think about, all she could see in her head, over and over, was Rachel and Kevin on the bridge.

Rachel kissing Kevin.

Rachel's hand slipping over Kevin's crotch.

And, worst of all, the sly little smile as Rachel's head turned to make sure Sally was below them, watching. It wasn't enough to steal turn away. Rachel needed to humiliate her, too.

She couldn't compete, not with Rachel. Her only salvation all along had been that Rachel had never taken the slightest real interest in Kevin. She toyed with him. Teased him. Flirted with him. And that was all.

Until tonight.

In her room, Sally's rage boiled over. She couldn't get the ugly image out of her head. A part of her wanted to say "Fuck you" to both of them and let Kevin see how happy he was in the arms of that sleazy whore. If that was what he wanted, fine. Let her destroy him. Let him see what life would be like under her thumb.

But she couldn't do it. This wasn't Kevin's fault. He was helpless, a fly caught in Rachel's web.

She decided to have it out with Rachel once and for all-and give her an ultimatum: Stay away from Kevin.

So she climbed out of her first-floor window silently and hurried down the street, her entire body coiled tightly like a spring. She barely noticed the blocks passing, or the cold that turned her rapid breath to steam. In her mind, she went over all the things she was going to say. She rehearsed a big speech, muttering it under her breath, going over and over the words until it was just perfect. But when she found herself on the sidewalk outside Rachel's house, all of the words she had carefully practiced vanished from her mind. Her tongue felt swollen and useless, and her insides turned to jelly. Her courage evaporated. She was frozen.

Rachel was home. Sally had thought Rachel might still be with Kevin and she would have to wait. That would have made it easier. Catch her as she's getting out of the car, when she isn't expecting anyone to confront her. But Rachel's car was parked in the driveway. All Sally had to do was march up to the door and ring the bell. She tried to screw up her courage by remembering yet again the sight of the two figures on the bridge. Rachel and Kevin. The kiss. The seduction. The smile.

Bitch.

Ring the bell, and Rachel would answer. And then Sally would unleash all the pent-up fury she had been carrying inside. Scream at her. Slap her. Show her that, for once, a girl was going to fight back.

But Sally was paralyzed. Her mind willed her forward, and her feet remained planted on the street. She didn't know if she could face Rachel, no matter how angry she was, no matter how much Kevin meant to her.

Inside Rachel's house, the downstairs light went off. The house went dark.

That's it, Sally thought. She's going to bed. I'm too late.

Then she heard a clicking inside, like the turning of a dead bolt, and she realized that someone was opening the front door of Rachel's house. Sally's courage fled completely, and she ducked off the sidewalk and pressed herself into a row of tall hedges. She could still see the house in the pale glow of the streetlight.

In the shadows, she recognized Rachel, dressed as she was before, slipping from her house. Rachel furtively studied the street for almost a full minute, waiting, not moving, holding back in the protective darkness of the porch. Then she hurried down the driveway. She clutched a large plastic bag in her hand.

Sally realized Rachel was heading her way. Rachel was bound to see her. Sally wanted to curl up in the hedges and hope she would walk right by, but she knew this was her one chance. It was now or never. Sally swallowed hard, then stepped out onto the sidewalk right in front of Rachel.

"We need to talk," Sally said. Her stomach flip-flopped, and she cursed herself as she heard the quivering in her voice. She sounded like a frightened child.

Rachel saw her and stopped dead. Shock filled her eyes, replaced in an instant by cold hatred and contempt.

"Oh, shit" Rachel hissed. "What the fuck are you doing here?"

Sally coughed. "I want to talk about Kevin," she said weakly.

Rachel glanced up and down the street. They were alone, just the two of them. She pushed her face practically to Sally's nose. "You have no idea what you're meddling with," Rachel said. "You're going to ruin everything."

Sally was confused. She had never seen Rachel like this. "What? What do you mean?"

Rachel grabbed Sally's wrist and twisted it until she grimaced in pain. "Look, this is none of your business. Do you get me? You never saw me here tonight."

"I don't understand," Sally said. "You're hurting me."

None of this was going as Sally had planned. She had no idea what Rachel was talking about, but she was scared of the look in her eyes.

"I'll do more than that if you don't shut up and listen," Rachel said. "You may be a fool, Sally, but I think you're smart enough to know two things. First, I don't have any interest in Kevvy. He's all yours, God help him. And second, you know damn well that I could take him away from you any time I want to."

"That's not true," Sally said.

Rachel laughed. "He'd do anything for me. And that's after a little hand job on the bridge, Sally. Did you enjoy the show? Did you like watching me make your boyfriend come?"

"Stop it," Sally pleaded. "Don't."

"Good. I'm glad we understand each other. So let's be clear about this. You're going to go back home, and you're going to forget all about this little conversation. It never took place. You never saw me. Because I'll make you a promise, Sally. If you ever tell anyone about this, I'll come back and make sure Kevvy never looks at you again. I don't care if you marry him tomorrow, I'll sleep with him the day after that, and believe me, he'll never spend another day with you."

Sally said nothing. She didn't know what to do.

Rachel sidled closer to her. She stroked Sally's hair, and Sally tried to pull away. Rachel held her. "Do you understand me, Salty?"

"I don't understand any of this.

"Then just tell me you believe me. You believe me, don't you? You know I'd take Kevvy away from you in a second."

Sally nodded.

"Good," Rachel said. She grinned. With her other hand, she let a finger run along Sally's cheek. Then she leaned closer and, with sweet breath, kissed Sally softly on the lips. The kiss lingered, and Sally felt sick.

"Don't forget," Rachel told her. "Not a word."

Stride listened to Sally's story with growing horror. He shook his head slowly.

"Do you realize the hell you could have saved everyone if you'd told us what happened?" he asked her.

Sally shrugged, completely unrepentant "You didn't know Rachel, Mr. Stride. She meant what she said. If I had told anyone about seeing her, she would have made it her life's mission to take Kevin away from me. I knew what she was capable of. Back then, it seemed like I was the only one who did."

"You were willing to let Graeme Stoner go to prison? When you knew he was innocent?"

Sally's eyes flashed with anger. "Innocent? Like hell. I told the truth about him hijacking me in his car. If he hadn't been scared off at the barn, he would have raped me. And I'll bet I wasn't the only one. You already knew he was fucking Rachel."

"But why lie on the stand?" Stride asked.

"I had to think fast," Sally said. "I figured I was sending Rachel a message, wherever she was: I'm keeping my end of the bargain. You keep yours."

Serena stared into Sally's determined eyes. "You wouldn't have liked it if Rachel came back, would you?"

Sally didn't blink. "No, I wouldn't have liked that at all. She was dead. I wanted her to stay that way. But if you're still thinking we went to Vegas and I finished the job, you're wrong. Rachel kept her end of the bargain. She never came back."

"You never heard from her?"

"Never. I think you're looking in the wrong place. You should be in Vegas, seeing whose lives she was destroying there. A bitch like that never changes. You can bet she was up to the same old tricks."

"Do you know what was in the plastic bag she was carrying?" Stride asked.

Sally shook her head. "I couldn't see."

"And she didn't have anything else with her?"

"Nothing. Just the clothes on her back. Same clothes she was wearing down in Canal Park that night."

"The white turtleneck?" Stride asked.

"Yes."

"Was it ripped in any way?"

"I didn't notice," Sally said.

"How about the bracelet?" Stride asked. "Was she still wearing it?"

Sally closed her eyes and reflected. "I think so. Yeah, I'm sure she was. I can still see it dangling on her wrist."

Stride nodded, his mind working through the possibilities. "Did she say how she was getting out of town? Was she meeting someone?"

Sally shook her head. "I don't know. I really don't. She didn't say anything about going away."

But she had to be leaving town, Stride thought. Did something else happen that changed her plans-something at the barn? Because she was at the barn that night. The bracelet put her there. Sally saw her outside her home, and somehow, later that night, she ended up at the barn, leaving behind evidence that pointed the finger at Graeme Stoner. Then she was gone.

"You must have thought about it later," Stride said. "What did you think?"

"I was as puzzled as everyone else. I figured she either hitched a ride with a guy and seduced him to keep him quiet, or she conned one of the guys at school to drive her to the Cities."

"But you didn't help her? You don't know anything more?"

"No, I don't And I'd like to get back to Kevin now."

Stride nodded. "All right, Sally."

The girl pushed herself off the sofa and brushed past him, leaving Stride and Serena alone in the laundry room.

"What do you mink, Jonny?" Serena asked.

Stride stared at the washing machines and wondered how much Guppo was going to love getting out of bed in the middle of the night to pack up a giant bag of wet dirty laundry.

"I think Rachel's dead, and she's still playing games with us."

44

"You're starting to bore me, baby," Lavender said peevishly. "I didn't think we were going to spend the whole evening talking. I figured a nice dinner and then a long slow ride, you know?"

Cordy took her face in his hands and kissed her. He dropped one hand to her right breast and caressed it softly, slipping his thumb inside one of the open patches. "Me too, mama. But I need to know, okay?"

She put her hand over his and tightened it on her breast. "Just so you know what you're missing," she said.

Cordy groaned. "Just a few more questions."

Lavender sighed and let go.

They sat in his car in the Bellagio parking lot Cordy drove the black PT Cruiser he had won on the slots of Sam's Town two years earlier-the biggest jackpot he had ever scored. He pampered the car like a baby and always parked it in a far corner, safe from dings and dents. The leather interior smelled of salsa and cigars, his two biggest weaknesses after sex and gambling.

He tried to concentrate, which wasn't easy, staring at the tight fabric on Lavender's chest.

"Tell me again about the boyfriend," he murmured.

"I only saw him once, Cordy," Lavender said. "I've told you that three times."

"And each time you remember a little more, mama. That's the way it works."

Lavender rolled her eyes. "It was a really hot night, just like this one. We were at the club. Christi and I both danced there, same shift. She was good, you know? She didn't like it, not like I do, but she was real good. Anyway, that night, about a year ago, this guy came backstage at the club after she was done with her act and hung out with us for a while. No name or anything like that. But I remember Christi calling him an old boyfriend. That was funny."

"Why?"

Lavender giggled. "'Cause he was so old. You know, old boyfriend. Get it?"

"How old?" Cordy asked.

"I don't know. Forty. Fifty. You know, old."

"What did he look like?"

"Oh, I don't remember. Average."

"Dark or light hair?"

"Uh, dark, I think. Graying, maybe. I don't know."

"Height?"

"Kinda tall," Lavender said.

Cordy realized he was getting nowhere. "And you had never seen him before? Christi never mentioned him?"

Lavender shook her head. "Nope."

"What about after? Did you see him after that?"

"Nope," she said again.

Cordy took a new tack. "You called him creepy before. What was creepy about him?"

Lavender frowned. "He didn't talk much. Christi was kind of ignoring him, and he didn't like it. It looked like he really wanted to get her alone, and she obviously didn't want that Looked like two people in the middle of a fight you know? Plus, he had this look in his eyes. Real intense. You know-creepy. If he wasn't a boyfriend, I would have figured him for a stalker. We get a lot of that kind. But he had it bad for her."

"How do you know?"

"Well, hey, this was the dressing room, you know? Half the girls were naked. Beautiful girls. Hell, I was naked, right in front of this guy. He didn't react at all. Didn't even see us. He didn't see anyone but Christi."

Cordy tried to imagine anyone not noticing Lavender naked. It was impossible.

"Do you remember what they talked about?"

"No. He sat off by himself, and every now and then, he would whisper something to her. But she mostly talked to the rest of us girls, not him. She was teasing him a little, I think. Trying to piss him off by ignoring him."

"Did Christi ever have other boyfriends meet her at the club?"

"Never. That was the only time. I don't think I would have remembered otherwise. Christi was a loner, a real cold fish."

"How so?'

"Well, like I said, she was talking to us that night, not him. And that was rare. She didn't talk much to the other girls. She came in, did her dance, and left, you know? Some of the girls thought she was a stuck-up bitch. Others thought she was ashamed."

"What did you think?" Cordy asked.

"That girl wasn't ashamed. You can't be as good as she was and be ashamed. I think we were all just nonpeople to her. Didn't exist at all. Hell, when I talked to her about my idea, she barely let me finish before slamming the door on me."

"What idea?"

Lavender poked him. "A Web site. Online sex shows. Christi would have been perfect, and it would have made her a lot of money. But she said there was no way she was going to be seen on the Internet. That was funny, because guys could see all they wanted live and in person every night. That didn't matter, though."

"She say why?"

"No, just that she wasn't interested. Period."

"Uh-huh. Look, Lav, I've got to find this boyfriend. This Christi, she's a puzzle, see? There's nothing personal in her apartment. The way you describe her, she barely had a life. This boyfriend is the only clue we've got."

Lavender shrugged. "I've told you everything I remember, baby. I don't see how you're going to find him. I mean, you could talk to the other girls who were there. A few of them might still be in town. They might remember something."

Cordy nodded, knowing it was a long shot. "Okay, I'll have you write down their names."

"And maybe some of the other people at the club saw him. Bouncers, bartenders, waitresses. I left the club not too long after that, so he might have come back when I wasn't there."

"Yeah, that's a start I'll run 'em all down tomorrow."

"Sorry, baby," Lavender said. "You look disappointed."

"I am. This could have been a big break, but I'm afraid it looks more like a dead end."

Lavender smirked. "I know how to make it up to you."

She slid her tongue out between her lips and reached for his zipper. Effortlessly, she pulled it down. "You want some head, baby?"

Cordy was immediately hard. "Oh, yeah."

Her fingers skillfully reached inside.

"Mmm, dessert," she whispered.

Lavender's upper body sank forward, and her hair tumbled over his lap. Cordy closed his eyes, waiting for the delicious warmth of her mouth closing over him. It never came. With a start, Lavender straightened up, and Cordy opened his eyes, enormously disappointed.

"What's wrong, mama?" he pleaded.

She stared at him with bright eyes. "I may, I just may, have a picture of him."

"Who?"

"The mystery man. The boyfriend."

Cordy felt his erection wither, but his mind was excited. "A picture? Get out of here."

"Yeah, yeah. We were clowning around with my Polaroid that night, making faces, shooting our tits and asses. I remember because Christi wouldn't let me take her picture. Kept turning her back. But it's possible creepy-face ended up in the background of one of the shots."

"You still have the pictures?" Cordy asked.

"I think so. In my apartment. I have a drawer where I dump all of them."

Cordy turned the key in the ignition, and the engine of the Cruiser fired into action. He clutched the wheel with tight fists. "Where's your apartment?" he asked.

Lavender told him, and before she was even finished, Cordy rocketed the car toward the ramp that led out of the parking lot. The tires squealed, and the rear of the car threatened to fishtail.

"Don't speed," Lavender said, grinning.

"Why not?"

Laughing, Lavender pointed between his legs, where Cordy's penis still dangled out of his pants. "Well, if another cop pulls you over, how are you going to explain that?"

45

Stride still didn't want to go home.

When he came to the intersection that led back to Serena's motel, he turned toward the lake instead, following by habit a route that had long ago become ingrained in his head, even though he hadn't driven it in a long time. He didn't ask himself where he was going. He just knew, because his heart pulled him there.

"Let's go down to the water," he suggested to Serena.

"Fine by me."

He guided them through Canal Park and across the bridge to the Point. There were no ships to delay them tonight. The steel buzzed under his tires, and a few seconds later, he was back where he had once felt more at home than anywhere else. Even at night, he could see the passage of time by the glow of the streetlights. Some trees were larger, and some were gone. New homes had been put up and others torn down. He had stopped coming here, but life had gone on without him.

He slowed as he drove past his old house. Glancing in the mirror, seeing no one behind them, he stopped in the street and rolled down his window.

"That was our place," he told her. "Me and Cindy."

"I'd love a place like that" Serena said.

The house looked good. The new owners had gone with yellow paint this season, which brightened it up considerably, and they obviously had a green thumb, judging from the flower gardens decorating the lawn. The grass and bushes were neatly trimmed. The driveway was paved now. They had put in a swing set for their kids.

All the lights were off. They were gone, or asleep, or lying in bed listening to the waves, as he and Cindy used to do.

Stride continued through the rest of the Point, which was dark and deserted. He followed the road all the way to the park at the very end and got out of the truck. Serena joined him. They held hands as they followed a sandy trail through the trees to the lake. When they emerged, the sky opened up, drowning them in stars, and the water loomed ahead, loud and black. The soft wind teased the trees behind them. Waves tumbled in, whooshing onto the shore. The strip of beach was lonely and dark as far as they could see.

He saw Serena smile with delight. She tugged on his hand, pulling him toward the water. They went to the edge of the wet sand where the incoming waves glided almost to their feet. Every few seconds, they had to dance back to stay dry.

Serena spun in a circle, soaking up the sights around her. She pointed at the thin line of houses stretching toward the city.

"You lived here?" she asked "Why move?"

"Andrea didn't like it," he explained. "Plus, there were too many memories."

"Does it hurt being here now?"

He shook his head. "Not at all."

Serena retreated from the water and looked for a flat stretch of sand. "Sit with me for a while, Jonny."

He leaned down and scooped a handful between his fingers. "The sand's still damp from the storm."

"That's all right"

He saw it in her eyes. A leap of faith for her. An act of trust. For him, there was no turning back, and he knew only that he didn't want to stop it, not for anything.

Serena kicked off her shoes. She unbuttoned her jeans, slipped them down her slim, long legs, and stepped out of them. She stretched her arms up to the sky, revealing a stretch of bare stomach and, below, white bikini panties. With both hands, she peeled up the bulky sweater of Stride's that she was wearing and the navy T-shirt beneath it. Her breasts strained at the fabric of her bra. She knelt in the sand and held her hand out to him.

"You'll freeze," he told her.

"Keep me warm."

He took off his own shoes. He left his shirt on but removed his pants and tossed them aside. He sat down next to her, their legs touching, and the sand beneath him didn't feel cold at all. Her arms came around him, her hands digging under his shirt, clutching his back, pressing into his skin. They kissed hungrily. Their bodies sank until they were prone in the sand.

He kissed her neck and slid a bra strap off her shoulder, pulling it down until her breast spilled into his hand. His mouth covered her nipple, sucking on it. He heard a soft rumble of pleasure in her throat. He exposed her other breast and kissed it. Her fingers found the slit in his boxers and slipped inside to stroke his erection with her nails. She pulled aside the flap of fabric, and he felt cool air as his penis slid out.

"Quickly," she whispered.

He reached for her panties and pushed his thumbs inside. She rose up from the beach, and he slid them off and tossed them away. Her hands grabbed for him and pulled him over her. He licked her breasts, but she took his face in her palms and brought him up to kiss her. He kissed her lips. Her cheeks. Her eyes.

Her legs spread and wrapped around him. He felt his penis brushing against her mound and sinking lower.

"We're not-" he murmured. Not safe. Not protected.

"Yes, we are," she told him, and there was a sadness in her voice, and he wondered if he had killed the moment.

But his penis found its way inside her in the next second, and she was wet and waiting. He gasped with pleasure. She did, too, and her legs held him tightly, and her fingers rippled against his neck. He began to thrust inside her, so deep they could have been one person. The stars watched them. The waves roared in his ears.

She watched him make love to her with her eyes wide open. He had never felt more naked, or connected, than having her see him like that. She kept them open until, finally, her head tilted back, and a smile and a cry escaped from her mouth at the same moment, and her body quivered in his hands. And he closed his own eyes and let himself go.

She had put her T-shirt back on, but she was nude below, and he stroked her legs and her mound gently as they lay on the beach. Sand streaked her skin. She was propped on both elbows, watching the sky.

"Feel guilty?" she asked.

"I should, but I don't."

"Good."

"Can I ask you something?" he said.

He watched her lips draw into a tighter line. She already knew the question. "The abortion," she explained. "I waited too long. It didn't go well. I can't have kids."

"Does that bother you?" he asked, thinking of Andrea.

"You go through phases. At that age, with what I'd been through, I couldn't imagine why anyone would want kids. Then mere was a point in my twenties where I felt very sorry for myself, and I cried a lot, and I drank a lot I almost drank my way off the force. Like mother, like daughter, you know? Addictive personalities. But I found a good shrink, and she helped me through it. Today, it comes and goes. But I haven't lived my life like I missed something by not having kids."

"Same here," he said.

"Tell me something," Serena said. "I know this sounds weird. Was I good?"

"What?"

"Making love. Was I good? In the past, it wasn't like this, and I knew it was because of me. All my baggage. It got in the way."

"You don't really need me to answer that, do you?" Stride asked.

She smiled, laughing at herself, but she looked relieved. "No, I guess not."

His caresses on her upper thighs became more directed, and he let his hand slip between her legs. Her hips thrust against his fingers. "Make me come again," she told him.

But he had hardly begun when muffled electronic music began playing in Serena's discarded jeans. She groaned, and they both laughed. Stride found her cell phone in a rear pocket and handed it to her.

"This is Serena." Then, a moment later, "Cordy, your timing sucks."

He heard a voice on the phone talking at a rapid clip.

"Slow down, Cordy," Serena said. "What the hell are you saying?"

Although he couldn't make out the words, he saw Serena's eyes, as she listened, light up with intense interest.

"Are you sure it's him?" Serena said into the phone. "If you're wrong, we're going to look like fools."

Stride heard the pitch of her partner's voice rise. Cordy was sure.

"I'll be damned," Serena said. "All right, get someone to watch the place, but don't roust him. See what he does. I'll fly back tomorrow."

Stride felt his breath leave his chest, leaving only a tight ache behind.

"Good work, Cordy," Serena said. "I'm sure you and Lavender will find a way to celebrate."

Serena flipped down the phone.

"We may have been searching in the wrong city after all," she said.

"What do you mean?"

"It turns out that Christi-Rachel-had a boyfriend. Cordy found a photograph from the club where she worked. The guy was in the background. He recognized him."

"How?"

"We know the guy," Serena explained. "Except now he looks more like Howard Hughes. It's the same old drunk desert rat who owns the trailer where Christi's body was found. And that sure puts a new spin on the ball."

"He kills her and simply dumps the body behind his own place?" Stride asked.

"This guy doesn't exactly have all his cereal in one bowl, at least when he's been drinking. If he was dating Christi, and she dumped him, it could have sent him over the edge."

"So he goes to her apartment to try to convince her to take him back," Stride speculated. "She tells him to take a hike, and he drops a vase on her head. He brings the body home, dumps it, and then ties one on."

"It's possible," Serena said.

Stride shook his head. "But what about the ATM receipt? The connection to Duluth?"

"Maybe I was wrong," Serena said, trying to put the pieces together. "Maybe Duluth is a red herring."

"You weren't wrong," Stride insisted. "There's something else going on."

Serena leaned over and kissed him with cool lips. "Come with me."

"What?"

"You were in at the beginning, Jonny. You deserve to be there when it all ends. Even if it turns out this guy didn't kill her, he must know something. Let's go see him together."

Stride got up out of the sand and began gathering their clothes. "All right," he said. "But there's something I have to do first."

She knew. "Talk to your wife?"

He nodded.

"I feel responsible," Serena said.

"You're not I am."

He didn't dread the idea of divorce the way he had for so long. Andrea had already opened the door. Now he would walkthrough.

"We may find the answer tomorrow," Serena said.

Stride wasn't so sure. He knew there was a mystery in Las Vegas, but he didn't believe for a minute he would find the truth there. The truth would still be here in Duluth. Waiting for him to come back and find it.

46

During the three years of their marriage, Stride and Andrea had carved out Saturday mornings for themselves. They had remained faithful to that except for the few weekends a year when Andrea visited her sister, Denise, in Miami. Even when he was in the middle of an investigation, Stride tried to keep Saturday morning free. Usually, they drove to Canal Park for breakfast overlooking the lake and brought along the paper to read over coffee. Or they jogged a few times around the high school track and rewarded themselves with pastries at the Scandinavian bakery. Those times, more than any other, he felt like they were husband and wife.

But here he was, on Saturday morning, packing for a flight to Minneapolis and then on to Las Vegas. It was like broadcasting an alarm. Andrea got the message. She stood in a corner of the bedroom, her arms folded, her jaw set in a pinched, unhappy line. Much of the anger she had first sent his way, upon learning of his trip, had dissolved already into bitterness and hurt. She didn't want to hear his explanations, and he had few to offer.

"Don't do this," she murmured, not for the first time. "Don't walk away from me, Jon."

Stride shoved a few pairs of socks into the end pocket of his duffel bag. "I have to do this."

"Oh, come on," she snapped. "This isn't your problem anymore. Why can't you just let it go?"

What could he say? He owed it to Rachel to uncover the truth. She had haunted him for years, and he wanted to unravel her mystery once and for all. But there was no denying to himself that he had another motive left unspoken. He also needed to know where his relationship with Serena was going. Because his marriage was over.

She seemed to read his mind. "You're leaving me. I've been there before. I know what it looks like."

He stopped packing. "Okay. Maybe I am."

"That's how you deal with this?" Andrea demanded. "By running away? For months, we've been like strangers. For days, you've hardly come home, never called. Where the hell were you last night?"

"Don't go there," he said.

"Why not? You think I don't know about you and Maggie?"

"There's nothing between me and Maggie. I've told you that before. I'm not talking about this."

"If we talked, we could work it out," Andrea insisted. "Goddamn it, all you can do is shut me out I'm telling you not to go. I need you to stay here."

In his mind, he could hear Maggie warning him years ago. "I know. But you don't love me. You never did."

"That's a lie!"

"Don't pretend," he told her. "I'm done with pretending."

Andrea was defiant. "I'm asking you to stay here and work this out."

He heard the implicit message: You're my husband. Do this for me. He wanted to make her happy, but he had been trying and failing for years.

"I'm sorry. This is something I have to do."

Andrea gasped, putting a hand over her mouth. "You want a divorce, don't you?"

He closed his eyes. "Don't you?"

"No!" she insisted. "No, I don't want that I would never want that!"

"But you're not happy," Stride said. "I'm not happy. There's only one answer here."

"We can fix this if you'll just stay and work with me, but all you can talk about is going away."

He took her hands in his and shook his head. "We can't fix this, Andrea. It's going to be better for both of us if we make new lives. And I think you feel that way, too."

She whirled away from him in anger, her blonde hair falling across her face. She squeezed her hands against her head, her eyes wild. From her dresser, she grabbed a bottle of perfume and threw it against the wall, where it shattered, filling the room with a sickly sweet scent. Andrea stared at the glass sprinkling the floor. It seemed to transport her. She seemed to be somewhere else entirely.

Stride put an arm around her shoulder. She shrugged it off.

"Just go," she told him.

"I'm sorry."

Her eyes were fierce. "No, you're not. You've already decided what's important to you. If it matters so much to you, then just get the hell out, and go. I hope you get what you want And when you find it, I hope you ask yourself why you wanted it so damn bad."

47

Stride was on the highway by the edge of the wilderness. It was the chase dream again, where he was running after a girl he couldn't find, but this time, after pursuing her along the trail and hearing her laughter luring him on, he did find her. He found Rachel in the middle of a clearing, dead in a ruby pool of her own blood. Surrounding her, looking down at the body, were Cindy, Andrea, and Serena. All of their hands were stained in red.

"Who did this?" he shouted.

Each of the women, in turn, raised a finger and pointed at him.

He started awake.

Serena was next to him, reading the airline magazine. She looked at him. "Bad dream?"

"Sort of. How did you know?"

"You called out Rachel's name."

Stride laughed. He rubbed his hands over his face and through his hair, trying to escape the fuzzy feeling of waking up. "Did I really?"

"No. I'm teasing. You just looked like you were somewhere you didn't want to be."

He leaned over and kissed her. "I'm exactly where I want to be."

Stride could feel the plane descending. He craned his neck to look out the window, but their seats didn't allow a view of the city. He saw only a bright glow suggesting an enormous source of light somewhere nearby. As they touched down, he could see little in the darkness but the guiding lights of the taxiways. When the plane turned toward the terminal, however, he caught a glimpse of a shimmering gold tower, angled toward him like a boomerang.

"That's Mandalay Bay," Serena said. "Amazing, huh?"

As they exited the plane and made their way inside the gate, Stride stopped, assaulted by the flood of color and neon that flashed everywhere. He couldn't help but smile, thinking of Serena in the quiet Duluth airport, comparing the terminal to the spectacle here in Vegas. It was another world.

In the baggage claim area, he noticed a man detach from the crowd and approach them. Serena gave the man a quick hug.

"Jonathan Stride, this is Cordy Angel, my partner."

Stride shook his hand. "That was a terrific break, making the connection between the body and the boyfriend."

"I am an extraordinary detective," Cordy said, winking.

"A lucky bastard is more like it," Serena said.

Cordy turned to Serena. "We've got trailer-man staked out. He left earlier this afternoon and drove to the liquor store. Got himself stocked with more gin. Then he went home, hasn't moved since."

Serena scowled. "Shit, that means he'll probably be incoherent tomorrow. I wanted him to have at least one foot in the real world."

"I don't think he spends a lot of time there."

"Well, we can always sober him up at the station," Serena said. "How about the warrant? You got that?"

Cordy nodded. "We can go in and tear the place apart. But I've been there. It ain't going to be me going through that pit of a trailer."

Stride interrupted them. "Did you find out any more about this guy's background with Rachel? Or Christi, I guess I should say."

Cordy smoothed down his slick black hair. "Nada. His so-called shop is unlicensed. Lavender only saw him once and said Christi never talked about him. He's one of those Vegas drifters, came from nowhere, going nowhere."

"Well, he had to come from somewhere to land a girl like Christi," Serena said. "We'll head out with a team first thing in the morning. Can you drop us off at my place?"

Cordy raised an eyebrow. "Whatever you want"

Stride deliberately didn't meet Cordy's stare, which was probably an admission of guilt as far as the other cop was concerned.

"You ever been to Vegas?" Cordy asked.

Stride shook his head. "First time."

"A Vegas virgin," Cordy said, chuckling.

Stride sat in the back seat of Cordy's PT Cruiser, staring out the window agog at the parade of mammoth casinos on either side of Las Vegas Boulevard. Cordy didn't want to take the Strip, but Serena insisted, to give Stride a view of the city. They were stalled in bumper-to-bumper Saturday night traffic, crawling between Tropicana and Flamingo. On his left, Serena pointed out, was the Monte Carlo. On the right was the Aladdin. Up ahead was Paris, then the Bellagio, then Bally's. The size of each property overwhelmed him.

He couldn't believe the heat When they stepped out of the airport, it hit him in the face like a fire, sucking oxygen from his lungs. It was night, but the temperature still hovered near ninety. He could taste desert grit in his mouth with each breath. Fortunately, Cordy had the air conditioner at full power, and it was now cold enough inside the car to make him shiver.

"Greatest city in the world," Cordy said proudly. "Who'd want to live anywhere else? This is the tops, man."

"People live here?" Stride asked, only half seriously.

"Now, now, Jonny," Serena murmured. She glanced back over the front seat and winked at him.

"You know what makes this town tick?" Cordy asked, as he pounded the horn at a limousine cutting in front of him.

"Oh, shit, not the breast thing," Serena said.

As if he hadn't heard her, Cordy explained, "Las Vegas is all about breasts, man."

Stride laughed. "What?"

"Breasts! It's true. You see more breasts in this city than anywhere else on earth, okay? That's what makes it special. That's what gives Vegas its character. It's not gambling, it's not drinking, it's not eighty million hotel rooms. It's walking down the street and having all these breasts quivering like Jell-O in front of you. All shapes. All sizes. Spilling out of everything they wear. Cotton, Lycra, nylon, bikini, tankini, halter, I don't care what, you know? Just so long as it's tight or see-through or shows lots of skin or lets you see their nipples, they'll wear it. Women come here so they can show off their breasts, and all the men walk around so horny they can't see straight."

"Cordy's something of a sociologist of tits," Serena explained dryly.

"Am I wrong? You tell me if I'm wrong."

Serena didn't have a chance to reply. Three women in their twenties, two blondes and a brunette, ran through the stalled traffic in front of them. The brunette passed closest to Cordy's cruiser, and Stride's eyes were drawn instinctively to her chest She wore a low-cut T-shirt, from which her breasts overflowed. Cordy honked the horn and gave her a thumbs-up. The girl stuck out her tongue at him and wagged it lasciviously.

Serena sighed. "I didn't say you were wrong."

"Uh-huh. Good thing, mama. The only reason this town can put so many strippers through college is that all of the men are so wired from watching the rest of the girls, they'll pay anything to see what's underneath."

Serena just shook her head.

When they passed Flamingo, traffic loosened slightly. Serena pointed out the next wave of mega-resorts, stretching from Caesars at the southern end to the Stardust in the north. As they passed the Mirage, the resort's street-side volcano exploded into action, cascading columns of water, steam, and fire into the air before a crowd of gawkers. He had never seen a city that pulsed with life the way Vegas did. The sensation was electric, watching the streams of people flowing in and out of the casinos and jostling to cross the street. Cordy was right: There were loose, jiggling breasts everywhere, plus the smell of sex, cigarettes, and money.

Even so, Stride noticed that the glitzy aura of the Strip faded quickly the farther north they went. Instead of expensive casinos catering to high rollers, he noticed porn shops and massage parlors, bars with nickel video poker signs, and motels with burned-out neon signs. The crowds of tourists on the sidewalks thinned; most of them were smart enough not to explore these neighborhoods. He saw hookers on every corner, grinning at them from behind garish lipstick and dyed hair. Several homeless people slept in doorways.

"No volcanoes here," he murmured.

Serena shook her head. "We call this the Naked City. And that's not a breast joke. You've got the Stratosphere tower, but all around it, there's more drugs and murder here than anywhere else in the city."

After another mile, they turned off the Strip on Charleston, leaving both the casinos and the Naked City behind them as they headed west. Out here the town looked like any other inner-ring suburb, with strip malls, discount stores, and chain restaurants. They reached Serena's town house complex in less than ten minutes. The gated community was a beehive of bone white, two-story stucco buildings with bright red roofs. Serena waved at the guard, who opened the electronic gate and let Cordy's Cruiser slide in. Cordy, who was obviously familiar with the grounds, navigated a bewildering maze of intersecting roads and driveways, pulling up to a unit at the far back of the complex.

"Home sweet home, mama," he announced.

Stride and Serena recovered their luggage from the trunk. Heat radiated from the pavement. The stiff, dry breeze out of the mountains offered no relief. Stride felt the urge to wipe his brow, but he realized the arid landscape was too dry even for sweat.

"Let's meet here at nine o'clock tomorrow morning," Serena told Cordy. "Alert the search team to meet us at the site at ten."

Cordy winked at Stride. "You sure you want to stay here? We could hit some clubs I know."

"Good night, Cordy," Serena said.

"But hell, mama, how can you let him stay in your boring town house? It's his first time in the city. The man deserves to have some fun."

"He'll have fun," Serena told him.

48

Morning sun streamed in through the vertical blinds in Serena's bedroom. Stride, long since awake, watched Serena sleep.

She lay on her stomach. Her hair fell loosely across her face. Her arms were tucked under the pillow, leaving the swell of her right breast visible where it pressed against the mattress. Her back sloped downward to the valley at the base of her spine, then rose again at her buttocks. She had one leg under the sheet and one leg above it.

Serena rolled over, and he was treated to the sight of her naked breasts and soft brown nipples. Her eyes blinked slowly, then opened to narrow, unhappy slits, unwilling to face the daylight. She brushed her long hair from her face. "What time is it?" she asked sleepily.

"Late. Almost eight-fifteen."

Serena groaned. "Shit. Cordy will be coming soon."

He moved to touch her breasts, but Serena nimbly slapped his hand. "None of that, Lieutenant. We only have five minutes to shower."

"I can do five minutes," he said.

"Hush." She scrambled out of bed, and his eyes followed her as she retreated into the bathroom. He heard her shout, "Make coffee, okay?"

"Okay."

Naked, he made his way downstairs. He hunted through cabinets and found a mason jar filled with ground coffee. With some difficulty, he figured out how to use her Scandinavian coffeemaker and started it perking, then returned upstairs. Serena was back on the bed, rubbing her damp hair with a towel. Beads of moisture glistened on her bare skin.

"I know what you're thinking, and don't think it," she told him casually.

"How do you know what I'm thinking?"

Her eyes traveled southward, and he looked down. "Oh."

"Yeah, oh. Now get in the shower. I suggest cold water."

When he emerged from the shower, he smelled the aroma of coffee. He didn't see Serena, but a few seconds later, she came back into the bedroom with two steaming cups on saucers in her hands. She was half dressed, wearing bikini panties and a white V-neck tee.

"We better get moving, Jonny. Cordy's always on time."

"So if we're going to do something, we better move fast."

"What you're going to do is get dressed," Serena told him. Then he saw her eyes slide down his body again. She cocked her head. "Can you really do five minutes?"

Stride sat in the backseat of Cordy's Cruiser as they headed south on I-15, leaving the Strip behind and heading into the wasteland. He felt a rush of anticipation. Somewhere ahead of them, on the fringe of a desert road, was a man who knew Rachel after her disappearance. Someone who had seen her in her life after death. Someone who might be able to give him answers to four-year-old questions.

They were also about to meet a man who might have bashed in the back of a young woman's skull and dumped her body in the desert. Serena had retrieved her 9 mm SIG-Sauer pistol from the locked glove compartment of her own car and lodged it securely in a shoulder holster under her loose, waist-length bluejacket. Stride's own Ruger was similarly holstered inside his charcoal sport coat.

Cordy turned off the main highway and kicked up a trail of dust on a frontage road. He pointed down the road a quarter mile, where Stride saw a ramshackle trailer just off the north side. "Down the road, that's him."

"This is where she was found?" Stride asked.

"This is it," Serena said.

Cordy parked the car directly in front of the trailer, leaving the engine running. Serena turned to Cordy and said, "Give us a few minutes with him, okay?"

Stride and Serena both got out. Stride studied the surroundings. The trailer was gray, permanently encrusted with dirt and grit blown from the expanse of desert around it. There was no sidewalk, only a worn path where visitors went to and from the door. He pricked up his ears, listening to a strange cacophony that rose and fell on the wind. It was a grotesque tune, without any rhythm, just a tinkling noise like a thousand children playing with toy bells.

"What the hell is that?" he asked.

"Wind chimes," Serena said. "A lot of them."

Serena led them up the trailer steps, which sagged under their weight. At the screen door, she stopped, banging on the aluminum siding of the trailer. There was no answer, just the singing of the chimes.

On the door, someone had painted the words ALWAYS OPEN. Serena glanced back at Stride, shrugged, and pulled the door open carefully. She stepped inside, with Stride immediately behind her. The noise inside the trailer was deafening. A window in front of them was open, creating a cross breeze that made several dozen stained glass wind chimes spiral and clang against each other in a wild, multicolored dance. They both put their hands over their ears. Serena took two steps and banged the window shut. The breeze died, and slowly the chimes settled down, tinkling softly like a formless music in the background.

Then they heard a voice.

"So you figured it out."

They both spun around. Bob sat at a card table six feet away, in front of a lopsided curtain that separated the shop from the rest of the trailer. A metal cash box sat on the table next to him, its lid open. Bob's T-shirt hung on his skinny frame, and his shorts were several sizes too large. He wore ratty old sneakers.

He had manic eyes, fierce and tiny, like two black holes. He studied them both in turn, first Serena, then Stride. His eyes lingered on Stride, and he squinted as if he saw something in Stride's face that was strange and unexpected. The longer Bob stared at him, the more Stride felt like an insect pinned to a collector's board. The eerie sensation went deeper, because when he stared back, his brain flashed a message. I know you.

But the man was a stranger to him.

"What's your name?" Stride asked.

Bob shrugged. "It's on the sign."

"It won't be difficult for us to find out," Serena said.

"No?" Bob asked. "Well, I have no records, I file no taxes, and I've never been fingerprinted. So you tell me how you plan to find out anything about me."

"You sound pretty smart," Serena told Bob. "I expected an old drunk."

Bob scowled and thrust a thumb toward the rear of the trailer. "The gin's in back. It's there in case I chicken out."

"Chicken out?" Serena asked.

Bob rubbed his long beard and pulled at the tangles. He put a finger to his head like a gun and pulled the trigger.

"You're planning to kill yourself?" Serena asked. "Why?"

Bob turned to Stride and smiled darkly, as if sharing a secret joke. "You know."

"How would I know?"

"You're a man. Why does a man do anything?"

"A woman," Stride said.

Serena leaned closer to Bob. "Are you talking about Christi?"

Bob's anger subsided, and he looked wistful. His voice cracked as he stared at Serena. "You look a little bit like her. She had green eyes, like you. But hers were cold. She destroyed me. I mean, just look around. Look at my life. But if I could get her back, I'd go through this hell all over again."

Serena's eyes narrowed. "You wanted her that much? She was that good?"

"Not good. She was never good. She was evil."

"What was it?" Serena asked. "Did she reject you?"

Bob laughed wildly. "If only it were that fucking simple! It's like having the keys to the palace, okay? And then one day they change the locks. And you look back and realize you gave up everything, destroyed everyone around you, for a fantasy."

"When did you see her last?" Serena asked.

Bob waved his hand impatiently. "Don't waste my time. You want to ask me? Ask me."

Stride knew the question he meant. "Did you kill Rachel?"

"Someone had to," Bob said.

"But did you do it?" Stride asked again.

"Isn't that what you want me to say? Won't that make it easier for you?"

"We just want to know what happened," Stride said.

Bob flicked a cockroach off the table. It skittered away toward the rear of the trailer. "No, you don't. You already know all you need to know."

"We don't know why," Stride said.

Bob laughed. "It was a game to her. She destroyed people. When you do that, sometimes people destroy you back."

"I think we ought to continue this conversation somewhere else," Serena told him cautiously, reaching for her cuffs. "Why don't you come down to the station with us? We can clean you up, get you a decent meal."

Bob's eyes snapped open with the gleam of a predator. "You don't get off so easy," he snarled at them.

His speed caught them off guard. Bob's left hand dove into the cash box, and with a shout, he leaped to his feet, the chair toppling backward onto the trailer floor behind him. Bob's left hand swung upward out of the cash box, his whole arm a blur of motion. He pointed his arm straight up, almost grazing the roof of the trailer. Stride saw the object clutched in Bob's fingers-a Smith & Wesson revolver with a four-inch barrel.

"Gun!"

Stride and Serena jumped backward, tumbling into a maze of wind chimes that clattered and then fell around them, shattering on the floor. Stride twisted to his right and slammed his body to the ground. Broken glass cut his hand as his palm scraped the trailer floor. He snaked his bleeding hand inside his jacket and slid the Ruger into his slippery palm. In a single motion, he flipped off the safety and rose to one knee, taking aim at Bob's chest.

Three feet away, Serena did the same. She came up on both knees and steadied her automatic with both hands.

Bob didn't move. He stared them down with a bizarre grin of triumph, his eyes darting between the two detectives like a Ping-Pong ball. The revolver quivered in his hands.

"What are you waiting for?" Bob demanded.

"We don't want to hurt you," Serena told him, her voice steady. "Put down the gun."

"I'm getting out," Bob said. "And you're going to help me."

Stride saw Bob's fingers tighten on the grip of the revolver. Bob lowered his gun arm.

"I'm going to take the shot," Serena called.

"No!" Stride insisted. "Wait! Wait!" He saw his one window on the truth sliding closed.

Bob hadn't cocked the hammer. He wasn't ready to fire. But he was now pointing the black hole of the barrel directly at Stride's head. Stride stared back along the path of Bob's outstretched arms, sighting down the barrel of his pistol. The revolver gaped back at him. Stride's arm twinged where his friend in Ely had shot him. He could hear the sound of that gun in his memory and feel the flesh ripping apart in his shoulder.

"Bob, you're not going to shoot me," Stride told him. "Put it down, and this time you win. You can beat her."

Bob shook his head. "She always wins."

Stride clicked the safety back into place on his Ruger. His fingers loosened, and the gun slipped upside down in his hand. He bent down slowly, laying it on the ground.

"Jonny, what the hell are you doing?" Serena hissed.

"I'm just not going to do it," Stride told Bob.

Bob was silent, hesitating.

Ting-a-ling, ting, ting, went the wind chimes.

"It's not me doing this," Bob said. "It's her. It was always her."

Stride shook his head. "You can't blame her anymore. She's dead. This time, it's all you. Is that what you want?"

Bob's hand trembled. He exhaled a long, mournful breath, and his muscles seemed to cave in as the air went out of his body. His gun arm sagged, the revolver going limp in his hand.

"Now just lay it on the table. Real easy. Real slow. Okay?"

Stride felt a wave of relief wash over him.

Then Bob's face contorted in panic and fear. His eyes widened as if he were a frightened child. His mouth dropped open, and he took a horrified step backward. He was fixated on something just behind Stride.

"There she is!" Bob wailed.

"Jonny, he's losing it," Serena warned.

Stride knew she was right. Bob was disintegrating.

"There's no one here," Stride told him firmly.

"YOU'RE DEAD!" Bob bellowed.

He swung the revolver up in a single motion, its barrel quivering. His jaw clenched, and he bared his teeth. Bob's thumb flicked to the hammer of the gun.

"Stop!" Serena screamed.

Stride tensed, waiting for Bob to fire, expecting to feel the air sucked out of his chest.

Serena's bullet blew Bob backward onto the floor. The gun spilled harmlessly from his hand. He landed hard, his eyes wide open and terrified. He gurgled, unable to breathe, and foam and blood sputtered from his lips. His whole body twitched, his limbs rocked by spasms.

Serena scrambled from her knees and ran to him.

Bob had enough strength to lift his head off the floor and contemplate the wreckage of his chest and smile. Blood was filling his lungs. He tried to speak, but the words died in a rattle, and his jaw went slack. His eyes flitted between them, his pupils giant and black.

"Cordy!" Serena shouted as the trailer door burst open. "Get an ambulance!"

But they both knew Bob would be gone before they heard the sirens.

Stride realized he was watching the mystery die with him.

He sat in the backseat of Cordy's car, the rear door open, his legs outside. For the first time in months, he felt the craving for a cigarette, and he rubbed his fingers together as if one were lit in his hands. He felt a trickle of sweat on his neck, dripping to the back of his spine.

Twenty yards away, two internal affairs detectives, looking cool as snakes even under the relentless sun, grilled Serena about the shooting. Her beautiful face was stoic-void of emotion, no hurricane churning inside her. Stride knew better. He had seen the delayed reaction among cops in Duluth, even tough veterans who had seen plenty of bodies, all killed by someone else. Firing your weapon, taking a life, watching someone die at your hands, was devastating. It sent cops into therapy. Some left the force.

Then came the second-guessing. People who weren't there, who hadn't experienced those terrible moments, felt entitled to question your judgment.

All Stride could do was sit tight and wait his turn, then tell them what it was. A good shooting. Unavoidable.

The ambulance had arrived too late to do anything but attend to the corpse. He watched as two orderlies maneuvered a stretcher through the doorway of the trailer. Bob's body lay beneath a white sheet, with a bloom of red in the center where the blood seeped into the fabric. A dusty breeze erupted from the desert floor, picking up a corner of the death sheet and fluttering it in the air like a flag of surrender.

Stride found himself staring at Bob's bony, lifeless leg and at the old sneaker that clung to his foot. The heel of the shoe winked at him like a bloodshot eye, oval and pink.

In that moment, Stride felt the world grinding to a halt, all the noise and motion winding down like a music box, until he could hear only the raging sound of his breath and feel each beat of his heart thumping like it could break through his chest.

Stride half expected the body to bolt upward from the gurney. He expected Bob to point a skeletal finger at him and cackle like a magician who has seen his audience gape at his latest trick.

But this was no trick. There was no mistaking the sole and the red oval in the center of the heel, worn pale from four years of use. Bob was wearing Graeme's shoes.

The shoes that left Graeme's footprints at the barn. The shoes that went missing when Rachel disappeared.

Stride stood frozen, his brain trying frantically to catch up with the reality in front of his eyes.

A moment later, he knew.

It had been a frame-up all along. Rachel stole Graeme's shoes. They were in the plastic bag she carried from the house. And that man-the dead man under the sheet-wore them. He had been there that night in Duluth.

Stride leaped up, running across the crusted ground, startling the attendants with the stretcher. He ripped the sheet down, revealing Bob's face, his dead eyes still wide open.

"Hey, what the hell!" the orderly complained.

Stride felt the man grab his shoulder, and he wrenched away. He bent down, inches from Bob's face. The odor of death, blood, and waste wormed into his nostrils. He stared at Bob, hunting for the truth. I know you.

He whirled around, seeing Serena out of the corner of his eye. He could feel her reading his thoughts, seeing his fear. Thank God, she didn't say anything, didn't react She pulled her eyes away before the other cops turned his way.

Right behind him, a voice said, "You okay, man?"

"Cordy!" Stride hissed. He dragged the young detective away and got in his face. "You said there was an old photograph. Before he looked like this. Do you have it?"

"What, of the dead guy? Sure, sure, man. Lavender gave it to me. Figured we could sweat him with it."

"Let me see it."

Cordy dug a plastic evidence bag out of his loose pants pocket, and Stride grabbed it out of his hand. The glare of the sun blinded him. He squinted and couldn't see through the plastic. Not hesitating, Stride tore it open and threw the bag away.

"Fuck it, you can't-" Cordy began, but stopped when he saw Stride's face.

Stride held the photo as if it were on fire.

"No, no, no, no," he murmured, not believing what he saw, feeling his mind spin out of control, and wishing the dry cracks in the desert earth would split apart and swallow him up.

49

Stride took a sip of cold coffee from a Styrofoam cup. His impatience was growing.

He stared through the floor-length windows and watched tourists wilting in the heat as they scurried between rows of rental cars. The thunder of another plane landing at McCarran rumbled overhead, rattling the walls. He saw the early evening shadows lengthening minute by minute.

The glass door banged. One of the rental agents waddled in, sweating, from the huge parking lot. Her thick fingers clutched a plastic clipboard.

"How long?" Stride called.

The agent stopped and propped her hands on her hips. Her bare ebony midriff ballooned from between powder blue sweatpants and a white concert T-shirt. "Do I look psychic to you? I told you, they were due in two hours ago."

"Do the guys outside know to hold it?" Stride asked. "I don't want them cleaning the car before we get to it."

"Tan Cavalier, Texas plates." She rattled off the license number. "Soon as it comes in, you get first crack at it, honey. So sit tight."

She disappeared into the back office behind the counter.

Serena sat nearby on a metal chair, her elbows propped on her knees. Her black hair fell messily across her face. She pushed herself up wearily and came up behind Stride, kneading the knotted muscles in his neck.

She leaned forward and whispered, "We don't have to do this."

"I do. I need to know."

Serena sighed. "Whatever you want."

Stride knew she was right. It was better to walk away. He knew what they would find when the car came in, and when he had the truth, he would wish he had left the mystery back in the desert to die with Bob.

But he couldn't stop. The photograph had led him here. From the desert to the airport to the rental agency, following the trail that had been left for him. It was so obvious that he wondered if it had all been laid out that way for him to find.

Serena borrowed his cup of coffee, took a drink, and made a face. "Oh, man. Two words for you, Jonny. Star. Bucks."

Stride couldn't help but smile.

"That's better," she said.

"Look, you don't need to worry about me," Stride told her. "I'll be fine. You've got your own shit to deal with."

"You mean, because I killed a guy? Because I just spent six hours reliving it five hundred times with IA? Just a day in the life."

"Ha."

Serena shrugged. "They'll make me talk to a shrink. It'll be like old times. I'll cry later." She looked down at her shoes, which were still dirty with dust and blood. "You want the truth, Jonny? It was easy. Too easy."

Stride didn't need to say anything.

The plus-sized agent emerged from the office with a walkie-talkie at her ear. "Your car just came in, honey. One of my boys is driving it over here."

Stride felt his insides seize with tension. "What's the routine when a car comes back? Vacuum the interior? Wash the mats?"

"You got it," she said.

"Trunk, too?"

She shrugged. "If someone barfs in it. Which happens, honey."

"And you're sure this is the first rental since it came back last weekend? No one else had it in between?"

"Nobody."

An attendant parked the Cavalier near the rental building a few minutes later, leaving the driver's door open and the engine running. Stride and Serena both put on gloves and went outside. He carried a halogen flashlight from Serena's car, which he directed into the backseat of the Cavalier.

It was clean, no trash, no stray papers. Stride got down on his knees and shined the flashlight carefully under both seats, examining the floor. Then he and Serena spent half an hour studying the fabric on the rear seats, going square inch by square inch, finding nothing.

Stride straightened up. "Let's do the trunk."

"She was probably wrapped in a blanket," Serena reminded him. "It was missing from the bed."

"Blankets leave tracks," Stride said.

It didn't take them long. When they popped the trunk, Stride lit up the interior, and almost immediately he zeroed in on a dime-sized brownish stain on the carpeted fringe. He kept the light on the stain while Serena leaned in and took a closer look.

"Could be blood," she said quietly. Then she added, "I've got something more here."

He watched her reach into a pocket and slide out a tweezers. She extracted something trapped in the metal edge of the trunk, then backed out and held the tweezers in the beam of the flashlight. Stride leaned closer and saw a wispy strand of blonde hair that spiraled down to a jet black root.

"It might be nothing," Serena said. "Lots of dye jobs in this town."

But they both knew what it meant.

"I have to go back," Stride said.

The rental agent waved her clipboard at them from the doorway. "Hey, officers, what's the word? Am I getting my tan Cav back? Otherwise, I need to find another car, or someone's going to be walking, know what I mean?"

Stride and Serena exchanged a long, sober look. It was her call, but Stride knew there was only one decision she could make. Impound it, call for forensics, bag the evidence, and bring his whole world crashing down.

Serena tore her eyes away. She slammed the trunk and waved at the agent.

"Take it," she said.

50

He found Andrea secluded in her office on the second floor, grading papers amid the tomblike silence of the school. Her door was open. She had her head down, deep in concentration, not having heard his footsteps on the stairs.

He couldn't help but think of the first time he had met her here. They had both been so wounded then, two people suddenly alone after they had envisioned a lifetime with someone else. He had really believed then that he could wash away her hurt, but her bitterness never seemed to fade, no matter how much time they spent together, even after they stumbled into marriage. They had made a mistake. He never imagined how costly that mistake would prove to be.

"Hello, Andrea," he said.

She looked up from the papers on her desk. He wasn't sure what he expected to see in her eyes: fear maybe, or anger, or sadness. Instead, he saw almost nothing, as if in this short time she had become a stranger to him.

"Welcome back," Andrea said evenly. "I didn't expect to see you so soon."

She looked older, although it may have been the lack of makeup on her face. She wore a gray college sweatshirt she had owned for years. Her blonde hair was pinned back away from her face, and she wore half-glasses, pushed down her nose.

"Did you find out?" Andrea asked, a cold edge rising in her voice. "Was it worth it?"

Stride could feel the blame spitting out of her, as if it were his own fault.

He entered the office and sat down heavily in the wooden chair opposite her desk. He hated to tell her.

"He's dead, Andrea."

She sucked in her breath and pushed back sharply from the desk. She stripped off her glasses, and he could see her terrified eyes.

She was waiting for him to say it.

Stride nodded. "Robin."

He almost wanted her to lie, to paste a look of shock on her face at the idea that Robin, her ex-husband, was Rachel's lover.

But there was no surprise. Andrea closed her eyes. "That stupid bastard," she whispered. "How did it happen?"

Stride explained briefly what happened in the trailer. Andrea didn't break down, but a single tear worked its way out of her eye and slid in a streak down her face. He let her grieve in silence for a few seconds before his anger caught up with him. "You knew," he said. "Goddamn it, you knew, and you didn't tell me. You let me go down there, knowing what I'd find."

"I told you not to do it," Andrea retorted, wiping her cheek. "You were the one who couldn't let it go."

"Because that's my job!" Stride said. He got up, pacing, and slammed the office door. He confronted her again. "How long? How long have you known? Did you know back then? We were running around in circles, and you knew Robin had run off with Rachel."

"No, I didn't know!" Andrea insisted. "He left me months before Rachel disappeared. Don't you see? That was how she wanted it. No connection. It was all her, all part of her plan. She told him to come back for her in the fall."

"Then when did you find out? How?"

Andrea stared down at her desk. "He sent me a letter last month."

"And he told you about Rachel?"

"Are you kidding?" Her mouth twitched as if she had bitten into something vile. "Everything was Rachel, Rachel, Rachel. How she seduced him. How she dumped him. The pathetic shit was obsessed with her."

"Where's the letter?"

Andrea hesitated. "I burned it."

"Why?" Stride asked. "Why would you do that?" He suspected he could open her desk drawer and find it there.

"I don't know why, I just did it. I wanted to erase him. I wanted to forget what he did to me."

Stride shook his head. "Now you're lying. Don't lie to me. Robin was obsessed? My God, what about you? He threw you away for a seventeen-year-old, and you still love him."

She didn't deny it He saw her jaw jutting out in defiance.

"Explain it to me, Andrea," Stride insisted. "He writes you a letter and grinds his affair into you like broken glass. And what do you do? You run to him. You go crawling to him in Vegas and try to get him back."

Now he saw fear.

"I didn't-" she began.

Stride cut her off. "Don't insult me. Do you think I'm stupid? First you beg me not to go, and when I do go, I find your ex-husband drinking himself to death in a trailer. What's my first thought, Andrea? You. I went to the airport. I called the credit card company. I know you flew from your sister's in Miami to Las Vegas last weekend."

"It's not what you think," Andrea told him. "I didn't want him back. But I was scared. His letter talked about suicide. I couldn't sit here and do nothing. That's why I went-to talk to him."

"I don't care about that" he interrupted. "This isn't about you and Robin."

The sudden silence between them was pregnant with anxiety.

"I want to know what happened between you and Rachel," Stride said.

He studied her as if she were a suspect watching for every flicker of a muscle in her face. He saw what he expected to see.

Guilt.

"I want to know why you killed her."

Andrea was calm. "Do I need a lawyer?"

"You think I'm going to turn you in? You don't know me at all. As far as the police in Las Vegas are concerned, a drifter named Jerky Bob killed Rachel. Case closed."

"How do you know it didn't happen that way?"

Stride exhaled in disgust. "Please, no games, Andrea. Robin would have killed himself before he killed Rachel. We both know that. And you left a trail a mile wide. I tracked down the car you rented. There was blood and hair in the trunk from when you drove Rachel's body out to the desert."

"I wanted him to see her," she said bitterly. "He wanted her so badly. Let him have her."

"Tell me about it," Stride said. "I need the truth."

Andrea nodded. She nervously tucked a stray hair behind her ear and bit her lip. "I didn't mean for this to happen."

She stood up and came out from behind the desk. She stood close to Stride but didn't look at him. Instead, she stared at photos on the wall. Of her and Stride. Of her and Robin. She kept them up even now.

He smelled tobacco. She was smoking again.

"The letter almost destroyed me, Jon," she said. "I knew you and I were in trouble. I was already dealing with that. Or not dealing with it. And then to hear from Robin and find out what really happened-I just had to see him. I didn't go there to see her, for God's sake. That never even crossed my mind. I went to see him."

She turned back to Stride. "You were there. You saw what he was like. I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe what she'd done to him."

"He did it to himself," Stride said.

"No, this wasn't his fault. Robin was always weak. I knew that about him. And Rachel saw it, too. She used him. He told me how she read his poetry and told him he was such a genius. How she made him believe they were meant for each other. But it was just another lie, and he swallowed all of it. Once Graeme was dead, she threw him out. She just cut him out of her life. She didn't need him anymore. It was like she was ripping his heart out. He started drinking, sliding downhill. He didn't have anything left to live for."

"Tell me about Rachel," he persisted.

"Yes, all right The crazy thing is, I never planned to see her. Robin told me where she worked, but I didn't care. I wasn't there for her. Robin and I talked for a couple of hours, if you can call it talking. He was too far gone. I couldn't take it anymore."

"So you went to confront Rachel."

"No, it wasn't like that. I was heading back to the airport, coming home. But more and more, I kept thinking about Rachel and what she did to us. To me. It's not like I consciously decided I was going there, but somewhere along the way, I realized I wasn't driving to the airport. I wound up at the club. I just wanted to see her, see what she looked like. Look into her eyes. When she came out onstage, it took me a minute, but I knew. I knew it was her. And she was everything that Robin said she was. Beautiful. And cold as ice.

"That was when I realized it wasn't enough just to see her. I needed her to look at me and admit what she'd done. So I waited in the parking lot and followed her. When I got to her apartment, I almost couldn't go through with it What do you say to someone you've never met who ruined your whole life? But I thought about Robin wasting away hi that trailer, and what our lives had been like, and I got angry all over again."

"Did she recognize you?" Stride asked.

"Oh, yeah. Right away. She laughed. She said if I'd come to take Robin back, I could have him now. And she knew all about the investigation. About me and you. She thought it was funny. 'I caught a husband for you and a murderer for him.' That was what she said. That we should thank her."

Andrea began crumbling.

"I don't know what-I mean, none of it was going the way I wanted. She had no regrets, no shame. She stared at me with those horrible green eyes like I was an insect. Something to play with and then swat away."

Stride saw Andrea's hands trembling. He wasn't sure how far he could push her before she lost control entirely. "What else did she say?" he asked.

"She lied," Andrea retorted, balling her fists. "All she did was lie."

"Lie about what?"

"About everything! I told her she had no right to break us up. Robin loved me." Her eyes narrowed to slits, almost reptilian. "And do you know what she said? She said Robin was going to divorce me anyway. He was so fucking easy to seduce because he could barely keep it up in bed with me. Making love to me was like humping a corpse. I couldn't get pregnant, because there was nothing alive between my legs."

"Son of a bitch," Stride murmured.

"That's when I knew. She wasn't lying. It was all true. I'd been the one lying to myself all along. About Robin. About myself. So I stood there, with this rage bubbling over like nothing I'd ever felt before, and all she could do was smirk at me. Like my life was a joke to her. Like everything she'd taken from me meant nothing."

"What did you do?" Stride asked quietly.

"There was a vase on the bookshelf. I grabbed it, swung it I wanted it to shatter. I wanted glass flying all over the apartment. But I didn't let go. I hung on to it, and it hit something. My eyes were closed. I didn't even know what I'd done. But I hit something, and then there was this heavy sound, of something falling…"

Stride had heard these stories too many times, from people he had arrested, from defendants pleading for mercy. He had hardened his heart to them. But not this time.

"She was dead. I couldn't believe it, but she was dead. I had killed her."

"Rachel's been dead a long time," he murmured.

Andrea stared at him, her eyes pleading. "I never expected you to be pulled back into this, Jon. You have to believe that. I never thought anyone would make the connection to Rachel."

Stride knew there was no gray area here. If they were in court, she would be guilty. But it occurred to him that Andrea wasn't entirely responsible. Neither was Robin. He, too, had to bear some of the blame. Maybe that was why he knew he could never give up the secret. Who would it satisfy?

"What now?" Andrea asked.

Yes, what now? he asked himself.

"Now we both have to live with it."

"I know what a difficult thing this is for you to do," she whispered. "To walk away."

"The truth is, it isn't difficult at all. I guess that should tell me something."

He was anxious to go now, to say good-bye, to be alone with his own guilt. But he knew he needed to tell her something, to give her something to hang on to. So that the past wasn't entirely a lie.

"Robin knew you killed Rachel," he told her, as he turned to leave. "He took the fall. He wanted us to blame him. That was for you, Andrea. He did it for you."

Stride realized he had nowhere to go. He was homeless in his own hometown.

He wound up on the bridge over the canal, standing where Rachel had stood on her last night in the city. Before she went home and planted evidence in Graeme's van. Before she stole Graeme's shoes. Before she met Robin waiting for her on a back street and lured him to the barn to play their little game.

Chase her into the meadow. Cut her clothes. Cut her skin. Blood. Fabric. Clues.

I played right into their hands, he thought.

Stride stared into the dark water, which barely stirred tonight under the cool lake breeze. He took hold of the railing with both hands and imagined Rachel balancing there. If a gust of wind had pitched her into the frigid canal that night his life would be very different today. Better or worse, he didn't know.

At least he knew Rachel's secrets. Except for one. He still didn't know why.

Why the game. Why the bitter war between Graeme and Rachel. It surprised him that Rachel hadn't left a clue, when she had dropped a trail of bread crumbs for everything else. Unless the cryptic postcard was her message to him. He deserved to die.

Stride turned and leaned against the railing, watching the cars come and go between the city and the Point. He reconstructed the timeline in his head, now that he knew Robin was the missing link. He thought about Rachel sitting in Robin's class in September. Launching her plot.

I caught a husband for you and a murderer for him.

He was closing in on something. He could feel the confusion in his brain clearing, like fog on the lake.

Stride heard the whine of tires striking the steel deck of the bridge. He was startled to see a red Volkswagen speeding from the Point, with a dark-haired girl behind the wheel. She grinned at him as she roared by. He had a wild thought that it might be Rachel. Even knowing she was dead, he thought she could find a way to haunt him.

But it wasn't Rachel's car. It wasn't…

…the Blood Bug.

Stride suddenly could see through the fog. And he knew. Rachel had been sending him a message all along.

51

Eleven hundred feet in the air, atop the saucerlike crown of the Stratosphere tower, the temperature was a comfortable fifteen degrees cooler than the Strip below. When Stride stepped out onto the open-air observation platform, he felt a disconcerting vibration under his feet as the tower swayed with the turbulent air. He had never been particularly afraid of heights, but being so far up, on what felt like an exposed catwalk, was enough to make him dizzy.

"Try the tower," Cordy had told him.

Serena once told Cordy that when she couldn't sleep, she sometimes drove to the Stratosphere and spent a few hours staring out at the city.

In the three weeks Stride had been gone, they had talked occasionally by phone, but he still wondered if the electricity would he there when they saw each other again. He worried that the few days they had spent together would already have been eclipsed in her mind.

Looking out on the panorama of Las Vegas, he asked himself if he could come to like this town, which was so unlike anything he had known. It was hard to take a creature of the wilderness and drop him in the neon jungle. But he wasn't sure he wanted to live in Duluth anymore. He had done his time, enough for a full pension, and this was his chance to make a break with the past. Plus, as of last week, he had learned that Maggie was pregnant and that her husband had prevailed upon her to hang up her shield. The prospect of doing his old job without her seemed empty.

He found he could walk by the edge and look down without a sense of vertigo. He followed the platform to his right, which led him on a course overlooking the eastern half of the city, free of the long stretch of glittering casinos. As he made his way to the south side, he saw the hypnotic grandeur of the Strip, jutting into the desert like a bent laser beam. At first, he saw only a dazzling ribbon of colors, devoid of detail. But the more he stared, the more he found himself focusing on individual details, like the emerald glow of the MGM Grand or the superstructure of the faux Eiffel Tower at Paris. He was so taken by the view that he spent several moments before realizing that he wasn't alone.

Serena stood a few feet away, watching him with a smile. She wore black jeans and a white mock turtleneck. He couldn't help but remember that Rachel was wearing almost the same outfit on the night she disappeared. With her black hair and athletic body, Serena must have looked very much as Rachel did then, atop the bridge over the canal. It gave him a little bit of sympathy, understanding how easily Robin, Graeme, Kevin, and everyone else could have been seduced by Rachel. Serena, with the same beauty, had that kind of power over him.

Why does a man do anything? Robin asked. A woman.

With a quiet grace, she came and put her arms around his back and pressed her cool cheek tenderly against his face, which was flushed and warm. He reached up and stroked her dark hair. Holding her felt natural, as if they had been doing it for years. He never wanted to let go, and for a long while, it felt as if they never would. They could stand there, wrapped around each other in the breezy night, forever. The electricity was still there, as vibrant as it had been at the start.

"You came back," she said, with a hint of surprise in her voice.

"I told you I would."

"I know. But promises don't always mean a lot in this city."

He let go and studied her, becoming familiar with her face again. "You looked good on television," he said.

Serena grinned. "You're such a charmer."

Two of the Minneapolis network affiliates had sent reporters to Las Vegas to do stories about Rachel's death. They interviewed Serena and Cordy, took footage inside and out at the strip club where Rachel had worked, and did live feeds from the open spot in the desert where Robin's trailer had been parked. The broken-down trailer had already been towed to the junk yard and its pest-ridden contents burned.

The television crews had no photograph of Jerky Bob to put on the air. Stride had seen to it that the only known photograph was lost during the investigation. So it was up to Serena to describe him, which she did. He was a vagrant. A nowhere man. There were a lot of them in Vegas, most of them mentally ill, and this one had nursed an obsession until it grew violent. Rachel had the bad luck to be the girl he couldn't let go.

That was her story, and she was sticking to it.

"They picked up your line, you know," Stride said. "'Rachel Killed By "Nowhere Man"' That was the headline in the paper."

"I like it."

"So what if it isn't true," he murmured.

"We talked about this," Serena said. "You had to protect her."

He placed his hands gingerly on the shield that prevented jumpers and peered downward, feeling dizzy again at the height. Serena joined him, laying a hand on his back.

"What else could you do?" she asked.

"I know. But I'm sorry I put you in the middle of it. I made you lie for me."

"That was my choice," Serena told him. She saw he was ready to say more, and she put a finger over his lips. "It's over and done, Jonny. End of story."

"Not quite the end," he said.

He took a breath and thought about how to tell her the rest He still blamed himself for not seeing the truth earlier, even though it would have made no difference. The deed was done.

Serena watched him, waiting.

"There's still the relationship between Rachel and Graeme," he said. "Something happened-something that made them blood enemies."

"We know they were having sex," Serena said. "Rachel wanted to stop. Graeme didn't. I've been there, Jonny. If he raped her, or if he tried to, that's enough to make a girl like Rachel get revenge."

"Yes, it is. But Graeme got his revenge first."

Graeme watched his hand tremble as he held a glass of brandy up to the light. He brought the drink to his lips and took a sip, hoping the alcohol would settle his nerves. The fumes filled his nose, and the brandy burned his dry throat. He swirled the liquor in the glass and took another swallow. But the quivering in his fingers refused to be quieted. He felt his desire rise.

Emily was at a church retreat in St. Paul. Rachel was in her room, waiting, knowing he would come. Graeme put the brandy down and slipped up the steps and down the hall to her bedroom door. He moved stealthily, measuring each step on the carpet to avoid a creak that would alarm her. A light came from under the door. He pictured Rachel on her bed, staring up at the ceiling with her head on the pillow. Thinking about the many times they had made love.

He twisted the knob silently and pushed. The door was locked.

"Rachel," he called out, just loud enough for her to hear. "You know how much I need you."

Nothing. She was inside, listening, but not saying a word.

"We're made for each other, Rachel," he told her. "You can't run away from that. We're like two sides of the same soul."

He knew she was there. The lingering silence began to erode his control. He found himself clenching and unclenching his fists and breathing harshly through his nose.

"Open the door, Rachel," he insisted, his voice quavering. "I promise I won't hurt you. But I need to talk to you."

His promise was a lie, and they both knew it. If she opened the door, he wouldn't be able to control himself. He needed to touch her and be inside her, whatever it took. The thought of her naked body made him sweat and tremble with longing.

"Rachel!" he shouted, anger creeping into his voice. He pounded the door with his fist, unable to restrain himself. "I need you!"

He threw his shoulder against the door with a jarring thud. He was willing to break it down to get inside. But it was a solid old house, and the oak door didn't budge.

"Let me in!" he screamed.

He laid his cheek against the door and listened. Rachel's voice, when it came, was so close it startled him. She was right on the other side of the door, separated from him by only an inch of heavy wood.

"I'll let you in if you want, Graeme," Rachel said. Her voice was like honey, without the slightest hint of emotion or venom. "If you need to rape me, you can rape me."

"I won't," he murmured.

"It's all right, Graeme. I understand. You have needs."

"Yes," he told her. "Yes, I need you so much. I want it to be like it was."

"And I'm telling you that you can have me."

He hardly dared to breathe. The thought of making love to her again overwhelmed him. "You'll let me?"

"I will. But let me tell you what will happen then."

Something in Rachel's tone made his flesh creep with unease.

"If you come inside and touch me again, I'm going to take a butcher knife to you, and I'm going to cut off your balls. Got it? And then I'm going to cut off your cock. That's a promise. Are you listening? Do you understand? You'll never sleep another night in this house without wondering when I'm going to dismember you. And don't even think about having your little darling reattached. Because once I cut it off, I'm going to flush it down the toilet where it belongs."

Graeme sank to his knees, terrified. Nausea gripped his stomach.

"Do you believe me, Graeme?" Rachel asked. "Do you believe I'll do it?"

He tried to talk but choked on the words.

"I can't hear you, Graeme."

"Yes, yes, I believe you!"

And he did.

"So tell me, do you still want to come inside?" Rachel asked.

Graeme fled without answering her. He had never felt so destroyed. She had proved once again that she was the one who held the real power. He returned downstairs and paced in the den, adrift. The trouble was that he was still enormously aroused. His penis was rock hard, and his desire for her was so strong that he wanted to go back upstairs and fuck her anyway, even knowing the consequences. But he knew Rachel wasn't lying. She would do to him exactly what she promised.

He felt himself drawn toward something ugly and familiar, like a star caught in the inexorable gravity of a black hole. He told himself that he wanted to pull away, but the truth was that he needed it, wanted it, would do anything for it. He tried to be calm, but his fingers were jittery again, and sweat gathered at his armpits and on his skin like a clammy film. He felt something stirring in his soul, a door opening, a shadowy figure awakening.

Please, no, he pleaded with the monster inside.

But it wasn't listening. It played with him like a child with a doll, making his limbs move and telling him what to do.

Rachel, this is your fault.

"Go," the monster rumbled, sounding so unlike a monster, so like himself.

Sounding so…immoral.

Graeme grabbed his keys and went out through the front door. The air was fragile. On an August night, it shouldn't have been dark so early, but the shroud of storm clouds overhead left the western sky almost black. The shifting wind made the oak branches whip angrily.

He made it almost to the detached garage before realizing the way was blocked. Rachel had parked directly across the two doors, trapping his van inside. Graeme cursed. When he glanced up at her bedroom window overhead, he saw her standing there, watching him with an icy smile. The very glimpse of her set his pulse racing. But he scowled, stretching his face muscles tight. His eyes were furious black dots. He kicked her rear fender, hard enough to leave a dent.

He stood outside, thinking furiously. Raindrops began to leave dark splotches on his clothes. Then he had an idea. The thought of it made him grin up at Rachel in the window. She frowned, reading his mind.

He stormed back into the house and panted as he ran up the stairs. In his bedroom, he rifted through Emily's dresser, dumping jewelry cases and cosmetics on the floor. He pawed to the far back of the drawers, groping through the mess. Finally, he heard a jangle as his fingers touched them. He pulled them out, his excitement growing. Emily's old spare keys.

He snatched them up and ran back outside, slamming the door shut behind him. He looked back up at Rachel's window, but she was gone. At the car, he fumbled with the keys. The rain made his fingers slippery, and he dropped them on the driveway. He bent down, grabbing the key ring, and shoved one key into the lock. It turned. The car door opened.

Nervous, Graeme looked around. He was alone.

"Drive," the monster growled. "Hunt."

He gripped the wheel so fiercely that it grew sticky from the sweat on his palms. Nuisance rain spat on his windshield, a mist that the wipers couldn't seem to wipe away. He sought out the back roads. His need was even more urgent being in the car, where the smell of Rachel was everywhere. She might as well have been seated next to him, teasing him with her cold green eyes. The memory of having sex with her was so intense he could still feel her fingers gliding over his skin.

"Hunt."

He headed uphill from Lakeside, quickly leaving the developed areas behind him as he climbed. Within five miles, he was driving through a deserted stretch bordered closely by stands of birch trees on either side of the highway. It was now pouring and completely dark, forcing him to slow down and peer through his headlights to see.

He drifted onto the right-hand shoulder. At the last second, he made out a girl jogging on the shoulder, directly ahead of him, distinct from the shadows of the trees. He braked and swerved the wheel sharply to steer around her, catching a glimpse of fear in the girl's eyes as she saw the car and dove off the road to avoid it.

Graeme pulled off and stopped, leaving the motor running. He hurried back and found the girl picking herself up and brushing dirt and mud from her skin. Her features were difficult to distinguish in the darkness, but she appeared to be about Rachel's age, with long chestnut hair tied in a ponytail. She had an athletic build and was dressed in tight shorts and a sports bra.

"I'm so sorry," Graeme said. "Are you all right?"

The girl took a few steps, favoring one ankle. "I'm okay. Probably just a sprain."

His eyes adjusted enough for him to make her out more clearly. She was young and very attractive, with a sweet vulnerability as she perched gingerly on her good ankle, strands of hair falling loose from her ponytail, her clothes and skin soaked by the rain.

"Come on, let me drive you home," Graeme said, holding out an arm to help her walk.

He smiled, reassuring her, hating himself for what he was doing. It's not me. It's the monster. There's a difference.

She took his arm, steadying herself. He was conscious of her touch. Her body was close enough to envelop him in an aroma of sweat and rain. He unlocked and opened the rear door, taking a quick glance up and down the deserted road.

"Why don't you sit in back so you can keep your ankle elevated?" he suggested.

The girl scooted inside. He leaned in, watching her get settled. The dome light illuminated her, sitting with her head propped against the opposite window. Her moist face had a rosy glow from her long run. Her eyes were bright. She stretched out her right leg on the seat and let the other dangle on the floor of the car. He saw her muscled calves and thighs and traced the Lycra where it met in a V at her crotch. Her chest rose and fell with her heavy breathing, and he watched her breasts swell. She smiled shyly.

"I'm getting the seats all wet," the girl said.

"It's all right," Graeme replied. He let the moment linger a little too long, and her smile eroded into a nervous laugh. A hint of uncertainty clouded her eyes. Suddenly, he felt that she could see through him and recognize his intentions.

Graeme shut the door and climbed into the front seat. He looked back and gave her a winning smile. "I have to make one stop, then we'll head back to town. Okay?"

"Oh. Sure." The girl bit her lower lip. He could see questions forming in her mind and the first glimmer of fear.

Put her at ease.

"I'm Graeme," he said. "What's your name?"

"Kerry," the girl said, squeezing some of the dampness from her hair. "Kerry McGrath."

Serena's eyes were lost somewhere, focused beyond the city. He knew it was Graeme she could see in her brain. Trolling the back roads, hunting the way a tiger hunts. Graeme, coming upon an innocent teenage girl whose only sin was to go running at the wrong time and in the wrong place.

"Are you sure?" she asked.

Stride took a deep breath and nodded. "Graeme killed Kerry. Rachel knew. That was the beginning."

"But after Rachel disappeared, your team went over Graeme's van with a microscope. It's hard to believe he didn't leave something behind."

"He did," Stride said. "We were just looking in the wrong place."

Serena's brow furled in confusion. Then she exhaled in disgust as she put it together. "That son of a bitch. He used Rachel's car."

"Exactly," Stride said. "That was what we missed all along. I remember listening to the testimony at Graeme's trial and thinking there was something I hadn't caught. It was right there in front of me, and I never made the connection. Kevin and Emily both testified about Graeme buying Rachel a new car to replace the old hand-me-down from her mother. I should have recognized the timeline-the red VW, purchased almost immediately after Kerry disappeared. And what did Rachel call it? The Blood Bug. Oh, yeah, she knew. She was going to pay him back-her way."

"Did you trace the car?" Serena asked.

"We did. We tracked down the new owners in Minneapolis. We found a strand of hair and minute traces of blood in the back seat that we matched to Kerry, and semen we matched to Graeme. I told the McGraths. They were pleased to learn that, in an odd way, justice had already been served. At least they know now that Kerry's killer didn't get away."

"Were there any others?" Serena asked.

"You know how it is. These guys don't usually do it just once. We're looking into other missing teenagers that could be linked to Graeme."

Serena hugged herself and shivered, but when Stride looked at her face, he realized she wasn't cold. She rubbed the flesh of her arms, as if trying to wash away a stain.

"I'm not sure there's so much difference between me and Rachel," she said. "I was abused, too. I wanted revenge."

"Rachel wasn't completely innocent," Stride reminded her. "She was playing a dangerous game."

"Don't judge her too harshly, Jonny. Until you've been alone with the monster, you don't know what you'll do." She shivered again, glancing over her shoulder. "I feel haunted."

"I don't believe in ghosts," Stride said.

Or did he?

For all he knew, they were surrounded by ghosts, pushing and shoving to get past them on the narrow platform. There were good spirits, like Cindy, whispering that he had done the right thing by falling for Serena, and spirits in limbo, like Rachel, smiling in dark irony at all the profound changes she had wrought in his life. Maybe there were evil spirits, too, like Graeme, raising gooseflesh on Serena's skin and making her as scared as the girl she was when she was alone with her own monster.

Stride lifted Serena's chin to stare into her soulful green eyes. With the back of his hand, he caressed the soft skin on her cheek. He tried to be strong for her, a man who would dispel her nightmares, someone she could walk next to, or lean on, whichever she chose. As they stared at each other, her face, softened, and the fear fled. At that moment, he knew they were alone on the roof of the world, without any spirits at all except their own.

"There are no ghosts," he told her firmly, wanting her to believe him.

Serena's lips turned upward in a smile. "I have no right to ask you this," she said, "but it would be nice if you could stay here a while."

"I was thinking that, too."

She leaned into him and kissed him, moving her mouth passionately. Below them, the city glowed.

"Welcome to Vegas, baby," she murmured.